Will rights be restored?

This wasn't supposed to happen here

[Reprinted from Issues & Views July 1, 2002]

In "Protecting liberty in a permanent war," (Washington Times, 6/25/02), the Cato Institute's Ted Galen Carpenter speculates on the consequences of a war that never ends. Given the unconventional imprisonment of American citizen Jose Padilla, a suspect in terrorist activities, Carpenter claims that it's justifiable for Americans to be concerned about constitutional rights. If no peace treaty can ever be signed with an enemy country, signifying the end of the "war," at what point might suspended civil liberties be restored? Perhaps never? Carpenter writes:

The war against terrorism is different. Because the struggle is against a shadowy network of adversaries rather than a nation state, it is virtually impossible even to speculate when it might end. . . . Indeed, it is not clear how victory itself would be defined. Even if the war is confined to combating al Qaeda, there is no way to confirm at any point that the organization's operatives have been neutralized. The concept of victory becomes more elusive if the goal is the eradication of all terrorism from the planet, as administration officials have sometimes hinted. That is a guaranteed blueprint for perpetual war.

Nor would the mere prolonged absence of attacks on U.S. targets be definitive evidence of victory. How long a period of quiescence would be enough? A year? Five years? Ten years? The reality is that no president would want to risk proclaiming victory in the war on terrorism only to have another terrorist attack occur on his watch. The political consequences of such a gaffe would be dire indeed. . . .

In short, the United States is now waging a permanent war. That reality makes civil liberties considerations even more important than in previous conflicts. Whatever constitutional rights are taken from us (or that we choose to relinquish) will not be restored after a few years. In all likelihood, they will be gone forever.

Columnist Nat Hentoff describes an old-fashioned town hall meeting, much in the spirit of this country's 18th century Sons of Liberty, who formed to counter British attacks on their liberties. Recently, about 300 citizens of Northampton, Massachusetts, met to figure out ways to protect town residents from the USA Patriot Act. They formed the Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee. Out of that meeting came a petition signed by 1,000 town residents urging the town government to approve a "resolution to defend the Bill of Rights." The resolution passed by unanimous vote and targets all government actions that "threaten key rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens and noncitizens by the Bill of Rights and the Massachusetts Constitution." Hentoff writes:

Among those key rights: "freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy; the right to counsel and due process in judicial proceedings; and protection from unreasonable searches and seizures." The city of Northampton officially asks, from now on, that "federal and state law enforcement report to the local Human Rights Commission all local investigations undertaken under aegis of the [USA Patriot] Act and Orders; and that the community's congressional representatives actively monitor the implementation of the Act and Orders, and work to repeal those sections found unconstitutional."

In "FBI begins secretly observing library patrons," (San Francisco Chronicle, 6/25/02), columnist Bob Egelko writes about a provision of the USA Patriot Act that permits the FBI to visit public libraries "to keep tabs on the reading habits of people the government considers dangerous." These new measures also include "clandestine searches of homes and expanded monitoring of telephones and the Internet." He writes:

Unlike other search warrants, the FBI need not show that evidence of wrongdoing is likely to be found or that the target of its investigation is involved in terrorism or spying. Nearly everything about the procedure is secret. The court that authorizes the searches meets in secret; the search warrants carried by the agents cannot mention the underlying investigation, and librarians and booksellers can be prosecuted for revealing an FBI visit to anyone, including the patron whose records were seized. . . .

Librarians and the FBI have been down this road before. Under a Cold War initiative called the Library Awareness Program, the FBI asked staff at science libraries about the reading habits of anyone with a foreign-sounding name or a foreign accent. Since then, every state except Kentucky and Hawaii passed laws making library records confidential. But a federal law like the Patriot Act overrides state laws.

"If people know what they're accessing or reading is evidence of wrong thinking, they're going to censor themselves," said Deborah Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom.

And here is some of what the Free Congress Foundation's J. Bradley Jansen wrote in a letter to Attorney General John Ashcroft on June 19:

Anyone who has tried to clean up a copy of one's credit report knows how easily bad information collects and disseminates in our technological age. Every victim of identity fraud understands the dangers inherent in your proposal to sweep lots of publicly-available information into new databases that will be sifted and shared.

What are the controls on the sharing and use of that information? Given that half or more of all computer security problems stem not from computer crackers breaking into a system but from authorized personnel abusing their access, are you protecting us or making us less secure? . . .

All investors have heard the admonition that past performance is no predictor of future gain. Profiles of past terrorists do an excellent job of "predicting" the past--not of preparing us for the future. Changing profiles from the World Trade Center bombing did not prepare for Timothy McVeigh. Updating profiles after the Oklahoma City bombing did nothing to prepare for September 11th. . . .

You asserted that terrorist entities use identity fraud among other means to fund their activities as a justification for some of the provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and other changes. By collecting information on all of us instead of just criminal suspects and sharing that information, you endanger all of us and make the job of terrorists easier. . . .

The proposals to suspend the Constitutional protections of non-citizens in this country under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures threaten all of us [see US v. Verdugo-Urquidez (1990)]. The Bill of Rights guards the rights of all "people" here, citizens or not.

Copyright © 2010 Issues & Views