If the first few weeks of 2004 are any indication,
the Bush administration is stepping up its assault on civil liberties.
A few legislative victories for civil liberties have done little to
stop the over all trend toward more and more repressive legislation.
Looking at whats happened in just the first two weeks of 2004,
heres an overview of eight things to expect the rest of the
year.
1) Silence
On Jan. 12 the Supreme Court turned down an appeal
challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrests and detentions of
hundreds of people in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Not a single
link to terrorism has been proven from these arrests, which came largely
during the mandatory registration of men from Muslim countries a year
ago, and many of the arrestees have already been deported for immigration
violations.
Yet the Supreme Court upheld the previous decision of a U.S. Court
of Appeals that releasing information about the arrests "would
give terrorist organizations a composite picture of the government
investigation." Since by most measures it was an ineffective
investigation as far as preventing terrorism goes, it seems the most
this composite picture would do is give "terrorists " more
scorn for our judicial system. Effectively closing the books on this
case should be seen not only as a civil liberties violation for those
involved and their families, many of whom are legal U.S. residents,
but for the general public. A precedent is set every time the administration
is able to get away with imposing secrecy and silence in the name
of national security. Now the court is essentially saying that even
two years after the terrorist attacks, the citizenry doesn't have
the right to examine or evaluate their government's response.
Meanwhile, detainees are still being held in Guantanamo Bay without
right to counsel or the courts, as the Supreme Court considers the
constitutionality of this arrangement. Though this could end up being
a civil liberties victory depending on how the court rules, the matter
is still up in the air. "In depriving the Guantanamo prisoners
of the universally recognized right to due process before the law,
our government not only flouts the U.S. Constitution, the Geneva Conventions,
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but the 'decent opinion
of mankind' sought by our nation's founders in the Declaration of
Independence," said ACLU executive director Anthony D. Romero
in a statement, as the ACLU and other groups filed a friend-of-the-court
brief on behalf of the detainees. "No government should be able
to assume such unilateral authority over people's basic rights, most
crucially during times of threat to our own democracy."
2. Surveillance
The PATRIOT Act hasn't been in the news quite so much
lately; and civil liberties proponents breathed a sigh of relief when
the proposed so-called PATRIOT Act II was revealed by the media and
consequently tabled last year. But the fact is the surveillance and
other tenets of the PATRIOT Act are being used as you read this, and
there is doubtless work still going on behind the scenes to push through
the more extreme measures of PATRIOT Act II in different ways. Perhaps
the first big civil liberties- surveillance related measure to be
rolled out in 2003 was the U.S.-VISIT program, in which foreign visitors
and immigrants are fingerprinted and photographed upon entry to the
U.S. Citizens of 27 European and other U.S.-allied countries are exempt,
however. This is a gap of logic there is no reason citizens
of these countries wouldn't be plotting terrorist acts just
remember failed shoe-bomber and British national Richard Reid. And
more important, it is another way to needlessly build resentment against
the U.S. by infringing on the civil liberties of foreign visitors.
"You fingerprint someone when they're going to prison,"
said an 18-year-old Mexican man arriving at Chicago's O'Hare International
Airport, to start his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology,
on Jan. 5, the first day of U.S.-VISIT. "Do they want us to feel
like prisoners here? How would you like it?" Brazil decided to
reciprocate by fingerprinting U.S. citizens, and apparently an American
pilot, Dale Robbin Hirsh, didn't like it very much. He was arrested
Jan. 14 after flipping the bird to Brazilian agents; he was charged
with showing disrespect to authorities, a crime that can carry a six-month
to two-year jail sentence.
3. Focus on the Death Penalty
Between the historic commutation of all death sentences in Illinois
by former Gov. George Ryan and other reforms around the country last
year, and the increased focus on war-on-terrorism-related human rights
and civil liberties abuses, the death penalty has dropped off the
public radar screen to some extent. But it hasn't gone away, and the
decreased attention it receives means various legislative reforms
or victories in individual cases, many of which are still caught up
in the appeals process, could be rolled back. On January 14, a man
named Lewis Williams was executed in Ohio after his defense's claims
that he is mentally retarded were rejected by the court. Four guards
were needed to pry the 117-pound man away from a table he was grasping
and carry him to the death chamber, according to news reports. As
he was strapped to the execution gurney he cried out, "I'm not
guilty. God, help me!" Scenes like this illustrate the basic
cruelty and inhumanity of the death penalty, a policy that also debases
those who are forced to carry it out like the guards who had
to pry Williams from the table. The ACLU notes that nine executions
are scheduled for January: three in Texas, two in Arkansas, one in
North Carolina, one in Oklahoma and two in Ohio.
4. More Mandatory Minimums
Like the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences
for drug and other crimes, which take away a judge's discretion in
the case, have been around for a while. But again with so much focus
on the war-on-terror-related policies, it's easy to forget that many
people are more likely to have their lives interrupted or destroyed
by a harsh mandatory minimum sentence than a terror-related probe.
In one recent quirky but chilling example, an 18-year-old Puerto Rican
computer whiz from a troubled home was sentenced to 10 years in prison
for trading child pornography over the internet. Jorge Pabon-Cruz
was charged with advertising for the distribution of child pornography,
which under a 1996 law carries a 10-year minimum federal penalty.
Pabon-Cruz had set up a server to distribute pornography to other
internet users, though he was not profiting from the trade.
The federal judge in the case, Gerard Lynch, denounced the forced
sentence as "the worst case of my judicial career" and said
it "has the potential to do disastrous damage to someone who
himself is not much more than a child." Regardless of the serious
issue of child pornography and many of the images in this case
were reported to be extreme the idea that a teenager will have
his life forever changed, and his physical and mental health seriously
endangered by a decade in an adult prison for neither creating nor
profiting off this pornography is deeply disturbing.
And every day hundreds of people including teenagers
and grandmothers are being handed down inordinately harsh mandatory
minimum sentences for drug crimes, sentences that will alter the course
of their lives forever, in many cases because they were just unfortunate
enough to have a drug-dealing boyfriend or grandchild.
6. Increasingly Regressive Drug Policy and Enforcement
Along with mandatory minimums for drug-related crimes,
the overall zealous and arbitrary enforcement of the war on drugs
continues to be a major civil liberties problem for huge numbers of
Americans. As 2003 came to a close, for example, students and parents
around the country were stunned by video footage from surveillance
cameras at Stratford High School in Goose Creek, South Carolina, where
during an early morning raid on Nov. 5 students as young as 14 were
held at gunpoint by police officers who handcuffed them, searched
them and allowed drug-sniffing dogs within inches of their bodies.
In December the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of 20 students charging
their constitutional rights were violated.
7. Immigrants as Guests, and as Exploited Workers
With his mid-January announcement of a new guest worker
program, President Bush gave the Mexican government and many immigration
reform proponents what they had long been lobbying for.
The plan will allow undocumented immigrants living abroad to petition
for temporary visas to work for a specific employer legally in the
U.S. exempting undocumented workers already living in the U.S.,
who have "broken the law" to come here.
Many immigrants' rights groups did welcome the decision, since it
will give workers an opportunity to earn a living without the constant
fear of deportation. But this program could actually be a set-back
for immigrants' rights, and by extension the civil liberties of immigrants
and citizen workers alike. Because while it legalizes immigrant workers,
it makes them even more reliant on and vulnerable to their employers,
as they were without documents. As with the existence of undocumented
labor, this essentially gives employers the upper hand in labor negotiations
and allows them to lower the bar on wages and benefits across whole
industries.
Many also see it as a moral affront to the immigrant workers themselves
you can do our work for us, but you can't stay. The coalition
of Immokalee Workers, a group of migrant agricultural workers in southern
Florida, describes the program as an attack on the dignity and rights
of all workers: "Rather than raise wages and improve conditions
to attract and maintain a stable workforce, as the market would have
it, employers have lobbied their friends in the Bush Administration
for the right to circumvent the U.S. labor market altogether and import
low-wage workers directly from countries far poorer than the United
States," says a statement from the Coalition. The President's
proposal would grant their wish, while cloaking this thinly-veiled
subsidy to low-wage industry in the compassionate clothing of immigration
reform.
8. Double-speak
The guest worker proposal could be seen as just one
more example of the current administration's propensity to try to
pass off initiatives which could harm millions of people and the environment
as exactly the opposite of what they really are: Healthy Forests.
No Child Left Behind. The Clear Skies Initiative. The Liberation of
Iraq.
We've heard enough of them. If you consider it a civil liberty to
have access to accurate information about what your tax dollars are
being used for and what decisions are being made in your name, this
continuing deception as we move toward the election could be seen
as one of the biggest civil liberties violations of all.
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