BY SEAN HEALY
US President George Bush junior always promised that his "war on terrorism" would be waged on many fronts, in every corner of the world. And he's delivered: because, just as the war in Afghanistan seems to be nearing an end, the war on the home front, on "terrorists" in the West, is heating up.
Since the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC, governments in all the major Western countries have introduced laws and regulations which expand their powers to spy on and detain those they believe to be undesirable. In their sights are not just members of actual terrorist groups, like al Qaeda, but also anyone who can be labelled a "terrorist", which could just about include any dissenter.
The latest in this veritable war on civil liberties came on November 30, when US Attorney-General John Ashcroft confirmed that he was considering reintroducing a long-banned program under which the Federal Bureau of Investigation spied on domestic opponents of the government.
The Counter-Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) was aimed at all kinds of groups deemed "subversive" by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, including the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King, anti-war groups and the socialist parties. The program included not only spying, wire-tapping and surveillance but also disruption, including attempting to get activists fired from their jobs and even to frame them for criminal acts.
Cointelpro discontinued in the 1970s, after Hoover's death and public alarm at revelations about how widely spread the program had been.
Senior justice department officials have argued that the previous restrictions on FBI operations are now outmoded and need to be overhauled. Ashcroft struck back at his critics, accusing them of "almost eagerly assuming the worst of their government before they've had a chance to understand it at its best".
The proposal to bring back Cointelpro comes on top of the passage of a new law which greatly empowers US law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the establishment of military tribunals to try alleged terrorists in secret and an unprecedented operation to arrest, question and detain thousands of people of Middle Eastern origin accused of having some connection with those who carried out the September 11 attacks.
The USAPATRIOT Act, signed into law in late October, allows for the indefinite detention of non-citizens, even on minor visa violations, minimises judicial supervision of phone surveillance, expands the ability to conduct secret searches, gives the attorney-general the power to designate domestic groups as "terrorists" and deport any non-citizen who belongs to them, grants the FBI access to private records without needing to show any evidence that a crime has been committed and rescinds restrictions which prevented the CIA from spying on Americans.
On November 13, Bush supplemented these powers by issuing a decree which permits the use of military tribunals to try non-citizens accused of terrorism. These tribunals could, at the discretion of the Pentagon, be conducted in secret, and would be empowered to convict accused persons (including ordering their execution) on only a two-thirds vote of military officers, require less than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, deprive a defendant of counsel of their own choosing, and do away with the presumption of innocence.
The decree could be expanded to include US citizens "at the stroke of a pen", says the American Civil Liberties Union.
On November 28, Ashcroft further added to his powers, by introducing new regulations which allow the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain a non-citizen even after a judge orders their release for lack of evidence.
More than 600 non-citizens are still being held in connection with the September 11 attacks. Under growing criticism from civil liberties groups, Ashcroft released an account of the charges against 93 of them: nearly all of them are for visa violations, none of them has been charged with anything in connection with the September 11 bombings.
The names or particulars of 548 others still have not been released. Nearly all are from the Middle East or North Africa.
Justice department officials claim that these people have to still be held because the investigation of the September 11 attacks is a "mosaic": they don't know when they're going to need a piece, even a mundane piece, so they need to keep all of those arrested in detention.
Opponents of the crackdown have described it as "racial profiling" and some have even drawn parallels with the "disappearing" of suspects by Latin American dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s.
The US is not the only country to have introduced such laws clamping down on civil liberties.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour government seeking the passage of an anti-terrorism bill which includes many of the provisions of the USAPATRIOT Act. It gives the home secretary the power to proscribe organisations as "terrorists", extends pre-charge detention, expands police's ability to trawl through private files for information, and bans the crime of "inciting religious hatred" (an offence which is presumably designed to include calls for an Islamic jihad).
In order to introduce the law, the government is planning to withdraw from the one of the fundamental provisions of the European Charter on Human Rights, that which forbids arbitrary detention.
The House of Lords rejected the bill at its first reading on November 30, but it won an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons and is likely to be pushed through the Lords in a future sitting.
The European Council of Ministers is discussing extending the Schengen Information System, a database which tracks those travelling between different European Union countries, to allow surveillance of those "suspected" of taking part in protests and of those "foreigners" who have not left the EU within a "prescribed time frame".
The motivation for introducing these sweeping powers seems in part to be old-fashioned empire-building: the post-September 11 crisis presents a perfect chance to legalise repressive measures long desired by ruling-class authorities.
Certainly, John Ashcroft made it clear on his elevation to the position of US attorney-general, months before September 11, that he thought many of the civil liberties restrictions on police powers should be done away with. British Home Secretary David Blunkett readily admitted that the UK Terrorism Act was "the end-product of a trawl of our current laws" for "loopholes that need to be updated".
The powers allowed to these men under the new laws and regulations extend far beyond measures conceivably needed to fight terrorism.
Part of the motivation for these new laws seems to be to allow a crackdown on any form of dissent, including mass protest movements.
The British law, for example, defines "terrorism" as: "the use or threat, for the purpose of advancing a political, religious or ideological cause, of action which (a) involves serious violence against any person or property, (b) endangers the life of any person, or (c) creates a serious risk to the health or safety of the public or a section of the public."
That definition is sweeping enough to allow anyone from Reclaim the Streets to Kurdish solidarity groups to campaigners against genetically modified foods to be labelled "terrorists".
The planned changes to the Schengen Information System are deliberately aimed at anti-globalisation groups, such as those who plan to protest against the next EU summit in Brussels on December 14, rather than at actual terrorist groups like al Qaeda.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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