Yes, you have lost rights under the Bush junta -- here's what you have lots

QUOTE

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my

message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists. ... They give ammunition

to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends.

-- former attorney general John Ashcroft

You're either with us or against us. -- George W. Bush

Today's America is a much less free place than the America of 2000.

Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration has, by

word and by deed, erected an edifice of repression here in the United

States.

We've been living in it ever since. And it's not a comfortable place. The

government is monitoring your phone calls and can read your e-mails and open

your snail mail.

The government can access records of your large financial transactions, such

as buying a house.

Law enforcement officers can bust into your home when you're not there,

riffle through your belongings, plant a recording device on your computer,

and leave without notifying you for at least thirty days -- and maybe a lot

more.

You no longer have the right to protest where the president or vice

president can see you, or at major public events when they aren't even

present.

Law enforcement officers can now monitor you in public if you are merely

exercising your political rights.

They can infiltrate your political organizations.

And they can keep track of you at your place of worship. The government can

find out from bookstores and libraries the material you've been reading, and

the bookstore owner and the librarian can't talk about it, except to their

lawyers, for a whole year -- or more.

The government can hold you in preventive detention for months on end as a

"material witness."

If you're not a citizen the government can deport you on a technicality or

for mere political association.

If you're not a citizen the government can label you an "enemy combatant"

and send you to secret prisons around the world, where you may never see the

light of day again -- much less a lawyer or a judge. And even if you are a

citizen, the government can label you an enemy combatant and hold you in

solitary confinement here in the United States.

Under George W. Bush's interpretation of the president's powers during the

so-called war on terror he can do just about whatever he wants. He cites the

Authorization for Use of Military Force bill, which Congress passed on

September 18, 2001, as the justification for this enormous leeway.

"Congress gave me the authority to use necessary force to protect the

American people, but it didn't prescribe the tactics,"Bush said in a speech

at Kansas State University on January 23, 2006. Those tactics, he presumes,

are totally up to him. Under this rationale Bush could send F-16s to attack

a residential area in, say, Indianapolis if he thought Al Qaeda suspects

were there.

Lest you think I'm exaggerating, check out the February 13, 2006, issue of

Newsweek:

A Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the

President might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects

inside the United States. ... Steven Bradbury, acting head of the

department's office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate

Intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W.

Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said Administration and

Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session

was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury

questions about the ex- tent of Presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could

Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S.

soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least

in certain circumstances.

Yes, the U.S. government has a primary obligation to protect us all from

another attack. But there needs to be a legal limit; there needs to be a

respect for our Constitution and our liberties. Otherwise, as Senator Russ

Feingold pointed out, "this country won't be America."

What the Bush administration did after 9/11 was not to engage in precise

police work to find any would-be terrorists in our midst. Instead, it issued

edicts and enacted laws that curtailed all of our freedoms. And it cast a

gigantic dragnet over Arabs and Muslims in this country, treating many of

them with a de facto presumption of guilt. To put those experiences in

context we need to examine how the Bush administration constructed the

edifice of repression.

It got the job done, in part, by blasting those who dared to dissent. When

the president's former press secretary Ari Fleischer told people they should

"watch what they say" after comedian Bill Maher on ABC's Politically

Incorrect dared to question the label of "cowards" that Bush had slapped on

the suicide bombers, it sent a message. As did the canceling of Maher's

show. As did Bush's repeated assertion that "you're either with us or

against us."

The message was clear: If you dissent you're un-American, you're a traitor.

And that message went down the ranks.

"You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group

protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is

international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest, "Mike Van

Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, told

the Oakland Tribune in 2003. "You can almost argue that a protest against

that is a terrorist act."

Celebrity dissenters, such as Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn, Linda

Ronstadt, and the Dixie Chicks, all felt the sting of reprobation. The

attacks on them reinforced the idea in the air that if you speak out, you'll

pay a price. Gradually, as Bush's popularity has faded, his power to

regulate the cultural thermostat has diminished.

But the Bush administration's efforts have gone way beyond chilly climate

control. Breathtaking in its audaciousness, the administration has

implemented, of ten by fiat, an amazing array of repressive policies that

still stand. These policies deprive us of some of our most precious freedoms

and threaten the very character of our democratic system. This repression

has not been indiscriminate. For the most part white, non-Muslim U.S.

citizens have not felt the full brunt of it. But for many Muslim and Arab

and South Asian immigrants in America, citizen or not, America became

inhospitable overnight. Their quality of life, their sense of security, has

never been the same.

1. The Ashcroft raids

Just as the rounding up of ten thousand immigrants and radicals from 1918 to

1921 became known as the Palmer Raids, after Attorney General A. Mitchell

Palmer, so too should the roundups after September 11 be called the Ashcroft

Raids.

John Ashcroft, who served as attorney general from 2001 to 2005, sent law

enforcement officers around the country to seize Muslims and Arabs in the

United States and to hold them on whatever conceivable pretext. As David

Cole notes in Enemy Aliens, this was a policy of "mass preventive

detention." In the first two months after 9/11 the Ashcroft Raids had

rounded up more than 1,182 people. (The Justice Department stopped reporting

numbers after that.) Some were citizens; the majority were not.

Ashcroft sent law enforcement agents all over the country to nab immigrants

on the slightest offenses. As he told the U.S. Conference of Mayors on

October 25, 2001, "Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay

your visa -- even by one day -- we will arrest you. If you violate a local

law, you will be put in jail and kept in custody as long as possible. We

will use every available statute. We will seek every prosecutorial

advantage."

Some Arabs and Muslims in the United States were apprehended solely on

"anonymous tips called in by members of the public suspicious of Arab and

Muslim neighbors who kept odd schedules," according to a June 2003 report of

the Justice Department's office of the Inspector General titled "A Review of

the Treatment of Aliens Held on Immigration Charges in Connection with the

Investigation of the September 11 Attacks." One such detainee worked at a

grocery store run by Middle Eastern men that was open twenty-four hours a

day, and someone called that in as a threat, the report says. Three other

Middle Eastern men were stopped in Manhattan on a traffic violation. In

their car were design plans for a public school. Even though "their

employers confirmed that the men were working on construction at the school

and that it was appropriate for them to have the plans," they were detained.

"The Department was detaining aliens on immigration violations that

generally had not been enforced in the past," the report noted. And it was

detaining them for long periods of time, without the usual due process.

Before 9/11, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) had a practice

of charging detainees within forty-eight hours of their arrests. After the

attacks, the INS changed that to seventy-two hours and added a huge

loophole: "In the event of an emergency or other extraordinary

circumstances, the charging decision could be made within an additional

reasonable period of time," the inspector general's report said. That period

was not specified, so there was no outer limit. More than 100 detainees were

not charged within the first 10 days of detention, and five detainees waited

"approximately 168 days after their arrest" to be charged. These delays

"affected the detainees' ability to obtain effective legal counsel."

The detainees were held without bond. Many were labeled in an

"indiscriminate and haphazard manner" by the FBI, making it difficult "to

distinguish between aliens who it actually suspected of having a connection

to terrorism as opposed to aliens who, while possibly guilty of violating

federal immigration law, had no connection to terrorism." Many were held in

the most restrictive wings of detention facilities.

And for the first "several days to several weeks" they were held

incommunicado, not allowed to make any calls to lawyers or loved ones. On

average, the FBI held these detainees for 80 days before clearing them. One

was actually held for 244 days: "The untimely clearance process had enormous

ramifications for September 11 detainees." One of those ramifications was

brutalization.

At the Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan "there is evidence

supporting the detainees' claims of abuse," the inspector general's report

concluded. Detainees said officers "slammed them into walls, dragged them by

their arms, stepped on the chain between their ankle cuffs ... and twisted

their arms, hands, wrists, and fingers." One detainee said that "an officer

bent his finger back until it touched his wrist. Another said that "officers

repeatedly twisted his arm, which was in a cast."

The Ashcroft Raids included not only the initial dragnet after September 11

but two other dragnets. One was the Absconder Apprehension Initiative. This

program expressly targeted Arabs and Muslims for deportation, even though

they made up only a tiny fraction of "the more than 300,000 foreign

nationals living here with outstanding deportation orders," Cole writes in

Enemy Aliens. The other was the Special Registration program, which ordered

immigrant men from predominantly Muslim or Arab countries to report to the

immigration service. According to Cole, these three dragnets combined

rounded up more than 5,000 people. With nothing to show for it.

"This program has been a colossal failure at finding terrorists," Cole

writes, "of the more than 5,000 persons subjected to preventive detention as

of May 2003, not one has been charged with any involvement in the crimes of

September 11."

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf

of "male non-citizens from the Middle East, South Asia, and elsewhere who

are Arab or Muslim or have been perceived by Defendants to be Arab or

Muslim, who have been arrested and detained on minor immigration violations"

after 9/11. The suit, Turkmen v. Ashcroft, charged that their First, Fourth,

Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights were violated.

On June 14, 2006, District Judge John Gleeson dismissed the plaintiffs'

claims, except those relating to the conditions of their confinement. He

ruled that it was OK for the government to hold the detainees essentially on

a pretext -- a minor immigration infraction -- when, in fact, they were

holding them for other purposes. He said that it was OK for the government

to hold detainees for six months -- and sometimes longer -- after a judge

has issued a determination to deport. In fact, he said, the government could

hold them so long as their release was "reasonably foreseeable" -- an

exceptionally elastic term. And he said that it was OK for the government to

discriminate on the basis of race, religion, and/or national origin by

holding Muslim and Arab detainees longer than others. The judge cited a

Supreme Court case (Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee)

that said that the discrimination needs to be "so outrageous"as to overcome

the deference owed to the executive branch in immigration matters.

Judge Gleeson said there was nothing outrageous about the alleged

discrimination in this case.

As Cole, who worked on the case with the Center for Constitutional Rights,

pointed out in a Los Angeles Times piece, "In essence, he authorized a

repeat of the Japanese internment."

2. Abuse of Material Witness Statute

The Bush administration has used another technique for holding people --

primarily but not exclusively noncitizens -- in preventive detention. And

that is by aggressively and speciously applying the 1984 material witness

statute. This law allows the government to detain a witness in a criminal

case if it's likely that this person would flee before testifying.

As Nat Hentoff wrote in The Progressive, this statute was "largely intended

to prevent members of organized crime from fleeing." But the Bush

administration used it to detain about four dozen people whom it viewed as

suspects but did not have sufficient evidence to charge with any crime or

immigration violation. Some were held for more than three months, according

to the Justice Department. "Jailing people who are simply under

investigation is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime," District Judge

Shira Scheindlin ruled on April 30, 2002, in a case involving Osama

Awadallah, a Jordanian student who was here legally but whose phone number

was found in one of the 9/11 hijackers' cars. "If the government has

probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime, it may arrest that

person," Judge Scheindlin said. But misusing the material witness statute

poses "the threat of making detention the norm and liberty the exception."

3. Enemy combatants and "extraordinary renditions"

Another mechanism for depriving people -- citizen and noncitizen alike -- of

their rights is to label them "enemy combatants."And that's what the Bush

administration has been doing. It's held more than six hundred prisoners at

Guant