DETROIT – Kary Moss, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Michigan, was in her office the morning of Sept. 11. For the rest of the day, like much of the rest of America, she was essentially paralyzed.
For her, it was worse than most. She had lived in New York for 13 years, and, in a sense, she was watching her old neighborhood be destroyed.
And she knew, almost from the start, that what would follow would make her already all-consuming job much harder. The ACLUs purpose is to protect the rights and freedoms that make America what it is. But in times when people feel most threatened, civil liberties are always most vulnerable.
Thats especially true for members of suspect minority groups – in this case, Arabs or others thought to be either Muslim or from the Middle East.
Within days, she learned that her fears were more than justified. Scattered incidents of violence against Arabs and others thought to be Muslim were reported. National Public Radio carried an interview with a citizen who said he believed that “disloyal” Arab-Americans ought to be “exterminated ruthlessly.”
She did her best to debunk some of the wild rumors circulating in the Detroit area, which has one of the largest Arab populations in the nation. (One, distributed on the Internet, said that patrons of a popular Middle Eastern restaurant stood up and cheered when the World Trade Center exploded. Never happened, nor did the “riots” in Dearborn, which were repeatedly said to be breaking out during the first days of the crisis.)
She and the ACLU knew that there was a threat even scarier than Osama bin Laden. “We risk descending into totalitarian government if we dont hold fast to our constitutional freedoms and the Bill of Rights,” she said.
True, Attorney General John Ashcroft was quick to reassure the public he didnt intend to allow the terrorists to threaten “our constitutional freedoms.”
But in the next twinkling, he was asking Congress to greatly expand federal law-enforcement authority without many safeguards. This includes the rules whereby people can be arrested and detained on the basis of “secret evidence” that doesnt have to be shared with their defense attorneys.
Two days after the attacks, to the ACLUs alarm, the U.S. Senate adopted new wiretapping measures in a late-night session with little or no debate. “Previously, a wiretap covered a particular phone,” Wendy Wagenheim, the Michigan ACLUs communications director, noted. “Now they can put it on a person, meaning they can listen in on any phone the target is thought to be using.” Which increases the risk, of course, that conversations by other innocent parties may be monitored, too.
Incidentally, Ms. Moss is not a fuzzy-headed parody liberal, who thinks we should turn the other cheek and try to feel Osama bin Ladens pain. She is a fairly hard-boiled lawyer. Additionally, both she and Ms. Wagenheim are Jewish, and know that these terrorists hate them even more than they do the rest of America.
“There is no question that extra security measures are needed,” she said. But if we “scapegoat or stereotype all the members of a particular ethnic group because of the actions of extremists,” we are playing into their hands.
“Terror is intended not only to kill and destroy,” Anthony Romero, the ACLU executive director, said in a message to the national nonprofit groups 300,000 members. “Terror is also designed to intimidate a people and force them to take actions that may not be in their long-term best interests.”
Last week, Ms. Moss was stunned to see the Detroit News with a banner headline “America Approves Limits to Liberties.” That was a misreading of a half-cocked poll, but ominous all the same. “I believe that Americans want to be both safe and free,” she said. “If we allow our freedoms to be undermined, the terrorists will have won.”
The day after the tragedy evangelist Jerry Falwell said the ACLU has “got to take a lot of blame for this,” and said that God gave the United States “probably what we deserve.” An ACLU spokesman “refused to dignify that with a comment,” though in the past, such moronic statements have often resulted in a fast boost to ACLU membership.
