How 9/11 began the decline in our democracy

(CNN) -

A year after the attacks of 9/11, Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained during a layover at JFK on his way home to Ottawa. He was held in solitary confinement for two weeks, interrogated and denied access to lawyers.

The Bush administration labeled him al Qaeda, and rather than send him home to Canada, they sent him to Syria, a country known for using torture. There, over the course of a year's confinement in a cell he describes as the size of a grave, he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured.

He was never charged and never tried. After a year, the Syrians released him and publicly stated he had done nothing wrong. Later, the Canadian government apologized and awarded him more than $9 million in compensation.

Around the same time in and around New York, immigrant men from countries ranging from Turkey to India were being swept up on minor immigration violations and detained for months on end, even after they were cleared of any connection to terrorism. They were sometimes held in solitary confinement. They were not permitted to reach out to family or friends or lawyers, and some were subjected to physical and verbal abuse and forbidden to practice their religion.

How did this happen? How did a nation that prides itself on being the world's greatest constitutional democracy become one that sends innocent people to be tortured or indefinitely detains and abuses immigrants who committed no crime?

September 11 was tragic in many ways, and it marked the beginning of the greatest decline in democracy in our country since the Japanese internment during World War II and the Red Scare of the 1950s.

It was the day we began to let fear erode our belief in our own system of government, with all its checks and balances and laws and treaties. Playing on that fear, our government began to operate outside the law and in the process destroyed many more lives than those lost in the attack.

Let us list some of the more egregious ways our most cherished protections were swept aside:

Our government engaged in surveillance of citizens, spying without the court approval required by law. For example, in March 2010 a federal judge found that the government under the Bush administration had violated a federal statute when in 2004 it wiretapped Al Haramain, a now-defunct charity organization in Oregon, along with two of its lawyers.

The Bush administration did more than that, though. Shortly after 9/11 it authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without a warrant, on the telephone calls and other electronic communications of millions of Americans, most of whom were suspected of no crime.

Continued