Civil Liberties: RIP?

April 2006

This month the US government’s sentencing case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged “twentieth hijacker” in the 9/11 disaster, was rocked by revelations of gross prosecutorial abuse. A government lawyer working with the prosecution gave witnesses transcripts of other witnesses’ testimony and coached them on what they needed to say and what they should not say. (Since Moussaoui has already been judged guilty­ thus never to be free­ the government’s effort to script the testimony against him is now solely in pursuit of his execution.) Upon learning of the misconduct, the judge in the case called it the worst example of witness tampering she had ever seen. She must not handle many sex cases; horrific violations of due process are routine when the allegations are of sexual misconduct.

Throughout the day-care and satanic abuse witch hunts of the 1980s and 90s, police and prosecutors would regularly tell friends and neighbors the details of alleged abuses in efforts to get more children to make accusations. Uncooperative parents were implicitly­ and sometimes explicitly­ threatened with charges should their children not recite the prosecutors’ script. Children were coached for days until they “remembered” the story they were to tell in court; if they lost their place while testifying, prosecutors were allowed to feed them the “correct” line.

The recent hysteria over allegedly wayward priests has seen egregious examples of trials conducted in the press, credible evidence entirely lacking. Accusation was equated with guilt, and legal proceedings functioned as show trials.

And the government engages in ongoing internet stings whereby men are lured into meetings with police playing the cyber-role of a sexually curious teen. Through such entrapment schemes, decades in prison await those who have not even touched anyone and whose only “victims” are non-existent adolescents concocted by imaginative government agents.

Many mainstream media outlets have professed shock at the government’s flagrant misconduct in the Moussaoui case, as they have over the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay and the not-so secret overseas torture gulags operated by the US. Such abuses­ wherein people are held without charges, afforded no chance to clear their names, and subjected to abusive torment­ are rightly denounced as inhumane and counterproductive to maintaining a free and ordered society.

But anyone familiar with prosecutorial excess in sex cases knows that such violations of basic justice do not all occur offshore, nor only to non-citizens. Right now, many states incarcerate those who are judged to possess a personality “defect” that would make them “likely” to commit a sex crime (which in most jurisdictions includes consensual sex with adolescents, jerking off in the woods or a tea room, and prostitution). Thus, a person can be locked up not for his actions, but for his allegedly naughty thoughts (as divined by government experts). Such prisoners are euphemistically called “patients” and have little recourse to legal remedy since they are being “treated,” not punished.

The civil liberties of accused terrorists (…or child molesters …or Communists) are sometimes difficult to defend, since many believe such “bad” people have it coming. But civil liberties and due process guarantees exist to protect us all from a government out of control, able to smear critics with unfounded accusations and to silence dissent with “preventative detention.” Let us hope this administration’s crass use of police-state tactics jars more Americans to realize that without civil liberties, none of us can ever be truly free.

Pasted from <http://guidemag.com/magcontent/invokemagcontent.cfm?ID=FE55AF28-5FCF-4CC6-AE61D753214A5542>