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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2001Editorial:Bush's war on freedom in the USA
The massive assault leveled since Sept. 11 by George Bush and his attorney
general, John Ashcroft, on a wide number of civil liberties guaranteed to us by
the U.S. Constitution, has reached such a chilling point that some legal
scholars are calling it nothing less than a "constitutional coup d'etat."
What finally brought forth the alarm was the sweeping presidential order of Nov.
13 empowering Bush to conduct secret military tribunals for those he, himself,
as commander-in-chief will decide should be tried as suspected terrorists.Those who can be imprisoned and sentenced to death include any noncitizen
accused of aiding or abetting "acts of international terrorism, or acts in
preparation therefore that have cause, threaten to cause... injury to or adverse
effects on the United States, its citizens, national security, foreign policy,
or economy." Spain made it known at once that it would not extradite the eight men it had
captured and charged with complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks unless the U.S.
agreed to try them in a civilian court. European Union officials said they
doubted that any of the other 14 nations all of whom have renounced the death
penalty and signed the European Convention on Human Rights would agree to any
extradition that would involve a military tribunal. Most frightening of all has been the speed by which one blow after another to
the civil rights of all of us has been delivered under the guise of being
"anti-terror." - Over 1,000 non-citizens were detained in the immediate post-Sept. 11
dragnet of people who might have some connection to that carnage, of whom over
600 are still being held, most of them on immigration charges. Not one has been
charged with involvement with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That no one knows
where they are being held, or who they are, has led civil libertarians to liken
them to the "disappeared" of Latin American dictatorships. At the same time, the USA Patriot Act was rushed through Congress,
establishing a broad definition of "terrorism" that, the ACLU pointed
out, could include activism on anything from opposition to the World Trade
Organization to Vieques. It threatens the free speech which up to now has been
protected by the Bill of Rights. The very acronym they painstakingly created by
the ludicrous title of "Unity and Strengthening America by Providing
Appropriate Tools Required to Interrupt and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001"
lends strong support to Samuel Johnson's warning that patriotism is, indeed, the
last refuge of scoundrels. - Among the most threatening changes the Patriot Act has effected is
the abolition of the separation between the overseas spying of the CIA and
domestic policing of the FBI, which was established 25 years ago in the wake of
Watergate and Richard Nixon's attempt to use intelligence-gathering against his
political opponents. Passage of the Act was quickly followed by Ashcroft's
dispensing with the Freedom of Information Act, while Bush removed any former
president's papers from the public domain. The furor created by Bush's presidential order establishing military
tribunals temporarily diverted attention from the plan Ashcroft had revealed
only a few days earlier. Not content with the 1,100 detained in the biggest
federal dragnet in U.S. history, he was now ordering the interrogation of 5,000
more young men from Middle Eastern countries, present legally in the U.S. on
student or business visas. Finally, opposition to the draconian edicts that have
been issued since Sept. 11 is being heard, both in the media and in Congress.
Only one lone dissenter in the Senate, Russell Feingold, raised his voice the
day the Patriot Act was signed, reminding his peers of the many assaults on our
freedom from the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams, through the internments
during World War II, to the McCarthy persecutions of the 1950s and the spying on
anti-war protesters in the 1960s. While we are constantly being told of the sky-high popularity ratings for
Bush in the wake of Sept. 11, it is hardly believable that the Black voters of
this land have forgotten the way he achieved power by stealth. Nor can anyone
truly have forgotten that John Ashcroft, who has become the most powerful
attorney general in recent U.S. history, less than a year ago was in trouble
having his appointment confirmed because of his racist and fundamentalist views. It is clear Bush and Ashcroft knew where they wanted to take this country
long before the reactionary Islamic fundamentalist movement handed them their
opportunity on Sept.11. The question now is how much further they will go. We
are already being told that the Pentagon is considering a plan to unify all
military aspects of "homeland defense" in a single, giant command
similar to the Central Command conducting the war in Afghanistan. It would
represent an enormous expansion of the military's power within the U.S. What is important to see is that the changes we have seen enacted over the
last two and a half months are not a mere expansion but a basic and frightening
restructuring of military and police powers that represents so serious an attack
on our civil liberties that it gives new meaning to the permanence of the war
that has been declared on civil liberties and on us. |
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