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Bush's war on civil liberties
The New York Times put together a really good summary of the changes the Bush administration has tried to make to our traditional civil liberties in the name of "national security" since September 11, and the resistance to their attempts to curtail our liberties. Highly recommended. It is becoming clearer, at least to me, that the Bush administration has cynically used the horrible events to 9-11 to drive its own agenda instead of reforming the intelligence agencies to make them more effective at preventing events like 9-11.
The article notes that more than 1,200 people were detained after Sept 11, many of them ostensibly on immigration charges, many of them for months under conditions that would lead to outcries if they were happening to US citizens in other countries. All kinds of dishonest legal tricks have been used as well, such as charging people with immigration violations (which don't require that they be provided with a lawyer) then questioning them daily for months about terrorism without a lawyer present. However, as the article notes, not one person in the US detained since Sept 11 has been charged with an act of terrorism. Not one.
There are three things I object to about Bush's war on civil liberties.
First is the passion for secrecy. Already a hallmark of this administration (see Cheney Task Force), it has gone to extreme lengths in this supposed war on terrorism. The citizens of a democratic country have the right to know that their government is up so, so they can decide whether to support or oppose what the government is doing. The Bush administration knows that they wouldn't have the support of the American people if people knew what and how they were doing things, so they try to operate under a veil of secrecy cloaked in patriotism. They are trying to make questioning what they doing unpatriotic. We know where that leads. The article quotes Warren Christopher, the secretary of state in the Clinton administration, saying that the administration's refusal to identify the people it had detained reminded him of the "disappeareds" in Argentina. "I'll never forget going to Argentina and seeing the mothers marching in the streets asking for the names of those being held by the government," Mr. Christopher said. "We must be very careful in this country about taking people into custody without revealing their names."
Second is Bush's arrogation of power to himself and to the executive branch. Our tripartite system of government has many faults, but it is the one mandated in the constitution and has served us reasonably well. To have a man chosen by the Supreme Court for President after getting considerably less than half the votes claiming that the judiciary and the legislative branches have no right inquire into his conduct would be funny and ironic, if it weren't so serious. To claim that he alone can arrest a US citizen in the United States, declare him an "enemy combatant" and throw him into a military prison and tell a US judge that the judiciary has no jurisdiction look into that citizen's detention is an incredible violation of our civil rights and treason to the Constitution. Bush should be impeached for that alone. If he now starts a war with Iraq without a congressional declaration of war, I for one will wonder if we will have a fair election in 2004.
Lastly is the cynical motivation. Samuel Johnson said "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel," and it seems clearer and clearer that the post 9-11 crackdown and roundup were motivated not by the belief that it would catch terrorists, but in order to distract the American people from what a massive failure Sept 11 represented for the US intelligence community, and how dysfunctional the FBI and CIA were (and still are). Since Bush couldn't figure out what to do, but felt the need to show that he was doing something, he spent our valuable resources rounding up and interrogating foreigners in secret. In the meantime, not one person in the intelligence community lost their job as a result of 9-11, no wholesale changes have been made in the way that the agencies operate, and there is a new news surprise from Ashcroft every time cries for a commission to investigate the events get loud enough. I wonder what they are hiding?
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