U.S.: A Dark Decade for Civil Rights and Liberties

Πηγή: The International News Magazine
By Kanya D'Almeida
Saturday, 10 September

WASHINGTON, Sep 9 (IPS) - The tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center's Twin Towers and the Pentagon on Sep. 11, 2001 are marked by mourning.

With rallies planned across the country, largely concentrated at the sites of the twin tragedies in Washington D.C. and Lower Manhattan in New York City, victims' family members and politicians will gather on
Sunday to share a solemn moment for those who were killed and maimed on that fateful day.

But another group of mourners are making themselves heard this year, lamenting more than just civilian deaths.

Led by civil rights and advocacy organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Brennan Center for Justice, this group is marking the demise of pre-9/11 democracy in the U.S., using the auspicious day to demand restoration of basic human and civil rights.

"We are using this moment to take a step back and ask big, broad questions about how and why the U.S. continues to define itself in a state of perpetual emergency, how we seem to be moving towards a national security state, rather than returning to a proper balance between liberty and security," Ben Wizner, litigation director of the ACLU's National Security Project and co-author of the union's newly-minted report ". Call to Courage", told IPS.

Wizner acknowledged that the U.S. has a long history of responding to national trauma by restricting rights and ladling out unchecked power to the executive during times of crisis - a pattern that is clearly marked out by the government's clampdown on individual rights and liberties during the Civil War, the Cold War and World War II, he said.

"But part of that pattern has always entailed realising our mistakes, admitting when we went too far, and attempting to regain some sort of balance in civil society," Wizner said, adding that in the decade since 9/11, the opposite has been true.

"The danger of defining a war as being against 'terrorism' is that it takes place everywhere and may last forever, the war itself becomes an abstraction rather than a reality, and there is no end in sight," he said.

"After the massive security response to 9/11, we all thought the pendulum would swing back, but it appears to be going in the same direction. Despite the fear-mongering, we haven't seen massive follow-up attacks in the U.S., the political debate is the same as it was 10 years ago, more and more power is being channeled to the
executive and to law enforcement and there has been increased authorization of illegal detentions without charge or trial and to the use of lethal force away from traditional battlefields," he concluded.

According to the CCR, the decade since 9/11 has been used to "shred the U.S. Constitution, trample on the Bill of Rights, discard the Geneva Conventions, and heap scorn on the domestic torture statute and the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment."

Hauling President Barack Obama into the spotlight for failing to deliver on any of his 9/11-related promises, the CCR claimed that Obama "has failed to shut down Guantánamo and to hold the Bush administration accountable for its war crimes, including torture;
(has allowed) war in Afghanistan to rage on with no sign of termination; and has perpetuated the practice of rendition to third countries for interrogation and indefinite detention, when monitoring and 'diplomatic assurances' cannot prevent against torture."

To commemorate the anniversary, the CCR compiled a database of its own clients who have suffered from the climate of impunity and illegality that has reigned for 10 years, including testimony from Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was tortured for a full year in Syria; 17-year-old Mohammed Khan Tumani, one of the original 22 minors to be detained and severely abused in Guantanamo Bay; and Benamar Benatta, who spent a total of five years in detention and is currently a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against former attorney-general John Ashcroft.

Benatta's testimony reads, "(While) in detention, I was unaware of how far the horrors of 9/11 had changed our world. We have let fear and hatred get the best of us."

As security tightens around New York and Washington on the eve of the weekend anniversary, a pressing concern on the radar of countless civil rights advocates has been the impingement of the state surveillance apparatus onto personal privacy.

A recent report by the Associated Press that exposed the close working ties between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) drew attention to some of the
destructive effects of counterterrorism on local communities, particularly the CIA's practice of deploying "authentic" spies into local communities for information-gathering purposes.

According to the AP report's authors, "the NYPD [currently] operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government and it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying."

Faiza Patel, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Programme at the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote last week, "The privacy of our homes and our communications has been eroded by a range of new measures. These include secret 'sneak and peek' warrants that allow the government to search your home without telling you about it until months later and national security letters that compel banks and Internet service providers to secretly reveal your personal information."

Critics say that far from making the country safer, these programmes and policies have actually made the U.S. more vulnerable, both in its image overseas and, more importantly, on a domestic level. 

According to Heidi Beirich, research director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the post-9/11 climate has seen a rise in hate groups across the country, possibly one of the most worrisome manifestations of a population's insecurity.

"There were no specific anti-Islamic hate groups before 9/11," Beirich told IPS.

"Now there are groups solely devoted to anti-Muslim hatred, including groups such as Pam Geller's 'Stop Islamization of America'," she added, referencing a group notorious for its Muslim-bashing that is
planning what will undoubtedly be a highly racially charged rally in New York this Sunday.

The six biggest vulnerabilties a decade after 9/11

Mark Lennihan/AP - Ten years after September 11, those who served on the 9/11 Commission reflect on the leadership lessons America has — and hasn’t — learned since the tragedy.

Πηγή: Washington Post
By John Lehman and On Leadership
September 7 2011

This piece is part of an On Leadership roundtable, examining whether — ten years after September 11 — America has learned the leadership lessons from the 9/11 Commission Report. The panelists for this roundtable are six of the ten 9/11 Commissioners: Former Governor Thomas Kean and fomer Congressman Lee Hamilton, former Senator Slade Gorton, former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, former White House Counsel Fred F. Fielding, and former Congressman and U.S. Ambassador Tim Roemer.

Despite the often grotesque inefficiencies of our government, America has done a lot of things right in the ten years after September 11 and the six years after the 9/11 Commission Report. We have actively prevented any major attacks in the United States, have effectively destroyed Al Qaeda as a mortal threat, and have killed Osama Bin Laden.
And in this time, we also have regained our self-confidence as nation. An Islamist threat will be with us for many years in the future—we have recognized this, yet not panicked; not abandoned the Bill of Rights and our civil liberties. Certainly these accomplishments have come at a very high price in blood, treasure and influence. Whether our decision to intervene in Iraq was necessary or wise will be long debated. Still, if how well we have applied the 9/11 Commission’s 41 recommendations is any measure of our progress, the glass is considerably more full than empty.

But it has fallen to our lot as commissioners to continue to nag the government about those vulnerabilities that remain. I won’t list all of them here, nor have we as commissioners tried to agree on the priorities, but there are six critical weaknesses I find most important to fix:

1. The Director of National Intelligence

The commission recommended creation of a very powerful intelligence executive with a lean headquarters but real power over budget and personnel for the entire U.S. intelligence community. We intended the position to tear down the stovepipes that prevented the sharing and fusing of information, to reduce bureaucratic bloat, and to focus the intelligence effort.

While Congress created such a position, Presidents Bush and Obama have made it neither lean nor powerful. There’s now a huge new bureaucracy sitting on top the existing 15 agencies; and this despite that the Director of National Intelligence is without budget or personnel powers. In the six years since the role was created, there have been four directors.

2. The FBI

It is time to re-open the issue of splitting domestic law enforcement and domestic intelligence, as they do in the UK. Here the FBI does both, and law enforcement dominates. The commissioners felt it would be too disruptive in the critical post-9/11 environment to attempt such a split, but ten years later we need to make the separation and strengthen domestic intelligence.

3. Radio spectrum

The fact that police and fireman nationwide were confined to a very narrow and saturated radio spectrum, while swaths of bandwidth went unused, greatly contributed to high casualties in New York. A decade later, our presidents and Congress have still done nothing to fix this problem for first responders.

4. Identity checks

Eighteen of the hijackers obtained 30 false state-issued IDs that enabled them to board the planes on 9/11. This is easily remedied by the Real-ID system requiring proof of identity. So far only 22 states have adopted this standard. Moreover, while we’ve instituted the reliable US-VISIT system, which requires all visitors entering the United States prove they are who they say they are, there still has been nothing put in place to record when or whether visitors have left the country.

5. Congressional reform

Effective oversight of our intelligence community requires effective congressional committees. The House and Senate intelligence committees do not have such powers, and are routinely overruled or ignored by appropriations and other committees.

Six years ago, when we were drafting our 9/11 Commission recommendations, we suggested that the Department of Homeland Security report to 2 committees and subcommittees in each house of Congress rather than the 88 they did at the time. But instead of seeing major reductions since then, they now report to 106 committees and subcommittees. This has to change.

6. Presidential transitions

Our investigation found that a major contributor to the systemic failures in September 2001 was the fact that, a whole nine months after President Bush’s inauguration, most of the senior national security presidential appointments were still not in place. The causes were an inexperienced and ponderous White House selection process, an antiquated and lengthy FBI clearance process, and a Senate confirmation process that was slow, intrusive and overwhelmed by volume—it required confirmation down to a relatively low level of appointee. The transition to the Obama administration was just as bad. We recommended changes that could easily fix this serious vulnerability, but they have been ignored.

Ten years after the attack, Americans are more secure and should be quite proud of that; but we need to keep the pressure on our elected leaders to carry through on fixing the glaring vulnerabilities remaining. The task will always be a work in progress. The threats to our values and way of life will always be evolving. Still, we can and must ensure that American ingenuity will always stay ahead of them.

(John Lehman was Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission.)