Ashcroft Defied on City Hall StepsNat Hentoff
The Village Voice (website)
6/6/2003 "As New Yorkers living in the city most affected by September 11, we
acknowledge the need to protect our safety, but as people who prize our
Constitution and Bill of Rights, we believe it is impermissible to suspend
freedom in the name of preserving it."
— New York Bill of Rights Defense Campaign leaflet, New York City Hall, May 28
On the outskirts of the May 28 press conference on the steps of City Hall to
herald the resolution submitted to the City Council by the New York Civil
Liberties Union's Bill of Rights Defense Campaign, there were other rallying
messages: "Save After School Programs!" "Save Day Care/If It Ain't Broke, Don't
Break It!"
The mayor was nowhere to be seen. His Honor is as imperious as his
predecessor, but in a Marie Antoinette way ("Let them eat cake!"). Bloomberg has
been as indifferent to the Bush-Ashcroft raid on the Bill of Rights as our
senators, Hillary Clinton and Charles Schumer, to whom this Civil Liberties
Resolution is also being sent.
Sponsoring the City Hall rally were the NYCLU and its New York Bill of Rights
Defense Campaign, along with more than 25 other organizations, among them:
The Center for Constitutional Rights, the Asian American Legal Defense and
Education Fund, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Puerto Rican
Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York
Public Library Guild, and the New York Immigration Coalition.
A key force in moving this Bill of Rights resolution is City Councilman Bill
Perkins, who is joined by Margarita Lopez, David Yassky, Hiram Monserrate,
Charles Barron, Larry Seabrook, and Albert Vann, among other supporting
councilmembers.
Conspicuously missing is City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, who may well be
running against Michael Bloomberg the next time around. Miller will lose votes,
rather than gain them, by opposing this resolution. Somebody send him a copy of
the Bill of Rights to contrast with the USA Patriot Act.
The resolution essentially includes the demands to federal and state
governments I've cited in previous columns about similar resolutions already
passed in three states and 120 cities, towns, and counties around the country:
End secret detentions; stop finding out what books we buy, or borrow from
libraries; cease ethnic and religious profiling; and stop sending official
burglars with badges into our homes and offices to download what's in our
computers.
There are also demands in this city's resolution directed at New York police
commissioner Ray Kelly, who is also in dire need of a copy of the Bill of
Rights.
One such command is to "refrain from collecting or maintaining information
about the political, religious, or social views, associations or activities of
any individual, group, association, organization, corporation, business, or
partnership, whether such information is obtained by NYPD employees acting alone
or in conjunction with state or federal law enforcement officials, unless that
information directly relates to an investigation of criminal activities, and
unless there are reasonable grounds to suspect the subject . . . is or may be
involved in criminal conduct."
But right now, Ray Kelly's NYPD is doing a lot of what this resolution tells
it not to. Consider the political questioning of hundreds of arrested anti-war
demonstrators recently. Also, under John Ashcroft's return to the disgraced
COINTELPRO surveillance guidelines of the 1960s, the FBI, the CIA, and other
federal intelligence agencies—often in conjunction with state and local
police—are violating our basic First Amendment rights in other ways.
As the New York City Bill of Rights Defense Campaign's briefing papers
emphasize, the FBI and other federal agencies do not have "to show reasonable
suspicion, much less probable cause," that the information they gather is
"related to criminal activity." They merely have to make "the broad assertion
that the request is related to an ongoing terrorism or foreign intelligence
investigation." (All these terms are very loosely described by the government.)
And now that state and local police are working closely with federal law
enforcement, dossiers collected on New Yorkers by the NYPD can wind up in merged
into federal data banks. Running the NYPD's "terrorism" investigations is former
CIA official David Cohen.
Therefore, although the City Council is required by the resolution to
periodically get detailed information from federal authorities on how they're
implementing the Patriot Act, and Ashcroft's executive orders, in this city—and
then give New Yorkers that information—that's not enough.
The mayor and the police commissioner should have to regularly make public a
record of how the NYPD is justifying its surveillance of us, and other
reductions of our liberties, whether under federal orders or on its own.
But this Bill of Rights Defense Campaign resolution is a very useful start.
To become part of it, contact the NYCLU/Bill of Rights Defense Campaign, 125
Broad Street, New York, NY. 10004, or the project director at the NYCLU, Udi
Ofer, 212-344-3005, ext. 242. The Web site for the campaign is nybordc.org; for
the NYCLU, it's nyclu.org.
Left out of the information available at the May 28 rally was the fact that
these Bill of Rights resolutions began in Northampton, Massachusetts, soon after
9-11, and have been organized nationally by Nancy Talanian of the original
Northampton Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and later by the national ACLU and
its affiliates.
On the steps of City Hall, I introduced myself to Charles Barron, who
co-sponsored the New York resolution and had spoken tellingly at the rally of
how the Bush-Ashcroft attacks on our liberties reminded him of the FBI's
COINTELPRO surveillance and infiltration in the 1960s that forced some
dissenting activists, as Barron said, "to go underground because of government
harassment of them."
I spoke to Barron about liberties repressed in Zimbabwe, and he denounced me
for "not telling the truth" about his report on Robert Mugabe's government after
Barron's trip there. I asked Barron if he'd read my four recent columns on
Zimbabwe. "No," he said, "because you do not tell the truth."
"How would you know," I said, "if you haven't read them? Send me any factual
corrections, and I'll print them." He refused to do that because, he said
repeatedly, "You have an agenda!"
"I do indeed," I told the councilman. "That's why I'm here today. I oppose
any government that suppresses civil liberties, whether it's Bush and Ashcroft
or Robert Mugabe." My friend Malcolm X used to urge, "Say it plain!" And Barron
is not doing that about Mugabe.
From what I could tell, there was no coverage in any of the newspaper dailies
of the May 28 rally. What the hell, it's only the Constitution. Close |