Nearly 10 years ago, in my first column following 9/11, I worried that our nation might respond to the attacks in the way it treated Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor by tarring millions of Arab-Americans and American Muslims with collective suspicion. "They deserve to be treated as Americans," I wrote. "They, too, are victims of this terror. Their country, too, has been attacked."
Looking back, I commend my fellow citizens who largely took this plea to heart. While anti-Muslim bias arises now and again — and I'm thinking specifically of the poor showing by New Yorkers when a mosque was planned within blocks of ground zero — there has been little community-wide backlash in the way I'd feared.
That said, the confidence that I had back then in the resiliency of America's inalienable rights now seems naive.
With the destruction of the twin towers and murder of thousands of people by Muslim terrorists, my chief civil liberties concern was the potential for unfair treatment of Arabs and Muslims in the United States. This came true. In a vast sweep, federal agents rounded up hundreds of Muslims without a valid basis for suspicion and abused many of them in custody. In the end, none of these people were publicly prosecuted for a terrorism-related crime. An FBI "voluntary" interrogation program and a special registration requirement for immigrants and visitors followed.
But the targeting of Arab and Muslim communities and mosques was only the beginning of a metastasizing and largely unchecked domestic surveillance apparatus that has grown outside public view. As the Washington Post reported last year in its investigative report "Top Secret America," 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work have been built in or around Washington since the attacks.
The National Security Agency for a time worked directly with major U.S. telecommunications companies to sift through billions of American calls and e-mail for anything suspicious. All without judicial oversight.
In response, Congress failed to stand for American privacy rights, instead passing a law to give the telecommunications industry immunity from lawsuits arising from the spying operation. And the federal courts, our ostensible citadels of liberty, have been largely dismissing lawsuits that challenge the constitutionality of domestic surveillance programs on secrecy and other grounds.
Meanwhile, a convincing case has yet to be made that this tsunami of data in government hands is making us any safer. It is certainly making us less free.
In addition to this massive surveillance state, President George W. Bush ushered in a regime of torture, the routine rendition of prisoners to countries known to torture, the indefinite detention of hundreds of prisoners at Guantanamo and secret overseas CIA prisons, and constitutionally defective military commissions.
President Barack Obama promised to reverse course, but he has yet to fully deliver.
http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/where-is-the-liberty-for-all/1190474
