I recall that morning the way you might remember a fitful nightmare - staccato images more than streaming video. I was at my newsroom desk, reading what turned out to be yesterday's news, when a colleague yelled out that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. It was inconceivable. Within minutes, the confusing jumble of "what's happening?" became clear: terrorism. Americans were being indiscriminately targeted for murder and mayhem.
I knew life would change after that day. Despite the estimated $30-billion we poured annually into the intelligence services budgets, something big had been missed. There would be the inevitable chest-beating calls for more security and monitoring. But what concerned me most was that the likes of George Bush and John Ashcroft were at the helm. Would they respect the values that define this nation and uphold the rule of law, separation of powers and individual rights? Or would they use this time of heightened anxiety as an opportunity to bulldoze any limits on their power?
Not surprising, they chose the latter route. We wake up two years later in a far diminished republic. The Bush administration has gone about this "war on terrorism" as though it were a war on the Bill of Rights.
If you want proof, I commend a new book by that title from columnist Nat Hentoff, which vividly describes the chilling compendium of abuses commited by our government since 9/11. The War on the Bill of Rights - and the Gathering Resistance (www.sevenstories.com) should be required reading in every high school government class. Drawing parallels to McCarthyism and COINTELPRO, the FBI's attempt to undermine the civil rights movement, Hentoff chronicles a great wrong inflicted by government - one we are still living, and one we will, like the others, come to regret.
With chapters titled "How We Began to Lose Our Liberties," and "Ashcroft's Master Plan to Spy on Us," Hentoff describes how the surveillance state has risen, Phoenix-like, from the ashes of the twin towers.
He writes: "(The) erosion of sections of the Bill of Rights began to be quickened when the president signed the USA Patriot Act on October 26, 2001. . . . Several members (of Congress) later said that parts of the new law seemed unconstitutional, but in view of the coming elections, they did not want to be attacked as "unpatriotic' by their opponents."
Hentoff lays bare a disturbing lack of courage among our current crop of political leaders. A paltry few have been willing to stand up to Ashcroft and his scandalous assertions that anyone who criticizes his tactics gives "ammunition to America's enemies."
"Where were Al Gore, John Edwards, John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Charles Schumer, and Hillary Rodham Clinton?" Hentoff writes in a section describing Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. Operation TIPS was Ashcroft's domestic spying program in which postal workers, cable technicians and others were to be recruited as government informants. It was a scheme, according to Hentoff, "that Josef Stalin would have appreciated." But Democratic leaders barely registered an objection. It took conservative lawmaker Dick Armey, who was House majority leader at the time, to torpedo the snitch brigade by getting an amendment in the Homeland Security Act.
As Hentoff documents, this was a rare victory for civil liberties. Mostly, Ashcroft and "his champion, George W. Bush," have succeeded in their efforts to arrogate power.
Perhaps the most flagrant disregard for our constitutional traditions comes in the cases of Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, two American citizens who are now being held as "enemy combatants," incommunicado and without charge.
Hentoff quotes then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff - now a federal appellate judge! - justifying this lawlessness by saying, "When we are talking about preventing acts of war against us, the judicial model just doesn't work." In other words, these days, the Bill of Rights is just too inconvenient.
Rightly in my view, Hentoff blames the country's direction in part on the media's distraction. Outrages, like the CIA's alleged collaboration in the overseas torture of prisoners and the Justice Department's abuse of immigrants swept up after Sept. 11, become one-day stories. Then it's on to the next thing.
There is a light, though: a growing and restive resistance movement that Hentoff compares to the Committees of Correspondence prior to the Revolution. More than 150 communities and three states have passed resolutions in opposition to the Patriot Act and Ashcroft's tactics.
He sees this citizen response "to the darkening authoritarianism of the present government" as a remarkably positive sign. "If Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson could be aware of the waves upon waves of resistance . . . they would, I believe, be reassured," Hentoff writes.
Maybe. But anyone who reads this book won't sleep easily as long as this president and attorney general are in charge.
