The
following two measures may be added to this list of abuse of power:
1. In August of 2002 the Department of Justice
initiated the National Security
Entry/Exit Registration System (NSEERS) "special registration"
program requiring nearly 85,000 men from 24 Muslim countries and North Korea
to voluntarily report to INS facilities for "special registration"
which entailed fingerprinting, photographing, and questioning about their
immigration status. The men were required to appear for annual interviews if
they stayed in the US
for more than one year and to register with immigration officials when they
leave the country.
While no
terrorist has been found through the program 13,000 of the men who voluntarily
reported ended up in deportation proceedings due to their immigration status.
In December 2003, the NSEERS program was supplemented by US-VISIT, a program
that takes biometric measurements of people entering the US from certain countries including
fingerprints and face scans.
On April
27, 2011, The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced the end of the
National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS). This special
registration process is no longer required.
2. In
October of 2006 The Military Commissions
Act (MCA) was signed into law, effectively creating a separate system of
justice for non-citizens. The act denies non-citizens the right to challenge
their detention in court, allows any non-citizen to be tried by military
commission and permits indefinite detention of non-citizens. The act will also
allow non-citizens to be convicted on the basis of coerced testimony, hearsay
evidence and warrantless searches, and sanction interrogation practices that
amount to torture. This law effectively abolished habeas corpus for individuals
declared "enemy combatants" by the U.S. government.
The
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reports that "the Military Commissions
Act gives the president absolute power to decide who is an enemy of our country
and to imprison people indefinitely without charging them with a crime."
According to ACLU's MCA fact sheet: "This law removes the Constitutional due
process right of habeas corpus for persons the president designates as unlawful
enemy combatants. It allows our government to continue to hold hundreds of
prisoners more than four years without charges, with no end in sight."
Senator
Obama voted against the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which stripped the
federal judiciary over habeas corpus review power over aliens detained abroad.
Obama gave a speech that September on the Senate floor pleading his colleagues
to amend the bill and restore habeas corpus. He criticized the Detainee
Treatment Act and lamented the procedural inadequacy of the Combatant Status
Review Tribunals. He pointed out the irony of the multi-tiered judicial
processes used to process so-called enemy combatants. [5]
Obama
appealed to habeas corpus many times in public, casting his lot with these
principles that were part of the "Anglo-American legal system for over 700
years." "The great traditions of our legal system and our way of
life" were at stake, he boldly said. He repeatedly said we must close down
Guantanamo, and
he would do so. He cheered on the Boumediene v. Bush decision in 2008 that
overturned the military commissions act's worst elements and extended habeas to
Guantanamo. He
pointed out that the commissions were not even yielding many convictions, and
consistently decried the "legal black hole" of having a system
unchecked by habeas corpus, prisoner of war protections or the Geneva
Convention. [6]
References
[1] One
Nation Indivisible, under God, with Liberty
and Justice for All: Civil Rights for Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians by Prof.
Gary Orfield - May 2003
[2] New
target of rights erosions: U.S.
citizens By Glenn Greenwald - May 13, 2010.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Top Ten
Abuses of Power Since 9/11 by ACLU
[5] Civil
Liberties in Obama's America
by Anthony Gregory - March 20, 2010.
[6] Ibid.
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