[jjr69] FW: [Viet Dinh talks about the Patriot Act]
- From: "Tran Thong" <thongt@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "JJRCVN" <jjr69@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 01:48:15 -0800
Hi Va^n
Don't know whether you have seen this.
Tho^'ng
-----Original Message-----
'Freedom's Attendant' -- Patriot Act Drafter
Defends His Vision
Sandip Roy, News Profile,
Pacific News Service, Jan 27, 2003
Many charge Viet Dinh, 34-year-old assistant attorney general and
architect of the Patriot Act, with sacrificing Americans' civil liberties
for
domestic security. The rising star of the Bush administration, who
escaped with his family from Vietnam 25 years ago, sees it differently.
Seared into the memory of the architect of the USA Patriot Act is the
image of his mother wielding an ax almost as big as herself, chopping to
pieces the rickety boat that carried them from Vietnam to Malaysia in
1978.
"My first question was, 'Is she crazy?'" recalls Viet Dinh. "We could be
imprisoned or forced back to sea in an even less seaworthy vessel. But it
was recognition that nothing could be as bad as going back to Vietnam. It
was a leap of faith into our freedom."
The irony for Dinh is that today, some Americans accuse him of presiding
over perhaps the most sweeping curtailment of individual freedoms since
the McCarthy era.
The lanky 34-year-old with a ready smile sees it differently. As assistant
attorney general overseeing the Office of Legal Policy, Dinh describes
himself as "an attendant of freedom." Dressed casually in blue jeans, he
looks more like a young, gung-ho hi-tech entrepreneur than a professor
of constitutional law and what the Los Angeles times describes as part of
the "brain trust" behind the Bush administration's anti-terrorism
campaign.
The child who learned English by reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew
mysteries went on to Harvard University and then its law school, where
he edited the Harvard Law Review. He became the first and only
Vietnamese-American law professor at Georgetown University.
After work with the legal counsels that investigated Whitewater and
impeached President Clinton, Dinh honed his media savviness as a
Constitutional law expert on CNN.
Dinh's office used to be concerned mostly with judicial nominations. That
changed after 9/11. "Out of the chaos of 9/11 came the opportunity to
survey how we do our business," Dinh says. "The attorney general (John
Ashcroft) asked me to do a top-to-bottom review of how we approach the
task of counter-terrorism and recommend changes."
In law school, Dinh wrote that the role of government was to maximize
"the zone of liberty" around each person. When some, even in the
government, now speak of balancing liberty and security, Dinh winces.
That, he says, is the slippery slope toward becoming "the boy in the
bubble -- security without liberty. It's not an America I would want to live
in."
For Dinh, the job of government is "to provide the preconditions for
certain ends -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Security is a
means; liberty is the end. As for charges that the Justice Department has
gone too far in curtailing civil liberties and due process, Dinh says
simply,
"The threat to liberty comes from Osama bin Laden and h is terrorist
network, not from the men and women in blue who work to uphold the
law."
When he and his family landed in America, Dinh says he took any job he
could find, working in strawberry fields or flipping burgers. His mother, a
teacher in Vietnam, took on seamstress work. They sent money back to
Vietnam, where his father and sister were still trapped.
"We had no money. We did not know the language. But we experienced
true freedom -- no middle-of-the-night searches, no arbitrary government
actions."
Dinh says he recognizes that in post-9/11 America, immigrants are afraid
that they can be deported for the slightest reason. Failure to comply with
certain immigration laws, however must be "willful" to be a "removable
offence." But an immigrant, he says, is a kind of "guest" obligated to obey
laws, some of which "have not been enforced for 50 years."
"We are letting you know that we are enforcing them now, Dinh says. "We
are not here to play 'gotc ha.'"
What about racial profiling? It's "wrong ... immoral and illegal" to target
any person for disparate treatment simply because of their race, ethnicity
or religion, Dinh says. When asked why most investigative efforts have
concentrated on men of a certain age, from certain countries, Dinh
shrugs. "These are not our criteria. They are al Qaeda's. These are the
countries they have cells in, the age groups they recruit from."
Dinh says the Justice Department is aggressively investigating anybody
about whom they have "individualized suspicions." Dinh says he makes
no apologies for using "every legal authority" at his disposal to get such
people off the street.
Dinh says there are only two ways to prevent terrorist attacks --
information or detention. "By our constitutional design, we do not do
preventive detention like many European countries," he says. "So we
have to develop information for the purposes of detention." The voluntary
interviews of thousa nds of Middle Eastern men in the aftermath of Sept.
11, 2001, elicited good leads from people who did not even realize they
had leads, Dinh says.
The Patriot Act, he maintains, "makes the best use of the information we
have, sharing information between law enforcement agencies to put the
pieces of puzzle together so we can look for the needle in the haystack."
Dinh says his department cannot release the information that many civil
libertarians desire. About 20,000 people are picked up every day on
immigration violations, and only a fraction of those are deemed "of
interest" to the war on terror. "To give a constant update of who is of
interest and who is not would give would-be terrorists a roadmap of our
investigation," Dinh says.
Long before he became assistant attorney general, Dinh was profiled in
the book "25 Vietnamese Americans in 25 Years," published in 2000.
Now, in addition to fending off questions posed by civil libertarians, Dinh
must deal wi th persistent Vietnamese parents who want him to meet
their daughters.
"I know I have a special place in the Vietnamese community, though I
seek to serve all Americans," Dinh says. "I just try to bring my girlfriend
along with me whenever I can."
Growing up, Viet Dinh's father hoped he would be a Catholic priest or a
doctor. Dinh chose medicine, but jokes that he switched to law to avoid
the sight of blood. He had always enjoyed debates, and still finds himself
drawn to studying "the institutions that safeguard our government -- for I
had seen government that did not work."
PNS Associate Editor Sandip Roy (sandiproy@xxxxxxxxxxx) is host of
"Upfront" -- the Pacific News Service weekly radio program on KALW-FM,
San Francisco.
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