Wartime Secrecy Presents Hazards to U.S. Freedom

[Anonymous]

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpcoc162417210oct16.column

Wartime Secrecy Presents Hazards to U.S. Freedom

Marie Cocco

October 16, 2001

ABDALLAH YASSINE says he is going home.

Nothing can dissuade him. Not the aid and comfort he's received from his suburban neighbors, who have provided food for his family and even arranged for a local church to pay a month's mortgage. Not pressure from his in-laws, who remind him that he has much in the United States - five children on the honor roll, a brand-new home, a car - and that he would have nothing back in Lebanon. Not even seeing the possibility that the immigration violation for which he was picked up a month ago, on the Saturday after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, might be resolved without further distress.

"I told him he's making an irrational decision," said Samir Shaban, Yassine's brother-in-law. "He said, 'You didn't spend 18 days in jail for doing nothing.'"

Yassine showed up for his shift with a security company at Dulles Airport on the weekend after the attacks. He was shackled, led from the terminal and brought home to get his papers - then carted off to jail. His family was told he'd be released in an hour. But, for about two weeks, Yassine was held on a violation that involved working a second job for an employer - the security company - that was not listed as the employer on his guest-worker visa.

He was kept in shackles and moved to three different jails. He was first denied bond, but later - after his lawyer, Denyse Sabagh, was quoted describing the way immigrants were being held virtually incommunicado on minor violations - he was freed on $2,500 bond. Yassine is one of some 700 people who have been rounded up since the terror attacks. The Justice Department does not claim these hundreds have any connection at all to the crimes. In fact, administration officials have suggested those with clear links may number only about a dozen. There are another 190 people at large, Attorney General John Ashcroft has said, who are being sought because they may have aided the terrorists.

And so, by the administration's own count, hundreds of people are now in jail who the authorities do not believe can be of help in this terrible matter. Some - 148 at last count - are immigrants held on violations such as Yassine's.

That leaves more than 500 about whom we are told absolutely nothing. Not their names, nor where they are being held. We are not told whether their offenses amount to having the misfortune of a Mideastern name and a broken tail-light. Or whether local authorities, who conducted many of the sweeps, have already released some who are guilty of little more than looking like an Arab. Or how many are material witnesses.

"We haven't released that," said Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson.

It is the administration's all-purpose answer. Wartime powers to legitimately restrict the press from getting information that could jeopardize troops or law-enforcement operations are stretched to new proportions. The public is told nothing about hundreds in jail. Television isn't supposed to broadcast the videotaped propaganda of Osama bin Laden and his henchmen. We were supposed to submit to the idea that the people's elected representatives weren't to be briefed on the war or the threats at home. So strained was this over-reach that it was pulled back in a day.

Secrecy in war is most necessary, and most dangerous. Efforts to control information slip easily into cover-ups. "Trust us" soon becomes a veil that erodes public trust.

We are unanimous in saying this war against terrorism is waged to protect freedom. Ashcroft himself, commenting on the targeting of media outlets in the anthrax attacks, turned a nice phrase when he described this latest line of attack: "If people hate freedom, they ought to hate information that allows free people to make good decisions," he said on the CBS program "Face the Nation."

Well put. We wait, now, for this advice to be well followed. 

Copyright ) 2001, Newsday, Inc.