Nat Hentoff: The War on the Bill of Rights

[Doug Millison]

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0139/hentoff.php
The War on the Bill of Rights, Nat Hentoff, The
Village Voice

"[...] A CBS-New York Times survey released on Sunday,
September 16, showed that 74 percent of Americans
thought they would have to give up some of their
personal freedoms to get Osama bin Laden "dead or
alive," as George W. Bush put it, recalling wanted
posters in the Old West. 

The explanation for this eagerness to relinquish our
supposedly cherished freedoms is not only the rage and
fear at the shocking numbers of civilians murdered on
our own land by foreign fanatics for the first time in
our history. 

The more frightening reason why the government can
have confidence in our support is that most Americans
have only the dimmest notion of what their
constitutional freedoms are—and what it took to get
them. So there is little concern that they and other
Americans can be caught in dragnets of suspicion by a
government that has suspended much of the Bill of
Rights. 

This willingness to surrender what we're supposed to
be fighting for is a recurring part of our history.
During the Civil War, Abra-ham Lincoln imprisoned
newspaper editors and other dissenters against his
policies. In addition, he suspended the oldest right
of English-speaking peoples, habeas corpus. "The
Constitution," Lincoln explained, "is not a suicide
pact." 

How many Americans, right now, would disagree with
that conclusion? [...]

There is still time to save the freedoms our
government says we're fighting for. And that requires
doing—and planning—with the confidence that most
Americans will applaud. 

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, which nearly
destroyed the First Amendment, ignited enough
opposition to elect Thomas Jefferson in 1800, and he
released all those imprisoned by that law. The "Red
Scare" of 1919 and the early 1920s—with its mass
arrests of "subversives" in 33 cities, without a
semblance of due process—was eventually seen by the
citizenry as a disgrace. And in the 1950s, Joe
McCarthy was finally overcome. 

If we do not spread the word of this bipartisan attack
on the Bill of Rights—and insist on our First
Amendment rights to protest—we will become accomplices
in this war against the Constitution. American flags
are everywhere. I bought one at a vigil for the dead
at Union Square. But what do those flags stand for? 

[...] New York is now the headquarters for the
multi-agency Joint Terrorism Task Force. He quoted
Justice Department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker as saying,
as Sisk summarized it, that "U.S. Attorney Mary Jo
White, top federal prosecutor for the Southern
District of New York, has been given extraordinary
powers to proceed in secrecy against anyone implicated
'in the entire attack against the four airliners.' " 

What does "implicated" mean? Reasonable suspicion?
Probable cause? And how will we know whether basic due
process has been afforded those "implicated" when, as
Sisk continued, the Justice Department says, "Search
warrants and records will be sealed. Law enforcement
also no longer will disclose when arrests are made or
when material witnesses are taken into custody." 

And we're supposed to be telling China how to reform
its justice system, which functions in secrecy as it
crunches human rights? [...]

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