Post by Anja Nieser on Sept 11, 2006 17:58:11 GMT -5
The insidious costs of terrorism
It has been 5 years since the 9/11 attacks, 5 years since we were awakened from our false sense of security to face a more uncertain and dangerous world than many of us had imagined.
The America of Sept. 11, 2001, was a nation paralyzed by fear and obsessed with its newfound insecurity. In that sense, little has improved over these 5 years. The small, virulent band of Islamic extremists behind the 9/11 attacks aren't a historical footnote today but are now viewed as the catalysts for a worldwide, generational strife - a seemingly never-ending, amorphous war on terror.
Our insecurity, if anything, has taken root.
Consider the words of U.S. House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, as he laid out his party's legislative priorities this month: "From homeland security to national security to border security, House Republicans will focus first and foremost on addressing the safety and security needs of the American people throughout the month of September."
Security, security, security, security.
After 5 years, we're still talking about all of the work that needs to be done to make us secure. We live in a world of Condition Yellow, where talk of freedom is interrupted by news of secret CIA prisons. Where national security has been used to justify just about anything: from preemptive war to warrantless wiretapping to farm subsidies.
All of the drumbeating to terror-proof America over the past 5 years has come at great cost: in lives, in international reputation and in many of the very principles we once considered the bedrock of what it means to be an American.
"In general, there was a willingness of the American people to consider trading civil liberties for security, but there's a lot more scepticism now because people have seen that these efforts haven't brought them any security," said Elliot Mincberg, legal director for the liberal People for the American Way.
Responding to 9/11 has become an all-encompassing rationale, a justification for what looks more and more like self-inflicted wounds of a Big Brother government adamant in its use of unchecked power but unable to do its homework.
Just ask Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who went on to co-chair the 9/11 Commission, only to be disillusioned by the government's response to the group's recommendations. Here's what he said last December:
"It is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis. It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on the terrorist watch list. It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork-barrel spending, not risk. . . .
"We believe that the terrorists will strike again. If they do, and these reforms have not been implemented, what will our excuses be?"
'Unfettered control'
The response to Hurricane Katrina last year only reinforced the notion that America may not be doing a heckuva job when it comes to managing the big picture. Stepping up cargo screening at seaports, securing weapons of mass destruction from the former Soviet Union and establishing oversight of how intelligence money is being spent are still on the to-do list 5 years after the attacks of 9/11.
It's not as if we've been idle.
We've been busy these past 5 years, busy flailing around in a kind of insecure incompetence, as the executive branch brazenly seized new powers in the name of national security.
Consider this: When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged a provision in the Patriot Act, the U.S. Department of Justice decided that portions of the ACLU's court filings should be blacked out because public knowledge of them would be a threat to national security.
What was so threatening? Censored portions included this:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
This was a quotation from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. That's right. The executive branch of government arbitrarily decided that a prior opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court violated national security. That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Or consider this. The no-fly list that Kean complained about has become a mess.
The list of possible terror suspects who should be kept from flying on U.S. commercial airliners has grown significantly since 9/11, when there were only 16 names on the list. On the day after the attacks, there were 400 names on the list. It has continued to grow.
Who's on the list now? It's a secret. But last year, the Transportation Security Administration reported that 30,000 people called to complain that their names were on the no-fly list in error.
The list has flagged infants, pop singer Cat Stevens and a smattering of members from Congress, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Author James Moore discovered this year that he was on the list when he tried to fly. He was given an 800 number to call to protest his grounded status.
In his blog, Moore relays the conversation of that call:
Moore: "Ma'am, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."
Agent: "I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir."
Moore: "What can you tell me?"
Agent: "All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."
Moore: "Well, let me get this straight. Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first 2 notes of the National Anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."
Agent: "I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."
Moore: "Oh wait. One last thing: This guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"
Moore's most recent book was entitled "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential."
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Last year, Cyrus Kar, an American in Iraq making a documentary film about the Persian King Cyrus the Great, was detained for 50 days there by U.S. forces without charges while his family sued to have him released. The government, unable to classify Kar as an enemy combatant, held him as "an imperative security internee."
Timothy Lynch, the director of the conservative Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, cites the Kar case in his report, Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism.
An imperative security internee?
"That designation apparently means that until the Supreme Court rules that this new category of person retains rights as well, the government will do whatever it wants," Lynch wrote. "Should the Supreme Court rule that the Bill of Rights applies to 'imperative security internees,' what is to stop the government from inventing another label for its prisoners?"
During the past few years, the FBI has used terrorism concerns as a reason to investigate all sorts of Americans far removed from Islamic fundamentalism. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the environmental group Greenpeace, the ACLU and protesters at the North American Wholesale Lumber Association convention in Colorado were all subjects of FBI counterterrorism investigations since 9/11.
Millions of Americans have been monitored through a warrantless surveillance program, secretly authorized by President Bush, that was begun in 2001 and was ruled unconstitutional last month by a federal district judge in Michigan.
"It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," wrote U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor. "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."
Giving up liberties to feel safe is still a deal many Americans will accept. But what exactly have we gained? And in these 5 years, what was the biggest domestic terrorist plot unearthed?
I guess it would have to be what's been called the Miami plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Sounds scary. But what Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called a "significant investigation" in the war on terror turned out to be the arrests of a small gathering of Bible-study, housing-project, Miami-area men who practiced martial arts in a warehouse and sold African-American hair-care products in the neighborhood.
The men, part of a self-styled, ideologically muddled group they called Seas of David, were conflated into Al-Qaeda terrorists by an undercover FBI informant.
The informant, who was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda, administered a fake Al-Qaeda oath to the men and gave them a video camera so they could shoot footage of American buildings they may like to blow up someday - if they only had the weapons, cash, transportation and a memory chip for the camera. Oh, and boots, too. These guys said they needed boots to wage their "full ground war" on the U.S.
The government supplied them boots, then arrested them.
So to recap: It's an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up a Chicago landmark, except that nobody involved was Al-Qaeda, and they hadn't even traveled to Chicago to videotape the Sears Tower with their government-provided camera.
That's what's been called the Sears Tower Plot.
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Sentences of 20 days
During the past 5 years, the government has gone to great lengths to highlight the terrorist threat and salute its own efforts in combating it.
Last year, the president, while stumping for the extension of his power under the Patriot Act, said, "Federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
But a review of U.S. Department of Justice figures by The Washington Post revealed that only 39 people were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. And most of them were minor false-statement violations of immigration laws and not related to any act of terror.
The newspaper found: "A large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance - through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck - and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.
"For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts for about 10 % of the individuals convicted - even though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties to terrorism in 2001."
TRAC, a data research organization connected to Syracuse University, released a report recently that looked at the 5-year record of terrorism prosecutions in the United States.
"The typical sentences recently imposed on individuals considered to be international terrorists are not impressive," the report concluded. "For all those convicted as a result of cases initiated in the 2 years after 9/11, for example, the median sentence - 1/2 got more, and 1/2 got less - was 28 days.
"For those referrals that came in more recently - through May 31, 2006 - the median sentence was 20 days."
By contrast, the report noted, the typical sentence on a terrorism case in the 2 years prior to 9/11 was 41 months.
Human warehouse
The record in the now notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba is also less than meets the eye. While the more than 400 "enemy combatants" there have been described by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "the worst of the worst," many of the men held for years in this secret prison have questionable ties to terrorism.
The conservative National Journal reviewed Defense Department court filings and other documents relating to 446 detainees at Guantanamo and found that most of the detainees there were not captured by Americans or Afghans in combat, but actually were handed over by Pakistan. About half are Afghans.
And most were only said to be "associated" with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and picked up in the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers, and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead," Corine Hegland, of the National Journal, wrote. "Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two or 3 Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans."
The cost for running this sort of human warehouse has been worldwide condemnation, a stain on the country's commitment to the rule of law and putting America at odds with the United Nations, which called for the camp's closing and referred the matter to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Bush has said he would like to close Guantanamo Bay. But last year, Halliburton - formerly headed by Vice President thingy Cheney - was awarded $30 million to build a permanent prison there.
And last week, the president announced that 14 high-value prisoners - the real worst of the worst - would be transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay, apparently to bolster its necessity.
A mind-set of fear
Since 9/11, the only actual terrorist attack foiled during its execution was the apprehension of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who was trying to strike a match to light a plastic explosive in his shoe during a London-to-Miami flight on Dec. 22, 2001.
And yet it took the TSA until August of this year to declare that all airline passengers must have their shoes scanned before boarding. As for the matches, well, you can't take a lighter on the plane, but each passenger is still permitted up to four books of matches in their carry-on luggage.
Why? You can't smoke on a plane.
Does anybody really know what you can or can't take onto a plane these days? OK, here's a quiz.
Which of these items is prohibited as a carry-on item? (A) knitting and crochet needles; (B) a 7-inch screwdriver; (C) a tennis racket; or (D) toothpaste.
The answer is the toothpaste, which became banned after last month's liquid-based London terror plot was foiled.
Screwdrivers, wrenches and other small tools used to be banned, but now they're allowed again. As for the tennis racket, it's OK, but a pool cue or a lacrosse stick isn't. Crochet needles of any size are OK now, too, as well as metal pointy-tip scissors that are shorter than 4 inches.
It's easy to get lost in shifting sands of concern in the post-9/11 world.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in his book "Why Courage Matters," offered a rare but refreshing bit of perspective to this new mind-set.
"Suck it up, for crying out loud," he wrote. "You're almost certainly going to be OK. And in the unlikely event you're not, do you really want to spend your days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape?"
The fear, however, has played into a mood that has given the government what has amounted to nearly a blank check when it comes to taking shortcuts with civil liberties and constitutional safeguards.
The Patriot Act, penned in haste after 9/11, allowed the FBI to expand its use of National Security Letters, a 1970s provision that allowed the agency to skirt privacy law by secretly reviewing records on individuals without judicial oversight.
The use of these letters has skyrocketed since 9/11, reaching about 30,000 a year. They allow the agency access to phone records, correspondence and financial records of ordinary Americans without judicial or congressional review.
2 years ago, a federal judge in New York ruled it was unconstitutional to use these National Security Letters to secretly get records from Internet service providers without oversight.
"Under the mantle of secrecy, the self-preservation that ordinarily impels our government to censorship and secrecy may potentially be turned on ourselves as a weapon of self-destruction," U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote. "At that point, secrecy's protective shield may serve not as much to secure a safe country as simply to save face."
'Dirty bomb' case
The court cases, as they begin to tumble in, are starting to add up to a legal rebellion to what has been an aggressive executive branch and a compliant, silent Congress.
Take the case of Jose Padilla, the Chicago-born gang member who became known as the man who wanted to set off a "dirty bomb" in America.
Then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, while traveling in Russia, announced the arrest of Padilla 4 years ago.
"I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism," Ashcroft said. "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States."
The government classified Padilla as an "enemy combatant," saying that although he was a U.S. citizen, he wasn't entitled to the rights of a U.S. citizen. He was held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina for more than 3 years.
At first, a federal appeals court gave the Bush administration wide latitude in holding Padilla without a charge or court appearance. But after 3 years, and with Padilla's unusual confinement percolating its way toward a review by the U.S. Supreme Court, prosecutors switched gears, coming up with less serious charges against him, dropping any claim of a dirty-bomb plot and asking that he be added as a defendant to an unrelated case in Miami federal court.
This evoked an unusual scolding from appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, who previously had sanctioned Padilla's remarkable confinement. Luttig wrote that Padilla's legal status deserved to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and that dropping the dirty-bomb claim "may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."
Luttig wrote that the government left "the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake."
Luttig is no wide-eyed liberal activist judge. He had been on a short list of conservative appellate judges considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
No 'blank check'
The government ran into even bigger legal problems with its attempt to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a way that defied all notions of what we might consider a fair trial. The Bush tribunal plan was to hold secret death-penalty, non-jury trials of the detainees, in which they would neither be allowed in the courtroom nor privy to the evidence against them.
The Bush administration also tried to deny any federal court review of its Guantanamo Bay treatment of prisoners, saying that Guantanamo Bay is not a U.S. territory, and therefore the courts aren't available to detainees there.
The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. In the 1st of 2 slaps against the White House's assertion of new powers, the court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees do have access to the federal court.
Writing for the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in a 2004 opinion that the war does not give the president "a blank check" to abrogate rights at his discretion.
"It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested," O'Connor wrote, "and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
The 2nd Supreme Court decision came this summer: this one ruling that the president doesn't have the right to order tribunals at Guantanamo Bay that violate the U.S. Constitution, the military's own code of justice and the Geneva Conventions.
The court, in a 5-3 vote, ruled that the Bush administration either needed to follow the established military justice system or ask Congress to draft a new law to sanction what was essentially unsanctioned executive power.
"Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation's ability to deal with danger," wrote Justice Steven Breyer. "To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation's ability to determine - through democratic means - how best to do so.
"The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means," Breyer wrote. "Our Court today simply does the same."
Last week, Bush pressed forward with his tribunal plan, asking Congress to write a law that allows the provisions questioned in the Supreme Court decision. But there are signs that Congress is losing its appetite for rubber-stamping another questionable legal shortcut.
"Congress has really fallen down," said Howard Simon, Florida director for the ACLU. "The fact that they're starting to stand up now is probably because the president's poll numbers are down."
Where does this leave us?
In the middle of a debate that is far from resolved.
Tonight, Bush will address the nation in a live prime-time television broadcast to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks. White House press secretary Tony Snow said the speech will cover "where we've been since Sept. 11 and how we move together."
(source: Frank Cerabino, The Pulse-Journal)
It has been 5 years since the 9/11 attacks, 5 years since we were awakened from our false sense of security to face a more uncertain and dangerous world than many of us had imagined.
The America of Sept. 11, 2001, was a nation paralyzed by fear and obsessed with its newfound insecurity. In that sense, little has improved over these 5 years. The small, virulent band of Islamic extremists behind the 9/11 attacks aren't a historical footnote today but are now viewed as the catalysts for a worldwide, generational strife - a seemingly never-ending, amorphous war on terror.
Our insecurity, if anything, has taken root.
Consider the words of U.S. House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, as he laid out his party's legislative priorities this month: "From homeland security to national security to border security, House Republicans will focus first and foremost on addressing the safety and security needs of the American people throughout the month of September."
Security, security, security, security.
After 5 years, we're still talking about all of the work that needs to be done to make us secure. We live in a world of Condition Yellow, where talk of freedom is interrupted by news of secret CIA prisons. Where national security has been used to justify just about anything: from preemptive war to warrantless wiretapping to farm subsidies.
All of the drumbeating to terror-proof America over the past 5 years has come at great cost: in lives, in international reputation and in many of the very principles we once considered the bedrock of what it means to be an American.
"In general, there was a willingness of the American people to consider trading civil liberties for security, but there's a lot more scepticism now because people have seen that these efforts haven't brought them any security," said Elliot Mincberg, legal director for the liberal People for the American Way.
Responding to 9/11 has become an all-encompassing rationale, a justification for what looks more and more like self-inflicted wounds of a Big Brother government adamant in its use of unchecked power but unable to do its homework.
Just ask Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, who went on to co-chair the 9/11 Commission, only to be disillusioned by the government's response to the group's recommendations. Here's what he said last December:
"It is scandalous that police and firefighters in large cities still cannot communicate reliably in a major crisis. It is scandalous that airline passengers are still not screened against all names on the terrorist watch list. It is scandalous that we still allocate scarce homeland security dollars on the basis of pork-barrel spending, not risk. . . .
"We believe that the terrorists will strike again. If they do, and these reforms have not been implemented, what will our excuses be?"
'Unfettered control'
The response to Hurricane Katrina last year only reinforced the notion that America may not be doing a heckuva job when it comes to managing the big picture. Stepping up cargo screening at seaports, securing weapons of mass destruction from the former Soviet Union and establishing oversight of how intelligence money is being spent are still on the to-do list 5 years after the attacks of 9/11.
It's not as if we've been idle.
We've been busy these past 5 years, busy flailing around in a kind of insecure incompetence, as the executive branch brazenly seized new powers in the name of national security.
Consider this: When the American Civil Liberties Union challenged a provision in the Patriot Act, the U.S. Department of Justice decided that portions of the ACLU's court filings should be blacked out because public knowledge of them would be a threat to national security.
What was so threatening? Censored portions included this:
"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."
This was a quotation from a U.S. Supreme Court decision. That's right. The executive branch of government arbitrarily decided that a prior opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court violated national security. That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Or consider this. The no-fly list that Kean complained about has become a mess.
The list of possible terror suspects who should be kept from flying on U.S. commercial airliners has grown significantly since 9/11, when there were only 16 names on the list. On the day after the attacks, there were 400 names on the list. It has continued to grow.
Who's on the list now? It's a secret. But last year, the Transportation Security Administration reported that 30,000 people called to complain that their names were on the no-fly list in error.
The list has flagged infants, pop singer Cat Stevens and a smattering of members from Congress, including Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass.
Author James Moore discovered this year that he was on the list when he tried to fly. He was given an 800 number to call to protest his grounded status.
In his blog, Moore relays the conversation of that call:
Moore: "Ma'am, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."
Agent: "I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir."
Moore: "What can you tell me?"
Agent: "All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."
Moore: "Well, let me get this straight. Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first 2 notes of the National Anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."
Agent: "I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."
Moore: "Oh wait. One last thing: This guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"
Moore's most recent book was entitled "Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential."
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Last year, Cyrus Kar, an American in Iraq making a documentary film about the Persian King Cyrus the Great, was detained for 50 days there by U.S. forces without charges while his family sued to have him released. The government, unable to classify Kar as an enemy combatant, held him as "an imperative security internee."
Timothy Lynch, the director of the conservative Cato Institute's Project on Criminal Justice, cites the Kar case in his report, Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism.
An imperative security internee?
"That designation apparently means that until the Supreme Court rules that this new category of person retains rights as well, the government will do whatever it wants," Lynch wrote. "Should the Supreme Court rule that the Bill of Rights applies to 'imperative security internees,' what is to stop the government from inventing another label for its prisoners?"
During the past few years, the FBI has used terrorism concerns as a reason to investigate all sorts of Americans far removed from Islamic fundamentalism. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the environmental group Greenpeace, the ACLU and protesters at the North American Wholesale Lumber Association convention in Colorado were all subjects of FBI counterterrorism investigations since 9/11.
Millions of Americans have been monitored through a warrantless surveillance program, secretly authorized by President Bush, that was begun in 2001 and was ruled unconstitutional last month by a federal district judge in Michigan.
"It was never the intent of the framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights," wrote U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor. "There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution."
Giving up liberties to feel safe is still a deal many Americans will accept. But what exactly have we gained? And in these 5 years, what was the biggest domestic terrorist plot unearthed?
I guess it would have to be what's been called the Miami plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Sounds scary. But what Attorney General Alberto Gonzales called a "significant investigation" in the war on terror turned out to be the arrests of a small gathering of Bible-study, housing-project, Miami-area men who practiced martial arts in a warehouse and sold African-American hair-care products in the neighborhood.
The men, part of a self-styled, ideologically muddled group they called Seas of David, were conflated into Al-Qaeda terrorists by an undercover FBI informant.
The informant, who was not affiliated with Al-Qaeda, administered a fake Al-Qaeda oath to the men and gave them a video camera so they could shoot footage of American buildings they may like to blow up someday - if they only had the weapons, cash, transportation and a memory chip for the camera. Oh, and boots, too. These guys said they needed boots to wage their "full ground war" on the U.S.
The government supplied them boots, then arrested them.
So to recap: It's an Al-Qaeda plot to blow up a Chicago landmark, except that nobody involved was Al-Qaeda, and they hadn't even traveled to Chicago to videotape the Sears Tower with their government-provided camera.
That's what's been called the Sears Tower Plot.
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Sentences of 20 days
During the past 5 years, the government has gone to great lengths to highlight the terrorist threat and salute its own efforts in combating it.
Last year, the president, while stumping for the extension of his power under the Patriot Act, said, "Federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects, and more than half of those charged have been convicted."
But a review of U.S. Department of Justice figures by The Washington Post revealed that only 39 people were convicted of crimes related to terrorism or national security. And most of them were minor false-statement violations of immigration laws and not related to any act of terror.
The newspaper found: "A large number of people appear to have been swept into U.S. counterterrorism investigations by chance - through anonymous tips, suspicious circumstances or bad luck - and have remained classified as terrorism defendants years after being cleared of connections to extremist groups.
"For example, the prosecution of 20 men, most of them Iraqis, in a Pennsylvania truck-licensing scam accounts for about 10 % of the individuals convicted - even though the entire group was publicly absolved of ties to terrorism in 2001."
TRAC, a data research organization connected to Syracuse University, released a report recently that looked at the 5-year record of terrorism prosecutions in the United States.
"The typical sentences recently imposed on individuals considered to be international terrorists are not impressive," the report concluded. "For all those convicted as a result of cases initiated in the 2 years after 9/11, for example, the median sentence - 1/2 got more, and 1/2 got less - was 28 days.
"For those referrals that came in more recently - through May 31, 2006 - the median sentence was 20 days."
By contrast, the report noted, the typical sentence on a terrorism case in the 2 years prior to 9/11 was 41 months.
Human warehouse
The record in the now notorious Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba is also less than meets the eye. While the more than 400 "enemy combatants" there have been described by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as "the worst of the worst," many of the men held for years in this secret prison have questionable ties to terrorism.
The conservative National Journal reviewed Defense Department court filings and other documents relating to 446 detainees at Guantanamo and found that most of the detainees there were not captured by Americans or Afghans in combat, but actually were handed over by Pakistan. About half are Afghans.
And most were only said to be "associated" with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban and picked up in the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Many of the enemy combatants arrested in that region say they fled the sudden chaos of Afghanistan without retrieving their passports and identification papers, and that when they asked to be taken to their embassies, they were taken to prison instead," Corine Hegland, of the National Journal, wrote. "Many of the men who detailed their capture described being taken through one, two or 3 Pakistani prisons before they were delivered to the Americans."
The cost for running this sort of human warehouse has been worldwide condemnation, a stain on the country's commitment to the rule of law and putting America at odds with the United Nations, which called for the camp's closing and referred the matter to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.
That's the kind of rabbit hole we're in now.
Bush has said he would like to close Guantanamo Bay. But last year, Halliburton - formerly headed by Vice President thingy Cheney - was awarded $30 million to build a permanent prison there.
And last week, the president announced that 14 high-value prisoners - the real worst of the worst - would be transferred from secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo Bay, apparently to bolster its necessity.
A mind-set of fear
Since 9/11, the only actual terrorist attack foiled during its execution was the apprehension of Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber, who was trying to strike a match to light a plastic explosive in his shoe during a London-to-Miami flight on Dec. 22, 2001.
And yet it took the TSA until August of this year to declare that all airline passengers must have their shoes scanned before boarding. As for the matches, well, you can't take a lighter on the plane, but each passenger is still permitted up to four books of matches in their carry-on luggage.
Why? You can't smoke on a plane.
Does anybody really know what you can or can't take onto a plane these days? OK, here's a quiz.
Which of these items is prohibited as a carry-on item? (A) knitting and crochet needles; (B) a 7-inch screwdriver; (C) a tennis racket; or (D) toothpaste.
The answer is the toothpaste, which became banned after last month's liquid-based London terror plot was foiled.
Screwdrivers, wrenches and other small tools used to be banned, but now they're allowed again. As for the tennis racket, it's OK, but a pool cue or a lacrosse stick isn't. Crochet needles of any size are OK now, too, as well as metal pointy-tip scissors that are shorter than 4 inches.
It's easy to get lost in shifting sands of concern in the post-9/11 world.
U.S. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in his book "Why Courage Matters," offered a rare but refreshing bit of perspective to this new mind-set.
"Suck it up, for crying out loud," he wrote. "You're almost certainly going to be OK. And in the unlikely event you're not, do you really want to spend your days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape?"
The fear, however, has played into a mood that has given the government what has amounted to nearly a blank check when it comes to taking shortcuts with civil liberties and constitutional safeguards.
The Patriot Act, penned in haste after 9/11, allowed the FBI to expand its use of National Security Letters, a 1970s provision that allowed the agency to skirt privacy law by secretly reviewing records on individuals without judicial oversight.
The use of these letters has skyrocketed since 9/11, reaching about 30,000 a year. They allow the agency access to phone records, correspondence and financial records of ordinary Americans without judicial or congressional review.
2 years ago, a federal judge in New York ruled it was unconstitutional to use these National Security Letters to secretly get records from Internet service providers without oversight.
"Under the mantle of secrecy, the self-preservation that ordinarily impels our government to censorship and secrecy may potentially be turned on ourselves as a weapon of self-destruction," U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero wrote. "At that point, secrecy's protective shield may serve not as much to secure a safe country as simply to save face."
'Dirty bomb' case
The court cases, as they begin to tumble in, are starting to add up to a legal rebellion to what has been an aggressive executive branch and a compliant, silent Congress.
Take the case of Jose Padilla, the Chicago-born gang member who became known as the man who wanted to set off a "dirty bomb" in America.
Then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, while traveling in Russia, announced the arrest of Padilla 4 years ago.
"I am pleased to announce today a significant step forward in the war on terrorism," Ashcroft said. "We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States."
The government classified Padilla as an "enemy combatant," saying that although he was a U.S. citizen, he wasn't entitled to the rights of a U.S. citizen. He was held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina for more than 3 years.
At first, a federal appeals court gave the Bush administration wide latitude in holding Padilla without a charge or court appearance. But after 3 years, and with Padilla's unusual confinement percolating its way toward a review by the U.S. Supreme Court, prosecutors switched gears, coming up with less serious charges against him, dropping any claim of a dirty-bomb plot and asking that he be added as a defendant to an unrelated case in Miami federal court.
This evoked an unusual scolding from appellate Judge J. Michael Luttig, who previously had sanctioned Padilla's remarkable confinement. Luttig wrote that Padilla's legal status deserved to be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court and that dropping the dirty-bomb claim "may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government's credibility before the courts."
Luttig wrote that the government left "the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake."
Luttig is no wide-eyed liberal activist judge. He had been on a short list of conservative appellate judges considered for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.
No 'blank check'
The government ran into even bigger legal problems with its attempt to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay in a way that defied all notions of what we might consider a fair trial. The Bush tribunal plan was to hold secret death-penalty, non-jury trials of the detainees, in which they would neither be allowed in the courtroom nor privy to the evidence against them.
The Bush administration also tried to deny any federal court review of its Guantanamo Bay treatment of prisoners, saying that Guantanamo Bay is not a U.S. territory, and therefore the courts aren't available to detainees there.
The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. In the 1st of 2 slaps against the White House's assertion of new powers, the court ruled that Guantanamo Bay detainees do have access to the federal court.
Writing for the court, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said in a 2004 opinion that the war does not give the president "a blank check" to abrogate rights at his discretion.
"It is during our most challenging and uncertain moments that our Nation's commitment to due process is most severely tested," O'Connor wrote, "and it is in those times that we must preserve our commitment at home to the principles for which we fight abroad."
The 2nd Supreme Court decision came this summer: this one ruling that the president doesn't have the right to order tribunals at Guantanamo Bay that violate the U.S. Constitution, the military's own code of justice and the Geneva Conventions.
The court, in a 5-3 vote, ruled that the Bush administration either needed to follow the established military justice system or ask Congress to draft a new law to sanction what was essentially unsanctioned executive power.
"Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation's ability to deal with danger," wrote Justice Steven Breyer. "To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation's ability to determine - through democratic means - how best to do so.
"The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means," Breyer wrote. "Our Court today simply does the same."
Last week, Bush pressed forward with his tribunal plan, asking Congress to write a law that allows the provisions questioned in the Supreme Court decision. But there are signs that Congress is losing its appetite for rubber-stamping another questionable legal shortcut.
"Congress has really fallen down," said Howard Simon, Florida director for the ACLU. "The fact that they're starting to stand up now is probably because the president's poll numbers are down."
Where does this leave us?
In the middle of a debate that is far from resolved.
Tonight, Bush will address the nation in a live prime-time television broadcast to mark the fifth anniversary of the attacks. White House press secretary Tony Snow said the speech will cover "where we've been since Sept. 11 and how we move together."
(source: Frank Cerabino, The Pulse-Journal)