'Is America turning into a Banana Republic?'
The view from Egypt:
Posted on Saturday, November 24 @ 09:24:47 EST
By Mohamed Hakki, Al Ahram
Shortly after the terrorist attack against the New
York Twin Towers on 11 September, many people said nothing would
be the same again. But nobody ever thought that Americans' civil
liberties and human rights would be subject to interpretation by their
own government. On 13 November, US President George W Bush
signed an order allowing people accused of terrorism to be tried by a
special military commission instead of civilian courts.
White House counsel Albert Gonzales said a military commission could
have several advantages over a civilian court. The main argument that
the government has used to frighten people into accepting this
shrinking of civil rights is that "this is a global war" -- presumably
meaning that extreme methods are in order. It is easier to protect the
sources and methods of investigators in military proceedings.
Some people, myself included, think that the events of 11 September
were a tremendous failure of intelligence, as well as a monumental
embarrassment for US law enforcement. That is why US Attorney
General John Ashcroft is coming down with a series of unprecedented
acts that are eating away at several laws that are supposed to enshrine
American citizens civil liberties. The sad thing is that many Americans
are suddenly willing to embrace racial profiling; detention without
charges; searches without warrants; and even torture and covert
assassinations.
First, there was the USA Patriot Act, which in the words of Patricia
Williams in The Nation "brought into being an unprecedented merger
between the functions of intelligence agencies and law enforcement.
Law enforcement agents can now spy on everybody, destabilizing
citizens as well as non-citizens."
Williams added: "In recent weeks, student demonstrators, global justice
workers, civil libertarians, animals rights and peace activists have been
characterized as terrorists sympathizers." What is more frightening is
that more than 1,100 people, mostly Arab- Americans -- some of whom
may have left their countries because of similar police practices -- have
now been arrested and held mostly without disclosure of their
identities, their locations or the charges against them.
Civil rights activists say these practices are frighteningly close to the
notorious practice of "disappearing" people in Latin America. The
Arabic expression "the visitors at dawn without appointment," which
refers to similar practices, is obviously not well known in the West. To
people who left countries familiar with the pain of the "disappeared," it
seems that more evil visitors have crossed oceans and lands to haunt
them here and turn America into a Banana Republic, courtesy of
Ashcroft and his team.
What is more frightening is the fact that there are very few voices of
dissent. Only two prominent organisations are objecting, but their
voices are buried on page 17 or 23 in the mainstream media.
Amnesty International has denounced the sweeping presidential order on military
trials, which bypasses the fundamental principles of international law --
specifically, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
ratified by the US in 1992 -- which enshrines the right to a fair trial.
Amnesty also points out that Bush's military order is discriminatory,
affording foreign nationals a lower standard of justice than US citizens
and giving unfettered and unchallenged discretionary power to the
executive to decide who will be prosecuted and under what rules.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is worried about even more
draconian measures proposed in these right- wing acts. The group is
especially concerned about technologies that may be employed to
enforce new security measures, which include face-recognition
technology, linked to stored photographs of criminals. Such
technologies, the UCLA says, could, even if initially targeted at known
terrorists, ultimately result in detentions of non- violent offenders such
as tax evaders or dead-beat dads. Bus terminals, seaports and train
stations could adopt the same technology, "which would turn America
into a virtual police state."
The legal community had already made some noises about Ashcroft's
authorization monitoring mail or communications between detainees
and their lawyers. This flouts the right -- guaranteed in the Sixth
Amendment -- of the privacy allowed lawyer-client relations. None of
those 1,100 or more detainees have been convicted of anything and in
many cases, they have not even been indicted. Can these mostly
foreign-born detainees, who are in dire need of legal representation, talk
candidly to a lawyer if they know that the government is listening in?
I was not surprised that writers at the conservative Wall Street Journal
have behaved like hypocritical columnists of the Arab world and
defended these dubious measures. "Past experience with trying terrorist
acts within regular criminal justice system has been unsatisfactory,"
one article reads, "largely because standards of proof and rules of
evidence appropriate to peacetime are ill-suited to effective punishment
and deterrence of terrorism." The paper throws the presumption of
innocence, the requirement of proof-based reasonable doubt, Miranda
rights and privileges against self- incrimination all out the window on
the basis of the government's all-encompassing motto: "The country is
at war."
But I must confess I was truly surprised at how some of my least
favourite columnists -- people with whom I could never agree about
anything, especially with regard to the Middle East -- are some of the
most vehement critics of these acts. New York Times columnist William
Safire called the new acts "dictatorial powers" and warned that the
president was "misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken attorney
general."
"In his infamous emergency order Bush admits to dismissing the
principles of law and the rules of evidence" that form the foundation of
America's justice system, Safire notes. He calls the military courts,
"kangaroo courts," which can conceal evidence by citing national
security, make up their own rules, find a defendant guilty even if a third
of the officers disagree and execute an alien with no review by a civilian
court.
Not surprisingly, Safire's solution is no more humane. He advocates
turning the caves of Bin Laden and his Al-Qa'eda terrorist group into
rubble as soon as their whereabouts are revealed: "Our bombers should
promptly bid him [Bin Laden] farewell with 15,000-pound daisy-cutters
and 5,000-pound rock-penetrates."
Another vocal critic of the new measures in Village Voice writer Nat
Hentoff, who describes Ashcroft's latest acts as "another attack on the
Bill of Rights" and asks: has Ashcroft read the Constitution? Hentoff
says that in Bush's impressive address to the United Nations on 10
November, he said that the law unites people "across cultures and
continents." But if international law does not hold in this country, what
is the Bush administration's fundamental responsibility to uphold the
Constitution?
Reprinted from Al Ahram:
ahram.org.eg
weekly/2001/561/5war2.htm |
