Sunday, September 28, 2003

Patriot Act targets non-terrorists

The government is using the Patriot Act to deprive all people of their constitutional rights. 

Patriot Act targets non-terrorists

The government is using the Patriot Act to deprive all people of their constitutional rights.

http://www.news-observer.com/front/story/2902681p-2671892c.html

Agents abridge rights

By SAM STANTON AND EMILY BAZAR, Mcclatchy Newspapers


Secret lists govern whether you can get on an airplane. E-mail messages and the Internet are under secret surveillance. New warrants allow the government to search your home, bank records and medical files without your knowing it.

When FBI agents learned last year that terrorist training included scuba techniques, the bureau obtained the names and addresses of more than 10 million Americans certified as divers.

Immigrants nationwide have been jailed indefinitely over visa violations that in the past would have been ignored, and about 13,000 face deportation.

Others have languished in cells while officials lied to their families about where they were. And thousands have fled the United States, seeking refuge in Canada.

For American citizens and immigrant residents, the echoes of Sept. 11, 2001, continue to resound in what a growing number of critics contend is a loss of basic civil liberties stemming from the federal government’s anti-terrorism campaign.

“The government is treating us like we are all terrorists,” said Kourosh Gholamshahi, 36, of Sacramento, Calif., an Iranian immigrant who spent nearly a year in jail over a deportation order he ignored. “What kind of Constitution is this? What kind of democracy is this?”

Critics, liberal and conservative, say it’s a democracy that has gone too far in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks by giving the federal government enormous new powers.

Supporters of the new laws insist that this same democracy is protecting its citizens’ rights, as well as their lives, by defending the nation from new attacks.

Early this month , President Bush said Congress still has not gone far enough and called for even greater federal powers in terrorism probes.

And Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a national tour to shore up support for tough new laws passed in the wake of the attacks.

“These tools ... prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil,” Ashcroft said Sept. 6 on a visit to Durham . “They enable us to save innocent lives.”

The dispute has sparked a national debate, with more than 160 communities voting to oppose some of the powers authorized under the Patriot Act, the toughest new law being used in the war on terrorism.

After initially brushing aside such actions as the protests of uninformed liberals, the Justice Department is now taking on the critics directly, issuing talking points to officials and urging them to address community concerns by appearing at public forums.

Liberty curtailed

The very definition of liberty is being challenged in the way some cases are being handled.

Consider these instances:

* Two peace activists are singled out by authorities at San Francisco International Airport as they try to board a flight to Boston for a family visit. Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon are held and questioned for hours because their names apparently popped up on a secret “no fly” list. Both are suing the federal government in a bid to gain more information about such lists.

* A public defender surfing the Web at a library in Santa Fe, N.M., finds himself surrounded by four local police officers, then handcuffed and detained by Secret Service agents after someone apparently overhears a political debate in which he declares that “Bush is out of control.” Andrew O’Connor’s experience in February led to legislative hearings in New Mexico over the Patriot Act and government secrecy.

* Barry Reingold, a retired phone company worker, gets into an intense debate at his San Francisco gym over the bombing of Afghanistan and his criticism of President Bush, and is awakened at his apartment a week later by two FBI agents who want to talk to him about his political beliefs.

The impact on the immigrant community has been more severe, as Gholamshahi’s experience illustrates. From the time he came to the United States 18 years ago, fleeing persecution in Iran, Gholamshahi had forged a new life in Sacramento, living quietly and marrying an American. He found odd jobs, including work as a busboy and as a security guard.

Gholamshahi sought political asylum in 1989 but was denied, and he was ordered deported.

He chose to stay in the United States illegally. Before Sept. 11, that was a common practice, and the government rarely pursued such cases unless an immigrant came to the attention of law enforcement.

But Gholamshahi’s old deportation order caught up with him last year. With the government newly focused on Middle Eastern men and Ashcroft’s post-9/11 declaration that any violation would be used to expel possible terrorists, he found himself shuttled from jail to jail.

Gholamshahi’s supporters acknowledge that the government had a right to detain him, but they argue that, like many Middle Eastern men, he was singled out because of his ethnicity.

“Kourosh is a person who has no criminal background,” said Gae Geram, a Sacramento immigration bond specialist who fought to win his release. “Wanting to stay here is his only crime.”

Gholamshahi was released from the Sacramento County jail in May, after a federal court agreed to hear his appeal for asylum.

His detention echoes that of thousands of others who still face the possibility of deportation. Among them are hundreds of immigrants rounded up after Sept. 11 in a sweep aimed at detaining those suspected of terrorist ties—something Gholamshahi was never accused of.

The Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report in April on the handling of the 762 detainees, saying there were “significant problems” with the way some were treated, and uncovering evidence that family members and lawyers were kept in the dark about where the detainees had been taken.

The Justice Department rejected much of the criticism, contending that its “actions are fully within the law and necessary to protect the American people.”

Courts give green light

Federal courts have given the government wide leeway in its pursuit of suspected terrorists, ruling that it may keep secret the names of the detainees. They have likewise ruled that immigration hearings involving these suspects may be held in secret.

The Bush administration has also created a new category that allows U.S. citizens to be classified as “enemy combatants” who can be held without charges and denied access to lawyers.

Kevin Johnson, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of California, Davis, law school, said the concept “relies in part on some World War II case precedent,” but he added, “It’s really a new term created by the Bush administration.”

Jose Padilla, the Chicago man alleged to have plotted a “dirty bomb” attack in the United States, was detained in May 2002 and declared an enemy combatant but was never charged with a crime. He was denied access to an attorney and turned over to military authorities. Yaser Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man captured as a Taliban fighter in 2001, is being held under similar conditions.

Some legal experts say the tactics recall those used in anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s.

“If you arrest a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, he has rights,"Johnson said. “He has a right to counsel that’s guaranteed by the Constitution. He generally has a right to some kind of hearing about his detention. ... He has due process rights.”

The Justice Department and the courts disagree, and since Sept. 11 authorities have used a variety of methods to hold people suspected of terrorist ties.

Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the Justice Department said, it has ordered reviews of 4,500 intelligence files to determine whether the new standards would allow prosecutors to file terrorism charges, and courts have issued 18,000 subpoenas and search warrants in connection with anti-terrorism investigations.

Elsewhere , authorities have detained nearly 50 individuals since the Sept. 11 attacks and held them—in secret—as “material witnesses” for federal grand juries investigating terrorism, the Justice Department said.

Almost all those witnesses were released within 90 days, according to the department.

Growing backlash

The backlash has been building steadily since the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001. That December, the City Council in Ann Arbor, Mich., responded to federal sweeps aimed at Arab immigrants with a resolution calling on the federal government to ensure “that all individuals are afforded their appropriate rights to due process.”

Since then, more than 160 communities have voted to condemn the law as too broad an attack on civil liberties. In the Triangle, Carrboro has passed an anti-Patriot Act resolution and was joined by Durham County last week. The Chapel Hill Town Council is considering following suit.

Among the provisions opponents find most troubling:

The FBI has broader authority to seek information on citizens’ reading habits at libraries and bookstores, as well as financial information and medical records.

Critics complain that the threshold for obtaining the information is not “probable cause”; instead, agents need only convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, a secret body that oversees investigations against terrorism suspects, that the information being sought may prove relevant in a criminal probe. The law bars anyone, librarians, for instance, from disclosing that he or she has been asked for such records.

The secrecy extends beyond the provisions of the Patriot Act, particularly with air travel. Some individuals trying to board airliners have been detained without explanation.

Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon sued after being detained at the San Francisco airport in 2002. They say they believe their names were similar to names on government no-fly lists, although they also wonder whether their work as editors of an anti-war newspaper led to their being singled out.

The idea that anyone would be singled out for searches because of his or her political beliefs is “preposterous,” said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. “That is not and never will be criteria for any no-fly list.”

Yet details of how someone ends up on such a list—or how many people are on it—remain secret. The government cites security concerns.

When the American Civil Liberties Union sought information on why Adams and Gordon were stopped, the FBI responded to Freedom of Information Act requests by saying it had no such records.

Eventually, however, officials at San Francisco airport turned over documents indicating that 339 passengers had been stopped or questioned at the facility in connection with no-fly lists between September 2001 and last March.

Many were apparently stopped because they looked Middle Eastern, according to descriptions in the nearly 400 pages of reports, including this stop made on Sept. 19, 2002:

“Female, brown hair ... Middle Eastern ... Subj is not on a ‘no-fly’ list but her name is a close match.”

NRA and ACLU

Such tactics have some Americans from across the political spectrum asking whether they’re being forced to give up too many personal freedoms.

“This whole thing scares me,” said Robert K. Corbin, a former president of the National Rifle Association. “I believe very strongly in the Bill of Rights, and I don’t want anybody to screw around with it.”

Corbin noted that his group, widely viewed as conservative, has found common ground with the ACLU in voicing concerns about the Patriot Act. The stakes are so high, he said, that opposing groups must work together.

“I’m just afraid that the Patriot Act is like the war on drugs, where people are willing to give up their freedoms for security,” he said. “I’m not.”

Ashcroft’s defenders say he has been unfairly portrayed—from the halls of Congress to “Saturday Night Live” skits—as a paranoid crusader.

“If he utilizes the tools that have been given to the Department of Justice by Congress, he’s attacked and vilified by the ACLU and others as taking away civil liberties,” said McGregor Scott, a federal prosecutor in Sacramento.

“On the other hand, if he’s not strong enough and we get attacked again, he goes down in history as the attorney general who let us get attacked.”

Ashcroft has said he intends to use his department’s powers to protect the nation, and that doing so requires quick and innovative information-gathering.

So last year, on the eve of the Memorial Day weekend, FBI agents began showing up in dive shops around the country asking for lists of certified divers.

Acting on a tip from a detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, agents had learned that some terrorists might have been trained in underwater attacks.

Eventually, the Professional Association of Diving Instructors provided the names. The association agreed to do so on the condition that the government use it “for the single purpose of investigating possible terrorist acts using scuba,” said Jeff Nadler, the group’s vice president.

With that agreement in hand, the association turned over CD-ROMs listing 10 million Americans and their addresses.

Few alarms raised

There was little partisan acrimony when the federal government began enhancing its ability to monitor would-be terrorists.

One month after the attacks of Sept. 11, Ashcroft asked Congress for sweeping new powers. The request came in the form of a bill titled “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism.”

It was dubbed “the USA Patriot Act,” and with the rubble of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still smoking, it was a hard pitch to resist.

In fact, it was almost impossible, because many in Congress knew almost nothing about what was actually in the bill.

“The final version of the Patriot Act that was passed into law was rewritten between midnight and 8 o’clock in the morning behind closed doors by a few unknown people, and it was presented to Congress for a one-hour debate and an up or down vote,” U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., said in an interview. “It was hundreds of pages long, and no member of Congress can tell you they knew what they were voting for in its entirety.”

Few politicians were willing to explain a vote against patriotism. Only one senator—Democrat Russ Feingold of Wisconsin—and 66 House members, including North Carolina Democrats Mel Watt and Eva Clayton, voted against the bill.

Some who voted for it said they had misgivings, but reasoned that it was palatable because many of the act’s provisions automatically expire at the end of 2005.

In recent months, however, a tougher follow-up version has been drafted.

For now, the focus of much of the new anti-terrorism efforts has been on immigrants, although one provision of the unofficial “Patriot Act II” would give the government the right to strip some Americans of their citizenship.

That, critics say, puts the country on a dangerous new course.

“When the government says, ‘We’re sacrificing their rights, you American citizens need not worry,’ the promise is illusory,” said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and author of the new book, “Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism.”

“When you look at history,” Cole said, “in virtually every crisis, the first targets are foreigners. The government argues that the threat emanates from abroad. ... But eventually, government officials grow accustomed to exercising these authorities and seek out ways to extend them to U.S. citizens.”

http://www.news-observer.com/front/story/2902681p-2671892c.html