| Ashcroft's
Brown Scare
By Achal Mehra
John
Ashcroft's war on terror will occupy the odious space
between Japanese internment camps and Joseph McCarthy's
Red Scare.
In
perhaps a decade, let's hope less, when the passions
unleashed by the horrific events of Sept 11 have ebbed,
Attorney General John Ashcroft's war on terror will
occupy the odious space between Japanese internment
camps and Joseph McCarthy's Red Scare.
Calculatingly preying on people's fears and passions,
Ashcroft has unleashed the single biggest frontal assault
on individual and civil rights since World War II.
Nearly 1,200 people have been detained without public
disclosure; hundreds of aliens have been deported in
secrecy; scores have been held in indefinite preventive
detention without any charges and denied their constitutionally
guaranteed right to a lawyer; and thousands of innocent
people have been subjected to excruciating, often humiliating,
interrogations, simply because they belonged to the
wrong ethnic group or religion.
In a throwback to the practices of the Gestapo in Nazi
Germany, Ashcroft's Justice Department even refuses
to dislose the names of people caught up in its dragnet.
U.S. District Judge Gladys Kesseler wrote in her opinion,
ordering the attorney general to disclose the names
of detainees, "Unquestionably, the public's interest
in learning the identities of those arrested and detained
is essential to verifying whether the government is
operating within the bounds of the law."
She cautioned, "Secret arrests are a concept odious
to a democratic society."
Former U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher has
drawn parallels between the secret detentions and the
notorious "disappeareds" incidents in Pinochet's Argentina.
Attorney General Ashcroft is busy establishing his TIPS
(Terrorism Information and Preventions System) project,
which aims to recruit an organized corps of citizens,
drawn from employees of utility companies, delivery
services and the post office, to report suspicious activities
to the government. The project is strikingly similar
to the revolting and discredited practices of the Soviet
Communists, who forced citizens to spy on families and
neighbors.
Already, the FBI and CIA have acquired sweeping new
powers to engage in domestic spying, monitoring Internet
sites, telephone conversations, libraries, churches
and political organizations. Law enforcement officials
are busy deploying state-of-the-art video and Internet
surveillance equipment in public and private spaces
in scenes eerily reminiscent of Orwell's 1984. North
Carolina Senator John Edwards dubbed one X-ray scanning
devise as the "equivalent of an electronic strip search,
revealing the naked body along with any concealed weapons."
The Justice Department defends its draconian practices,
gloating that they have "incapacitated and disrupted
some ongoing terrorist plans." Only we must take their
word on it.
A free society does not rest its hopes on the unverifiable
assertions of government officials with unchecked powers.
America is built on the premise of individual liberties
and the rule of law. Guilt by association or because
of membership in a religious or ethnic group is both
illegal and an anathema in the American tradition. U.S.
constitutional theory is predicated on the assumption
of an individual's innocence, a practice the U.S. Justice
Department has turned on its head.
Tragically, in these impassioned times, much as during
the periods of the Japanese internments and the Red
Scare, Americans cannot fathom the magnitude of Ashcroft's
subversion of the U.S. constitutional process. We must
rest our hopes on his excesses, which unrestrained power
inevitably fosters, and the judgment of history, which
cannot be too soon in coming.
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