It is becoming increasingly clear that while reorganizing and mobilizing for homeland security, we also need to construct a practical means of addressing wartime threats to civil liberties and civil rights.

The line-drawing between security and liberties carries three distinct risks: Officials and judges may draw a line in a place we come to regret. Or they may not fully disclose where they have drawn it. Or, finally, wherever the line is drawn, government agents may violate it, without our having much of a chance to detect, correct and punish the abuses. There are things Congress can do now to address these risks of failure to disclose and comply.

Executive abuses during Watergate, Vietnam, the internment of Japanese Americans and the World War I sedition trials seem ancient history to many. Yet in the long winter since 9/11, we have seen the indefinite detention of unnamed illegal immigrants from Islamic nations at undisclosed locations and for undeclared reasons. We've seen confusion and controversy about access to counsel, about secret hearings and about relaxing the predicates of evidence or suspicion required to search and surveil. Impassioned accusations of racial profiling are met with vehement denials. And we are preparing for unseen military tribunals.

What of liberty's familiar safeguards?

First, don't count on the courts. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist warned in his prescient 1998 book, wartime courts strain to accommodate security imperatives declared by the political branches. Unlike the Civil War or 20th century conflicts, however, finality for today's mobilization will be elusive, so our liberties will be compromised for who knows how long. To many judges, that distinction may not make a difference.

Second, discount the congressional watchdogs for now. Bipartisan consensus, plus the volume of concerns, means that oversight will be both overwhelmed and deferential.

Finally, don't count on political pressure. A watchful public will not protest, because the war will be mostly secret, mostly for good reason. Without transparency, public debate will be ill informed or nonexistent.

What to do? Within the new agency of homeland security, Congress should create an independent Office of Rights and Liberties, headed by a Senate-confirmed director. This director should have the powers of a super-inspector general, but focused solely on monitoring compliance with civil liberties and civil rights norms in the government-wide war. With capable career professionals having the necessary security clearances and expertise, this office should have the power to subpoena documents, interview witnesses under penalty of perjury and aggressively audit both policymakers and foot soldiers. It should receive and address public complaints. It should make a classified quarterly report to Congress and the president, and an unclassified version for the public, along with mandatory official responses from the affected security agencies.

This office should have power to seek judicial enforcement of subpoenas, independent of the Justice Department, which it would occasionally investigate. It should have power to impose civil administrative fines on individuals for violations of statutes or regulations intended to safeguard civil liberties, with such fines appealable to a federal court, in secret if necessary. (Separately, Congress should strengthen criminal laws covering intentional deprivation of liberties.)

Finally, the Office of Rights and Liberties should have a part-time, bipartisan advisory board designed to build public confidence in its operations and in the general conduct of the war. It would, by the way, be constitutionally permissible for appointments to that board to be shared by the president, the House and the Senate, as the board would have no executive or legislative powers.

This bears emphasis: The Office of Rights and Liberties would not be responsible for deciding where to draw the line between our need for security and our commitments to liberty. That's another debate. The office would not, for example, have a role in deciding whether INS detainees should have access to counsel, when prisoners should be transferred from civil to military jurisdiction or when to plant bugs in mosques. Instead, its role would be to ensure that when our war-fighters do draw a line, the public knows where it is: No secret policies. (I can imagine rare exceptions, but at least the office would notify Congress.) Its further duty would be to exercise the diligence and independence to assure us that, from top to bottom, those waging the war know where the line is and obey: compliance without coverups.

Congress must secure things even more fundamental than our borders and power plants. Our religious practices and bank records, our color and our language, our political opinions and our travel habits -- the triggers for suspicion and the investigatory reach in this war are too sweeping to comprehend. Over time, the tension between security and liberty will create corrosive doubts about the war's home-front legitimacy. This is because, even more than in conventional crime-fighting, we cynically see a political agenda behind every move, and many moves are altogether secret. Can we not reach an agreement to prevent abuses and promote legitimacy? An agreement to trust our war-fighters, but verify?

Mr. Edley is a law professor at Harvard and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

This article was originally published in the Washington Post on July 14, 2002.