Increased National Security Will Come At A Cost Civil Libertarians Alarmed By Provisions Of Pending Legislation

Americans with ties to suspect groups are more likely to be spied upon by U.S. law enforcement agents as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Congress is all but certain to enact a pending counter-terrorism bill that would step up federal spying on anyone connected to suspected terrorist groups. Big-city police chiefs also say stepping up surveillance and penetration of suspect groups is the best move they can make to boost anti-terror security.

Civil libertarians are alarmed. They say several provisions of the pending legislation threaten fundamental American rights and warn that a trend toward increased spying could lead to renewed police-power abuses like those the FBI and CIA committed in the past against suspected “subversives.”

The FBI alone conducted 238 illegal break-ins against “domestic subversive targets” between 1942 and 1968, according to a landmark 1975 U.S. Senate investigation led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho.

“What is a ‘suspect group?”’ asked James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil liberties watchdog group. “Is it one suspected of criminal activity? If so, then it should be investigated and penetrated.”

But if law enforcers target a suspect group because of its political ideology, religious beliefs or its members’ ethnic background, the civil liberties of all Americans could be threatened.

“The lesson of the ‘60s and ‘70s was that we had hundreds of domestic security investigations, none of which produced anything good, because we were going after politics and ethnicity and ideology and not criminal conduct,” Dempsey said.

The Clinton administration, leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress and law enforcement authorities across the United States all say the rising threat of terrorism requires stronger countermeasures. They invariably assure that they will not trample on Americans’ constitutional rights, but there is an inescapable conflict between such police powers and privacy rights.

Two sections of the pending bill in particular disturb civil libertarians. One would permit the government to deport aliens suspected of terrorist ties by revealing evidence against them only to a judge, while keeping it secret from the suspects themselves.

“The most fundamental requisite of due process is that a person should have the right to confront the evidence against them,” protested Gregory Nojeim, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The White House argues that the best evidence against terrorists comes from friendly foreign governments.

“Foreign governments simply will not confide in us if we cannot keep their secrets,” said Adm. William Studeman, acting director of the CIA.

A second provision in the pending bill would make it a federal crime for anyone - citizen or visiting alien - to give money to support any activities, even legal ones, undertaken by a group labeled “terrorist” by the president.

If such terms had been law in the past, they would have criminalized donations to foreign political causes dear to many Americans, civil libertarians say. They cite the Sinn Fein, the political arm of Northern Irish nationalism; the African National Congress, now the governing party of South Africa; and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which now gets official U.S. aid.