[Reader-list] non-citizens of the US

douwe at oberon.nl douwe at oberon.nl
Thu Mar 6 15:49:17 IST 2003


Actually, I think in most countries you *can* be stripped
of your citizenship for high treason, so it is not something
fundmentally new. Still scary though.

Douwe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: reader-list-admin at mail.sarai.net
> [mailto:reader-list-admin at mail.sarai.net]On Behalf Of Rana Dasgupta
> Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 4:14 AM
> To: reader-list at sarai.net
> Subject: [Reader-list] non-citizens of the US
> 
> 
> referring to a leaked draft of bush administration's
> Domestic Security Enhancement Act.
> 
> includes the idea that US citizens could be stripped
> of their citizenship and thrown out.  they would be
> non-citizens of everywhere.  anywhere.  whatever.
> 
> the world seems to throw up more and more of these
> surreal thoughts at the moment.  only expressible with
> twisted double negative phrases.
> 
> R
> 
> 
> 
> Patriot Act's Big Brother
> by David Cole
> 
> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030317&s=cole
> 
> In early February, the Center for Public Integrity
> disclosed a leaked draft of the Bush Administration's
> next round in the war on terrorism--the Domestic
> Security Enhancement Act (DSEA). The draft
> legislation, stamped Confidential and dated January 9,
> 2003, appears to be in final form but has not yet been
> introduced in Congress. Presumably the Administration
> had determined that the timing would be more
> propitious for passage--meaning less propitious for
> reasoned debate--after we go to war with Iraq. But it
> is one thing to play politics with the timing of a
> farm bill; it is another matter to do so with a bill
> that would radically alter our rights and freedoms. 
> 
> If the Patriot Act was so named to imply that those
> who question its sweeping new powers of surveillance,
> detention and prosecution are traitors, the DSEA takes
> that theme one giant step further. It provides that
> any citizen, even native-born, who supports even the
> lawful activities of an organization the executive
> branch deems "terrorist" is presumptively stripped of
> his or her citizenship. To date, the "war on
> terrorism" has largely been directed at noncitizens,
> especially Arabs and Muslims. But the DSEA would
> actually turn citizens associated with "terrorist"
> groups into aliens. 
> 
> They would then be subject to the deportation power,
> which the DSEA would expand to give the Attorney
> General the authority to deport any noncitizen whose
> presence he deems a threat to our "national defense,
> foreign policy or economic interests." One federal
> court of appeals has already ruled that this standard
> is not susceptible to judicial review. So this
> provision would give the Attorney General unreviewable
> authority to deport any noncitizen he chooses, with no
> need to prove that the person has engaged in any
> criminal or harmful conduct. 
> 
> A US citizen stripped of his citizenship and ordered
> deported would presumably have nowhere to go. But
> another provision authorizes the Attorney General to
> deport persons "to any country or region regardless of
> whether the country or region has a government." And
> failing deportation to Somalia (or a similar place),
> the Justice Department has issued a regulation
> empowering it to detain indefinitely suspected
> terrorists who are ordered deported but cannot be
> removed because they are stateless or their country of
> origin refuses to take them back. 
> 
> Other provisions are designed to further insulate the
> war on terrorism from public and judicial scrutiny.
> The bill would authorize secret arrests, a practice
> common in totalitarian regimes but never before
> authorized in the United States. It would terminate
> court orders barring illegal police spying entered
> before September 11, 2001, without regard to the need
> for judicial supervision. It would allow secret
> government wiretaps and searches without even a
> warrant from the supersecret Foreign Intelligence
> Surveillance Court when Congress has authorized the
> use of force. And it would give the government the
> same access to credit reports as private companies,
> without judicial supervision. Historically, we have
> imposed a higher threshold, and judicial oversight, on
> government access to such private information, because
> government has the motive and the wherewithal to abuse
> the information in ways private companies generally do
> not. 
> 
> But the trajectory of the war on terrorism is probably
> best illustrated by an obscure provision that would
> eliminate the distinction between domestic terrorism
> and international terrorism for a host of
> investigatory purposes. The Administration's argument
> sounds reasonable enough--terrorism is terrorism,
> whether it's within the United States or has an
> international component. But in the Patriot Act
> debates, the Administration argued that it should be
> afforded broader surveillance powers over
> "international terrorism" because such acts are
> simultaneously a matter of domestic law enforcement
> and foreign intelligence. Because foreign intelligence
> gathering has traditionally been subject to looser
> standards than criminal law enforcement, the
> government argued, the looser standards should extend
> to domestic investigations of "international
> terrorism." But now it proposes to extend the same
> loose standards to investigations of wholly domestic
> crimes. 
> 
> The DSEA's treatment of expatriation and domestic
> terrorism are harbingers of things to come. Thus far,
> much of the war on terrorism has been targeted at
> foreign nationals and sold to the American people on
> that ground. Americans' rights are not at stake, the
> argument goes, because we're concerned with
> "international" crime committed mostly by "aliens."
> With the DSEA, however, the Administration seeks to
> transgress both the alien-citizen line, by turning
> citizens into aliens for their political ties, and the
> domestic-international line, extending to wholly
> domestic criminal-law-enforcement tools that were
> previously reserved for international terrorism
> investigations. 
> 
> How will Congress respond? Thus far, when citizens'
> rights have been directly threatened, Congress has
> taken civil liberties seriously. Most recently, it
> blocked the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness
> data-mining program. But it blocked it only as applied
> to US citizens. As long as the Pentagon violates only
> foreign nationals' privacy, Congress in effect said,
> Go ahead. But that tactic--protecting citizens' rights
> while ignoring those of foreign nationals--is
> untenable, not only on moral grounds but because if
> the Administration gets its way, we are all
> potentially "aliens."
> 
> 
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