Fears For Individual Liberty

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32214, 5 February 1970, Page 16

Fears For Individual Liberty

/By TOM WICKER. of the “New York Times,’’ through N.Z.P.A.) WASHINGTON, Feb. 2. In the few days since Congress, roasting from the heat of the anticrime wave, returned from its mid-winter recess, it has raised the greatest threat in manyyears to American liberty.

So it has to be asked: where is the legal profession in the United States, w’hile frightened politicians undermine the Constitution and the principles upon which rests the great calling of the law?

Not since corrosive no-; tions of “national security”; came to prevail in the 19505,' bearing with them loyalty oaths, witch-hunts, and Joe McCarthy, has there been: anything like the hysterical spree in which Democrats and Republicans alike, with approving nods from the Nixon Administration, have tried to be (in Senator Sam Ervin's phrase). . So zealous in their efforts to enforce the law that they would emulate the example set by Samson in his blindness and destroy the pillars upon which the temple of justice itself rests.” Anti-crime Bill First, the Senate, in spite of amendments supported in vain by men so disparate as Senators Ervin, of North Carolina. Philip Hart of Michigan. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Charles

Goodell of New York, approved with only one dissenting vote an omnibus anticrime bill that limits the Fourth Amendment, erodes the Fifth, threatens the Eighth and in numerous other ways combats crime by assaulting constitutional rights.

Next, the Senate —with Senator Thomas Dodd, of Connecticut, waving around what he said was $3OOO worth of marijuana, the possession of which could have put him away for years if he had not had the immunity of the Senate floor—passed a drug control bill that granted police the right to burst into any premises without warning if a judge could be persuaded that such a warning would result in the destruction of evidence.

This is a flagrant legislature example of the philosophy that the end justifies the means catching criminal validates any invasion of the rights supposedly guaranteed to all people. Political Dissidents How long will it be, as a result, before agents come bursting without warning into! the houses of political dissidents. contending under this law that any other procedure! would have resulted in the destruction of pamphlets, doc-; uments and the like needed by society to convict? But perhaps as one respected Senator said casually to a reporter, “Oh, the House will fix it all up." This is a thin reed to lean upon—why should the House be more courageous than the Senate? One day after the drug bill was passed, a House sub-com-

mittee on District of Columbia matters approved a proposal that would permit Washington judges to gaol “dangerous” criminal suspects for up to 60 days before trial. This measure, which suspends the presumption of innocence, W’as patterned on the Nixon Administration’s “preventive detention” bill and was limited to the voteless helpless District of Columbia only because the broader measure is stalled in the House and Senate judiciary committees. Defence Employees At the same time, as if to show the temper in which it will receive these travesties of justice, the House whipped through by 274 to 65 a measure that overruled the Supreme Court and resurrected the discredited "programme of barring so-called “subversives” from employment in defence plants. As a result, anyone who ever picketed a napalm plant has about as much chance of getting a defence job as of getting one with the Subversive Activities Control Board —and whether he picketed or not, he can be dismissed from a defence job without even ! the right of confronting his ' accuser or knowing who he is , —if a Federal official decides that disclosure of the accuser's identity would be “substantially harmful” to the national security. When the redoubtable Mr Bob Eckhart, of Texas, tried to have the question of disclosure of an accuser’s identity determined at least by a Federal judge rather than by a bureaucrat, the House voted him down by the thun-

dering majority of 27 to 13, out of 435 vitally-concerned members. Who cares about a few subversives, any more than about a few crooks? Who cares, to take the question beyond Congress, if a Federal judge rules that a prospective defence witness has nothing to say that a jury may hear, even before that witness can testify? Why should agitators like the Chicago seven have the right to call such witnesses as a former Attorney-General, if he might say something useful to their defence? Is the legal establishment

of America, in particular, going to watch all this silently, relying on the Supreme Court to rectify it years from now, if ever, and only after untold damage to individuals at the hands of the State, after further demonstration of this kind of “justice” to young people, many of whom already believe American ideals are a fraud?

Are they a fraud? Where are the law school faculties to tell us no? Where are the great legal firms? The judges? The heirs of Darrow and Bradies? The silence from the bar is deafening.