Big
Brother takes grip on America
The
US's response to 11 September has been an unprecedented clampdown on the
rights of its own citizens, reports Paul Harris in New York
Sunday September 7, 2003
The Observer
The message of the posters on the walls of Skokie library is plain: Big
Brother is watching you. The signs, put up by librarian Caroline Anthony,
warn of the radical new laws that have given the American government power
to monitor the reading habits of its citizens without telling them.
Now the FBI can
also secretly record what websites people look at. And what books they
buy. Or videos they hire. 'Libraries are all about freedom of knowledge
and not having Big Brother watching you. We had to warn our users,' said
Anthony.
She believed
Skokie was particularly at risk. The Chicago suburb has a large population
of immigrants, including many from countries such as Iraq and Iran. Two
years after the terror attacks of 11 September, 2001, Anthony and many
others think America is in the grip of a frightening extension of state
power.
At the centre of
it is the Patriot Act, rushed through in the wake of the attacks to give
authorities the legal weapons they needed to fight the 'war on terror'.
Instead, critics say, those weapons have also hit at America's own civil
rights and freedoms.
The act allowed
the FBI to pull records from libraries and bookstores, defined 'terrorism'
to include direct action by protesters, widened the use of wire-tapping on
phone calls and emails and paved the way for the mass internment without
charge of several thousand foreign nationals. The most vulnerable are
Arabs, Asians and Muslims. 'Essentially this is the most massive case of
ethnic profiling since the internment of Japanese Americans during the
Second World War,' said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor
and author of a forthcoming book on the subject, Enemy Aliens .
The government
refuses to number the amount of foreign nationals it holds without charge.
But even those released and deported are still victims. The shadow of
being detained for suspicion of terrorism is not easily lifted. Certainly
Akil Sachveda is suffering. He is now a part-time pump attendant in
Toronto. He used to own a petrol station, a bar and a pool hall in New
Jersey, until one day the FBI came looking for an ex-employee who was a
Muslim. The man had left but they arrested Sachveda instead on suspicion
of Islamic terrorism, despite the fact he is a Hindu. He was held for five
months and given no access to a lawyer. Prison guards threatened his life.
Eventually he was deported to Canada. He was never charged, but he had
lost everything. 'It is so painful. It was terrifying, but you can't fight
the government,' he said.
Sachveda now can't
get a full-time job. His spell in prison puts off employers. 'You either
don't get an interview or they let you go as soon as they find out. But I
never did anything wrong.'
The extensions of
state power go beyond round-ups and the Patriot Act. The FBI has secretly
recruited campus police officers to monitor students and academics. The
scheme was only uncovered after the interrogation of a Sri Lankan campus
union organ iser at the University of Massachusetts. Yaju Dharmarajah had
applied to help with a state emergency co-ordination agency as part of
plans to become an aid worker. But his Asian name and accent instead
brought the local campus FBI officer to his house. 'They thought I wanted
to video their work as part of a terrorist plot,' he said.
'I am lucky. I
have a white American wife. If she was Sri Lankan like me, I wouldn't have
said anything for fear they would deport us,' Dharmarajah said.
Others are also
afraid. Last year Sister Virgine Lawinger, a 74-year-old Milwaukee nun,
was travelling to an anti-war rally. But she was on a list of people
considered too dangerous to fly and was stopped from boarding her plane.
She believes her politics were to blame. 'People should not be naive. My
experience just raised the stakes for me. It shows we have to be even more
alert to protecting our democracy,' she said.
Jan Adams, a
journalist on the anti-war San Francisco newspaper War Times , has also
been stopped at airports, as has her colleague Rebecca Gordon. New York
lawyer Barbara Olshansky, who is involved in several anti-Patriot Act
suits, is stopped almost every time she flies. She is frequently subjected
to strip and full body searches. She now fears to leave the US, despite
being an American citizen, out of concern she will not be allowed back. It
has made her angry. 'It is becoming an awful witch-hunt. At first I didn't
believe it, but now it is just horrifying to me,' she said.
But there is a
growing movement to try to roll back the act. It is gathering support from
across the political spectrum, including such notable Republicans as
Idaho's Senator 'Butch' Otter, who has led an effort in Congress to
curtail some of the act's powers.
Across America
more than 150 cities and counties have passed local legislation 'opting
out' of the Patriot Act. In Boise, Idaho, a Republican stronghold, a group
calling itself the Boise Patriots is hoping to force the city council to
add their city to the list. They are a diverse group, including
anti-abortionists, women's rights groups, environmentalists and pro-gun
lobbyists. 'If enough communities join this effort, we can roll this law
right back,' said founder Gwen Sanchirico.
The movement has
become so powerful that Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on a
nationwide tour to promote the Patriot Act. But it is already too late for
some. Sachveda is not adjusting well to his newfound poverty and exile
from his adopted home. 'I lost everything. It would have been better if I
had never come to America,' he said.
