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NEWS & LETTERS,
AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 2003
Editorial
Bush's war on freedoms
The Bush administration has decimated our
constitutionally guaranteed civil rights and constructed the legal underpinnings
for a police state. It has achieved this with the USA PATRIOT Act passed just
after September 11, 2001, the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness, now
renamed Terrorist Information Awareness, as well as executive orders stopping
the release of information under the Freedom of Information Act. If Bush’s
Justice Department under John Ashcroft gets its way however, there will be an
even more draconian assault on civil liberties. The Justice Department has secretly prepared The
Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003--dubbed PATRIOT Act II. Some of its
more shocking provisions are: 1) giving the government the power to take away
anyone’s citizenship if they are a member of, or even giving material support
to, an organization deemed to be terrorist, 2) prohibiting release on bail for
anyone suspected of terrorist activity, 3) terminating all consent decrees that
limit state police from gathering information about individuals and
organizations, and 4) prohibiting the disclosure of information about an
investigation of a detainee suspected of terrorism. In other words, all the government has to do is accuse
someone of being associated with a group considered by the attorney general to
be terrorist and their status as a citizen and their rights as citizens
disappear. They, too, will no doubt disappear like over 1,000 non-citizens who
were detained under the first PATRIOT Act. For the most part there is still no
public information on who was detained, except that none were criminally charged
with terrorism or shown to have anything to do with the September 11 bombing. In addition, human rights groups all over the world have
condemned the U.S. treatment of hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo, including
some under 18 years of age, who are denied any legal recourse and are held
without any oversight. None of the proposed legislation was developed in
consultation with Congress and legal watchdogs fear it will pop out and be
jammed through in the next crisis. This administration has always been
very calculating in promoting its war agenda in concert with its insatiable
appetite for amassing executive power and secrecy. BUSH'S FOCUS After the war in Afghanistan, that country’s welfare
was abandoned as was the focus on Al Qaeda, which in October last year had a
hand in killing some 200 in a Bali nightclub. Islamic fundamentalism has never
more deeply penetrated Pakistan, which is considered a friend of the U.S. and
has real nuclear capabilities. A congressional report released July 24 on
pre-September 11 intelligence showed how little preventing terror was a priority
in the government. Even now, on national security grounds, the CIA refused to
let a recent report include information implicating officials in Saudi Arabia,
another friend of the U.S. government. While under Saddam Hussein the link
between Al Qaeda and Iraq was totally fabricated, Al Qaeda may now indeed be
moving, after Saddam’s fall, into Iraq. The administration has its own agenda for its permanent
war abroad and an unprecedented concentration of executive police power against
the population at home. The war on Iraq was marketed as necessary because of an
imminent threat, including the visions of a nuclear mushroom cloud incinerating
masses of Americans. Some brave souls from within close-knit and usually
tight-lipped intelligence circles in the government have spoken out against the
reasons Bush used to sell the Iraq war. Former Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed
Bush’s pronouncement in his State of the Union address that Saddam tried to
procure uranium for a nuclear bomb from Niger. Wilson, charged with investigating that assertion, told
top levels of the administration in February 2002 that it was totally bogus.
When he went public with this information on July 7, he became a target of the
administration, which leaked to columnist Robert Novak the name of his wife and
the fact that she is an undercover CIA operative. This treatment as an enemy of
the state of one of the government’s own suddenly woke up a number of
Democrats in Congress who recognized that no one who questions Bush is safe.
They noted that this not only ruined the career of Wilson’s wife but seriously
endangered her life. Over 30 years ago Daniel Ellsberg--another insider, this
time in the Pentagon--leaked papers revealing government lies during the secret
escalation of the war in Vietnam. Ellsberg was added to the Nixon
administration’s enemies list. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office was burglarized as
was the now-famous Watergate Hotel. These crimes eventually brought down
Nixon’s government and safeguards were erected to stop widespread abuse in the
form of FBI domestic spying on over 10,000 citizens. The PATRIOT Act has erased
those safeguards and everything Nixon’s government did in its reach for
totalitarian power with a secret shadow government, including his surreptitious
entries to gather evidence, is now openly legal. RESISTING AUTHORITARIANISM There is a growing movement of opposition to the PATRIOT
Act and the looming PATRIOT Act II, especially among librarians, asserting the
freedom to read without being snooped on, and over 100 local governments, some
of which have made complying with the PATRIOT Act illegal under local law. Even
as the anti-war movement has died down there are new demonstrations against the
PATRIOT Act with ordinary people telling their stories about their mistreatment
by the government. Even some in Congress are having second thoughts.
Because of what Congressman Bernie Sanders calls “massive discontent with the
anti-civil liberties provisions” of the PATRIOT Act, the House appropriations
committee voted 309 to 118 on July 22 to cut any funding for secret break-in
searches. Bush’s reach for totalitarian power comes under the rubric of bringing “democracy” abroad. This strategy works in so far as the Left fails to go beyond bare opposition to U.S. imperialism and fails to project its own positive democratic vision against all reactionary contenders, especially Al Qaeda or totalitarian regimes like Saddam Hussein’s. We need to return to Marx’s vision of genuine democracy based on new human relations on the ground, in the workplace and our everyday lives, that can overcome the pull of the logic of capital with its global reach now based on permanent war. |
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