www.villagevoice.com/issues/0237/solomon.php
VOICE Giveaways Performance 52 Tickets to see Cirque du Soleil's Alegria Film Screenings 53 Coffee & Cigarettes 54 Van Helsing 55 Breakin' All the Rules Nightlife 56 Win a Night on the Town prize package Dance 57 Win Tickets to a dance performance of your choice at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Project click links to win! Trying to strike the bell of liberty, he sounds its death knell, depicting government not as the agent of the people's will, but as an imperious power with the authority to give us our democratic freedoms. Which means, of course, that it can also take them away. They have sneered at, ignored, or defied the courts and legislatures that are designed to provide checks and balances on uninhibited executive power. They have eroded the precious Bill of Rights protections of free speech, assembly, and association and its assurances of privacy, due process, equal protection, legal counsel, and a fair trialpractically everything but the right to bear arms. Thanks to these maneuvers in the name of combating terrorism, the government can now freeze the release of public records, monitor political and religious gatherings, and jail Americans indefinitely without trial and without legal representation. As Bush and Cheney ready the country for war against Iraq, they have established a climate that stifles dissentand put laws in place enabling them to clamp down on those who ask too many questions. If you're a citizenand if you haven't tried to organize any major protests latelyyou might easily have missed the rupture. It's the liberties of noncitizens that have been most severely curtailed in the past year. Midwood, Brooklyn, home to some 150,000 Pakistanis, saw two planeloads of its young men sent home in August after long detentions by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The annual Pakistani festival days later drew less than half the usual crowd of 80,000, according to Asghar Choudhri, president of the Pakistani-American Federation of New York. Polls have shown that at least 40 percent of Americans are willing to give up some civil liberties for the sake of security, but as constitutional lawyer David Cole has pointed out, so far it's not our own freedom we've been sacrificing. From the invoking of the 1798 Enemy Alien Act during the 1941 internment of Japanese American citizens to McCarthy's use of the tools of 1919 Palmer Raids in the witch-hunts of the 1950s, the Feds have repeatedly sharpened their teeth on immigrants before closing their repressive jaws on all dissidents and undesirables. Indeed, many of the post-9-11 provisions swept into place by Ashcroftsuch as those for the tracking and eventual punishment of would-be perpetrators of "domestic terrorism"focus primarily on citizens. Balanced against security concerns at a time of war, the old dictum holds, civil liberties spring back to full force when danger has passed. In an endless "war on terrorism" that soon might include attacks on Iraq, those springs could get mighty rusty. Power Grab: Kicking Over Checks and Balances In the fearful weeks immediately 65 after September 11, Congress and the American people gave the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt, supporting a rash of new measures to get to the bottom of the heinous attacks and to protect us from "sleeper" cells hatching plots on our shores, as well as from enemies preparing strikes from afar. Military Force resolution, granting the president carte blanche to wage war against anybody he deemed responsible for the hijackings. And in October, with hardly enough time even to read the 342-page document, much less debate it, lawmakers rushed through sweeping anti-terrorism legislation whose very name and jingoistic acronymthe Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (or USA Patriot) Actmade it unassailable. Meanwhile, Attorney General Ashcroft granted himself and the agencies he oversees a spate of new powers. Soon after, he unilaterally removed restraints on the FBI that had been put in place after the excesses of the 1960s and '70s, unleashing agents to sniff around community meetings, political gatherings, religious services, and even your e-mail messages and Web site visits, without having any evidence, nor even a good hunch, that anything illegal is afoot. Not to be outdone, Bush issued a few executive orders of his own. One called into being military tribunals in which "enemy combatants" could be arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death entirely in secret and with no opportunity for judicial review. Another rescinded the planned release of the papers of former presidents, effectively closing the public record. Civil libertarians, immigrant advocates, and human rights activists frantically sent up warning flares, highlighting various ways the new laws, regulations, and acts of fiat threatened various constitutional protections. During the past year, thousands of immigrants were swept up and disappeared into detention and secret trials; Newspaper columnists, cartoonists, and an irreverent TV talk-show host were fired for questioning whether the men who slammed airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually cowards, or whether the president, who hid out in some cushy compound while the towers crumbled, was genuinely brave. Dredging up the old statements, The O'Reilly Factor and local Florida shock-jocks had recklessly denounced Al-Arian for fomenting jihad under the Tampa palms, and he soon found himself unemployed. Brown opened her door in Durham, North Carolina, one October evening as she was getting ready for a date to find a couple of local secret service officers who had been tipped off about the "un-American" propaganda in her apartmenta poster, it turned out, protesting the record number of executions in Texas under Bush's governorship. Brown told The Progressive magazine that the officers asked whether she had any pro-Taliban material. Other outlandish cases of repression and neighborly ratting crept into national consciousnessor at least were splashed across lefty Web sitesas the year wore on: the guy in San Francisco who got a visit from the FBI after he'd questioned Bush's motives for the war in a conversation at his gym; Death of Due Process & Flouting the First Amendment Our attorney general's name doesn't lend itself as readily as Joe McCarthy's to the mellifluous abstract noun that came to define the witch-hunts, loyalty oaths, and blacklisting of the '50s: "Ashcroftism" is not likely to enter American parlance. But if it did, the term would describe not only the climate of enforced conformity, but the administration's high-handed disregard for the most fundamental of constitutional protections: First Amendment rights to free association and free speech and the Fifth Amendment right to due process. The most egregious breach has been the roundup and "preventive detention" of thousands of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian immigrants under an unprecedented veil of secrecy. The USA Patriot Act allows the attorney general to function as prosecutor, judge, and jury when it comes to incarcerating and deporting noncitizens. All he has to do is say he has "reasonable grounds to believe" that they have engaged in "terrorist" activity, and he can throw them in the clinker for a week before issuing any charges. Such detainees have no opportunity to mount a defense against their classification as "terrorist"nor even to know why the attorney general has so branded them. What's more, the detainees cannot be released from detentioneven if they prevail in immigration hearingsuntil the AG lifts the designation. That's not so easy: The act defines terrorism broadly as the use of a "weapon or dangerous device (other than for mere personal monetary gain)" and expands "terrorist activity" to include providing material or other support to a "terrorist organization," even if that support goes to legitimate, nonviolent efforts by a political group that may also have a military wing. Under this Orwellian twisting of terminology, grabbing a bottle in the midst of a barroom brawl could be deemed terrorism. Me...
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