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Alarum The Intelligence-Surveillance Complex by Christopher Pyle The Immigration
& Naturalization Service arrested a Canadian and turned him over to the FBI,
which sent him to Syria to be tortured for ten months. John Ashcroft is a student
of the Bible. Obviously, he remembered the story of Pontius
Pilate.
"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't
happen here in America, not possibly! We're a country of freedom."
| | Christopher
Pyle teaches civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Mass.
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So declared a character in Sinclair Lewis' novel about a president who makes
himself dictator by offering quick and easy solutions, including war, to a
society wracked by insecurity.
But it can happen here. It is happening right now.
Consider the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian. He was trying to
change planes at Kennedy International Airport in New York on Sept. 26, 2002,
when immigration officials pulled him aside for questioning. They thought he
might be a terrorist.
Arar answered all their questions, but the immigration officials were not
persuaded. They detained him at the airport for a day without food, then locked
him up at a federal facility for 20 days, while FBI and police department
interrogators asked the same questions repeatedly. Still not satisfied, the FBI
took Arar to New Jersey, put him on a private airplane, and flew him to
Washington, D.C. From there another team (probably from the CIA) flew him to
Jordan where he was turned over to the Jordanian police. The Jordanians beat him
several times before taking him to the border and turning him over to Syrian
military intelligence. The Syrians locked him in an underground cell three feet
wide, six feet long, seven feet high — the size of a grave.
There he remained for ten months, except when he was questioned under torture.
While he was being beaten and threatened with electrical shocks, he could hear
prisoners in other interrogation rooms screaming in pain. Eventually he admitted,
quite falsely, to having visited Afghanistan and the Syrians released him, 40
pounds lighter, with a pronounced limp and recurrent nightmares of being abducted
again.
When the Canadian government protested this kidnapping, Attorney General John
Ashcroft refused to apologize. He also disclaimed responsibility for the torture,
claiming that the Syrians had expressly promised not to mistreat Arar.
Arar's abduction was not an isolated act by rogue agents. It was part of a
secret program, approved by President Bush, called "extraordinary rendition." As
one intelligence official explained to the Washington Post, "We don't kick the
shit out of them. We send them to other countries, so they can kick the shit out
of them."
Where our president gets the authority to authorize torture-by-proxy has never
been explained. But he clearly thinks that he has the authority, probably as
commander in chief, to abrogate the laws governing extradition and deportation,
as long as he does so secretly.
What the Bush administration did to Maher Arar is worse than anything our
forefathers condemned in the Declaration of Independence. It is worse than
anything J. Edgar Hoover did to alleged Communists, civil rights workers, and
anti-war protesters during his long campaign of dirty tricks. But Arar's
experience is only the tip of a very chilling iceberg.
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| Arar's abduction was not
an isolated act by rogue agents. It was part of a secret program, approved by
President Bush, called "extraordinary rendition."
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Back in the 1960s the United States developed the functional equivalent of a
police state. It was a sloppy, undeveloped police state: mainly it spied on
people by illegally wiretapping telephones, bugging rooms, opening first-class
mail, and infiltrating politically active groups. The FBI also tried to defame
reputations, blackmail members of Congress, frame activists to look like
"snitches," and trick street gangs and Black Panthers into shooting each other.
Bureau agents allowed Southern sheriffs and Klansmen to club civil rights
marchers and a Justice Department lawyer. Chicago policemen beat hundreds of
lawful demonstrators and murdered a member of the Black Panthers in his own bed.
The FBI also tried, anonymously, to blackmail Martin Luther King into committing
suicide rather than accept the Nobel Prize for Peace.
By and large, however, the old police-state apparatus was inefficient and
half-hearted. Each agency did its own thing and was reluctant to cooperate with
others. Hoover demanded that other agencies send their intelligence to "the seat
of government," as he called the FBI's headquarters, but he sent little
information back. In a fit of pique during the late 1960s, he even cut off all
exchanges with the CIA.
Today there is much more file sharing among the Justice Department, the FBI,
the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (FIX), the
Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, the Army's Intelligence and
Security Command, the Army's new Northern Command, and nearly 2,000 state and
local law enforcement agencies. The administrative wall between intelligence and
law enforcement investigations, erected during the 1970s to restore the
constitutional rights of protesters, has been bulldozed by the attorney general.
The Fourth Amendment's ban on unreasonable searches and seizures, and its
preference for warrants based on probable cause to believe that a crime
has been committed, no longer exists, except on paper.
Now we have the fiber-optic equivalent of a giant sewage system, through which
an enormous amount of raw and often erroneous data about "persons of interest"
sloshes back and forth. Much of it settles into secret agency computer systems,
where it can never be corrected or disinfected, but can be used, without
verification, to construct watch lists like the one that marked Maher Arar a
terrorist-by-association.
Back in the 1960s, our quasi-police state was national in scope. None of its
constituent agencies, except the Army and the CIA in Vietnam, engaged in torture,
or was grossly unprofessional in its handling of dubious information.
Today's police-state bureaucracy is international in scope. It integrates, in
a very loose fashion, nearly 100 foreign law enforcement and intelligence
agencies, including some, like Syria's, Egypt's, Turkey's, and Pakistan's, that
specialize in collecting dubious information through torture. It is this sort of
information, in part, that puts hundreds of alleged terrorists behind bars and
exposes them to torture or abuse. Right now there are probably hundreds of
suspects like Arar — people who might know someone who knows a terrorist
— under interrogation in foreign jails because of information supplied,
directly or indirectly, by our own government.
As part of its global war on terrorism, the U.S. military maintains a secret
gulag of interrogation centers in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Diego Garcia,
Qatar, Thailand, and Cuba where thousands of suspected terrorists have been
subjected to frightening inquisitions. So far as we can tell, our interrogators
stop short of outright physical torture. Otherwise they would not bother to send
suspects to Syria, Egypt, or Pakistan, for questioning under the president's
program of "extraordinary rendition." But they could torture detainees, because
— like the Phoenix Program of assassinations in Vietnam — they are
without independent supervision. Anyone unfortunate enough to be held in one of
these centers has no legal rights whatever, even though the accusations against
him may come from unscrupulous, bounty-hunting warlords in Afghanistan, Yemen, or
Somalia.
| Right now the focus of
this surveillance system is on Arabs, but the Bush administration is eager to
extend the same tools to other alleged criminals and the people who might know
them. |
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But we don't have to look abroad for examples of brutality. For nearly two
years after the Sept. 11 attacks, our Department of Justice rounded up, detained,
and questioned approximately 5,000 immigrants of Middle Eastern origin.
So far as we know, none of these detainees was beaten during an interrogation,
but thousands were held for months without being charged with any crime. They
were arrested ostensibly for being "out of status" with the immigration
authorities, but really to keep them out of circulation until the FBI could
confirm that they weren't terrorists.
What happened to most of these detainees is not yet known, but we do know,
from the Justice Department's own inspector general, what was done to 762 Muslims
held at the federal detention center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Guards chained them
hand-and-foot, slammed them into walls, strip-searched them repeatedly (in front
of female guards), mocked them as they prayed, and subjected them to sustained
periods of sleep deprivation. In the early weeks of their detentions, these
detainees were often denied phone calls to their families, who didn't know where
they were or why they had disappeared. Access to telephones and attorneys was
deliberately made difficult, and some attorney-client conversations were
surreptitiously filmed and recorded. Many of the detainees were never released,
but deported on the basis of secret hearings that not even their families could
attend. Others lost their jobs and their families were forced to go on welfare.
These dragnet detentions failed to uncover a single terrorist, but the
Attorney General responded to the inspector general's first report in June 2003
with another curt "no apologies." The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division
and its Bureau of Prisons undertook cursory investigations, but found no reason
to prosecute or punish any guards.
The inspector general continued his investigation and eventually found
"missing" videotapes at the prison. According to a report released in December
2003, but virtually unnoticed in the press, the tapes confirmed all previous
findings, and further revealed that when detainees were first brought to the
prison, guards shoved their faces into an American flag T-shirt taped to the
concrete wall of the receiving area. Before long, that flag was stained with
blood.
According to President Bush, al Qaeda's terrorists "hate freedom." If they
kill, torture, or abuse our people, we will punish them for "war crimes." Fair
enough, but when his administration does the same to innocent persons in the
United States, is that not a "war crime" too?
| Ashcroft and Bush are so
invested in their anti-terrorist crusade that they cannot imagine that Lord
Acton's admonition about the corrupting effects of power might apply to them.
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In his farewell address in 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued a
prescient warning:
"[The] conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms
industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic,
political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every
office of the Federal Government. [W]e must not fail to comprehend [the] grave
implications [and we] must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence
. . . by the military-industrial complex."
Were Eisenhower with us today, he would be warning us of a new intelligence
and surveillance complex, international in scope and unrestrained by law.
Right now the focus of this surveillance system is on terrorists from the
Middle East, but the Bush administration is eager to extend the same tools, via
the PATRIOT Act and other means, to "narco-terrorists," "domestic terrorists,"
and other alleged criminals and the people who might know them. The system is
metastasizing, and as it grows, more and more innocent people, here and abroad,
will be "watch listed," detained, and interrogated.
How quickly the watch lists can spread was demonstrated immediately after the
Sept. 11 attacks, when a desperate FBI shared a list of "persons of interest" it
wanted to interview with a few dozen corporations, airlines, and casinos. These
companies promptly augmented the list and shared it with subsidiaries abroad.
Within a month one FBI list had become 50, and versions appeared on websites as
far away as Brazil and Italy. No longer were the people listed just "persons of
interest," which might imply some possibility of innocence. They were now
"terrorists."
The new surveillance complex consists of law enforcement, military, and
domestic and foreign intelligence services. But that is only part of it. As
Eisenhower realized, security agencies require an industrial base, and right now
corporations are springing up to supply governments and private industry with
personal information of all kinds. Their offers to produce criminal reports on
former classmates, ex-spouses, and job applicants first appeared as spam on
personal computers, but now some of these firms have multi-million dollar
contracts with the Justice Department, the military, and law enforcement
agencies. Legally or otherwise, they are funneling credit reports, bank accounts,
medical files, and college records to the international law enforcement and
intelligence network. Within a few years, these companies are likely to be rich
enough to hire their own lobbyists and prevent Congress from restricting their
access to our most confidential files.
Some of the information on alleged terrorists is inaccurate or out of date. In
many instances, it cannot be verified because its sources are confidential. Once
it lands in the computers of intelligence and law enforcement agencies, however,
it cannot be reviewed and corrected, as can a bad credit report. It just sits
there until it is tapped and used to mark travelers for interrogation, or to deny
people access to an airliner, visas with which to enter the United States, or
security clearances to serve in the armed forces or work for a defense
contractor. In the hands of corporations, it can cost people jobs, loans,
mortgages, or insurance. Eventually, the mere existence of so much potentially
derogatory information in the hands of secret agencies will deter citizens and
politicians from questioning how it is collected or used.
Justice Brandeis once warned that the greatest dangers to our liberties stem
not from tyrants, but "from men of zeal, well-meaning, but without
understanding." It is unlikely that John Ashcroft anticipated how badly the
detainees would be abused in American prisons. But it is also probable —
given his "no apologies" attitude — that he didn't care. Both before and
after those abuses, his overriding objective has been to eliminate terrorists.
Just as Timothy McVeigh failed to consider the "collateral damage" of his attack
on the government in the Oklahoma City bombing, Ashcroft and President Bush have
not paused to consider the "collateral damage" this unregulated intelligence
apparatus might cause. Ashcroft and Bush are so invested in their anti-terrorist
crusade that they cannot imagine that Lord Acton's admonition about the
corrupting effects of power might apply to them.
Like the anti-Communist zealots of the 1940s and 1950s, they have exaggerated
the risks posed by our new clandestine enemy. They have allowed fears of
terrorism to disorient the nation's moral compass. The enemy is ruthless, they
believe, so we must be ruthless too. Because this is "war," the end of security
justifies almost any means, including the abandonment of America's tradition of
limited government, guaranteed liberties, checks and balances, and the
presumption of innocent until proven guilty. The Bush administration has fostered
anti-terrorist zeal and exploited that zeal to give us mass detentions without
charges, searches without judicial supervision, and secret interrogation centers.
Meanwhile, the unlimited surveillance bureaucracy they are creating, with all its
technological powers of information control, threatens permanently to destroy our
liberties, as it has already destroyed the Fourth Amendment.
Yes, it is happening here, and at a dizzying pace. The only question is what
we will do about it.
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| | Note: More extensive accounts of Maher Arar's ordeal can be
found under his name on Google. The inspector general's reports on the detainees
may be accessed, again through Google, by typing "U.S. Department of Justice
inspector general. |
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