The Witch Hunt

(taken without permission from nytimes.com)

December 3, 2001

By BOB HERBERT

Twenty years ago The New York Times ran a story out of Buenos Aires that mentioned a woman who was "small and wiry and full of hate for the Argentine government."

The woman told how men had broken into her house five years earlier and taken her adult son away. Three months later the men visited her family's newsstand and took away her daughter.

There was a lot of news in those days about "the disappeared" in Argentina, the thousands of men and women abducted by state security forces who spent years hunting and killing suspected terrorists in the aftermath of a military coup in 1976.

The Washington Post, in an article in 1982, said: "After the military takeover, armed forces officials admit privately, the operation slipped completely out of control. Human rights groups charge that not only terrorists, but also thousands of other persons suspected of supporting them, or simply suspected of knowing them, were picked up - as were families and bystanders - and brutally disposed of."

A friend of mine who spent some time in South America in the 1990's and who works at The Times now said, "In Argentina, friends told me how people would disappear and never come home, and their families never knew what happened to them. And - like here now - the press had no list of names, charges, etc. And I actually thought at that time of how lucky I was to live in a country where that would never happen."

The United States is not brutally disposing of suspected terrorists and people suspected of knowing them. But it is on an incredible witch hunt, fueled, as witch hunts always are, by incredible fear. The public is predisposed to give the government a free hand in its search for terrorists. Just do what you have to do.

But a criminal-justice club wielded without restraint is all but guaranteed to spread its own form of terror, bludgeoning the innocent right along with the guilty.

At the direction of the president and the attorney general, more than 1,200 people have been rounded up as part of the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks. But only a tiny number of those arrested are suspected of having even the remotest connection to terror activities. The dragnet has mostly yielded traffic violators, petty criminals, people who have done unsavory things with credit cards and people guilty of nothing at all.

In hundreds of cases the authorities have withheld from the public the names of those detained for allegedly violating immigration regulations. We don't know if they're guilty or not. We don't even know precisely what they're charged with. What we do know is that this kind of secrecy can lead to the worst kinds of abuses. It's a recipe for tragedy.

And then there are President Bush's military tribunals, proceedings that - incredibly - could impose a sentence of death by a vote of just two-thirds, possibly in secret, and with the accused having no effective right to appeal either the verdict or the sentence.

Can I get a vote of 6 to 3? Done! You're guilty. Take him out and kill him.

Can that possibly be the American way?

If you don't want to drag Osama bin Laden to the U.S. for a circus of a trial, fine. Shoot him in his cave. Bomb him. Whatever. He's a war criminal on the loose and a genuine threat to kill thousands more at any time.

But if you're the United States of America, and you're going to start arresting people and bringing them to trial, you have to give them fair trials. And before you start executing people, you have to try to make sure you're separating the guilty from the innocent. This is not a principle that evaporates because the populace is angry and frightened.

The rounding up of Japanese immigrants in the early 1940's was not the answer to the mortal threat of World War II. And the indiscriminate seizure and prosecution of Middle Eastern people in the U.S. and overseas will not now make us safe from terrorism.

We have a choice. We can fight and win a just war against terrorism, and emerge with the greatness of the United States intact. Or, we can win while running roughshod over the principles of fairness and due process that we claim to cherish, thus shaming ourselves in the eyes of the world and - eventually, when the smoke of fear and anger finally clears - in our own eyes as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/opinion/03HERB.html?ex=1008390065&ei=1&en=a89fa2f0bb74300d