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Subject: Reopsted from the "Economist"
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Date Posted: 20:18:39 10/06/02 Sun
Almost everywhere, governments have taken September 11th as an opportunity to restrict their citizens' freedom
FROM the outset, the struggle against al-Qaeda was cast by George Bush as a war for freedom, and for most people, in most places, the 350 or so days that have passed since last September 11th will not be associated with any noticeable diminution of their freedom. For most Afghans, and especially Afghan women, they will surely be associated with liberation. For a few people, though, the aftermath of September 11th has brought unfair arrest, detention without trial, enforced expulsion or some other form of intrusion or repression. Even for those not directly affected by al-Qaeda's attacks, the war in Afghanistan or the anti-terrorism measures taken almost everywhere, the past 12 months may yet come to be seen as an annus miserabilis as far as freedom is concerned.
The reason is that, from motives good and bad, governments everywhere have been restricting rights or enforcing existing laws more harshly, and thus reducing the freedoms that people used to enjoy. This is not to say that they have always been wrong to do so: most people in a democracy are quite willing to suffer the inconvenience and invasion of privacy that come with a search of their bag or briefcase when they board an aircraft or enter a public building. Indeed, they might well be worried if they were as free and unimpeded in such places today as they had been a year ago. But their freedom has been curtailed nonetheless and, taken together, many such minor infringements of freedom, coupled with the precedents they create, may add up to a considerable loss of liberty.
In the United States, where the concept of freedom is built into the very idea of what it means to be an American, and where freedom is therefore never taken for granted, any attempt to reduce it is stoutly resisted. Even so, attempts there have been. Those that have caused most concern to civil libertarians fall into one of three categories. First are the administration's attempts to circumvent the law. “Bush, Ashcroft [the attorney-general, John Ashcroft] run roughshod over Bill of Rights,” says a study by the Cato Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank, a sentiment echoed by other watchdogs.
One example is the government's contention that “enemy combatants” have no rights to the due process of American law—meaning they can be denied access to a lawyer and may be detained indefinitely without trial—and moreover that the president can designate even American citizens to be enemy combatants. That is what Mr Bush has done in the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana-born man captured with the Taliban forces, then transferred to the American base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and now held on a naval brig in Norfolk, Virginia.
Both in his case and in that of Jose Padilla, another American, this one arrested in Chicago on suspicion of involvement in an al-Qaeda plot to set off a “dirty” bomb, the government's motive seems to be a desire to avoid civilian trials. That is thought to be because of the fierce defence put up by John Walker Lindh, an American who fought for the Taliban, and the bizarre course of the trial in a federal criminal court of Zacarias Moussaoui, accused of being al-Qaeda's 20th hijacker. If the government gets its way, though, it will be able simply to lock up enemy combatants, even Americans, without the bother of a trial. Mr Bush has already called Mr Padilla (also known as Abdullah al Muhajir) a “bad guy” and “a threat to the country who is now off the street, where he should be.” Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, has said, “We are not interested in trying and punishing him at the moment. We are interested in finding out what he knows.”
Rules are for ignoring?
A similar desire to escape legal obligations seems to lie behind the government's eagerness to bypass extradition procedures when it has transferred people suspected of links to terrorism from one country to another, neither of them the United States. Typically, such people—the numbers are unknown—will have been picked up in a country like Indonesia on CIA advice and then taken to a country such as Egypt or Jordan where they can be interrogated using procedures, including torture, that would be illegal in the United States.
A dislike of tiresome rules was also evident in the government's early reluctance to consider the (now) roughly 600 fighters held in Guantanamo Bay to be prisoners of war under the Geneva conventions. It can be seen even more clearly, though, in Mr Bush's order authorising military commissions to try suspected terrorists. Critics are appalled not just that the order betrays a profound lack of confidence in the criminal justice system, but that it also gives the president the unfettered discretion to select those who will be tried by military tribunal. He will also be the ultimate decision-maker in any appeal.
The second general category of concern about the government's anti-terror measures since September 11th is the secrecy in which they have been taken. The Cato report accuses the administration of “supporting measures antithetical to freedom, such as secretive subpoenas, secretive arrests, secretive trials and secretive deportations.” Human Rights Watch, which keeps vigil over civil liberties from New York, reported two weeks ago that “Some 1,200 non-citizens have been secretly arrested and incarcerated in connection with the September 11th investigation... Turning the presumption of innocence on its head, the Department of Justice kept [752 of them] in detention until it decided they had no links to or knowledge of terrorism... Most were ultimately removed from the United States.” Jill Savitt of Human Rights Watch worries that because so much has happened in secret, it has all been done with little public debate.
Click to enlarge
The third area of concern is the sinister nature of some of the wider measures now being taken in the war on terror. Not surprisingly, Arabs have come under close scrutiny over the past year. Despite denials of racial profiling, the authorities stand accused of going after Muslims and Arab-Americans indiscriminately through programmes like the FBI's systematic interviewing of 5,000 people of Arab descent.
Looks funny
In truth, it would be odd if the FBI were not at work among Arab-Americans, but the need to take great care should be apparent from the lessons of history. It is now well recognised that much injustice was involved in campaigns against communists and anarchists after the first world war, in the internment of over 110,000 Japanese-Americans during the second world war and in the McCarthyite witch-hunts at the start of the cold war. Such things could never happen again, some may argue. Yet the administration has been eager to start TIPS, a Terrorism Information and Prevention System in which millions of citizens will be asked to spy upon one another and send their titbits to a central database. Recent legislation will allow the police to demand records from any business about any person, including medical records from hospitals, educational records from universities, even the reading tastes of shoppers in bookshops and borrowers from libraries.
Americans, of course, are not alone in having seen their freedoms reduced recently. Most countries have taken the opportunity of September 11th to tighten up in the name of security. Common to most of these efforts, as to many of the anti-terror measures recommended by Mr Bush in July, is the long-standing nature of the desire behind them. Often existing legislation has just been extended or amplified. Thus in early June it emerged that the British government wanted to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, passed two years earlier, to allow countless Whitehall departments, local authorities and other bodies to demand all manner of information about e-mails and other communications. The ensuing outcry obliged it to restrain itself somewhat, just as it soon had to rethink its desire to give foreign authorities access to information about British companies. Yet another rebuff came in July when its post-September 11th anti-terrorism act was ruled discriminatory and in breach of human-rights law. The act had given the home secretary powers to detain indefinitely foreigners suspected of terrorism without charging them or sending them for trial.
Buff up the thumbscrews
Most European countries responded to September 11th by rushing through new measures or dusting off old ones to give the police wide powers to investigate and detain suspects. The European Union brought in a long-contested warrant that allows police in one country to arrest people wanted in another for any of 32 crimes, many of them unrelated to terrorism. The European Commission has also proposed much wider definitions of terrorism and what constitutes a terrorist group. Most EU governments have also leapt at the chance to act against asylum-seekers and tighten immigration laws, though their motives in doing so have little to do with security.
They have leapt at other measures too. Thus Spain has moved to ban Batasuna, the political wing of the Basque terror group ETA; Joaquin Almunia, a former leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, says it would have been impossible before September 11th. France has amended its existing anti-terror legislation to allow the police greater freedom to stop and search cars; intended to catch terrorists, the measure is in fact chiefly used to find drugs, says Michel Tubiana, president of the League of the Rights of Man. Another amendment obliges telephone companies and Internet service-providers to keep for a year records of all their customers' communications. In practice, says Mr Tubiana, it is hard to keep only the numbers and not also the content of the messages.
Germany, too, is preparing legislation requiring e-mails and website-address records to be retained. Its internal intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has been given direct access to records held by banks, and can now ask the postal service and airlines for information on demand.
On the fringes of Europe, Russia has astutely moved to improve relations with America and, simultaneously, to crack down on the rebels in its secessionist Muslim republic of Chechnya. Despite plenty of evidence to suggest that the long years of fighting in Chechnya have been fuelled by much more than Islamic extremism, Russia has tried to portray the war as little more than an anti-terrorist struggle. Though Chechnya is undoubtedly infested with Islamic extremists, their presence hardly justifies Russia's own terror tactics. Yet Russia escapes censure, certainly from an America now absorbed above all in a global fight against terrorism.
Farther afield, India, emboldened by September 11th, has passed a law that authorises the police to detain suspects for 90 days without trial and to accept evidence from unidentified witnesses. India has long been concerned about terrorist infiltrators from Pakistan. But the real purpose, says Kapil Sibal, an opposition member of Parliament who is also a constitutional lawyer, is to use “this draconian legislation” against India's own citizens.
Hong Kong's anti-terror proposals, which define a terrorist act as one involving the use or threat of force to influence a government, have also been criticised as being so vague that they could be used against a group as unpolitical as the Falun Gong cult. Critics also worry about the power given to Hong Kong's chief executive, who can, for example, freeze the assets of anyone he considers, with “reasonable grounds”, to be a terrorist.
Much worse has happened in mainland China, or rather in its province of Xinjiang. There the government has long been persecuting Muslim Uighurs who have protested at the discrimination they suffer and at the policy of swamping them with migrants from other parts of China. In the past, though, the authorities were at pains to play down the Uighurs' protests. But since September 11th the Chinese have deemed it geopolitically correct to admit to the discontent and describe it as terrorism. Indeed, they claim that 1,000 Chinese Muslims have been trained in Osama bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Astonishingly, America this week obliged China by declaring a Muslim separatist group to be a terrorist organisation. Amnesty International had earlier reported thousands of political prisoners, torture and summary executions, with an intensification of the “strike-hard” anti-crime campaign leading to executions among alleged Uighur nationalists. A new wave of executions started after September 11th, it said.
Similar tales come from the new states of Central Asia. The threat of Islamism there has been used to justify ever greater repression by presidents such as Nursultan Nazarbaev of Kazakhstan and Askar Akaev of Kirgizstan, who are squelching dissent as they entrench themselves in power. The sad truth is that September 11th has given despots everywhere a licence to brand all their critics terrorists and take action accordingly. The United States, which anyway needs the help of men like Mr Akaev to prosecute its war against al-Qaeda, is often disinclined to criticise, partly because some of the measures are directly modelled on American ones. Indeed, in a hideous piece of Grand Guignol inspired directly by Mr Bush's actions, President Charles Taylor of Liberia has declared three of his critics (the editor of a local newspaper and two others) to be “illegal combatants”. They would therefore be tried for terrorism in a military, not a civilian, court, ruled Mr Taylor.
The widening crack
If all this reads like a tale of woe, no wonder: that is what it is. The world is undoubtedly less free than it was on September 10th last year. Most of the blame for this lies squarely with al-Qaeda. Many governments, it is true, have simply seized the opportunity to pass restrictive measures that they have long coveted. Others, less malign, have undoubtedly been too ready to restrict liberty in the name of an effective campaign against terror: they have reckoned, probably correctly, that the voters would be less forgiving of another terrorist attack made possible by excessive freedom than of the various new restrictions they have imposed. Security is uppermost in the minds of citizens these days, and the true price of an erosion of freedom becomes apparent only over time, which is to say after the next election.
But spare some sympathy, if you can, for the politicians. Some values—good values—are to some degree always at odds with each other, which means that governments must try to balance them. Freedom and security are two such values, even if the trade-off between them is not as simple as politicians often try to claim: a loss of freedom does not necessarily bring a commensurate gain in security.
Do not despair. Though restrictions, once in place, are always difficult to dislodge, and governments are usually loth to give power back to the people from whom they have taken it, freedoms lost can nonetheless be regained. If they are not, however, Mr Bush's fine words last September will have simply served to widen for ever the crack in the Liberty Bell.
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