The USA Patriot Act expands on these policies against immigrants and dissenters:

• Immigrants now can be detained for up to seven days without being charged with a crime, and deported based on mere suspicion that they have terrorist ties.
• Immigrants can be held in prison indefinitely without a trial under certain circumstances, for example, if the government is trying to deport them and their country of origin refuses to take them back.
• The government can declare certain organizations, foreign or domestic, to be terrorist, and then any material aid to such organizations, even if it supports only legal, charitable activities, constitutes a criminal felony and entails a stiff prison sentence.
• The government has "sneak-and-peek" rights when it claims to be investigating terrorism – they can go into a person's house or office based on a secret warrant without telling the person. This creates a danger of planted evidence and frame-ups. Sneak-and-peek searches have been legal since 1978, but now secret searches can be used for criminal prosecutions.
• The government can use "roving wiretaps," which means they can get authorization to listen in to any phone they assert a person they are investigating "might" use, even if that entails listening in on many other people's conversations.
• The government has greatly expanded ability to spy on your email and to do surveillance of the internet websites you visit.
• Colleges and universities are now required to provide detailed information to government security agencies on all non-citizen students, including those studying on student visas and those who are permanently residing in the US.

• If the government finds that the judge of the local jurisdiction where a person it is investigating in relation to terrorism lives will not give them a warrant, it can search the whole country for a judge easygoing enough to give the warrant.
• The CIA is now authorized to spy on people within the US, and there will be much more sharing of information among the CIA, FBI, INS, National Security Agency, grand juries, and local police.

The USA Patriot law may not be the last one passed as part of the "war against terrorism." There are calls for a national identity card and even more crackdowns on the foreign-born. There is a bill in Congress to ban all students from seven countries the US claims sponsor terrorism. Yet, none of the terrorists who committed the crime of 9-11 was from any of these countries.

In Illinois, State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jim Ryan is promoting his own "Illinois Comprehensive Anti-Terrorism Bill" which in some ways goes even further than the federal legislation. For example, under Ryan's bill, even actions that "endanger property" will be classified as terrorism as long as their intention is to pressure the government or sway public opinion. These would be considered "Class X Felonies" and carry mandatory sentences of 20 years to life.

There is a huge risk that such laws would be used to try to break up protest movements by labor unions, anti-globalization forces, civil rights groups, and environmental organizations.

Nobody disagrees that certain things, such as improved airport security, need to be done to prevent terrorism. However, the establishment press is not asking if the draconian legislation might be aimed at suppressing dissent and protest movements against government policy rather than preventing terrorism.

Prior to 9-11, there was a mounting movement against corporate globalization and sweatshop exploitation; a real, if cautious, turn to the left by the labor movement; and strong protest movements on topics ranging from immigrants' rights to police brutality. In the wake of 9-11, all of these movements have been silenced. But the social conditions that produced them have not disappeared; they will arise again. Now the government is using the shock and fear of the American people to give itself the power to crush these legitimate protests.

How has the American press responded? A number of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, have editorialized that the administration is going too far. But in general, press reaction to this assault on civil liberties has been inadequate, thanks to insufficient critical analysis and ignorance of history.

In reporting the possible use of military tribunals to try foreign terrorists, few media outlets looked in depth at the underlying assumption of this move by the government.

The hanging of Major Andre during the Revolutionary War and the execution after World War II of Japanese General Tomoyuki Yamashita, both as the outcome of military tribunals, were cited as precedents in some of the press stories, without mention that both acts were considered travesties of justice by many people at the time and even today.

For the Chicago Tribune to cite the Yamashita case as a precedent without mentioning its controversial nature is a disservice to the Chicago public. The Sun Times sank even lower, its editorial simply validating the government's idea that people we don't like don't deserve due process.

Statements by Attorney General John Ashcroft and Vice President Dick Cheney clearly show that they see due process as an advantage for guilty people and not what it is supposed to be – a fundamental right and a mechanism to protect the innocent from false accusation and wrongful conviction. They think there should be two sets of rules: one for citizens like Timothy McVeigh and another for people who are not US citizens.