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The State of Civil Liberties
by INDEPENDENT STAFF
September 2004
If you're not an Arab, not a Muslim, not a foreign national, don't ride airplanes, and don't publicly protest the government, you're probably just as content with the state of your civil liberties as you were at the beginning of President Bush's term in office. You may not have noticed that the FBI and Department of Justice have interviewed and detained thousands of persons of interest due to their address, name, and ethnicity, without any evidence that they had committed or were planning to commit one. Below is a brief tallying of new law enforcement measures under Bush, how many innocent people have been cast under suspicion, and how many guilty people have been caught.
Immediately following September 11, 2001, 762 mostly Arab suspects were arrested and held at prisons in Brooklyn and Northern New Jersey. They were “detained” under a “hold until cleared” policy, which meant being imprisoned without charges for an average of eighty days. According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) report, some of these prisoners were beaten, shocked, slammed into walls, deprived of sleep and forced into painful stress positions for long periods. In the two years following September 2001, the federal government referred 6,400 cases to the DOJ for possible charges of terrorism. Of these, only twenty-three have led to convictions of more than five years. There are also concerns that some of these convicts may not be terrorists. Nearly half of the terrorism-related convictions claimed by the DOJ in 2002 had nothing to do with terrorism, according to a report by the General Accounting Office.
The U.S. Army is holding 598 prisoners of war, mostly low-level Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan, at a prison camp in Guantánamo, Cuba. They will be tried not by U.S. or international laws but by military tribunals, and some face possible execution if found guilty.
Under the U.S. Patriot Act, the federal government can infiltrate, wiretap and investigate political and religious groups without any evidence of wrongdoing. Late last month, The New York Times reported these powers are being applied not just to mosques and immigrants but to protesters preparing for the Republican National Convention. Under the Patriot Act, anyone who breaks any local, state or federal law while putting a human life in danger—hanging a sign off the side of a bridge, for example—could be charged with domestic terrorism. If the president decides a U.S. citizen is a threat to national security, he can hold them indefinitely without charges and try them under the military laws being used at Guantánamo, a policy currently under review by the Supreme Court.
Between September 2001 and December 2003, the Department of Homeland Security registered and interviewed 177,260 foreign visitors from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, and visited many from time to time to verify where they were and what they were doing. Of these, 13,799 were deported and 2,870 were imprisoned. (Since September 2001, the government has been allowed to close deportation hearings to all outside observers for any case deemed to be “of special interest.”) As of December 2003, twenty-three were still being held, not one of whom had been charged with a terrorism-related crime.
Due to public outcry, the Department of Homeland Security scrapped its proposed Operation TIPS system, which would have recruited more than 1 million utility employees, mail carriers, and other workers with access to private homes to report on their customers and employees. But the department is following through with its MATRIX program, which maintains a list of the 120,000 U.S. residents with the highest “terrorist factor,” a quotient calculated from a combination of age, gender, race, credit history, past addresses, known relations to pilots, and other publicly available information. Of the thirteen state governments that were originally participating in the program, Pennsylvania is one of five still signed on.
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