[Peace-discuss] Reality

[Dlind49 at aol.com]

Please refer to Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) # 39 and (PDD) #62 
also. 

The Journal-Gazette
Fort Wayne, Indiana
September 8, 2002

EDITORIAL: Attacks on Liberty
Over the past year, the Bush administration has used the Sept. 11 attack as
an excuse to justify a repressive assault on the liberties that are the
nation's foundation.
In the name of national security, President Bush, Attorney General John
Ashcroft and even Congress have pulled strand after strand out of the
constitutional fabric that distinguishes the United States from other
nations.
Though 9-11 clearly showed a need for tougher security measures and better
intelligence gathering, there can be no justification for secret tribunals,
for detaining people without charging them or allowing access to attorneys,
for giving federal agents power to pry into the reading habits of individual
Americans.
Here is what Bush is using 9-11 to justify:
*   Concentrating power in the executive branch.
*   Grabbing unilateral power to detain anyone he declares an "enemy
combatant."
*   Seeking to create a Department of Homeland Security that would
eliminate whistleblower protections and other government-worker rights.
*   And suggesting he can launch a war against Iraq without the
congressional approval the U.S. Constitution explicitly demands, before
backing down under criticism and vowing to seek congressional approval.

Actions taken over the past year are eerily reminiscent of tyranny portrayed
in the most nightmarish works of fiction. The power to demand reading lists
from libraries could have been drawn from the pages of Ray Bradbury's
"Fahrenheit 451."
The Bush-Ashcroft explanation that restricting freedom will enhance freedom
echoes the Big Brother proclamations in George Orwell's "1984." The sudden
suspension of due process for immigrants rounded up into jails is familiar
to readers of Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here."
More Americans - conservatives as well as moderates and liberals - must
speak out against these most undemocratic restrictions.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and 
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, 
and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or 
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the 
persons or things to be seized."  - Fourth Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Congress passed some of the most frightening elements of the assault on
civil liberties when it rushed the USA Patriot Act into law just weeks after
9-11.
Not all the law's elements are clearly unwarranted infringements on the
rights of Americans. Indeed, the age of cell phones and the Internet
requires new means of surveillance, when justified. For example, the
permission of "roving wiretaps" authorizing agents to eavesdrop on whichever
phone a suspect is using, not just one individual line, is not an
unreasonable proposal and is worthy of legitimate debate.
Such debate did not occur. Both houses of Congress passed the act by
overwhelming margins without weighing the pros and cons of its effects.
Some of its more Draconian elements did not become clear until weeks later.
The columnist and civil liberties authority Nat Hentoff was one of the first
to point out - long after the Patriot Act became law - that previously
ignored parts of the bill gave agents authority to obtain lists of books
suspects checked out from libraries or purchased from stores. Any librarian
or bookstore clerk who acknowledges that agents sought the material commits
a criminal act under the law's frightening provisions.
The act gives agents, with court authorization, freedom to secretly search a
home or business. They can break in, seize or copy what they want and leave,
without ever notifying the owner or occupant.
The House and Senate judiciary committees have given Ashcroft a series of 50
written questions about how the Justice Department interprets the law,
legitimate questions like, "what are the standards by which the department
decides to hold a foreign national secretly and indefinitely?"
Characteristically, he has refused to answer.
"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy
and public trial ... to be informed of the nature and cause of the
accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; ... and to have
the assistance of counsel for his defense." - Sixth Amendment, U.S. 
Constitution
Agents rounded up hundreds of non-citizens in the weeks after 9-11. The
government has refused to say who has been detained and on what charges.
Many detainees have been refused access to attorneys. Several, after their
release, have proved not to be terrorists and have described the horror of
being jailed without rights in what they previously believed was the land of
the free.
One, Syed Gul Mohammed Shah of New Jersey, was arrested on Sept. 12 after
police found him and his roommate with $5,600 in cash and box cutters. Shah
said he was never advised of his right to attorney and was held 57 days in
New York jail cells before seeing a lawyer. Eventually, he was sentenced to
a year in jail - for credit card fraud unrelated to any terrorist activity.
Perhaps some people take heart in knowing that these are not citizens. They
are non-naturalized immigrants - a status that applied, of course, to the
forebears of nearly all Americans. Yet two American citizens - Yaser Esam
Hamdi and Jose Padilla - are also being held incommunicado, without charges,
without access to attorneys.
Yes, Hamdi was taken into custody in Afghanistan, but Padilla was arrested
in the United States on a court-issued warrant, then yanked out of the court
system by the Bush administration. Ashcroft first announced the arrest of
Padilla had foiled a major terrorist attack, but it soon became clear that
was not the case.
When detainees are suspected of terrorism - or of possibly conducting future
terrorism - and are held in the federal prison system, the Justice
Department has also claimed power to listen in on their conversations with
attorneys, essentially depriving them of their right to counsel.
Perhaps most frightening, Bush and Ashcroft have unilaterally decided they
have the power to usurp the Constitution, to claim when the basic rights
guaranteed to every American apply - and when they do not.
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in 
the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, 
self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of

tyranny."  - James Madison, Federalist No. 47
Even before 9-11, it was clear Bush was heading in a direction to strengthen
executive power. Well aware that information is power, he and Ashcroft took
steps to shut off the public. One of Bush's early decisions choked the
release of President Reagan's White House papers - and those of Reagan's
vice president, George H.W. Bush. Ashcroft's Justice Department, before
9-11, sent a memo to federal agencies that all but encouraged them to deny
requests for documents under the Freedom of Information Act.
Bush subordinates initially suggested they need not seek congressional
approval before launching a war against Iraq, despite the Constitution
clearly giving Congress the authority to declare war.
Now, Bush is seeking to create the biggest bureaucracy in the nation's
history, the 170,000-employee Department of Homeland Security. Some senators
have expressed legitimate concerns about many elements of the proposal: 
Bush, for example, wants to eliminate the employment guidelines that apply
to other federal agencies, including, some fear, whistleblower protection.
The free flow of information is essential to a representative democracy. By
closing off information and conducting government in secret, the Bush
administration threatens the very essence of America.
"A government operating in the shadow of secrecy stands in complete
opposition to the society envisioned by the framers of our Constitution."  -
The 6th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals, ruling on a Justice Department
attempt to close all immigration hearings.
All but a small minority of Americans abide by the law and have no intention
of ever conducting terrorist acts or aiding those who might. Many citizens
may well believe the restrictions cited in this editorial apply only to
criminals and terrorists who deserve what's coming to them.
Experience has shown, however, that people suspected of crimes are not
always guilty. Dozens of inmates imprisoned of murder and rape, convicted on
the testimony of eyeball witnesses, have been freed after incontrovertible
DNA evidence proved their innocence.
Today, we are entrusting the same federal agencies that fingered Richard
Jewell for the Atlanta Olympic bombings to have the power to decide whose
reading lists should be seized. The same departments that were sure Wen Ho
Lee was the biggest spy in U.S. history can now seek nearly unlimited
wiretapping authority.
These are not rare aberrations. Just days ago, senators revealed that the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - itself previously unknown to most
Americans - reported that the FBI had submitted 75 pieces of wrong or false
information in efforts to obtain wiretaps. And these were all pre- 9-11.
Politicians have long used the national security argument as a blanket
reason for concealing embarrassing - even criminal - behavior. The Richard
Nixon White House, it should be remembered, made that very argument in the
early days of the Watergate cover-up.
"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when 
the government's purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally 
alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest

dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, 
well-meaning but without understanding."  - Supreme Court Justice Louis 
Brandeis, 1928
The U.S. government has the right - indeed the responsibility - to take
reasonable steps to protect the nation, even if it means irritating limits
on our freedom of movement. Metal detectors and superficial searches in
airports, for example, are an acceptable price to pay.
The Bush administration, however, has crossed the line into violating
constitutional guarantees without even making a legitimate case about how
its actions are protecting the nation's security. The nation had all the
legal tools it needed in place on 9-11 to prohibit the attacks.
If airport security had been as tight as legally allowed, weapons might not
have made it on the airplanes. If federal agents had pursued the leads they
had in hand - had they connected the dots - the hijackers may well have been
thwarted.
Rather than address long-known problems of communications, hierarchy and
turf battles in the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency, the Bush
administration has launched a full-fledged assault on civil liberties with
little evidence the steps will make America more secure.
Fortunately, legal challenges to some of the actions are making their way to
federal courts, which are beginning to pull back the administration. Those
cases will eventually make their way, though, to a U.S. Supreme Court with a
majority of justices who have displayed a willingness to act more in the
interest of politics than constitutional law.
Americans of all political stripes must voice their objections to these
encroachments on their freedom. Certainly liberals, who have long emphasized
individual liberties, have displayed their concern. Conservatives who have
long questioned the role of big government should be equally concerned. Even
if they entrust Bush and Ashcroft with such power, would they want to see
these same powers concentrated under Bill Clinton and Janet Reno? Pragmatic
moderates must ask: How are these steps protecting the nation?
For if we lose our rights to liberty, if we lose the fundamental freedoms
that make America unique, what do we have left to protect?