Has post-9/11 dragnet gone too far?
As White House pushes to expand domestic terror laws, critics worry limits on civil liberties will become permanent.
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MIAMI AND WASHINGTON –
When they came for Adham Hassoun, America's counterterrorism forces took no chances. Federal agents and sheriff's deputies circled his car in a quiet residential area not far from his home in Sunrise, Fla., and whisked him into custody.
"It was like a movie, with helicopters above me," Mr. Hassoun recalls in a telephone interview from Miami's Krome Detention Center. "They thought I was somebody important.... They thought they hit the jackpot."
Now, 15 months later, Hassoun has yet to be charged with a violation of any US law. Nonetheless, he remains behind bars - and fears he is about to lose everything he has ever loved and worked for during 13 years in America.
Hassoun's experience is not unlike that of other immigrants of Middle Eastern or Islamic heritage swept up in a post-Sept. 11 dragnet aimed at disabling terrorists before they strike again. It is a nationwide antiterror campaign with
tactics including preventive detention, coercive interrogation, and secret deportation hearings, targeting a community of noncitizens in America now living in silent dread of a knock at the door.
"By my count, based on government-released figures, they've detained over 5,000 foreign nationals in antiterrorism-related initiatives," says David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor and author of the forthcoming book "Enemy Aliens." "The government has treated thousands of people as suspected terrorists who turned out to have nothing to do with terrorism."
Permanent shifts in the landscape?
The vast majority of Americans have never experienced such tough tactics firsthand. That may explain why there has been relatively little outcry, analysts say. Yet increasingly, some members of Congress - and a vocal minority of the public - are questioning the full range of Bush administration strategies in the war on terror. On Wednesday, President Bush proposed new measures giving federal law enforcement even more power to go after suspected terrorists (see sidebar).
The stakes, say the White House and supporters, are too high to risk another attack. In an era of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction, they say, it is too costly to permit even a single Al Qaeda operative to strike again.
Douglas Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., who supports the administration's approach, says that one can't draw a firm correlation between steps the US has taken and the lack of a second attack. But, he continues, "one thing we can say is if we failed to take meaningful steps and were attacked again, the recriminations for failure to engage in serious law-enforcement and counterintelligence activities would be even greater."
The US has faced severe threats to its national security throughout history, with leaders wielding extraordinary powers to counter those threats - sometimes at great cost to civil liberties. But always when the threats subsided, earlier levels of legal protections were restored.
Two years after the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, civil-liberties advocates warn that, given the open-ended nature of the war on terror, the current counterterrorism provisions could become a permanent feature of the legal landscape. Their list includes:
• The indefinite imprisonment without charge of three "enemy combatants" - Jose Padilla, Yasser Hamdi, and Ali Saleh al-Marri.
• The planned use of military commissions - with relaxed evidentiary rules and diminished defendant rights - to try terror suspects. It would be the first time since World War II that military tribunals, not federal courts, are used in the US for such cases.
• The holding in indefinite detention of material witnesses as a means of coercing testimony or confessions from anyone who might possess intelligence information federal agents deem useful.
• The detention and interrogation of 660 Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects as war criminals facing possible death sentences at a new US terrorism prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
• The open-ended detention of thousands of Muslim noncitizens as suspected terrorists or terrorist sympathizers as a means of extracting information from them or preventing future terrorism by keeping them locked up.
"In the days and weeks after the September 11 attacks, understandably the country was in a traumatized state and there was a lot of overreaction," says Michael Posner, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "We are now at the point, two years out, where there needs to be a recalibration of some of those measures to restore the balance between liberty and security."
Bush administration officials and supporters disagree. They defend the new provisions as having played an important part in disrupting Al Qaeda and other terror-group operations: America is still at war against a ruthless enemy that measures victory by the number of innocent lives destroyed.
Most Americans appear comfortable with this strategy. Sixty-two percent of respondents in a recent Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll said President Bush was doing an "excellent" or "good" job in fighting terrorism, while only 18 percent characterized the president's antiterror efforts as "poor" or "unacceptable."
But there are signs of growing opposition. In July, Congress voted 309-118 to eliminate funding for a key portion of the USA Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law that expanded the government's ability to monitor and investigate anyone in the US. At the grass-roots level, 157 communities and three states have passed resolutions opposing the Patriot Act.
And alarm is growing over government proposals to use technology and electronic eavesdropping to compile detailed profiles not only of suspected terrorists, but potentially of every American adult. Although the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness program is in question, there are efforts to use similar technology to screen all airline passengers.
"Government acquisition of lots of information about citizens for use in making security-risk determinations is moving forward," says David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. But he expects a backlash. Mr. Sobel says that sometimes the best solution to threats is to go low-tech. With planes, for instance, "there's nothing that will beat secure cockpit doors and more air marshals. There's no privacy downside and no civil-liberties downside."
But how do you protect a nation without affecting civil liberties and privacy? How do you gauge whether the tough tactics were necessary and effective? Administration officials cite a mountain of statistics to justify their policies.
Six alleged terrorist cells have been broken up in Buffalo, Detroit, Seattle, Portland, Tampa, and North Carolina; 260 individuals have been charged; and 515 "linked" to the 9/11 investigation have been deported.
What the government doesn't reveal is that the vast majority of the 260 charged and 515 deported were involved in relatively minor crimes or immigration infractions and had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or terrorism.
Indeed, many of the highest-profile terror suspects - including Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh - were caught without any reliance on the new hard-nosed tactics.
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