Casualties of war - Comment

Progressive, The, Jan, 2003

Oh, it was too easy for a nation to turn its back on 1,200 detainees, mostly Muslim, rounded up since September 11 and held in secret. The terrorist attack was so shocking that many Americans were able to condone this violation of due process, thinking perhaps that the government would stop there. But now the government of the people has turned its attention to the rest of the people, and the war on terrorism goes from murky to muddy.

Welcome to the era of Total Information Awareness and other tomfoolery.

We're now at a time of perhaps unprecedented spying and secrecy. Richard Nixon could only dream of such powers. More than a year after the events of September 11, 2001, we are seeing the best of America--the Constitution and Bill of Rights--shredded by President George Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft. To comprehend this breathtaking assault, we need to look back at how it all began.

The Ashcroft confirmation hearing was a bitter fight for the soul of the Justice Department. Amidst the cantankerous rhetoric and blow-hard posturing from both sides of the narrow fence, there was some plainspoken eloquence from Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

"The Attorney General, more than any other Cabinet officer, is entrusted with protecting the civil rights of Americans," Durbin said. "We know from our history that defending those rights can often be controversial and unpopular. I find no evidence in the public career or voting record of Senator Ashcroft that he has ever risked any political capital to defend the rights of those who suffer in our society from prejudice and discrimination."

How right Durbin was.

Since 9/11, our top law enforcement officer has gone to great lengths to rewrite and dismantle civil liberties in this country. For all the Attorney General's singing about patriotism and love of country, his odious record demonstrates that he does not respect the fundamental tenets of our democracy.

The opening act in this wretched tragedy started two nights after the 9/11 attack when the Senate swiftly voted, by voice, to approve an attachment to an appropriations bill that made it easier for the government to wiretap the computers of terrorism suspects without having to go through due process. That was just the beginning of what would eventually become the USA Patriot Act, an omnibus anti-terrorism law that was supposed to pacify Americans so they would return to shopping malls and sporting events.

The USA Patriot Act is full of lax language that gives the government expansive powers to peep into the lives of Americans they deem dissenters and subversives. This is the kind of law a nation gets when 78 percent of its citizens, in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, say they're willing to sacrifice rights to fight against extremists. It's simply one of the most regressive acts in American history.

Even the definition of a terrorist in the act is flimsy and transparent. For instance, you're a domestic terrorist if you're breaking a law at the same time that you're doing something that appears "to be intended to influence the policy of government by intimidation." Under this definition, Martin Luther King was a domestic terrorist in Birmingham.

The act lets the FBI and other law enforcement agents enter your home when you're not there, ransack your files, use your computer and search your emails, and place a "magic lantern" on your computer to record your every keystroke. Then they can leave without telling you they were there.

In addition, the Patriot Act lets law enforcement find out what books you're buying at stores or checking out at libraries. And it then gags the bookstores and libraries so they can't tell anyone that they've had to fork over your name.

But this lunacy goes beyond reading material. A story in the December 10 edition of The New York Times reports that last summer the FBI, concerned about a terrorist attack involving scuba divers, "set out to identify every person who had taken diving lessons in the previous three years."

According to the Times, hundreds of dive shops and organizations willingly turned over the information.

"But just as the effort was wrapping up in July, the FBI ran into a two-man revolt," the Times says. "The owners of the Reef Seekers Dive Company in Beverly Hills, California, balked at turning over the records of their clients ... even when officials came back with a subpoena asking for `any and all documented and other records relating to all noncertified divers and referrals from July 1, 1999, through July 16, 2002.'"

The owners say they had several reasons to deny the FBI's request, primarily because terrorists would need to have far more sophisticated training than a few scuba lessons. The owners said they also worried the information would be passed on to other agencies. Some people called to say they hoped the shop would be blown up by terrorists.

"If we are going to decide as a country that because of our worry about terrorism that we are willing to give up our basic privacy, we need an open and full debate on whether we want to make such a fundamental change," Cindy Cohen, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Times. The foundation represented Reef Seekers.