E-Mail This Article to a Friend Unpatriotic A new report by the ACLU of Massachusetts shows that oppression begins at home

ESSAM MOHAMMED Almohandis will never forget the abuse he suffered at the hands of prison guards. "The treatment was very hard," he recalls. "They made me take all my clothes off, except my underwear, and kept me in a cell that way for eight hours. It was very cold. While I was there, some of the guards harassed me by saying things like, ‘Why don’t you call on Mohammed to help you?’" Finally, after 20 days, he was released — and the charges against him were dropped when the "incendiary devices" he’d been carrying turned out to be noisemakers for a party.

The twist is that Almohandis’s ordeal took place not at Saddam Hussein’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — now "under new management," as Jon Stewart has mordantly observed — but at the Plymouth County jail, where the 33-year-old biomedical engineer from Saudi Arabia was taken after he landed at Logan Airport on January 3 of this year. Oppression, it seems, begins at home — especially for the foreign-born, and especially for those with Arab- and Muslim-sounding names.

Almohandis’s story is one of many contained in a report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, Mass Impact: The Domestic War Against Terrorism in Massachusetts — Are We on the Right Track? The report, an advance copy of which was obtained by the Phoenix, is scheduled for release at a news conference on Thursday, May 13. Mass Impact is a comprehensive overview of the changing climate for civil liberties following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent passage of the USA Patriot Act.

"The constitutional abuses are not as blatant here as in certain other states," the report finds. "But the well-being of our Commonwealth’s residents and institutions is being harmed by measures that violate privacy and chill dissent, by ethnic and religious profiling, and by a zero tolerance enforcement of immigration laws."

The ACLU’s findings are buttressed by a number of personal stories such as Almohandis’s. Take, for example, Louie Joliat and Colin Downs-Dudley, students at Lexington High School who posted notice of an anti-war protest they were organizing, listing themselves as the contacts, on the Web site of the National Youth Student Peace Coalition — generating an inquiry to the school by Lexington police.

"I was shocked and surprised that they would investigate high-school kids exercising their First Amendment right to free speech," Joliat said. "To even mention terrorism when we were just protesting going to war was ridiculous." And the fact that the local police would follow up on Joliat and Downs-Dudley’s Web-site posting reeks of Big Brother.

Or consider Ann Withorn, a writer and teacher at UMass Boston who wrote an essay in April 2002 for the magazine Sojourner: The Women’s Forum about her own youthful — and unconsummated — dalliance with terrorism 30 years earlier. Several months after her essay was published, she received a knock on the door from two state troopers, who told her they were acting on anonymous complaints of "suspicious activity." Withorn told the ACLU that despite the troopers’ polite behavior, the experience left her shaken. "My visit from the troopers brought back far more nightmares than my own article could ever generate," she says. "It should make us all afraid."

Nor are governmental actions the only ones mentioned in the report. An investigative series by the Boston Herald into the Islamic Society of Boston is cited as an example of "guilt by association" because the paper reported that some of the society’s founders — no longer part of the organization — may have had ties to radical Islamists.

Carol Rose, executive director of the ACLU of Massachusetts and a co-author of Mass Impact, says the report coincides with a push by the ACLU to urge both the City of Boston and the state legislature to pass resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. "We really feel that there is momentum here in Massachusetts for supporting the Bill of Rights," she says, noting that large cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle have all passed anti–Patriot Act resolutions.

The Boston City Council actually considered such a resolution last year, but it was ruled out of order by council president Michael Flaherty, who said it violated a provision against taking up business not directly related to the governance of the city. Rose says she hopes Flaherty will prove more amenable the second time around, adding, "I think he’s a reasonable person who might be willing to take up the issue in the future."

Flaherty could not be reached for comment. But his policy director, Joe O’Keefe, says that though Flaherty would continue to rule out of order a blanket condemnation of the Patriot Act, he might be willing to consider a resolution opposing certain provisions that have a direct impact on city government — such as the notorious Section 215, which requires municipal libraries to comply with secret orders to hand over patrons’ records, or rules pertaining to the level of cooperation city police may give to federal investigators.

If there is an overarching theme to Mass Impact, it is that civil liberties in Massachusetts — and nationwide — are more threatened than the average citizen realizes. By way of warning, it offers the words of the late Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, who wrote: "As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness."

To obtain a copy of Mass Impact, visit the ACLU of Massachusetts Web site at www.aclu-mass.org. Contact Boston City Council president Michael Flaherty and urge him to allow consideration of a resolution opposing the Patriot Act by calling (617) 635-4205 or by sending an e-mail to Michael.F.Flaherty@ci.boston.ma.us

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