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A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 21, 2001
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
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
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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:
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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
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A Pocket Guide to
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November
21, 2001
The Press and the
USA Patriot Act
Where Were They When It Counted?
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The weekend before Thanksgiving, as the Taliban
fled into the Hindu Kush and America's children flocked to Harry
Potter, the nation's opinion formers discovered that the Bush
administration had hijacked the Constitution with the Patriot
Act and the military tribunals. Time magazine burst out that
"war is hell on your civil liberties". The New York
Times suddenly began to run big news stories about John Ashcroft
as if he was running an off-the shelf operation, clandestinely
consummating all those dreams of Oliver North back in Reagan
time about suspending the Constitution.
On November 15 the Washington Post's
Richard Cohen discarded his earlier defenses of Ashcroft, and
declared the US attorney general to be "the scariest man
in government". Five days earlier, The New York Times editorial
was particularly incensed about suspension of client-attorney
privileges in federal jails, with monitoring of all conversations.
For the Hearst papers Helen Thomas reported on November 17 that
Attorney General Ashcroft "is riding roughshod over the
Bill of Rights and cited Ben Franklin to the effect that "if
we give up our essential rights for some security, we are in
danger of losing both."
In this outburst of urgent barks from
the watchdogs of the fourth estate, the first yelp came on November
15, from William Safire. In a fine fury Safire burst out in his
first paragraph that "Misadvised by a frustrated and panic-stricken
attorney general, a president of the United States has just assumed
what amounts to dictatorial power." Safire lashed at "military
kangaroo courts" and flayed Bush as a proto-Julius Caesar.
On the same day, November 15, from Britain,
whose traditionally appalling emergency laws are now being rendered
even more faithful to the vicious tradition of the Star Chamber,
the Economist chimed in that Ashcroft's new laws and DoJ rules
are "drastic", "unnecessary" and "not
the way to fight terrorism". Infringements of civil rights,
the Economist declared, "if genuinely required, should be
open to scrutiny and considered a painful sacrifice, or a purely
tactical retreat, not as the mere brushing aside of irritating
legal technicalities. Those who criticized such measures should
be given a careful hearing, even if their views must sometimes
be overridden."
Even mainstream politicians began to
wail about the theft of liberty. Vermont's independent senator
Jim Jeffords proclaimed on November 19 that "I am very concerned
about my good friend John Ashcroft. Having 1000 people locked
up with no right to habeas corpus is a deep concern." Jeffords
said that he felt that his own role in swinging the Senate to
Democratic control was particularly vindicated because it had
permitted his fellow senator from Vermont, Democrat Patrick Leahy,
to battle the White House's increase of police powers, as made
legal in the Terrorism bill.
Speak memory! It was not as though publication
on November 13 of Bush's presidential order on military courts
for Al-Qaeda members and sympathizers launched the onslaught
on civil liberties. Recall that the terrorism bill was sent to
Congress on September 19. Nor were the contents of that proposed
legislation unfamiliar since in large part they had been offered
by the Clinton administration as portions of the Counter-Terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. Well before the end
of September Ashcroft's proposals to trash the Bill of Rights
were available for inspection and debate.
At the time when it counted, when a volley
of barks from the watchdogs might have provoked resistance in
Congress to the Patriot bill and warned Bush not to try his luck
with military tribunals there was mostly decorum from the opinion
makers, aside from amiable discussions of the propriety of torture.
Taken as a whole, the US press did not raise adequate alarums
about legislation that was going to give the FBI full snoop powers
on the Internet; to deny habeas corpus to non-citizens; to expand
even further warrantless searches unleashed in the Clinton era
with new powers given in 1995 to secret courts. These courts
operated under the terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act passed in the Carter years, in 1978.
In the run-up to Bush's signing of the
USA Patriot Act on October 25, the major papers were spiritless
about the provisions in the bill that were horrifying to civil
libertarians. It would have only have taken a few fierce columns
or editorials, such as were profuse after November 15, to have
given frightened politicians cover to join the only bold soul
in the US Senate, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin. Now it was Feingold,
remember, whose vote back in the spring let Ashcroft's nomination
out of the Judiciary Committee, at a time when most of his Democratic
colleagues were roaring to the news cameras about Ashcroft's
racism and contempt for due process. The Times and the Post both
editorialized against Ashcroft's nomination.
But then, when the rubber met the road,
and Ashcroft sent up the Patriot bill, which vindicated every
dire prediction of the spring, all fell silent except for Feingold,
who made a magnificent speech in the US Senate on October 25,
citing assaults on liberty going back to the Alien and Sedition
Acts of John Adams, the suspension of habeas corpus sanctioned
by the US Supreme Court in World War One, the internments of
World War Two (along with 110,00 Japanese Americans there were
11,000 German Americans and 3,000 Italian Americans put behind
barbed wire), the McCarthyite black lists of the 1950s and the
spying on antiwar protesters in the 1960s. Under the terms of
the bill, Feingold warned, the Fourth Amendment as it applies
to electronic communications, would be effectively eliminated.
He flayed the Patriot bill as an assault on "the basic rights
that make us who we are." It represented, he warned, "a
truly breath-taking expansion of police power."
Feingold was trying to win time for challenges
in Congress to specific provisions in Ashcroft's bill. Those
were the days in which sustained uproar from Safire or Lewis
or kindred commentators would have made a difference. So the
USA Patriot Act passed into law and Feingold's was the sole vote
against it in the Senate. Just like Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening
in their lonely opposition to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in
1964 he'll receive his due, and be hailed as a hero by the same
people who held their tongue in the crucial hours. Instead, as
Murray Kempton used to say of editorial writers, they waited
till after the battle to come down from the hills to shoot the
wounded.
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