SPEAKING
FREELY Punishing activists or pursuing
terrorists? By Maggie Mitchell
Salem
Ramzy Baroud, who teaches mass
communications at Curtin University of Technology
in Malaysia and freelances for Asia Times Online,
recently noticed he didn't have enough pages in
his US passport for a trip to Dubai, where he was
to participate in the 4th annual Arab Thought
Foundation conference. So he added a stop at the
American Embassy in Brunei to his pre-departure
to-do list.
As the veteran journalist
found out after waiting more than three
hours, the US government had
him on a list of their own.
The perplexed
consular officer adjudicating Baroud's request for
extra pages said he could not return the passport
nor could he provide any explanation beyond "this
is very serious" and "you're on a list". Baroud
and his family spent the weekend trapped in
Brunei.
He was not idle. Then again, he
rarely is. Editor-in-chief of
PalestineChronicle.com and an ardent activist on
behalf of the Palestinian cause, his unflagging
(and 100% non-violent) campaign to broadcast the
plight of his people so alarmed Israeli officials
that he is excluded from returning to Gaza, his
birthplace. Of course, this is just speculation.
No Israeli official has ever divulged the reason
for blacklisting him.
It is entirely
possible that Baroud's predicament is a result of
intelligence sharing between Tel Aviv and
Washington. The Israeli designation is likely to
have raised concern at the US Department of
Homeland Security and other agencies.
During his unexpected sojourn in Brunei,
he alerted friends around the world. Within 48
hours, an armada of non-governmental organizations
- including Human Rights Watch, the Center for
Constitutional Rights and the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - along with a
global network of allies had rallied to his
defense.
The consular officer also had a
busy weekend. Despite his repeated inquiries, the
State Department had not provided him with an
explanation for holding the passport. So, the
officer told Baroud he had spent hours on the
Internet, conducting his own rather crude
background check in an effort to find some
rationale for the instructions he had received.
Linda Mansour, an immigration attorney
with the ADC who now represents Baroud, said that
in 26 years of practice she had never come across
a case of the US government seizing an American
citizen's passport while abroad.
Perhaps
cognizant of the legal quicksand, State reversed
course over the weekend, and the embassy returned
Baroud's passport to him with a generous supply of
extra pages. Though a welcome development, the
consular officer was once again unable to explain
the about-face.
The delay caused Baroud to
miss the conference and cost him thousands of
dollars in phone calls and accommodation, to say
nothing of the emotional anguish he and his family
suffered that weekend. Yet he is not pursuing the
all-American lawsuit.
When I e-mailed
Mansour about the legal case, she replied that
they are quietly seeking an explanation for all
that transpired. Perhaps, as she put it, this may
have been "a terrible mistake".
That
optimistic assessment is actually quite plausible.
Ever since September 11, 2001, when the
nation's fear allowed the Bush administration to
convert hysteria into law under the guise of
national security, and with the blessing of a
weak-kneed Congress, the Patriot Act and other
less well-known measures have eroded prized civil
liberties.
American citizens such as Yaser
Esam Hamdi (captured in Afghanistan while
allegedly fighting US forces with the Taliban in
2001) and Jose Padilla (an alleged member of
al-Qaeda), who were found to be "enemy
combatants", are held indefinitely without legal
representation or formally being charged with a
crime; for speaking to each other in Arabic,
Syrian American Ahmad al-Halabi (a US Air Force
translator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) and Muslim
convert James Yee, a US Navy chaplain, were deemed
suspicious, monitored and eventually charged with
espionage; 30-year legal resident and South
Florida University Professor Sami Al-Arian, a
tireless fundraiser and advocate for the
Palestinian cause, faces 17 federal
terrorism-conspiracy charges.
The silver
lining? In all the cases above, and in many more,
the government has failed to convince that
all-important third pillar of democracy, the
judicial system, that 9/11 sanctioned the
suspension of American civil liberties.
In
July, the Supreme Court ruled that while Congress
did give President George W Bush authority to
detain Hamdi as an enemy combatant, Hamdi
maintained the right to challenge his detention in
US courts.
In the spring, the government
dropped the most serious charges against al-Halabi
and Yee.
On December 5, a jury in Florida
found al-Arian innocent of eight counts and was
hung on the other nine, including the most serious
terrorism-related charges.
Perhaps the
most promising news came in September, when a
federal judge, John Gleeson, ruled that former
attorney general John Ashcroft and other senior
government officials would have to testify in a
lawsuit brought against them by Egyptian and
Pakistani immigrants. The suit accuses them of
organizing a campaign to violate the rights of
Muslim immigrants held at the infamous
Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, an
American Abu Ghraib just a few miles from the
Statue of Liberty.
Gleeson's opinion
recalled a 1970 Supreme Court ruling that held
former president Richard Nixon's attorney general
John Mitchell liable for an illegal wiretap of a
radical group. As Gleeson put it, "He [the
attorney general] may on occasion have to pause to
consider whether a proposed course of action can
be squared with the constitution and laws of the
United States."
Bush's team isn't
conceding defeat just yet. A number of legal
maneuvers are under way to circumvent the Supreme
Court's decision to hear other detainees' cases.
Despite his success in court, al-Arian may be
deported.
But the courts are standing up
to the administration, Congress has got its mojo
back (just in time for 2006 elections), and
Americans are waking up to the dangers of
over-zealous and often-discriminatory law
enforcement practices.
As Benjamin
Franklin put it, "They that can give up essential
liberty to obtain a little temporary safety
deserve neither."
Maggie Mitchell
Salem is a former special assistant to US
secretary of state Madeleine K Albright; a former
career foreign service officer; former director of
communications and outreach at the Middle East
Institute in Washington, DC; she now provides
Middle East analysis to private and public sector
clients in the US and the region, including a
number of dailies in Arabic and English.
(Copyright 2005 Maggie Mitchell Salem)
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