WHY NOT? LET'S TALK: "Testing, testing, one, two, three ..." (10/15/06)

WHY NOT? LET'S TALK

by Yaro Bihun

"Testing, testing, one, two, three ..."

At times I muse that somewhere in some musty corner of an old KGB archive there is a recording of this standard microphone level test, in English and repeated in Ukrainian. It would be a recording of me as I entered my room in the Hotel Lybid in Kyiv in October 1989. It was my tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging Soviet reality in the electronic presence of whoever was listening and recording me somewhere down the hall or in the building's basement.

Or maybe I was a few years late. This was the "new" Soviet Union, with Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika in full bloom. Still, much of the "old" USSR, I suspect, had not yet made it to the dustbin of history, such as the recording of hotel-room and telephone conversations, checking for forbidden literature at the Moscow international airport (where they held "for further evaluation" many Western-published Ukrainian books and periodicals from the crateful I tried to bring in), the casually dressed young men mingling around the Hotel Lybid parking lot who would break off and follow us as we went about the city, and many other measures the "security organs" felt were necessary to safeguard the Soviet way of life from foreign - and domestic - enemies, including "bourgeois Ukrainian nationalists" like us.

Those Kyiv episodes came to mind again when we learned from leaked classified information that the U.S. president secretly authorized the National Security Agency to monitor our phone calls and electronic mail without any court warrants. I had presumed that our government intensified foreign and domestic surveillance as part of its expanded countermeasures to what it calls the "asymmetrical" threat to our security from terrorism following the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. I never expected, however, that it would be based solely on a decision of the executive branch without any judicial branch involvement.

I understood the necessity of waging war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and the tightening of security at our airports and other entry points, as well as intensifying our vigilance domestically against those who were planning to do our country and its people harm. Early on, however, things were said and done that made me uneasy.

On the day following the September 11, 2001, attack, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held a short press briefing, the main thrust of which - quite out of the blue - was to caution U.S. government employees against revealing classified information and to be on the lookout for those who would and thus "frustrate our efforts to track down and deal with terrorists." If, as he admitted in response to a reporter's question, no release of classified information played a role in the 9/11 attack, why was he underscoring this point?

A possible answer came a year later when it became known that the Defense Department initiated the Total Information Awareness System for collecting, processing and sharing vast quantities of data, including personal information about U.S. citizens. Following that, I would tell my computer-savvy friends - in jest, of course - that the best way to back up their important computer files was to attach them to e-mails that included a few key words the TIA System may be focusing on; the files might be difficult to retrieve later, but they certainly would be secure. The secret NSA program disclosures followed later.

Two months after the attack, the president issued an order that foreigners accused of terrorism would be tried by special military tribunals and that he would be the official determining who was to be considered an accused terrorist. Since then, we have had Guantanamo, indefinite detentions without what a normal American would consider due process, secret arrests, secret prisons for "high-value" terrorist suspects, "renditions," a "program" of "alternative" interrogation techniques by CIA "professionals" who are being forgiven any past transgressions of U.S. and international laws against torture.

During the recent debate in Congress and in the press over the administration's request that it legitimize the use of "alternative" interrogation techniques among other things, Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch suggested in the Washington Post that the president should familiarize himself with two authoritative books that describe their use in the past: Robert Conquest's "The Great Terror" and Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago."

Are there other things our country is doing secretly that we, our Congress and our courts may not know about? I don't know. What's worse, I'm not sure anymore.

Hearing official statements, watching the debates in Congress and observing public reaction to much of what I see and hear suggests that our old vision of what this country stands for and its values are changing, or, more accurately, are being changed by those who, despite the flag pins in their lapels, fail to appreciate what is being lost in their preoccupation with security.

Maybe Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer simply misspoke when he cautioned Americans to be careful about what they do and say in these times, when he asked about a TV comedian's questioning President George W. Bush's characterization of the terrorists who flew the planes into the buildings as "cowards," suggesting, instead, that his description would better fit those who launched cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away.

Maybe the senator from Texas, John Cornyn, also simply misspoke when he stressed during a recent debate on legislation dealing with the treatment of suspected terrorists that they should not be afforded habeus corpus and other "privileges" reserved for U.S. citizens.

And, again, maybe the president's current press secretary, Tony Snow, made a poor choice of words when he suggested that, come Election Day in November, the American people will cast their ballots not on the basis of the latest scandal in Congress but on something that's more important: "safety, security and prosperity."

Personally, I prefer political discourse without warnings about being careful about what we say, even if irreverent; I also find it "self-evident" that habeus corpus, and similar constitutional safeguards, are rights and not privileges of U.S. citizenship; and that all men, regardless of citizenship, "are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Given the choice, I hope to continue casting my ballot for "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" rather than for "safety, security and prosperity."

Yaro Bihun's e-mail address is yarob@aol.com.

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