Drive launched to defend civil liberties

CRYSTAL CITY, Va. – The Bush administration is moving with lightning speed to expand FBI spying and intimidation using the “war on terrorism” as a pretext, civil liberties leaders warned last week. They urged a grassroots campaign to defend Constitutional rights.

The call came during the 19th Annual Convention of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which attracted 3,000 delegates from across the nation June 6-9. Hussein Ibish, ADC communications director, told the World, “The thrust of the convention was essentially ... the Arab-American response to the new challenges the community faces in the post-Sept. 11 environment in the United States and how we can best meet the challenges posed by the intensifying conflict in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories.”

Greg Nojeim, chief legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told a workshop on the “Impact of Sept. 11 on Civil Rights” that Bush’s Office of Homeland Security is the latest threat.

“Today what Congress and the administration is doing is not temporary, it’s permanent,” Nojeim said. “It is an attack on the very pillars of our constitutional rights. The Office of Homeland Security is a fundamental reordering of the way law enforcement is going to be done.”

Nojeim gestured toward the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division representative who had been introduced as a guest. But Attorney General John Ashcroft has also decreed that FBI agents may covertly infiltrate public meetings, even the ADC’s convention. “We have one Justice Department representative here. But there is another representative even though nothing criminal is going on here,” he said. “That’s wrong. That’s secret government. Now is the time to come together and say with one voice: ‘We can be safe and we can be free!’”

Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, told the crowd, “We have a government based on checks and balances but we have an Executive Branch that has taken a litany of measures without consulting even Congress.”

Butterfield cited the administration’s detention of many hundreds of Arab, Asian and Muslim men after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

Last Jan. 25, Butterfield continued, the administration unveiled its “absconder list” of 314,000 people targeted for deportation, with no evidence that any are tied to terrorists. Last week Attorney General John Ashcroft called for fingerprinting and photographing every person who visits the United States. “We are becoming a country where immigrants are considered ‘suspects.’ This is the criminalization of people, trampling on their civil rights and civil liberties.”

Merrie Najimy, president of the Massachusetts ADC, speaking from a floor microphone, drew strong applause when she blasted the USA Patriot Act, rammed through Congress in the dead of night last Sept. 20 with little debate.

Najimy announced that a grassroots coalition in Massachusetts has launched a petition drive to gather 100,000 signatures in the Bay State to repeal the most repressive sections of the measure. “We plan to hold Town Hall forums to educate people on the dangers of the Patriot Act,” she said.

Endorsers of the petition include the ACLU, ADC, Massachusetts AFL-CIO, Jewish Alliance for Law & Social Action, ACORN, Jobs with Justice, Service Employees International Union Local 254, National Lawyers Guild, Immigrant Voting Rights Campaign and many immigrant and refugee organizations.

“What if ten or twenty states each collect 100,000 signatures on our petition?” Najimy told the World. “If we are able to mobilize a nationwide movement, we could gather millions of signatures demanding repeal of pieces of the USA Patriot Act.

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, spoke at the ADC convention. He told the World he is talking with Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisc.), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, about convening hearings on Ashcroft’s new FBI guidelines, which, he charged could bring back the worst abuses of J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, used to target Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands more.

Conyers denounced Bush’s new Office of Homeland Security as “damage control … designed to divert the nation’s focus from the problems of the CIA and FBI” when the administration faces hard questions on why they failed to respond to warnings weeks before Sept. 11. Conyers rejected as a “non-starter” the proposal in the Homeland Security scheme to place all immigration programs in one agency focused exclusively on “security.”

He added, “Coming on the heels of announcements by the Attorney General that he would begin to investigate religious activities without any cause and profile Middle Eastern and Muslim immigrants, this constitutes yet another devastating blow to civil liberties and civil rights.”

Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) was honored during a luncheon in the House Caucus Room on Capitol Hill. Dingell decried the internment of citizens of Japanese, German, and Italian descent during World War II. “Since Sept. 11, Arab Americans have borne an especially harsh burden. Sometimes your patriotism was questioned. The Justice Department lacks any concern for civil rights or civil liberties.” He recalled FBI spying and infiltration during the Cold War. “I don’t want to see a return to those dark days.”

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