Two years after Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA PATRIOT Act, political debate about civil liberties seems focused on the wrong issues, to the detriment of liberty and security alike.
President Bush’s assertion on Tuesday that "we’ll get to the bottom of this and move on" has the ring of wishful thinking. This scandal is going to roil the White House for quite a while. That prediction holds even if — as seems reasonably likely — the "senior administration officials" who allegedly sought to discredit, or spite, a whistle-blower by telling reporters that his wife worked for the CIA were unaware that she was a covert agent, and thus committed no crime.
Underlying the debate over the aftermath of the Iraq war is a question that, in the long run, looms larger than all of the others: Is President Bush’s foreign policy making Americans safer — or less safe — from the danger of being obliterated by nuclear-armed terrorists?
A civil-libertarian backlash against the USA PATRIOT Act is gathering steam. More than 140 cities and communities in 27 states have passed resolutions opposing it, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU itself has intensified its nonstop barrage, filing a lawsuit on July 30 challenging the constitutionality of one of the act’s most far-reaching provisions, and airing TV ads that warn of government spies secretly searching homes. Some librarians say they are destroying records to prevent the feds from tracking patrons’ book borrowing and Internet browsing.
"The only thing I know for certain is that these are bad people." So said President Bush during his July 17 press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when a reporter asked whether they had concerns about "not getting justice" for some 660 Muslim prisoners from 42 countries languishing in 8-by-8-foot cells at Guantanamo Bay.
President Bush’s pre-war exaggerations of the strength of the intelligence that Iraq had an active nuclear weapons program and large stockpiles of biological and chemical arms were neither "lies" nor as far from being true as partisan critics suggest. His now-infamous assertion in his January 28 State of the Union address — that the British government "has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" — would have been quite accurate had he crossed out "has learned" and inserted "believes." More recently, Bush could have repaired the damage to his credibility by taking responsibility for any overstatements or errors about details, while carefully explaining why the case for war was and remains strong.
Some of the 762 mostly Middle Eastern men detained on immigration charges after the September 11 attacks "appear to have been arrested more by virtue of chance encounters or tenuous connections to a … lead rather than by any genuine indications of a possible connection with or possession of information about terrorist activity," concludes Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in his 200-page report, released on June 2, on the detentions.
Two major court decisions on the rights-or lack of rights-of suspected terrorists, Talibans, and others detained in the war against terrorism came down on March 11. The first held that the 650 foreign nationals seized by U.S. forces abroad and detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have no legal rights enforceable in U.S. courts. The second decision, by contrast, sharply rebuffed the Bush administration position that even a U.S. citizen arrested in this country can be held incommunicado indefinitely, with no right ever to see a lawyer, a judge, or anyone else, if the military labels this person an enemy combatant.
"Before we interviewed detained foreign national Al Qaeda subjects in East Africa in connection with the East African embassy bombings," former FBI Director Louis Freeh told congressional investigators last October, "FBI agents gave them their Miranda rights."
Imagine President Bush responding as follows to the latest rebuffs from France, Germany, South Korea, and others and to the stunning surge of anti-Americanism around the world:
