[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: A Very Bad Deal

Fri Oct 8 10:45:02 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
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A Very Bad Deal

October 8, 2004

In the days of fear following the 9/11 attacks, Congress
gave the government new powers to track down terrorists.
Most Americans approved, expecting that, at worst, they
were trading minor infringements of civil liberties for
well-planned and well-executed operations that would make
us safer. Instead we got a mounting pile of bungled
operations, ranging from merely inept to scandalously
abusive, and military prisons filled with Afghans, Iraqis
and other Muslims who had committed no real offenses. 

Our investigators, sent after dangerous terrorists, came
back with a motley crew of hapless innocents and people who
had said and done stupid things but were hardly a threat to
the nation's security. Some cases were Keystone Kops
capers, like the grounding of a trans-Atlantic flight so
the authorities could nab the former pop singer Cat
Stevens, now a Muslim named Yusuf Islam, who was on the
federal watch list. Others were more serious, like the
terrible miscarriage of justice, reported yesterday in The
Times, by top Justice Department officials in moving
against four Middle Eastern immigrants. Three of them were
convicted and imprisoned - two on terrorism charges - until
the government was forced to repudiate its own case. 

Brandon Mayfield, an Oregon lawyer who was imprisoned for
two weeks after the F.B.I. botched a fingerprint match and
accused him of complicity in the Madrid railroad bombings,
is suing to have parts of the Patriot Act overturned. Mr.
Mayfield says federal agents invaded his home secretly,
tapped his phone and seized some of his family's
belongings. His name was among 20 produced by a
computerized fingerprint comparison. He was the only one
arrested, and Mr. Mayfield says he was singled out because
he is a Muslim. 

Confidence in the Justice Department's judgment and sense
of proportion has been undermined by the government's
tendency to make a huge deal out of arrests that turn out
to involve unimportant people with bad attitudes but no
ability - or even any apparent will - to do anything
dangerous. In November, a Somali citizen was imprisoned in
Columbus, Ohio, for supposedly talking about blowing up a
shopping mall. There was no evidence of any confederates or
weapons, or even a plot, but people in Ohio were treated to
days of debate about whether it was safe to go shopping
anymore. 

The government managed to get six young Arab-Americans from
Lackawanna, N.Y., who had spent time at training camps in
Afghanistan, to plead guilty to terrorism charges and
accept long prison terms last year. But that very thin case
is a far cry from what Mr. Bush advertised in his 2003
State of the Union speech: "We've broken Al Qaeda cells in
Hamburg, Milan, Madrid, London, Paris, as well as Buffalo,
N.Y." 

After 9/11 Mr. Bush gave himself the power to declare
anyone, including American citizens, an "enemy combatant"
and then jail such people indefinitely without charges or
due process. The government held Yaser Hamdi, a U.S.
citizen who grew up in Saudi Arabia and was captured in
Afghanistan, in solitary confinement for two years. Without
ever demonstrating that their prisoner had any connection
to terrorism, officials recently offered Mr. Hamdi a chance
to be deported to Saudi Arabia if he stayed there for at
least five years, renounced his citizenship and agreed to
report contacts with potential terrorists. At last word,
the Saudi government was refusing to join this absurd
arrangement. 

The president used the "enemy combatant" rule to jail
hundreds of supposed members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban at
the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, and would not submit
his judgments to public scrutiny until the Supreme Court
ordered it. It turns out that the supposedly dangerous
terrorists were for the most part neither terrorists nor
dangerous. This week, the deputy commander of that military
prison said that most of those 550 prisoners had said
nothing of value - suggesting that they probably should
never have been held - and would be released. "Most of
these guys weren't fighting," the officer, Brig. Gen.
Martin Lucenti, told The Financial Times. "They were
running." 

Americans are serious about protecting the nation from
terrorist plots. Federal officials say they have made
progress in many important investigations, any one of which
may turn out to be the critical case that prevents deadly
violence. We hope that's true. But our confidence isn't
bolstered by the hyping of unimportant arrests or the abuse
of the rights of people whose only crime appears to be
their religious faith. 

We're certain to hear Mr. Bush call many times before Nov.
2 for the Patriot Act to be renewed. Republicans in the
House are trying to add expansions of the act to the
intelligence reform bill. But everything we've learned
since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that this is a time to review,
revise and provide more oversight over the extraordinary
powers of federal authorities, not to expand them. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/opinion/08fri1.html?ex=1098257502&ei=1&en=30905d24be1e6aad

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