American Prison Camps Are on the Way
By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet Posted on October 9, 2006, Printed on November 2, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/42458/
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 governing the treatment of
detainees is the culmination of relentless fear-mongering by the Bush
administration since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Because
the bill was adopted with lightning speed, barely anyone noticed that
it empowers Bush to declare not just aliens, but also U.S. citizens,
"unlawful enemy combatants." Bush & Co. has portrayed the
bill as a tough way to deal with aliens to protect us against
terrorism. Frightened they might lose their majority in Congress in the
November elections, the Republicans rammed the bill through Congress
with little substantive debate. Anyone who donates money to a
charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or
who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an
"unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes
American citizens. The bill also strips habeas corpus rights
from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress
has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of
rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill
is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the
issue comes before it. Although more insidious, this law
follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation.
In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted
immigrants and dissidents. In 1798, the Federalist-led
Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and
Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's
political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary
for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants
sympathized with the Republicans. The Alien Enemies Act
provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of
any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000
French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France
and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends
Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of
endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only
two years and no one was deported under it. The Sedition Act
provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed,
published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the
intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The
Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the
government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition
Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the
Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against
Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and
newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams. Subsequent
examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering
during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the
Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible
internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the
Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act). During the
McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived
threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal
surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox
political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost
their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in
"red-baiting." One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A.
Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime
of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest
government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into
the United States. In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States.
Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie
about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can
bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need." That day
has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the
basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he
determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown
& Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a
huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of
undesirables. In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States,
Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk
in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without
understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman
Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they
need to watch what they say, watch what they do." We can expect
Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties.
Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin
Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give
up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty
or security."
Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is
president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S.
representative to the executive committee of the American Association
of Jurists. Her new book, "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has
Defied the Law," will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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