 
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Ashcroft's military courts for terrorists make a mockery of American values
Sunday, November 18, 2001
By Ann McFeatters
WASHINGTON - The military news out of Afghanistan is improving, and Cold War enemies Russia and the United States have declared themselves friends.
The threat of terrorism remains, but it is no longer possible to ignore the handwringing over actions of the Bush administration that strike some as an all-out assault on civil liberties.
It is not just "knee-jerk liberals" who have a nagging feeling that something is awry. The leaders of the American Bar Association profess themselves "troubled." Some members of Congress are furious. Libertarians and not just a few conservatives alike are worried.
The nation's righteous anger in this new world of having to be on guard against terrorists in our own back yard kept a lot of people from voicing alarm when the administration under the direction of Attorney General John Ashcroft took steps deemed necessary for self-protection. There are understandable new rules restricting airline and train passengers. The anti-terrorism law that Ashcroft pushed Congress to pass, signed into law as the USA Patriot Act by President Bush, gives the government popular if unprecedented new police powers to wiretap, detain noncitizens and conduct search-and-seizure raids.
But Ashcroft didn't stop there.
Most recently he issued an "emergency order" to permit officials to eavesdrop on the conversations that lawyers have with clients in federal custody, including those detained but not charged with a crime. Mail also may be intercepted. There is no judicial review or court order needed. The attorney general decides if his people have gone too far.
The instinct of most of us will be to say that if the government thinks there are people who might know something about a terrorist plot, the government should use every measure to find out. But the reality is that the government is holding hundreds of people, some just because of how they look; most of them by far are innocent and have not been charged with anything, let alone terrorism. Ashcroft's department refuses to give any information about them.
More worrisome, no government likes to give up power even though most legal scholars believe this new power to listen in surreptitiously on attorney-client conversations without a court order violates constitutional rights.
Even if they are comfortable with letting the government have this power temporarily, few Americans would want this to continue. It is not inconceivable that in time, an ordinary taxpayer taking a lawyer to a tax audit with IRS officials could be subject to having whispered advice from the lawyer listened to by the IRS. A farmer fighting an eminent domain case to prevent the government from taking his land could have his telephone conversations with his lawyer tapped.
Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way Foundation, says he finds Ashcroft neither a passionate nor tenacious defender of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He urges citizens to recall words of Benjamin Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., was outraged when he heard of Ashcroft's move. He wrote a letter to Ashcroft that said few safeguards to liberty are more fundamental than the constitutional right to legal aid in the criminal process.
"When the detainee's legal adversary -- the government that seeks to deprive him of his liberty -- listens in on his communications with his attorney, that fundamental right and the adversary process that depends upon it are profoundly compromised," Leahy said.
Bush also has instituted secret Third World-dictatorship-style military tribunals to "try" suspected terrorists with power to judge and execute them without the safeguards of the U.S. judicial system. This clearly will fuel anti-American anger in the growing Muslim world, certain to view these tribunals as kangaroo courts.
Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, is horrified at this new turn of events. "We do not defeat the Taliban by embracing its view of swift and arbitrary justice," he wrote.
"[Secret trials] would be a step back for American criminal justice," argued Duke University military justice professor Scott Silliman in the Los Angeles Times.
There is even planning for the U.S. government to try people arrested in the United States in such tribunals with rules set by the secretary of defense. Leahy, appalled, says this would be unconstitutional.
Too many people around the world already believe America is waging a holy war against Islam. The Bush administration means well but is sliding down a slippery slope that says the end justifies the means. In the end American values could mean nothing.
Ann McFeatters is National Bureau chief for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio. Her e-mail address is amcfeatters@
nationalpress.com.