Although he supports the US-led coalition against terror, Kennedy Library CEO John Shattuck said the Bush administration might be overlooking human and civil rights in its campaign to root out terrorism both domestically and abroad.
"Sept. 11 is clearly a huge wake-up call of what was happening in the '90s," said Shattuck in his discussion, "Human Rights and Civil Rights At Home & Abroad After 9/11."
Shattuck, a former US ambassador to the Czech Republic, said the public has not always supported human rights missions, but the post-Sept. 11 diplomacy would bring such abuses back into the public eye and that Americans would become more concerned with human rights crises such as those in Chechnya and East Timor. "I'm optimistic about the future of human rights," he said.
While the public was previously characterized by a "lack of real support for the missions," Shattuck said that war would bring the issues into the public consciousness, creating an "opportunity for the human rights agenda to be integrated into defense." But, he added, promoting human rights would create short-term costs in the name of coalition building and crime fighting.
"We are blind-siding ourselves in many of these places," he said. The US is cooperating with Pakistan and Russia - two nations guilty of human rights violations, according to Shattuck. He warned that double standards in US foreign policy and inconsistent enforcement of these policies would give some nations a "complete pass" on their actions.
Shattuck said the current conflict is the result of heightening tensions that were left unchecked during the 1990s. While communication and globalization spread across certain regions, he said, other areas were left behind and enjoyed few advantages from global integration.
In his government and non-government posts, Shattuck was exposed to the international "trajectory of terrorism." He was twice forced to close his embassy due to credible threats of terrorist acts.
Although he said he was "shocked and outraged" by the Sept. 11 attacks, Shattuck said the US had knowledge of extremist groups' dissatisfaction with the US, and of their willingness to act. According to Shattuck, in recent years the US has encountered "plenty of evidence that something was underway."
Shattuck was joined by Juliette Kayyem, executive director of the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, as part of a series of Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) panels on the subject of terrorism. The 15 audience members asked questions and interacted directly with the speakers, a hallmark of IGL events.
Kayyem said the current law enforcement trends, such as racial profiling, are "like nothing we've ever seen before" in the area of civil rights. Kayyem is a regular consultant on terrorism for the US and foreign countries, and has served as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice.
Freshman Daniel Mandell asked the speakers to comment on the tension between civil liberties and national security. "I have been greatly concerned over the conflicts and limitations being imposed on civil liberties," he said.
Kayyem cited the detention of more than 1,000 people as an ethical blunder on the part of the administration, and called the questioning of 5,000 people by intelligence agencies a "joke." She was specifically concerned with the acceptance of racial profiling against Arabs and Muslims within the United States.
Mandell, who is helping to organize an American Civil Liberties Union chapter at Tufts, said it was valuable to hear the presenters give their "experienced opinion about what is really going on."
According to Kayyem, "antagonizing a community isn't going to get that community to help you." A more effective strategy, she said, would be to cooperate with the targeted groups.
Kayyem also criticized the US intelligence community, citing a lack of coordination between different agencies, and calling them "extremely ineffective" at detecting potential attacks. "There's a lot of information out there, and it's not that we don't have enough. We just don't know how to get the gems from the noise," she said.
Shattuck, who also served as executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, DC, and vice president of Harvard University, drew on his experiences to discuss the conflict from a policy, legal, and academic perspective.
He called on his experiences defending a victim of Watergate wiretapping to draw parallels to the current situation and likened Attorney General John Ashcroft's arguments justifying the expansion of intelligence agencies' capabilities to Richard Nixon's statements during the Watergate scandal.
