Before retiring from the U.S. Supreme Court, Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has provided an eloquent, as well as chilling, warning to Americans about their government and the insidious expansion of police powers nibbling away at liberties they once assumed were protected.
"A state of war," she said from the high court's bench during a hearing on an Iraq war detainee's rights, "is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens."
Justice O'Connor can see what's happening. Using the cover of "the war on terror"—the war launched on fabricated intelligence—the Bush administration's ultra-rightwing authoritarians are trying to straightjacket Americans with incessant doses of fear and twisting or ignoring laws.
Millions of executive branch documents are being sealed from public review. Terror "suspects" are summarily whisked out of the United States and imprisoned abroad in former Soviet prisons. Vice President Cheney is involved in an almost crazed demand to exempt the CIA from laws prohibiting abuse and torture of prisoners—American citizens or otherwise.
Underscoring just how far this president and his court are willing to go in abusing constitutional rights of Americans, The Washington Post reveals that the FBI has issued some 30,000 "national security letters" that demand files and documents from institutions and individuals—and, further, threatens letter recipients with criminal charges if they reveal the FBI's actions.
In a frightful act of surliness, the FBI has rejected requests from Congress for information about this dragnet operation—as if to say to Congress, butt out, just as the CIA has rejected congressional demands for information about overseas CIA prisons.
For those who've forgotten, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides: "The rights of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue. But upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
But the FBI winks at the Constitution: a low-level field agent for the FBI has authority to draw up one of these letters and serve it, without court approval or any justification other than "suspicion."
This is the technique of a police state. It also is defiance of the Fourth Amendment.
Doesn't it frighten Americans to learn 30,000 such "national security letters" have been served on people who've been prohibited from talking? And suspected of what? Have any of them disappeared?
Pat Murphy
