Who Needs Civil Liberties Anyway?
By Peter Douglas
Staff Writer

While many of Americans were glued to their televisions, waiting for Tom Ridge to tell them when the "Orange Alert" would be over, a much scarier threat was waiting the in halls of the Department of Justice. Two weeks ago the Center for Public Integrity, a civil liberties watchdog group, exposed a leaked draft of the Bush Administration's next anti-terrorism legislation, called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act. The administration was planning on keeping it a secret until the political timing was right, possibly once the country was distracted by war in Iraq. In fact, the Justice Department on several occasions told members of the Senate Judiciary committee that they weren't working on any such legislation. Fortunately for all Americans, an anonymous and conscientious employee of the Justice Department leaked the draft, and the Center for Public Integrity then passed it on to several media sources.

The proposed draft has alarming measures to alter or discard our civil liberties in order to "combat terrorism." Perhaps the most extreme is a provision stating that any citizen who supports the activities, lawful or unlawful, of any organization deemed to be "terrorist" can be stripped of his or her citizenship. At this point, the newly declared non-citizen could then be deported, since the act also gives the Attorney General the authority to deport any non-citizen he sees as a "threat to our national defense, foreign policy, or economic interests." The problem then would become that this former American would have no state to which he or she could be deported. To deal with this, the Justice Department has issued a regulation allowing it to detain indefinitely any suspected terrorists who are stateless or whose state refuses to take them back.

Aside from the ability to deport or detain any suspected terrorist, the act would authorize secret arrests, wiretaps and searches without warrants, and would overturn a court ruling requiring the government to reveal who it detained in its investigations of the September 11 terrorist attack. It would expand the death penalty to anyone convicted of a terrorist act. DNA samples from any suspected terrorists could be collected and maintained by the FBI. Finally, it would erase the distinction between international and domestic terrorism, further obscuring an already broad definition of terrorism and giving law enforcement much greater power in investigating wholly domestic crimes.

In December, "America's finest news source," The Onion, ran a story headlined "Bill of Rights Pared Down to Manageable Six." The story was a joke, but it seems that the Bush Administration thought it was a good idea. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act would clearly violate many of the basic concepts upon which our country was founded. The most obvious example of this is the Fourth Amendment, which protects against "unreasonable search and seizure" and requires probable cause before a warrant can be issued. This new act would directly circumvent that right for anyone suspected of being a terrorist. Taking citizenship away from anyone connected with terrorist groups would be depriving them of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without due process of law, which is expressly prohibited by the Fifth Amendment. The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a speedy and public trial, and the Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Detaining suspected terrorists indefinitely without bringing charges against them violates both of these amendments. In fact, two American citizens affiliated with either the Taliban or Al-Qaeda are in exactly this situation and are currently being held by the Navy as enemy combatants. So far, no court has made a decision as to whether this detainment is constitutional or not.

In a more subtle way, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act would violate the First Amendment as well, by abridging Americans' right to political expression. Making even lawful support of a group considered to be a terrorist organization punishable by the loss of citizenship, the government is indicating that previously legitimate involvement in political affairs is a crime.

Terrorism should clearly be illegal, but currently the definition of "suspected terrorist" is so vague that this new law would be incredibly easy to abuse. One example that comes to mind is the Earth Liberation Front, a group which has been labeled terrorist, though it has never caused any deaths, because it has repeatedly destroyed private property. This group is an offshoot of Earth First!, a radical but non-violent and legitimate organization. It is feasible that, under this law, members of Earth First! opposed to Bush's plan could be blamed for the Earth Liberation Front's "terrorist acts," and therefore have their citizenship taken and risk deportation, since they are a "threat to our…economic interests."

Throughout American history, important social movements have had violent and even terrorist fringes. Anarchists affiliated with the labor movement set off a bomb at Haymarket Square in the beginning of the century, the Weathermen, a group opposed to the Vietnam War, blew up a building at the University of Wisconsin, and members of the Black Panther Party supposedly planned to assassinate Lady Bird Johnson. These acts did not make the labor, anti-war, or civil rights movements they were associated with any less legitimate, yet if this law were in place when they occurred, it is easy to see a nervous government deporting the legitimate leaders of those movements. By having the power to decide who is and who isn't a terrorist, the government will basically have the power to decide which groups and social movements it will allow to exist and which it won't, moving us even closer to being the type of repressive, authoritarian society we pretend to decry.

When the Patriot Act was introduced after September 11 resistance to it was nearly non-existent. Now many people are beginning to realize how many of our civil liberties were lost with the passage of that act. And the Bush Administration is currently pressing for legislation involving even greater violations of basic rights. So far, there has been minimal coverage of this legislation in the mainstream media; yet despite this fact, a movement resisting the act and other encroachments on the Bill of Rights has begun. One of the most impressive aspects of this movement is that it is uniting liberals and conservatives, people from across the political spectrum, against what increasing numbers of Americans see as a power mad administration. The question is whether this opposition will continue to grow as we go to war with Iraq and Bush steps up his message of "you're either with us or against us." It's easy to imagine a Congress that is even more in line with the President than the one that passed the Patriot Act, thus giving him unlimited power to attack Iraq in a frightening and undemocratic act of legislation.

It is our duty to remain informed, and when the Domestic Security Enhancement Act is quietly introduced in Congress, we must create an uproar, by sending letters and e-mails and flooding Congressional phone lines, in order to show that we will not allow any further erosion of our rights.