“Citizens need to be able to look under the skirts of their government, not the other way around.” Kate Riley, Seattle Times
Today will wrap up a year-long debate on the ASIO bill, which gives ASIO the right to detain people without charge for interrogation even if they’re not suspected of a crime.
Debate has raged within and between the major parties on mechanisms to safeguard citizens from abuse of power – the latest is the Senate’s decision that the legislation will lapse after three years.
As I write, the Senate is still finalising the details of the new law. Professor George Williams – who’s led the legal defence of our rights throughout the year with passion, erudition and credibility – discussed what’s happened so far in smhDec4.
I’ve spent a lot of time this year on the legislative responses to the war on terror, particularly the federal anti-terrorism bill (where a Liberal backbench revolt forced significant changes to safeguard our right to protest), the ASIO bill, and most recently the NSW government’s disgraceful Terrorism (Police Powers) Bill which Bob Carr rushed through parliament this month.
I pay tribute to the six brave souls who stood up for civil liberties and safeguards on unchecked police power in the NSW Upper House and voted against the bill because it contained no safeguards. They are Helen Sham-Ho (former Liberal), Arthur Chesterfield-Evans (Democrats), Peter Wong (Unity Party), Peter Breen (Reform the Legal System Party), Richard Jones (former Democrats) and Ian Cohen and Lee Rhiannon (Greens).
Only one of the lonely six is standing for re-election this time, the Greens’ Ian Cohen. Helen Sham-Ho and Richard Jones are retiring and Peter Breen, Arthur Chesterfield-Evans and Lee Rhiannon were elected at the last election and have another term to serve. Peter Breen’s Party is standing secular Muslim Ahmed Sokarno.
So if you vote in NSW and want the people’s rights, including yours, mentioned in the NSW parliament next term, look for Ian Cohen, Ahmed Sokarno and the Democrats on the Upper House ticket. They’re all you’ve got left.
Unlike their federal counterparts in both parties, the ALP backbench nodded and buttoned their lips and the Liberal backbench nodded and buttoned their lips. Otherwise Alan Jones would have shredded them for breakfast.
How’s this for smarmy cynicism from NSW Treasurer Michael Egan during December 5’s question time:
Lee Rhiannon (Greens): I direct my question to the Treasurer, representing the Premier. Is the Treasurer aware of the comments of the Federal Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, on ABC radio yesterday? He said:“When you look at what we have in our bill and compare it to what the NSW government is proposing in its bill you’ll see that there are an enormous range of safeguards in ours that are not present in the NSW bill.”
The Federal Attorney-General was referring to the Terrorism (Police Powers) Bill. In light of this information, will the Premier hold back on promoting the New South Wales model of fighting terrorism until it has been subject to the same proper and open parliamentary inquiries that the ASIO bill has been through?
Michael Egan: The Hon. Lee Rhiannon has been in this place long enough to realise that she should not reflect on a vote of the House or on legislation passed by the House. The legislation to which she refers has been subject to debate in this House and the other place in the past week or so. It passed through this House last night, and I think it is very balanced legislation. We live in quite difficult times and we are subject to threats that we once thought would never emerge. It is very important to have in place safeguards that balance our civil liberties with our right to be protected from harm. I think the legislation that Parliament passed yesterday achieves that aim.
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New King Carr edict: Once legislation is passed, no member of Parliament has the right to criticise it. And don’t ignore King Bob – he’s got the police in his pocket and the judiciary out of the way if police minister Michael Costa oversteps the mark.
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Today, Brian Bahnisch, Simon Priestley, Peter Funnell, a federal public servant who must remain anonymous and Michael Strutt comment on Carr’s disgrace, then Jozef Imrich’s selection of United States commentary on what’s happening to civil liberties over there. When you read the United States pieces, remember that at least they’ve got a bill of rights, so the Courts can intervene if Bush and his apparatus go too far. There’s nothing anyone can do to curb Carr’s excesses in NSW – he’s made sure of that. For up-to-the-minute news on the collapse of our way of life via our governments, not the terrorists, go to Zem.
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Brian Bahnisch in Queensland
My brain is not good on legal issues, but having lived in Queensland all my life except 1964-1968 I understand what it is like to live under a strong and ruthless premier, whose power is unchecked.
I had a chat with Joh one day in the courtyard of a school library we were opening. He was a nice avuncular chap in that context, but non-Queenslanders have no idea what it was like to turn on the radio and every time risk hearing the latest outrageous comment. You had to listen and weigh up each astonishing word because his word was law. Putting down street protests was a specialty.
As a state public servant, I could not go on protests, but my younger brother, as a university student, once lost half his beard, ripped out of his face just for being there.
We suspected there was a netherworld of corrupt activity. We had one honourable police commissioner, Ray Whitrod, who tried to clean it up. He failed and left because of Joh’s interference. We had one honourable politician, Joh’s deputy Bill Gunn, who initiated the Fitzgerald Inquiry when Joh was out of town. We had one senior police officer, with residual and re-found honour, who broke the police ‘wall of silence’. Later in the last days we had an honourable Governor, who refused Joh’s request for a wholesale sacking of cabinet ministers when they finally turned against him.
When the CJC (Criminal Justice Commission) was established we profited, I think, from some honourable and generally high profile chairs of the Commission. Such persons, however, did not always handle the media well and there did seem to be some problems with how the CJC was constituted.
The whole thing became hopelessly politicised during the brief reign of Rob Borbidge as Premier, when the CJC was investigating him and his Police Minister Russell Cooper for their role in the notorious Memorandum of Understanding with the Police Union before the byelection that finally unseated Goss. These two gentlemen countered by mounting an investigation into the CJC.
This was resolved in the end by the Commissioner investigating Borbidge and Cooper resigning because he couldn’t investigate while being investigated. The CJC then had its wings clipped by the establishment of a second Commission to take over some of the CJC’s powers.
This has now been sorted by two honourable men. First Peter Beattie, whatever you may think of him, understands the need for dissent and protest. He has replaced the two commissions with a new one – The Crime and Misconduct Commission. The second honourable man is Brendon Butler SC, the last chair of the CJC and chair of the new Commission.
Vivian Schenker interviewed him on the ABC RN Breakfast Program recently. You could not imagine a more calm, measured, deliberative man. He summed up the argument put to him in hearings over the prior two days, commented thoughtfully on the issues, let everyone know how the matter would be progressed and absolutely refused to be drawn on personal views or likely positions the Commission might take.
As it happens I know the guy. We see each other on little group weekend mini-retreats in the mountains or by the sea organised by a mutual friend one or two or three times a year. I used to work with his wife in the public service.
The point is, while he has had positions of responsibility in the past, he has no great profile. He comes across as a normal, honest, straight-talking, careful garden variety solicitor. But the man is not garden variety; he’s quality.
So to our New South Wales friends, I would say that your idea of an independent person to oversee the new police powers, Margo, is a good one, and probably a high profile person would be useful at first.
Ultimately, however, it will depend on the quality of the person rather than the profile. It will also depend on the quality of the legislation and the independence of the office. Bipartisanship should be built into the structure somewhere. But finally it will only work well if you have quality politicians, who don’t try to undermine, bypass or subvert it.
The quality of the act should be such that it does not need to be rescued and interpreted by a quality person. To leave the responsibility with the Police Minister is gross stupidity and a danger to democracy. It’s times like these we need a Bill of Rights written into the Constitution.
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Simon Priestley, Sydney lawyer
I have just read the new legislation for the widening of police powers to “combat terrorism”. I am more afraid of the new laws widening police powers to “combat terrorism” than the terrorists.
I’m most afraid of how an apparently insane Premier and a Police Minister who seems to confuse himself with the Ghost Who Walks will abuse them. Both men have shown complete disregard if not dislike for honesty/accountability/the truth – anything that may make keeping in power more difficult.
Anyone who doubts they will abuse it is either a fool or in denial of the tragic turn our society is taking. We must not forget this is the Labor Premier who gave the finger to protesting unions, stripped away more workers rights than Menzies dreamed was possible, protects insurance companies and grovels to The Parrot (Sydney talkback king Alan Jones).
If we don’t protest now we may lose the right to protest ever again.
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Peter Funnell in Farrer, ACT
You’re doing terrific work on the terrorism/law and order/civil rights/democracy issues. I hadn’t seen all the connections till I read your stuff on NSW. Bloody hell! Have they no shame or sense of ordinary decency? Do they really believe in liberal democracy?
Where is this all going I wonder? Terrorism is a criminal matter, but what powers do law enforcement agencies need to pursue and prevent major crime that they don’t have today? There has been a push for a very long time to stretch the limits when pursuing illegal drug crime, but there has been only a limited and measured increase in additional powers. No difference here that I can see and no more threatening.
Terrorism leads to a call to enhance “security”, while illegal drug crime inspires calls for greater criminal investigative powers. The bridge between the two is the need to physically secure people and places, the sense of “war”, when in fact we are talking about gathering more intelligence and giving higher priority and resources to criminal investigation.
The very best results, the only results that matter in dealing with terrorism, is through law enforcement and intelligence agencies. If they work globally or regionally, the results compound significantly. Just look at Bali and the efforts of numerous countries around the world, as they follow the money, investigate and close down the infrastructure.
This is not “war”, it’s bloody good criminal investigation. We don’t need a lot more powers given to these investigative agencies and we don’t need to forego our civil liberties. That is completely the wrong way to go with terrorism. By calling it a “war” and linking it to military capability or objectives, the situation gets seriously out of control – for everyone involved.
My memory of these things goes back to the CHOGM conference in the mid seventies and the Hilton bombing, As a young army rifle platoon commander, I was given a set of orders – rules of engagement that were about three foolscap pages long – which had no chance of being effectively communicated to my troops ( I didn’t understand them and no did my superiors). I was also given a sand bag full of ball ammunition (which I would distribute at my discretion or on order), then, along with the other platoons and companies in my battalion, set forth in our armoured personnel carriers and took up a series of observation posts along a section of the highway to the Blue Mountains.
It was a dangerous farce, that did not sit well with most of us, as I remember it. Fortunately that situation was mitigated by some very responsible and experienced military commanders who were respectful and concerned for potential use of military force on a domestic issue. Things can and do get out of control very quickly. Democracy is fragile and people use the power available to them is my experience. Today there are more than adequate call out provisions. Nothing more is required.
What disgusts me is the Federal and NSW State Government’s disgustingly similar agendas – make people very fearful for their safety and the future to elections. Trade off democracy for an another shot at power. All Carr and Howard are doing is proving the terrorists correct and diminishing our democracy. Sickening, just sickening. Each time they do this, it becomes easier to take another liberty the next time.
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Anon
I just want to say that I like the things you write and I share your opinion on Mr Carr and Mr Howard and their quest (or obsession) for populist authoritarianism. Dreadful phrase; appalling reality.
As for their “arguments” – more accurately described as assertions of necessity for these authoritarian moves for increased ASIO and police powers, I can only recall Pitt’s comment: “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”
Apologies for me remaining Anon. I would be unemployed by Friday if my employer even suspected I was reading your articles! (I work in the Commonwealth Government.)
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Michael Strutt
Disclosure: I’m a social justice activist, former member of Justice Action and a regular reader of your column. This is an article I recently wrote for the Justice Action magazine ‘Framed’.
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Demolishing Democracy – How Carr and bin Laden gave birth to the NSW police state
The Bali bombings could not have come at a better time for Bob Carr and his project to bring an end to Westminster democracy in NSW.
The parliament has long been under the control of the executive, thanks to the combination of strict party discipline and an ineffective opposition. Guideline sentencing, a timid Chief Justice and regular moral panics over ‘light sentences’ keeps the judiciary in line. The ‘fourth estate’ has been rendered impotent by a supine and sycophantic parliamentary press gallery and by the simple expedient of handing the police ministry over to most extreme right wing shock-jock in the state.
The prisons are packed and new ones being built as fast as possible, the Wood Commission reforms have been rolled back and the Ombudsman and Police Integrity Commission nobbled. A notorious prison officer has been put in charge of Corrective Services, in spite of adverse ICAC findings against him and an ‘old style’ NSW cop made Commissioner of Police, although the PIC had been told that he was the leader of the ‘Black Knights’ dedicated to blocking any reform of the NSW police.
The police themselves have more powers than at any time since the Rum Rebellion and a record number of citizens are now languishing in prison cells under conditions as abusive as any since the Nagle Royal Commission.
But how could you run a law and order election campaign from here? What is left to crack down on?
The answer came in a flash. The same flash that extinguished 87 Australian lives at Kuta Beach.
The police and military could be joined under a Homeland Security Ministry, based on the model established by George Bush following the September 11 attacks.
The draconian ASIO bill which had been stalled in Federal parliament for a year could be adapted for NSW police requirements and shoved through NSW parliament, granting Carr’s crackpot police minister unheard of powers and freedom from all judicial oversight or review.
But best of all, the war on terrorism gave Carr the perfect cover to terrorise dissenters. So he released his yapping attack dog.
Costa immediately swung into action, slandering a forum on civil disobedience as a plot to unleash violence against his police force. He went on to ensure that peaceful protesters against the WTO would feel the boot (and hooves) of NSW police aggression. Soon he had joined with the Federal Justice Minister in a Stalinist plot to silence independent media on the internet, with open publishing websites such as IndyMedia and Active Sydney copping particular vilification.
“I think with the current climate we are in we have all got to be nervous all of the time,” Costa told reporters. He is sure doing his bit to make sure we are.
The Premier himself was soon to join the fray, wielding the Bali bombing like a bludgeon against all who dared challenge him.
When Herald journalist Margo Kingston had the temerity to question the anti-democratic nature of the Terrorism (Police Powers) Bill 2002, Carr was quick to attack, falsely accusing her of blaming the Bali victims for their own deaths. Just to make sure everyone understood that his words had not been an accident, he repeated the lie later in an interview with 2GB’s Chris Smith.
“These nosey reporters”, simpered Smith, “they tend to ask questions”.
Even the International Commission of Jurists was not safe from the wrath of the rampant Premier.
When Supreme Court Justice Dowd told the Senate that anti-terrorism laws were exploiting a climate of hysteria to abolish fundamental rights, Carr was quick to demonstrate how hysterical he could get.
“Can’t John Dowd get it into his thick head that Bali occurred, that we have a problem here, that these threats are real?”, he fumed.
Terrorism is not new to NSW, it has been here for at least two hundred years – as many Aboriginal Australians can attest. Bob Carr’s new order just means that terrorism will now touch far more innocent people, not just those from marginalised and disempowered groups. In a sense, Carr has brought state terror to the masses.
So when Costa’s stormtroopers drag you from your bed, parliament remains silent, the media calls you ‘a suspected terrorist’ and the judiciary stands by and does nothing, just think of the Premier and reflect that not all terrorists are foreigners bearing bombs.
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UNITED STATES COMMENTARY
Correction: I wrote recently that “(Nancy) Pilosi was the only Democrat to vote against the resolution authorising Bush to use military force in Iraq. She also voted against the Homeland Security Act.” WebdiaristMark White corrects my spelling – it’s Pelosi – and advises: “Plenty of Democrats voted against George W. Bush’s resolution (on Iraq). In fact, in the House, the vote was 296-133, with a majority of Democrats voting against the resolution. In the Senate, the vote was 77-23, with 21 Democrats voting no, joined by Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont and Republican Sen. Linc Chafee of Rhode Island.”
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“Homeland security” a threat to Americans’ rights
Two weeks ago THE LIGHTHOUSE reported Independent Institute research fellow Paul Craig Roberts’ prediction that the Department of Homeland Security will make its constituent bureaucracies even less accountable than they already are.
This week we report Independent Institute senior fellow Robert Higgs’ emphasis on the risk that Homeland Security will pose to Americans’ rights.
“Higgs believes that despite some intense public criticism, most people simply accept the government rationale for curtailing civil liberties until something happens to draw their attention to the limits of such policy, such as another large terrorist attack,” writes Christian Bourge, think tanks correspondent for United Press International.
“I think that will eventually cause people to question the efficacy of the measures the government has taken,’ [Higgs] said. ‘This is a situation, however, in which logic doesn’t operate and fear prevails. In the short run people always fall for this bogus promise – that the government will protect them – whether it has substance or not.”
He said that it would probably take an administration attack on a powerful person or group – something on the level of the Watergate scandal – to awaken the public to the negative impact of the policies enacted over the last year.
“As long as you attack people who are marginal, like immigrants, Muslims and people with unpopular political views, the government has a good chance of getting away with its suppression of liberty no matter how draconian,” said Higgs. “It is when (government) abuses its power and uses it against people who have the ability to fight back through official channels and the political process that something is likely to happen.”
See:
Report: Anti-terror Powers Curtail Rights by Christian Bourge (UPI, November 23, 2002) independent
Government Protects Us? by Robert Higgs (The Independent Review, Fall 2002) independent
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Doublespeak and Internment: ‘Let It Not Happen Again’
by Kate Riley, Seattle Times
Clarence Moriwaki sees something all too familiar in the words used in the War on Terrorism.
“They call them detainees, instead of prisoners,” the Bainbridge Island man says of about 1,200 people rounded up after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “It’s the same kind of Orwellian doublespeak that they used during World War II.”
Moriwaki and Mary Woodward fretted recently over coffee after showing me the island’s old Eagledale Ferry Dock site. There a small marker commemorates the 227 people of Japanese descent, most of them American citizens, who were rounded up March 30, 1942, and taken from this idyllic island to the Manzanar internment camp in the desolate Mojave Desert. These were the very first of some 120,000 Americans who would lose their freedom in unconstitutional imprisonment lasting up to three years.
“They called them evacuees,” said Woodward, whose parents published the Bainbridge Island Review, one of the few newspapers in the nation to consistently criticize the government action. “You evacuate a burning building. These people were taken prisoner.”
Moriwaki and Woodward hope the Bainbridge story might help to remind our nation’s leaders of the risks of curtailing civil liberties. Within days of passing the Homeland Security Act, Congress also approved a bill that directs the Interior Department to study whether to establish the Eagledale Ferry Dock site under the National Park Service. The Bainbridge committee has artist renderings of a larger memorial keyed around its central message, Nidoto nai yoni. “Let it not happen again.”
The bill’s sponsor, U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, acknowledges a lesson in its success. “It’s the perfect moment, because the kinds of fear and stress that gave rise to (the internments) in 1942 are the same that we’re seeing now.”
Granted, most “detainees” rounded up after 9/11 reportedly are not American citizens, as most of the World War II prisoners were. Many were illegally in this country and reportedly have been deported. I emphasize “reportedly,” because no one can be sure. The federal government has refused to give any information on these detainees and has sought to close immigration hearings and move other proceedings from the court system to military tribunals where they can keep the curtains closed.
That gives Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, fits. “Not to say that some of these people shouldn’t be kicked out of the country,” she says, “but there needs to be some sort of way for the public to know what the government is doing.” (Margo: Carr decrees that there is no requirement for public reporting of Costa’s activities or those of his police force’s activities under the new law.)
For sure, these are uncertain, scary times that require smarter ways to flush out and apprehend enemies. But what scares me as much as the threat of a terrorist attack is the threat to civil liberties, citizen privacy and public access to government.
Astonishingly, President Bush has put a convicted felon in charge of the Department of Defense’s Total Information Awareness program. Former National Security Advisor John Poindexter, who masterminded the Iran-Contra scandal and was saved from a prison sentence for his five convictions because of a technicality, proposes to combine databases to track the dealings of American residents, citizens and otherwise, with no warrants necessary.
And you thought your grocery-store savings card was innocuous, right?
How are we supposed to trust the government won’t overstep its bounds with a convicted liar in charge?
Can Congress trust Poindexter? Can Congress protect us? Can we trust Congress?
Before the Homeland Security Act vote in the House, Inslee entered into the record a statement trying to clarify that the act was not an endorsement of Poindexter’s plan. He had proposed a bipartisan colloquy, which would have carried more weight, but Republican leadership refused.
A feisty, inquisitive press is one way that citizens have been able to keep tabs on their government and hold officials accountable. The press’ watchdog role has never been more important, but its abilities are being curtailed.
Even before the 9/11 attacks, Bush was buttoning down access to government. Under the Clinton administration, the standard for responding to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests was to disclose unless there was a good reason not to.
Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the bent was shifted to require a good reason to disclose. The new Homeland Security Act limits FOIA access even further.
Dalglish is alarmed at the changes. “I’m afraid there’s going to have to be some really egregious behavior before Congress is going to catch on.”
That’s something Clarence Moriwaki, Mary Woodward and I are worried about, too.
Citizens need to be able to look under the skirts of their government, not the other way around.
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In Terror War, 2nd Track for Suspects
Those Designated ‘Combatants’ Lose Legal Protections
by Charles Lane , Washington Post, December 1.
The Bush administration is developing a parallel legal system in which terrorism suspects – U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike – may be investigated, jailed, interrogated, tried and punished without legal protections guaranteed by the ordinary system, lawyers inside and outside the government say.
The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that an American citizen can be put in a military camp, incommunicado, is frightening. They’re entitled to hold him on the grounds that he is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an opportunity for him to contest those facts…
The elements of this new system are already familiar from President Bush’s orders and his aides’ policy statements and legal briefs: indefinite military detention for those designated “enemy combatants,” liberal use of “material witness” warrants, counterintelligence-style wiretaps and searches led by law enforcement officials and, for noncitizens, trial by military commissions or deportation after strictly closed hearings.
Only now, however, is it becoming clear how these elements could ultimately interact.
For example, under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a U.S. citizen’s home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a U.S. military base. Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it.
Administration officials, noting that they have chosen to prosecute suspected Taliban member John Walker Lindh, “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in ordinary federal courts, say the parallel system is meant to be used selectively, as a complement to conventional processes, not as a substitute. But, they say, the parallel system is necessary because terrorism is a form of war as well as a form of crime, and it must not only be punished after incidents occur, but also prevented and disrupted through the gathering of timely intelligence.
“I wouldn’t call it an alternative system,” said an administration official who has helped devise the legal response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “But it is different than the criminal procedure system we all know and love. It’s a separate track for people we catch in the war.”
At least one American has been shifted from the ordinary legal system
into the parallel one: alleged al Qaeda “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla, who is being held at a Navy brig, without the right to communicate with a lawyer or anyone else. U.S. officials have told the courts that they can detain and interrogate him until the executive branch declares an end to the war against terrorism.
The final outlines of this parallel system will be known only after the courts, including probably the Supreme Court, have settled a variety of issues being litigated. But the prospect of such a system has triggered a fierce debate.
Civil libertarians accuse the Bush administration of an executive-branch power grab that will erode the rights and freedoms that terrorists are trying to destroy – and that were enhanced only recently in response to abuses during the civil rights era, Vietnam and Watergate.
“They are trying to embed in law a vast expansion of executive authority with no judicial oversight in the name of national security,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit group that has challenged the administration approach in court.
“This is more tied to statutory legal authority than J. Edgar Hoover’s political spying, but that may make it more dangerous. You could have the law serving as a vehicle for all kinds of abuses.”
Administration officials say that they are acting under ample legal authority derived from statutes, court decisions and wartime powers that the president possesses as commander in chief under the Constitution.
“When you have a long period of time when you’re not engaged in a war, people tend to forget, or put in backs of their minds, the necessity for certain types of government action used when we are in danger, when we are facing eyeball to eyeball a serious threat,” Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who leads the administration’s anti-terrorism legal team in the federal courts, said in an interview.
Broadly speaking, the debate between the administration and its critics is not so much about the methods the government seeks to employ as it is about who should act as a check against potential abuses.
Executive Decisions
Civil libertarians insist that the courts should searchingly review Bush’s actions, so that he is always held accountable to an independent branch of government. Administration officials, however, imply that the main check on the president’s performance in wartime is political – that if the public perceives his approach to terrorism is excessive or ineffective, it will vote him out of office.
“At the end of the day in our constitutional system, someone will have to decide whether that [decision to designate someone an enemy combatant] is a right or just decision,” Olson said. “Who will finally decide that? Will it be a judge, or will it be the president of the United States, elected by the people, specifically to perform that function, with the capacity to have the information at his disposal with the assistance of those who work for him?”
Probably the most hotly disputed element of the administration’s approach is its contention that the president alone can designate individuals, including U.S. citizens, as enemy combatants, who can be detained with no access to lawyers or family members unless and until the president determines, in effect, that hostilities between the United States and that individual have ended. (Margo: Bob Carr hasn’t even taken responsibility for the awesome new police powers under his new laws – instead his out-of-control police minister Michael Costa will decide when and where to declare a state of emergency and who to target for strip search and home and vehicle invasion with no accountibility to the public or the courts.)
Padilla was held as a material witness for a month after his May 8 arrest in Chicago before he was designated an enemy combatant. He is one of two U.S. citizens being held as enemy combatants at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. The other is Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi Taliban fighter who was captured by American troops in Afghanistan and sent to the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, until it was discovered that he was born in Louisiana.
Attorneys are challenging their detentions in federal court. While civil libertarians concede that the executive branch has well-established authority to name and confine members of enemy forces during wartime, they maintain that it is unconstitutional to subject U.S. citizens to indefinite confinement on little more than the president’s declaration, especially given the inherently open-ended nature of an unconventional war against terrorism.
“The notion that the executive branch can decide by itself that an American citizen can be put in a military camp, incommunicado, is frightening,” said Morton H. Halperin, director of the Washington office of the Open Society Institute. “They’re entitled to hold him on the grounds that he is in fact at war with the U.S., but there has to be an opportunity for him to contest those facts.”
However, the Bush administration, citing two World War II-era cases – the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding a military commission trial for a captured American-citizen Nazi saboteur, and a later federal appeals court decision upholding the imprisonment of an Italian American caught as a member of Italian forces in Europe – says there is ample precedent for what it is doing.
Courts traditionally understand that they must defer to the executive’s greater expertise and capability when it comes to looking at such facts and making such judgments in time of war, Bush officials said. At most, courts have only the power to review legal claims brought on behalf of detainees, such as whether there is indeed a state of conflict between the United States and the detainee.
In a recent legal brief, Olson argued that the detention of people such as Hamdi or Padilla as enemy combatants is “critical to gathering intelligence in connection with the overall war effort.”
Nor is there any requirement that the executive branch spell out its criteria for determining who qualifies as an enemy combatant, Olson argues.
“There won’t be 10 rules that trigger this or 10 rules that end this,” Olson said in the interview. “There will be judgments and instincts and evaluations and implementations that have to be made by the executive that are probably going to be different from day to day, depending on the circumstances.”
The federal courts have yet to deliver a definitive judgment on the question. A federal district judge in Virginia, Robert G. Doumar, was sharply critical of the administration, insisting that Hamdi be permitted to consult an attorney. But he was partially overruled by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond.
The 4th Circuit, however, said the administration’s assertion that courts should have absolutely no role in examining the facts leading to an enemy combatant designation was “sweeping.” A decision from that court is pending as to how much of a role a court could claim, if any. The matter could well have to be settled in the Supreme Court.
Secret Surveillance
The administration scored a victory recently when the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review ruled 3 to 0 that the USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, gives the Justice Department authority to break down what had come to be known as “the wall” separating criminal investigations from investigations of foreign agents.
The ruling endorsed the administration’s view that law enforcement goals should be allowed to drive Justice Department requests for special eavesdropping and search warrants that had been thought to be reserved for counterintelligence operations. But the court went further, agreeing with the administration that “the wall” itself had no real basis in pre-Patriot Act law. Instead, the court ruled, “the wall” was a product of internal Justice Department guidelines that were, in turn, based partly on erroneous interpretations of the law by some courts.
There is no clear line between intelligence and crime in any case, the court said, because any investigation of a spy ring could ultimately lead to charging U.S. citizens with crimes such as espionage.
The decision overruled an earlier one by the lower-level Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in which seven judges sharply criticized past Justice Department misstatements in applications for permission to do secret surveillance.
Administration officials say that the ruling permits what is only sensible — greater sharing of information between federal prosecutors and federal counterintelligence officials.
Thanks to enforcement of “the wall” by FBI lawyers, they note, pre-Sept. 11 permission to search Moussaoui’s computer was not sought, a crucial missed opportunity to prevent the attacks.
In practical terms, the ruling means that the attorney general would still have to convince the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that he has probable cause to believe that a given subject of a wiretap or search is an agent of a foreign terrorist group, a standard that is not dissimilar to the one required for warrants in ordinary criminal cases.
Yet civil libertarians say that targets of such investigations who end up being ordered out of the country or prosecuted would lose a crucial right that they would have in the ordinary criminal justice system – the right to examine the government’s evidence justifying the initial warrant.
“So the government starts off using secret surveillance information not to gather information upon which to make policy, but to imprison or deport an individual, and then it never gives the individual a fair chance to see if the surveillance was lawful,” Martin said.