American history is a series of inspiring reminders of how far we’ve come in our national quest to form a more perfect Union. The American present is a reminder of how far we still have to go. In yet another sad failure to repudiate the now 30-year trend of executive overreach and disrespect for civil rights, President Barack Obama decided to maintain a policy that allows the Central Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command to assassinate U.S. citizens abroad without arrest or trial if suspected of terrorism. This policy is a practical problem and an unjustified betrayal of the core fundamental tenants of our nation. Since the president is apparently unable to recognize the pitfalls of allowing anonymous individuals the right to play judge, jury and executioner, Congress should pass the bill proposed by Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, to ban such extra-judicial killings, lest this become another in a line of fear-motivated civil rights encroachments that we have come to regret.

We’ve been down this road before, and the results have not been pretty. During both the ’20s and ’50s, state legislatures, Congress and the Justice Department relentlessly assaulted the free-speech rights of political liberals nationwide in the “Red Scares.” During World War II, the U.S. Army herded more than 60,000 loyal Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps.

The common thread in both of these periods is that ordinary Americans went along with such encroachments out of fear of a shadowy foreign enemy, and used national security to justify sacrificing our precious liberties. As with most ill-conceived policies born of public panic, however, we have come to regret these actions deeply and have realized that trading our civil liberties didn’t make any of us safer and caused needless suffering for many of our loyal countrymen. The current policies of extraordinary rendition and extra-judicial assassination are eerily similar in tenor to these past policies, and even less related to public safety.

Making matters worse, the U.S. government and U.S. military seem to be terrible at both resisting the political pressure to value expediency over sound judgment and differentiating real threats from boogeymen. In the aforementioned cases, the White House knew that Japanese-Americans posed no actual threat to security (and indeed, not a single act or attempted act of sabotage was ever discovered during the war) but interned them anyway. Most of the people blacklisted during the Red Scares were harmless intellectuals. Recent evidence further supports this principle, as when the Supreme Court ruled in the 2008 case Boumediene v. Bush that Guantanamo detainees must be granted habeas corpus rights. Thirty-three of the 39 detainees were later released due to insufficient evidence that they were actually terrorists. If the government cannot determine who is really a terrorist, how on earth can we trust them to kill U.S. citizens based on similar suspicions and innuendo?

The distinction the government is attempting to draw here is even more dubious. Somehow, we are supposed to believe that terrorists represent a special existential threat to our security, thus justifying such extreme measures. Terrorism, however, is an ineffective tool used only by those who are unable to access more powerful methods of warfare. To pretend that these fringe lunatics are a legitimate threat to us is only to do ourselves a disservice. Murderers and serial killers at home are much more immediately dangerous and threaten more Americans in real ways, yet our justice system manages to handle these fiends while protecting their civil rights. American citizens-turned Al Qaeda operatives are no more scarier than Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer and Gary Ridgway, and their rights were not breached.

It is sorely tempting in this fearful time to give in and trade freedom for safety. Such trades are fools’ gold, however. The threats we face from terrorists in this period are real, but they are likely a temporary problem specific to this period in history. If we give our government the ability to kill any U.S. citizen without trial or burden of proof, we create a much bigger, much more permanent threat here at home. Giving up our freedoms for the sake of expediency never makes us safer. It is our highest ideals — and our commitment justice, fairness and rule of law — that make us a great nation. Making hard choices, fighting our collective fear, standing up for our rights — that is what it means to be the leader of the free world. It’s time we owned up to that responsibility.