[Nettime-bold] (Fwd) NYT: U.S. Widens Policy on Detaining Suspects

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

There is a civil-liberties alert in the U.S.. It was expected given the 
circumstances. However, I don't think that in the process of fighting 
against those who hate our way of life - we should give up on it. 
Wouldn't that be their ultimate victory? This is not draining the 
swamp - this is the scorched Earth tactics.
ivo

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From:           	Zorka Milin <zorkam@FREESERBIA.ORG>
Subject:        	NYT: U.S. Widens Policy on Detaining Suspects
To:             	JUSTWATCH-L@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU

   The following two pieces from today's New York Times are very
worrisome. Both are bad news in terms of freedom of speech and other
constitutional freedoms, but taken together, they make it seem as though
the U.S. is slowly turning into a totalitarian state (and I think I'm
exaggerating only a bit here). Sadly, this may be the worst consequence
of all, after last week's terror attacks.

   "The Bush administration today announced a major expansion of its
power to detain immigrants suspected of crimes, including new rules
prompted by last week's terrorist attacks that would allow legal
immigrants to be detained indefinitely during a national emergency."

  note: LEGAL immigrants to be detained INDEFINITELY.

  WWII detention camps for Japanese Americans, ring the bell?

Zorka Milin
English Editor
www.FreeSerbia.org
+381 64 160-4167


http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/national/19CIVI.html

September 19, 2001
POLICY AND LEGISLATION
U.S. Widens Policy on Detaining Suspects

By PHILIP SHENON and ROBIN TONER

WASHINGTON, Sept. 18 — The Bush administration today announced a major
expansion of its power to detain immigrants suspected of crimes,
including new rules prompted by last week's terrorist attacks that would
allow legal immigrants to be detained indefinitely during a national
emergency.

Citing the new powers, the Justice Department said it would continue to
hold 75 immigrants arrested in connection with the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. Previously, the department faced a 24-
hour deadline on whether to release detained immigrants or charge them
with a crime, or with violating the terms of their visa.

The new detention powers drew statements of concern from civil liberties
advocates and immigration lawyers. While the pressure on the
administration and Congress to act is immense in the wake of the
terrorist attacks, there is rising concern on the left and the right that
the rush to respond could erode basic constitutional freedoms.

The administration, which had the authority to rewrite the detention
rules, is also expected within days to present Congress with a broad
package of anti-terrorism legislation. Civil liberties and privacy groups
are pleading with Congress not to act hastily on the package.

A draft bill circulating today on Capitol Hill, apparently reflecting the
administration's views, would give new authority to the Justice
Department to arrest immigrants suspected of terrorism, accelerate the
process of deporting them and curtail court appeals.

In announcing the new regulations, Attorney General John Ashcroft said at
a news conference that the government had "a responsibility to use every
legal means at our disposal to prevent further terrorist activity by
taking people into custody who have violated the law and who may pose a
threat to America."

Mr. Ashcroft insisted that "we're going to do everything we can to
harmonize the constitutional rights of individuals with every legal
capacity we can muster to also protect the safety and security of
individuals."

Under its new powers, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which
is part of the Justice Department, would normally have 48 hours to decide
whether to release or charge a detained immigrant.

The 48-hour deadline could be waived, however, "in the event of emergency
or other extraordinary circumstance," allowing an immigrant to be held
for "an additional reasonable period of time" without charges.

The new rules would apply to immigrants and foreign visitors who entered
the country legally but who are suspected of committing crimes in the
United States, or who have overstayed a visa or violated other terms of
their entry into the country. They would not apply to citizens.

David Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia and a former
general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
said "there's definitely a civil liberties concern" in the new
regulations.

"I don't want to be alarmist about this," Mr. Martin said. "If we're
talking about adding an additional 12 hours or 24 hours to detention, I
don't think that's a problem. But if we are holding people for weeks and
weeks, then I think there will be close scrutiny."

Jeanne A. Butterfield of the American Immigration Lawyers Association
said that in the midst of the crisis created by last week's terrorism,
the new rules "may be reasonable, but no one wants to see this lead to
some kind of indefinite detention."

The Supreme Court has questioned the constitutionality of indefinite
detention, ruling last summer that the government could not order open-
ended detention of illegal, clearly deportable immigrants simply for lack
of a country willing to take them.

Human rights groups have long criticized indefinite-detention laws in
other countries, noting that they are often used by repressive
governments to lock up dissidents for months or years under the guise
of "emergency" conditions.

The Justice Department has announced that it will ask Congress for broad
new surveillance authority to place wiretaps on phones and computers and
a variety of other powers to fight terrorism. Mr. Ashcroft has asked
Congress to act within days, and few politicians or advocacy groups have
been willing, until now, to suggest a more cautious response.

But in recent days, more are stepping forward to urge lawmakers and the
administration to slow down, examine the security flaws that led to the
attacks and consider the consequences of various proposals for civil
liberties.

Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican and staunch opponent of gun
control, sent a letter to Mr. Ashcroft and Congressional leaders today
declaring, "Before we begin dismantling constitutionally protected
safeguards and diminishing fundamental rights to privacy, we should first
examine why last week's attacks occurred."

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, acknowledged in an interview that there
was "a hunger to act," but added, "My concern is that at some point
you've got to stop doing things that give you a nice press release and
start doing things that actually protect the nation."

Mr. Leahy promised quick — but careful — action, adding, "The first thing
we have to realize is this is not either or — this is not the
Constitution versus capturing the terrorists. We can have both."

And Morton H. Halperin, a longtime official with the American Civil
Liberties Union and a veteran of the State Department under the Clinton
administration, described Mr. Ashcroft's plea for action by week's end
as "deeply troubling."

Mr. Halperin, now a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations,
added, "We should not be enacting restrictions on the liberty of
Americans without careful debate. If we do it carefully, we can find an
acceptable balance. If we rush into it, we will do things that deprive
people of their liberty without improving security."

Mr. Halperin was one of the organizers of a coalition of groups, as
varied as the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans for Tax
Reform, that met for the first time on Friday. That coalition, informally
known as the In Defense of Freedom Coalition, has scheduled a news
conference for Thursday to declare its concerns. At the moment, many of
these groups are demanding that the administration's proposals be the
subject of open debate and orderly consideration.

Grover Norquist, the influential conservative strategist who heads
Americans for Tax Reform, said, "I've heard some politicians say we need
to pass this this week — that's code for, if anybody read it, it wouldn't
pass."

Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology, another member of the new coalition, said, "We've had a
history of racing to judgment and passing inappropriate and wrongheaded
and ultimately counterproductive laws."

Mr. Berman added, "Before you pass legislation in this area, you need to
know what happened. And I have not yet found a story or a statement by
any official that says the failure here was caused by restrictions on
electronic surveillance."

But Ron Klain, who served in the White House and Justice Department under
President Bill Clinton, argued that "it's inevitable at times like this
that the pent-up agenda of law enforcement gets put forward."

"I think there is nothing wrong and probably something right about
Congress acting on these matters relatively quickly," Mr. Klain said.

Moreover, he said, the public may well be ready to recalibrate the
balance between civil liberties and security. "The Constitution is not a
suicide pact," he said.

Mr. Klain argued that Congress needed, however, to ensure that whatever
trade-off was made actually resulted in a safer society.


* * *

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/19/arts/music/19POPL.html

September 19, 2001
After the Horror, Radio Stations Pull Some Songs
By NEIL STRAUSS

Clear Channel Communications, the Texas-based company that owns about
1,170 radio stations nationwide, has circulated a list of 150 songs and
asked its stations to avoid playing them because of the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Some listed songs would be insensitive to play right now, such as the Gap
Band's "You Dropped a Bomb on Me" and Soundgarden's "Blow Up the Outside
World," but other choices, critics and musicians say, are less explicable
because they have little literal connection to the tragedies.

These include "Ticket to Ride" by the Beatles, "On Broadway" by the
Drifters and "Bennie and the Jets" by Elton John. Even odder, some songs
on the list are patriotic, like Neil Diamond's "America." Others speak of
universal optimism, like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," and
others are emotional but hopeful songs that could help people grieve,
like "Imagine" by John Lennon, "Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon and
Garfunkel, "Peace Train" by Cat Stevens and "A World Without Love" by
Peter and Gordon.

The move by Clear Channel, whose collective broadcasts reach more than
110 million listeners in the nation weekly, was voluntary. Many stations,
including some in the New York area, said they were disregarding the
list, which was distributed internally.

Another Peter and Gordon song, "I Go to Pieces," made the list. "I
suppose a song about someone going to pieces could be upsetting if
someone took it literally," said Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon after
learning that the group's two songs were on the list. "But 'I can't live
in a world without love' is a sentiment that's as true in crisis as it is
in normal times. It's a totally pro-love sentiment and could only be
helpful right now."

A Clear Channel spokeswoman emphasized that the list was not a mandate or
order to radio programmers. In a statement, the company said the list
came not from the corporate offices but from "a grass-roots effort that
was apparently circulated among program directors."

Others in the Clear Channel network, speaking on condition of anonymity,
told a more complicated story. They said that a smaller list of
questionable songs was originally generated by the corporate office, but
an overzealous regional executive began contributing suggestions and
circulating the list via e-mail, where it continued to grow.

Either way, compliance with the list varied from station to station.
Angela Perelli, the vice president for operations at KYSR (98.7 FM) in
Los Angeles, said the station was not playing any of the listed songs and
had previously pulled a couple of the cited songs, "Jumper" by Third Eye
Blind and "Fly" by Sugar Ray, on its own accord. On the other hand, Bob
Buchmann, the program director and an on-air personality at WAXQ-FM
(104.3) in Manhattan, said that some songs on the list ("American Pie" by
Don McLean, "Imagine" and others) happened to be among the most-played
songs on his station. In the meantime, the station decided not to
broadcast some songs even though they did not make the list, such
as "When You're Falling," a collaboration between Peter Gabriel and Afro-
Celt Sound System that had fictional lyrics too eerily similar to the
truth.

In 1942 the United States government issued a list of suggested wartime
practices for radio broadcasters. In the interest of national safety, it
advised radio programmers to ban weather forecasts, which could help the
enemy plan a bombing attack, and to avoid man-on-the-street interviews
and listener music requests in case the interviewee or caller was a spy
conveying a coded message to the enemy in words or song.

The new list is clearly different. Instead of promoting national safety,
its intended aim is to ensure national mental health, though First
Amendment supporters may point to it as the first shadowy blacklist in
what President Bush says will be a war against terrorism. Radio
programmers and producers outside of Clear Channel said that they found
the list bewildering. "There are obviously songs on there that people
could take the wrong way," said Michael Stark, a freelance producer who
works on "The Tom Joyner Morning Show" on the ABC Radio Network. "But
there are just as many that could be used to heal and bring context to
the tragedy. It seems from the list that they don't want anything that
comes close to making waves."

In an odd anomaly on the list, a specific song or songs are mentioned for
each artist except for one: the politically minded rap-rock group Rage
Against the Machine. For this band, the list simply considers "all Rage
Against the Machine songs" questionable.

Tom Morello, the guitarist in Rage Against the Machine, said via e-mail
that the band's music "is diametrically opposed to the kind of horrible
violence committed against innocent people" that occurred in the Sept. 11
attacks, "which we condemn in the strongest possible terms."

"If our songs are 'questionable' in any way," he added, "it is that they
encourage people to question the kind of ignorance that breeds
intolerance — intolerance which can lead to censorship and the
extinguishing of our civil liberties, or at its extremes can lead to the
kind of violence we witnessed" last week.

Nina Crowley, the executive director of the Massachusetts Music Industry
Coalition, a free-speech organization, worried that this was just the
beginning of suppression of artistic expression and that politicians and
corporations that have been trying to restrict access to popular music
may expand and perpetuate this list. "President Bush said to be prepared
for a long engagement," she said, "so this could potentially continue and
grow, and these songs could be removed from the public ear for a long
time. This list has eliminated songs about flying and falling, but when
something else happens, do we remove all the songs about trains and
whatever else?"


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