t would be easy to dismiss the harm that has been done to our civil
liberties in the past year. Most of us do not know anyone whose rights have been
seriously curtailed. The 1,200 detainees rounded up after Sept. 11 and held in
secret were mainly Muslim men with immigration problems. So were the people the
government tried to deport in closed hearings. The two Americans who were
labeled "enemy combatants," hustled off to military brigs and denied the right
even to meet with a lawyer, are a Saudi-American man captured in Afghanistan and
a onetime Chicago gang member.
There is also no denying that the need for effective law enforcement is
greater than ever. The Constitution, Justice Arthur Goldberg once noted, is not
a suicide pact.
And yet to curtail individual rights, as the Bush administration has done, is
to draw exactly the wrong lessons from history. Every time the country has felt
threatened and tightened the screws on civil liberties, it later wished it had
not done so. In each case — whether the barring of government criticism under
the Sedition Act of 1798 and the Espionage Act of 1918, the internment of
Japanese-Americans in World War II or the McCarthyite witch hunts of the cold
war — profound regrets set in later.
When we are afraid, as we have all been this year, civil liberties can seem
abstract. But they are at the core of what separates this country from nearly
all others; they are what we are defending when we go to war. To slash away at
liberty in order to defend it is not only illogical, it has proved to be a
failure. Yet that is what has been happening.
Since last September, the Bush administration has held people in prison
indefinitely and refused to tell the public who is being held or even how many
detainees there are. No less odious than the administration's secret arrests are
its secret trials. The government has barred the public and the press from
deportation hearings for immigrants suspected of ties to terrorism.
The administration has also shown contempt for basic rights in its enthusiasm
for military tribunals. In November, when President Bush first issued the order
setting these up, it seemed the administration wanted to try anyone alleged to
have ties to terrorism, even American citizens arrested in the United States, in
military courts. Faced with an uproar, the administration backed down,
announcing that the tribunals would accord defendants some rights. It then
decided to try several prominent terrorism suspects in civilian courts.
This summer the administration unveiled, with great fanfare, the TIPS program
(for Terrorism Information and Prevention System), to recruit Americans to spy
on their fellow Americans. As originally conceived, TIPS was to include mail
carriers, utility workers and others with access to people's homes. Again, after
a popular outcry the administration scaled TIPS back.
In times of conflict, the president seeks to increase his power. Congress,
sensitive to public fears over safety, cannot always be counted on to stand up
to him. That leaves the judiciary and members of the public to worry about the
trampling of rights. This year a number of judges have stood out for their
courage. Gladys Kessler, of Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., declared
that secret arrests were "odious to a democratic society," and ordered the
government to release the names of all detainees. It has not done so. And Judge
Robert Doumar of Federal District Court in Norfolk, Va., who is presiding over
one of the "enemy combatant" cases, recently told prosecutors to submit
documents for his review so he could determine if the defendant was in fact an
enemy combatant. The Justice Department, disgracefully, defied his order.
As the Bush administration continues down its path, the American people need
to make clear that they have learned from history and will not allow their
rights to be rolled back. The world has changed since Sept. 11, but the values
this country was founded on have not. Fear is no guide to the Constitution. We
must fight the enemies of freedom abroad without yielding to those at home.
(sin asunto)
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