For the week of March 5 - 11, 2003

Freedoms slipping away?

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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Not long after September 11, Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was among the first to predict Americans would lose some freedoms.

How prescient she was. Congress handed President Bush the bulky, wide-ranging U.S. Patriot Act, whose jingoistic official name is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism."

But some in Congress have second thoughts, such as powers to hold suspects indefinitely incommunicado without lawyers.

Some in the public are resisting. The American Library Association has recommended public libraries destroy files about patrons at the end of the day that federal snoops might sift through.

Some U.S. communities have prohibited police from assisting federal agencies in conducting surveillance of local citizens. The FBI, coincidentally, at first denied, then admitted last week that a small aircraft flying nightly over Bloomington, Ind., neighborhoods involves government surveillance.

Even though Congress has forbidden the Defense Department from launching the Total Information Awareness project to siphon information from personal bank accounts, e-mail, and telephone and credit card records, President Bush seems to have found a way around Congress.

Washington has contracted defense contractor Lockheed Martin to develop a risk-level color code system for airline passengers (the Bush White House seems big on color codes).

When booking flights, passengers will provide personal information to be fed into a computer programmed to determine if passengers get green labels, cautionary yellow labels as possible risks or no-go red labels banning their travel.

If this scheme is plagued with the same incompetence that made simple airport screening a farce, many passengers will be wrongly color-coded as risks because of name confusion or unverified data in unreliable files managed by poorly trained workers.

Consider what Americans discovered when the 1967 Freedom of Information Act was amended in 1974 to open files of the Justice Department: tens of thousands found to their horror that their files contained rumors and malicious gossip from anonymous sources that lacked any credibility and characterized otherwise law-abiding citizens as suspicious.

We’re entering another of those periods when super-patriots cheer for war and doubt the patriotism of those who criticize.

"Better dead than Red" was the epithet hurled at anti-war critics during the Cold War. Today’s denunciations come in various flavors. Apparently forgetting we expect the best advice the Pentagon can give, conservative columnist George Will calls military officials with reservations about Bush’s strategy "fragile flowers." U.S. Sen. Lindsay Graham, the South Carolina Republican who succeeded 100-year-old Strom Thurmond, uses "appeasers" to denounce the unwilling.

Some take their fervor farther: John Goolrick, an aide to Republican Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis, of Virginia, tried, but failed, to engineer an e-mail and phone campaign to get columnist Rick Mercier of the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star fired for criticizing conservatives who discredit the anti-war movement. His boss didn’t disavow Goolrick’s vindictiveness.

Wouldn’t it be something if columnist Mercier ends up in the government’s super data file with yellow coding as a possible security risk simply for defending the anti-war movement?

 

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