The National Security Exception Was Never Going to Stop at Prosecuting Muslims – truthout.org

The National Security Exception Was Never Going to Stop at Prosecuting Muslims  truthout.org

For 25 years, the US ran a parallel legal system targeting Muslims. It now reaches activists, immigrants, and the left. Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation. For 25 years, the US ran a parallel legal system largely for Muslims. It now reaches immigrants and the left. Less than two weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W. Bush told Congress that the war on terror “begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there.” Twenty-five years later, his line reads as a confession: the war on terror was designed to have no borders and no end, and the legal machinery built to wage it at home was drafted in the same way.

In my work as a federal criminal defense and constitutional law attorney, I defend people unjustly prosecuted by that machinery. Until recently, most of my clients were Muslim. What their cases demonstrate is that after 9/11, the United States built a separate system of justice — a national security exception to the Constitution — that was largely tested on a population that was demonized by both the state and the media. While non-Muslims were assured it would never apply to them — and were repeatedly told not to worry about