[Infowarrior] - The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.

Sun Dec 31 11:15:02 EST 2006

The Bill of Wrongs
The 10 most outrageous civil liberties violations of 2006.
By Dahlia Lithwick
Posted Saturday, Dec. 30, 2006, at 6:30 AM ET
http://www.slate.com/id/2156397/

I love those year-end roundups‹ubiquitous annual lists of greatest films and
albums and lip glosses and tractors. It's reassuring that all human
information can be wrestled into bundles of 10. In that spirit, Slate
proudly presents, the top 10 civil liberties nightmares of the year:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
Long after it was clear the hapless Frenchman was neither the "20th
hijacker" nor a key plotter in the attacks of 9/11, the government pressed
to execute him as a "conspirator" in those attacks. Moussaoui's alleged
participation? By failing to confess to what he may have known about the
plot, which may have led the government to disrupt it, Moussaoui directly
caused the deaths of thousands of people. This massive overreading of the
federal conspiracy laws would be laughable were the stakes not so high.
Thankfully, a jury rejected the notion that Moussaoui could be executed for
the crime of merely wishing there had been a real connection between himself
and 9/11.

9. Guantanamo Bay
It takes a licking but it keeps on ticking. After the Supreme Court struck
down the military tribunals planned to try hundreds of detainees moldering
on the base, and after the president agreed that it might be a good idea to
close it down, the worst public relations fiasco since the Japanese
internment camps lives on. Prisoners once deemed "among the most dangerous,
best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth" are either quietly
released (and usually set free) or still awaiting trial. The lucky 75 to be
tried there will be cheered to hear that the Pentagon has just unveiled
plans to build a $125 million legal complex for the hearings. The government
has now officially put more thought into the design of Guantanamo's court
bathrooms than the charges against its prisoners.

8. Slagging the Media
Whether the Bush administration is reclassifying previously declassified
documents, sidestepping the FOIA, threatening journalists for leaks on
dubious legal grounds, or, most recently, using its subpoena power to try to
wring secret documents from the ACLU, the administration has continued its
"secrets at any price" campaign. Is this a constitutional crisis? Probably
not. Annoying as hell? Definitely.

7. Slagging the Courts
It starts with the president's complaints about "activist judges," and
evolves to Congressional threats to appoint an inspector general to oversee
federal judges. As public distrust of the bench is fueled, the stripping of
courts' authority to hear whole classes of cases‹most recently any habeas
corpus claims from Guantanamo detainees‹almost seems reasonable. Each tiny
incursion into the independence of the judiciary seems justified. Until you
realize that the courts are often the only places that will defend our
shrinking civil liberties. This leads to ...

6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
The Bush administration's insane argument in court is that judges should
dismiss entire lawsuits over many of the outrages detailed on this very
list. Why? Because the outrageously illegal things are themselves matters of
top-secret national security. The administration has raised this claim in
relation to its adventures in secret wiretapping and its fun with
extraordinary rendition. A government privilege once used to sidestep civil
claims has mushroomed into sweeping immunity for the administration's
sometimes criminal behavior.

5. Government Snooping
Take your pick. There's the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program wherein
the president breezily authorized spying on the phone calls of innocent
citizens, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The
FBI's TALON database shows the government has been spying on nonterrorist
groups, including Quakers, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and
Veterans for Peace. The Patriot Act lives on. And that's just the stuff we
know about.

4. Extraordinary Rendition
So, when does it start to become ordinary rendition? This government program
has us FedEx-ing unindicted terror suspects abroad for
interrogation/torture. Khalid El-Masri, a German citizen, was shipped off to
Afghanistan for such treatment and then released without charges, based on
some government confusion about his name. Heh heh. Canadian citizen Maher
Arar claims he was tortured in Syria for a year, released without charges,
and cleared by a Canadian commission. Attempts to vindicate the rights of
such men? You'd need to circle back to the state-secrets doctrine, above.

3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
First, he was, according to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, "exploring
a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty
bomb,' in the United States." Then, he was planning to blow up apartments.
Then he was just part of a vague terror conspiracy to commit jihad in Bosnia
and Chechnya. Always, he was a U.S. citizen. After three and a half years,
in which he was denied the most basic legal rights, it has now emerged that
Padilla was either outright tortured or near-tortured. According to a recent
motion, during Padilla's years of almost complete isolation, he was treated
by the U.S. government to sensory and sleep deprivation, extreme cold,
stress positions, threats of execution, and drugging with truth serum.
Experts say he is too mentally damaged to stand trial. The Bush
administration supported his motion for a mental competency assessment, in
hopes that will help prevent his torture claims from ever coming to trial,
or, as Yale Law School's inimitable Jack Balkin put it: "You can't believe
Padilla when he says we tortured him because he's crazy from all the things
we did to him."

2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
This was the so-called compromise legislation that gave President Bush even
more power than he initially had to detain and try so-called enemy
combatants. He was generously handed the authority to define for himself the
parameters of interrogation and torture and the responsibility to report
upon it, since he'd been so good at that. What we allegedly did to Jose
Padilla was once a dirty national secret. The MCA made it the law.

1. Hubris
Whenever the courts push back against the administration's unsupportable
constitutional ideas‹ideas about "inherent powers" and a "unitary executive"
or the silliness of the Geneva Conventions or the limitless sweep of
presidential powers during wartime‹the Bush response is to repeat the same
chorus louder: Every detainee is the worst of the worst; every action taken
is legal, necessary, and secret. No mistakes, no apologies. No nuance, no
regrets. This legal and intellectual intractability can create the illusion
that we are standing on the same constitutional ground we stood upon in
2001, even as that ground is sliding away under our feet.

What outrage did I forget? Send mail to Dahlia.Lithwick at hotmail.com. (E-mail
may be quoted by name unless otherwise stipulated.)

Wishing you and yours a happy, and freer, New Year.

A version of this piece appears in the Washington Post Outlook section.
Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2156397/