Investigative reporter and essayist Russ Baker is a
longtime contributor to TomPaine.com. He is the founder of the
Real News Project, a new organization dedicated to
revitalizing investigative journalism. He can be reached
at russ@russbaker.com.
Research assistance for this piece was provided
by Stefanie von Brochowski.
Good news! Efforts to safeguard Americans
are working perfectly—if you read last week’s new report from
the Justice Department’s inspector general. The report says the Justice
Department received no complaints in the first six
months of this year related to misconduct by department
employees carrying out the USA Patriot Act—a key component of
the campaign to prevent domestic acts of terror.
If you take that statement about the lack of complaints out
of context—and many Americans probably will, thanks to the
Bush administration's prowess at spinning and
news-managing—you might conclude that the homeland security
operation has been a resounding success.
But you get a very different impression if you piece
together scattered reports from a variety of sources about the
impact of the Bush administration’s domestic “War on Terror.”
In early August alone, a number of disturbing articles
suggested that measures designed to protect Americans are
seriously undermining the most basic civil rights of both
citizens and guests in this country—in an ostensibly
still-free society.
Here’s a sampling of the bad news:
-
On August 7, The New York Times reported the
case of a longtime naturalized American citizen—a New York
area-translator, an apparently peaceable fellow, working on
his doctorate, with no personal involvement in or sympathies
with terror activity. He has now been convicted of providing
material aid to terrorism and conspiring to deceive the
government. His crime: Translating material into and
out of Arabic for defense attorney Lynne Stewart and
her client, the jailed Sheikh Abdul Rahman. A jury
found Stewart guilty of passing along violent messages from
the cleric, but the translator claims that in his own
actions he was simply following her instructions. It’s far
from clear that he understood that anything he did could be
seen as aiding terrorism or that this was his intention—yet
he now faces a possible 20 years in prison.
-
The grim spectre of American troops in American streets
is not just a nightmare scenario any longer. On August 8,
The Washington Post reported on Pentagon plans to
have normal military troops intervene domestically in
various crisis scenarios, despite the fact that the Posse
Comitatus Act of 1878 severely restricts the use of troops
in domestic law enforcement. The long-range concern here is
that introducing active-duty troops onto American streets
could lead to military involvement in politics and
eventually, under the cloak of some future crisis, to
military government. In the meantime, worries arise about
the transferability of skills that troops need in war zones
where civil liberties and other niceties play little or no
role, to political demonstrations on the streets of, say,
Washington, D.C., or Cleveland. The article contains
various reassurances that there’s no cause for alarm. But
the Post got this story from “officers who drafted
the plans.” Assuming the officers spoke to the reporter
with the permission of their superiors, that means the
military is floating the idea to see whether it actually
bothers anyone. Do the words “Kent State” mean
nothing to today’s Pentagon planners?
-
People may be incarcerated right here in the United
States in conditions as harsh as those that exist or existed
in places like Abu Ghraib, Bagram and Guantanamo. On August
9, we learned about an Illinois student from Qatar being
held as an enemy combatant—in a Navy brig in Charleston,
S.C. His lawyer claims that he is held in isolation, nearly
round the clock, in a dark 6-by-9-foot cell; deliberately
exposed to extreme cold; denied basic necessities like a
toothbrush, toilet paper, adequate bedding and medical and
psychological care; and denied any contact with his family.
He further claims to be denied access to any books,
newspapers, radio, television or religious material except
for the Koran (which he says was placed on the floor, with
other items heaped atop it), and says that threats have been
made against his family.
-
The U.S. government is seizing foreigners who are
simply changing planes at U.S. airports, detaining them
without charges, depriving them of access to a lawyer or the
courts and even denying basic necessities like food. On
August 10, I read how one naturalized Canadian citizen is
suing the U.S. government over the practice known as
''extraordinary rendition.'' He alleges that he was
grabbed at JFK Airport, held in solitary confinement in a
Brooklyn detention center and then shipped off to his native
Syria to be interrogated under torture because officials
suspected that he was a member of Al Qaeda. Since then,
Syrian and Canadian officials have said that the man had no
terrorist connections. U.S. officials maintain otherwise.
According to The New York Times , they are seeking
dismissal of his lawsuit, in part through the rare assertion
of a "state secrets" privilege.
One wonders, of course, if these are just isolated
examples, an unavoidable byproduct of a system that, overall,
is protecting our lives. But is it?
The government steadfastly refuses to reveal how many
people have been arrested in this country on suspicion of
terror-related activity, though legal and human right experts
say the numbers may be as high as 5,000. Now, it’s
understandable that in the climate following 9/11, errors
would be made. Still, one might reasonably expect a certain
percentage of those incarcerations to be justified in the end.
Yet, according to a statistical analysis released early this
year by the NYU Center on Law and Security, based on the 120
terrorism-related cases it could identify, only two cases
resulted in convictions for actual or planned terrorist acts.
One involved shoe bomber Richard Reid, who was only
apprehended (by fellow passengers) when he unsuccessfully
tried to blow up a plane. The other involved Iyman Faris, a
Kashmir-born Ohio truck driver sentenced to 20 years in prison
for planning to sabotage Brooklyn Bridge trains—who has a
history of mental illness, attempted suicide and spent some
time in a mental hospital in the late '90s. Not your typical
Al Qaeda operative.
In addition, the authorities have required more than 80,000
foreign men, from predominantly Arab or Muslim countries, to
register, be fingerprinted and photographed; called in around
8,000 for FBI interviews; and prioritized more than 6,000 for
deportation, says David Cole, professor at Georgetown
University Law Center and expert on civil liberties and
national security. As of now, he says, not a single one of
those has been charged with anything terror-related.
The reason the number actually arrested is a mere guess is
that there are no records—indeed, no public scrutiny at all.
Even the families and the detainees themselves are sometimes
denied access to court documents. “The simple fact is: nobody
knows—and I’m not sure we’ll ever know the number of people
that have gone through U.S. custody,” says Jumana Musa,
Advocacy Director of Domestic Human Rights and International
Justice, at Amnesty International USA.
But why don’t we know? “The government was announcing the
number of people that they had taken into custody until they
got to around 1,200,” says Musa. “And people started asking
the question ‘well, how many of those people were charged with
September 11?’, and the answer was zero. So they stopped
giving numbers in custody.”
If this still sounds too remote to trouble you, consider
this: You don’t have to be Muslim or even appear to fit any
profile to come close to personal peril. I have twice been
pulled into an interrogation room after coming off foreign
flights. The first time, the officers involved released me
soon after, but declined to explain why I had been flagged.
The second time, one confessed that my name was ‘similar’ to
that of someone on a watch list (“Sheikh Ras al-Bakr”?)—this
despite a unique passport number and a history of decidedly
nonjihadist overseas travel, albeit as a journalist who has
found many occasions to criticize the current
administration.
Can I—can any of us—learn more about what is going
on? No, we can’t. Because no administration in history
has come close to the Bush White House in its zeal to block
the routine release of information, and to stamp “classified”
on pieces of paper—millions upon millions. It’s worth noting
that this policy went into effect long before 9/11—indeed,
within days of Bush taking office in early 2001.
Since then, of course, the claimed justification for
opaqueness has grown. And so have the dangers to
democracy.
.gif){kind=spacer}
.gif){kind=spacer}
.gif){kind=spacer}
