4 - 10 October 2001
Issue No.554
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 4 - 10 October 2001 Issue No.554 |
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Over the top
Draconian security measures under consideration in Congress suggest that a war on terror means more than coalition building and military might. Nyier Abdou finds the price of civil liberty could become cheap in shell-shocked America
The US constitution is the holy book of the American religion. It supersedes personal and theistic beliefs to unify Americans in a common cause: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in the words of the inimitable Thomas Jefferson. They were powerful words in 1776, and they still invoke chest-beating and national pride in Americans representing the broad spectrum of political discourse.
Because Americans were so unprepared for an attack on the scale of 11 September, people are demanding to know why their government failed them. Lawmakers, putting partisan pettiness aside, have reacted by throwing their unwavering support behind the president in order to seek fast, effective measures to identify and thwart future attacks.
And yet, new security measures proposed by Attorney General John Ashcroft may be cracking the bipartisan façade. The draft Anti-terrorism Act of 2001 (ATA) is essentially an aggressive update of far-reaching anti-terrorism and immigration legislation passed under the Clinton administration in 1996 to answer the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Although civil liberties advocates have repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with sweeping security powers introduced by the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, ATA seeks to augment many of the contentious measures sanctioned by them.
Increased powers conferred on the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), including the use of so-called secret evidence and the right to deport legal aliens on minor offences, were soon brought under scrutiny and second-guessed by authorities. A trend toward reducing the powers of the INS before the 11 September attacks, however, has been radically reversed.
Gary Orfield, a professor of education and social policy and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard concedes that in the short term, those who will be netted under the new proposals are likely to be Arab and Muslim immigrants. Though he commended government officials for their efforts to show support for the Muslim and Arab community, Orfield expects that there will be "many innocent victims." He cited examples of people frightened to leave the country to visit their families out of the country. "Obviously, visas were issued without background checks. All of these agencies are going to be much more careful," he told Al-Ahram Weekly.
The dangers for immigrant populations in the US are clear, as Jack Strayer, vice president of external affairs at the Washington-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), notes. Congress was already looking at the anti-terrorism act and a need for new immigration laws dealing with Mexico and South America in the "war on drugs," Strayer told the Weekly. "In fact, it was the 'war on drugs' that allowed the US government to arrest, try and jail nearly 25 per cent of all black American men under the age of 25 for some drug infraction."
With anti-Arab and anti-Islamic sentiments on the rise, the administration has been extremely cautious in urging tolerance and stressing that it is not at war with Islam itself. But ATA could ultimately be used to back up policies of racial profiling and further sanction the use of secret evidence. "I think that in the near future, things are going to be difficult for young men who look like Arabs to people here," said Orfield.
Angelo N Ancheta, director of legal and advocacy programmes at Harvard University, told the Weekly that "It's difficult to say how far federal law enforcement will go in terms of racial profiling, but it seems highly likely that it will occur on a widespread basis and with limited opposition."
"I am certain that immigration laws are going to be revisited, and we are hearing that many legal immigrants may be deported, even if they have the proper papers," Strayer warned. "Keep in mind that this country held US citizens of Japanese decent in interment camps during World War II, so a precedent has been set, even though today it is a most un-American policy option."
Horror stories abound, of legal residents who have been detained for months, even years, without knowing the charges against them, only to ultimately be freed when the "secret" evidence was found too flimsy and unfounded. President Bush originally trumped former Vice President Al Gore in the 2000 presidential race by being the first to denounce the use of secret evidence and throwing the issue of racial profiling on the table. But ATA would reinforce and expand the cases when secret evidence could be used, making it possible to detain someone without a hearing, possibly indefinitely, only if there is "reason to believe" the suspect could be a threat.
Other contentious measures include increased authority to conduct "secret searches" and a vague definition of terrorism. Activists and legal experts warn that the draft ATA allows demonstrators guilty of nothing more than pelting a rock through a window to be classified as terrorists. "By employing a vague definition of material support, membership in many associations or support for charities that might have some distant relationship to terrorist activities could be classified as terrorist," Harvard's Ancheta said.
Ashcroft and Solicitor General Ted Olson, have called the measures introduced by ATA extremely moderate. But despite pressure from Secretary of State Colin Powell to deliver a bill by next week, some lawmakers are wondering if the administration is taking advantage of an emergency situation to sail disputable measures through Congress.
"We are in a state of war," explains the NCPA's Strayer, "and the US will take every precaution." Strayer admits it is a "hard-line approach", but stresses the need to bring the attacks perpetrators to justice. There will "undoubtedly be false arrests and other injustices," he notes, as there "always are during periods of war."
With drastic measures being sold to the American public as a necessary evil for a nation at war, one might pause to wonder if ATA is closer to martial law than any other security measures passed by Congress. Harvard's Ancheta admits that ATA could approach martial law, but notes that respect for civil liberty runs deep in America, "even if [this] is often abused in practice. We're not likely to see a formal declaration of martial law, and there are strong supporters of civil liberties in the government -- among both Democrats and Republicans."
"Millions of Americans remember that the powers given to [government] agencies to fight communism were used to spy on Martin Luther King, many civil rights leaders, leftist leaders, and the 'enemies' of President Nixon, who was forced to resign in scandal," notes Gary Orfield, of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard. "My hope is that the damage will not be as great as appeared likely even a week ago, and that there will be serious vigilance of the use of increased discretion." He added: "There is absolutely no question that there is going to be much more active monitoring of non-citizens in the US."
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