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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (283862)	8/5/2002 12:59:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

It may not be '1984,' after all -- but what about due process? By HELEN THOMAS Columnist HEARST NEWSPAPERS Sunday, August 4, 2002 WASHINGTON -- Thank heavens wiser leaders than President Bush have prevailed, and we are not going to become a nation of official snitches. In an Orwellian nightmare of a big-brother society, Bush put forth his neat little public-spy plan called Operation TIPS (for Terrorism Information and Prevention System) in his State of the Union address. It would have deputized millions of people -- including letter carriers, truck drivers, telephone and cable repair workers -- to be snoops for the anti-terrorist campaign. An office in the planned Department of Homeland Security would have overseen these busybody snoop patrols. The U.S. Postal Service smartly nixed the idea for itself, saying that postal workers have enough to do as it is. And then the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, headed by Rep. Dick Armey, R-Texas, shot down the whole onerous proposal for prying into our everyday lives. Fortunately, in this case liberals focusing on protecting civil liberties and conservatives focusing on violations of privacy converged and saved us from the horrors that George Orwell wrote about in "1984." What could Bush and his team, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge, have been thinking of? Have they no memory of the totalitarian "isms" of the 20th century -- fascism, Nazism, communism? Those ideologies were all distinguished by spying and tattling, pitting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, brother against brother. The system demeaned the spy and the persons spied upon. One shudders to think that we could have been emulating the East German Stasi, the secret police who kept files on millions of people, or the former Soviet Union's KGB. We would have had a replay of "Darkness at Noon," the 1941 novel that Arthur Koestler wrote in disillusionment with the German communist system of the 1930s. If Bush's plan had prevailed, the 4th Amendment guarantee of the people's right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" would have been meaningless. We would have become a nation of informers in which suspicion alone could have been proof of wrongdoing. Next would have come massive racial profiling and particularly the targeting of foreigners from nations that we say support terrorism. All this, of course, would have been done in the name of security. No one is arguing that we should not have tightened security. But average Americans are surely not prepared to evaluate the activities of their fellow citizens or to judge them. Imagine if your views don't coincide with those of your neighbor. What then? Do you phone the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI to voice your fears? The whole process is frightening and calls to mind the "babushkas," the prying grandmothers in the Soviet Union who were suspicious of anything unusual in their limited world and who snitched on their neighbors to the KGB. It's ironic that many of us under Bush's plan would have been emulating the "good" Europeans in Nazi-dominated countries who were forced to play ball with their oppressors. Even now, too many of us are remaining silent in the face of Ashcroft's dragnet, which has resulted in the arrests of hundreds of suspects including immigrants who have violated their visa stays. Once imprisoned, countless numbers have been denied access to their families or their lawyers. Unless there is a public outcry, many Arabs and Muslims will remain in prison indefinitely without even being charged with a crime, let alone convicted. When he tries to trample on the Constitution in establishing unprecedented prerogatives for his administration, Bush is going too far. Fortunately, the checks and balances on which our government system is based are still operating. They worked last year when the Defense Department tried to set up an office of strategic information with the stated purpose of disseminating "disinformation" to foreign correspondents. That dumb idea, which demonstrated an appalling naivete on the part of some Pentagon aides, shocked the media. Once challenged, the officials quickly dropped the plan. In this information age, who could believe that foreign reporters would be so gullible that they could not distinguish between propaganda falsehoods dished out to them and the material given to the U.S. press corps? The American people undoubtedly are ready to accept some unprecedented restrictions on their freedom and privacy during the war on terrorism. But indiscriminate spying on individuals and deliberate distortions of the truth are never acceptable. -------------------------------------------------------- Helen Thomas is a columnist for Hearst Newspapers. seattlepi.nwsource.com