By adopting a "preventive paradigm" that includes legislation such as the USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration has severely curtailed American civil rights with results that have only worsened the nation's security, according to Georgetown law professor and civil rights attorney David Cole.
Cole's invitation to speak yesterday in Salomon 101 coincided with the Brown chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union's appeal to the Undergraduate Council of Students Wednesday to adopt a resolution condemning the Patriot Act. Co-sponsored by the Brown ACLU, Brown Lecture Board and Brown Pre-Law Society, the lecture was intended to "galvanize people" to sign a petition in support of the resolution, said Brown ACLU president Tristan Freeman '07.
The proposed resolution calls the Patriot Act of 2001 "a threat to the constitutional commitment to freedom of speech and freedom of association upon which student groups at Brown are predicated" and addresses specific threats to student rights, such as allowing federal agents to obtain students' library records and perform " 'sneak and peek' searches of dorm rooms."
Twenty-one other universities, including Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as 371 cities nationwide, including Dallas and Providence, have passed resolutions similar to the Brown ACLU's.
Cole, a Yale graduate and legal affairs correspondent for the Nation, sees the resolutions as testimony to the power of "ordinary people" and as a reason for optimism among civil rights advocates because "they're significant - not legally, but politically." In his speech, attended by about 30 people, Cole said that the resolutions are symbolic of an attitude that has probably helped dissuade legislators from enacting a second, proposed Patriot Act, and might affect the renewal of the Patriot Act's "sunset provisions" that will come up for vote in December 2005.
Addressing the government's present balance between liberty and security, Cole compared former Attorney General John Ashcroft's Justice Department to the government in Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report." In the movie, the Justice Department uses prophetic psychics to make arrests based on a suspect's future crimes. Though Cole joked that "the only visionary psychic in D.C. is (White House political adviser) Karl Rove," he said that the Bush administration has adopted a similarly abusive "preventive paradigm" to deal with terrorism. Such a doctrine differs from a precautionary stance by using "the coercive arm of (law) that puts tremendous pressure on ... the values this country is supposed to be founded on."
By targeting foreign nationals, who are not citizens and therefore not voters, the Bush administration has been able to trample human rights with impunity, according to Cole. Ashcroft's Preventative Detention Campaign identified 5,000 foreign nationals, overwhelmingly of Muslim heritage, as potential terrorists, and arrested, held and tried them in secret for immigration violations. Many of the detainees were guilty of immigration violations, and several openly admitted as such when questioned. But rather than simply being deported as is standard practice, Cole said, these illegal immigrants were subjected to the "Hold Until Cleared Policy."
"We kept them locked up," said Cole, who was the attorney for a group of foreign nationals who were held for up to six months after their cases were resolved. Such practices "reversed the assumption of innocent until proven guilty" that is supposedly the trademark of the U.S. judicial system, he said.
Cole also cited the human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, where many detainees were convicted on "secret evidence" and tortured. Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian who was detained at John F. Kennedy airport in New York en route to Montreal, was questioned by authorities who would not tell him why he was being held before being deported to Syria, where he was kept in solitary confinement and tortured for almost 12 months, he said. He was eventually released without charges.
Cole is an attorney for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has since taken Arar's case.
The government invoked the "state's secret privilege" in response to the incident, which, Cole said, amounts to asking citizens to accept unquestioningly the government's right "to outsource torture." According to this philosophy, Cole said, "We can lock up any person anywhere in the world ... or as President Bush put it, any 'bad guy.' "
These "major sacrifices" of human rights have proved not only ineffective, but counterproductive, Cole said. A RAND Corporation study shows that the number of terrorist incidents worldwide more than doubled from about 2,000 to over 4,000 in the two years after Sept. 11, 2001. And of the 5,000 suspects arrested under Ashcroft's Preventative Detention Campaign, none were ultimately found to have terrorist connections.
"What we've lost (in terms of) security," Cole said, "is the legitimacy of our efforts to keep ourselves from getting attacked again." By approaching this "legitimate goal" with "illegitimate means," the Bush administration is only making it more likely that the enemy can recruit people to its side, he said.
"In the three years after Sept. 11, we've gone from the object of the world's sympathy to the object of the world's antipathy," Cole said. Anti-American ratings are at an all-time high around the globe - "this," according to Cole, "is the greatest threat to our national security."
Though he has low expectations for Ashcroft's replacement, Alberto Gonzales, Cole says that civil rights advocates have cause to be optimistic about the next four years, citing improved court performance in resisting Bush administration tactics and improved press coverage. Cole also applauded the achievements of grassroots movements and civil rights organizations such as the ACLU and said, "Our future depends on our getting involved."
The Brown ACLU will be in the post office next week asking students to sign its petition in support of the resolution, and UCS will vote on its acceptance at its meeting on March 16. When asked about the likelihood of the resolution's success, Freeman, the ACLU chapter president, said, "We don't want to speculate. It's not in our hands anymore ... it's up to UCS."
