 SLIPPERY SLOPES: THE DANGERS OF ANTI-TERRORISM LAWS IN A FREE SOCIETY
Toronto, like most cities of its size, has something of a gang problem. However, it is not as serious as most politicians would have you believe it is. For a city of nearly three million people, Toronto has never had more than a hundred murders in a single year. Compare that to a Detroit, a city less than a third the size of Toronto, which hasn't had fewer than a hundred murders a year in decades. San Francisco, with only 650,000 people, consistently has more murders than does Toronto.
What does trouble several people is that increasing proportion of assaults and murders that are gang-related. And by gangs, I'm not talking about the Mafia or biker gangs, which largely target one another. These are street-level gangs, who routinely murder innocent passers-by. There is nothing at all organized about the crime these thugs engage in.
In the wake of 9/11, most Western nations passed anti-terrorist legislation in hopes that it would prevent another attack. The problem is that it has been largely ineffective. Great Britain, with its decades of trouble with the Irish Republican Army, has always placed a higher legal and constitutional premium on security than it has on freedom. Its laws were further strengthened after September 11, 2001.
Those laws did absolutely nothing to prevent the 2005 transit bombings, which killed 52 and wounded 700. The same is true of the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 and wounded 1,775. Saudi Arabia, where personal freedom is a foreign concept, suffered repeated al-Qaeda attacks between 2003-05. Because most terrorists have no criminal records, even the most stringent anti-terror laws wouldn't stop American cell members from buying semi-automatic weapons and launching a paramilitary assault on a shopping mall.
Despite what anyone tells you, anti-terror laws do not necessarily prevent attacks, they just make the investigations and subsequent prosecutions easier. And since the United States Supreme Court effectively destroyed the avenue of "enemy combatant" military prosecutions last week, civilian prosecutions are the only course remaining.
Even after the horror of 9/11, I was extremely reluctant to accept measures like the USA PATRIOT ACT and its foreign counterparts, particularly in nations like mine where collective rights has always taken precedent over individual freedom. My reluctance was based on two things; I am a traditional (as opposed to the newer brand) conservative and I understand how government works.
Traditional conservatives understand that the only way to secure freedom for everyone is to secure freedom for the individual. In an adversarial justice system, the rights of the defendant must always hold greater weight than the interests of the state. If controlling crime, or even suppressing insurrection, were the main priority of society, we would not require the police to obtain judicial warrants before they could enter your home or listen in to your private conversations.
If security were the only interest of the Founding Fathers, the Second Amendment would never have been proposed, let alone ratified. However, modern American conservatives use the access to deadly weapons as the yardstick by which they judge the freedom of other countries, even as they justify the government's extra-judicial eavesdropping in the convesrations of their countrymen.
Traditional conservatives understand that once government is given a measure of power, that power does not remain static. That power, as we have seen with the welfare state, only grows and metastasizes. If there is a vacuum in society, government will always move in to fill it if individual citizens don't.
As conservatives have lost their way over the last thirty years, they have pushed for the growth of state power at the expense of the individual every bit as much as liberals traditionally have. The only individual freedom that they fight for is financial, and even then they are dishonest. They budget government spending in a way that guarantees continuous government growth but do so with borrowed money, thinking that economic growth will eventually pay it back. As we have seen with previous large deficits, it doesn't. Eventually, tomorrow's taxes are always raised to pay for the spending of today.
Modern conservatives seem to have forgotten that government grows just as surely in security and criminal justice matters as it does in economic ones, and with much greater corrosive effects on a democracy. For the most part, they have forgotten that security without freedom is little more than totalitarianism. Modern conservatives have forgotten that government is not designed to contract its power, it constantly expands or it dies. They have essentially forgotten 4,000 years of human experience.
They support the Bush administration's violation of the National Security Agency's charter as they opposed an assault weapons ban. As a traditional conservative, I oppose both.
Giorgio Mammoliti is a Toronto city councillor that I have written about before. Last December, he actually called for the army to patrol certain Toronto neighborhoods, essentially imposing martial law. That those neighborhoods happen to be among the city's poorest and duskiest went sadly unreported. Also unreported was the fact that as he was calling for martial law, he was decrying the the local media's examination of his excesses with his office budget.
The Toronto police mocked Mammoliti relentlessly for his insane demand because it was too unconstitutional and fascist even for them.
Now our boy Giorgio is looking at using the cannon of Canadian anti-terror laws against the gnat of gang violence.
"I'm not prepared to wait 20 years to see whether a group hug is going to get rid of gang members in this city," Councillor Giorgio Mammoliti told the Sun a day after a brazen daylight shooting of two teens in a Regent Park playground Wednesday night. An 18-year-old youth was hit multiple times in the chest and a 15-year-old boy, whose family came here from Somalia a few years ago, was hit in the legs. They both underwent surgery and were in stable condition last night.
"We should use the tools federally that we have and deal with gangs as terrorists," he said. Mammoliti, who last year suggested calling in the army to address Toronto's gang and gun problem, said police should also have the power to hold gang members indefinitely.
"They know who they are," he said. "You pick them up and you hold them indefinitely and you question them for two years on their involvement with gangs. What Mammoliti forgets is that we are a society that at least pretends to be predicated on due process of law, where preventative detention is abhorrent. For my foreign readers, Canada has an interesting little tool called security certificates. Until last February, a security certificate allowed the government to hold a non-citizen - including even permanent residents of Canada - indefinitely without any of the minimal protections that allow us to think of ourselves as a democratic society.
After 9/11, several suspected terrorists were held for years without charge or the ability to see the evidence against them. After having two convictions of violating Canadian hate speech laws overturned by the Supreme Court of Canada, Ernst Zundel was held for two years on a security certificate before being deported to his native Germany.
Security certificates are as close to "enemy combatant" status as Canada dare get and they were being used for crimes as insignificant as Holocaust denial. Giorgio Mammoliti wants to extend those powers to Canadian citizens accused of street crimes.
At what point do you allow a government to detain citizens without charge and allow them to be questioned without an attorney before you officially become a police state?
If this were just a matter of of a waste of skin Mammoliti spouting off again, it wouldn't merit further comment. He is an insignificant bug of a human being and a profoundly ignorant one at that. That he continues to be elected makes me question my belief in democracy itself. No one can repeatedly put a facist in power and continue to pretend to be a lover of freedom.
Unfortunately, this isn't limited to people like Mammoliti. By any reasonable measure, street gangs kill more innocent people than do Islamist terrorists in North America. What then constitutes the greater threat civil society? And if those gangs are a greater threat to security, why not use anti-terrorist measures against them? If you believe government rhetoric about "serious threats," why not use the most powerful tools the government has at its disposal against them?
The use of asset forfeiture was first enacted during the U.S Civil War. That was an instance of demonstrable civil insurrection and habeus corpus had already been suspended, first by President Lincoln, then by the Congress. For those four years, the United States had ceased to be a constitutional democracy.
Then it was resurrected with the intensification of the wrongheaded war on drugs. Even in a period of domestic and international peace, the government was allowed to seize the property of a private citizen, even in the absence of criminal charges. But that was never used in the case of suspected espionage, only drugs. And it was certainly never used in cases of suspected political corruption. Randy "Duke" Cunningham had his day in court before he lost his boat. Because only property was being charged as committing a crime, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Bill of Rights didn't apply. It was at that point that those amendments ceased to mean anything at all as a practical matter.
Modern conservatives continue to scream endlessly about Kelo v. New London et al, without making any adverse comment about asset forfeiture. But what Reagan / Thatcher conservatives are guilty of is ignoring their own rhetoric about government power. They wrongheadedly believed that they could extra constitutionally remove the property of one set of citizens without due process of law without it eventually impacting the rest of the population.
If you believe the comments of politicians about the latest threat de jour, why shouldn't you allow the government extraordinary power to thwart those threats? Modern conservatives are more than willing to allow the government to eavesdrop on private conservations involving an American citizens who might have a friend or relative involved in terrorism without a warrant, so why not allow them to do so with one involved in drugs or even tax evasion? How about public corruption?
Rush Limbaugh, despite entering a "not guilty" plea for doctor shopping, surrendered $30,000, revoked his right to personal privacy in submitting to random drug testing and gave up his right to own a firearm for 18 months. Why shouldn't the state of Florida eavesdrop on his conversations with his doctor? After all, medial privacy - or, according to modern conservatives, any privacy at all - isn't an explicitly recognized constitutional right.
When the post 9/11 laws were passed, we were assured by our governments that they were written to address a specific emergency. That hasn't been the case. The USA PATRIOT ACT has been used to investigate tax fraud, Atlanta strip club owners and Eliot Spitzer's love of whores. An anti-terrorist measure is now being used to regulate where cold medicines are placed in local pharmacies, and is used to pressure sovereign countries where they place those same medicines.
Anti-terrorism laws stopped being about terrorism before the ink on them was even dry. Once you pass laws like that, the question about expanding their scope stops being "why?" it becomes "why not?" Why not detain gang bangers without cause or legal recourse? Why not listen in on a tax cheat's conversations in the absence of a judicial warrant? You'll notice that I haven't prefaced any of the above with the word "alleged." That's because everyone else seems to have dropped it. The presumption of innocence, something that defines us from those we fight, has almost vanished completely.
Well, the modern conservative era has passed, and the liberals are poised to take over. And anyone who thinks that what happened to cold medicine won't happen to the private right to gun ownership is stupid beyond words. What modern conservatives don't see is that in making the Fourth Amendment meaningless, they weakened the entire Constitution, including the Second Amendment.
As a Canadian, I really shouldn't care about any of this. But I love America and see it as the greatest hope of freedom in the world. I haven't spent my life and tens of thousands of dollars studying the country as a way to get laid. I love what America represents to the world, and I'm terrified of what liberals will do with the already unreasonable Bush precedents once they assume power. So-called "conservative" presidents have been abrogating the constitution for thirty years, and I can only imagine what a hard-core liberal one will do to it.
The single greatest reason I dissociated myself from the conservative movement is because they made people like Giorgio Mammoliti possible. If President Bush convinced me of anything, it is that I shouldn't waste my time trying to save a movement that's determined to destroy itself.
I resigned myself to being a lonely voice a long time ago.
Easy Listening Recommendation of the Day: Democracy By: Leonard Cohen From: The Future
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