Send Comments and Tips to: Elaine Cassel May 2004 Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31   Apr   Jun Home About This Blog City Pages Cover Story by Elaine Cassel Published By:		<< Check Box to have links open new windows... Saturday, May 29, 2004 PERMALINK: ACLU Suit Uncovers The Secrets of Secret Surveillance Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying information that will allow the government to target people who are plotting terrorism or who are otherwise potentially "dangerous" to national security. I am sure that many of you reading this (and I, of course) have the government in our computers. The same mechanism of NSLs is used to obtain information from librarians, health care providers, and business records of invididuals and entities. The party from whom the government demands information is forbidden from telling the client that the FBI is being provided information. And the target of the investigation won't know about it until or if he or she is arrested for crime or detained without a charge (say, as a material witness). Until now, we did not know much about how the government goes about this procedure. Now we do. Thanks to a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York in behalf of an unnamed ISP. The government has tried mightily to keep the entire suit under seal, but the federal judge has allowed the ACLU to release some information about the case. Following is a report on the case, with some interesting heretofore unknown details.  Never has the ACLU needed your financial support more. Clearly, it is the only thing standing between us and our fascist government. Read the briefs and supporting documents in the case. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) yesterday released more information about the heavily censored legal challenge it is bringing against the government's use of a controversial provision of the USA PATRIOT Act that allows the FBI to obtain from businesses sensitive personal information about their clients. Among the documents unsealed today is a declaration by the ACLU's anonymous client in the case, the president and sole employee of an unnamed Internet Service Provider (ISP), referred to only as "John Doe." John Doe is prohibited by law from revealing his identity to the public, even as he confronts the federal government over the very section of the Patriot Act that forces him to remain anonymous. In his statement, Doe explains that his business provides access to the Internet, email accounts and space on the Web where people can post their own sites or store electronic files. He says some of his clients "are individuals and political associations that engage in controversial political speech," and that some "communicate anonymously or pseudonymously," which allows them "to discuss embarrassing, sensitive or controversial subjects without fear of retaliation or reprisal." Doe and the ACLU are asking the court to deem unconstitutional the government's use of National Security Letters (NSLs), which allow FBI agents to demand, with no judicial oversight, personal information about clients of Internet Service Providers. "I believe that the government may be abusing its power by targeting people with unpopular views," Doe writes. "I am challenging the constitutionality of the NSL provision in an effort to protect all of my clients' interests." In a memorandum to the court, the ACLU wrote that the statute allowing the broad use of National Security Letters gives the FBI "unchecked authority" to require businesses to reveal "a broad array of sensitive information, including information about the First Amendment activities of ordinary Americans who are not suspected of any wrongdoing." The memorandum continues: "The statute does not require the FBI to seek judicial authorization before demanding the disclosure of sensitive information, and it does not specify any means by which a person served with an NSL can challenge the NSLs validity before complying with it. In other words, the FBI issues NSLs without judicial oversight of any kind." ACLU lawyers and their client are also disputing a section of the law that prohibits an entity that receives a National Security Letter request for information from telling anyone about the request. Ironically, this gag order is the same rule that prohibits the ACLU and John Doe from talking about many aspects of their case. The ACLU challenge of the National Security Letters and the gag rule has been wrapped in secrecy since it was filed in early April this year. The civil liberties organization has been locked in constant disagreements with the government over how much can be revealed about the case. The group was not even allowed to announce the existence of the suit for over two weeks, and even after negotiating the right to publicize the case, has been subjectto numerous restrictions on the kinds of information it can disclose. Numerous words, sentences and entire sections of the documents related to the suit, which are posted on the group's website, remain blacked out. Assistant Attorney General for Legal Policy Daniel Bryant defended the gag order last week at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing, saying it prevents people from interrupting terrorism investigations. But critics saythe secrecy rule is designed to keep the public in the dark about thegovernment's invasion into people's constitutionally protected privacy. "It is particularly troubling," writes ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero in a statement to the court, "that while the ACLU ... [has] been gagged from discussing the NSL power, President Bush and representatives of the FBI and Justice Department are engaged in a public campaign in supportof the Patriot Act. The gag provision silences those who are most likely to oppose the Patriot Act. [We] believe we have the right to inform the public of a great deal of the information the gag is suppressing." In filings with the court, Both Romero and Doe described the self-censorship they had been forced to engage in when asked by others about the National Security Letters in general or the case in particular. "The government has now prohibited the disclosure of my name and my company's name in connection with the case," said Doe. "They have provided no further clarification about what I can and cannot say." He says that he has found it difficult to have normal conversations. "[I] used to discuss topics related to politics and current events, but now I feel wary when Icommunicate ... I have steered clear of numerous topics of conversation as I am afraid.... The gag has put me in a very compromising situation, as I do not want to be dishonest in my communications [words blacked out] but also do not want to violate the gag." Romero said that not only is the gag order affecting how he and other staff at the ACLU can talk about the case, but it is having an impact on the broader activities of the organization, which has been actively engaged in educating and organizing against the Patriot Act since the law's inception in late 2001. "[T]he scope of the gag in this case, and the refusal of the government to clarify what is prohibited, is intolerable," he writes. "The gag has severely disrupted our ordinary course of business... More importantly, the public and even members of Congress are denied non-sensitive information essential to public and legislative debate that is at the heart of democratic self-governance." # -- Posted 5/29/04; 9:41:38 AM Thursday, May 27, 2004 PERMALINK: Ninth Circuit Judges to Ashcroft: Leave Oregon Alone The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals handed Attorney General John Ashcroft a stinging rebuke yesterday for trying to prosecute Oregon doctors for implementing that state's voter-approved assisted suicide law. Thinking that he knows more about the practice of medicine than doctors do, and of course that he knows better how to regulate doctors than the Oregon Board of Medicine, three years ago Ashcroft said he was going to begin prosecuting Oregon doctors for prescribing a cocktail of drugs that allow a terminally ill patient to die with dignity. The U.S. District Court early on injoined him from prosecuting doctors under federal law (Ashcroft argued that prescibing such medications violated the federal Drug Enforcement Act, as such use of drugs was not an appropriate "medical" use) before they ruled against him. Now the appellate court followed suit, and hopefully put to rest this latest travesty of justice from an attorney general who, like his boss in the Oval Office, considers himself above the law. Read more about the decision. # -- Posted 5/27/04; 3:49:03 PM Thursday, May 20, 2004 PERMALINK: Lynne Stewart Trial Jury Selection Underway Jury selection in the trial of attorney Lynne Stewart began on May 19, with opening arguments scheduled for June 21. Federal prosecutors convinced the judge that the jurors will be anonymous, with the names known only, presumably, to the judge. Certainly the defense team or the defendant won't know their names, but I am taking bets that the prosecutors will. Juror anonymity, which the government says it needs after the debacle in the recent hung jury in the Tyco case, is just the first step to secret trials--which the government already has successfully engineered in the case of deportations of immigrants post-September 11, 2001 and in several "terrorist" trials (some of which are so secret they don't even appear on a court docket anywhere). Stewart was interviewed on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now on May 19. Listen to the interview. Then read the article setting out the new charges she is facing. Recall that last year, Judge Koetel dismissed the terrorism charges against her. Not to be deterred, the government filed new terrorism charges, more vague and troublesome than the first. Call it Ashcroft's revenge. Also, you can read more background on the Stewart case by linking to the articles and court filings on this page. Defense: Sheikh's Lawyer Lacked Notice Her Actions Violated the Law Mark Hamblett New York Law Journal 04-12-2004 The latest charges accusing attorney Lynne Stewart of providing material support and resources to a foreign terrorist group should be dismissed because she could not have known her actions were illegal, according to her defense lawyer, Michael Tigar. In oral arguments on Friday before Southern District of New York Judge John G. Koeltl, Tigar said Stewart's prison communications with her client, Islamic Group spiritual leader Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, could not be penalized because she lacked proper notice that her actions would violate the material support law. For the government, prosecutor Robin Baker expressed confidence that the statute as applied to Stewart was not unconstitutionally vague. A similar case against Stewart was dismissed in July on grounds of vagueness. Now the government has brought new charges -- based on exactly the same actions -- that by nature are harder to prove. To win a conviction the prosecution must show that Stewart intended to give assistance to members of a terrorist conspiracy. She is not charged with conspiracy herself. The charges stem from her contacts with Sheikh Abdel Rahman. Stewart was first indicted in 2002 for providing material support for terrorism. That charge was based on her actions both inside the federal prison where the sheikh is serving a life sentence for seditious conspiracy against the United States, and outside the prison in statements to the media. The indictment alleged that Stewart assisted terrorists by helping the sheikh communicate with his followers in Islamic Group, and she did so by violating a promise to abide by so-called special administrative measures, which isolated the sheikh from the outside world. Stewart was accused of two specific kinds of acts. One was telling the sheikh's followers -- in a public announcement on the courthouse steps -- that he was withdrawing his support for a moratorium on acts of terror by the group against the Egyptian government. The other involved her behavior in visits to the sheikh in prison. She was accused of making noise to conceal the fact that he was exchanging information with an interpreter. The interpreter, Mohammed Yousry, is a co-defendant of Stewart. A third defendant, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who sent and received messages from the sheikh, was charged with two counts of providing material support to a terror group. In July, Judge Koeltl found unconstitutionally vague charges that Stewart assisted Islamic Group by providing communications equipment and "personnel." The "personnel" were the three defendants, which Koeltl said she could not have known. Those charges were dismissed on the ground that the statute, 18 U.S.C. 2339(B), was unconstitutionally vague as applied. The government responded with a superseding indictment under a different section, 18 U.S.C. 2339(A), based on exactly the same acts. Stewart was again accused of conspiring to provide material support and providing material support to Islamic Group. She was again accused of providing "personnel" to the outlaw group. This time, the sheikh himself was the "personnel." In the new indictment, Sattar was not charged with providing material support. He was, however, charged with conspiracy to kill and kidnap persons in a foreign country. That charge is key to the reconfigured accusations against Stewart because of the differences between the two statutes. The one being used now, § 2339(A), was passed in 1994 after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. It defines a violation as giving material support to anyone while intending or knowing that the support will be used in connection with any one of a list of violent crimes. The violent crime alleged to have been furthered by Stewart's support is one that Sattar is alleged to have been planning. The first indictment was under a law passed in 1996 aimed at making it easier to obtain a conviction. That law, § 2339(B), does not require intent. It requires only that the defendant give aid or support to a group that has been designated as a terrorist organization by the secretary of state. "It was intentionally drafted so there is no defense along the lines of 'I gave money to Hamas, but I didn't want them to use the money for guns, I wanted them to use the money for an orphanage,'" said professor Robert M. Chesney of Wake Forest University Law School. "Congress wrote the statute with the idea that these organizations are so tainted by political acts of violence against civilians that any act that boosts the organization is harmful." The statute the government is now using against Stewart is "a more narrow crime, a more difficult crime to prove," Chesney said. "The new charges against Ms. Stewart will be harder to prove," he said. "It's a traditional conspiracy or aiding and abetting case." For Tigar, the new charges still fail for vagueness and overbreadth. THE JUDGE'S ATTITUDE But as he continued to press this argument on Friday, Judge Koeltl seemed to agree with the government that the addition of the element of knowledge of the outcome may spare the government the problem of vagueness that doomed the material support charges last year. The judge focused on the "much higher specific intent" required by § 2339(A). He disagreed when Tigar framed the charges under that section as requiring little more than "the knowledge of the existence of a conspiracy." "No, it is not simply knowledge of a conspiracy to kill," the judge said. "It is knowing that resources are to be used in carrying out specific violations -- and under (2339)B, all you have to do is knowingly provide something." Baker relied on the government's memorandum and offered no oral argument on the issue of intent Friday, save to say that she agreed with the court that the current prosecution sets a "rigorous" standard for the government. The government's memorandum says, "It is ironic that Stewart, by making her as-applied vagueness challenge, professes to have lacked notice that the conduct at issue in Counts Four and Five -- enabling an otherwise-isolated terrorist leader to resume such activities -- could constitute the provision, concealment, and disguisement of material support and resources to terrorist activity. "The SAMs expressly put Stewart on notice," it says, referring to the special administrative measures. The new charges also prompted the defendants to accuse the government of vindictive prosecution. Barry Fallick, representing Sattar, said that, under the old indictment, Sattar faced a sentence of 30 years in prison. Now he faces a potential life sentence for conspiracy. "The ante has been upped," Fallick told Judge Koeltl, adding that prosecutors offered no new discovery in regards to the new charges and do not claim that additional time gave them the opportunity to review the facts more thoroughly. Judge Koeltl said the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has "rejected the view that prosecutors must bring all the charges possible in the first indictment." He again noted that the "level of proof the government has taken on the second time is much greater" than under the charges in the first indictment. Fallick answered that the higher burden on the new charges "can not be used as an escape hatch" by the government because the government had created "a presumption of vindictiveness" in bringing the superseding indictment. The second indictment was also different, Tigar argued in his memorandum. "Unlike the first indictment, the superceding indictment represents a wide-ranging attack on all aspects of the professional legal services that Lynne Stewart provided during the course of representing Sheikh Abdel Rahman," Tigar wrote. He asked the court how a lawyer such as Stewart could conscientiously provide legal services to the sheikh without knowing what is actually forbidden by the statute. Baker responded on Friday that Stewart's role as a lawyer was irrelevant to the charges. In their memorandum, Baker and her colleagues insisted, "This case does not involve federal imposition of rules of conduct for lawyers, but federal enforcement of generally-applicable anti-terrorism laws." "This case does not involve infringement upon lawyer autonomy and democratic rights, but the infringement upon the safety of people around the world by a person who happens to practice law, and her co-conspirators," they state. # -- Posted 5/20/04; 6:41:25 AM Sunday, May 16, 2004 PERMALINK: The Other War--One Year Later A year ago, I started writing about the Bush Administration's war on civil liberties. Having just completed a book on the topic (The War on Civil Liberties: How Bush and Ashcroft Have Dismantled the Bill of Rights, Lawrence Hill Books, September 2004), I am mentally and emotionally exhausted from keeping up with the bad news on many fronts. And, for the past month, engrossed in the tedious copy-editing and other end-of-stage publication details, I have been unable to write about developments in this war. But I have not stopped keeping up with the news.   The reports of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison should come as no surprise to one who has kept up with the shenanigans of the government whose motto could be, "no law but our own."  Indeed, mandates (not mere approval or benign ignorance) for torture in order to gain information (about what has not been made clear) are the direct result of an administration that, quite literally, will trample over any law, no matter how sacred. Geneva Conventions, Bill of Rights, what's the difference?  The shocking attempts to minimize such horrors in a country the Bush cronies are supposedly liberating should bring to mind Nazi occupations. Oh, I realize that what Bush is doing in Iraq is a far cry from loading Jews in train cars, but hey, the occupation is in its early stages   Speaking of loading people in train cars, the Washington Post last week finally reported on imprisonment abroad of thousands of people, American citizens and others, who are being held by the CIA in what is politely known as a "rendition." These "detainees" are in no way protected by any law whatsoever.  I have been in touch with one family whose son is imprisoned in Saudi Arabia. He is American citizen, a resident of Virginia, and a student at a Saudi university. Last June, he was seized by Saudi law enforcement as he prepared to come home for the summer. Though the U.S. government denies publicly even knowing that he is there, sources tell me that he was held initially because he "knew" some of the men charged as the Alexandria 11, those notorious Muslim men about to be sentenced for 50 to 100 years for playing paintball, supposedly in preparation for "jihad."  The Saudis deny that they have the man. Contacts from him to his family confirm that he is indeed imprisoned there. American lawyers are helpless to do anything for him, and no Saudi lawyer dare even attempt to visit him (so I am told by a Saudi lawyer).   Well, how about the fact that thousands of Americans are disappearing like this, and being held out of reach of family, attorneys, or courts? Does that make you think a little harder about blowing this off as not Nazi-esque?  Maybe you ought to keep this in mind as you make summer travel plans, especially if they take you across the Atlantic. Last week, the European Union announced that the airlines of EU countries would share complete passenger information with American law enforcement prior to airline departures. The government (or one of its tens of thousands of contractors who work without complete immunity from federal law or oversight if they are contracted by the Department of Homeland Security) will scan the lists and take action against any people whose names are the same or similar to those on its "terrorist" watch list. Note that I said the names are the same or similar. Not that the identities are. Big difference, don't you think?   What kind of action is taken against those whose names are the same or similar?  Either detentions abroad (from hours to days) to detentions in the US upon landing (federal agents board planes, handcuff you, and take you away for interrogation, denying you a call to your family, let alone a lawyer).  If you are very, very unlucky, you, too, could be "rendered" abroad, taken from say an airport in Paris to Syria (yes, Syria is one of the most popular countries for sending our own or other citizens for torture and interrogation) where you won't be heard from again unless you are very, very lucky.   What I have been cataloging here are cases when there will be no intervention by any court whatsoever. There cannot be. But the war on civil liberties at home has, finally, some courts taking notice. Actually, lately a judge or two has acted like a judge.   What looked like a slam-dunk win for the government's prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui turned sour last week when the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond that handed Alexandria, Virginia prosecutors such a big win (the appellate court overruled U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema who said Moussaoui should either be allowed to question al-Qaeda witnesses or he could not face the death penalty) has called the chief federal prosecutors to a special hearing in Richmond. Seems the prosecutors in the Moussaoui case told the court that they were not involved in interrogating these al-Qaeda witnesses that Moussaoui and his lawyers wanted access to—that's why the court said it was alright that Moussaoui's lawyers could not examine them. Supposedly, the witnesses' "testimony" was gathered by "impartial sources" (as impartial as CIA interrogators who torture people for information can be). But when Moussaoui's lawyers produced evidence that the prosecutors were boasting that they were involved with the witnesses in developing other cases, the 4th Circuit, surely the most faithful handmaidens of Bush, were upset.  Ashcroft says that his lawyers "look forward" to clarifying the issue with the judges. Maybe, just maybe, these prosecutors have been court lying one time too many.   And in New York City, a federal judge told Ashcroft's soldiers that its interpretation that the Patriot Act does not allow the ACLU to publicize anything about its case against the government, including that it even has such a case, is a bit too-far fetched even for a judge that also wants to give the President his "due" in fighting the war on terror.  Several skirmishes in the past week ended up with the ACLU being able to let some information trickle down to the public. Ironically, the substance of the litigation is the power of the government under the Patriot Act to secretly gain information about you and me from a host of sources—information-gathering that we can never be privy to—not ever.   Speaking of the Patriot Act, there has been some lukewarm interest in scaling back its most egregious provisions (like the one attacked by the ACLU suit). Bush made it clear he wants all of the provisions made permanent that were set to expire in 2005. But four Republicans, including Sen. Butch Otter (R-Idaho) and Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) have sponsored legislation that would place greater restrictions on roving wire taps, require law-enforcement officials to notify the targets of "sneak and peek" searches within seven days after a search, restrict the use of nationwide search warrants and amend the section of the Patriot Act that allow for secret searches of library and bookstore records.  Of course, just how these errant Republicans will hold firm to their convictions when the White House puts the heat on them remains to be seen. But at least, there is a slight break in the ranks that have let an administration dead-set on running the country—indeed, the world—by its own rules rum amok.   Looking ahead to the immediate future, the Supreme Court will be handing down opinions within the next month that will determine the future of our liberty—up to a point. For if the Court rules against the administration in the cases dealing with the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and the American prisoners held without due-process, Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi, do you really expect Bush and Rumsfeld to obey a Supreme Court order? I certainly don't. People suggest that a constitutional crisis will result. I don't buy that either. A crisis means people care, people revolt. Did we object when the justices took over the Florida 2000 presidential election and thus put its man in the Oval Office? Oh, there was some ranting and raving but it all died down. If Bush disobeys the Supreme Court, that would be an impeachable offense. But would this Congress impeach? Not hardly.   Would it hurt his reelection chances if Bush thumbs his nose at the court? I doubt that—for he has enough hard line supporters who buy his "my way or no way" and "no law but my law" approach to carry the vote. After all, arrogance and flaunting the law are, essentially, an American trait. Think wild West, slaughtering Indians, slaughtering Buffalos, lynchings, etc. When Bush expressed his pseudo-outrage at the Abu Ghraib abuses, saying this is not representative of America, whom was he kidding?  America is, at its core, violent, abusive, arrogant, and, when it chooses to be (and no one is big enough to stop us) lawless. And if admiration for the President's arrogance and flagrant violation of law doesn't carry election day, then Diebold machines will kick in and do their job. Diebold "we promise to deliver the vote for Bush" are the machines most Americans will be using to cast their "preference" for President (please don't call it a vote).   So, a year after I started writing about this "other war," where are we? Some Americans are a little more aware of what our government is doing to us, some congressmen and women are a little concerned, and a few judges are taking names and making notes. Would anything be different under John Kerry's rule? I doubt it. I tend to agree with Nader (though I do not support Nader)that Kerry is, in terms of Bush and civil liberties, a distinction without much of a difference. I think he or anyone else that replaces Bush (someday) will appreciate the precedence of the Bush years that sanctioned an adminisration making up the rules as it goes along and ignoring the courts and the Congress. Who wouldn't want that power? The Bill of Rights didn't make it into the Constitution (it was later ratified as the first ten amendments), leading Virginian George Mason to leave the constitutional convention in disgust. He saw that the founding fathers wanted power for themselves, not power to the people.   The Bill of Rights—or any other law—only has meaning if it is obeyed and enforced. Bush had demonstrated that one can trample on the Bill of Rights with impunity.  That is not a trend that we will see reversed in our lifetimes. # -- Posted 5/16/04; 10:12:10 AM Sunday, April 25, 2004 PERMALINK: Lies, Lies, and More Lies Keeping up with the lies of the Bush Administration (something that  Steve Perry has been doing at Bush Wars) would be a full-time job. In order to maintain my sanity, I focus only on lies about civil liberties. Until recently, Attorney General John Ashcroft has been the Fraudmeister. But fueled by the 9-11 Commission hearings (the panel Bush did not want to begin with) and the steady stream of Administration talking heads who tout the Patriot Act as the compilation of laws that will save us from "terrorism," Bush's handlers have come to the recognition that touting the Patriot Act is a mighty fine reelection campaign tool. After all, it is aptly named so that if you are not for it, you are un-"Patriot"-ic.  Last week, Bush made two speeches about the Patriot Act, one in New York City, one in Buffalo. The Buffalo speech focused on how the Lackawanna Six, young American citizens of Yemeni descent who never engaged in one act of terrorism but made the dumb mistake of going to Afghanistan (and returning) to study Islam before September 11, are serving long prison terms because of the Patriot Act and the prosecutors who used it to nab the bad guys before they could hurt us. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Patriot Act itself cannot be tied to any terrorism "convictions" (mostly guilty pleas) other than the fact that it defines "terrorism" so broadly that my writing this article equals a terrorist act. Ergo, traveling to a "terrorist" country before September 11 makes you a terrorist. The ACLU has saved me the trouble of cataloguing and contradicting Bush's lies about the Patriot Act: The President:  "By the way, the reason I bring up the Patriot Act, it’s set to expire next year. I’m starting a campaign to make it clear to members of Congress that it shouldn’t expire. It shouldn’t expire for the security of our country." The Truth:  Less that 10 percent of the Patriot Act expires; most of the law is permanent and those portions that do sunset will not do so until December 31, 2005. The President:  "And that changed, the law changed on- roving wiretaps were available for chasing down drug lords. They weren’t available for chasing down terrorists, see?" The Truth:  Roving wiretaps were available prior to 9/11 against drug lords and terrorists. Prior to the law, the FBI could get a roving wiretap against both when it had probable cause of crime for a wiretap eligible offense. What the Patriot Act did is make roving wiretaps available in intelligence investigations supervised by the secret intelligence court without the judicial safeguards of the criminal wiretap statute. The President:  "… see, I’m not a lawyer, so it’s kind of hard for me to kind of get bogged down in the law. (Applause). I’m not going to play like one, either. (Laughter.) The way I viewed it, if I can just put it in simple terms, is that one part of the FBI couldn’t tell the other part of the FBI vital information because of the law. And the CIA and the FBI couldn’t talk." The Truth:  The CIA and the FBI could talk and did. As Janet Reno wrote in prepared testimony before the 9/11 commission, "There are simply no walls or restrictions on sharing the vast majority of counterterrorism information. There are no legal restrictions at all on the ability of the members of the intelligence community to share intelligence information with each other.  "With respect to sharing between intelligence investigators and criminal investigators, information learned as a result of a physical surveillance or from a confidential informant can be legally shared without restriction.  "While there were restrictions placed on information gathered by criminal investigators as a result of grand jury investigations or Title III wire taps, in practice they did not prove to be a serious impediment since there was very little significant information that could not be shared." The President:  "Thirdly, to give you an example of what we’re talking about, there’s something called delayed-notification search warrants. … We couldn’t use these against terrorists [before the Patriot Act], but we could use against gangs." The Truth:  Delayed-notification - or so-called sneak-and-peek search warrants - were never limited to gangs. The circuit courts that had authorized them in limited circumstances prior to the Patriot Act did not limit the warrants to the investigation of gangs. In fact, terrorism or espionage investigators did not necessarily have to go through the criminal courts for a covert search - they could do so with even fewer safeguards against abuse by going to a top secret foreign intelligence court in Washington.  For criminal sneak-and-peek warrants, the Patriot Act added a catch-all argument for prosecutors - if notice would delay prosecution or jeopardize an investigation - which makes these secret search warrants much easier to obtain. The president’s sneak-and-peek misstatement clearly demonstrates that the Patriot Act is not limited to terrorism. In fact, many of the law’s expanded authorities can clearly be used outside the war on terrorism. The President:  "Judges need greater authority to deny bail to terrorists." The Truth:  The new presumptive detention that the president is proposing takes judicial authority away from the bail process. The presumption would take away the prosecution’s burden of showing that the accused is a danger or flight risk and instead puts it on the accused. Pending Legislation to "Enhance" the Patriot Act President Bush is setting the stage for a fight that will ensue next year, as several controversial provisions of the Patriot Act that impinge most on American's civil liberties are set to expire. He wants to convince the public that spying on citizens is the way to stop terrorism. If Congress does what it did in 2001, it will once again sell our liberties down the river--this time for good. In addition, new legislation is pending to create more crimes of "terror," many of them carrying the death penalty. Following on the heels of President Bush’s road trip to promote the controversial Patriot Act at events in Pennsylvania and New York, on April 21, 2004 a key House subcommittee considered a proposal to expand the Patriot Act’s controversial definition of "terrorism" to provide a death penalty for any federal crime punishable by more than one year in prison if the crime was intended to influence government policy and results in death. "The Patriot Act remains one of the most controversial measures ever passed by Congress," said Timothy Edgar, an ACLU Legislative Counsel. "Attempts to expand it, such as the now-defunct draft Patriot Act 2 that floated around Congress last year, have been highly contentious. Now we’re seeing attempts to pass provisions of Patriot Act 2 piece-by-piece." Federal law already provides 20 separate death penalties for serious terrorism crimes, including bombings, hijackings, assassinations and hostage taking. Testifying at the April 21 hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, Edgar reminded committee members that the Justice Department has not been forthcoming in its disclosures regarding how the Patriot Act has been used so far, saying Congress should review existing powers before adding to them. "This proposal will rightly be seen as another federal infringement on civil liberties that will not make America safer," Edgar added. "It will result in increasing mistrust, both at home and abroad, even of legitimate anti-terrorism efforts and further isolate America in the world. It should be rejected." The proposed legislation would do two things. First, it would make 23 crimes eligible for the death penalty. Second, it would create an unprecedented "catch-all" death penalty for any other federal crime punishable by more than a year in prison if it meets the PATRIOT Act’s overbroad definition of terrorism and results in death. The ACLU said that protestors and activists from groups including Greenpeace and Operation Rescue could risk being sentenced to death for participating in certain civil disobedience events if they involved a federal crime punishable by more than a year in prison and resulted in a death of one of the participants or someone else. Laws such as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the federal gun control regime at 18 U.S.C. § 922, among many other crimes, could carry death sentences if the bill passed, Edgar said. The ACLU also noted that the proposal could actually hurt the anti-terror efforts. Many nations that have abolished the death penalty are unwilling to extradite or provide evidence in federal terrorism cases if the death penalty might result from their cooperation. Suicidal, politically motivated terrorists such as members of Al Qaeda would be unaffected as often they are seeking to create martyrs for their causes and to generate publicity. Read the ACLU’s testimony on HR 2934, the "Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act of 2003." Don't be caught sleeping (let Congress do that).  Visit the ACLU website often and send email and faxes (crimes of terror, of course, since designed to influence politics and too many faxes and emails might jam your congressman's critical infrastructure--and I am only half-kidding) to your elected representatives. Not that they will listen, but at least you can tell your children that stood up for liberty. # -- Posted 4/25/04; 4:32:27 PM Thursday, April 15, 2004 PERMALINK: Broken Wings: The Indignities of Being on the No-Fly List by Jesselyn Radack Last October, when I flew to a family function in New Mexico, I was pulled aside for a more extensive search than the usual stroll through the metal detector. I didn't think twice about it. I remembered Israeli security forces arresting a young Palestinian woman who was planning to disguise herself as a pregnant woman, with a bomb hidden in her falsely extended belly. It made sense that my being seven months pregnant raised suspicions. This March, I flew to Georgia for my grandfather's funeral. On the way down, I was singled out for a full-body pat-down search and told that I had been "randomly selected." The screener asked me if I was wearing an underwire bra. I said yes. She said she would be feeling it with the back of her hand for verification. I asked her to please not press too hard because I was breastfeeding and it would trigger my let-down reflex Meanwhile, my fashionable Medela "Pump In Style" was being sent back and forth through the x-ray machine. "It's a breastpump," I explained. Attorney General Ashcroft, who ordered the Justice Department to cover the semi-nude statue of the lady Spirit of Justice, may have a problem with the female breast, but surely baggage screeners, many of them women, would be more enlightened. When I later opened the luggage I had checked, the lock had been broken off and there was a notecard from the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) explaining that my suitcase had been hand-searched. A plastic blue "lock" had then been placed on the suitcase as a "courtesy." It seemed invasive, but hey, it was for security's sake. During the return flight, I was again told that I'd been "randomly selected" for a more elaborate search. "Randomness" was becoming pretty predictable. Randomness, in the true sense of the word, has no specific pattern or objective. Randomness is a phenomenon that does not produce the same outcome or consequences every time it occurs under identical circumstances. Randomness is unsystematic. Before my next flight less than a week later, I became aware that the airlines administered a "no-fly" list designed to keep terrorism suspects off commercial airlines, which subjected scores of innocent passengers to repeated interrogation, detention and stigmatization. The "no-fly" list is one of two the TSA maintains. The other is the "selectee" list. Those on the "no-fly" list are not allowed to board a commercial aircraft. Those on the "selectee" list must go through more extensive screening before boarding. When I went through security for my upcoming flight to California, I was again pulled aside for a full-body wand search. With respect to my carry-on bag, they wanted to know why I had a breastpump but no milk and no baby. I explained that was precisely the point: I couldn't bring my infant on the trip, so I was going to collect and store milk for her during my travels. On the way back, the screeners looked at my boarding pass and again singled me out for the dubious distinction of special search. I specifically asked the screener if I was on the "no-fly" or "selectee" list. She didn't disabuse me of that notion; instead, she just told me she did not know. I had two full baby bottles of breastmilk in the refrigeration compartment of my breastpump. A male screener asked me if I would be willing to take a sip from each. "Are you serious?" I asked. I requested to see a copy of the written policy in which passengers are asked to personally sample liquids they take through security. I figured that if there was a policy governing suspect liquids, the screeners would be specially equipped with sterile droppers from which they could take a sample of my breastmilk to make sure it wasn't an organic peroxide, which is a low-power explosive with unusual stability problems. But this screener was obviously not really concerned that my milk was, for example, perchloric acid, an odorless water white liquid that can be dangerously reactive. If he harbored such a concern, he would not have asked me to open the bottle because it would have blown a hole in the building. There was no scientific basis for the drink-your-own-breastmilk test. Passengers take through security everything from beverages to hand lotion to nasal spray. Knowing there was no lactation policy, I further objected because drinking from the sterile baby bottles would contaminate the milk, the milk was for the baby, I'm lactose intolerant, and it formed, overall, a barbaric request. At that point, the screener's supervisor said he would check it in a different way, which he did by rubbing a white cloth all over the bottles and the breastpump. I can only surmise that the cloth was meant to pick up traces of chemicals or hazardous material, which of course it did not. I was finally allowed to board. I'm on the "selectee" list. Of course, I have no way of verifying that for certain, or of getting my name removed. One might think that I'm being overly-paranoid, but not when I explain that I am a former Department of Justice attorney and a whistleblower in the case of the so-called "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh. Because I blew the whistle on misconduct by the Justice Department's ethics office, I have been retaliated against for the past two years. The Justice Department got me fired from my private law firm, conducted a criminal investigation that has since been closed with no charges ever being brought, and most recently, reported me to the state bars in which I am licensed. The "selectee" list is just the latest in a series of examples in which I have been designated as a suspect without any sort of due process. It is more than an inconvenience. It is political punishment. Getting stopped twice in less than we week for the extended dance version of the security search seems not like a way to stop passengers who pose a security risk, but more like a way to detain, interrogate, delay, embarrass, and humiliate perceived political enemies. That's what happens when the Bush administration labels dissenters as unpatriotic. Unnamed government officials have called me a "traitor" and a "turncoat" in The New York Times. They fail to realize that it makes us all less safe to waste so much time and so limited resources on vengeful partisan practices rather than going after people with real terrorist ties. Jesselyn is a former Department of Justice employee and mother of three young children. She lives in Washington, D.C. # -- Posted 4/15/04; 6:49:36 AM Monday, April 12, 2004 PERMALINK: No More First Amendment Stifling speech and worship in the name of fighting a war on "terrorism" is becoming common place in the U.S. Last week, U.S. Marshals "guarding" Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ordered reporters who recorded his speeches before two religious schools in Mississippi to erase their tapes. Ironic in that the man who fancies himself the sole authority on the Constitution would believe that reporters should not be able to talk about what he says (it was amazing that they got in at all, as Scalia typically bans all media from his public appearances). Imagine if there had been no free speech in the founding days of the Republic.  It is striking that the reporters willingly handed over their tapes. Why didn't they refuse and make the marshals get search warrants? Doubtless, such a warrant would have not been issued since the reporters were not committing a crime. Even under the Alice-in-Wonderland laws targeting thought today (think an anti-Bush thought, go directly to jail), the journalists would have been on solid footing in refusing to hand over their work-product. According to Washington Post reporters Jerry Markon and Timothy Dwyer, in a story published March 26, 2004, a federal judge in Cleveland, Ohio denied the request of Fawaz Damra, a Muslim imam charged with a minor visa violation (but under orders not to leave the jurisdiction of the court), to travel to Virginia for a meeting in Springfield, Virginia sponsored by the United Association for Studies and Research Inc., or UASR. He and his colleagues might be plotting terrorism, says the government. After all, they are Muslims, you know. And to be a Muslim in American today is to be a terrorist--or a terrorist "sympathizer." The group says it is a Muslim American think tank, but federal prosecutors and congressional investigators have linked it to terrorist groups, primarily the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas. Hamas has been designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Anisa Abd el Fattah, director of public affairs for UASR, said the organization is not tied to Hamas or any other terrorist group. She said last night's meeting at the UASR offices was the first in a series that would lead to "a structure for what we hope is going to be Muslim-Jewish dialogue between Muslim and Jewish leaders in the United States." Damra, the imam of the Islamic Center of Cleveland, also known as the "grand mosque," was indicted by a federal grand jury in December on one count of naturalization fraud. A trial date has not been set. Prosecutors allege that Damra did not disclose his ties to Islamic Jihad, which has claimed responsibility for bombings and other terrorist acts in Israel. Law enforcement sources said Damra was formerly the head of al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y., whose adherents include men convicted in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheik" who was convicted along with nine others in a plot to blow up Manhattan landmarks including the United Nations. In response to Damra's travel request, Gregory A. White, the U.S. attorney in Cleveland, filed a memo saying he "strongly opposes" granting it because UASR "has demonstrated its sympathies for Hamas." He added that several "key associates" of the Springfield group "are, or have been, integrally involved in Hamas activities." UASR is also one of the dozens of Muslim charities and foundations for which Senate Finance Committee investigators are seeking tax and financial records. The records were requested as part of a widening probe into alleged ties between tax-exempt organizations and terrorist groups, according to documents and federal officials. Federal prosecutors in Alexandria have tried, without success, to indict the charities and their leaders for aiding and abetting terrorism. When that failed (hard to do in Alexandria, where writing this article is likely tantamount to terrorism), prosecutors appealed to the Senate to open up a tax probe into the organizations, a procedure that exposes all of the charties' contributors to IRS investigations and possible prosecution.   # -- Posted 4/12/04; 7:16:08 AM Saturday, March 27, 2004 PERMALINK: When Is Playing Paintball Terrorism? When You're A Muslim-American In Virginia  On March 5, in a Virginia federal court, U.S. District Court Judge Leonie Brinkema found three American citizens, Masoud Khan, 32, Seifullah Chapman, 31, and Hammad Abdur-Raheem, 35, guilty of participating in a conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism by supporting a Muslim group that the government has deemed a terrorist organization. (The three had waived their right to a jury trial, and allowed the judge to both try them and render the verdict in their case). The three men, along with eight others, had initially been charged with conspiracy to violate the Neutrality Acts, little-used laws enacted in 1937 and 1939 that make it a crime for American citizens or residents to attack countries with which the United States itself is at peace.  When the three men did not plead guilty to the Neutrality Act charges, they were the subjects of superseding indictments (which replaced the original indictment) for conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism by allegedly supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The antiterrorism law carried stiffer penalties and has the added cachet of containing the “t” word-terrorism. None of the eleven men, most residents of Northern Virginia, attacked anyone at all. The three who were convicted by Brinkema face prison terms of fifty to one hundred years. The men who pled guilty are going serve from three to 11 years. Defense attorneys have made a convincing case that the men were indicted and convicted primarily because they are Muslims in the post-September 11 era. Abusive Prosecutions If the men didn't attack anyone, why were they charged? Because all of them were, in the past, supporters of Lashkar-i-Taiba -- an Islamic group that would like to oust India from Kashmir. Lashkar-i-Taiba has been accused by India of mass killings of Sikhs, and of partial responsibility for a December 2001 attack on India's Parliament.  In late 2001, the U.S. declared it a terrorist organization. However, at the time the men were alleged to have plotted to support Lashkar-i-Taiba, the organization was not on the list. Of what did the men's support for Lashkar-i-Taiba consist?  Prosecutors alleged that they played paintball -- which prosecutors deemed engaging in “paramilitary training" -- to prepare to someday help Lashkar-i-Taiba if necessary.  Prosecutors apparently interpreted this paintball-playing as an "attack" -- or planned attack -- on India, and thus a violation of the Neutrality Acts and, later, under the new indictment, a violation of anti-terrorism laws. At least two of the men had admitted to being in a training camp in Pakistan, and one of them said he helped to recruit others to join in support of the organization. The men were also charged with using a firearm in a conspiracy to commit terrorism. The usage consisted of firing legally owned firearms in the Virginia countryside on private property, and, like playing paintball, a perfectly legal activity under state law. But the prosecutors alleged that shooting off guns—like playing paintball—was in preparation for “violent jihad.” Thus, firing guns and playing paintball became crimes of terror. Gun charges, in particular, require judges to tack years onto already harsh sentences, thanks to mandatory federal sentencing guidelines. Confused as to how perfectly legal activities can get you 50 years in prison? Welcome to the world of prosecuting Muslims in John Ashcroft’s Department of Justice. Consider the following hypotheticals:  Would Irish Americans who played paintball and played with guns in order to support the IRA have been similarly treated?   What about Jewish Americans who played paintball and engaged in target practice to train to support the Israeli army's actions in the Palestinian territories? And even if these Irish and Jewish Americans were charged would anyone possibly suggest that they were terrorists who might someday attack the United States as well? Judge Brinkema suggested exactly this with respect to the three Muslim American defendants.  She said she believed that those convicted might someday take up arms against the United States.  Yet the defendants' only proven political animosity was toward India, over its actions in Kashmir.  There was no evidence to support that they had any political animosity toward the U.S. -- let alone that they would ever attack violently attack their own country. Disturbing Tactics: The Fate of The Alexandria 11 These three defendants are part of a group that has been referred to as the "Alexandria 11."  The government plainly did not consider these 11 men true threats.  And why should it have?  Its whole case was based on speculation that they might someday go to fight on the side of Pakistan (which happens to be an American ally, but whose position on Kashmir is adverse to that of India, whose rule of Kashmir the U.S. government does support). Recognizing that these were not hardened criminals, the government offered the 11 men deals that could mean they would serve only a few years in prison.  But when they rejected these deals, it went after them with all its resources anyway. Unsurprisingly, four of the 11 pled guilty early on.  Even innocent persons may rationally choose a three-year prison term over the chance of a 50-year sentence.  And Muslims, after September 11, may have seen the 50-year sentence as a certainty. The remaining seven men were then the subjects of superseding indictments.   Suddenly, the charges against them were new: conspiracy to aid and abet terrorism. Such charges made it even less likely that they could receive a fair trial -- especially in the conservative Eastern District of Virginia.  These superseding indictments appeared to be a punishment for the refusal of these seven to plead guilty.  They contained allegations that the men conspired to support the Taliban and al Qaeda, allegations which were never proven and which defense attorneys believe the government hurled at the men in order to intimidate them. Not surprisingly, two more men pled guilty shortly after the superseding indictments were handed down.  For their cooperation, they received promises of sentences of 3 to 11 years. (Ironically, two of the men who pled guilty and got lighter sentences admitted that they went to a Lashkar-i-Taiba training camp between June 2000 and fall 2001.) That left five men.  Charges against two were completely dropped.  Three insisted on going to trial -- the three that were just convicted by Judge Brinkema.  Why did these three Americans insist on going to trial?  My guess is that they were innocent.  Why else would they fight what they knew to be an uphill battle, at great risk, rather than accept a few-year plea bargain as others in the same situation had done?  Further, what they would have to admit to, in order to get a lighter sentence, would follow them for the rest of their lives. A Prejudiced Verdict?  Using Religious Belief As a Sword Against Defendants The evidence against defendants came from three sources, all of which are troubling. One source was the testimony of their co-defendants who had pled guilty in exchange for light sentences, based on their willingness to give this very testimony.  Again, these co-defendants had been under tremendous pressure to take these plea bargains, regardless of their own guilt or innocence -- and to testify in support of the government, regardless of the guilt or innocence of the men they were testifying against.  Can testimony be truly credible when it is given in exchange for forty-seven years of freedom?   Another source of evidence was the three men's political beliefs: They thought India ought to get out of Kashmir, and said as much.  But of course, that was their right, as Americans protected by the First Amendment's free speech clause. The three men's place of worship was a source of evidence used against them.  They attended a Virginia mosque in which the Kashmir issue was discussed, and India's actions criticized.  But of course, that was their right, as Americans protected by the First Amendment's free exercise clause. Three tainted sources of evidence led to three convictions.  Obviously, the government does not -- and cannot -- prosecute every supporter of a cause of which it does not approve.  But Muslims today are easy targets.  The evidence suggests that these prosecutions and convictions were motivated by discrimination. Terrorism or no terrorism, justice was not done. # -- Posted 3/27/04; 3:26:51 PM Sunday, March 14, 2004 PERMALINK: In Their Own Words, Britons Describe the Hell of Guantanamo Civil Liberties Watch has had the Guantanamo Bay prisoners at the top of its watch list for months. Now, we can finally learn what is going on in the law-free black hole. Though lawyers and journalists who visit the prison camp are forbidden to speak about much except the weather, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush can no longer gag four British citizens, released not only from Cuban confinement last week, but released by their own government. The U.S. had extracted a promise from the British government that the men would be interrogated, yet again (two years in Gitmo didn't get any confession out of them, but why stop now?) and charged with a crime, if the Brits could find one that they had committed. Well, even with Britain's stiff anti-terrorism law, it found no cause to charge them. So, the government released them. "We don't incarcerate people who have not committed a crime," said British law enforcement. But the men are far from safe. The government is trying to protect them from the public, as the men face threats and humiliation. Already their images have been hung in effigy. Thanks to Bush and Rumsfeld, the lives of these innocent men are ruined. What about the other 650? Here, in the words of three of the four released, is their story, reprinted from London's Guardian: To see this story with its related links on the The Observer site, go to http://www.observer.co.uk How we survived jail hell For two years the Tipton Three have been silent prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Now, in this remarkable interview with David Rose, they describe for the first time the extraordinary story of their journey from the West Midlands to Camp Delta David Rose Saturday March 13 2004 The Guardian 'When I woke up I didn't know where I was. I'd lost consciousness at the side of the container, but when I woke up I was in the middle - lying on top of dead bodies, breathing the stench of their blood and urine. 'They'd herded maybe 300 of us into each container, the type you get on ordinary lorries, packed in so tightly our knees were against our chests, and almost immediately we started to suffocate. We lived because someone made holes with a machine gun, though they were shooting low and still more died from the bullets. When we got out, about 20 in each container were still alive.' In a safe house in southern England at the weekend, Asif Iqbal was describing his survival, together with his friends Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul, after a massacre by US-backed Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan - the start of a 26-month nightmare which ended last week with their release from the American detention camp at Guantanamo Bay. Their faces gaunt with accumulated stress and exhaustion, they spoke softly, still stunned by the change in their circumstances: 'I just can't believe we're sitting here,' Ahmed says. 'This time last week, we were in the cages at Guantanamo.' The horror of their story needs no embellishment. One day, perhaps, there will be an inquiry into Guantanamo. Until then, some of their allegations - which, it can be assumed, America is likely to deny - cannot be corroborated. However, many of the experiences they describe, including gunpoint interrogations in Afghanistan and random brutality both there and in Guantanamo, have been related in identical terms by other freed detainees. Last October I spent four days at Guantanamo. Much of what the three men say about the regime and the camp's physical conditions I either saw or heard from US officials. Having escaped the truck container massacre, they endured near-starvation in a jail run by the Afghan warlord, General Dostum. When the Red Cross appeared and promised to make contact with the British Embassy in Islamabad they thought they were going home. Instead, with the apparent agreement of British officials, they were handed over to the Americans, first for weeks of physical abuse at a detention camp in Kandahar, followed by more than two years in the desolation of Guantanamo. Month after month they were interrogated, for 12 hours or more at a time, by American security agencies and, repeatedly, by MI5 - in all, they say, they endured 200 sessions each. But when they re-emerged to freedom on Wednesday after two final days of questioning at Paddington Green police station, every apparent shred of evidence had melted away. Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed, together with the other early arrivals at Guantanamo, had been described by US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as 'the hardest of the hard core', lethal terrorists 'involved in an effort to kill thousands of Americans'. Even last week the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, was claiming America had been justified in holding them. Yet despite the denial of legal rights or due process, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic have been forced to accept what the three men said all along - that they were never members of the Taliban, al-Qaeda or any other militant group. The Americans had justified their detention by claiming they were 'enemy combatants', but they were never armed and did not fight. 'They formally told us we were going home last Sunday [several weeks after this news was relayed to the media],' Rasul said. 'We had a final meeting with the FBI, and they tried to get us to sign a piece of paper which said something like I was admitting I'd had links with terrorism, and that if I ever did anything like this again the US could arrest me.' Like the other two detainees freed last week, Tarek Dergoul and Jamal al-Harith, they refused. 'They took us to the airport in chains,' said Rasul, 'and when we got there this huge plane was surrounded by armed men. As we walked towards the steps they had guns trained on us. This military police guy hands us over to the British, takes off our shackles and tells the Brit he can put on the handcuffs. But the British policemen say, "no, no, there's no need for handcuffs". We walk up the steps and they're not even touching me. 'For the first time in two years I'm walking somewhere without being frogmarched. We get to the door and someone says: "Good morning. Welcome aboard." ' Capture Rasul, 26, Ahmed, 22, and Iqbal, 22, were boyhood friends from the Midlands town of Tipton. In Septem ber 2001 they travelled to Pakistan ahead of the marriage Iqbal's parents had arranged for him to a woman in Faisalabad. Ahmed was to be best man; Rasul hoped to do a computer course after the wedding. The three were in no sense fundamentalists: their brand of Islam, they say, was never that of the Taliban. But like many young Muslims in Pakistan they crossed the border into Afghanistan in October 2001, as it became clear that, in the wake of the 11 September attacks on America, one of the poorest countries in the world was about to be attacked. They had no intention of joining the fighting, they insist, but only of giving humanitarian aid. In England, none of them was rich, but in Asia, the little money they had could go a long way. For a short time they used the savings accumulated for their trip to buy food and medical supplies for Afghan villagers. But in Taliban-led Afghanistan one aspect of their appearance made them dangerously visible - they had no beards. Travelling through a bombed landscape, they tried to escape in a taxi. But instead of reaching safety they were driven further into danger - to the city of Kunduz, which was promptly surrounded and bombarded by Dostum's troops. Aware that a bloodbath was imminent, they tried to leave on a convoy of trucks but their own vehicle was shelled, killing almost everyone on board. 'We were trapped,' says Iqbal. 'There was nothing we could do but give ourselves up. They took our money, our shoes, all our warm clothes, and put us in lines.' They were part of a vast column of prisoners, around 35,000, says Rasul: 'You'd look down the slope and there were lines and lines of people, as far as the eye could see. We went through the mountains and the open desert. There were these massive ditches full of bodies. We thought this was the end. We thought they were going to kill us all.' Many of the prisoners were wounded and died by the wayside. After two days they ended up outside Shebargan prison and crammed into the containers - it was night, says Iqbal, and the massacre began under the glare of spotlights which the three men claim were operated by American special forces. 'The last thing I remember is that it got really hot, and everyone started screaming and banging. It was like someone had lit a fire beneath the containers. You could feel the moisture running off your body, and people were ripping off their clothes.' When he came to, Iqbal had not drunk for more than two days. Maddened by thirst, he wiped the stream ing walls with a cloth, and sucked out the moisture, until he realised he was drinking the bodily fluids of the massacred prisoners. 'We were like zombies,' Iqbal says. 'We stank, we were covered in blood and the smell of death.' Freed from the trucks which had become mass graves, they were taken into Shebargan prison, where they were held in appalling conditions for the next month. Much was open to the elements, and to make room inside its bare communal cells the prisoners lay down in four-hour shifts. They were fed a quarter of a naan bread a day, with a small cup of water: sometimes, says Rasul, there were fights over the rations. Often snow blew into the buildings. Rasul says: 'There were people with horrific injuries - limbs that had been shot off and nothing was done. I'll never forget one Arab who was missing half his jaw. For 10 days until his death he was screaming and crying continuously, begging to be killed.' A few days earlier Taliban prisoners had organised the uprising against their captors at Qala-i-Jhangi Fort at Mazar-e-Sharif, and western reporters paid a visit to Shebargan. They seemed blind to the misery there, Rasul says. 'All they seemed to be interested in was if any of us knew the American Taliban John Walker Lindh.' After 10 days the Red Cross arrived, bringing some improvement and an increase in the water supply. But by now all three were malnourished and suffering from amoebic dysentery. Ahmed says: 'We were covered with lice. All day long you were scratching, scratching. I was bleeding from my chest, my head.' Iqbal adds: 'We lost so much weight that if I stood up I could carry water in the gap between my collar bones and my flesh.' Prisoners died daily: of the 35,000 originally marched through the desert, only 4,500 were still alive, the three men estimate. All this time they could see American troops 50 metres from their prison wing on the other side of the gates. Beatings After a month of this living hell, on 27 or 28 December, the Red Cross spoke to the three and promised they would contact the British Embassy in Islamabad and ask them to intervene on their behalf and notify their families that they were alive. Rasul's brother, Habib, says he had contacted the Foreign Office at the end of November and asked for help in tracing his missing brother. In fact, very soon, the three would meet British officials. But Habib would be told nothing until February 8 - three weeks after his brother's arrival in Guantanamo. Two days after the three talked to the Red Cross, Dostum's troops put them in chains, marched them through the main gate and handed them over to American special forces. Ahmed says: 'They put something like a sandbag over my head so you could see nothing. Then we got thrown on to a truck. They taped the sacks at the bottom of our necks, making it difficult to breathe.' The Americans took them to Shebargan airport, where they were beaten, then loaded on a plane. 'I wanted to use the toilet,' Rasul says. 'Someone smacked me on the back of my head with his gun. I started peeing myself.' Trussed like chickens, their chains replaced by plastic ties, they were flown to the US detention centre at Kandahar. The weather was freezing. Wearing only thin salwar kameez, with no socks or shoes, they were tied together with a rope and led into the camp, where they waited to be processed. In the very different setting of a sitting room in suburban England, Iqbal demonstrates how they were made to kneel bent double, with their foreheads touching the ground: 'If your head wasn't touching the floor or you let it rise up a little they put their boots on the back of your neck and forced it down. We were kept like that for two or three hours.' Rasul adds: 'I lifted up my head slightly because I was really in pain. The sergeant came up behind me, kicked my legs from underneath me, then knelt on my back. They took me outside and searched me while one man was sitting on me, kicking and punching.' All this time they were still wearing their hoods. Then one soldier took a Stanley knife and cut off their clothes. Naked and freezing, they were made to squat while the soldiers searched their bodily cavities and photographed them. At last, they say, they were frog-marched through a barbed wire maze and put into a half-open tent where they were told to dress in blue prison overalls. They had not washed since the container massacre a month earlier. There, Iqbal had sustained a ricochet wound to the elbow. Displaying an ugly purple scar, he explains that by the time he reached Kandahar, it had become infected. It was late at night by the time they had been processed, but next morning, they say, they were taken straight to their first interrogation. Rasul says: 'A special forces guy sat there holding a gun to my temple, a 9mm pistol. He said if I made any movement he'd blow my head off.' Each endured several such sessions at Kandahar: each time, they say, they were questioned on their knees, in chains, always at gunpoint. Often they were kicked or beaten. (Other released detainees have described Kandahar in similar terms.) Not all their interrogators were American. Iqbal and Rasul also describe an English officer in a maroon beret who said he was a member of the SAS. 'He had a posh English accent,' Rasul says. 'He mentioned the names of British prisons like Belmarsh and said we'd end up there.' Iqbal says the SAS officer told him: 'Don't worry, you won't be beaten today because you're with me.' Ahmed says he was also questioned by an officer from MI5 and another Englishman who said he was from the British Embassy. 'All the time I was kneeling with a guy standing on the backs of my legs and another holding a gun to my head. The MI5 man says: "I'm from the UK, I'm from MI5, and I've got some questions for you." He says he was called Dave. He told me: "We've got your names, we've got your passports, we know you've been funded by an extremist group and we know you've been to this mosque in Birmingham. We've got photos of you." None of this was true. 'The second occasion was on the morning I left - they said I was going home. In fact I was on my way to Cuba.' As Muslims, they were shocked when in repeated 'shakedown' searches of the sleeping tents, copies of the Koran would be trampled on by soldiers and, on one occasion, thrown into a toilet bucket. Throughout their stay at Kandahar the guards carried out head-counts every hour at night to keep the prisoners awake. Rasul says: 'You'd just be dozing off and then you were made to get up, and that's the way it was all the way to morning.' To Cuba At 3AM on 13 January 2002, Rasul was moved to a new tent with Iqbal. Next morning their numbers were called out and they were made to sit while soldiers chained them tightly, sat them in a tent and attached another chain to a hook on the floor. 'These guys came in with clippers,' Rasul says, 'they shaved my hair and my beard; they cut all my clothes off and threw this medication over me, to kill the lice. Then they unlocked me from the floor and led me into another tent naked where they forced me to squat again and did another intimate cavity search.' Instead of the blue overalls they were dressed in orange jumpsuits, chained and cuffed and made to wear thick gloves taped to their sleeves. Then, says Rasul: 'They made us sit outside on the gravel while they processed everyone. We had no water all day, but towards the end they gave us an MRE [a ready-to-eat US army meal] but no spoon. I had to try and trough it like an animal.' The restraint device they were now forced to wear would become extremely familiar for the next 26 months - the 'three-piece suit', a body belt with a metal chain leading down to leg-irons with hand-shackles attached to it. Rasul says: 'I told the guard they'd put it on much too tight and he said: "You'll live." ' Before boarding a military aircraft they were dressed in earmuffs, goggles and surgical masks. Inside, they were chained to the floor with no backrests, and even when they requested the toilet, they were not released from their chains. 'Basically people wet their pants. You were pissing all over your legs.' 'The only thing that relieved the sensory deprivation and occupied me for the 22-hour flight was that I was in serious pain,' Rasul says. 'The guards told me to go to sleep but the belt was digging into me - when I finally got to Cuba I was bleeding. I lost feeling in my hands for the next six months.' Rasul and Iqbal were on the second flight to the new Camp X-ray - the first had been three days earlier. (The Australian David Hicks and another British prisoner, Feroz Abbasi, were on that first flight.) Ahmed followed on 10 February on the fifth flight from Kandahar to Guantanamo Bay. 'When I got there,' he says, 'I was half dead. We had a two-hour stopover somewhere in Turkey. As we were being frog-marched from one plane to another, one of the guards stamped on the metal body bar of my three-piece suit so the leg-irons bit deeply into the flesh of my ankles.' But Ahmed, at least, had been told where he was going. When Rasul and Iqbal landed they had no idea where they were: 'All I knew was that I was somewhere with intense heat,' Rasul says. 'An American voice shouted: "I am Sergeant so-and-so, US Marine Corps, you are arriving at your final destination." ' The Guantanamo airstrip lies a three-mile ferry journey across the bay from the detention facilities, a journey the prisoners made in a school bus. Iqbal says: 'The boat was moving in the swell, making the bus rock and the American guy says: "Stop moving." I couldn't stop, so he hit me.' Rasul made the mistake of telling a guard he was English. 'Traitor,' he yelled. Later, when Ahmed took the ferry, he heard a guard whispering: "This motherfucker speaks English." Repeatedly the guard kicked his leg: 'I couldn't move it for days, it was so badly bruised.' At last they arrived at Camp X-ray, and became part of the group of orange-jumpsuited prisoners kneeling in the dust, still shackled and blindfolded, whose images went round the world. Rasul says: 'They made us kneel in that awkward way, and every time you moved, someone would kick you. 'The sun was beating down and the sweat was pouring into my eyes. I shouted for a doctor, someone poured water into my eyes and then I heard it again: "Traitor, traitor." ' Rasul was the last one processed, and by the time he got to his cage it was dark. First he was stripped naked and, still wearing his goggles and chains, he was given a piece of soap and told to shower for the first time since his capture. 'I looked around and I thought what the hell is this place?' Iqbal recalls the moment his goggles were finally removed: 'I look up and I see all these other people who hadn't yet been processed in orange suits and goggles and I think I'm hallucinating.' Two days after arriving in Guantanamo Bay, with his family still desperate for information as to his whereabouts, Rasul was taken in his three-piece metal suit to an interrogation tent. 'I walk in and this guy says: "I'm from the Foreign Office, I've come from the British Embassy in America, and here is one of my colleagues who's from the embassy as well." Later he added his colleague was actually from MI5.' Rasul asked where he was and the British officials replied: 'We can't disclose that information.' His family heard nothing for another three weeks. It would be many months before the British Government - which, in public, was voicing deep concerns about the lack of legal process at Guantanamo, and claiming it was trying to exert diplomatic pressure - would confirm that its own Security Service had connived from the outset. Camp X-ray In the early days at Camp X-ray, the conditions of detention were extreme. The detainees were forbidden from talking to the person in the next cell and, Rasul recalls, fed tiny portions of food: 'They'd give you this big plate with a tiny pile of rice and a few beans. It was nouvelle cuisine, American-style. You were given less than 10 minutes to eat and if you hadn't finished the Marines would just take your plate away.' After a few more days Rasul was questioned again by MI5. The officer asked how he was. 'I started crying, saying I can't believe I'm here. He says: "I don't want to know how you are emotionally, I'm only interested in your physical state." ' After about a week the prisoners were allowed to speak to detainees in adjacent cells, and a few weeks later still were given copies of the Koran, a prayer mat, blankets and towels. Yet all witnessed or experienced brutality, especially from Guantanamo's own riot squad, the Extreme Reaction Force. Its acronym has led to a new verb peculiar to Guantanamo detainees: 'ERF-ing.' To be ERFed, says Rasul, means to be slammed on the floor by a soldier wielding a riot shield, pinned to the ground and assaulted. Iqbal and Rasul were at opposite ends of the same block and were forbidden from talking to each other. There was almost nothing to do. 'Time speeds up,' Rasul says. 'You just stare and the hours go clicking by. You'd look at people and see they'd lost it. There was nothing in their eyes any more. They didn't talk.' As the weeks of detention became months they would sometimes see psychiatrists. The response to any complaint was always the same: an offer to administer Prozac. (On my visit to Guantanamo, the camp medical staff told me that at least a fifth of the detainees were taking anti-depressants.) It was almost impossible to master the rules and know how to avoid punishment. There was only one rule that mattered, Rasul says: 'You have to obey whatever US government personnel tell you to do.' In mid-2002 the prisoners were moved from the open cages with mesh walls at Camp X-ray to the pre-fabri cated metal cellblocks of Camp Delta. There, the standard punishment was transfer to solitary confinement in the sensory deprivation isolation wing. Once, Ahmed says, he was given isolation for writing 'Have a nice day' on a polystyrene cup. This was deemed 'malicious damage to US government property'. On another occasion, he was punished for singing. The cells were about the size of a king-size mattress, made of mesh and metal, exposed to the relentless tropical heat, with no air conditioning. They contained a hole in the floor for a toilet, a tap producing yellow water which was so low they had to kneel to use it, and a narrow metal cot. Apart from interrogation, the only break in this confined monotony were showers and 20 minutes' exercise, two or three times a week. 'When we were on a block with English speakers, we'd go over the conversations again and again,' Ahmed says. 'Often they'd start by someone asking if you remembered a particular kind of food. Soon you'd exhaust the possibilities, repeat the same stories four or five times.' Even this, however, was better than the isolation punishment block, or the fate which Iqbal endured for five months in 2002 - being placed in a wing where all the other prisoners spoke only Chinese. The three Britons were visited at least six times by MI5 and Foreign Office staff, Rasul says: 'Every time the Foreign Office came we asked about what was going on, and whether we had solicitors. His reply was "I don't know, all I know is what's been on TV. Your case hasn't been on TV." ' In fact, their families had engaged lawyers in Britain and America soon after learning of their whereabouts in February 2002, and a federal lawsuit was launched in their name which, had they not been released, would have been argued before the Supreme Court next month. They were told of this by a guard a few weeks ago, almost two years after the suit was first filed. In September 2003 Rasul was visited on consecutive days, first by the man from the Foreign Office, then by an MI5 officer. He asked the Foreign Office man about his legal status and was told: 'You should ask the MI5 guy who's coming tomorrow.' When he did so next day, the MI5 agent said: 'You should have asked Martin from the Foreign Office yesterday.' How long had they thought they would be at Guantanamo? I asked the three men. They reply in unison: 'Forever!' Interrogation For the second six months of 2002, the interrogations ceased. But from the beginning of 2003, interviews with MI5, the FBI, the CIA and US military intelligence became increasingly frequent. Rasul says: 'They kept taking us and taking us, showing us photos saying: "This guy says you've done this, this guy says you've done that" - what they meant was that other detainees desperate to get out were making allegations, making stuff up that they thought would help them get out of the camp.' Last year the Americans introduced a formal system of rewards for co-operation with interrogators, so that detainees would be given an increasing number of so-called 'comfort items' such as books, extra clothes and utensils in return for their testimony. (The books, best-selling novels, usually came with pages torn out, which the censor had deemed too subversive or exciting.) Experts on the psychology of interrogations and false confessions say that for pris oners who were already depressed and isolated by more than a year of arduous incarceration, this system seems almost calculated to produce fantastical accounts. Professor Gisli Gudjonsson of King's College London is perhaps the world's leading authority in this area, and he has testified in dozens of trials and helped expose numerous miscarriages of justice. One of the methods which his research has shown to be particularly prone to generating unreliable testimony is the use of deception, where an interrogator will claim he has incontrovertible proof of a suspect's guilt when in reality this does not exist. Such methods, the three men say, were employed against them time and time again. For example, Rasul says, he was told that photographs of him and an 'al-Qaeda membership form' and his passport had been found in a raid on an Afghan cave. 'Actually I'd left my passport in Pakistan. Then the interrogator told me that next to my file they'd found my brother Habib's al-Qaeda file. The interrogator said he wasn't lying, and that next time he'd bring it with him. When it came to the next time, he claimed he'd made a mistake.' The interrogators also used the good cop/bad cop routine. 'It was scary although I knew what they were doing. I think they tried it more with some of the Arabs and the young kids.' Less funny were the conditions in which interrogations were conducted, in so-called 'booths' behind the cell blocks. Throughout their interviews, the detainees wore their three-piece suits, and were shackled to the floor. In 2003, many more interrogators were brought in, some of them young and inexperienced. 'You'd look at these guys in their shorts and polo shirts and think: 'This guy's an interrogator? He's only 20 years old,' says Rasul. 'About two months ago one guy asked me: "If I wanted to get hold of surface-to-air missiles in Tipton, where would I go?" I started arguing with him. Did he really think I lived in some sort of war zone. I was scared in the interrogations but towards the end the questions just seemed stupid.' However, last summer the situation of the Tipton Three suddenly took a seri ous turn for the worse. The Americans had a video of a meeting in August 2000 between Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. Behind bin Laden were three men, and in May 2003 someone alleged they were none other than Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed. For the previous two weeks, Rasul had been in the relatively comfortable conditions of Camp Four, the lower-security section of Guantanamo where prisoners are freely allowed to associate and play football and volleyball. Suddenly he and the others found themselves in solitary confinement in the isolation block for three months. Finally, Rasul says, a senior interrogator arrived from Washington and played him the video. He protested that the men in the video looked nothing like him and his friends, and none of them had worn beards. More to the point, in August 2000, when the video was shot, he had been working in a branch of the electronics store Curry's, and was enrolled at the University of Central England - a fact, he suggested, his interrogators could easily check. Instead, he says: 'They told me I could have falsified those records, that I could have had someone working with me at Curry's who could have faked my job records.' I'd got to the point where I just couldn't take any more. Do what you have to do, I told them. I'd been sitting there for three months in isolation so I said yes, it's me. Go ahead and put me on trial.' The other two made similar confessions. Last September it was MI5 which for once helped them when they arrived at the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have been in Afghanistan at the relevant time. Rasul says: 'We could prove our alibi. But what about other people, especially from countries where such records may not be available?' There is also the danger that false testimony from one inmate, extracted by the Guantanamo incentives system, may breed a false confession from another. Iqbal recalls: 'One inmate said I had been in the Farouk terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. It led to a whole series of interrogations where they tried to persuade me that I had been. The way the system is it's accusation after accusation; if this one won't work maybe this one will, if that won't work try this one, until they finally get their confession.' For those who do confess, and fail to sustain their alibis, trial by an American military commission and a possible death penalty awaits. Those who have been charged are no longer at Camp Delta, the three men reveal. They have been moved to a new, super-maximum security facility outside the main compound - Camp Echo. A few men have been returned thence to the main Guantanamo Camp; they describe a white-walled, sound-absorbent hell of 24-hour solitary confinement in cells smaller than Camp Delta's, with a guard permanently stationed outside each cell door. Camp Echo's current inmates, say the three men, include the Britons Feroz Abbasi and Moazzem Begg, and the Australian David Hicks. One detail of Hicks's life inside Guantanamo Bay reveals the desperate measures prisoners go to retain their sanity. He occupies his mind all day by catching and killing mice. More than a year ago, the three men said, Hicks renounced Islam and shaved off his beard. He no longer answers the call to prayer. 'He's just a little guy with a very deep voice,' says Rasul. 'If you met him you'd think he was the typical kind of Aussie you might see drinking Fosters in a bar.' Freedom Proof of the Tipton Three's alibis led to rapidly improving treatment. Every Sunday after last September, Rasul says, they were taken to a shed they called the 'love shack', and allowed to sit unchained on a sofa to watch movies on DVD. They were allowed to read magazines, and were sometimes fed with hamburgers from Guantanamo's branch of McDonald's. Unaware of the stream of leaks to the media which suggested their release might be imminent, they began to sense that the end of their ordeal might be drawing near. Even then, they were still being interrogated regularly. Rasul says: 'They'd still show us pictures, try to get names. My last interrogation was on 5 March. But I could see the guy was getting desperate. At one point he said: "Look, I'm from the CIA, I can get you anything. What do you want? Coke? Ice cream?" ' For men who had been through Kunduz and Kandahar, this was not impressive. All are convinced that there are no 'big-time' terrorists at Guantanamo: arguably the most dangerous, in American eyes, says Ahmed, is a group of Taliban mullahs. American intelligence sources have confirmed this view to me. The 'big-timers' - men such as Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, architect of 9/11, have never been near Guantanamo. One source says: 'Guantanamo may even be a bit of a front, designed to divert al-Qaeda's attention. It takes everybody's attention away from more important matters and locations where big fish are being held. The secrecy surrounding it makes everybody think that very serious stuff is going on there.' The three say some of the inmates have seen such suspects - not in Cuba, but at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. According to Iqbal, 'we spoke to people who'd been with them there when they were being interrogated. They said they flew them out of there alive, but in coffins.' Reviled so publicly by Rumsfeld, now the Tipton Three must struggle to rebuild their lives. Their home town, say their families, has become too dangerous: effigies of men in orange jump suits have been strung from lampposts, while the area is a strongholds of the extreme right-wing BNP. For now they have been marvelling at the little things, Rasul says: sitting in cars without chains and being able to operate the windows; finding that food does not arrive automatically at set hours, and can be tasty and varied. This weekend their dominant emotion is relief. As they come to reflect on the experience over the coming weeks, it seems likely to turn to a burning, righteous anger.   # -- Posted 3/14/04; 5:23:44 PM Monday, March 1, 2004 PERMALINK: I Hate To Say, "I Told You So," But, I Told You So It has been almost two years since I first wrote a comprehensive story on the USA Patriot Act. At that time, I warned that the Patriot Act could be construed to render nonviolent protest against government policy  an act of terrorism. One example I used was a fax or e-mail campaign to Congressional representatives (or the White House, for that matter) that could lead to the allegation that the faxes or email had “crippled” the government office and interfered with its normal business. For utilizing tactics that in any way interfere with the government can be an act of terror. Another example was a peaceful protest that blocked a law enforcement vehicle—that could be an act of terror.   In the past couple of weeks, what I predicted has come to pass—and then some. We learned that the Justice Department started an investigation into anti-war protests led by the National Lawyer’s Guild at Drake University, in Des Moines, Iowa in November 2003. The FBI’s Joint Counter-Terrorism Task Force subpoenaed the records of the National Lawyer’s Guild, the student records of student organizers, and the surveillance tapes of campus security.  Demonstrations at the federal courthouse, motions to quash by recipients of the subpoenas, and negative publicity led the government to withdraw the subpoenas. The U.S. Attorney changed his tune and said they were never after anti-war protestors, but were looking for leads into who might have tried to enter a National Guard facility in Des Moines. Aside from casting a pretty wide and chilling net for a would-be trespasser, the affidavits in support of the subpoenas were devoid of any mention of a trespassing incident. Asked to explain the discrepancy, the U.S. Attorney said the affidavit was deficient—not his story.   Shortly after the Drake story broke early in February, the government confirmed that Defense Intelligence Agency operatives had “infiltrated” a conference on Muslim Law at University of Texas-Austin, and that FBI agents were attending ACLU meetings in Texas. They were on the lookout, we were told, for people who might be espousing terrorist tactics. I think they were taking names of attendees so that they could open files on people who dared to think about Islam law, or dared to be a part of an organization that has been in the forefront of taking the Bush Administration’s despotism to federal courts.   When Secretary of Education Ron Paige referred to the National Education Association as a terrorist organization, he was parroting the Patriot Act. It was no slip of the tongue, but a calculated shot across the bow at people and organizations that speak out against a Bush policy. Paige later retracted the term, but not the substance of his charge. The NEA, he repeated over and over, has used “obstructionist and scare” tactics to defeat Bush’s No Child Left Behind law. That description is one of the ways in which the Patriot Act defines “terror.” In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Saturday, Paige lambasted all critics of the law, including state legislators who don’t want the damn federal money if it means letting Paige and his cronies tell them how to run their schools, as people willing to sacrifice “children” for political purposes. I found the op-ed alarming—for he went even further than just calling them terrorists. He accused them of wanting to harm children because they don’t agree with the Bush policy, driven by the desire to control each and every public classroom in the US (similar to Ashcroft wanting to control the body of every woman in the U.S.).   I could imagine all of the above, but what I read in the Saturday New York Times gave even me pause. The Treasury Department, which forbids doing "business" with countries (Iran, Cuba, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea, for instance) who are considered state sponsors of terrorism and are defined as our "enemies," notified editors and publishers that if they change one comma, word, or syntactical element in a document that came from a person who lives in a "forbidden" country, they may be charged with "trading with the enemy," a crime that carries a penalty of up to ten years in prison and a fine of $500,000. Presumably, an editor could not remove a comma from a story written by a born-again Christian Bush-ite any more than it could correct the pagination of a treatise by an al-Qaeda operative—if the writer was an Iranian national.     This regulation begs the question, “Are all citizens of all nations our enemy?" Judge T.S. Ellis, Alexandria, Virginia federal district judge, alluded to this mindset of our government when he recently refused to sentence a former Bush Administration most-favored Muslim to two years in prison for carrying money into and out of Libya. Federal prosecutors wanted to put him away for at least ten years because he had “friends” whom the government alleged were “terrorists.” Aside having no proof that his friends were terrorists, the pro-Bush Ellis said, last he checked, it was not a crime to know a “terrorist” socially.   The Treasury Department is up to more mischief than I can keep up with. The Washington Post reported on Friday that the Treasury Department was freezing the assets of travel agencies who book trips to Cuba (you do realize, don’t you, that some travel to Cuba is legal? Tell that to Treasury), including the legitimate deposits of American citizens. And Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge ordered the Coast Guard to take over any ship, American or otherwise, traveling to Cuba. Cuba, you see, is a “terrorist” state. And if we travel to Cuba, we are supporting terror. A friend recently traveled to a Caribbean island and brought me back a CD of Cuban music. I have it displayed prominently in my office for Ashcroft to easily find. I am surely a terrorist for having Cuban music in my house and listening to it—even enjoying it, and my friend is a terrorist for buying it. (In a disgusting display of idiocy and bigotry, the State Department denied visas to Cuban musicians nominated for Grammy awards this year. Cuban Ibrahim Ferrer won the Grammy for Best Traditional Tropical Latin Album, putting the Grammy organization into the unenviable position of arguably supporting terrorism.)   So, what I predicted, and worse, is upon us, and I am not hearing much outrage about any of it. A yawn, a “what’s new,” a “does that surprise you, Cassel?” is about all I am getting when I rant and rave. No, it does not surprise me, it terrifies me. Four more years of Bush and I doubt that I will be writing or you will be reading these warnings. We will have been silenced. I wish I were exaggerating, but this past year has taught me that, if anything, my warnings have been too tame.   We have seen a despot, and he is occupying the White House. We have seen tyranny, and it is the Bush Administration. And yes, I am certain that, if there has been any doubt heretofore, now I am sure that I can be labeled a “terrorist” for saying it. And you, likely, are a terrorist for reading it. # -- Posted 3/1/04; 6:31:44 AM >Home >Use the Calendar to view previous posts		ARTICLES BY ELAINE CASSEL ON CIVIL LIBERTIES The War on Terror Antiterrorism: A History of Abuses Terrorism and the New War Terrorism and the Constitution The Legal System Superseding Indictment of Lynne Stewart, November 2003 (112k PDF) The Lynne Stewart Case Bringing Down the Curtains on Defense Attorneys An Interview with Michael Tigar A Review of Michael Tigar's Memoir The Criminal Justice System When Doing Time Isn't Enough Execution of the Mentally Retarded The Prisonization of America Immigrants Detained in America Higher Education The Controversy over Teaching Islam and the Koran UNITED STATES V. LYNNE STEWART Stewart Reply Memo (573k PDF) Michael Tigar Declaration (92k PDF) Lynne Stewart Motions to Dismiss (1.48MB PDF) Michael Tigar Letter to Judge Koeltl (110k PDF) Amicus Brief filed by National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (1.2MB PDF) You will need the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDF files. INTERNET LINKS American Civil Liberties Union Bruce Jackson's Buffalo Report Center for Constitutional Rights CounterPunch Center for Democracy and Technology Electronic Privacy Information Center International Bill of Rights Project People for the American Way
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