We will not allow the enemy to win the war by changing our way of life or restricting our freedoms. —George W. Bush, September 12, 2001

As most of you have heard, Congress recently rubber-stamped a bill at the behest of the President that will supposedly “help fight terror.” The Village Voice has a nice summary article:

Right after 9-11, then attorney general John Ashcroft was directing the swift preparation of the USA Patriot Act. He sent a draft to the aggressively conservative James Sensenbrenner, Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee. The bill included the suspension of habeas corpus for terrorism suspects—the right to go to a federal court to determine whether the government is holding you lawfully.

Sensenbrenner angrily recoiled at the proposed disappearance of the Great Writ and forced Ashcroft to strike it from the Patriot Act. Five years later, Sensenbrenner helped shepherd through Congress the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which prevents detainees held by us anywhere in the world, not only at Guantanamo, from having lawyers file habeas petitions in our courts concerning their conditions of confinement.

In 1798, the writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson—who insisted habeas corpus be embodied in the Constitution—said to generations to come: “The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen [freedom from arbitrary confinement]…”

But now, the Republicans’ Military Commissions Act can not only remove this bedrock of our liberty from prisoners outside the country but can also strip habeas protections from legal immigrants here, as well as from American citizens.[Link]

In the wake of 9/11 many of us South Asian Americans have dealt with the erosion of civil liberties by joking around about it. “Hey, don’t talk in Tamil at the airport or they might arrest you as a terrorist.” Or what about “Hey, be careful going to Pakistan because they may suspend your 5th Amendment rights and ask you to take a polygraph when it is time to return to America.” Behind all of these nervous jokes is the suspicion that under these new laws perhaps anyone, including U.S. citizens, could be arbitrarily labeled a “terrorist” and stripped of their rights. The Bush administration counters by arguing that we should trust them and that they will only pin the label of “terrorist” on the real bad guys. You see, under the Patriot Act once you are officially designated as a “terrorist” you are in a whole new legal reality.

Now consider for a few minutes the case of Luis Posada Carriles. 30 years ago last week he masterminded a bomb plot that brought down a Cuban jetliner off the coast of Barbados. 73 people aboard were killed.

New documents made public on Thursday by the US National Security Archives prove the participation of Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch in the bombing of a Cubana airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people on board.

Among the documents posted are four sworn affidavits by officers in Trinidad and Tobago police, who were the first to interrogate the two Venezuelans — Hernan Ricardo Lozano and Freddy Lugo — who were arrested for placing the bomb on flight 455. Information derived from the interrogations suggested that the first call the bombers placed after the attack was to the office of Luis Posada’s security company ICI, which employed Ricardo. Ricardo claimed to have been a CIA agent (but later retracted that claim). He said that he had been paid $16,000 to sabotage the plane and that Lugo was paid $8,000.

The interrogations revealed that a tube of Colgate toothpaste had been used to disguise plastic explosives that were set off with a “pencil-type” detonator on a timer after Ricardo and Lugo got off the plane during a stopover in Barbados. Ricardo “in his own handwriting recorded the steps to be taken before a bomb was placed in an aircraft and how a plastic bomb is detonated,” deputy commissioner of police Dennis Elliott Ramdwar testified in his affidavit. [Link]

According to US National Security Archives, Carriles helped down this airplane in much the same way as the suspected terrorists in London were planning on bringing down airliners a few months ago. This act was also historically significant:

The attack marked a new era of fear. It was the first act of midair airline terrorism in the Western Hemisphere. [Link]

Where is this terrorist Carriles now? Well…he was arrested on immigration violations as he tried to sneak into the U.S. from Mexico and is currently sitting in a U.S. jail awaiting deportation. The border system does work! Only in this case maybe the Bush administration wishes that it didn’t. Some of you can see where this is headed I’m sure:

Posada Carriles’s legal odyssey has turned into a diplomatic quandary for the Bush administration and a test of the president’s post-Sept. 11 credo that nations that harbor terrorists are guilty of terrorism. While the United States does not want to free a terrorism suspect, it is also reluctant to send him to Cuba or Venezuela, countries that not only remain hostile to the Bush administration but that, according to court testimony of a Posada Carriles ally, also might torture him.

Attorneys for the Justice Department must respond by Thursday to a Texas magistrate’s recommendation that Posada Carriles be freed by a federal judge because he has not been officially designated a terrorist in the United States and cannot be held indefinitely on immigration charges.

”This is the moment of truth for the Bush administration,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior Cuba analyst with the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library at George Washington University.

The prospect of freeing Posada Carriles, who is also a suspect in a series of 1997 hotel bombings in Havana that left one Italian tourist dead, has outraged Cuban leaders. Havana is papered with Cuban government posters and billboards invoking President Bush’s position on harboring terrorists.

”It’s as if you were to say to the American people that country X has found Osama bin Laden, who arrived without a passport or a visa, and that he is being held as an illegal immigrant but will not be sent back to the U.S.,” Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s general assembly, said in an interview. [Link]

So we have a real life, honest to goodness terrorist in our custody. All we have to do is designate him as a “terrorist” under the Patriot Act and we can hold on to him and keep him in a jail cell for his crimes. With the new law we can even strip him of Habeus Corpus. Why doesn’t the Bush administration just call him a terrorist already and be done with it?

In a brief submitted to the judge Thursday evening, the administration of President George W. Bush said it opposed the release of Luis Posada Carriles and argued that granting him freedom on bail may have “serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States”.

But, while referring to Posada as “the admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks”, the administration declined to officially declare him a terrorist under the USA Patriot Act which, unlike the immigration law, gives the government authority to detain him indefinitely.[Link]

Could the administration’s reluctance stem from the fact that Carriles’ act is rumored to have been CIA sponsored and the victims were Cuban nationals? Also, what would the Cuban American voters in the battleground state of Florida think if we labeled this “freedom fighter” as a terrorist?

“It simply indicates that, as far as we’re concerned, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; it completely undercuts our position against terrorism,” according to Wayne Smith, who served as Washington’s top envoy in Havana in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“Bush himself has said numerous times that anyone who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist,” Smith, a Cuba expert with the Centre for International Policy here. “Under that definition, President Bush and members of his administration are terrorists because they are effectively harbouring Luis Posada Carriles…” [Link]

For the record I do not support sections of the U.S. Patriot Act nor do I support the bill that passed in Congress last week. I just wanted to point out why our founding fathers were sound in their logic and why I believe that a President should never be given the powers that are currently being granted by the American voters through their Congressional proxies. The word “terrorist” is not always an objective description and can be employed as a political tool as we see here.