New York Congressman Nadler Calls USA Patriot Act Extreme Danger to Civil Rights

By Jane Adas

At a May 28 New York County Lawyers’ Association panel on “Terrorism and the Constitution: Do Terrorists Have Civil Rights?” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) began by stating that in almost all wars the U.S. has fought, it has taken measures that compromise civil rights. These include, he said, the 1798 Alien Sedition Act, the 1917 espionage act and Palmer raids, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, McCarthyism during the Cold War, and COINTEL during the Vietnamese War. Few people today defend these actions, he noted, and in each case apologies were required.

According to Nadler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee’s Constitution subcommittee, and whose district includes “ground zero,” the 2001 USA Patriot Act will be added to this list one day. After working on a compromise bill, the Judiciary Committee—normally the most polarized in the House—passed the final version unanimously. Its members felt that the bill added useful tools to fight terrorism without skirting civil liberties. The House Republican leadership, however, along with Attorney General John Ashcroft, threw out the committee’s bill and wrote a new one, Nadler said. Only two copies of the new 187-page bill were printed at 10:00 a.m., and three hours later the bill was passed by the House.

It was clear, said Nadler, that most members had not read the bill for which they voted. It includes all the provisions that did not make it into the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act because they were considered too invasive of civil liberties. Describing the USA Patriot Act as an extreme danger to civil rights, Nadler pointed out that it allows for indefinite detention for minor visa violations, expanded use of government surveillance, physical searches and wire taps of anybody, not just suspected terrorists and greatly expands secret searches.

Sohail Mohammed, counsel to the American Muslim Union, is an immigration lawyer who represents 18 Muslim detainees, not one of whom has been charged with terrorism or anything else. All were arrested for minor immigration violations or for working without a proper visa. Although these are civil violations, the detainees are kept handcuffed and shackled. All the proceedings are secret, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and immigration court provide no information to the detainees’ families and lawyers, or to the press.

Mohammed described how one of his clients, an Egyptian national, was brought into the system. The client asked a policeman for directions. The policeman responded, “You sound foreign. Show me your passport.” The client’s visa had recently expired, so the policeman arrested him. FBI agents then interrogated him for two hours with questions like “How many times do you pray?” and “Why do you make your women wear those things?” After the FBI cleared him, the INS kept him in jail for four and a half months, then sent him back to Egypt with no advance warning and no opportunity to tell his family. But, Mohammed said, his client’s troubles are not over. The Egyptian secret service met his plane, assuming that the U.S. would not have jailed him for no reason.

Norman Siegel, former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said Americans should be suspicious of having to choose between freedom and security, because both life and liberty are inalienable rights. Some post-9/11 Bush administration policies, he charged, have allowed the executive branch to usurp its authority, and the legislative branch—i.e., Congress—for the most part has allowed it to happen. Siegel said that the most frustrating trend he has encountered in his 30 years of practicing civil liberty law is increased secrecy. While the government admits to detaining 1,200 people since 9/11, he noted, most people think the number actually is much higher, and the attorney general refuses to disclose their identities, locations, or charges against them. Had any one of them actually been connected with 9/11, Siegel said, it would have been headline news.

What may lie ahead, warned Siegel, are FBI surveillance of domestic civil and religious groups, national ID cards, increased video surveillance cameras and facial recognition software, and the elimination of the statute of limitations for “terrorists.” Saying he had never before understood how Americans tolerated the Japanese internment or McCarthyism, Siegel said he now realized that it happens when good people are silent. History will judge the Bush administration’s actions after 9/11, he concluded, but it will also judge us. The next generation will ask the questions: “Were you aware? What did you do?”

Benefit for Azmi Bishara Features Noam Chomsky

Simon Shaheen provided music and Prof. Noam Chomsky spoke at a May 25 benefit at New York City’s Hunter College for the Legal Defense of Azmi Bishara and for Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Chomsky, a chaired professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has written more than 30 books, including The Fateful Triangle and, most recently, the best-selling 9-11.

Before being elected to the Israeli Knesset in 1996 Dr. Azmi Bishara headed the Philosophy and Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University in the West Bank. In October 2000, a mob of more than 300 Israeli Jews attacked his home in Nazareth with impunity. No arrests were made. Last November the House Committee for the Knesset voted to remove MK Bishara’s parliamentary immunity. Four days later Israeli Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein filed two indictments against Bishara, the first for two public speeches in which the Knesset member affirmed the right to resist occupation and the second for arranging reunification visits for elderly Palestinian citizens of Israel with their refugee relatives in Syria. This marks the first time a member of the Knesset has been stripped of parliamentary immunity and served with criminal charges for anything other than corruption. Since the beginning of the current intifada, 10 other Palestinian members of the Knesset—but no Jewish ones—have been investigated.

Bishara, Chomsky alleged, is being prosecuted not for what he said, but because of who he is—an Israeli Palestinian. The American academic quoted Bishara as saying he had great respect for Israeli democracy, but regretted that it is only for Israel’s Jewish citizens. Chomsky first met Bishara in 1988, during the first intifada. Together they visited Beita, a Palestinian village then under siege. Following the shooting death of a Jewish settler girl—and even after it was determined that a settler security guard had been the accidental gunman—the Israeli army destroyed tens of Palestinian homes. Chomsky was struck by the attitude of the people of Beita: they were not resigned and would accept the help of Israeli Jews to rebuild, he said, but they made no call for retaliation.

The past year, with the Sept. 11 attack and Palestinian suicide bombers, has been a shock, Chomsky said. The U.S. and Israel lost their monopoly on violence, he noted, and gained an obsession with terrorism. Chomsky pointed out that in December 1987 the U.N. General Assembly passed a strong resolution condemning terrorism and calling on member states to eradicate it. The context of the resolution, however, was the apartheid situation in South Africa, at a time when Washington considered Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and—because of a paragraph on the right to struggle against racist and colonial occupation—Israel and the U.S. cast the only two negative votes.

Chomsky enumerated several methods the U.S. employs to enhance terror and to prevent any political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. First, he noted, the U.S. provides weapons to Israel. In October 2001, for example, at the beginning of the second intifada, the Clinton administration sent Israel Blackhawk helicopters and spare parts for Apaches in the biggest deal of the decade. A month later, the Israeli army used American helicopters in the first of many direct assassinations of civilians—acts constituting international terrorism, according to Chomsky. A political solution would have a better chance if the U.S. suspended military aid to Israel, he said.

A second tactic is Washington’s silence regarding Israel’s assassinations, with their collateral damage, its devastating military incursions into Palestinian-controlled areas, and its arrest of untold numbers of Palestinian men. Instead, Chomsky pointed out, Bush instructs Arafat—besieged in his destroyed compound and surrounded by Israeli tanks—that he must do more to remove terror.

Third, Chomsky continued, is U.S. opposition to any international involvement in the conflict. Implementing the Geneva Convention, for example, certainly would reduce terror, but the Clinton administration abstained on a U.N. resolution in 2000 stating that Israel, as the occupying power, is subject to it. On Dec. 5, 2001, the high contracting parties met in Geneva and declared Israeli settlements illegal and “grave breeches” of the Convention. The U.S., however, boycotted the meeting. On Dec. 14, 2001, the U.S. vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution calling for international monitors to reduce violence. When the resolution went to the General Assembly, the U.S. and Israel again were the only two negative votes, constituting what Chomsky described as a double veto: the resolution cannot be implemented, and is written out of history.

Fourth, Chomsky concluded, Washington unilaterally blocks all peace initiatives. Contrary to media reports, he said, the Saudi plan, “for which Thomas Friedman takes personal credit,” is not an historic offer. Chomsky listed several earlier peace initiatives ignored by the American government and media, among them Egypt’s 1971 offer of a full treaty with Israel and the 1981 Fahd plan. All of these methods, which Chomsky summarized as unilateral American rejectionism, constitute the primary barrier to a political settlement, he said.

More information about Azmi Bishara is available at <http://www.azmibishara.info>.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer based in the New York metropolitan area.