The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2006
(Xinhua)Updated: 2007-03-08 10:09
III. On Civil and Political Rights
In recent years, American citizens have suffered increasing civil rights infringements.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the US government has put average Americans under intense surveillance as part of terrorism investigations. According to a survey released in December 2006, two-thirds of Americans believe that the FBI and other federal agencies are intruding on their privacy rights. (The Washington Post, Dec. 13, 2006) A report from the US Justice Department, dated April 28, 2006, disclosed that its use of electronic surveillance and search warrants in national security investigations jumped 15 percent in 2005. According to the report, the FBI issued 9,254 national security letters in 2005, covering 3,501 US citizens and legal foreign residents. The Justice Department said the data did not include what probably were thousands of additional letters issued to obtain more limited information about some individuals or letters that were issued about targets who were in the US illegally. (The Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2006) Reports show a Pentagon research team monitors more than 5,000 jihadist web sites, focusing daily on the25 to 100 most hostile and active. (MSNBC News Service, May 4, 2006) An internal memo of the FBI shows that the agency has spent resources gathering information on antiwar and environmental protesters and on activists who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless. In the United States, the government has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. According to USA TODAY, more employers feel they have justifiable reason to pry, track workers' whereabouts through Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite, implant employees with microchips with their knowledge and hire private investigators to check up on what employees are really doing at work. According to a study by the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute, 76 percent of companies monitor employees' website connections, 65 percent block access to specific sites, and 36 percent track the content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard. More than half of employers retain and review e-mail messages. (USA TODAY, Nov. 7, 2006)
As The Associated Press reported on Jan. 4, 2007, a signing statement attached to postal legislation by US administration may have opened the way for the government to open mail without a warrant. An internal review of the US State Department has found that US officials screened the public statements and writings of private citizens for criticism of the administration before deciding whether to select them for foreign speaking projects. The vetting practice, the Washington Post said, appears to have been part of the administration's pattern of controlling information, muffling dissenting views. (The Washington Post, Nov. 2, 2006) On May 23, 2006, Electronic Frontier Foundation, a US-based organization committed to protecting citizens' privacy, accused the FBI for undercutting the intent of the privacy law, saying the agency has built a database with more than 659 million records culled from more than 50 FBI and other government agency sources. (http://www.eff.org/press/ Aug. 30, 2006)
The United States touts itself as the "beacon of democracy", but the US mode of democracy is in essence one in which money talks.
In 2004, candidates for the House of Representatives who raised less than one million US dollars had almost no chance of winning, the USA TODAY quoted a spokesman for the Center for Responsive Politics as saying in a report on Oct. 29, 2006. The average successful Senate campaign cost 7 million dollars, it said. In 2006, all state campaigns in the United States were predicted to cost about 2.4 billion dollars. In California, the oil and tobacco industries were the year's two biggest spenders with a total of 161.6 million dollars, and they became the two biggest winners. (The Los Angeles Times, Nov. 9, 2006) In the House race in Pennsylvania, the National Republican Congressional Committee spent 3.9 million dollars, mostly in ads against Democratic candidate Lois Murphy, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent 3 million dollars against Republican candidate Jim Gerlach. (The Baltimore Sun, Nov. 6, 2006) Seventy-four percent of respondents to a new Opinion Research poll say the US Congress is generally out of touch with average Americans, as CNN reported on Oct. 18, 2006, and 79 percent of the surveyed say they feel big business does have too much influence over the administration's decisions.
Corruption is a serious problem in US politics. More than 1,000 government employees, including hundreds of police officers, have been convicted in FBI graft cases in the past two years. Former high-powered lobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to conspiracy, fraud and tax evasion charges, revealing the biggest scandal of trading money for power to hit Washington in decades. (CNN, Jan. 3, 2006) Meanwhile, four Republicans have resigned from the House under clouds in the year. A handful of other members of the Congress are under investigation. (USA TODAY, Dec. 12, 2006) Over the past five and a half years, US Republican and Democratic lawmakers accepted nearly 50 million US dollars in trips, often to resorts and exclusive locales, as The Washington Post reported on June 6, 2006. From January 2000 through June 2005,House and Senate members and their aides were away from Washington for more than 81,000 days - a combined 222 years - on at least 23,000 trips. US lawmakers accepted thousands of costly jaunts to some of the world's choicest destinations: at least 200 to Paris, 150 to Hawaii and 140 to Italy, it said. Twenty-five individual lawmakers accepted more than 120,000 US dollars worth of travel during the period and private trip sponsors spent the most money on about two dozen congressional offices.(Seattle Times, June 6, 2006)
In the United States scandals of government manipulating
the media give the lie to press freedom in the country. To serve its political
purposes, the US government often produces fake news stories and passes them off
as normal news to domestic and overseas audiences. The US State Department,
among 20 federal agencies, was found to have produced and distributed such
items. (The Independent, May 29, 2006) In recent years, some journalists were
harassed or detained by US law enforcement agencies for declining to reveal
their sources. In 2005, a Rhode Island TV reporter spent four months confined at
home by a judge for refusing to expose the source. In San Francisco, a federal
prosecutor tried to force two San Francisco Chronicle reporters to reveal
sources of secret grand jury testimony used in stories. (USA TODAY, June 22,
2006) Two journalists were sentenced to 18 months in prison for contempt of
court in September 2006 and another Los Angeles freelancer was sent to prison
for a year on contempt charge after refusing to turn over to a grand jury his
private video clips. (SFGate.com August 1, 2006)
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