On October 23, a Pakistani man was found dead in a “correctional facility” in New Jersey.  He had been picked up on charges of being an illegal immigrant and detained by American authorities who did not inform the Pakistani consulate at the time of his detention.  Another 30 or so Pakistanis are reported to be in detention in the eastern half of the United States.  A Pakistani student, Mohammad Yasin Haider, president of the Pakistan Students Association at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, has been detained on unspecified immigration related charges.  Mr. Haider, a student of electrical engineering, may have been picked up because he had been a neighbour of Hussein al-Attas and Mukkaram Ali, two former students of the University of Oklahoma who are being questioned in connection with the World Trade Centre attacks.  The home of three Pakistanis was raided in Pennsylvania when a neighbour reported having seen one of them “dumping a liquid on the ground behind his house and carrying a canister.”  The canister, it appears, was a dish and the liquid nothing more lethal than soapy water from a clogged sink.

            In times of war, suspicion is quick to poison perception, and reason is held in abeyance while animal responses, dictated by fear, are allowed to hold sway, unhindered.  In times such as these, it is the government’s responsibility to curb hysteria,  advise calm and maintain an atmosphere of normalcy and good sense.  If this is not done, the people are likely to act in ways that everyone will regret later.   

           Unfortunately, though, governments, too, are more prone to fan fears than soothe frayed nerves.  I can still recall the warnings issued again and again by Radio Pakistan, during the 1965 war, about spies that were supposed to have been air-dropped by India deep into Pakistani territory.  The citizens were advised to be on their guard and report strangers and suspicious activities to the authorities at once.  One afternoon I saw an old man, bleeding from the head, stumbling about in my street.  As I approached him to offer help, he shrank away in fear.  It was only after he had finished the glass of water I fetched him that he told me that he had come from his village to see his son but young men in the area had attacked him with sticks, shouting all the while that he was an Indian spy.  It was only when he fainted that they awoke to the horror of what they had done and ran away leaving him lying on the roadside.

          If all kinds of strange deeds are being committed in the United States these days, deeds in which the government as well as the public reinforce each other’s irrationality, it is because times are far from normal.  It appears that the people as well as the authorities have succumbed to the temptation of using a spanner to kill the mosquito biting them on the nose because a spanner is all that is available to them.  If, in the process, the nose suffers somewhat greater damage than would be desirable, it is an awareness that will come only later.

        President George W. Bush made several exhortations in the immediate aftermath of the WTC outrage.  When a number of people who either were or were taken to be Muslims were attacked, he cautioned against treating the followers of a whole religion as the enemy.  That was an eminently sensible admonishment.  Another advice was to the effect that Americans should get back to normal life to show the terrorists that they could not be cowed.  Otherwise the international criminals would think that they had won.  It is becoming obvious that this injunction was meant primarily to get the people to return to work – and to shop, with their credit cards drawn.  That, in the corporate ethic, would mean normalcy.  As for other aspects of life, these need not return to what they had been before September 11.  At least not immediately; nor, it soon became clear, for quite some time.  The Commander-in-Chief, his Defence Secretary and his Attorney General have made it clear that the war on terrorism is not likely to come to an end soon, not even with the total destruction of Al- Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, the Taliban, Afghanistan or other countries who harbour or support terrorism.  As was to be expected, Mr. Bush junior experienced the same heady surge in popularity that Mr. Bush senior had reaped as a consequence of the Gulf War.  People showered enthusiastic praise on him for the determined way in which he and his team had reacted to the crisis, how they had “grown” in the job.

            Mr. Bush and his team interpreted this to mean that they could get away with just about anything and soon they were devising policies that were in glaring contradiction to yet another profound statement that he had made.  The terrorists, he had said, hated the United States because they were against democracy and opposed to the freedoms that democracy brings and which the Americans enjoyed.  The attack on WTC was, therefore, an attack on civil liberties.  It was not long, however, before the imperatives of a democratic order and the sacrosanct principles enshrined in the constitution were being held in abeyance.  The President issued an edict that would take away one of the fundamental guarantees of freedom and, indeed, the very basis of the rule of law.  He decreed that he could order the trial of those accused of terrorism to be tried by military tribunals.  The military prosecutors and judges empowered to determine the fate of defendants would all report to him as Commander-in-Chief.  Cases could be heard in secret. Hearsay, and evidence that civilian courts may deem illegally obtained, would be permissible.  A majority of only two-thirds of the presiding officers would be required to convict, or impose a death sentence.  There would be no right of appeal to any other court.

            It would appear that, like Nawaz Sharif’s anti-terrorism laws in Pakistan, the objective was to gain convictions and have the accused executed, not to determine guilt or innocence.  Not to be outdone, the President’s Attorney General chipped in with directives of his own which would serve to concentrate power in the hands of the executive to the exclusion of other branches of the state.  Thus, the Justice Department intends to eavesdrop on conversations between some prisoners and their lawyers, taking away an important right of the accused.  Ordinarily the courts would throw out any evidence gathered in this fashion and it would be practically impossible to obtain a conviction on this basis.  It appears, however, that in this case the administration is not interested in obtaining convictions.  They are interested in “prevention” rather than “prosecution.”

            By deciding that those accused of terrorism will not be treated according to the norms of civilian and military justice, Mr. Bush has established a procedure that answers only to him, violating the principle of separation of the executive, legislature and judiciary incorporated into the constitution.  Responding to the criticism that is being increasingly voiced, the President and his apologists have said that the President’s decree applies only to people who are not citizens.  This is hardly reassuring since a distinction between citizen and non-citizen in the national legal system means the institutionalisation of discrimination.  This is even more so in this case since the non-citizens to be treated in this manner are mostly Arabs, and is thus open to charges of racial profiling.  In fact, this has been the reaction of some police officers to the Attorney General’s orders about the questioning of ‘Middle Eastern’ people.

            If there are serious questions regarding the violation of democratic principles and norms, there is also considerable doubt about the practical consequences of these decisions.  Firstly, if Osama bin Laden were to be caught and tried under this system, there would be serious doubts about the fairness of the trial.  As one critic has remarked, “no amount of spinning by Mr. Bush’s public relations team could overcome the impression that the verdict had been dictated before the trial began.  Reliance on tribunals would also signal a lack of confidence in the case against the terrorists and in the nation’s democratic institutions.”

            The Bush Administration continues to defend the tribunals on the argument that they are justified by the times.  The country is at war and the rules have been framed to try an enemy.  It points to similar edicts by previous American Presidents during times of war.  But, argue the critics, the Congress alone is authorised to declare war and the Congress has not done so.  In the meantime, the administration continues to hold hundreds of people without revealing their identities, the charges being brought against them or even the reasons for such secrecy.  Reportedly, several of them (around 200, according to one source) are Pakistanis but they are mostly Arabs and almost all are from countries that are publicly praised for having allied themselves with the United States and Europeans in the war against terrorism.

             During the early days of the crisis, there was a great deal of worry that the United States was not doing too well in the propaganda war and that Osama bin Laden’s taped messages, broadcast by Al-Jazeera, were not being effectively countered.  How, it was being debated, could America win the battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslims.  Either the Bush administration has now come to believe that its allies will love it regardless of what it does to their nationals or it has decided that how its actions are viewed is unimportant as long as it gets its way and the governments of these countries continue to support it regardless of the opinion of their peoples.  It is not even clear whether this is understood in the heady atmosphere generated by public support and flag-waving emotionalism.

            The United States, President Bush had said in the immediate aftermath of the WTC attack, has a society founded on the principles of liberty and rights.  These are concepts that apply to all who live in that society.  It would be a pity if those principles were abandoned, even in defense of those rights and liberties.