- The storm of questions and criticism following revelations
that the Bush administration had numerous warnings of an impending hijacking
before the Sept. 11 tragedy have focused primarily on the Nixon-era mantra,
"What did he know, and when did he know it?" But even if a congressional
investigation agrees with Bush administration protestations that the warnings
weren't specific enough to know what to do, administration policy after
Sept. 11 is going to require some explaining, too.
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- The "lack of specific warnings" defense may
justify a lack of action before the airliners hit the World Trade Center,
but it can't explain away the lies that were told to Congress and the American
people after Sept. 11 to justify the administration's war on civil liberties.
The administration has been cynically using its own failure to act on intelligence
developed under then-existing laws to justify vastly increasing its own
power at the expense of civil freedoms.
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- Within a month of Sept. 11, Attorney General John Ashcroft
packaged an old FBI wish list as the USA Patriot Act and demanded Congress
pass it without discussion, because of the threat of yet another "Pearl
Harbor-like attack." He told us the administration needed new "tools"
to prevent unexpected terrorist attacks -- new wiretap authority; secret
searches; the use of secret evidence; secret immigration hearings; taping
lawyers' conversations; locking up "undesirables" on his command,
and other measures.
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- No less an expert than Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor told us that concerns about civil liberties and abuse of power
had to be shelved because of the "unexpected" new threat. Members
of Congress have been accused of being the next thing to traitors for questioning
administration policy and have even been forcibly expelled from Ashcroft's
secret immigration hearings. Thousands have been locked up and deported,
though no terrorists have been found, and our allies object to our holding
of prisoners in violation of international law.
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- By presidential decree, the press has been cut off from
normal access to government information. Local law enforcement is being
deputized for federal immigration duty and Ashcroft is indicting lawyers
who represent alleged terrorists a bit too independently. Even at the state
level, in places like Minnesota, local law enforcement has gotten on the
bandwagon with state "antiterrorism" bills that ape the Ashcroft
proposals.
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- All of this has been justified in the name of preventing
another "surprise attack." The administration, however, had the
right "tools" in place before Sept. 11. Those tools would have
proved effective, if the administration had known how to use them.
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- Now we know that we were all deceived. Recent revelations
about the Sept. 11 tragedy prove that existing investigative powers were
effective. The Bush administration used its own failure to act on the warnings
it had received to justify grabbing even more power, at the expense of
our civil liberties, by deceiving Congress and the American people.
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- The USA Patriot Act became law in less than a month,
without any hearings. Now that we know it was passed under false pretenses,
Congress should repeal it just as quickly. And the Bush administration
should rescind the policies that diminish our civil liberties, until we
can get an honest assessment of what went wrong in the months before Sept.
11.
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- -- Peter Erlinder, a professor at William Mitchell Law
School, is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild.
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- http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/2848003.html
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