The freedom trail

As I prepare to leave New York and my position at the New York Times for a self-imposed exile, I wonder whether my time abroad will be longer than the two years I’ve planned – whether there will be a forced extension.

I have been awarded a fellowship to research and write about north African immigration and integration in Europe. I will be based in France and will travel frequently to north Africa. I have prepared intensively: by exploring the online umma (the transnational Muslim continuum); visiting websites that are gathering-places for the Islamic world and for people like me, non-Muslims interested in Islamic culture; ordering books by influential Islamic theorists like Sayyid Qutb, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, and Muhammad Abduh; exchanging emails with people in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia.

“What will the government think of your activities?” my mother asked, “Will you be able to come back?”

It is quite possible that the government knows of my recent activities. We’ve known for years that the details of our lives are easily accessed by the technologically proficient, but I have always felt cloaked by my insignificance. I am far too inconsequential to catch the interest of Big Brother – corporate or governmental. But times are changing. Recent history has shown that it is precisely those deemed insignificant who present the greatest threat.

The July bombs in London and Egypt have prompted heightened tension in the west and in north Africa alike. World public opinion is thinking fearfully.

Also by KA Dilday in openDemocracy:

“Lost in translation: the narrowing of the American mind” (May 2003)

“The Return of the King: Tolkien and the new medievalism” (December 2003)

“Jacques Derrida: life beyond the margins” (October 2004)

If you find this material valuable please consider supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work and keep it free for all

The war at home

Italy, with 3,000 troops remaining in southern Iraq, wonders if it will be next to suffer an attack. France, with Europe’s largest Muslim population, anxiously anticipates the end of the sacred lull of late summer. Much of the middle east is already in a state of tension beyond such calculations. And in the United States, fear has invited random searches on the subway. These searches speak directly to fear: they are not likely to prevent terrorist attacks, as New York’s law enforcement team has admitted, but are primarily to comfort New Yorkers. These comforting fictions are the US government’s public reaction to fear. But there is also an actual counterattack – the real domestic defensive manoeuvre is intelligence gathering, which takes place in shadows.

Secret and probably illegal methods used in American detention centres and interrogation rooms have been exposed and publicised. But intelligence efforts focused on US citizens remain obscure. The Patriot Act (“Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”) expanded the ability of the US government to monitor secretly the activities of American citizens. Through the justice department, the attorney-general of the United States, the president’s lawyer, files a request to monitor a citizen, backing it up with electronic evidence. Each request is reviewed by one of the nine judges appointed to a secret court. Since 2001, the court has reviewed and approved more than 1,000 requests each year. Very few applications are rejected.

Civil-liberties groups and muckraking journalists publicly write and complain about the secret monitoring and the Patriot Act and they file freedom of information requests – which is largely a symbolic exercise since most requests for information about the secret court and its warrants go unanswered. No one really knows the extent of the intrusion.

This type of surveillance differs from criminal surveillance in that you do not have to be suspected of engaging in criminal activity to provoke a warrant – you need only be suspected of knowing some things the government thinks it might like to know in its defence of the country. Unless you are prosecuted, you will never know that the secret court approved a warrant to monitor your activities. It allows the government to present those cases most susceptible to challenge – those involving US citizens – in darkness.

The chief justice of the United States appoints the judges who authorise each request. Right now that man is William H Rehnquist, an ailing 80-year-old. It is likely that George W Bush will appoint the next chief justice by the end of the year, if not before.

George W Bush’s administration has become extremely powerful. When the president does appoint the next chief justice, he will probably appoint a conservative ideologue fiercely loyal to him. The secret court is designed to be the judicial restraint on the president’s ability to spy on citizens – one check in the system of checks and balances. But Bush will control the check. The system is very dangerous – mainly because it is secret. When the files are opened one day, it will be akin to the opening of the Stasi files in the German Democratic Republic. Thousands of Americans will learn that a dossier of their activities exists.

I may well be monitored once my passport is filled with stamps from travel to north Africa. And my actions will affect others. The Australian friend who gave me a copy of the Qur’an (I cringed – for his sake, not mine – when I realised he had used a credit card to purchase it, leaving a paper trail; the Patriot Act now allows the government to seize records from bookstores and libraries) will be added to a do-not-fly list.

That same Qur’an was sitting in plain sight beside books on radical Islam when a neighbour stopped by to borrow something. She doesn’t know why I might be reading such books and the government now encourages citizens to report suspicious activity. I don’t think that I will be so quick to let the next neighbour in.

Is the United States entering an era of “neo-McCarthyism”? Also in openDemocracy, Gara LaMarche dissects “The crisis of democracy in America” (June 2005)

Gara LaMarche’s article provoked an exchange with Roger Scruton: to read it, click here and here

The price of the ticket

My mother lives in Mississippi. About seven years ago, the files of the Sovereignty Commission, Mississippi’s civil-rights-era surveillance organisation, were made public. I went to the archives where they were stored and spent hours perusing them. One can see the surveillance reports that informed the murderers of the whereabouts of their targets, the three civil rights workers of legend: James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. The national papers are filled with their story, as the Ku Klux Klan initiated murder has just been re-prosecuted in Jackson, Mississippi.

When my mother asked what the government might think of my activities, I scoffed. “I can’t live my life worrying about what George W Bush might think of me.”

But if I want to continue to live my life as I have, with free passage back and forth over my country’s borders, it looks as if George W Bush’s opinions may begin to matter a great deal.