September 25, 2003: ACLU-TN Statement Criticizes AG Ashcroft's Closed-to-the-Public Visit to Nashville; Statement by ACLU-TN Director

For Immediate Release
Thursday, 25 September 2003

For more information,
615-320-7142

ACLU of Tennessee Criticizes Attorney General Ashcroft's
Closed-to-the-Public Road Show as it Comes to Nashville

Statement by Hedy Weinberg, Executive Director, ACLU-TN

Nashville - Today in Nashville, the Attorney General of the United States is giving yet another speech to yet another closed audience of law enforcement officials. Outside the hotel, Nashvillians will gather in opposition to the government's anti-civil liberties initiatives. Like many in this Administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft has chosen to avoid speaking to the American people. Instead he prefers to speak only to hand-picked audiences, thus creating the illusion of agreement and consensus.

But across this country Americans are learning about the PATRIOT Act and concluding that it goes too far. Congress is coming to the same conclusion. But Mr. Ashcroft does not seem to care what we, the people, think. Instead he is on a taxpayer financed, closed-to-the-public "public relations" road show to defend a flawed product.

Mr. Ashcroft does not seem interested in the public’s concern about the war on terrorism and limits his speaking engagements to a constituency that will be inclined to support him. The Justice Department must be worried about the public backlash but is unwilling to subject its policies to open public debate, a quality that has pervaded this entire Administration.

We welcome the opportunity to send an open and public message to the Attorney General that the American people are concerned about their civil liberties and civil rights in the face of expanding government power. We, the people, are being shut out while Ashcroft attempts to defend his attacks on liberty and the checks and balances that are so essential to our constitutional system.

The PATRIOT Act has come under increasing criticism, not only from the ACLU, but from Congress as well. Most recently, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 309 to 118 to repeal one of the more egregious parts of the USA Patriot Act -- the "sneak and peek" provision which allows law enforcement to search a home without telling the targeted individual.

On July 30, the ACLU filed a lawsuit challenging Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act, a provision that vastly expands the power of FBI agents to secretly obtain records and personal belongings of innocent people in the United States, including citizens and permanent residents. Since then, Attorney General Ashcroft has launched a multi-city public relations road show promoting the controversial USA PATRIOT Act.

One of our primary concerns with the tour is that it appears to be designed to prop up other politically ailing legislative initiatives, including the expansive sequel to the PATRIOT Act, known as PATRIOT 2. Significantly, lawmakers and advocacy groups from across the political spectrum, including conservative mainstays like the American Conservative Union and Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, oppose this legislation.

Americans are responding to the ever-growing list of examples of civil liberties abuses in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, including:

• The June DOJ Inspector General report detailing widespread and systematic abuses of the hundreds of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men detained in the weeks after 9/11. The report showed that, even though the men were found to have no connection whatsoever to the attacks on September 11, they were held for extreme amounts of time - in some cases for several months - under a quasi-official "no-bond, no-lawyers" policy. Although the Justice Department ’s response has been a pat "we did nothing illegal," it’s clear that most of the detainees were held on pretextual immigration violations such as an expired visa or incomplete paperwork.
• The proposed neighbor-spying-on-neighbor program called Operation TIPS, which would have recruited Americans whose jobs - such as cable repair persons and postal workers - grant them easy access to our homes as government informers, charged with reporting "suspicious activity" to a dedicated tips hotline.
• The plan to base the number of investigations in any given FBI jurisdiction on demographic criteria, including the number of mosques in the area.
• The initiative at the DOJ to force local and state police to enforce immigration laws, a plan opposed not only by immigrants’ advocates but also by law enforcement officials themselves.

Across America, over 160 communities, including three states, across the country have passed resolutions against provisions of the PATRIOT Act and other aspects of the Attorney General's domestic "war on terrorism" that undermine civil liberties without making the public more safe. Resolution movements are cropping up everywhere from East Coast to West and from the Heartland to the South. In Tennessee, coalitions are now forming across the state to promote these resolutions.

Mr. Ashcroft, Americans want to be safe, but they also want - and deserve - to be free.

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