God bless Big Brother

Law enforcement officials are taking advantage of the war on terrorism to get everything they ever wanted.

By Damien Cave and Katharine Mieszkowski

Sept. 22, 2001 | Northwest Airlines kicked three Arab-American men off a flight from Minneapolis to Philadelphia Friday, simply because other passengers refused to fly on the same plane with them. The airline defended removing the men from the plane, saying that security rules gave it permission to "reaccommodate" passengers. The Council on American-Islamic Relations reacted immediately: "This is racial and religious profiling of the worst kind. Both the passengers and the airplane personnel should be ashamed of their actions."

Even as Arab-Americans face daily affronts to their civil liberties, Congress is crafting new legislation to further limit their freedoms -- and everyone else's. And while there is some dissent being expressed behind closed doors in Congress, an "anti-terrorism" bill is expected to be formally introduced next week. Given the current climate of fear and anger, most observers expect easy passage.

The process started last Sunday after the Bush administration and congressional leaders met and agreed to come up with drafts of an anti-terrorism act. By Wednesday, two draft bills had been released. One came directly from the Department of Justice; the other was from Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. The two bills share many provisions. Among them: extending more aid to victims of terrorism; allowing for so-called "roving wiretaps"; and giving law enforcement access to previously off-limits education records. Now, legislators are at work crafting the two draft bills into one proposal that could be introduced next week, but there are some policy differences between the two bills.

"The immigration proposal and the wiretap proposal are two points where differences remain," says David Carle, a Leahy spokesman.

The Department of Justice's bill introduces a host of surveillance and detention measures that have been immediately denounced by civil libertarians. The proposal includes intrusions on e-mail privacy, extensions of the government's ability to use information gathered by dubious means (such as torture) and the relaxation of safeguards against intrusive government surveillance.

Some critics are accusing the Justice Department of taking opportunistic advantage of the national security crisis to push aside the judicial checks and balances that hold law enforcement accountable.

"The politics of this is: Let's try to get our wish-list passed in the name of preventing terrorism, because Congress is unusually receptive right now," says Mike Godwin, policy fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology. "It's a Department of Justice bill written by career Justice people who have a longstanding agenda and see the opportunity to put things in that they have always wanted to have."

The proposals causing the greatest outcry focus on immigration. One section would allow immigrants to be detained indefinitely without being charged with a crime or appearing before a judge. Under present law, an immigration judge determines whether the government case against a suspect is good enough to justify holding him or her, but if the DOJ bill becomes law, the prosecutor would be judge, jury and jailer.

"These actions offend the Constitution and are an affront to the millions of law-abiding immigrants in our country as well as the millions of other citizens who are sons and daughters of immigrants," says Anthony Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU has been joined by a motley crew of more than 150 organizations both liberal and conservative. Everyone from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum to the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee has pledged to work with Congress to rein in the attack on civil liberties.

Congressional leaders from both parties also objected to the prospect of detaining immigrants indefinitely. "It allows the INS to hold immigrants until the attorney general is convinced that they're not a threat," says Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. This could take a week, a month or years, but the problem is that it's subjective. "It goes much further than any other immigration law -- possibly too far."

Next page: You want a wiretap -- you got it!