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ADC Bulletin - September 7, 2007
ADC joins coalition letter opposing warrantless spying
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), along with other leaders in the civil liberties community, today sent a letter to Congress relaying concerns about a new law that could potentially allow the warrantless surveillance of any international communication by persons in the US or international communications coming through the US. The coalition's letter was sent to Democratic leaders House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senator Harry Reid (D-NV).
Under heavy pressure from the Administration to close what it termed as a "surveillance gap," and in the last days before the August recess, Congress passed S. 1927, the Protect America Act. Signed into law by President Bush, the law amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 by removing legal impediments to the interception of foreign communications that pass through the United States. It also redefined the terms of FISA to permit increased surveillance of communications involving persons in the US while curtailing judicial supervision.
The White House request came to Congress shortly after a FISA court allegedly knocked down one of the pillars of the Bush Administration's surveillance programs. Although activities of the FISA court are classified it is believed that judges ruled against the Administration's use of "basket warrants," or court approval for surveillance on multiple targets rather than approval on a case-by-case basis. The Administration was unable to prove that some of that surveillance was not crossing the US or involving persons in the US.
The bill was rushed through Congress before the August recess without sufficient review or debate. Shortly after passage, according to The New York Times, congressional aides pointed out that the Protect America Act actually gave the Administration additional powers that had not been requested from Congress. Spokespersons for the Administration said they do not intend to use those enhanced spying powers that lay outside the scope of what they requested. The Administration has held that their intent was to allow for easier collection of communications from people aboard that are incidentally routed through the US. ADC and coalition partners believe our nation can be vigilant on national security without stripping the civil liberties of innocent Americans.
Political Affairs magazine – September 7, 2007
Bush restricting travel rights of over 100,000 US citizens
By Sherwood Ross
The freedom to travel of more than 100,000 Americans placed on “watch” and “no fly” lists is being restricted by the Bush-Cheney regime.
Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’, strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The End of America.”(Chelsea Green Publishing)
“Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the fascist playbook,” Wolf says. She noticed starting in 2002 that “almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA) and given a more thorough search.”
During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians “who have criticized the White House.”
Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe from Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American citizen, described the “humiliation factor” he endured:
“I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal,” Wolf quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy airport by officers who “threatened and shoved” him. And that was mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant was detained at Kennedy and “rendered” to Syria where he was imprisoned for more than a year by goons that beat him with a heavy metal cable.
After the Canadian furor over Arar’s illegal kidnapping and torture, he was eventually released as he had zero ties to terrorists. Yet the Bush gang refused to concede error; refused to provide documents or witnesses to Canadian investigators; and claimed last January it had “secret information” that justified keeping Arar on the watch list, Wolf noted.
Again, Chaplain James Yee, an American citizen born in New Jersey who had converted to Islam and had the Christian compassion to call for better treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, was nabbed in Sept., 2003 on suspicion of “espionage and possibly treason” and flung into the Naval brig at Charleston, S.C., where he was manacled, put in solitary for 76 days, forbidden mail and family visits, demonized in the media and warned he could face execution. Wolf writes, “Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee,” claiming it did so to avoid making sensitive evidence public, not because the chaplain was innocent.
Over and again, the Bush gang claims it can prove terrible crimes about suspects but, like the men imprisoned at Guantanamo, it repeatedly turns out to have “conspiracy” zilch in its briefcase rather than hard proof of actual misdeeds. Yet it goes on punishing hundreds of suspects with solitary confinement and worse without ever bringing them to trial. Globally, the number of such detainees is in the tens of thousands. Stalin would have understood.
Apparently, favorite targets of the Bush tyranny are peace activists like Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, detained at the San Francisco airport; a political leader such as Nancy Oden, of the Green Party, prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago; King Downing and David Fathi, both of the American Civil Liberties Union and both detained (proves ACLU’s case about Bush, eh what?); and Constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, of Princeton University, who had attacked the illegalities of the Bush regime. He was put on notice his luggage would be ransacked.
“When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something you said or wrote, it has an impact,” Wolf writes. “…you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.”
Wolf traces the “watch list” back to a 2003 directive from Bush to his intelligence agencies to identify people “thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts.” After the list was given to the airlines, CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes got a copy. The list was 540 pages long and there were 75,000 names on it of people to be taken aside for extra screening.
The more stringent “no fly” list has 45,000 names on it, Wolf reports. Prior to 9/11, the list had just 16 names, but 44,984 suspects were quickly manufactured to justify the creation of the vast airport security apparatus at God knows what cost to American taxpayers.
One ludicrous “no fly” story concerns John Graham, president of the nonprofit Giraffe Heroes Project, an organization that honors people who stick their necks out. A former government careerist who served in Viet Nam, Graham is an inspired speaker that receives standing ovations from groups such as West Point cadets, yet is kept from flying from his Langley, Wash., base by the National Security Agency. NSA won’t tell him why, either. Maybe they have “secret” information on him, too.
Author Wolf notes that dictatorships from Hitler’s Germany to Pinochet’s Chile have employed arbitrary arrests to harass critics. And Bush’s airport detention policies are more of the same. As Wolf writes, “being free means that you can’t be detained arbitrarily.” Somebody ring the fire bell!
--Sherwood Ross is a Miami, FL-based writer who has worked in the civil rights movement, and for major dailies and wire services.
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/5795/1/282/
Washington Post – September 7, 2007
Terrorism watch list is faulted for errors
Ellen Nakashima
The government's master watch list of known or suspected terrorists continues to be marred by errors and inconsistencies that can obstruct the capture of terrorists or cause innocent people to be detained by U.S. authorities, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday.
As one of the most powerful intelligence tools created by the Bush administration after the 2001 attacks, the watch list is used to screen about 270 million people a month and its content can determine whether people are allowed to fly on airplanes or detained after routine traffic stops.
Its size has more than quadrupled since its creation in 2004, to the point that it contained more than 720,000 records as of April, according to the new report. It is growing at the rate of more than 20,000 records a month.
But Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said its management by the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) "continues to have significant weaknesses," producing a high error rate and a slow response to complaints from citizens.
In an examination of 105 records, for example, the auditors found that 38 percent of the records contained errors or inconsistencies that the TSC's own quality-assurance efforts had not found. They also discovered that the TSC is operating two versions of the database in tandem without ensuring that their contents are identical, which they said could result in missed opportunities to identify terrorists.
The report, a follow-up to a 2005 audit, noted that the TSC has opened an office to deal with complaints, and that 438 have been registered so far. But auditors found that the office typically took more than two months to resolve them.
In 97 of the 388 complaints resolved as of February, the TSC found that the watch-list record was inaccurate or incomplete. In an additional 76 instances a person's name was removed from the watch list, and in other cases people were misidentified or their records wound up being modified. The whole process was complicated by the fact that the government generally does not reveal a person's watch-list status to avoid tipping off terrorists.
The report attributed some problems to the fact that the FBI can directly enter international terrorist information into the database while bypassing the TSC and the National Counterterrorism Center, which is responsible for vetting such information. That bypass creates unnecessary data errors, the report said.
The review found that nearly half the initial name matches against the watch list proved worthless, suggesting that the government should consider misidentifications a priority and develop policies to address them, Fine said……
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/06/AR2007090601386.html
Baltimore Sun - September 7, 2007
Federal judge strikes down part of Patriot Act
By Richard B. Schmitt
The Bush administration suffered another legal setback yesterday when a federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act.
U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruled that investigators eventually must obtain a court's approval when ordering Internet providers and phone companies to turn over records without telling customers.
The ruling suggests that despite Congress' attempts to put the Patriot Act on firmer constitutional ground, it still faces significant legal challenges. If upheld on appeal, Marrero's decision could mean major new oversight of the FBI's use of a controversial investigative technique.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has issued thousands of so-called national security letters to help build counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases. The letters have become a popular tool at the bureau because they do not require court approval, and recipients have been prohibited from telling their customers that the data have been requested by authorities.
The Justice Department is expected to vigorously challenge yesterday's decision.
In his ruling, Marrero said the gag order on letter recipients violated the First Amendment. He also ruled that the process for issuing the letters undercuts the role of the courts, in violation of the principle of separation of powers under the Constitution.
Marrero, who struck down the Patriot Act once before, stayed his decision to give the Justice Department time to appeal.
"The risk of investing the FBI with unchecked discretion to restrict such speech is that government agents, based on their own self-certification, may limit speech that does not pose a significant threat to national security or other compelling government interest," the judge, who sits in New York, wrote in a 103-page ruling.
Marrero said that the FBI may issue a temporary non-disclosure order without going to court but that "within a reasonable and brief period of time" it must notify the recipient that the order is no longer in effect - or else persuade a court of the need for continued secrecy.
Michael Woods, a former head of the FBI national security law unit, said that if upheld, the ruling would "likely have the effect of making the NSL process so burdensome that the underlying tools are just not worth the trouble."
He said he expected the government would fight the decision by Marrero, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton.
National security letters - first authorized by law in 1986 - have become one of the FBI's bedrock investigative tools since Congress made them easier to issue as part of the original USA Patriot Act. But they also have been a source of criticism, even within the Justice Department.
In a report released in March, the department's inspector general found that many letters had been issued in violation of Justice Department rules and regulations. The watchdog office also found that the FBI's recordkeeping system for the letters was in such disarray that reports to Congress understated by thousands the number of letters the bureau was issuing.
Yesterday's ruling follows changes that Congress made last year in an effort to address a 2004 ruling by Marrero that found other problems with the security letters.
The original Patriot Act prohibited the phone companies and Internet providers from revealing the existence of a national security letter in all cases; Marrero found that patently unconstitutional.
Congress - in legislation reauthorizing the Patriot Act last year - changed the law to require that the FBI decide in each individual case whether disclosure would result in dangers to national security.
The law was also changed to give recipients of the letters a limited right to challenge the gag orders in court, but it required courts to accept as "conclusive" testimony of FBI officials that found secrecy was needed for national security reasons….
www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation/bal-te.patriot07sep07,0,5600606.story
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