- Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely
anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also
U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."
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- The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment
of detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush
administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
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- Because the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely
anyone noticed that it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also
U.S. citizens, "unlawful enemy combatants."
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- Bush & Co. has portrayed the bill as a tough way
to deal with aliens to protect us against terrorism. Frightened they might
lose their majority in Congress in the November elections, the Republicans
rammed the bill through Congress with little substantive debate.
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- Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on
Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against
the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant"
and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.
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- The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained
aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional
power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion.
The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and
the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.
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- Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps
of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national
crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.
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- In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on
the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent
against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act
extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because
most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.
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- The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention
and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the
United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could
have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was
never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen
suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted
only two years and no one was deported under it.
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- The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any
person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous
and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt
or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress
criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that
the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of
the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans,
the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who
criticized President John Adams.
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- Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken
as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage
Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War
I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War
II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).
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- During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort
to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged
in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had
an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted
and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged
in "red-baiting."
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- One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot
Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic
terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies,
and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.
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- In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the
internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United
States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would
"lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority
that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."
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- That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of
2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and
U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists.
Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing
a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of
undesirables.
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- In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice
Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in
insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding."
Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer,
speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch
what they say, watch what they do."
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- We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip
us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in
serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us
pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary
security, deserve neither liberty or security."
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- Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School
of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S.
representative to the executive committee of the American Association of
Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied
the Law, will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.
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- http://mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=543885
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