Trib: A Government’s Gotta Do What a Government’s Gotta Do
The Tribune rejected the end-run theory: “The fear rests on a mistaken premise….The government can get a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant only if it has probable cause that someone is involved in espionage or terrorism activities–which happen to be crimes.”
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“The law is not perfect,” said the November 5 editorial “Myth, reality and the Patriot Act,” “but it has hardly been the assault on civil liberties depicted by its most vociferous critics.” Much of that vociferousness the Tribune blamed not on the act itself but on Attorney General John Ashcroft’s maladroit hawking of it. Ashcroft, said the Tribune, “has been almost contemptuous of concerns about civil liberties. He conducts himself as though he thinks that inflaming critics will deter Al Qaeda.”
But the editorials were written by Steve Chapman, and Chapman, a libertarian, is by any reasonable measure a civil libertarian too. He’s simply one who’s parted company with other civil libertarians over means and ends. “I think it’s just an honest disagreement on complex issues that involve a lot of unknowns and competing concerns,” he e-mailed me. “I still call and get along with the ACLU Washington people, because they’ve known me long enough to know I share a lot of their basic values. I think I put a bit higher priority on preventing terrorism, and they put a bit higher priority on protecting civil liberties.”
This is the sort of “end-run around the Constitution” that the Tribune told us not to worry about because a warrant authorizing it requires “probable cause that someone is involved in espionage or terrorism activities.” But Cole says, “That’s just wrong. All the government has to show is that the person is an employee of a foreign government or a foreign political party or even of any organization that has a majority of non-American members–such as Amnesty International.”
Chapman’s most ambivalent yet most pointed writing (aside from what he had to say about Ashcroft) addressed the detention of immigrants held while the government tried to figure out if they were dangerous. “After Sept. 11,” he wrote in “Prisoners in the war on terror” (November 16), “the government arrested some 762 immigrants for possible terrorist ties and held them for weeks or months on immigration charges that normally would not have led to extended confinement. The government released these detainees only after the FBI had satisfied itself that they posed no threat.
One reason a second wave of detentions is unlikely is that so many foreigners detained in the first wave have been or are in the process of being kicked out of the country. This Monday the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was pretty much abandoning the 18-month-old program that obliged foreign men from Muslim countries to register and face questioning as what the government called “high national security concerns.” Since Ashcroft launched the program, some 83,000 foreigners had registered, and deportation proceedings had been started against almost 14,000 who’d violated some immigration law. As Chapman wrote, not a single one has been charged with terrorism.
