| | The Ashcroftonian assault on liberty presses on
By Daniel J. Cragg | Editor-in-Chief | 24 June 2003
Last week the Justice Department scored a major victory with the arrest of Al Qaeda operative Iyman Faris, a naturalized U.S. citizen whom the Justice Department says plotted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. What many do not know though, is that the Government did this the old fashioned way -- without expanded police power. He was not jailed indefinitely as an "enemy combatant."
Despite this success, the Attorney General continues to propound that he can detain any U.S. citizen without due process -- that is, without formal charges, the right to a hearing or legal counsel. Whether an individual is captured in the United States or not, the Justice Department says "A court's inquiry should come to an end once the military has shown ... that it has determined that the detainee is an enemy combatant. The court may not second-guess the military's enemy-combatant determination." In other words, the Executive Branch can detain anyone without any oversight and without any respect for a U.S. citizen's Constitutional rights.
Whether John Ashcroft has exercised good judgment thus far with this new power or not is irrelevant, this power is downright un-American and is a bouleversement to U.S. civil liberties. Even the 1942 Supreme Court case that the Attorney General is basing his indefinite detentions on, which allowed military trials of German saboteurs arrested in the U.S., affirmed the defendants' right to appeal their status in federal court. The court did not allow for indefinite detentions of enemy combatants, nor did it deny them counsel. Every American should be able to see how parlous this policy is. I cannot emphasize this enough: if the designation of U.S. citizen's as enemy combatants stands, any American could be detained indefinitely on simply the Executive Branch's word. This is not a liberal caviling, but a conservative that is genuinely concerned.
Former conservative Congressman Bob Barr, who currently chairs the civil liberties committee at the American Conservative Union, has even said that the government is "reaching too broadly and gaining too much power." Privacy concerns over Ashcroft's Patriot Act have caused ACLU membership to increase thirty percent since September 11, 2001, the largest increase in the organization's history. Librarians and booksellers are also rankled by the Patriot act because it eliminated the need for a court order to obtain records from libraries and booksellers.
"Libraries are very local and we're hearing about this every day. People don't want the government snooping on them," Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "People understand when their rights are being thrown away and they aren't going to stand for it."
Not all of the Ashcroftonian assault is terrorism related either. As reported in this week's Economist, The Justice Department is prosecuting Brett Bursey, a veteran protester, for holding up a sign saying "No War For Oil" at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport. Ironically, Bursey was arrested thirty-three years ago for the same thing, only then against Vietnam and Richard Nixon. That case was dropped when the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that anti-war demonstrators could not be charged with trespassing on public property. This time around, the government has decided to prosecute him under an obscure law that allows the Secret Service to deny access to places where the President is visiting. According to prosecutors, Bursey should have been in a designated "free-speech zone," which was about a half a mile from the hangar where the President landed. Bursey rightly averred that all of America was a free-speech zone. It should be noted that Bush proponents were not confined to the designated "free-speech zone."
This petty persecution of an American who was simply exercising his first amendment right is yet another example of the Attorney General's assault on our most basic freedoms. New leadership is desperately needed in the Justice Department, before even more of cherished rights are taken away from us.
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