Civil Rights Trampled in Terror Cases

Ruben Navarrette Jr.

DALLAS -- A lot of Muslim-Americans think their civil rights should be an issue in the presidential campaign. And they're right.

Some of them are telling reporters that they're "disgusted" and frightened by President Bush and some of the government's actions taken since Sept. 11, 2001.

These are, in many cases, U.S. citizens who have the right to vote and who live in battleground states such as Ohio, Michigan and Florida. The nation's Muslim population is estimated at anywhere between 1 million and 6 million.

And yet, because much of this population is foreign-born, it's hard to say how many actual voters we're talking about. Here's the short answer: Enough so that a president who won the White House by 537 votes in 2000 shouldn't be ignoring them.

And through organizations such as the American Muslim Task Force on Elections, an umbrella group that brings together nine U.S. Muslim groups, Muslim-Americans are determined not to be ignored.

Here's their beef: They say it was freedom that brought them and their ancestors to the United States in the first place, and that this commodity has been in short supply since the Sept. 11 attacks. They say that they've been unfairly harassed, profiled and singled out for excessive scrutiny by federal law enforcement agencies. They point to instances where innocent Muslim-Americans have been apprehended and detained, only to be released without so much as an apology. And for most of this, they blame the Patriot Act, the administration's use of secret and often unreliable evidence in antiterrorism investigations, and what they call "malicious prosecutions" by the Justice Department.

I don't expect much of this to resonate with those of you who insist that some freedoms must be sacrificed to fight terrorism -- and then invariably offer up someone else's freedoms to be sacrificed. But there are many Muslim-Americans who are steaming mad at how they, their families and their fellow Muslims have been treated as a result of the war on terrorism.

And it only makes them madder that the criminal justice system has a habit of fumbling terrorism cases. Of the more than 310 people who have been charged by the Justice Department in terrorism-related cases since Sept. 11, 2001, only 179 have been convicted.

At least one conviction has come unraveled. In Detroit, a federal judge recently threw out the June 2003 convictions of two Moroccan immigrants who the government had insisted were members of a terrorist sleeper cell. Federal prosecutors themselves, in a 60-page filing, asked the judge to dismiss the convictions after a nine-month investigation concluded that the original prosecutors not only withheld evidence to which the defendant was entitled, but went so far as to have "created a record filled with misleading inferences that such material did not exist."

In the old days, they called that railroading someone. And it is utterly deplorable and totally un-American.

It is no wonder that American Muslims think that protecting civil rights should be a central issue for anyone seeking the presidency. Now if only they could find a candidate worthy of their support.

On this issue, I'm afraid that President Bush is a lost cause. His black-and-white view of the war on terror has given him a blind spot when it comes to innocent bystanders who get caught up in the antiterrorism net. About the best Bush can do in terms of expressing empathy for those who have suffered is remind audiences -- as he did during a gathering of minority journalists thus summer -- that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, he visited a mosque to condemn hate crimes.

John Kerry isn't much better. Afraid of being painted as soft on terrorism, the former prosecutor rarely talks about detainees, false prosecutions or anything even vaguely connected to the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans. Kerry has said that he has concerns about the Patriot Act -- yet he voted for it.

Come to think of it, civil rights is a good issue. In fact, it is as good as they come. We're talking about wrongful imprisonment, the depriving of liberty and the debasing of some of our country's most sacred principles. Some of those abuses were spelled out last year by the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, who criticized the treatment of terrorism detainees at federal holding centers in the Northeast.

It is frightening that this happened on Bush's watch, and it is shameful that Kerry is turning away from it.

And they call this leadership.

Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is rnavarrette@dallasnews.com.