[Reader-list] non-citizens of the US

[Irina Aristarkhova]

It looks like USSR + KGB practices were the future of the US and its
followers, as Foucault and others predicted, not its 'opposite other' or
'Soviet past'. 9/11 is used to bring to light, figuratively speaking.
The question - would again social movements follow to the same scale as
in the 60s? Are they effective? Or who cares?   

Irina

-----Original Message-----
From: Rana Dasgupta [mailto:rana_dasgupta at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 11:14 AM
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Subject: [Reader-list] non-citizens of the US


referring to a leaked draft of bush administration's
Domestic Security Enhancement Act.

includes the idea that US citizens could be stripped
of their citizenship and thrown out.  they would be non-citizens of
everywhere.  anywhere.  whatever.

the world seems to throw up more and more of these
surreal thoughts at the moment.  only expressible with
twisted double negative phrases.

R



Patriot Act's Big Brother
by David Cole

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030317&s=cole

In early February, the Center for Public Integrity
disclosed a leaked draft of the Bush Administration's
next round in the war on terrorism--the Domestic
Security Enhancement Act (DSEA). The draft
legislation, stamped Confidential and dated January 9,
2003, appears to be in final form but has not yet been introduced in
Congress. Presumably the Administration had determined that the timing
would be more propitious for passage--meaning less propitious for
reasoned debate--after we go to war with Iraq. But it is one thing to
play politics with the timing of a farm bill; it is another matter to do
so with a bill that would radically alter our rights and freedoms. 

If the Patriot Act was so named to imply that those
who question its sweeping new powers of surveillance,
detention and prosecution are traitors, the DSEA takes
that theme one giant step further. It provides that
any citizen, even native-born, who supports even the
lawful activities of an organization the executive
branch deems "terrorist" is presumptively stripped of
his or her citizenship. To date, the "war on
terrorism" has largely been directed at noncitizens,
especially Arabs and Muslims. But the DSEA would
actually turn citizens associated with "terrorist"
groups into aliens. 

They would then be subject to the deportation power,
which the DSEA would expand to give the Attorney
General the authority to deport any noncitizen whose
presence he deems a threat to our "national defense,
foreign policy or economic interests." One federal
court of appeals has already ruled that this standard
is not susceptible to judicial review. So this
provision would give the Attorney General unreviewable authority to
deport any noncitizen he chooses, with no need to prove that the person
has engaged in any criminal or harmful conduct. 

A US citizen stripped of his citizenship and ordered
deported would presumably have nowhere to go. But
another provision authorizes the Attorney General to
deport persons "to any country or region regardless of
whether the country or region has a government." And
failing deportation to Somalia (or a similar place),
the Justice Department has issued a regulation
empowering it to detain indefinitely suspected
terrorists who are ordered deported but cannot be
removed because they are stateless or their country of
origin refuses to take them back. 

Other provisions are designed to further insulate the
war on terrorism from public and judicial scrutiny.
The bill would authorize secret arrests, a practice
common in totalitarian regimes but never before
authorized in the United States. It would terminate
court orders barring illegal police spying entered
before September 11, 2001, without regard to the need
for judicial supervision. It would allow secret
government wiretaps and searches without even a
warrant from the supersecret Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court when Congress has authorized the
use of force. And it would give the government the
same access to credit reports as private companies,
without judicial supervision. Historically, we have
imposed a higher threshold, and judicial oversight, on government access
to such private information, because government has the motive and the
wherewithal to abuse the information in ways private companies generally
do not. 

But the trajectory of the war on terrorism is probably
best illustrated by an obscure provision that would
eliminate the distinction between domestic terrorism
and international terrorism for a host of
investigatory purposes. The Administration's argument
sounds reasonable enough--terrorism is terrorism,
whether it's within the United States or has an
international component. But in the Patriot Act
debates, the Administration argued that it should be
afforded broader surveillance powers over
"international terrorism" because such acts are
simultaneously a matter of domestic law enforcement
and foreign intelligence. Because foreign intelligence gathering has
traditionally been subject to looser standards than criminal law
enforcement, the government argued, the looser standards should extend
to domestic investigations of "international terrorism." But now it
proposes to extend the same loose standards to investigations of wholly
domestic crimes. 

The DSEA's treatment of expatriation and domestic
terrorism are harbingers of things to come. Thus far,
much of the war on terrorism has been targeted at
foreign nationals and sold to the American people on
that ground. Americans' rights are not at stake, the
argument goes, because we're concerned with
"international" crime committed mostly by "aliens."
With the DSEA, however, the Administration seeks to
transgress both the alien-citizen line, by turning
citizens into aliens for their political ties, and the
domestic-international line, extending to wholly domestic
criminal-law-enforcement tools that were previously reserved for
international terrorism investigations. 

How will Congress respond? Thus far, when citizens'
rights have been directly threatened, Congress has
taken civil liberties seriously. Most recently, it
blocked the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness
data-mining program. But it blocked it only as applied
to US citizens. As long as the Pentagon violates only
foreign nationals' privacy, Congress in effect said,
Go ahead. But that tactic--protecting citizens' rights
while ignoring those of foreign nationals--is
untenable, not only on moral grounds but because if
the Administration gets its way, we are all
potentially "aliens."


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