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November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Kalpana
Sharma
Flower
Power:
A Blow for Peace
Tony Mauro
The Quirin
Ruling:
FDR's Horrible Precedent for Bush's Terror Courts
C.G. Estabrook
American
Crusades
November 17, 2001
Zoltan Grossman
It Ain't
Over Til It's Over
November 16, 2001
Rick Giombetti
Rep.
McDermott and
the Decay of Liberalism
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Voices
of Muslim Feminists
Mokhiber/Weissman
Kill,
Kill, Kill
November 15, 2001
George
Monbiot
Blasting
Our Way
Toward Peace
Jack McCarthy
Hitchens
Mind-Meld
and Hot Bodies
Steve
Perry
Afghan
Puzzle Palace
RAWA
We Do Not Accept
the Northern Alliance
November 14, 2001
Jensen/Mahajan
The
Press Must Press Harder on Afghanistan
David Vest
The Great Unificator
Harry
Browne
Preventing
Future Terrorism
November 13, 2001
Peter Mahoney
Veteran's
Day, 2001
Rep. Ron
Paul
Expanding
NATO
Is a Bad Idea
November 12, 2001
Robert Jensen
Goodbye to
All That...
Patriotism
Nancy
Oden
My
Day at the Airport
CounterPunch Wire
East Timor
10 Years
After the Massacre
C.G. Estabrook
Instead
of Terror
Alexander Cockburn
Wide World
of Torture
November 11, 2001
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland
Insecurity: The Politics of Terror in America
November 10, 2001
Grover Furr
Seeking an Opposition
to the Afghan War
Bruce
Kyle
Anatomy
of a Green Smear:
Backstabbing Nancy Oden
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
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November 27,
2001
Waking Up in Another
Country, Not Our Own
By Paul Coggins
The Texas
Lawyer
I toss in an unfamiliar bed. Strange bed. Strange
room. Strange town. Strange country. A stranger in a strange
land, I sleep fitfully in a country not my own. The hotel door
bangs open. Heavy boots shake the room as armed soldiers surround
me. Angry voices. Blinding lights. Paralyzing panic. Groggy,
I am slow to react. Too slow. Rough hands jerk me off the bed
and onto the hard floor. A boot presses on my spine and another
on my neck. Face down, I am pinned to the floor. My hands are
cuffed behind my back, so tightly that my arm sockets burn with
pain.
A stifled scream corks my throat. After
the scream finally breaks loose, I slip into my native tongue,
not their language. All the while the soldiers shout at me, but
I only understand every 10th word. Though I shout back, they
apparently don't understand me. I have been thrust into a Kafkaesque
nightmare. I have read "Kafka," but I am certain the
soldiers have not.
Under the cover of night, I am whisked
to a solitary cell in a maximum-security prison. My pleas for
a phone call are ignored. I have not been allowed to contact
family or friends. I'm terrified that my wife and daughter are
worried about me. My requests to see a lawyer also fall on deaf
ears.
The only people I see are my captors.
Every day they haul me into an interrogation room to grill me
with questions. Surrounded by stone-faced soldiers and unsympathetic
translators, I hear the same questions day after day. Same hostile
questions. Same open skepticism. Same life-or-death threats.
The days stretch into a sameness like
a living death. My claustrophobic cell shrinks to the dimensions
of a coffin. No one on the outside knows where I am or if I'm
alive. Down to a flicker of hope, I am spirited in the night
to a new prison, hundreds of miles, maybe thousands of miles
from my old cell.
New prison. Same questions. Same threats.
Same loneliness. Same living death. The first transfer presages
a second -- and a third. I feel like the pea in a shell game.
I picture my wife, maybe a lawyer and my friends pounding on
a prison door, only to discover that I had been whisked away,
hidden under another shell. The captors stay a step ahead.
Disoriented by frequent moves and forced
isolation, I forget where I am, what country is holding me. Am
I a political prisoner in South America? Eastern Europe? Southeast
Asia? Have I joined the swelling ranks of "los desaparecidos,"
the disappeared ones?
But my name isn't Paul, and I'm not in
South America, Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia. My name could
be Pablo or Nikita or Omar, and I am a prisoner in the United
States. I have been branded a terrorist suspect, though the basis
for the suspicion may be vague, flimsy or not spelled out at
all.
Forget the books and movies. There is
no phone call from prison, no lawyer in the visiting room and
no judge watching over my case. There are only captors, questions
and solitary cells.
SIMPLISTIC
ANALYSIS
In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the United
States joined the ranks of countries that allow the police to
pick up noncitizens (if certified by the U.S. attorney general
as terrorist suspects) and detain them almost indefinitely with
virtually no judicial oversight. Even the expansive detention
powers granted by Congress last month fell short of Attorney
General John Ashcroft's bid for the right to detain noncitizen
terrorist suspects indefinitely with no judicial oversight.
While Congress should be commended for
rejecting Ashcroft's radical proposal, Congress erred by shifting
the burden of proving the need for greater detention powers and
by undervaluing judicial oversight as a deterrent to abuse of
those powers. Granted, elected officials tremble at the prospect
of being branded as soft on terrorists (more toxic than past
charges of being soft on communists or drugs), but was it too
much for Congress to force the administration to prove a need
for expanded detention powers to battle terrorism?
Instead of careful deliberation of the
long-term implications of removing an important check on law
enforcement, the simplistic analysis was that foreigners had
committed horrific crimes and that noncitizens have fewer rights
than citizens. That noncitizens enjoy fewer rights than citizens
should have been the beginning of the analysis, not its end.
Before we weaken judicial oversight of police, law enforcement
should bear a heavy burden of proof that judges are impeding
their terrorism probes.
The executive branch made no such showing
here. Indeed, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, federal courts have
issued hundreds of material witness warrants for citizens and
noncitizens. There is simply no evidence that the courts, by
retaining oversight over the detention of citizens and noncitizens
(including those detained in a terrorism investigation), are
thwarting law enforcement in any way.
More than 1,100 people have been detained
by law enforcement in connection with the Sept. 11 investigation
-- some for hours, some for days, some for weeks, some for who
knows how long -- and the toll climbs daily. Disturbing stories
are surfacing that some detainees have been cut off from phones,
family, friends and lawyers. Some apparently are being shuttled
from prison to prison.
Except for aggregate (and unreliable)
numbers, the Department of Justice does not release information
about the detainees. Thus, there are more than 1,100 case studies
bearing directly on the scope of the present detention powers
-- case studies that should have been carefully reviewed by Congress
before it granted law enforcement greater detention powers.
The vast majority of police detentions
are undertaken in good faith and pursuant to law, but cops occasionally
overstep the bounds. In a system of checks and balances, the
presumption should be that, when the police obtain greater powers,
judicial oversight is tightened. Only on the most compelling
showing of necessity (with the burden falling squarely on law
enforcement) should the police gain greater powers by relaxing
or removing judicial oversight.
It's easy, too easy, to take rights from
noncitizens. After all, it's not our problem, right? It's not
our problem unless, of course, we happen to be sleeping in another
country, not our own. And if we close our eyes too tightly and
too long, we may fall asleep in the United States and wake up
in another country, not our own.
Paul Coggins
is a principal in the Dallas office of Fish & Richardson,
a national intellectual property, complex litigation and technology
firm. He is a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District
of Texas.
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