US Pushes Freedom Abroad, Stifles It Here

by David Lazarus

U.S. forces are closing in on Baghdad to bring freedom to the Iraqi people. On the home front, federal authorities are expanding their surveillance of U.S. citizens.

The White House decries treatment of U.S. soldiers captured in Iraq. Yet Afghan fighters held by the United States are deliberately denied protection under the Geneva Convention.

"It's a complete double standard," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego nonprofit organization. "How can we preach democracy in Iraq while the government is doing all these other things at home?"

This is what civil liberties advocates are asking as the war in Iraq intersects with America's war on terror.

"The policies are deeply contradictory," said Pamela Karlan, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in constitutional law.

No one disputes that law enforcement authorities need to be fully equipped to defend the flock from predators. The question critics are asking is how many freedoms and legal protections should be sacrificed in the name of national security.

"We're living in a whole new world," acknowledged Randall Scarlett, a San Francisco attorney who focuses on civil rights cases. "But the degradation of citizens' rights cannot in any way be considered a healthy and decent thing to do to our democracy."

The latest apparent drop in that bucket is news that the U.S. Justice Department has significantly increased use of emergency powers enabling it to tap phones and seize personal records without a court's prior approval.

Attorney General John Ashcroft has personally signed more than 170 "emergency foreign intelligence warrants" allowing wiretaps and searches of people deemed threats to national security.

His use of this little-known measure is in fact three times greater than that of all other U.S. attorneys general combined over the past 23 years.

"In the post-9/11 world, it shouldn't be a surprise that more emergency warrants are being issued," said Mark Corallo, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington. "The reason you're doing it is because you're going after spies and terrorists."

That would be suspected spies and terrorists?

"Right."

Corallo also stressed that all the anti-terrorism moves have been upheld in court, including in the U.S. Supreme Court, which on Monday rejected -- albeit on procedural grounds -- a challenge to the government's broader surveillance powers.

"This is all within the law," he said. "We're on solid legal ground and solid constitutional ground."

But Stanford's Karlan countered that the same was said when courts upheld the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and loyalty oaths during the McCarthy era.

"The Justice Department may be succeeding in the short run," she said. "It will be a different question when we look back 10 years from now and ask whether the courts got it right."

Civil liberties advocates have been crying foul ever since passage of the Patriot Act in the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It expanded the government's ability to conduct surveillance and searches.

Meanwhile, they can't help but take note of President Bush's insistence that captured U.S. soldiers in Iraq be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, which requires that prisoners of war "must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation."

However, the more than 600 prisoners captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and held at a military facility in Cuba have been denied POW status and are instead termed "unlawful combatants." They do not, in turn, fall under the safeguards of the Geneva Convention.

"It's a stark example of doublespeak," said Ann Beeson, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

"Protecting civil liberties in this country should serve as an example to the rest of the world," she said. "The promise of democracy in Iraq rings hollow if we're gutting our own core liberties at home."

What about national security?

"No one's saying you shouldn't vigorously go after terrorists," Beeson replied. "But in a democracy, you comply with the Bill of Rights before you do it."


Published on Tuesday, March 25, 2003 by the San Francisco Chronicle