Focus of Suspicion
Rev. Edmund Robinson
UU Church of Wakefield
March 2, 2003

	Imagine yourself in this story.  You were born in Yemen, but you have lived in this country since you were five years old.  The only language you speak is English.  The only identity you have is American,  though technically you are a resident alien.  You are a citizen of Malden, say, or Saugus.   Suddenly, the Immigration and Naturalization service starts a program which says you have to come in and register.  So you go down to the John F. Kennedy building in Boston on January 18, and there you have your fingerprints made and a photograph taken of you.  The government agents ask you questions about your religious affiliation, where you worship, who you worship with.  
	Suddenly they take you into custody.  One of the identifications you have given them has a spelling of your fist name which is different from the spelling on some other document they have.  Or the birthdate is off by one digit.  Or there is an old address. Or they have your uncle’s address because two years ago you got kicked out of your apartment and were using that address.  
	You find yourself in the Nassau Street jail with common criminals.  Maybe you get a phone call, maybe you don’t.  Maybe you get a lawyer, maybe you don’t.  They discover that someone with a similar name has felony record.  They hold you to check out if that’s you.  If they think it’s you, they can start deportation proceedings.
	Sound scary?  You bet.  Welcome to the Brave New World, America 2003.  The scenario I presented is not based on any actual individual, but it is the collective story of hundreds of individuals right now in the Boston area, under a post 9/11 program of the Immigration and Naturalization Service called National Security Entry-Exit Registration Program, or NSEERS.  NSEERS was launched on September 11, 2002, and it applies to males over sixteen who are not US Citizens and are nationals of certain countries.   John Ashcroft gave a speech at Niagra Falls in November, describing the program as a method for guarding the borders of the US, and it does require fingerprinting of all males entering the US who are nationals of those countries.  But it goes far beyond this, and applies to residents who have been in this country for most of their lifetimes.
	The list of countries of origin involved in this program started with five, all chosen supposedly because they practiced state-sponsored terrorism: Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya and Syria.  In the last few months, the INS has expanded this list, and it now includes Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, Yemen or the United Arab Emirates.  You will notice immediately that all but one of these countries are Arab or Muslim, and the exception is our new adversary in East Asia, North Korea.  You will also notice that the list does not include the Arab and Muslim states which have supported US policy in the past such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Kuwait.	
	Last June, the General Assembly of the UUA endorsed what they call an SAI, which stands for study/action issue, on civil liberties.  The resolution reads, in part:
“In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, civil liberties have again been seriously endangered. Honest criticism of official policy has been labeled ““aiding the terrorists.”” The power of the courts has been compromised in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The authority to conduct document and computer searches and wiretaps, once permissible only by judicial warrant, is now exercised without warrant by law enforcement officials in the field. People are being incarcerated indefinitely without charge or access to legal council or evidence against them, in violation of the Fifth Amendment. The traditional restrictions on government agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert espionage have been lifted, allowing the possibility of administrative abuses without redress, in violation of the Sixth and Eighth Amendments. Citizen minorities and non-citizen residents, including both undocumented immigrants and those who carry Green Cards, live in fear of dragnets that can expose them to exploitation and abuse. 
“In short, the recent dramatic expansion of unrestrained executive power, claimed by the United States government to be necessary to fight wars against both terrorism and drugs, weakens the civil liberties it is supposed to protect. Sun-setting provisions in the new legislation are not adequate to ensure freedom from its abuse and misapplication. The sanctity of the social contract has been violated, and it is time for Unitarian Universalists in the United States to stand up and reclaim the civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights.”

	This resolution is in the heartland both of Unitarian and Universalist history and of UU values.  As the resolution says, “Unitarians Roger Baldwin and John Haynes Holmes were among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920, at a time when conscientious objectors to World War I needed protection from persecution.... During the era of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunts during the 1950’s, Unitarian Universalists regularly stood up for those whose civil liberties were jeopardized.”
	Well, I have a little historical quibble with that last statement: we weren’t Unitarian Universalists in he 1950's, we were Unitarians and we were Universalists.  I say that because one of the bravest Universalists to stand up to McCarthyism in the 1950's right here in Boston was Donald Lothrop, the Universalist minister of Community Church in Boston, who had started his ministry at Wakefield in this church in the early 1930's.  
	The resolution could also have recognized Ellery Schempp, who spoke at a meeting I attended back in October.  Ellery was a 16-year old Unitarian youth in suburban Philadelphia on the late 1950's when he decided that the practice of saying prayer every morning in his public school violated the separation of church and state, and he took the case all the way o the U.S. Supreme Court, which agreed with hi, deciding the precedent which most dismays the religious right, Schempp v. Abingdon Township.
	It is also congruent with our values.  If you will turn to the front of your hymnals, you will see printed there, on about the fourth page,  our principles and purposes, and you read that we affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every individual, the free and responsible search for truth and meaning, the right of conscience and the use of democratic processes in our churches and society at large, and a world community with liberty and justice for all.
	All of these principles are offended by a police state, and that seems to be what America is becoming.  We all read in the 1980's of the plight of people in Argentina and Chile, where citizens would simply disappear and never be heard from again.  We are approaching that point.  Last month, a federal appeals court in Virginia approved the holding of a US citizen named Hamdi who was captured in Afghanistan as an enemy combatant, indefinitely, without any criminal charges and without access to a lawyer.  There’s a big catch here: the whole basis or his detention is that we’re at war, but Congress has never declared war on any country, so how long can he be held?  When is a war that is not a war over?  When all possibilities of acts of terrorism against the US have been eliminated? That will be a very long time.
	When we survey the whole American scene, we see that these high=profile cases are just the visible tip of a very large iceberg.  Just Friday, we learned about a new program called CAPSII which will give your airline access to all your credit card information in order to determine whether you are a security risk to  board a plane; you might get bumped from the flight if you subscribe to Soldier of Fortune magazine or have just bought a lot of ingredients for fertilizer at your farm.
	You probably heard about the USA Patriot Act, the legislation that the administration rammed though Congress in a few days in the immediate wake of September 11, with virtually no hearings or opportunity for public input, which expands the government’s power to gather information and invade privacy.  That was bad enough, but it was nothing compared to what’s in the pipeline.  The Department of Justice has been drafting legislation in secret which has just leaked to the press.  You might have seen the Bill Moyers program on it.
	This new legislation is dubbed Patriot II.  According to an ACLU analysis, it would increase the government’s surveillance powers dramatically, allowing them broader access to the shadowy foreign intelligence court and in some instances to bypass that court altogether in surveilling.  It would also create a new category of “domestic security surveillance” that would allow new surveillance of entirely domestic activity.  It also expands the definition of terrorist groups which could encompass political groups such as Greenpeace, Operation Rescue or the protestors at Vieques Island, Puerto Rico.  Folks if you lived through the Sixties, as I did, you recognize that we’ve passed this way before.  It was the FBI abuses of the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras that put in place all the checks we have on police infiltration of political movements.  J. Edgar Hoover lives.  Let’s not go there again.
	But wait, there’s more.  Much more.  Patriot II does some things that Hoover would never have thought of.  Like give the government access to your credit reports without your knowledge or consent.  Make it a separate crime for you to use encryption devices on your computer if you ever thought of trying to prevent the government from  hacking in and reading your e-mail.  
	Or how about the most personal information of all, your genetic code?  Patriot II allows the government to sample and catalogue the DNA of innocent Americans without a court order or consent.
	Now all this sounds horrific and completely unreal.  You can be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t affect you.  It probably doesn’t – yet.  But a fundamental principle of civil liberties is that the rights of any are the rights of all.  If the government has the power to abuse the rights of he most marginalized in society, it has the power to abuse yours.
	Our country was founded by people with a deep suspicion of power and of government.  The genius of this experiment in democracy is that the founders put into place a system of checks and balances, so that no branch of government could run away with tyranny.  But this only works to the extent that one branch is really willing to ride herd over the others.
	What is truly scary about his situation is that both the legislative and judicial branches seem to have been kowtowing to the executive in the wake of September 11.  There are a few victories, to be sure.  Congress last month denied funding for a program called Total Information Awareness (TIA) which is the government’s attempt to build a super database compiling all of our health records, credit card records, driver’s license, tax returns and every other kind of record imaginable.  And in the Hamdi case, the court gave lip service to the principle of judicial review.  
	But neither the judiciary nor the congress has put significant roadblocks in the way to turning this country into a police state.   After the TIA setback in Congress, the administration is going ahead with plans to coordinate all terrorist intelligence and share it with local law enforcement.
	At this point, many of you are asking, yes, but what’s wrong with going after the terrorists?  That is the question which always arises when civil liberties are threatened.  The asserted justification for curtailing liberties is a real threat.  There is always a justification.  If its not a war on terrorism, it’s a war on Communism or drugs or some other kind of evil.  Terrorism is scary, but that’s not the point.  The point is that if we give up our freedoms in the name of fighting terrorism, what have we gained? We will not be safer, we will be more vulnerable and less free.
	The court in Hamdi basically said we in the judicial branch have to give deference to the judgment of the executive branch when it comes to war, because the constitution mentions the power to wage war in the executive branch but doesn’t say anything about the role of the courts in wartime.  They overlooked the fact that the constitution also gives to congress the power to declare war, and this congress hasn’t done that.   Congress hasn’t done that for the simple reason that congress can only declare wars on countries, and terrorism is not a country.  Terrorism is a fluid term describing certain violent political actions with which we disagree.   What happened was that the administration simply characterized its reaction to the September 11 attacks as one of war, and sent military power to Afghanistan.   Previous administrations have used similar warlike words in regard to drugs – does that mean that an American citizen caught running cocaine in Colombia could be held indefinitely by the military as an enemy combatant?
	The court also said that this deference to the executive branch for military decisions was a part of the separation of powers, and it was the separation of powers which made us a free people.  I hadn’t heard that.  I thought it was not just the separation of powers, but the checks and balances founded on the separation of powers that kept us from a state of tyranny.   And if the branches of government aren’t willing to exercise those checks and balances, we will surely descend into that tyranny.
	Hitler came to power by convincing the Reichstag that the state was under extreme threat from the Communists, who had just burned the Parliament building.  As we know now, it was the Nazis that actually set the Reichstag fire.  I don’t mean to draw exact parallels here, but the lesson is that when the executive claims that the other branches must give up power to help it combat an emergency threat, that is when some hard questions need to be asked.
	On Valentine’s Day, President Bush went to the FBI headquarters to announce that he was continuing with the intelligence coordination effort despite Congress’ failure to fund TIA.  His initiative is now called TTIC, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center.  Here’s what he said, in part:
“The American people need to know that we're collecting a lot of information and we're going to share it in a way that enables us to do our jobs that you expect us to do; that we're going to use the best information technologies available to not only make sure information flows freely at the federal level, but flows from this data bank of information to local law enforcement officials. It will enable us to make sure that we do everything we can to win the war on terror at home.”

I don’t know about you, but I don’t find a lot of comfort in those words.  What groups exactly does he contend are terrorists?  Is it everyone who is a member of the local mosque?  Everyone with an ancestry from Yemen or Libya?  Where is the focus of suspicion?
	You see, nobody wants the government to be powerless in the face of terrorist threats; when government acts with a certain amount of information, when the focus of suspicion can be narrowed to certain individuals who have certain histories and ties to certain other individuals, arrests and detentions can and should be made.  But when they don’t have the individualized suspicion, when they are attempting dragnet operations aimed at anyone from a particular country, then they are in effect tarring whole nations with the brush of suspicion.
	As Carl Takei points out in his article, this is just what the government did against Japanese Americans in 1942.  It was racist then and it is racist now.  It is racial profiling, and it is a disgrace to our government.
	What can we as citizens do about it? I have some concrete suggestions.  One is to look up the Study Action Issue on the UUA website and fill out the form which calls for your comments.  The deadline for receiving these is tomorrow, I think.  Another thing you can do is join the ACLU or at least check out their website.  It is the nation’s oldest and most effective voice in support of individual rights and liberties.  A third thing you can do is write or e-mail your congressional representatives to let them know what you think of Patriot II.  Even if you don’t have the time to read the whole thing through, you’re entitled to have an opinion on it, and to share that with your representative.
	A fourth thing that you can do is to volunteer to be a monitor for those required to report under NSEER.  Volunteers will go down to the J.F.K. building in a couple of weeks, the next time the residents have to register, and stand there with clipboards getting names and contact numbers for all those going in.  Other volunteers will follow up to make sure that all who went in came out, and to start asking questions about the ones who don’t.  It is a kind of counter-database to make sure we don’t have our own disappearances.  I’m planning to be there, and if you want to join me, let me know.
	And if you go there, to the John F. Kennedy building, after you’ve done your stint, go down the hill to the holocaust memorial to remind yourself why you’re doing this.  Read these famous words of Pastor Niemoller and ponder them in your heart: “First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.” 
Amen