The Bush administration has been compelled by popular and elite opposition to diversify its campaign against civil liberties. Nevertheless, state surveillance, repression and persecution continue to intensify, particularly against foreign nationals.
The "Patriot Act II" bill circulating last year-which would have intensified the repression measures permitted under the original USA PATRIOT Act, passed shortly after September 11, 2001-has not been introduced in Congress. This seems to be because there was substantial opposition to the bill. MIM was a leader in opposing it-last spring we delivered more than 3,100 signatures to California Senator Barbara Boxer's Los Angeles office (1)-but there were also campaigns by traditional civil libertarians as well as anti-big-government conservatives, including many Republicans.
For example, more than 200 local governments have passed resolutions objecting in one way or another to the Patriot Act.(2) Also, a group of U.$. Senators, including Republicans and Democrats, attempted to pass legislation at the end of last year that would have somewhat limited some of the government's new powers under the Patriot Act, including "sneak and peak" searches in which the subject is never told the search took place. The House of Representatives effectively limited that part of the Patriot Act last summer, denying it funding by a vote of 309 to 118.(3)
[This mainstream opposition to the Patriot Act was also seen during President Bush's State of the Union address, when many legislators applauded the line, "Key provisions of the Patriot Act are set to expire next year," instead of the line Bush wanted them to applaud: "You need to renew the Patriot Act."] In response, the administration has narrowed its legislative agenda, and pushed ahead with some measures that are less politically sensitive- including some by administrative fiat.
For example, in January the Department of Homeland Security implemented a new fingerprinting and photographing program for adults entering the country from most countries (exempting those coming from countries that don't require visas, which are mostly European).(4) The "biometric" data collection supposedly allows immigration police to check entrants against databases of potential terrorists. In practice, it amounts to a giant data collection effort to allow widespread surveillance of foreign nationals-an estimated 24 million per year.(5)
Although comprehensive new legislation may be stalled, the administration has made some progress in the courts, especially regarding its treatment of foreign nationals. Most recently, the Supreme Court ruled that the administration may withhold the identities and charges against the hundreds of mostly Muslim men rounded up and detained in the weeks and months after September 11. Most of them ended up deported for reasons unrelated to "terrorism," and the administration doesn't want people to know who they were, what they were charged with, how they were treated, and other embarrassing information. This is not surprising, given that the court previously approved of closed-door deportation hearings for the detainees.(6)
Both the immigration policy and the detainee decision represent the tendency to separate U.$. citizens from others in terms of legal rights-which has been the most visible pattern since September 11, and one of the reasons the Amerikan public has not protested more against increased government repression. For example, the U.$. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit in New York ruled in December in the case of Jose Padilla that Bush cannot declare an Amerikan citizen an "enemy combatant" and hold him indefinitely in military custody.(7) However, the detention of foreign nationals as enemy combatants has been allowed to persist.
Other moves against foreign nationals include crackdowns on informal money transactions used to send money back home to immigrants' families. In New York, federal prosecutors have brought charges against dozens of people from the Middle East and South Asia for the unlicensed transactions which used to be extremely common. The new enforcement has a nice side effect for banks, as the amount sent back to Pakistan though U.$. banks increased from $300 million the year before September 11 to $1.2 billion last year.(8)
The government won some legislative gains for repression, as in a little- noticed part of the intelligence authorization bill, which gave the FBI new power to demand some business records secretly and without a court order. The law expanded the definition of "financial institutions"-which are covered by new power-to include many private businesses, such as travel agencies and pawnbrokers.(9)
One ominous development in the war on civil liberties has been the increasing role of private companies in the repressive apparatus. For example, the company Kroll has released a new product called "TruAlert," which it calls a "USA Patriot Act compliance solution," part of their "suite of risk detection products." The product allows qualified financial institutions access to government databases for purposes of verifying "compliance" with anti-money laundering and other so-called anti-terrorism provisions. Their press release says the product "helps ensure that you do not engage in transactions with 'enemies' of the United States, which is accomplished by crosschecking the name of an individual against the US Treasury Department Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list."(10) Kroll's stock (KROL) has increased in value by 137% since September 11, 2001, including a 40% spike in September 2001, while most of the stock market was dropping.(11)
To help stem the tide of opposition, the InJustice department has launched a publicity campaign, under the freedomequals- slavery style name of "www.lifeandliberty.gov." On this website, the government claims that the Patriot Act merely "took existing legal principles and retrofitted them to preserve the lives and liberty of the American people from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network." The word "retrofit" just means to modernize something, which falsely implies that the government has not increased its repressive apparatus through the Patriot Act, but rather just improved its efficiency.
The government has shown no evidence that the repressive measures instituted since September 11, 2001 have made people safer. MIM accuses the U.$. government of perpetrating terrorism in the name of fighting terrorism, and calls on people everywhere to organize against the growing repressive power of the imperialist state. Clearly, for the victims of this repression, the world has become less safe. But for average Amerikans, too, their government's belligerent aggression and warmongering increases the threat of all kinds of war and violence.
Opposition to the war on civil liberties is a vital part of our internationalist duty to oppose imperialist militarism, which threatens all of humanity. Get involved!
Notes:
1. http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/ agitation/civlib/PatActRally.html 2. Buffalo News 16 Dec 2003, p. B2. 3. St. Louis Post-Dispatch 26 Oct 2003, p. B3. 4. http://www.dhs.gov/us-visit 5. Christian Science Monitor 6 Jan 2004, p. 3. 6. New York Times 12 Jan 2004, p. 1. 7. Washington Post 6 Jan 2004, p. A10. 8. Newsday 5 Jan 2004, p. 3. 9. Washington Post 4 Jan 2004, p. B6. 10. Mortgage Mag, 7 Oct 2003. 11. http://finance.yahoo.com