The War on Civil Liberties

On Sept. 11, more than the Twin Towers fell. So, too, did many civil liberties in America, although most Americans remain unaware of the fact. There were no planes crashing into the Bill of Rights, only our trusted government officials.

Because, as in past wars, the worst punishments were inflicted upon immigrants or non-white citizens, few Americans spoke out in opposition. A year later, a Freedom Forum poll indicates that a substantial number of Americans express support for limiting freedom in the name of fighting terrorism.

Most Americans think that the worst consequences of terrorist-hunting at home have been shoe doffing at airports or other mere inconveniences. They believe, after years of watching cop shows, that you can't simply hold people incommunicado for months on end without charges, refusing to let them contact an attorney or anyone else.

They're wrong. American law makes a huge exception for legal immigrants, and the "USA-Patriot" Act passed after 9-11 dramatically increased the power of the government to imprison innocent people for indefinite periods under mere suspicion of some knowledge about terrorism.

A one-time terrorist suicide attack, albeit devastating, was more of a crime than a war. Yet it became the justification for a profound attack on civil liberties.

A new book just released, It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America after September 11 (RDV Books), challenges the idea widely publicized in the media that domestic liberties were mostly unaffected by terrorism.

One of the most shocking things about It's a Free Country is the inclusion of statements by members of Congress. The media presented America post-Sept. 11 as a glorified oneness of thought in support of the war on terror. These sharp criticisms by Reps. Jerome Nadler (D-NY), Bob Barr (R-Ga.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.), and Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) were almost invisible in the press.

The media failed to report the fact, as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) observed, that the USA Patriot was "strengthened" to restrict civil liberties by "backdoor maneuvers" after coming out of committee, without the knowledge of members of Congress who voted mere hours after the legislation was finalized to approve it, unaware of the changes made by the Bush Administration.

Suppression of free speech during war has a long history explored in this book. Howard Zinn observes how the US Government during World War I prosecuted under the Espionage Act a film called "The Spirit of '76" on the grounds that portraying our ally, Britain, as the enemy during the American Revolution was seditious. As Zinn notes, "Without the right to speak freely, to dissent, we cannot evaluate what the government is doing, and so we may be swept into foreign policy adventures with no oppositional voices, and later lament our silence."

Former Illinois Senator Paul Simon writes, "In moments of passion, administrations can grossly violate our basic civil liberties-and when those actions are taken in times of tension, the American public will back the president." Simon observes, "It is better to have the unpopular awkwardness of following the Constitution and the law than the popular crudeness of violating our important heritage of freedom."

The book also includes cartoonists and musicians, such as a poem by singer Ani Difranco ("and we holds these truths to be self-evident:/#1 george w. bush is not president/#2 america is not a true democracy/#3 the media is not fooling me").

However, the core of the book is the stories and testimonials of those who faced retaliation after Sept. 11. Lawyer David Cole tells the stories of unjust detentions, such as Ali Maqtari, a Yemeni jailed without charges for two months after he accompanied his American wife to Fort Campbell, despite having no links to terrorism and passing a lie detector test. At other times, the war on terror seems comical, like the Federal agents who investigated a 60-year-old retiree at a gym who criticized Bush's links to the oil industry, and the agents who questioned a North Carolina student for having an anti-Bush poster in her apartment.

One of the essays is written by Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who was fired because he appeared on the Fox News Channel show, The O'Reilly Factor. Al-Arian is typical of the people who find themselves under fire in the war against terrorism: he has no links to any of the 9-11 terrorists, and he denounced all terrorist attacks on innocent civilians without reserve. Yet because of his past criticism of Israel, and his guilt-by-association links to Palestinian terrorists, Al-Arian was deemed too dangerous to teach computer science.

The University of South Florida (USF) at first claimed ludicrous grounds for Al-Arian's firing: that he violated his contract as a tenured professor by appearing on a talk show without distancing himself from the university, and that he could be fired solely for receiving death threats which "disrupted" the university. A university where any professor can be fired for getting a death threat is neither safe nor free.

After being denounced even by conservative groups and Bill O'Reilly, USF on August 21, 2002 announced a change in tactics: Al-Arian would now be fired for his "terrorist" activities a decade earlier, even though he had never been charged with any crime despite extensive investigations, and a USF report had cleared him of any wrongdoing.

Technically, firing a tenured professor for his speeches and conference criticizing Israel is an even clearer violation of academic freedom, which is why USF avoided making this argument at the start. But in the wave of hysteria surrounding the war on terror, anyone labeled a "terrorist" can be fired without good reason. Florida Gov. Jeb Bush wanted Al-Arian fired, and his self-appointed Board of Trustees pressured USF to fire Al-Arian on any grounds.

The Al-Arian case poses an enormous threat to academic freedom: any professor can be fired for terrorist acts by anyone who works for an organization he founded, or even if a future terrorist attends a conference he organizes. Any professor can be fired for raising money for humanitarian causes if any of the money goes to a relative of a terrorist, even if it is done without his knowledge.

Al-Arian was not the only victim of academic freedom in the war on terrorism (see www.collegefreedom.org). Another firing in academia occurred at the University of Miami, where an Iranian medical technician born on Sept. 11 was dismissed for saying sarcastically, "Some birthday gift from Osama bin Laden. In this war on terror, we are all well-advised to follow Bush spokesperson Marlin Fitzwater's demand to "watch what we say."

For those who desire to destroy civil liberties, the war on terrorism becomes a convenient launching pad for a war against the Constitution. After all, the deaths of more than 3,000 people can justify almost anything: who could care about a piece of paper when human lives have been lost? Yet no one questions the false presumption that a free society is an unsafe society. In fact, the Bush Administration crusade against immigrants almost surely cost us the cooperation of people who could have provided useful information. Any immigrant who might report future criminal activity will now be dissuaded by fear of illicit detentions.

Norman Siegel of the ACLU writes, "Years from now, historians and our children will ask us if we were aware of the secret detentions, military tribunals, eavesdropping of attorney-client conversations, and other encroachments on our freedoms. Eventually, we will also be asked what we did in the face of these violations of freedom." The fact that today's infringements of liberty may fall short of the concentration camps for Japanese-Americans during World War II is no solace to the victims, and no excuse for violating Constitutional rights.

Freedom may seem more difficult during the heady rhetoric of a "war against terrorism," but unless we defend it during troubled times, we will undermine the foundation of American government. The terrorists of Sept. 11 could not bring liberty crashing down to the ground; that crime we are accomplishing by ourselves.