SUPER-PATRIOTS, GET A GRIP -- LESS FREE ISN'T MORE SAFE

AUSTIN, Texas - CIVIL LIBERTIES

"We were initially told in the early '90s, when they began to apply the
military law heavily, that it would be used only against drug dealers and
terrorists."

- Hisham Kassem, head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, after
Saad Eddin Ibrahim, an Egyptian-American sociology professor, was sentenced
to seven years in prison for "tarnishing the image of Egypt." From an
interview on NPR.

That's worth chewing on for a while.

"If there's another terrorist attack, and if it's from a certain ethnic
community ... that terrorists are from, you can forget about civil rights
in this country. I think we will have a return to Korematsu (internment
camps)."

- Peter N. Kirsanow, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner, July 22 in Detroit.
After his remarks were criticized, Kirsanow said he was warning against
camps, not advocating them, but he also told the Detroit Free Press, "Not
too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions,
more stops, more profiling."

With a civil rights commissioner like this guy on the job, we haven't got a
thing to worry about.

Civil libertarians have a slight tendency to look as though we've just been
fired out of a cannon. We are forever hearing the sounds of jackbooted
Fascism approaching. Nearly every time someone complains about a dirty
movie theater or a KKK rally, we can be counted upon to leap up and
announce that the First Amendment is in dire peril. To be a good civil
libertarian is to spend one's life in a fairly constant state of alarm,
which leaves the group somewhat frazzled.

On top of that, we constantly have to defend the most disgusting people --
on the grounds that disgusting people have rights, too. One is not required
to like the disgusting specimens whose rights are being violated. In fact,
one is, thanks to the First Amendment, perfectly free to denounce them with
splendid invective.

But it is time to take note that we are getting ourselves into a truly
silly fight. Now is not the time to dismiss concerns over civil liberties
as alarmist. "O pshaw," is not a helpful response to violations of the
Constitution. Worse than the dismissive pooh-poohing of concern is the
implication that those who speak up on behalf of those caught up in the
post-Sept. 11 sweep who have still not been charged with anything are
themselves somehow unpatriotic. Boy, is that standing the world on its
head. Seems to me every sentient patriot should be concerned.

The notion that a "liberal federal judge" did something wrong by ordering
the government to reveal the names of those it is holding is nonsense. Of
course the government must account for those it has in custody. Even if one
had been inclined after Sept. 11 to give the government a few weeks to
separate the sheep from the goats after its round-up, you cannot hold
someone in jail for a year without showing that he or she did something
wrong. Fish or cut bait.

Of the 1,200 detained, 752 were charged with immigration violations and are
now stuck in the notorious black hole of the Immigration and Naturalization
Service's clumsy system. Accounts vary as to how many are still being held.
But by no possible stretch of the Constitution can the government's action
be justified. Secret arrests are the stuff of old novels like "The Count of
Monte Cristo." Not since pre-revolutionary France has it been legal to
imprison someone without explaining by whom and of what they are accused.

District Judge Gladys Kessler made an exception where the government can
show that a material witness in a terrorism investigation is involved and
ruled that the government need not provide details of the arrests. But as
she noted, the government did not claim or even hint that any of the
detainees has connections to terrorism. Kessler seems to have considerably
more respect for the Constitution than Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Some of the super-patriots running around need to get a grip. We can't make
ourselves safer by making ourselves less free.

Some comment is required on Rep. Bob Barr's unfortunate gun accident. Barr,
a member of the board of the National Rifle Association, plugged a glass
door when somebody handed him a loaded antique .38 at a campaign
fund-raiser. Further evidence that there is a God.