a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America after September 11
Edited by Danny Goldberg, Victor Goldberg and Robert Greenwald
RDV Books, 2002, 362 pages, $39.95 (hb)
REVIEW Y PHIL SHANNON
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/26177
One month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the
United States, 60-year-old retiree Barry Reingold was working out at his
San Francisco gym. He was overheard saying that the US war against Afghanistan
had more to do with the oil industry and its wealthy beneficiaries, like
the Bush family, than any �war on terror�. Shortly afterwards, he was visited
by two FBI agents and interrogated.
Reingold was not alone. Urged on by the US government, almost 500,000
people in the US have been dobbed in to the FBI to be investigated for
suspected �terrorist� links.
Unlike Reingold, the vast majority of the 8000 Americans eventually
interviewed by the FBI, as were the 2000 arrested and held in indefinite
detention, were Muslim or Arab men. Like all of them, however, Reingold
was innocent of any crime, let alone any connection to terrorism.
It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America after September
11, a book sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU),
analyses the abuses of civil liberties that have occurred following 9/11,
Contributors include lawyers, artists, academics and others critical of
the Bush government's drive to trade-off civil rights for �increased security�.
Attacks on civil liberties, racial discrimination
and suppression of dissent, under the cover of super-patriotism, have a
long ancestry in the US. In 1787, President John Adams fanned the fear
of war with France and made French refugees in America subject to arbitrary
deportation and incarceration, whilst criminalising criticism of these
policies as unpatriotic.
In response to a widespread protest movement against Washington's entry
into World War I in 1917, President Woodrow Wilson's administration prosecuted
2000 and jailed 1000 (mostly Italian, German and Russian immigrants, but
also ministers of religion, newspaper editors and trade union leaders)
for expressing critical opinions on the war. In the �Palmer raids� of 1919,
US attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer authorised the FBI to round up,
jail and deport thousands of mainly immigrant trade unionists, anarchists
and socialists during a government-manufactured �Red scare�.
In 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the imprisonment of 112,000
Japanese Americans in concentration camps in the deserts of California
and the swamps of Arkansas, following Tokyo's attack on Pearl Harbour.
None was ever charged with any crime. During the Cold War, anti-communist
laws, government spies and congressional witch-hunters put hundreds in
prison and ruined the careers of thousands of people, simply because of
their left-wing political beliefs.
The administration of US President George Bush junior has now joined
this illustrious list of repressive regimes. His regime is capitalising
on, and inflaming, the fear of terrorism in order to attack civil liberties.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the FBI conducted
a dragnet roundup of over 5000 men of Muslim or Arab origin � not because
they were suspected of committing a crime but because they fitted the �profile�
of a terrorist hijacker. Most were guilty of nothing more than minor technical
breaches of immigration regulations unrelated to September 11.
Some were the victims of personal vendettas, like the Jordanian-born
civil engineer who was informed upon by a rival building contractor. Or
the Yemeni-born janitor who was fingered by his employer in retaliation
for filing employment discrimination complaints.
Two thousand of these men were detained in secret, refused information
about the charges filed against them, forbidden from making contact with
their families and sometimes maltreated. Many are still detained. The �evidence�
against them is withheld from the detainees and their lawyers.
Such �secret evidence� has been found to be easily disproved, as it
was for the dozen wrongly convicted Arabic and Muslim men jailed for years
under President Bill Clinton's 1996 anti-terrorism act, which allowed secret
evidence for immigration proceedings.
The detainees are victims of the racist policy of �racial profiling�.
Ineffective as a law enforcement tool (nothing related to September 11
has come from the thousands interviewed and jailed), racist round-ups are
useful to governments because they create the impression that politicians
are �doing something�, that demonstrate their �toughness� and they hit
the populist racist nerve.
The anger, fear, inflamed patriotism and talk of war that erupts around
a Pearl Harbour, a September 11 or a Bali bombing are used by governments
to gather extra repressive powers that they have long sought. It is no
accident that inflamed patriotism is branded into the very title of the
USAPATRIOT Act, rushed into law in October 2001. It allows for expanded
surveillance of email and web sites, the introduction of secret evidence,
the monitoring of confidential client-attorney communications and legalises
indefinite detention.
The USAPATRIOT Act broadens the definition of �terrorist organisation�,
which could now encompass Greenpeace and would certainly have included
the supporters of the movement that is today the legally constituted government
of South Africa. The act creates the crime of �domestic terrorism�, which
could have been applied to the hugely successful anti-globalisation demonstration
against the World Trade Organisation protest in Seattle in 1999. The USAPATRIOT
Act also allows for wider use of undercover agents to infiltrate organisations
deemed to be �terrorist� (a revival of the discredited Cointelpro program
of the FBI to disrupt the progressive, African-American and socialist movements
of the 1960s).
US attorney general John Ashcroft is considering
even harsher measures, such as the fingerprinting and photographing of
100,000 more Arab and Muslim men, a national ID card and a personal database
on every US citizen, more public video surveillance and the use of facial
recognition software.
To make detainees more cooperative, the use of �drugs or pressure tactics
such as those employed by Israeli interrogators� � in other words, torture
� or extradition to �friendly� countries, like Egypt or Jordan, where torture
is practised, is being considered.
Human rights are no match for the heavy boots of super-patriotism at
war. The detention of 300 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, in brutalising and
dehumanising conditions, �violates every human rights norm relating to
preventive detention� but the so-called �war on terror� justifies all.
Bush has also authorised military tribunals � secret trials with death
penalty powers and no independent appeal � for dealing, summarily and without
due process, with terrorist �suspects�.
Human Rights Watch notes that the �subordination of human rights� and
civil liberties to the �war on terror� is practised by many other governments,
including the government of Australian Prime Minister John Howard. By �stroking
post-September 11 fears of foreigners�, HRW pointed out, Howard �built
his candidacy for re-election in November 2001 around his summary expulsion,
in blatant violation of international refugee law, of asylum seekers�.
Although the ACLU's obsessive political �non-partisanship� detracts
from the integrity of It's a Free Country by including some contributions
from some Democrats (who are predicably silent on Clinton's abuses of civil
liberties), and even a Republican (who is from the libertarian right and
is loud on rhetoric but a faker who voted for the USAPATRIOT Act), there
is more than adequate recompense from Ani Di Franco, Steve Earle, Michael
Moore, Howard Zinn and others from the left who make the crucial connections
between the �war on terror� abroad and the attacks on civil liberties at
home.
Sacrificing freedom for �security�, and launching bombing frenzies,
will not end terrorism. As many contributors note, US foreign policy, and
the global economic inequality it enforces, lie at the heart of the problem.
Standing in solidarity with the innocent victims of the US �war on terror�
and repression of civil liberties is essential to stopping governments
from acting out of callous and cynical political self-interest in the wake
of terrorist outrages.