WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- In less than three months, President Bush has enacted the largest extension of national security powers in a quarter century, giving investigative agencies new authority to delve into the lives of Americans and foreign nationals alike.
Moving almost immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and capitalizing on national anxiety as the war in Afghanistan and the anthrax crisis dominated the American psyche, the administration swept aside long-standing civil liberties protections and practices in order to pursue terrorists.
The administration says these steps are necessary to defend the country against attack, but civil libertarians counter that they undermine the privacy and legal rights of ordinary Americans.
President Bush said Wednesday that the government must take aggressive steps to protect Americans from further attacks. "I want the people of the world to understand that our great nation will never forgo the values that have made us unique, that we believe in democracy and rule of law and the constitution," Bush said.
"But we're under attack. Every morning I wake up and read the threat assessments."
Nonetheless, Congress is now asking serious questions about some of these actions in a series of hearings slated to last another 10 days. At a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee hearing Tuesday, both Republicans and Democrats had sharp questions about Bush's plan to try non-citizen terror suspects before special military tribunals. On Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft will come to the Senate to answer further questions about it.
Next week the spotlight will turn to a possible hearing featuring Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who is charged with writing rules for this controversial court.
In just three months, the Bush administration has:
-- Rounded up more 1,200 persons, most of them without any apparent connection to the terrorist attack; held many for weeks without charges in jails across the country; kept their names secret; and charged many with crimes not connected to terrorism. Others were held on procedural immigration violations. The government won't give even the number of unidentified suspects being held as material witnesses.
-- Gained passage in Congress of the USA Patriot Act, which extended the power of the government to wiretap persons suspected of connection to terrorism, allowed searches of homes and offices without notifying the owners for weeks or months -- so-called "sneak and peek" power -- and vastly extended the right of agents to obtain personal data including banking, medical, educational and even library records of suspects.
-- Ordered the Department of Defense to create the ground rules for possible military tribunals, special courts for trying non-citizen terrorist suspects. In those tribunals the government would choose the lawyers, the venue, the rules of evidence and the standard of proof. A two-thirds vote of those judges could sentence a defendant to death. The tribunals would allow secret evidence to be used and can be held in secret as well.
-- Authorized agents to listen in on conversations between suspects and their lawyers.
-- Clamped down on the release of information available through the Freedom of Information Act, tightening public access to many government records and policy decisions.
-- Ordered law enforcement officers to interview some 5,000 persons legally in the United States, who the administration says are from countries where terrorists are active. Most of the targeted men and women are from the Middle East.
-- Just weeks after passing the USA Patriot Act, asked Congress to skip congressional hearings and quietly expand its spy powers even further, by slipping the provisions into a must-pass funding bill headed for final passage. Among other things, that request would have given investigators vast new power to delve into the Internet. One provision would let the CIA obtain from electronic communication providers' e-mail traffic that goes from one country to another in the world and only incidentally passes through the United States. Congress is unlikely to grant most of the requests.
-- Planned to permit investigations and wiretap surveillance of religious organizations saying that some Islamic mosques and groups are aiding terrorists.
The Bush administration has moved so boldly, it has caught Congress off guard and left civil liberties groups straining to understand and evaluate this rush of regulations and orders. Where it could, the administration has avoided actions that would require Congressional approval. Except for the Patriot anti-terrorist legislation, Bush has largely ignored Congress. The administration has also declined to send witnesses to several hearings, and by doing so given critics a fast moving target.
"Congressional oversight is important in helping to maintain public confidence in our system of laws," Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy told United Press International Wednesday. "In our society, unlike in so many other nations, when a judge issues an order, it is respected and carried out, because the public has faith in our system and its laws.
"In a democracy, there are never going to be enough police to enforce an order. The division of power and the checks and balances built into our system help sustain and earn the public's confidence in the actions taken by the government."
The president has had enormous public support for many of these moves. The military tribunals, for instance -- soundly opposed by many in Congress on both sides of the political aisle and by civil liberties groups -- were approved by 68 percent of the persons questioned in a Newsweek Magazine poll last week. On the other hand, only 43 percent were willing to accept the idea that aliens could be rounded up and detained as a way to prevent further terrorism.
On Capitol Hill, Bush defenders like Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions argue that "when we wage war, the Constitution does not give foreign enemies rights to invoke against us. Rather the Constitution provides us with the means to defeat and destroy our enemies. Otherwise our liberties would be subject to a potential victory by a terrorist group who doesn't value the values we cherish in this country."
James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a liberal Washington think tank, counters that neither Congress nor the news media has "put all of this together," to recognize the breadth of the aggressive moves by the administration and the breadth of the dragnet methods now available to government investigators.
Dempsey focused on aspects of the Patriot Act and the surveillance changes to warn that the government can now delve into personal and private records of individuals even if they cannot be directly connected to a terrorist or a foreign government.
Bank records, credit card records, telephone toll calls, local call records, e-mails, library records, even the track of discount cards at grocery stores can be obtained on individuals without establishing for judges any connection to a terrorist.
"Previously to get any of this information, the government had to link it to particular suspected terrorists. They had to name the person and give specific facts and say we believe this person is an agent of a foreign power.
"That whole requirement is gone. In the past, they could go to an airline and say, give us the travel records of a specific person; now they can go and say give us the records of everyone who flew on Sept. 11."
The investigators know, he said, that most of the people they are focusing on are innocent, but they want to put the material in their computer, crunch it and find out if any connections emerge.
The Patriot Act erased the line between FBI criminal investigations and intelligence gathering, so under the rubric of intelligence gathering, the bureau can obtain information that can be used against someone in a criminal case.
The problem, he argues, is that names will remain in that computer, available to the government at any time. "You are arriving at the airport after a foreign trip and your named shows that your records were gathered in investigation of international terrorism," Dempsey said.
In effect, he said, the act erases the line set between the CIA and domestic intelligence created in the 1970s. The CIA now has the authority for the first time to get the product of an FBI criminal investigation and task the FBI to gather information in the U.S.
Armed with personal public approval polls of 90 per cent or more, Bush has aggressively defended the need for these tough new actions. Taking on attacks against military tribunals before a town meeting in Orlando, Fla., Tuesday, the president said, "I know a lot of people have some concerns about how safe we can make the country and if we're doing things within the Constitution Let me give you an example of why it may be necessary to use such a tribunal.
"What if the information necessary to bring him [a terrorist] to justice would compromise our capacity to keep America safe? In the court of law, there would be all kinds of questions that might compromise our ability to gather incredibly important intelligence to prevent the next attack from happening to America.
"It seems like to me that the President of the United States ought to have the option to protect the national security interests of the country." His explanation was met with a standing ovation.
The president and his key officials, Attorney General John Ashcroft, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and others, argue that critics should not predict the laws will be abused.
Twentieth-century history is not reassuring on that point, however. Indeed, many of the safeguards that were imposed on intelligence agencies came in the middle 1970s after sweeping hearings by the Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Idaho Sen. Frank Church.
The committee had uncovered illegal wiretapping, burglaries by government agents, crimes by informants under direction of agents as well as assassination plots and other violations by the Central Intelligence Agency.
It reported on "Cointelpro," the acronym for Counter Intelligence Program under which the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King and the Socialist Workers Party among thousands of others, and used techniques such as character assassination, harassment and physical intimidation to attack their enemies.
In 1975, Rep. Don Edwards, a former FBI agent, wrote this assessment on the disclosures:
"Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations, the Constitution does not permit federal interference with activities except through the criminal justice system, armed with its ancient safeguards. There are no exceptions. No federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, or the FBI, can at the same time be policeman, prosecutor, judge and jury."
