War on terrorism terrorizes Bill of Rights
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air, however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
Almost sixty years ago my mother stopped by to visit her stepfather at his office in Dallas. But on this day in 1941, he was not at his desk. Kiyo Ando, a graduate of Texas A & M, an electrical engineer who had lived in the U.S. all but six months of his life had been detained, taken into custody by the FBI because of his Japanese heritage.
History has not been kind to the executive order that called for the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II. The internment camps created great hardships and terrible indignities for those held there and constituted a flagrant breach of our Constitution. The federal government has since apologized to the survivors and offered twenty thousand dollars to each of them in reparations. My grandfather, who became a U.S. citizen in 1955, did not live to collect.
Today we face challenges similar in some respects to those confronted in 1941. And in meeting today’s challenges, we again have a choice. Will we willingly relinquish our civil liberties and join in the subversion of the Bill of Rights, all in the name of combating terrorism and ensuring domestic security? Or will we awaken to the hazard of permitting too few to possess too much power?
President Bush has declared a “great emergency.” And while it certainly makes sense for our government to take such domestic measures as tightening airport security, there is dreadful danger in the imprudent actions of recent weeks, which according to the American Civil Liberties Union, include:
- The executive order issued by the president, without input from Congress, that set up military tribunals to try noncitizens who legally reside in the U.S. and are suspected of unspecified offenses (not necessarily terrorism)
- Attorney General Ashcroft’s failure to provide adequate information about the hundreds of noncitizens who have been detained since September 11
- The order issued by the attorney general to allow federal agents to listen in on confidential communications between detainees and their attorneys
- The USA Patriot Act, which Congress passed without debate (and without some legislators even reading the legislation) and President Bush signed into law. Substitute “terrorist” for “communist” and we’re back to the McCarthy era of the ’50s. Among other repressive provisions, this law seriously undermines Constitutional safeguards regarding unreasonable searches and seizures. If authorities contend that you might know a suspected terrorist, foreign or domestic, police now have the authority to covertly enter your home, sift through your belongings, take your possessions as evidence, and copy your computer files without having to tell you about it.
And that’s not all. Other measures are in the works including a national ID system that would allow the government to electronically track our movements wherever we go.
These Draconian actions do not enhance our domestic security; they do, however, eviscerate the Bill of Rights, not just for noncitizens, but for citizens as well. How can we profess to bring democracy to other nations while treating it with such disdain at home? How can we claim the moral high ground while we take the low road toward totalitarianism? Having once given up these rights, be assured there is no guarantee that we will regain them after this “state of emergency” has passed.
We cannot call ourselves patriots if we trample the very documents that have sustained our freedoms these past centuries. If we permit the actions taken by the president, the attorney general, and Congress to go unchallenged, those who would defeat us have already won. We must act now to end this subversion from within. We must reclaim our rights as citizens of this great nation and then extend them even further. If we are to be true to ourselves, we are compelled to live up to our highest vision . . . for our nation and for our world.
Saturday, December 1st, 2001No Comments »
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