The civil liberties time bomb

By Tom Maertens
Published in the Mankato Free Press

House Republicans are planning to keep us “safe” by renewing Patriot Act provisions that allow “roving wiretaps,” allow investigators to seize “any tangible things” deemed relevant to an investigation and allow wiretaps on “terrorism suspects” not connected to any foreign terrorist group or government.

In the past, “terrorism suspects” have included peaceful protesters outside Halliburton offices in Houston, environmental protesters in Colorado, Quakers meeting in a Florida church, along with Greenpeace, Catholic Workers, and 150 other peaceful domestic organizations.

Until a public outcry forced its repeal in 2009, a Pentagon training manual labeled protest of any kind as “low-level terrorism.”

The list of government infringements of civil liberties following 9/11 is a long one. In the name of protecting us from terrorism, the Bush administration:

• Denied habeas corpus rights, trial by impartial jury, legal counsel, and knowledge of the evidence against the accused (several cases are cited on Wikipedia);
• Employed enforced disappearance/secret prisons, including kidnapping and rendition to regimes known to employ torture (BBC News, ABC News);
• Approved the use of torture and other mistreatment (Washington Post and others news organizations);
• Supported use of coerced and hearsay testimony (CBC News, CNN and other news organizations);
• Claimed the right selectively to ignore laws in more than 1,000 Presidential Signing Statements;
• Conducted warrantless searches and wiretaps (New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and others);
• Instituted secret no-fly lists, including reportedly, to punish White House “enemies” (Wikipedia, ACLU);
• Passed the USA Patriot Act that permits secret arrests, sneak-and-peek searches and access to many private records (Electronic Frontier Foundation);
• Issued 45,000 secret administrative subpoenas (National Security Letters) per year to circumvent the FISA court, while issuing gag orders on revealing their existence (Electronic Frontier Foundation);
• Intercepted e-mails and phone calls without warrants (NY Times, USA Today and others);
• Engaged CIA’s National Clandestine Service and DOD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity in domestic spying (military involvement in law enforcement was prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 for more than 100 years) (NY Times, MSNBC and others);
• Passed the Military Commissions Act that allows U.S. citizens to be labeled enemy combatants and held under indefinite preventive detention;
• Argued before Congress (by Steven Bradbury, Department of Justice) that the president may unilaterally order domestic assassinations of terrorist suspects;
• Conducted the unprecedented pre-emptive arrests of protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention and charged those protesters with being “domestic terrorists” (Truthout.org and Salon.com).

In short, every American is a suspect whose civil rights are only what the government is willing to tolerate.

There’s more: The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) policy permits border agents to search, copy and even keep travelers’ electronic devices at the border — including laptops, cameras and cell phones — without “reasonable suspicion” of a crime.

According to federal law, police can seize assets — houses, cars, money — without ever charging a crime if they suspect you may have been involved in drug trafficking. No proof is required. Having a large amount of cash is sufficient.

The executive can declare any organization a terrorist organization without trial or appeal and any American who even unwittingly works with such organization a criminal, or if, like Jimmy Carter, they are urging Hezbollah to participate in democratic elections.

What enabled Bush’s subversion of the Constitution was a rubber-stamp Republican Congress with toothless oversight committees, abetted by White House lawyers who were prepared to justify anything Bush did.

This is what the John Yoo/Jay Bybee torture memos represent, an extension of the pernicious doctrine of the “Unitary Executive,” which asserts essentially that the president’s commander-in-chief authority means he can do whatever he wants.

The result was the most sweeping assault on our civil liberties since the Japanese-American internments in World War II and the Palmer Raids of the 1919-20 “Red Scare” that saw thousands swept up and more than 500 deported without due process.

Unfortunately, President Obama has failed to investigate and correct this litany of abuses, and has even continued many of the same policies. That means they remain as precedents, time bombs, for future presidents to seize upon and expand in time of crisis.

Obama has even declared American citizens “enemy combatants” and ordered that they be assassinated, as with the radical Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and others, which is capital punishment without a trial.

Tea party Republicans claim that government is too intrusive and that health care reform has taken away our freedom, but there is no law more intrusive or anti-democratic than the Patriot Act. The Fourth Amendment guarantees “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…” but where in the Constitution is the government empowered to take “any tangible things?”

Their support of these real infringements of our freedom shows what empty demagoguery their health care claims are.

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