Liberty in the balance: Security collides with civil liberties
Debate intensifies over war on terrorism
By Sam Stanton and Emily Bazar -- Bee Staff Writers - (Published September 21, 2003)
To our readers

Sept. 11, 2001, changed America. In its wake, Americans demanded bolstered security. The Bush administration responded with new policies and new laws giving the government broad investigative powers in the name of fighting terrorism. Some say the government has gone too far. Over the next four days, The Bee examines how the crackdown on terrorism has come into conflict with the civil liberties that set America apart.

- Rick Rodriguez, Executive Editor

The FBI is counting mosques, and law enforcement has asked hundreds of libraries about your reading habits.

There are secret lists governing whether you can get on an airplane, secret surveillance of e-mail and the Internet, and new warrants allowing the government to search your home, your bank records and your medical files without your knowing it.

When FBI agents were told last year that terrorist training included scuba diving techniques, the agency asked for -- and got -- the names and addresses of more than 10 million Americans certified as divers.

Immigrants nationwide have been jailed indefinitely over visa violations that in the past would have been ignored, and about 13,000 face deportation.

Others have languished in cells while officials lied to their families about where they were.

And thousands have fled the United States, seeking refuge in Canada.

For countless American citizens and immigrant residents, the echoes of Sept. 11, 2001, continue to resound in what a growing number of critics contend is a loss of basic civil liberties stemming from the federal government's anti-terrorism campaign.

"America operates sometimes on an interesting dichotomy," Michael Mason, former head of Sacramento's FBI office, said at a forum in Grass Valley in March. "The one is a desire for absolute safety, and the second is a desire for no erosion of civil liberties."

"Believe me," he told the skeptical and sometimes jeering crowd of about 100, "I am as concerned as anyone about the erosion of our civil liberties."

But the very definition of liberty is being challenged in the way some cases are being handled.

Consider these instances:

* Two middle-aged peace activists from San Francisco find themselves singled out by authorities as they try to board a flight to Boston for a family visit. Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon are held and questioned for hours before being released at San Francisco International Airport because their names apparently popped up on a secret government "no fly" list. Both are suing the federal government, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, in a bid to gain more information about such lists.

* A 40-year-old public defender surfing the Web on a library computer in Santa Fe, N.M., finds himself surrounded by four local police officers, then handcuffed and detained by Secret Service agents after someone apparently overhears a political debate in which he suggests that "Bush is out of control." Andrew O'Connor's experience in February, during which he was questioned about whether he was a threat to the president, led to legislative hearings in New Mexico over the Patriot Act and government secrecy.

* Barry Reingold, a 62-year-old retired phone company worker, gets into an intense debate at his San Francisco gym over the bombing of Afghanistan and his criticism of President Bush, and is awakened at his Oakland apartment a week later by two FBI agents who want to talk to him about his political beliefs.

In addition to those legal tools, the Bush administration has created a new category that allows U.S. citizens to be classified as "enemy combatants" who can be held without charges and denied access to lawyers.

"It's a new term of art used by the government," said Kevin Johnson, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of California, Davis, law school. "It relies in part on some World War II case precedent.

"But it's really a new term created by the Bush administration. They didn't use that term in World War II. They're using it differently and more expansively and more aggressively."

"If you arrest a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, he has rights," Johnson said. "He has a right to counsel that's guaranteed by the Constitution.

"He generally has a right to some kind of hearing about his detention that's guaranteed by the Constitution. He has due process rights."

The Justice Department and the courts disagree, and since Sept. 11 authorities have used a variety of methods to hold people suspected of terrorist ties.

Some individuals trying to board airliners have found themselves detained without explanation, many apparently because their names are similar to those on secret government watch lists.

Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon sued after being detained at San Francisco International Airport in 2002. They say they believe their names were similar to names on government no-fly lists, although they also wonder whether their prominence as editors of an anti-war newspaper led to their being singled out.

The idea that anyone would be singled out for airport searches because of their political beliefs is "preposterous," said Brian Turmail, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. "That is not and never will be criteria for any no-fly list."

Yet details of how someone ends up on such a list -- or how many people are on it -- remain secret because of what the government says are security concerns.

When the ACLU sought information on why Adams and Gordon were stopped, the FBI responded to Freedom of Information Act requests by saying it had no such records.

Eventually, however, officials at San Francisco International Airport turned over documents indicating that 339 passengers had been stopped or questioned at the facility in connection with no-fly lists between September 2001 and last March.