What Rights Are Left After Sept. 11?

Jason Steinberg, a photojournalism student from Long Beach, was on the way to his Aunt Gail’s house in Phoenix for Thanksgiving dinner. While waiting for a Southwest Airlines flight at LAX, Steinberg began taking photographs.

“I’m doing a project for class about the aftermath of Sept. 11,” says Steinberg, 26, who works as a customer representative at a hospital when he is not at Los Angeles Harbor Community College.

After passing through a security checkpoint, Steinberg took a quick photo of a female National Guard trooper, with passengers in the foreground.

The guard did not approve.

“She demanded my film, and I rewound it right away in case she popped the camera open and ruined it,” says Steinberg.

He should have counted himself lucky he doesn’t resemble a Middle Easterner. There’s no telling how long he’d be locked up without explanation while authorities eavesdrop on his telephone conversations with Aunt Gail.

But Steinberg felt uncomfortable about having so easily surrendered his film. Didn’t he have the right to take a photograph in a public place? So he went back to ask for an explanation.

He says the trooper, an airline representative and a cop told him it was a security risk, and his film would be destroyed. End of conversation.

Good work. No telling what might have happened if the Al Qaeda network had gotten its hands on that hot photo.

(The real security risk, actually, is having transportation boss Norman Mineta serve as chief apologist for an airline industry that continues to drag its feet on examining checked-in luggage for explosives.)

I checked with the Guard and LAX, and neither has any specific policy prohibiting photography. So Steinberg, it appears, simply ran into an overzealous team of junior crime busters.

All of which prefaces a question:

Have we slid headlong into a police state, using Sept. 11 to justify everything from locking up bewildered Yemeni immigrants to strong-arming Kodachrome away from photography students on their way to Aunt Gail’s for Thanksgiving?

Actually, before continuing with that thought, I should clarify something.

Anyone who had a role in the death and destruction of Sept. 11 could be locked up until Afghanistan is a stop on the pro golf tour, as far as I’m concerned. Any lawful attempt to nail them, or to find so-called sleeper terrorists, is fine by me.

And although I’m sympathetic, I won’t be contributing to the defense fund of the otherwise law-abiding Arab immigrants picked up for visa violations. Anyone who doesn’t have their papers in order ought not to be carping and moaning about the law suddenly being enforced.

But having said all that, the Bush administration has gone positively medieval. So much so that it’s really beginning to terrify people, including some who are usually on its side.

“How can you talk about full partnership when nobody let us know that this executive order was coming?” U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) demanded of a Justice Department official, called on the carpet this week in Washington.

Specter, a former prosecutor, was horrified that President Bush, U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and a few others in the Star Chamber cabal are running their own private government, freezing out Congress and everyone else.

It almost sounded like a report from Comedy Central, but Bush wanted to try suspected terrorists before secret military tribunals. The Justice Department, meanwhile, has locked up scads of people without naming them or charging them. And they’ve been eavesdropping on their telephone conversations.

There’s no strong indication yet that they’re pulling out fingernails or bringing the thumbscrews and rack up from the basement, but there’s no way to know for sure.

It’d be easier to justify these tactics if the government had cracked the back of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network. But after rounding up more than 1,000 people, they’ve come up with a big goose egg.

Not one person has been connected to any act of terrorism. The names of more than 500 detainees have still not been released. Six hundred others had minor immigration violations, and none of the 93 facing criminal charges are accused of terrorism.

“Due process should be observed, and it’s not. Full disclosure should be observed, and it’s not,” Jim Zogby of the Arab American Institute told me.

“People’s lives are being taken apart because they have an Arab surname and a minor violation on their visa, and I don’t see it getting any terrorists. I see it dragging people through the mud.”

Here in L.A., Jason Steinberg is watching the federal proceedings with a little more interest than he did before Thanksgiving. He feels no particular kinship with detainees, obviously. All he lost was a roll of film. But he wonders if the Justice Department’s Gestapo model has emboldened authorities everywhere.

Steinberg hasn’t given up on his confiscated film, by the way. Once you’ve surrendered a freedom, no matter how small, you begin to understand its true value.

*

Steve Lopez writes Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com