Bye,
Bye Civil Liberties:
Blame The Democrats
By Joshua Frank
10 October, 2006
Countercurrents.org
I’m
still wondering where all the damn outrage is, and I’m not talking
about the Foley scandal. On September 29 the Senate voted 100-0 in favor
of the pork swollen Pentagon Budget, which earmarked $70 billion for
our ongoing military ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was no
debate over the appropriations and not one Democrat voted against the
egregious spending. On the same day, the Senate also overwhelmingly
approved the dismantling of habeas corpus for “enemy combatants”.
Twelve Democrats sided with the Republicans to allow the US government
to detain people arbitrarily and indefinitely.
We shouldn’t be all
that surprised the Democrats didn’t filibuster the awful bill,
which also expanded the definition of “enemy combatant”
to include anybody who “has purposefully and materially supported
hostilities against the United States.” Whatever that’s
supposed to mean. No, the Democrats have long been on the frontlines
of the federal government’s assault on our civil liberties.
In fact, what we are seeing
today is just a logical continuation of a foundation laid during the
Clinton era. Before the now well-known Patriot Act there was The Antiterrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act, which was signed into law following
the Oklahoma City bombing that took place on August 19, 1995. “The
act was wide-ranging, dealing with everything from the making of plastic
explosives to trading in nuclear materials,” writes Georgetown
law professor David Cole and James X. Dempsey in Terrorism and the Constitution.
“Members of Congress
immediately felt tremendous pressure to pass antiterrorism legislation,”
Cole and Dempsey recall. “It did not matter that the proposals
in the President’s initial bill were directed largely against
international terrorism, while the Oklahoma bombing was the work of
homegrown discontents … Eager to get the bill on the President’s
desk by the April 19 anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Senate
adopted the conference report on April 17 in a 91-8 vote. The next day,
the House also adopted the report by a vote of 293-133. On April 24,
President Clinton signed The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act of 1996.”
“To make the death
penalty effective,” explains civil liberties expert Elaine Cassel
in The War on Civil Liberties, “meant making it harder to appeal
convictions of capital offenses.” Clinton’s law, says Cassel,
also “[made] it a crime to support even the lawful activities
of an organization labeled as terrorist … [authorized] the FBI
to investigate the crime of ‘material support’ for terrorism
based solely on activities protected under the First Amendment …
[freezes] assets of any US citizen or domestic organization believed
to be an agent of a terrorist group, without specifying an ‘agent’
… [expanded] the powers of the secret court … [repealed]
the law that barred the FBI from opening investigations based solely
on activities protected under the First Amendment … [and allowed]
the Immigration and Naturalization Service (now called the US Citizenship
and Immigration Services) to deport citizens (mostly Muslims) upon the
order of INS officials.”
Of course, these are but
a few of the ways in which the Clinton administration infringed upon
civil liberties. Speaking of the legacy of these breaches in the guarantee
of civil liberties, Clinton himself admitted to making “a number
of ill-advised changes in our immigration laws, having nothing to do
with fighting terrorism.”
Sounds familiar, doesn’t
it?
In the wake of September
11, it wasn’t surprising that Clinton’s successor George
W. Bush legislated additional infringements upon civil liberties in
the name of patriotism and national security. And yes, the Democrats
overwhelmingly supported the Patriot Act in both of its awful versions.
But it wasn’t the Patriot Act that allowed the federal government
to make those sweeping detentions across the country immediately following
9/11 -- it was Clinton’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
bill.
So, who is honestly supposed
to believe that ushering the Democrats back into office in November
will bring any sort of legitimate change -- in Iraq, or back at home?
Joshua Frank is the author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect
George W. Bush, and edits http://www.BrickBurner.org
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