Seeking Truth From Justice found to be the wholesale and long-term preventive detention of immigrants swept up in the months following 9/11. According to the report issued by the Justice Department's Inspector General, many immigrants who had no connection to the terrorist attacks of September 11 languished in federal lock-up for months at a time under an official "no bond policy" that effectively prohibited their release. The INS complained that the FBI had given them no evidence to justify their continued detention, yet some immigrants still spent up to eight months waiting for release. Conclusion: A pattern of deceit It is time for the Department of Justice to stop misleading the American people. The public cannot make informed decisions about the future of the police powers contained in the PATRIOT Act - whether to let them expire, renew them, or expand them cven more with PATRIOT Act II if the government is not truthful about the extent of its current powers. And the falsehoods are not limited to the PATRIOT Act. In a letter to the City Clerk of Ithaca, the FBI's Keith A. Devincentis, Special Agent in Charge of the Bureau's Albany office, misstates the FBI's powers under the Attorney General guidelines on domestic surveillance. "Contrary to popular television and theatrical portrayals, the FBI initiates cases predicted on facts, not suspicions or guesswork. 'Fishing expeditions' are clearly proscribed by FBI policy, Attorney General Guidelines, and other Federal statutes and regulations," Devincentis wrote. In fact, in the aftermath of the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, on May 30, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that he had rewritten the guidelines that govern FBI surveillance. The Ashcroft guidelines sever the tie between the start of an investigative activities and evidence of a crime. Ashcroft's guidelines give the FBI a green light to send undercover agents or informants to spy on worship services, political demonstrations and other public gatherings and in the Internet chat rooms without even the slightest evidence that wrongdoing is afoot. Contrary to what Devincentis wrote, the FBI is now very much empowered to conduct investigative "fishing expeditions" on First Amendment protected activities even though there is no indication of criminal activity. At this moment, the Justice Department has clear political incentives to soft-pedal the nature of the PATRIOT Act. But we can count on the fact that government investigators and prosecutors, when they appear before judges, will be making much bolder claims about what the Act lets them do. Some Americans might have a hard time believing that a Justice Department spokesperson could be inaccurate about basic matters of law with such flagrancy. The ACLU has certainly found that from time to time it is possible to make occasional errors about matters of law, or to be misunderstood by a reporter when discussing the law. In this case, however, we are witnessing a pattern of inaccuracy spread out over a long period of time, over a wide variety of news outlets, by various staff members, on a central issue in a prominent national debate. Seeking Truth From Justice The Department's inaccuracies have to do not with subtle, debatable points of legal interpretation, but clear matters of law that are spelled out in black and white in the text of the PATRIOT Act. There is no excuse for the Justice Department to get the PATRIOT Act wrong; the Department was behind the legislation from the beginning. The Justice Department drafted the Act (most of the Act's surveillance provisions were part of a longstanding wish list that had previously been sought by the Justice Department but rejected by Congress), and the Department was instrumental in forcing the bill through Congress with minimal discussion or debate in the panicked weeks after 9/11. Considering the extent to which the USA PATRIOT Act is the Ashcroft Justice Department's "baby," one might expect department officials to be proud parents. Instead, they seem intent on denying the truc nature of their creation. ARTICLE, NEW YORK TIMES, “JUST SHUT IT DOWN," MAY 27, 2005 Thomas L Friedman Op-Ed column says Guantanamo Bay prison should be shut down Immediately; says he is convinced that more Americans will die if it is kept open than if it is plowed under; says it has become worse than an embarrassment for United States; cites scathing remarks in newspapers of American allies such as Britain, Australia, Canada and Germany; says if there is case to be made against any of 500 inmates still there, it is time they were put on trial; says rest should be allowed to go home; agrees with Michael Posner of Human Rights First on need for US to be law-abiding and uphold values it wants others to embrace (M) London Shut it down. Just shut it down. I am talking about the war-on-terrorism P.O.W. camp at Guantanamo Bay. Just shut it down and then plow it under. It has become worse than an embarrassment. I am convinced that more Americans are dying and will die if we keep the Gitmo prison open than if we shut it down. So, please, Mr. President, just shut it down. If you want to appreciate how corrosive Guantanamo has become for America's standing abroad, don't read the Arab press. Don't read the Pakistani press. Don't read the Afghan press. Hop over here to London or go online and just read the British press! See what our closest allies are saying about Gitmo. And when you get done with that, read the Australian press and the Canadian press and the German press. It is all a variation on the theme of a May 8 article in The Observer of London that begins, "An American soldier has revealed shocking new details of abuse and sexual torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in the first high-profile whistle-blowing account to emerge from inside the topsecret base." Google the words "Guantanamo Bay and Australia" and what comes up is an Australian ABC radio report that begins. "New claims have emerged that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are being tortured by their American captors, and the claims say that Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib are among the victims." Just another day of the world talking about Guantanamo Bay. Why care? It's not because I am queasy about the war on terrorism. It is because I want to win the war on terrorism. And it is now obvious from reports in my own paper and others that the abuse at Guantanamo and within the whole U.S. military prison system dealing with terrorism is out of control. Tell me, how is it that over 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody so far? Heart attacks? This is not just deeply immoral, it is strategically dangerous. I can explain it best by analogy. For several years now I have argued that Israel needed to get out of the West Bank and Gaza, and behind a wall, as fast as possible. Not because the Palestinians are right and Israel wrong. It's because Israel today is surrounded by three large trends. The first is a huge population explosion happening all across the Arab world. The second is an explosion of the worst interpersonal violence between Israelis and Palestinians in the history of the conflict, which has only recently been defused by a cease-fire. And the third is an explosion of Arabic language multimedia outlets from the Internet to Al Jazeera. What was happening around Israel at the height of the intifada was that the Arab multimedia 5/27/05 NYT A23 Page 2 of 2 explosion was taking the images of that intifada explosion and feeding them to the Arab population explosion, melding in the minds of a new generation of Arabs and Muslims that their enemies were J.I.A. -- "Jews, Israel and America." That is an enormously toxic trend, and I hope Israel's withdrawal from Gaza will help deprive it of oxygen. I believe the stories emerging from Guantanamo are having a similar toxic effect on us -- inflaming sentiments against the U.S. all over the world and providing recruitment energy on the Internet for those who would do us ill. Husain Haqqani, a thoughtful Pakistani scholar now teaching at Boston University, remarked to me. "When people like myself say American values must be emulated and America is a bastion of freedom, we get Guantanamo Bay thrown in our faces. When we talk about the America of Jefferson and Hamilton, people back home say to us: 'That is not the America we are dealing with. We are dealing with the America of imprisonment without trial.TM" Guantanamo Bay is becoming the anti-Statue of Liberty. If we have a case to be made against any of the 500 or so inmates still in Guantanamo, then it is high time we put them on trial, convict as many possible (which will not be easy because of bungled Interrogations) and then simply let the rest go home or to a third country. Sure, a few may come back to haunt us. But at least they won't be able to take advantage of Guantanamo as an engine of recruitment to enlist thousands more. I would rather have a few more bad guys roaming the world than a whole new generation. "This is not about being for or against the war," said Michael Posner, the executive director of Human Rights First, which is closely following this issue "It is about doing it right. If we are going to transform the Middle East, we have to be law-abiding and uphold the values we want them to embrace -- otherwise it is not going to work." |