HOME
your socialist home on the internet
ABOUT US
who we are, our politics, and what we do
GET ACTIVE!
joining ysa, getting active locally, making a difference
NEWS & VIEWS
articles, fliers, statements and opinions
THEORY
what is socialism, reading lists and study guides
CONTACT US
our email, snail mail, phone number and club directory
LINKS
socialist, youth, activist, labor, feminist, anti-racist, and other important sites
WHAT'S NEW
listing of what's been recently added
how 2 save our civil liberties
For the past few weeks, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI head
Mueller,
and other Justice Department officials have been speaking at
universities
and public forums nationwide in an attempt to defend the Bush
administration’s attacks on civil liberties against increasing public
criticism.
Most of their audiences have been made up of law-enforcement officers,
partisans of right-wing politics, and other friends of the Bush White
House.
In June, however, Mueller even ventured to address the convention of
the
American Civil Liberties Union.
The Justice Department road team has avowed for their audiences and the
press that they always give careful consideration to protecting civil
liberties while conducting the so-called fight against terrorism. The
USA
Patriot Act in particular, they say with a straight face, should not be
seen
as a danger to our Constitutional rights.
The Justice Department felt compelled to embark on its tour, says White
House spokesman Scott McClellan, in order to combat “a small minority
that
has spread disinformation about these [Patriot Act] provisions ... and
to
set the record straight.”
Of course, that’s the “soft cop” routine; Ashcroft himself has seen fit
at
times to play the “hard cop.” For example, when civil libertarians
first
began to protest against the USA Patriot Act and other post 9/11
police-state measures, Ashcroft retorted: “To those who scare
peace-loving
people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics
aid
terrorists.”
Since then, however, the “peace-loving people” of America have turned
so
sharply against Ashcroft’s policies that even Al Gore—who is certainly
no
radical—felt it was politically opportune to point out (speaking last
month
at New York University) that the Patriot Act allows President Bush to
“send
his assistants into any public library in America and severely monitor
what
the rest of us are reading.”
Bill of Rights under attack
A glance at the tactics of the Justice Depaprtment and the White House
in
their “war on terrorism” will show that the Constitution’s fundamental
provisions protecting political dissent (enacted in the Bill of Rights)
are
under attack. Especially vulnerable is the First Amendment, which
states
that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or the
right of the people to assemble and to address the government for a
redress
of grievances.
Also under attack is the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right
of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects
against
unreasonable searches and seizures—specifying that governmental
searches can
only proceed upon the issuance of a sworn warrant that describes the
place
to be searched, the persons or things to be seized, and the probable
cause
to require such actions.
The government’s “war on terrorism” has also contramanded the Fifth
Amendment, which states among other things that a person may not be
deprived
of life, liberty, or property without due process of law—except in
times of
war or public danger.
The government attacks also counter the Sixth Amendment, which states
that
the accused in criminal cases shall enjoy the right to a speedy and
public
trial by an impartial jury, as well as have the assistance of a defense
attorney; and the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits excessive bail,
excessive fines, and cruel or unusual punishments.
Despite all these provisions of the Bill of Rights, soon after the 9/11
attack, the Justice Department rounded up some 1200
persons—non-citizens and
immigrants of Middle Eastern, South Asian, or Islamic background—and
deprived them of their liberty, denied them due process of law, refused
them
the right to an attorney, gave them no speedy hearing or trial, and
imprisoned them without even having lodged charges against them.
According to the Justice Department’s Inspector General, in his report
of
early June, there was a “pattern of physical and verbal abuse ...
conditions
of confinement [were] unduly harsh, such as illuminating the detainees’
cells for 24 hours a day.” How does this in any way concur with the
Eighth
Amendment’s enjoinder against cruel and unusual punishment?
He noted that “in many instances the clearance process [that is,
clearing
the suspects of suspicion of ties to terrorism] stretched on for many
months.” And even many of those who had been cleared continued to be
held
while encountering “frustrated efforts by detainees’ attorneys, family
members, consular officials, and even law enforcement officiers to
determine
the detainees’ location.” This is all in clear violation of the Fifth
and
Sixth Amendments to the Constitution.
While Attorney Gen. Ashcroft and his subordinates fly around the
country
paying homage to civil rights, he and the rest of the Bush
administration
have in general refused to account for or to even consider these
specific
blatant constitutional infractions—at least in public.
In June, Ashcroft went before Congress to warn that the first Patriot
Act
does not go far enough, and that they needed to give the Justice
Department
much more power by allowing them to hold suspects indefinitely,
expanding
the list of crimes covered by the death penalty, and other repressive
measures.
Ashcroft’s pet project, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003,
often
dubbed the USA Patriot Act II, caused some embarrassment to the Bush
administration after it was leaked to the public last February. Since
then,
it has been sitting on the back burner in Congress, though it certainly
hasn’t gone away.
In the meantime, a few other programs put forward by the White House
have
also been placed on hold—at least temporarily—because of public
opposition.
These include the TIPS program, in which postal employees, librarians,
transportation workers, and others were to have been enlisted in a
domestic
snoop-on-your-neighbor program, something like the STASI in Stalinist
East
Germany.
They also include the Pentagon’s Big Brother-like Total Awareness
program,
which would have taken the credit ratings, bank records, criminal
records,
and other personal information—even DNA samples—of the American people,
and
amassed them into one giant electronic nationwide information bank
available
to law-enforcement authorities.
This program was to have been led by John Poindexter, who was convicted
of
participating the 1980s conspiracy backed by the White House to sell
weapons
to Iran in return for funds to support the forces fighting to overthrow
the
Sandinista government of Nicaragua—and then lying about it to Congress.
In
other words, until the program was shelved, the current administration
had
advocated putting an admitted terrorist in charge of policing the
suspected
terrorists of today.
Until last month, the sheer arrogance, if not insanity, of the proposal
was
only outdone by Bush’s appointment of Henry Kissinger—the Nixon
administration’s main apologist for the war in Vietnam and Cambodia,
for
U.S. support for the overthrow of the Allende government of Chile, and
other
atrocities—as head of the commission to look into the U.S. preparedness
for
the 9/11 terrorist attack. That appointment, too, of course, was
rapidly
withdrawn.
Last month, however, John Poindexter was forced to resign his Pentagon
post
(that is, to “take the fall” for the higher-ups) when news was leaked
of a
hairbrained scheme that he was to have headed that would create a kind
of
casino, a betting parlor, in which the Pentagon would invite monied
investors to speculate on the outcome of developments in the Middle
East
such as coups and terrorist actions.
In the meantime, Poindexter’s Total Awareness Program—now renamed the
Terrorist Awareness Program—is still lying in the files ready to be
relaunched when the time is judged more appropriate.
“Giving up dissent is too high a price”
In my article in the July issue of Socialist Action, I argued that the
administration was unwilling to face the political risks they knew
would
ensue if they had decided to take on critics of the Bush regime’s
pro-big
business policies in too vigorous a manner—such as throwing antiwar
activists in jail on trumped-up charges.
The government felt a less risky method of keeping a damper on dissent
would
be put into effect by exploiting the terror Americans had experienced
during
the 9/11 catastrophe. In order to help foster a continual climate of
fear,
they conducted round-ups and scare stories planted in the press
concerning
the least protected sector of the U.S. population—foreign-born
non-citizens,
especially dark-skinned people from Middle Eastern or Islamic
backgrounds.
Furthermore, the targeting of Middle Eastern people was related to U.S.
foreign policy objectives in that region. It is much easier to go to
war in
a region where the population is portrayed as endemic suicide bombers
and
religious fanatics who are a threat to the United States itself.
As the 2004 elections come closer, however, some politicians—Democrats
and
even a few Republicans—are beginning to shrink back from their previous
support of the White House’s repressive measures. They realise that
Bush and
Company are vulnerable on this issue in public opinion.
Sen. Russell Feingold (who was the only senator to vote against the
Patriot
Act in 2001) commented in June concerning the Patriot Act: “It’s just
unbelievable how many people are concerned about this. They get the
feeling
that these are powers that could be used against them.”
This feeling of concern is reflected in local politics, where over 142
cities, towns, and counties have approved resolutions asking their
agencies
not to aid federal authorities in implementing actions that infringe on
civil liberties—sometimes mentioning the Patriot Act by name. The list
includes city councils from San Francisco to Denver, Detroit,
Baltimore, and
Philadelphia.
A city council member from Denver, Kathleen MacKenzie, explained their
vote
by saying: “We were concerned about the abridgement of free speech
because
of national security concerns. It seemed to us that it was more
unpopular
than ever to criticize the government or protest for peace, and that
was
really scary. As awful as we feel about Sept. 11 and as concerned as we
were
about national safety, we felt that giving up the right to dissent was
too
high a price to pay.”
Recent court decisions, such as the Supreme Court’s pro-affirmative
action
ruling and the decision banning state laws against gay sexuality, may
reflect the fact that the ruling class as a whole is reluctant to go
too far
prematurely in clamping down on civil rights. This judgment must be
balanced, however, by taking note of court decisions like that of June
17,
in which a federal appellate court ruled that the Bush administration
may
continue to conceal the identities of hundreds of people detained after
9/11, saying that the disclosure of even one name could endanger
national
security.
There are several bills in the House and Senate right now that aim to
limit
some of the more egregious provisions of the Patriot Act—while letting
the
bulk of it stand. Just a week ago, the House passed a bill sponsored by
conservative Republican Sen.Butch Otter, which would prevent funds
going to
the Justice Department for secret FBI searches. But the bill still has
to be
passed by the Senate and signed by Bush.
Several of the Democratic Party presidential candidates have seen fit
to
take up the issue of civil liberties as a regular talking point in
their
campaign speeches. Of course, the senators and congressmen among them
have a
problem in that all of them—with the exception of Ohio Congressman
Dennis
Kucinich—voted for the Patriot Act in 2001.
Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat from Florida, has emphasized in his
campaign
rallies that he criticizes Ashcroft’s implementation of the Patriot
Act.
Graham rarely mentions, however, that he was one of the main authors of
the
Patriot Act; when he is reminded of that fact, he hastens to add that
he
wrote merely some of the less controversial sections of the act.
Now that civil liberties are in vogue again on the part of not just a
few
politicians, the movement among some on the left to campaign to dump
Bush by
any means necessary has been given new fire. We should not be
surprised, in
fact, if as the 2004 elections near we see a headlong stampede by many
radical activists and leaders into the Democratic Party—if they’re not
there
already.
Many of them are already stomping for Dennis Kucinich. The San
Francisco
Examiner in July printed a front-page interview with several California
Green Party leaders, including Medea Benjamin, who told the Examiner
that
“Kucinich is as green as you can get.” Peter Camejo, a former
socialist,
said that if Kucinich wins the Democratic Party nomination, Camejo
“would
favor calling an emergency national convention of the Green Party” to
discuss how to support Kucinich in the race.
Kucinich was in San Francisco with three other Democratic Party
candidates
to seek support for their campaigns from the annual convention of the
United
Food and Commercial Workers Union, which was held in the city.The
Examiner
stated that Vermont Gov. Howard Dean drew strong applause from
thousands of
union delegates when he stated, “This debate is a waste of time unless
we do
one thing, beat George Bush, and the only way we will beat George Bush
is if
we stop trying to be like him.”
That was probably good advice to his fellow candidates, who until very
recently were trying to be as much like Bush as they could. But we can
expect that the refrain “beat George Bush” will become the motto of the
union bureaucracy for the coming period—and that of many social
activists as
well. Few people expect Kucinich to succeed in gaining the nomination
against Bush, so most of the current support for him will probably
shift to
backing some one like Joe Lieberman as the “lesser evil” agains the
“fascist” Bush.
How much more productive would be the efforts of union delegates,
social
activists, and defenders of civil liberties if they organized their own
party—a party of working people and the oppressed. Such a party would
be an
activist party, which would aim to fundamentally change society in
favor of
fullfilling people’s needs instead of filling the pockets of a favored
few.
Why waste a vote on any of the candidates of the Democratic Party—who a
few
months ago were all in favor of the Patriot Act and other police-state
measures, and now that they sense that Bush is in hot water have once
again
become the fair weather friends of working people?
As for Kucinich, he too supports the Democratic Party—a capitalist
ruling-class party—which from the days of Wilson, Roosevelt, and Truman
up
through Bill Clinton’s White House, has been the historic party of war,
racism, and anti-civil-liberties witch hunts. The Democratic Party has
always been the graveyard of social movements; when activists get
sucked
into it, they never return alive.
In these times, when working people do not yet have their own party,
two
things must be foremost: staying independent of the ruling-class
parties and
staying “in the street.” If history teaches anything, it is that
governments
only make progressive change when they are pushed to do so by people in
struggle—ordinary people mobilized in the streets.
That is the way the Bill of Rights to the Constitution was won. And
that is
the way that we will preserve the Bill of Rights, and even extend our
rights
for the future.
The article above was written by Michael Schreiber.
