It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11
edited by Danny Goldberg, Victor Goldberg and Robert Greenwald
Akashic Books
In this collection of essays, 47 politicians, writers, lawyers, musicians, civil rights activists and ACLU flacks add their voices to the cacophony of pundits weighing in on the state of American civil liberties, post-Sept. 11. So far, hundreds of books have been published since the fall of 2001 trying to explain, blame, comfort and inform us about what led up to the attacks and what we can expect next. Out of this word storm some clear lines of argument have taken shape.
Conservatives have largely tried to blame the Clinton administration almost exclusively for the intelligence lapses that allowed Sept. 11 to happen in the first place. They don't understand why his administration failed to convert the Middle East into a parking lot after the first WTC attack, the African embassy bombings and the attack on the USS Cole. If only it were so easy. While Clinton and his administration obviously must shoulder some of the blame, to lay it all at their feet is an intentional oversimplification and clearly ignores the more complex geopolitical and cultural origins of the conflict.
Liberals, on the other hand, largely concede Clinton's part in the intelligence failure while pointing to the United States' generally belligerent international posturing and successive administrations' foreign policy blunders, most notably the support of corrupt and repressive Middle Eastern regimes. The events of Sept. 11 are no single policy's, person's or administration's fault, however. Like all definitive moments in history they were the result of a succession of cultural, personal and political decisions made independently of one another which somehow coalesced, making conditions ripe, however completely unjustified the scale may be, for an attack. Even as our pundits insist on trying to write history as it happens, the present administration's Orwellian code of secrecy has so far kept much of what has happened over the past year under wraps, allowing only for conjecture and vain political posturing that in the end adds little of substance to the national debate.
"It's a Free Country" falls squarely in the liberal camp. While an informative read, the collection could have used more editorial focus; several of the articles are basically carbon copies of each other, running down the litany of past civil rights abuses like the Alien and Sedition Acts, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII and the clampdown on dissent during wartime under Lincoln, Wilson and FDR. Despite these somewhat forgivable redundancies, the book actually gets stronger as it goes on, excepting Ani Difranco's rambling, Def Poetry Jam-style poem.
The book's most striking pieces call into question the imprisonment of well over 1,100 immigrant men of Arab descent directly following Sept. 11. In fact, by November 2001, when federal officials stopped issuing information on the subject, the tally was 1,147 prisoners. As far as the public knows, of those initial 1,147 arrests, only three have resulted in terrorism-related indictments, and more than 400 people have been deported following closed hearings. Thankfully, the courts have recently begun overturning the government's right to detain immigrants without filing charges or informing the public of whom they have in custody. Who is to say, several commentators point out, that the next Islamic militant to carry out a crime won't be South Asian or African, (or Jamaican British like Richard Reid, or Latino American like Jose Padilla or white American like John Walker Lindh)? No matter how sweeping the definition, as Tom Hayden says, "Fighting evil is good politics."
Newsweek correspondent Michael Isikoff checks in with one of the strongest pieces in the collection, detailing the Bush administration's gross exaggerations concerning the number of terrorists trained by bin Laden at his camps. The administration claims some 100,000 terrorists are at large, while most other government and international sources put the number much lower — somewhere between 2,000 and 15,000. To be sure, that's still a pretty wide margin for error, but any way you cut it, it still falls absurdly well below 100,000. Such sensationalism on Bush's part is an unacceptably dangerous practice.
Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU (indeed, every other essay in the book seems to be by an ACLU director, executive director or vice president), describes the coalition put together by her organization to protest the USA Patriot Act — a coalition that spanned the political spectrum from the far left to the far right, an unprecedented achievement for which the ACLU has yet to receive the credit it deserves. The one thing these groups agreed on is that the act has effectively upended the Constitution and that a program consisting of wiretapping, warrantless search and seizure, military tribunals and other affronts to our basic liberties has stepped way over the bounds of what we really need to defend the security of our nation. As five-term New York Democratic Congressman Jerrold Nadler — whose district covers Ground Zero — says in his contribution: "This administration simply does not understand the American tradition of civil liberties and due process of law." Where will all this new, dubiously obtained information go, one wonders. If the FBI and other security agencies couldn't sift through the comparitively limited amount of information they had before Sept. 11, how will they handle the "chatter" gleaned from all these new wiretaps and surveillances? The answer: They won't, but they'll still have it.
"A government 'of' the people and 'by' the people must be visible to the people," the ACLU's executive director Anthony Romero asserts in strikingly common sense fashion, exemplifying the book's tone. Thankfully, the book largely manages to avoid falling victim to the knee-jerk alarmism so prevalent in too much Sept. 11 analysis. Still, it's difficult not to grow alarmed when you read story after story of illegal detentions based solely on ethnic grounds, tales of our most respected law enforcement agencies' startling incompetence and the fact that much of what is covered under the USA Patriot Act is simply cribbed from a previously submitted, and rejected, "wish list" John Ashcroft handed to Congress well before the attacks. Just like the administration's newfound rush to invade Iraq, which probably isn't new at all, it seems as if their assault on our civil liberties, instead of coming as a response to the attacks, had already been making the rounds for some time.
— Paul McLeary (pjmcleary@yahoo.com)
