Headlines, Human Rights, North America

RIGHTS-U.S.: One Step Forward, Two Back?

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Aug 22 2003 (IPS) - Just when it appeared U.S. lawmakers themselves were starting to resist the administration’s tendency post-9/11 to make laws that trample on civil rights, another bid to expand government’s police powers has surfaced, while Amnesty International reported this week that Washington continues to ignore global norms.

The draft law making the rounds is the Victory Act, which would grant authorities more power to seize records and secretly listen to conversations in a bid to stop the drug trafficking that the law’s backers say finances terrorist activities.

Floated by a group of senators from President George W. Bush’s Republican Party, the law would also make it easier for investigators to freeze the assets of alleged drug traffickers or terrorists and to convict those accused of laundering money through informal networks or "hawalas", such as the ones said to have financed the activities of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.

Like the Patriot Act, passed in reaction to the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon on Sep. 11, 2001, the Victory Act would expand police powers in the name of Bush’s ‘War on Terrorism’.

But the new bill’s appearance seems to contradict Congress’ latest move against the Patriot Act. Last month, members from both sides of the House of Representatives voted to add an amendment to the controversial law that would block federal agents from searching homes, confiscating property or monitoring computers without peoples’ knowledge.

The amendment must still be approved by the Senate and the president.

That rebuke of the Patriot Act’s expansion of agents’ spying powers is one reason, experts say, that Attorney General John Ashcroft embarked this week on a nation-wide tour to win back support for the Act, which has also been censured by state legislatures and more than 150 municipalities.

Another reason, analysts add, is that elections are scheduled for 2004.

"An attorney general going on the road, away from his official duties, to favourably spin policies violative of civil liberties is troubling, to say the least,” said Laura W. Murphy, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington legislative office, in a statement this week.

”It raises two serious questions: is this tour . political in nature, and how prudent is it to be spending public money on a ‘Patriot Act’ charm offensive?"

The law, she added, goes beyond the fight against terrorism.

”As the New York Times reported, it’s been used – over the objections of the State Department – to seize funds stolen by American con artists and stashed in overseas accounts."

"By the attorney general’s own admission to the judiciary committee, the Act is actively being applied in non-terrorism related investigations, even though terrorism was the sole justification for the bill for most of the lawmakers who voted for it."

The Victory Act is just one of many paths the administration has followed en route to eclipsing civil rights, according to Wendy Patton in the Washington office of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

There were "a whole range of executive actions taken – not laws passed by Congress – but either regulations that were formally promulgated . or also just new internal policies: old laws applied in new ways that greatly expanded powers of surveillance and detention," she told IPS.

"The best example of that would be the immigration detainees."

In a report in June, the justice department’s inspector general denounced the "unduly harsh" conditions faced by 750 detainees arrested in New York and New Jersey following the 9/11 attacks.

It singled out the FBI for criticism. "Even in the chaotic aftermath of the Sep. 11 attacks, we believe the FBI should have taken more care to distinguish between aliens who it actually suspected of having a connection to terrorism from those aliens who, while possibly guilty of violating federal immigration law, had no connection to terrorism," the report said.

This week’s report by Amnesty International, ‘The Threat of a Bad Example’, accuses the administration of merely paying lip service to the freedoms that have become synonymous with the United States.

"Respect for human rights is not a public relations exercise, and rather than responding constructively to the widespread international concern about the detainees in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere, the administration has largely ignored or rejected it," it says.

The document details numerous instances since 9/11 when Washington ignored global norms on human rights, "threaten(ing) to erode international laws and standards forged over the past half-century or more".

For instance, the administration revoked its signature on the Rome Treaty that created the International Criminal Court, labelled two nationals "enemy combatants" and locked them up in a U.S. military jail without charge or trial, and continues to try to block the optional protocol to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which would establish a system of regular visits to places of detention.

Much of the report examines treatment of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba – or en route to detention there – many of whom have been held there for more than one year, in conditions violating Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners.

"In May 2003, a former Guantanamo detainee who had been sent back to Afghanistan recalled to Amnesty International the 40 days he had spent in U.S. custody in Bagram Air Base (in Afghanistan) in mid 2002 before his transfer to Cuba," the report says.

"Afghan national Sayed Abbasin said that he had not been hit by anybody, but that he had been forced to stand, sit and kneel. He described how being forced to kneel for four hours a day felt worse than being beaten . He described a regime of sleep deprivation, 24-hour lighting and guards banging on cells and shouting to keep detainees awake."

"The USA has contravened international law and standards in its treatment of detainees in its declared ‘war on terror’ and it is setting a dangerous example in so doing," concludes the report.

"As Secretary (of State Colin) Powell said, states which demonstrate a high degree of respect for human rights are the most likely to contribute to international security and well-being."