Guarding the Home Front

Will civil liberties be a casualty in the War on Terrorism?

From the December 2001 issue

(Page 2 of 6)

Clint Bolick is vice president and director of state chapter development for the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.�based public interest law firm.

Lessons Never Taught

Jim Bovard

The blind glorification of government currently prevailing puts almost all liberties at grave risk. Most of the media and most of the politicians are stampeding behind the notion that the greatest danger is any limit on federal power. The Justice Department wish list of remedies invokes the danger of terrorism to seek sweeping new powers to be used against all classes of alleged criminals.

The determination of some members of the Bush administration to use the terrorist attacks to wage wars against a laundry list of "rogue nations" could mean that aggressive military action continues indefinitely -- along with the pretext to suppress Americans' freedom of speech and movement. And if there is another successful terrorist attack that kills many Americans, the pressure for severe crackdowns will probably be irresistible -- regardless of how badly government agencies screwed up in failing to prevent the attack. At least for the time being, people have lost any interest in government's batting average -- either for actually protecting citizens or for abusing power.

The best hope for the survival and defense of liberty is that enough Americans will recall the history lessons that public schools never teach.

Jim Bovard is the author, most recently, of Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion & Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (St. Martin's Press).

Beware of Tom Ridge

Alexander Cockburn

For a foretaste of the sort of assault on civil liberties we might expect, we need go no further than the actions last year of George W. Bush's nominee to run the newly minted Office of Homeland Security (OHS), Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania.

Last July, in preparation for anti�World Trade Organization demonstrations scheduled at the same time as the Republican National Convention, Philadelphia saw coordinated law enforcement involving the Federal Bureau of Investigation and local and state police, with covert surveillance, infiltration, and disruption of legitimate groups, snooping on e-mail, and phone taps. Protest leaders were arrested early on, under absurd pretexts and, in the case of John Sellers (of the Ruckus Society) and Kate Sorensen (ACT-UP), held on $1,000,000 bail. Jailed protesters were brutally handled, denied access to medical care and attorneys, and thrown into cells with dangerous inmates.

When all was over, the courts threw out 95 percent of the charges brought against protesters by the Philadelphia police. Ridge presided over an utterly disgraceful and violent denial of freedom of assembly, free speech, and due process.

The only comfort we can expect is that the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Pentagon, and the Coast Guard will see the OHS as a bureaucratic threat to their turf and move swiftly to neutralize it. I have no doubt that these seasoned bureaucratic fighters will soon be leaking information to discredit Ridge and the OHS.

Alexander Cockburn is a syndicated columnist and co-editor of the radical newsletter CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org).

The End of Privacy