You leave the bad-tempered, snarling traffic of Massachusetts Avenue and the next minute you are inside America’s most prominent mosque, formally opened by President Eisenhower in 1957. Ramadan has just started, and the atmosphere is muted and reverential; Turkish porcelain tiles line the walls, and closely woven Persian carpets cover the floors. Men come in to pray quietly – their knees, hands and forehead touching the floor in the symbolic recall of the five pillars of Islam. A couple come in and, with the minimum of fuss or formality, are married. But the men – except for the bridal party who have parted company with the women, now on the floor below – look both sad and lonely. If you are a Muslim in America today, you are frightened: it is rather as the Japanese in America felt after Pearl Harbor, and before their mass internment.
Despite the protestations of the Bush administration that the perpetrators of the 11 September atrocities will never prevail in their attempt to overturn the American way of life, they have already succeeded in doing so. Amid all the triumphalism over military operations overseas, the transformation of the US into a police state has gone largely unnoticed. Britain may be up in arms about David Blunkett and his dismissal of airy-fairy rights and liberties, but what is happening in the UK is benign and gentle compared to the situation here. “American values”, a phrase much used of late by President Bush, have been tossed out of the window. More than two centuries of painfully accrued constitutional checks and balances have been discarded. In the words of the American Civil Liberties Union, the Bill of Rights is now “distorted beyond recognition”.
Weeks ago, I wrote that more than 1,000 men had been interned here without trial or proper access to a lawyer or the outside world. The US Justice Department now refuses to release any kind of figure for the number arrested and imprisoned without trial, and so we do not know how many people – we can assume nearly all of them to be Muslims – have been plucked away. The atmosphere is such that supposedly liberal columnists debate the pros and cons of torturing prisoners, and then finally conclude that, yes, torture is OK in these extraordinary times. The Democratic senator for Vermont, Patrick Leahy, sums up the edgy mood succinctly: “I don’t know when, in the last 20 years, I’ve heard so many members of both parties come up and say, ‘What the heck is going on?’ “
Even senior senators were not informed beforehand of Bush’s latest executive order, bringing in secret military tribunals to try non-US citizens. For those men at the mosque, it seems a real possibility, while for me, as a legally resident alien, it may be more theoretical: but we non-citizens can now be secretly arrested and then tried in secret at undisclosed locations (naval ships have been suggested), without being entitled to the legal representation we request. If a two-thirds majority of the military tribunal so order it, we can then be executed without the information being released to the public. Non-US citizens now have no constitutional protections in the land of the free and home of the brave, no soppy bills of rights to see that they are treated fairly or even openly. “Any individual subject to this order shall not be privileged to seek any remedy . . . in any court of the United States, or any state thereof,” the president decreed.
The justification for such measures is that they protect the very American values they suspend; that only by suspending basic human rights (to say nothing of the ancient principle of habeas corpus) can these true American values be restored. “This is absolutely, totally constitutional,” the White House insists. “The only ones to be tried will be foreign enemy belligerents.” A military tribunal “guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve”, says the vice-president, Dick Cheney. But it will be the president and his proxies who will decide on the identity of those individuals and the nature of their supposed crimes. So much for a fair trial, juries of peers, and other originally English ideals previously held so precious here: the moves are being opposed only very gingerly, though such timid protests are coming from both the right and the left.
This staggering accrual of power by the US president has been made possible by intense public revulsion over the atrocities; Americans have been suborned into believing in the overwhelming rightness and fairness of their government. Not since FDR instigated a secret military hearing to try eight Nazi saboteurs who landed on US soil by submarine in 1942 has any administration been so omnipotent. In that case, six of the eight – two had presumably given evidence against the others – were swiftly executed. But even their case went before the US Supreme Court, a judicial review that Bush et al now seek to circumvent.
Even the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War were held in public, as was Israel’s 1961 trial of the Nazi ringleader Adolf Eichmann (who was then hanged). In this country, the suspension of habeas corpus was last granted to President Lincoln in 1861. All this is now in effect here without reference, let alone approval, by either the House or Senate. A cardinal principle of American rule of law – the separation of powers, of the judiciary from the executive and the legislature – has now been breached, with the president assuming the roles of police, judge, jury and (if he so wishes) executioner.
US citizens’ rights are being swiftly eroded, too. The patently inadequate attorney-general, John Ashcroft, has approved the right of the authorities to wiretap conversations between lawyer and client, a hitherto sacrosanct, privileged exchange in the eyes of US law. The sixth constitutional amendment, designed to ensure that the accused receives adequate legal counsel, has been eroded by the stroke of a pen. Five-thousand men between the ages of 18 and 33, nearly all of them (we can again assume) Muslim, are now being rounded up for questioning.
The authorities have greatly increased powers to wiretap phone calls and e-mails. Intelligence briefings about what is going on, meanwhile, are being restricted to eight out of the 535 members of Congress. And the president has also issued a new executive order, known just as 13223, which bars the public from seeing documents from the past four presidencies; so much for the Freedom of Information Act.
Thus the atmosphere of emergency, fear and foreboding proliferates. The Bush administration continues to give out its confusing double messages: it tells people to live their lives normally and enjoy themselves at restaurants and shopping malls, while its members themselves show every sign of being petrified over what may happen next. Reassuring traditions next month would have been the public tours of the White House Christmas decorations, with a huge Christmas tree taking pride of place in front of the White House; neither will happen this year, the White House announced last Monday.
In this past Thanksgiving week here, no American has dared raise more than a timid voice of protest about what is going on in the name of justice and security. But the suspension of the civil rights of which America was so justly proud must be giving quiet satisfaction to those behind the 11 September outrages. Disrupting the American way of life was what they wanted, and this is what they have now achieved.
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