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Bush administration enlists police to
pursue immigrants

By Mithre J. Sandrasagra

New York, New York, Dec. 18 (IPS)— Civil rights and immigrant defense groups filed suit in a federal court here Wednesday to challenge a post-9/11 initiative by US Attorney General John Ashcroft to enlist state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws.

The plaintiffs are alleging that following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) unlawfully entered immigration information about non-citizens into a federal criminal database — the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database.

Its entries, “rap sheets” or criminal warrants and stolen property records, date back to the 1930s, and are routinely used by federal agencies to notify state and local law enforcement about people wanted for crimes.

“Co-opting state and local police to make immigration arrests undermines public safety and encourages racial profiling,” said Raul Yzaguirre, president and CEO of the National Council of La Raza, one of the plaintiffs.

“It makes immigrant victims and witnesses afraid to report crimes and assist police investigations, diverts law enforcement resources from other policing priorities, and entangles untrained officers in the complexities of immigration law,” he added in a statement.

The new practice departs from longstanding federal policy. Congress has strictly limited the power of local and state police to make immigration arrests by requiring them to, among other things, receive formal training in immigration law before they can undertake enforcement.

More than 60 local police and sheriff departments countrywide, numerous law enforcement organizations, the National Conference of State Legislatures, the National Association of Counties and the National League of Cities have publicly opposed local police enforcing immigration law.

A bill before Congress that would give local police the authority to act on information from immigration officials has drawn strong opposition from police departments in some of the largest US cities, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and New York.

The DOJ policy will do nothing to identify terrorists, and will serve only to disenfranchise and alienate the very communities whose assistance the government should be seeking, contends the San Francisco-based Japanese American Citizens League (JACL).

In Seattle, where 60 years ago police helped to round up Japanese immigrants during the Second World War, Officer John Ditto says aliens who “fear being arrested” will not approach him with tips about more serious crimes if the policy is left to stand.

“People would have one more reason to run away from me, and that’s not something that I think I want to have happen,” Ditto said in an interview.

State and local police routinely access NCIC data after stopping or arresting individuals in the course of their duties. The database is accessed about 3.7 million times each day, according to the FBI.

Civic leaders are calling for an end to what some contend is a return to McCarthy-esque government campaigns to detain immigrants in the administration’s so-called “war on terror.” (In the 1950s, the height of the Cold War, Senator Joseph McCarthy led a brutal campaign to uncover communists in the United States.)

The overwhelming criticism is that the DOJ system will prevent immigrant communities from coming forward with information that could be helpful in the fight against terror. The overwhelming fear is that thousands of immigrants will suffer unjust persecution.

Before 9/11, the FBI did not enter non-criminal information, such as immigration data, into the NCIC. Since then, senior administration officials have announced that information on more than 400,000 people with outstanding orders of deportation will be entered into the database to prompt state and local police to make immigration arrests.

An undisclosed number of people whom the government believes are not in compliance with “special registration” requirements — directed at male immigrants over the age of 16 who are citizens and nationals of North Korea and 24 majority-Muslim countries — will also be entered into the NCIC, according to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, another plaintiff in the lawsuit.

On Dec. 1 the Department of Homeland Security ended the annual re-registration requirements of 83,000 immigrants who had registered under the post-9/11 program. If now, almost a year after the first “registrations,” immigrants are “out of status” they will be added to the NCIC.

Many critics contend that special registration and other new policies amount to racial profiling. In addition, “numerous reports by the inspector general of the DOJ have confirmed the infamous unreliability of INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service] records,” said former congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“Information is being disseminated to police all over the country, and will be used to detain immigrants, many of whom may have a legal right to be in this country,” she added in a statement.

Ejaz Haider, a Pakistani working as a visiting scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, was detained earlier this year because he missed his “special registration” deadline.

“I did not know I was in violation of the policy. Brookings did not know I was in violation. My friends in the State Department did not know I was in violation,” he wrote in a ‘Washington Post’ article Feb. 5.

Despite informing himself and calling authorities, “we could not understand the law,” he wrote. “What hope can there be for the cab driver or the restaurant worker who doesn’t have the leisure to discover the letter and intent of INS policies?”

Other plaintiffs in Friday’s case are the New York Immigration Coalition, the Latin American Workers Project and the Union of Needle trade

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SC students were terrorized by police - ACLU

Goose Creek, South Carolina, Dec. 15-- Students as young as 14 were terrorized by police with guns and drug-sniffing dogs in an early-morning SWAT raid at Stratford High School that violated their rights, charged the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit filed today on behalf of 20 families.

“What this school administration allowed is truly shocking,” said Graham Boyd, Director of the ACLU’s Drug Policy Litigation Project and lead counsel in the lawsuit.  “Officials at this school, along with law enforcement officers, treated innocent children like hardened criminals.”

The now-notorious SWAT team-style raid on schoolchildren sparked national outrage after a school videotape of the Nov. 5 incident was broadcast on television. This week a police video of the raid surfaced showing even more disturbing detail of police handcuffing students and holding guns to their heads while a large drug dog sniffed and tore at the students’ book bags. No drugs or weapons were found during the sweep and no charges were filed.

The ACLU’s lawsuit charges school and police officials with violations of the students’ right to be free from unlawful search and seizure and use of excessive force.  The lawsuit seeks a court order declaring the raids unconstitutional and blocking officials from carrying out future raids, as well as damages on behalf of the students who were terrorized.

“I was shocked and outraged that the principal would let this happen,” said Sharon Smalls, mother of Nathaniel Smalls, a ninth-grader who was forced to his knees with his hands behind his head while his socks, wallet and pockets were searched. “When I saw the video on television I almost lost it. It looked like something from the war, not from my son’s school.”

The ACLU said such unconstitutional tactics — more appropriate for a prison lockdown than a school — are on the rise as schools increasingly apply the “zero tolerance” approach to perceived drug problems in schools. But these escalating measures have no justification in reality since long-term studies show that student drug use has declined in the last 10 years.

Zero tolerance policies also have a disproportionate affect on minority students, who are frequently far more harshly disciplined than their white counterparts, according to a Harvard University study. A New York Times story about the raid noted that while black students make up less than a quarter of the 2,700 students at Stratford High School, two-thirds of the 107 students caught up in the sweep were black.

“Many people in the community are concerned that the police targeted black students in the raid,” said Denyse Williams, Executive Director of the ACLU of South Carolina. “The ACLU shares that concern, and we also believe that no student, black or white, should ever have to go through the kind of nightmare that our clients experienced on November 5.”

As 16-year-old Joshua Ody, one of the students caught up in the sweep, put it: “I felt like I had less rights than other people that day.”

The ACLU complaint names as defendants the Goose Creek Police Department; the City of Goose Creek; Police Chief Harvey Becker; Supervisory Police Officer Dave Aarons; the Berkeley County School Board; Stratford High School Principal George McCrackin; and 20 unknown police officers identified only as “John Doe.”

The ACLU’s clients are: 15-year-old Carl Alexander , Jr.; 15-year-old Rodney Goodwin; 17-year-old Samuel Ody III; 17-year-old Micah Bryant; 15-year-old Marcus Blakeney; 14-year-old Danyielle Ashley Cills; 15-year-old Cedric Penn, Jr.; 14-year-old Elijah Le’Quan Simpson; 14-year-old Jeremy Bolger; 14-year-old Tristan Cills; 14-year-old Arielle Pena; 17-year-old Jalania McCullough; 17-year-old Cedric Simmons; 14-year-old Nathaniel Smalls; 15-year-old Timothy Rice; 15-year-old Shnikqua Simmons; 16-year-old Joshua Ody; 16-year-old De’Nea Dykes; 15-year-old Chernitua Bryant; and 18-year-old Rodricus Perry.

New York, New York, Dec. 17 (IPS)— US immigration officials have dropped parts of a contentious registration program for Muslim and Arab men, but critics note that thousands are still being deported and many others will face onerous screening procedures when they travel.

The program dates back to November 2002, when the Justice Department started requiring all male non-citizens over age 16 from any of 21 countries deemed to have terrorist links to register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, now a division of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The process entails being interviewed, photographed and fingerprinted, or facing possible criminal prosecution. Many of those who have complied said the ordeal took several days, during which time they were held in unheated detention cells without any way to communicate with their families.

Earlier this month, officials said that some 83,000 people who had already registered once would not be automatically required to return for periodic follow-up interviews, as under the old rules. But they would still have to notify the DHS of any change of address, employment or educational institution within 10 days of the change.

In addition, the planned deportations of at least 13,000 people who were found during the initial registration to have committed immigration violations are still going forward.

“The Department of Homeland Security will utilize a more tailored system that is individual-specific rather than the broad categories by geography,” said Asa Hutchinson, the department’s undersecretary — meaning that DHS retains the right to demand that certain people return for follow-up registration, on little more than a week’s notice.

Civil liberties and Arab American groups welcomed the rule changes, but argue that the program remains fundamentally biased, and is not working in any case, since it has not led to a single terrorist prosecution. “What we’ve learned is that special registration, like all other programs introduced after 9/11 that have been geared to make us safer, have not been focusing on the right area; they’ve been targeting immigrants,” said Julia Hendrix of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

“Intelligence experts have told us that these programs are not effective — in fact, it’s the absolute reverse,” Hendrix told IPS.

“Families have been torn apart, fathers, brothers, uncles taken away. It’s been extremely disruptive to the communities...this violates the civil liberties of immigrants, and we’d like to see it ended totally,” she added.

The Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee points out that those subject to the program will still be required to submit to exit interviews if they travel abroad, even though DHS offices in airports are not always open or efficiently managed — which could force travelers to either violate the exit interview requirement, or abandon their trips.

Other persistent problems include the failure of immigration authorities to explain the program’s requirements to the public, advocates say.

“A lot of people in the community took [the rule change] as an end to special registration, when this was not the case,” said Radiah Ahmed of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations. “We wish there had been more outreach.”

“The fear is still there,” she added. “So many people know someone who was detained or deported.”

The crackdown following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon has also had dire consequences for Arab and Muslim men just passing through the United States.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, was detained by US authorities on Sept. 26, 2002 during a stop-over in New York, as he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia.

After days of interrogation, during which he was denied access to a lawyer because he “was not an American citizen,” Arar was shackled and put on plane to Syria — where he had not been since he was 17 years old.

He was accused of having links to the al-Qaida terrorist group, although officials refused to detail any evidence they had against him, and have never formally charged him with a crime.

Arar, who says he plans to sue the US government, says he was held and tortured in Syria for more than 10 months, until he finally signed a “confession” and was allowed to return to his home in Ottawa.

“I describe my cell in Syria as a grave because it was just three feet wide, six feet long, seven feet high and unlit,” Arar recalled in a commentary published Dec. 10 by the Los Angeles Times.

“While I was there I sometimes felt on the verge of death after beatings with a black electrical cable about two inches thick. They mostly aimed for my palms but sometimes missed and hit my wrists. Other times, I was left alone in a special ‘waiting room’ within earshot of others’ screams.

“I want to know why the United States sent me to one of the seven countries that the [George W.] Bush administration has designated a sponsor of state terrorism — and that President Bush singled out just last month as a country that tortures its own people.”

“And I want to know why the Canadian government sent information on me to the United States and what the nature of that information was.”

“I need to know why this happened to me,” Arar wrote. “My priority is to clear my name, get to the bottom of the case and make sure this does not happen to anyone else again.”

Arar is not the only one turning to the court system for justice. Several activist groups have brought lawsuits to halt the special registration program, as well as the USA PATRIOT Act, a sweeping law passed shortly after 9/11 that greatly expanded the government’s domestic spying powers.

In July, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on behalf of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor in the state of Michigan and five other nonprofit groups, challenging provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

These sections allow federal agents to seize records on a person’s reading habits, religious affiliations, internet surfing and other activities without a warrant, without showing probable cause and without ever informing people of the searches.

Another lawsuit, led by the California-based Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, seeks to block new detentions under the registration program and to prevent the deportation of immigrants who may be eligible to legalize their status.

The Center, and several other advocacy groups, brought the suit after the mass arrests last December of hundreds of mostly Iranian immigrants who had come forward to register with authorities in Los Angeles. The majority were detained for overstaying their visas.

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US ‘need not have suffered’ attacks of 9/11

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, Dec. 18— The head of an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks yesterday said that they could and should have been prevented, and that the officials responsible for the failure should be fired.

His full report is not due to be published before May, but the comments by the commission’s chairman, Thomas Kean, suggests its conclusions are likely to be politically explosive.

“This is a very, very important part of history and we’ve got to tell it right,” Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey appointed by the Bush administration, told CBS television. “As you read the report, you’re going to have a pretty clear idea what wasn’t done and what should have been done...This was not something that had to happen.”

A less ambitious congressional report into the attacks published a year ago found evidence that leads were overlooked but stopped short of ruling that the hijackings could have been prevented. That report examined pre-Sept. 11 warnings from the intelligence community that al-Qaida had for years been planning a hijacking attack, that extremists were using flying schools to train, and that two were tracked as they entered the United States -- and then lost.

Kean said the officials responsible for the intelligence failure should have been fired. So far, no one in the CIA and FBI found to have shelved repeated warnings that an attack like Sept. 11 was being planned by al-Qaida, have suffered setbacks in their careers.

“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean said.

The White House had no comment on Kean’s remarks yesterday, and said only: “The president wants to learn everything possible about what happened.”

The 10-member bipartisan commission last month struck a compromise with the White House over access to secret documents, in particular the president’s daily intelligence brief. The tussle focused on a brief given to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, in which the CIA warned about the possibility that al-Qaida could be planning hijackings in the US. After the commission threatened to issue a subpoena, the president’s staff agreed to hand over the documents to a commission sub-committee.

The administration suffered another setback yesterday when a federal appeals court ordered the release of a US terrorist suspect Jose Padilla from military custody within a month. Padilla was arrested in June 2002 on suspicion of plans to build a “dirty” radioactive bomb, although intelligence officials later said there was no evidence he had made any progress.

Since being designated an “enemy combatant” he has been held at a military base without access to lawyers or relatives. Yesterday’s ruling found that the executive had no right to designate a US citizen arrested on American soil as an “enemy combatant” and deprive him of the normal rights of a criminal defendant, without specific permission of Congress. Padilla, a Hispanic gang member from Chicago, converted to Islam in jail.

In his interview yesterday, Kean said that his commission’s public hearings, starting next month, will produce important revelations, as its members question officials from the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Pentagon, and possibly President Bush and former president Bill Clinton.

Against the backdrop of a presidential election campaign, the hearings could damage the president if it emerges that his administration failed to take reasonable steps to defend the country against such a devastating attack. However, the final report in May could also find fault with the preceding Democratic administration.

Under particular scrutiny will be public statements like the claim by the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no way the administration could have known that al-Qaida would hijack US airliners and fly them into crowded buildings.

However, the 2002 congressional report examined a string of warnings from foreign intelligence agencies and FBI field agents, that al-Qaida had been contemplating doing just that for nearly a decade.

It also emerged that two of the future hijackers had been spotted at an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, but the CIA failed to pass on their identities to immigration and customs officials before the two, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, arrived in California. The FBI was still on their trail on Sept. 11, 2001.

The commission could also investigate another sensitive issue removed from the congressional report in December 2002 - the possible knowledge or role of Saudi officials in the Sept. 11 plot.

Unheeded warnings

1995 Abdul Hakim Murad, an accomplice of Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, tells Philippine authorities that he learned to fly at US flying schools as part of a plot to hijack an airliner and fly it into CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia. Philippine police inform the FBI immediately. “Murad’s idea is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters,” a police report from 1995 says.

January 2000 Two future hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, are observed arriving in Kuala Lumpur for a meeting with al-Qaida suspects there. The two men then fly to California, but the CIA does not inform customs or immigration about its suspicions.

July 2001 Ken Williams, an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, sends a memo to his superiors warning that Middle Eastern terrorists could be using American flying schools to train for future hijackings. The memo says the possibility has been examined by US law enforcement since April 2000. The “Phoenix memo” makes it as far as FBI HQ but no action is taken.

August 2001 As part of his morning briefing on August 6 during a “working holiday” on his Texas ranch, the president is told that al-Qaida might be planning hijackings against US targets.

August 2001 Zacarias Moussaoui is arrested in Minnesota after a flight instructor calls the FBI to voice his suspicion that the Frenchman is training to hijack a plane full of passengers. French intelligence quickly confirms Moussaoui has links with extremist groups.

FBI HQ turns down a request to search his possessions which would have revealed links to other hijackers. A Minnesota FBI official, Coleen Rowley, later issues a whistleblowing memo saying her office “identified [Moussaoui] as a terrorist threat from a very early point.” On hearing about the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA director, George Tenet, reportedly says: “I wonder if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training.”

Source: Guardian (UK)

Washington, DC, Dec. 19— US civil liberties and human rights groups Thursday hailed the one-two punch delivered by two federal appeals courts against the Bush administration’s refusal to recognize basic due-process rights of alleged US and foreign detainees held as “enemy combatants” in Washington’s “war on terrorism.”

“Not one, but two federal courts have rebuked the president today for his belief that he should be able to lock people up without basic access to our justice and without congressional approval,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“No president should be able to assume such unilateral authority over people’s freedoms, most crucially during times of threat to our national well-being,” he added.

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) also hailed the two decisions — by the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeal — as an important vindication for basic liberties. “Both [decisions] attacked the Bush administration’s view that a war metaphor can justify restrictions on basic criminal justice rights away from a traditional battlefield,” Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director, told the New York Times.

Justice Department officials, who said they believed the two 2-1 decisions were flawed, indicated they may seek further review. The cases could well wind up in the Supreme Court, according to legal analysts on both sides.

The first case involved an appeal by lawyers for Jose Padilla, a US citizen arrested in Chicago in May 2002 as a material witness in the government’s ongoing counter-terrorism investigation and subsequently designated by Bush as an “enemy combatant.” Transferred to a high-security naval brig in Charleston, South Carolina, Padilla has been refused permission to communicate with his family, with a lawyer, or any non-military personnel for 18 months.

The government contends that Padilla met with members of al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan where he developed a plan with them to build and detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” in the US and had returned there to carry out the plan, although he carried no arms or explosives when he was arrested at O’Hare Airport.

Padilla’s lawyers claimed, among other things, that as a US citizen who was arrested in this country, their client was entitled to full due-process rights guaranteed under the US Constitution, and could not be denied them by the executive branch acting on its own.

The second case was based on a petition for habeas corpus by the brother of a Libyan, Salim Gherebi, captured in Afghanistan two years ago and held — along with more than 600 other so-called “enemy combatants” — at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. His lawyer contended that, even though his client was being held outside US territory, Washington was obliged to provide him with certain basic protections under US law, including the right to contest his detention in a US court.

In a separate case earlier this year, the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the administration’s position that “enemy combatants” held at Guantanamo Bay were not entitled to a court review of their detention, but that ruling is not binding on the Ninth Circuit, which is based in San Francisco.

Both cases thus tested the authority of the executive branch to detain individuals it deemed to be “enemy combatants” without explicit authorization from Congress or providing them recourse to the US court system.

In both cases, the courts ruled against the administration’s position.

In the first, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled that the president lacked the power to authorize the unilateral detention of a US citizen. “The president, acting alone, possesses no inherent constitutional authority to detain American citizens seized within the United States, away from the zone of combat, as enemy combatants,” the majority ruled.

Moreover, the two judges went on, a 1971 law designed to prevent any repetition of the notorious internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II expressly forbids federal detention of any US citizen in the United States without congressional authorization. It ordered the government to release Padilla from military custody within 30 days, although it noted that Padilla could continue to be held in civil custody by, for example, charging him with a crime in civilian court or seeking his detention on some other basis.

While a White House spokesman called the court’s ruling “troubling and flawed” and indicated the government may seek a stay of the release order, rights groups hailed the judgment as a breakthrough.

“After the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II, we learned our lesson as a nation,” said Deborah Pearlstein, an attorney at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) in New York. “Congress passed a law saying that ‘no citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained by the United States except pursuant to an Act of Congress’. The court’s decision today makes clear that Congress means what it said, and the President is not above the law. This decision is a victory for the Constitution.”

Amnesty International USA director William Schulz said he, too, “welcomed the decision” but voiced concern that “it does not seem to have been made in recognition of basic human rights principles or constitutionally guaranteed protections.” Schulz noted that, while it denied the executive branch the ability to detain individuals without access to a lawyer, “it also laid the groundwork for future detentions ...providing he has permission from Congress.”

The ruling in the Gherebi case was more sweeping with the two-judge majority arguing that indefinite detention by the executive branch without charges defied basic principles of US jurisprudence.

“Even in times of national emergency — indeed, particularly in such times — it is the obligation of the Judicial Branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the Executive Branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike,” Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for the majority.

“We simply cannot accept the government’s position that [the] Executive Branch possesses the unchecked authority to imprison indefinitely any persons, foreign citizens included, on territory under the sole jurisdiction and control of the United States, without permitting such prisoners recourse of any kind to any judicial forum, or even access to counsel, regardless of the length or manner of their confinement,” he argued.

The Ninth Circuit’s ruling ran directly counter to that of the DC Circuit. The Supreme Court last month agreed to hear an appeal of the DC Circuit’s decision, although oral arguments before the court are not likely to take place until late February at the earliest. Lawyers said the Supreme Court, whose ruling will be binding all federal courts, may now combine the two cases.

In another setback to the administration earlier this month, the Ninth Circuit, which is widely considered the most liberal of the federal appeals courts, declared unconstitutional significant parts of an anti-terrorist criminal statute that has been used as a key tool in a number of recent criminal prosecutions in the war on terrorism.

The administration has argued that a 1996 anti-terrorism statute, which was broadened by the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, makes it a crime to provide material support to terrorist organizations without regard to whether the donor knows that the organization has been designated a terrorist group. In addition to financial contributions, “material support” was defined in the PATRIOT Act as including the provision of “personnel” or “training.”

The Court held that the prohibitions on “personnel” and “training” were too vague and that the government’s insistence that donors who were not aware of the organization’s terrorist status or activities could be prosecuted under the law risked punishing “moral innocents” in violation of due process. The Justice Department has indicated it will appeal the decision.

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Families sue US, reject 9/11 ‘bribe’

By Tim Harper

Washington, DC, Dec. 23— For some, it’s blood money, a repugnant payoff they feel they have no choice but to accept.

For a handful of others, the process of claiming compensation is too painful: They find themselves paralyzed by grief and unable to reopen emotional wounds barely healed from the deaths of their loved ones in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But as many as 73 families see the process of US government compensation as an attempt to protect those who should be held accountable for what they believe was mass murder.

They ignored a midnight deadline last night, their last chance to apply for government cash.

And today, they begin a new stage in an arduous odyssey and will sue their government, airlines, and state and local authorities.

“This may be uncharted waters, but I was thrown in a pool on Sept. 11, 2001 and had to learn to swim,” said Monica Gabrielle, who lost her husband Richard in the World Trade Center attack.

“I am doing this for my husband. He was a gentle man, and he was alive, trying to get out of that building that day. The dead. The dying. The smoke. The terror. No one should have suffered like that. I want accountability. I need answers.”

The compensation fund has been controversial since President George W. Bush signed it into law 13 days after the attacks. For those who lost family members, it was always about protecting airlines, federal, state and local authorities from billions of dollars of lawsuits.

To receive the federal money, recipients must sign a waiver giving up their right to sue anyone involved in the worst terrorist attacks in US history.

A late surge of claims on the deadline yesterday meant close to 95 per cent of the 2,976 families who lost loved ones in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were expected to finally take the money.

To get there, they had to accept a monetary value on the lives of those closest to them, after making a case based on birth and marriage licenses, diplomas and degrees, even videos. They will, on average, receive $1.8 million each.

Families of 24 Canadian victims are eligible for compensation, and most have applied.

Brian Alexander, a New York lawyer representing a portion of the victims who have launched the lawsuit, said he knew of no Canadians involved.

He said those who have chosen to sue have put no dollar figure on awards and each claim will be individually tailored.

“A widow who is 80 years old is not in the same category as a widow who lost her husband at age 30 and has four kids at home,” he said.

Some $1.5 billion had been paid from the government fund by the weekend. Compensation for individual deaths has ranged from $250,000 to $6.9 million. Those physically injured as a result of the attacks have received compensation ranging from $500 to $7.9 million.

“Only in America could there be a program like this,” fund administrator Kenneth Feinberg told CNN yesterday.

“You wouldn’t find a program paying an average $1.8 million tax-free to eligible families. This is an unprecedented, unique program and exhibits I think the best in the American people.”

Yet Gabrielle says it is a bribe by the government so victims can be coerced into washing their hands of the affair.

She is also resentful that the government is determining the worth of loved ones.

“This is about mass murder,” she said. “I want to know who was responsible.

“No one has been fired. No one has been demoted. The same people who are guarding us today on an elevated security alert are the same people who were working that day.”

Gabrielle said she is looking at a special Sept. 11 commission headed by former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean to answer the question of responsibility.

Kean has battled the White House, New York, and aviation authorities for access to documents. He has a May deadline.

“There are people that, if I was doing the job, would certainly not be in the position they were in at that time because they failed. They simply failed,” Kean told CBS last week.

He said later he was talking of lower level officials, but Gabrielle and others want to know more about the safety of the buildings and airport security.

Even those who have accepted the money see it only as the lesser of two evils.

Irene Golinski, 53, whose husband died in the Pentagon attack, was still grappling with the decision to put 9/11 behind her or continue with a lawsuit.

“It’s almost like it’s a payoff to save the airlines and not hold any of those people responsible for what happened,” she said.

Feinberg’s office detailed some awards. The beneficiary of a 36-year-old project manager earning $231,000 and with one dependent was paid $3.48 million, while the beneficiary of a 26-year-old military officer with no dependents and a $44,000 salary got $1.84 million.

Source: Toronto Star

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High-tech voting vulnerable to age-old tricks

By Katherine Stapp

New York, New York, Dec. 18 (IPS)— “Democracy,” the rapier-tongued writer H.L. Mencken once observed, “is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”

As the United States lurches into another election cycle, officials around the country are rushing to avert a replay of the debacle of 2000, when thousands of African American voters were rejected at polling sites, and fancifully designed ballots prompted hundreds of others to inadvertently choose a Holocaust revisionist over Democratic contender Al Gore.

Not to mention the infamous “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” — those tiny pieces of paper shed (or not quite) by punch-card machines in Florida that inspired frenzied speculation over the voters’ true “intent” in an election that was won by a remarkable 537 votes.

Having received 3.9 billion dollars in federal aid to prevent such a spectacle from ever recurring, dozens of states are abandoning traditional paper ballots in favor of electronic systems that allow people to vote by touching a screen or flipping a switch.

In theory, computerized voting eliminates human error from the tabulation process, a problem that experts say is all too common. But many security gurus worry that the electronic systems are vulnerable to hacking, fraud and voter confusion.

And because the software code they use is considered “proprietary”, outside programmers have been largely barred from performing independent evaluations.

“With classical election technology — hand-counted paper ballots — you can always redo any part of the count if there is any question about the totals,” said Douglas Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa and a member of the Iowa Board of Examiners for Voting Machines and Electronic Voting Systems.

“With many computerized systems, there is no recourse,” he added in an interview. “We know that technicians at the county level have been known to rig mechanical lever voting machines. Why should we believe that technicians or programmers will not attempt similar fixes with direct recording electronic voting systems?”

A recent study one touch-screen system used in 37 states last year, sold by an Ohio-based company called Diebold, found problems with the vote-tallying software and a host of other loopholes.

“I’ve been teaching computer security for years, and my students would never design something like this,” said Aviel Rubin, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who led the study. “You’re looking at Swiss cheese. There’s not much you can do to fix the system.”

The chief of Diebold, Walden O’Dell, raised eyebrows in August when the press got wind of a George W. Bush fund-raiser invitation in which he declared: “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

Diebold insists that the Johns Hopkins study was flawed and stands by its product, although a recent audit of the company’s voting machines in California found that it had installed uncertified software in all 17 counties that use its equipment.

With cries of foul play multiplying, the consensus among many elections officials and security experts is that voting machines should also print out a paper receipt, something California has promised to introduce by 2006.

Other states are following suit, and the issue has been taken up by the new federal Election Assistance Commission and the National Institute of Science and Technology, although it is unlikely printers will be in place in time for the November 2004 elections.

“Current touch-screen systems record votes in electronic memory,” said David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University. “The recording process and the resulting records can’t be observed by anyone. If the computer records something different from what the voter wanted, no one knows about it.”

“Each voter needs to be able to inspect the record that is made of his or her vote,” Dill said. “Those records need to be saved for a later recount, if required.” But others are not so sure that creating a paper trail is the solution.

“Trying to retrofit an electronic voting machine with a paper roll and printer will undoubtedly result in printer jams on election day, which will delay voting and then folks won’t want to wait,” Denise Lamb, director of elections in the state of New Mexico, told IPS.

“[Another] problem is that paper ballot systems are not accessible to the visually impaired or alternate language speakers,” she said. “There’s the issue, for New Mexico and other states with Native American populations, of languages that are not written.”

Felicia Davis, coordinator of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation’s Election Protection Program in Georgia, expressed concerns that voters could end up staying home because they lacked confidence in the new system.

“In the wake of the Florida fiasco, the public is seeking assurances which are difficult to translate into lay terms when applied to electronic systems,” Davis said. “It is a fact that all systems can fail and the question that persists is, absent a paper trail how would such a failure be detected?”

In the last election, nearly 10,000 ballots cast by heavily Democratic-leaning black voters in Florida State were disqualified. These spoiled ballots had a crucial impact on the outcome since US President George W. Bush won Florida by a handful of votes, giving him the presidency under the US voting system although he lost the popular vote.

When they go to the polls to vote for president next November, more than one-half of Florida’s 9.4 million registered voters will be using touch-screen systems.

“Communities that have been systematically disenfranchised in the past must remain vigilant, and an important aspect is becoming knowledgeable about the new technology, asking questions and demanding verification,” Davis said.

“Research is needed to determine that the technology does not suppress the vote.”

In the end, experts say, no system is foolproof — but measures can and should be taken to minimize the chance of mistakes or deliberate vote theft.

“Examples like Enron and Worldcom provide excellent examples of what happens when accounting systems are allowed to run without adequate auditing oversight,” said Jones.

“Accounting for votes is no less important than accounting for dollars, and I don’t see why we should not demand comparable standards of accountability,” he added. “If they decide to start rigging things, they could have a state-wide or even a nationwide effect, posing the threat of wholesale fraud.”

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