Maria Voukelatos
The USAPATRIOT Act and other post-9/11 "anti-terrorist" laws have given local, state and federal authorities in the United States the power to detain people without charge or legal representation, and monitor people's communications and financial transactions.
The US continues to be in the grip of a government- and media-generated "terrorist" hysteria, despite the fact that there has not been a single terrorist attack reported on US soil since 9/11.
Civil liberties organisations have reported thousands of infringements of civil liberties and civil rights by US authorities since the passage of the USAPATRIOT Act in October 2001.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union's report, Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America (available at ), these abuses include:
- Repeated attempts by city authorities across the US to deny permission to anti-war groups to hold protests, and the use of excessive force by police to break up protests;
- the arrest of a 61-year-old man last March for refusing to take off his T-shirt, which carried the message: "Peace on Earth; Give peace a chance", while shopping at his local shopping mall;
- when Bush visited a Boeing plant on April 16, 2003, Christine Mains was arrested after disobeying an order to move to a small "protest area" hundreds of metres away from the president. Mains and her distraught five-year-old daughter were taken away in separate squad cars.
Immigrants have been major targets of the USAPATRIOT Act and post-9/11 laws. On January 12, the US Supreme Court turned down an appeal challenging the secrecy surrounding the arrest and detention of hundreds of non-citizens since 9/11.
According to Amnesty International (see ), between September 11, 2001, and September 30, 2003, the US government racially profiled Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asians, forcing 177,260 men and boys to register with federal officials. While 2870 were detained after registration (23 remain in custody) and 13,799 people face deportation, none have been charged with terrorism-related offences.
Young people's civil liberties are also taking a beating. Students have been suspended for reciting anti-war poems and teachers sacked for allowing them to do so. A student was suspended and deemed a "threat to school security" for having an anarchist symbol drawn on her sneakers and a "defy your government" sticker on her school folder.
In late April, two 16-year-old students at Oakland High School, California, had a heated class discussion about President Bush and the war in Iraq. The students' teacher reported them to the FBI. The next day, Secret Service agents interrogated the students for more than an hour. When one of the students asked if he could have a lawyer present, one of the agents told him, "We own you, if you don't talk to us now, and we find out you haven't told us everything, we'll put you motherfuckers in federal prison. This is the beginning of the end for you."
All this took place in the presence of the principal, who made no attempt to contact the students' parents or advise them of their right to remain silent or seek legal advice.
The FBI has followed up on thousands of "tips" since the attacks of 9/11. In June, Atlanta bookshop employee Marc Schultz was visited by FBI agents after someone spotted him reading an article titled "Weapons of Mass Stupidity" at a local coffee shop.
In the past year, state and local police departments have admitted to monitoring political protests and political activity. Last May in St Louis, demonstrators had planned to protest at the annual meeting of the World Agricultural Forum. But two days before the demonstration, police preemptively arrested 22 of the protest organisers.
The May 16, 2002, US Nation magazine reported that US attorney-general John Ashcroft's Justice Department is supporting training programs for local police forces that explicitly urge them to not only target al Qaeda-style terrorists but local activists. The core curriculum, called A Police Response to Terrorism in the Heartland: Integrating Law Enforcement Intelligence and Community Policing, urges police to collect information on "enemies in our own backyard", including "the Green Movement" (described in a footnote as "environmental activism that is aimed at political and social reform with the explicit attempt to develop environmental-friendly policy, law and behaviour").
On May 30, 2002, Ashcroft in effect abolished restrictions on FBI surveillance of Americans' everyday lives first imposed in 1976. One FBI internal newsletter, reported the December 15 edition of the American Conservative magazine, encouraged FBI agents to conduct more interviews with anti-war activists "for plenty of reasons, chief of which it will enhance the paranoia endemic in such circles and will further service to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."
In this spirit of post-9/11 hysteria and intimidation of dissent, Oregon state politicians tried to pass an anti-terrorism bill in a thinly veiled effort to discourage anti-war demonstrations. Critics of the bill said its language was so vague that it eroded basic freedoms. "Under the original version [terrorism] meant essentially a food fight", Andrea Meyer of the American Civil Liberties Union told the Reuters wire service on April 4. The bill contained automatic sentences of 25 years to life for the crime of domestic terrorism.
In an effort to discourage people from participating in the growing anti-Bush protests in the US, protesters are being relegated to "free-speech zones" or "protest zones", where people opposed to Bush's policies are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of the president's sight. Police do not allow the media inside the protest area or allow protesters out to talk to reporters.
Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America describes how when Bush went to the Pittsburgh area in October 2002, retired steelworker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, "The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us". Neel refused to go to the designated protest area and was arrested for disorderly conduct.
Neel later commented, "As far as I'm concerned, the whole country is a free-speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who criticises them will be out of sight and out of mind." Pennsylvania District Judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly conduct charge against Neel, declaring, "I believe this is America. Whatever happened to 'I don't agree with you, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it'?"
The January 4 San Francisco Chronicle reported Secret Service agent Brian Marr's bizarre justification for such anti-democratic measures: "These individuals may be so involved with trying to shout their support or non-support that inadvertently they may walk out into the motorcade route and be injured. And that is really the reason why we set these places up, so we can make sure that they have the right of free speech, but, two, we want to be sure that they are able to go home at the end of the evening and not be injured in any way."
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, January 28, 2004.
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