IP: trial balloon for special military tribunals

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> From: bdolan () usit net
> To: <dave () farber net>
> Subject: trial balloon for special military tribunals
> Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 14:50:49 -0400
> X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 4.72.3110.1
>
> Things are moving faster than I can keep up with.  However, as I understand
> it, the legislation Congress just passed allows George W. Bush to decide who
> is a terrorist.  He decides it, you are one.
>
> Now he "is considering the establishment of special military tribuinals" so
> persons defined as terroists "could be tried without the ordinary legal
> constraints of American justice."
>
> Brad
>
> http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010924/bprivacy.html
>
> Terrorizing Ourselves
> >From now on, tighter security is the rule. But how much of our freedom will
> we sacrifice?
> BY RICHARD LACAYO
>
> Two days after the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
> Virginia Sloan realized that if the terrorists wanted to attack American
> freedoms, they had got somewhere. "I was valet parking for dinner, and I had
> my hood and trunk and the inside of my car searched," says Sloan, executive
> director of the Constitution Project, a legal-issues organization in
> Washington. "Can we as Americans tolerate that? I think not."
>
> Maybe we can. Americans are generally unfriendly to security measures that
> intrude too much on their privacy. But that was before last week, before
> they saw the crematoriums in New York City and Washington and started to
> wonder if the next dive-bombing airliner could be aimed at them. If ever
> there was a time when they might be receptive to trimming their accustomed
> freedoms, that time is now.
>
> And whether they are receptive or not, the changes have already begun. Long
> waits to cross the Canadian and Mexican borders were the rule last week, as
> vehicles and travelers were finecombed by border police. Civil libertarians
> are bracing for an upsurge of "racial profiling" at airports targeting Arab
> Americans, or for an FBI investigation of the attacks that sucks in many
> innocent members of that group, or simply for a wave of hate crimes against
> them.
>
> Emergencies have always been a time when the niceties of law have been most
> vulnerable to the demands of national security or national hysteria. As
> Senate minority leader Trent Lott said last week, "When you're in this type
> of conflict, when you're at war, civil liberties are treated differently."
> World War II produced the internment camps for Japanese Americans, a
> development upheld in 1944 by the Supreme Court but later repudiated. After
> the bombing at the federal building in Oklahoma City, the Immigration and
> Naturalization Service was authorized to establish a new court to consider
> the deportation of suspected alien terrorists, in which cases would be heard
> without the usual obligation to inform the accused of the evidence against
> them.
>
> Now the Bush Administration is considering the establishment of special
> military tribunals. Suspected terrorists could be tried without the ordinary
> legal constraints of American justice. During World War II, German saboteurs
> were tried secretly that way in Washington, and those convicted were hanged
> 30 days later.
>
> Just one day after last week's attacks, the Senate also approved a provision
> expanding the circumstances under which law-enforcement agencies can force
> Internet service providers to hand over information about subscriber
> e-mails. If the Federal Government were to monitor more e-mails, a key
> question would be whether it would hold on to them for some time or dispose
> of them almost at once, as it now does with the information obtained from
> instant background checks mandated by federal law for gun purchases.
> Americans may be willing to let their e-mails pass one time through a sort
> of national filter that would screen for hints of terrorist activity. They
> will be far more reluctant to allow the government to collect a national
> e-mail database.
>
> Civil libertarians expect renewed calls for a national identification card.
> The cards could have photographs and hard-to-falsify identifying information
> like handprint or retina data that could be read by scanners at, say,
> airline counters. If cards were required for many common
> transactions—renting a car, buying an airline ticket—they would be useful
> for keeping track of criminals and terrorists. Or you. Eva Jefferson
> Paterson, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights Under
> Law in San Francisco, predicts that innocent citizens would be challenged
> constantly to produce their cards. "You could be stopped by the police to
> prove you can walk down the street," she says. "Poor people and people of
> color would be stopped the most."
>
> There could also be stepped-up public surveillance. At last year's Super
> Bowl in Tampa, Fla., law-enforcement officials secretly scanned spectators'
> faces with surveillance cameras and instantly matched their faceprints
> against photographs of suspected terrorists and known criminals in
> computerized databases. Facial-recognition technology might help, says Bruce
> Hoffman, vice president for external affairs at the Rand Corp. and a former
> adviser to the National Commission on Terrorism, but mostly after the fact,
> during an investigation. And that means storing all the face data collected,
> something civil libertarians fear will allow the government to track any
> individual. If systems were set up all over a city, you could be
> "checkpointed" by camera when you board a train, stop at a cash machine and
> enter a store or the place where you work. "We are vulnerable," says
> Hoffman, "and there's a certain level of risk that we have to accept and
> live with. To me, the cure can be far worse than the disease."
>
> Says Morton Halperin, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: "If
> you take both security and civil liberties seriously, you can find solutions
> that respect individual rights and privacy and still give the intelligence
> and law-enforcement agencies the scope that they need. We had worked that
> out in terms of airports. Nobody thinks you have the civil liberty to take
> knives on airplanes. I don't know who made the decision to let people bring
> knives on anyway, but it was certainly not civil libertarians."
>
> Reported by Andrew Goldstein/Washington, Chris Taylor/San Francisco and
> Elizabeth L. Bland/New York



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