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After 9/11, an assault on civil liberties: the worst terrorist attack on American soil jolted a populace complacent about national security. It also sparked an unprecedented backlash against Arab-Americans and restrictions on long-cherished rights. Now critics ask: has the government gone too far?

Article Excerpt
In his 1998 book, All the Laws But One, Chief Justice William Rehnquist quoted a Pasman maxim to describe his view of the courts in periods of national crisis: "In times of war, laws are silent. "After all, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War; thousands of Japanese-Americans were indiscriminately interred during World War II.

But after 9/11, the book struck a prophetic chord. Little more than a month after the attacks, President Bush signed into law the USA PATRIOT Act, authorizing sweeping new powers for domestic surveillance of suspected terrorists and searches of private residences without previously required judicial approval.

Before 9/11, Attorney General John Ashcroft had promised action to end racial profiling. Afterward, the administration approved a series of homeland security measures that singled out Arab immigrants, including fingerprinting and pursuing deportation orders, even for those with no connection to terrorism. Some critics believe such measures helped fuel prejudice against Arab-Americans. The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), formed in 1980, reported a fourfold increase in hate crimes and incidents of discrimination since the attacks.

The world has changed in the past two years. The proposed PATRIOT Act II, a far more restrictive program than its prequel, sparked intense criticism when a draft was leaked to the press earlier this year; and it has yet to be proposed in Congress. A separate Defense Department initiative called the Total Information Awareness project--a database that would sift through medical, travel, and financial information to penetrate terrorist networks--was significantly scaled back by legislators who were deeply concerned about the program's proposed incursion on privacy.

At press time, Ashcroft was crisscrossing the country, trying to mollify the PATRIOT Act's critics while garnering support for a new proposal that links the "war on terrorism" to drug interdiction efforts.

If the tide is turning; KAREEM SHORA and TIMOTHY EDGAR can claim a share of the credit. Shora, legal adviser to the ADC, and Edgar, legislative counsel on national security and immigrant rights at the American Civil Liberties Union, frequently work together, lobbying on Capitol Hill or speaking to groups about the effect of the "war on terrorism" on human rights. They spoke with TRIAL recently at the ACLU's offices in Washington, D.C.

TRIAL: By the time this goes to press, the second anniversary of 9/11 will have passed. How have altitudes and policies toward Arab-Americans changed?

EDGAR: One of the big challenges in addressing civil liberties after 9/11 is that you're faced with an almost impossible conundrum: We know there are a lot of negative stereotypes and public attitudes toward Arab-Americans and immigrants. If the American public feels that the only people's rights that are at risk are those of one community, then we are not going to get the level of engagement in Congress that we need to fix the civil liberties problems that increase government power and reduce government accountability for everyone.

While...

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