Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music

A long-term resident of the United States who President Bush believes may have aided a terrorist can now be tried in secret by a military commission and be sentenced to death on the basis of hearsay and rumor with no appeal to any civilian court, even the Supreme Court. Thisis the upshot of the "military order" issued by Bush on November 13, 2001. And that is notall. Noncitizens suspected of membership in Al Qaeda or of aiming "to cause injury to or adverse effects on the United States" can be rounded up and "detained at an appropriate location" for an indefinite time without access to the courts.

This is the kind of "military justice" now in effect for our alleged enemies both foreign and domestic. No wonder so many experts on wartime tribunals believe that "military justice is to justice as military music is to music." The role of the military is to win wars, to protect citizens, and to follow the orders of the commander in chief. Under our constitutional system of civilian control over the military, it is not the role of military subordinates to question and challenge determinations made by the president, and in every case coming before a military commission pursuant to this new order, the president will have already "determined" that there is reason to believe that the suspect is a terrorist. Command influence over these military tribunals will be inevitable.

Nor will the suspect have any real opportunity to defend himself, since the ordinary rules of evidence will not be followed. The commission will be allowed to base its decision on any evidence that would "have probative value to a reasonable person." Translated from the legalese, this means that hearsay, coerced confessions, and fruits of illegal searches can be considered, and that cross-examinations will not always be allowed. It also means that the prosecution need not even disclose the sources of its hearsay if such disclosure would reveal a "state secret"—a broad term nowhere defined.

It's one thing to subject prisoners of war who are captured on foreign battlefields to secret military tribunals. Though secret military trials of Bin Laden and his foreign associates may be unwise, they would be constitutional. It is quite another thing to treat American residents, some with long ties to this country, as if they had no rights under our constitution. There are no Supreme Court precedents justifying secret military trials of American residents who are not citizens and who are accused of domestic crimes. Those nonresidents who tried to blow up the World Trade Center back in 1993 were tried in a federal court and convicted, after being accorded the full panoply of constitutional rights. So were the Al Qaeda terrorists who blew up American embassies in Africa. The independent jury in the latter case refused to do the government's bidding on sentencing, declining to impose the death sentence.

That is the proper function of a jury—to follow its own lights on sentencing within the bounds of law. And it is precisely this independence that President Bush wants to avoid by placing "justice" against suspected terrorists within the chain of military command. But in a post-Civil War case, the Supreme Court ruled that as long as civilian courts remain open, civilians must be tried in such courts, rather than in military tribunals. That case involved an American citizen, but the Court suggested no distinction between citizens and residents. In a World War II case, the Supreme Court upheld a military tribunal's conviction and execution of Nazi spies who had landed in the United States, but they were German soldiers out of uniform, and a long tradition of military justice makes such spies subject to military tribunals. This tradition does not apply to long-term American residents suspected of aiding terrorists.

In addition to the specter of kangaroo courts trying suspected terrorists, the president's order raises the prospect of mass detentions of noncitizens. Although the order specifies that the detainees must be treated humanely, without any "adverse distinction based on race," it is clear that the detainees will be primarily Arab and Muslim. We are unlikely to experience a repetition of the detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans—citizens and noncitizens alike—which followed the attack on Pearl Harbor. But it is certainly possible we will see mass detentions of the sort that occurred in Hawaii between 1942 and 1945, when martial law was declared and most civil courts closed. Many businesspeople in Hawaii favored martial law and were actually disappointed when it ended following the Japanese surrender in 1945. They liked the tough law-and-order approach taken by the military and approved of the lower crime rates that accompanied military justice. The fact that thousands of innocent people—mostly of Asian background—were detained or falsely charged did not seem to be of concern to these good citizens.

I was not surprised to read The Wall Street Journal's editorial in favor of the Bush order. The Journal editors don't much like our constitutional system of justice, with its emphasis on procedural safeguards, exclusionary rules, and the right to a vigorous defense. They see terrorism as a justification—an excuse—for ridding us of "the excesses of the modern U.S. criminal justice system," with its rigorous "standards of evidence," its "exclusionary rule," and "the legal artifice of Johnnie Cochran."

The real danger is that many Americans, not only the editors of The Wall Street Journal, have always distrusted our constitutional system of justice, with its historical preference for the acquittal of the guilty over the conviction of the innocent. They prefer a more streamlined system, with fewer safeguards and fewer acquittals. They trust the government to bring only the guilty to trial.

The war against terrorism—unlike previous wars—will not end on a date specific. We may never declare victory. The military approach to justice reflected in the Bush order may well persist indefinitely, and perhaps even expand in its scope. Its visible successes, undiscounted by its less visible failures, will encourage many Americans to view the military approach to trials—which favors efficiency and certainty over fairness and resolution of doubts in favor of the accused—as the norm rather than the exception. This must never be allowed to happen, if our liberties are to be preserved. As the Supreme Court said, in ruling that Abraham Lincoln had violated the Constitution by subjecting Confederate sympathizers to military tribunals:

. . . [Our constitution] foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers and people would become restive under restraint and seek by sharp and decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established by irrepealable law.

This nation has no right to expect that it always will have wise and humane rulers, sincerely attached to the principles of the Constitution. Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this right [to suspend provisions of the Constitution during the great exigencies of government] is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate.

Sadly, the old slander that a liberal is someone who has never been mugged is turning out to be true. The Sept. 11 attacks were so close to the center of the intelligentsia's power and consciousness that they have propelled many civil libertarians to abandon their long-held principles.

Congress passes, without due consideration, a draconian anti-terrorist bill that Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft demands, and only one senator--Russell Feingold (D-Wis.)--dares to rise in opposition. The president doesn't even bother to consult Congress as he detains more than 1,000 prisoners without charges, approves wiretaps on lawyer-client conversations and issues an executive order implementing military trials for those accused of terrorism.

Secret military tribunals are defended by Harvard's Laurence Tribe, a preeminent liberal law professor, as necessary to "protecting our lives from terrorism." His colleague Alan Dershowitz assures us that the Constitution does not prohibit "torture" and argues that it be kept within the legal system: "If we are to have torture, it should be authorized by the law. Judges should have to issue a 'torture warrant' in each case." With the exception of a few stalwarts, such as the ACLU, we have witnessed the sorry spectacle of most civil libertarians remaining silent or actively supporting the most sweeping and ill-considered assault on civil liberties since the roundup of Japanese Americans during World War II.

For all the horror of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we are still the most powerful nation in the world. We should be able to minimize terrorist danger without shredding our standards of freedom.

One way to do this is to stop being reactive and instead be proactive in the world and at home. If the air marshal program had not been gutted a decade ago for budgetary reasons, the Sept. 11 attacks may likely have been prevented. The nation's air security also was shortchanged by our relying on poorly paid, trained and screened private employees. And if we had made war on Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network three years ago, after they took credit for killing Americans and promised to kill more, we might have saved countless lives, here and in Afghanistan.

The war on terrorism, like the war on drugs, is being used to justify the destruction of individual privacy rights. Feingold, in voting against the largely unchallenged USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism bill, said: "Under this bill, the government can compel the personal records of anyone--perhaps someone who works with or lives next door to or went to school with or sat on an airplane with ... the target of the investigation." That's a witch hunt.

After endlessly proselytizing to the world on the virtues of limited government, judicial restraint, due process and the rights of the individual, we now cavalierly with limited debate and dissent are willing to throw it all away. The justification is that our security is threatened. Has it never occurred to these summer-soldier civil libertarians that any government can make that claim to justify suppression of human rights?

The human rights advocates who criticized China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the Taliban (when no one cared to hear it) are right: Freedom makes a nation stronger, truth drives out lies and the free marketplace of ideas is the best defense against despotism.

After listening to George W. Bush address the United Nations General Assembly on Nov. 10, the question is whether the Presidential suit is half-empty or half-full. Has Mr. Bush fully grasped the need to move beyond the unilateralist attitudes of his party, or is he merely mouthing platitudes that serve the needs of wartime?

The tone of the Bush speech was certainly encouraging, giving voice to sentiments that are rarely heard among conservative Republicans. It was refreshing to hear this once-parochial President say that "we"—presumably meaning the international community—"must press on with our agenda for peace and prosperity in every land," making specific references to development, trade and investment in the global effort to contain the AIDS pandemic. "In our struggle against hateful groups that exploit poverty and despair, we must offer an alternative of opportunity and hope," he said, without expanding upon what that alternative might be.

Mr. Bush even spoke of Kofi Annan, recently slandered by Osama bin Laden, as "our Secretary General"—a tiny phrase that nevertheless must have irked isolationist Republicans who regard the United Nations as an affront to American sovereignty. Only months ago, those isolationists were again proposing to withdraw U.S. support from the U.N., a species of idiocy silenced within two weeks after Sept. 11, when Congress suddenly agreed instead to pay more than $800 million in back dues, with $840 million more to come by year’s end.

Like his father before him, Mr. Bush has discovered that those foreigners in Turtle Bay have their uses, notably in the two resolutions swiftly and unanimously passed by the Security Council authorizing allied military operations under Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter. He could scarcely have asked for a broader endorsement. And Mr. Annan’s reappointment of an able Algerian diplomat as special envoy for Afghanistan provided an important opening to certain key parties, such as the government of Iran, with which the United States at present has no official contact.

As a new convert to the doctrine of "nation-building" that he derided during his campaign last year, Mr. Bush also seems to understand the potential role of the U.N. His promise to work with international organizations to "reconstruct" a postwar Afghanistan was a significant departure from his administration’s previous posture, as was his clear declaration of renewed resolve to foster a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Yet if Mr. Bush has truly turned a new page in his worldview, his weekend speech left that page mostly blank. He said precious little about AIDS and poverty, and not a word about other contentious issues such as global warming, nuclear proliferation or debt reduction. Instead, he departed from his main topic to lecture the delegates about the election of certain rogue states to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, as though nothing in the world matters nearly as much as anything that irritates the White House.

In those respects, Mr. Bush’s appearance on the U.N. podium was a squandered opportunity. He rightly urged world leaders to attend to the threat posed by terrorists who may someday possess weapons of mass destruction, if they don’t already. He eloquently expressed the indignation felt by all decent people who witnessed the atrocities perpetrated by civilization’s common enemies. And he implicitly asked the world to accept American leadership against those enemies.

What he failed to do was to offer any reciprocal attention to the profound concerns of peoples and countries who have felt neglected, even spurned, by American policymakers. That halting approach was adequate to the moment, but eventually Mr. Bush will have to do much better.

There are reasons to believe that he may, and reasons to fear that he will not. His negotiations this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin are promising, particularly if they lead to real reductions in nuclear armaments without voiding the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But he still seems obsessed with the chimera of missile defense at the expense of more important measures against terror, including underfunded programs to safeguard Russian nuclear materials and the endangered chemical and biological weapons treaty.

Coming from a politician reared in the stifling atmosphere of Texas Republicanism, even the most tentative nod toward a larger horizon represents progress. As a young man, George W. watched his father contend with the most bitterly paranoid currents of isolationism, and he has demonstrated his own determination not to alienate his party’s right-wing fringe. Still, if he believes his own rhetoric about humanity’s responsibility to oppose fascist aggression "decisively and collectively," he will have to articulate a broader vision of America’s commitment to the rest of the people who share this planet.

Next time some knucklehead complains about the left-wing press, ask him to explain the spin placed on the Florida election recount by the media consortium that sponsored it. The press interpreted the results to enhance President Bush's "legitimacy" and explain away the Supreme Court's shameful decision to prevent the votes from being counted. "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote," headlined the New York Times. "In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help," said the Wall Street Journal. CNN.com wrote "Florida Recount Study: Bush Still Wins." The Los Angeles Times reported that "Bush Still Had Votes to Win in a Recount, Study Finds," and the Washington Post "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush."

In plain fact, the numbers by themselves showed almost the exact opposite: had every legal Florida vote been counted, Al Gore would be president. In order to reach the conclusions they did, the journalists ran the data through a legalistic blender, interpreting it according to the arguments of the Bush and Gore campaigns to the U.S. Supreme Court. Because Gore never asked to include the so-called "overvote," consisting mainly of ballots rejected by counting machines due to confused voters who'd both checked their candidate's name and also written it in, consortium members omitted them too.

Caused by poorly-designed ballots, the overvotes strongly favored Gore because of the counties in which they occurred. Only the Orlando Sentinel had sufficient wit to ask the judge appointed by the Florida Supreme Court to supervise the recount if over-votes would have counted. Unsurprisingly, since the "intent of the voter," could hardly be plainer on a ballot marked twice for the same candidate, he said yes. Had that happened, Gore, who won the national vote by 539,000 votes, would have won Florida's electoral votes too. Add the thousands of votes irretrievably lost to Palm Beach County's notorious "butterfly ballot" and it's clear the exit polls were right: a clear plurality supported Gore.

Although a few Democrats are criticizing Gore for not pitching a belated hissy fit, the Bush presidency is a political fact. Protesting now would make Gore look ridiculous. Even before the dire events of Sept. 11, most Democrats accepted the results of the 2000 election more or less the way they'd accept an unfair traffic ticket-not something they had to like, but not worth an insurrection either. Times were good, the vote was close, and neither candidate aroused strong passions.

The journalists, however, have no excuse for manipulating their own survey for transparently political ends. Enhancing Bush's "legitimacy" isn't the media's job any more than it was Justice Antonin Scalia's, who brought the expression into the disputed election to begin with. Nor is their task to let the five offending justices of the U.S. Supreme Court off the constitutional hook by pretending that they magically intuited how the vote would have turned out under various scenarios. "The trouble with Bush v. Gore," as Jonathan Chait wrote in The New Republic "was that it distorted the law to bring about a desired political outcome." End of story.

And the trouble with our esteemed Washington press corps is that they appear to have forgotten who's boss. Legitimacy in our democracy is conferred by the will of the voters. Period. It's merely ironic that Gore's handlers asked the courts for the wrong remedy; also arguably symptomatic of how he ended up calling for a recount in an elec-tion he ought to have won easily. But it's not the real issue. The election, the presidency and the U.S. Constitution, see, don't belong to the candidates, to their political parties, to their lawyers, to the U.S. Supreme Court or to the decision makers at the Washington Post or CNN. They belong to the American people, whose will was clearly thwarted in Florida when tens of thousands of legal votes were thrown out due to a combination of mischance, incompetence, partisan skulduggery and unwarranted judicial interference. The press's job is to shine as clear a light as possible on those events to help prevent anything like them from happening again. Times might not be so good, public passion could be very high, and the legitimacy of our democracy itself could be at stake.

ALMOST REGARDLESS regardless of which candidate you favored, it would be hard not to be amused by the droll "correction" that appeared in the Nov 115 edition of the English news magazine The Economist: "In the issues of December 16th 2000 to November 10th 2001, we may have given the impression that George Bush had been legally and duly elected president of the United States. We now understand that this may have been incorrect, and that the election result is still too close to call. The Economist apologises for any inconvenience."

In the space of little more than a week, the Bush administration has issued a series of executive orders that amount to the most far-reaching assault on democratic rights in modern legal history. The directives violate protections laid down in the US Constitution and upheld by judicial precedent over many decades.

On Tuesday, Bush issued an executive order allowing for the use of special military courts to try suspected terrorists. This followed by days the announcement that Attorney General John Ashcroft had authorized the monitoring of conversations between lawyers and clients in federal custody, including people who have been detained but not charged with any crime.

Other recent executive orders include the following:

* A directive empowering the attorney general to authorize the indefinite detention of some non-citizens, a rule that could affect "hundreds of individuals," according to the Justice Department.

* An order to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to carry out "voluntary" interviews of more than 5,000 mostly Middle Eastern men, ages 18 to 33, who are living in the US, ostensibly to gather information concerning future terrorist attacks.

* A new policy on visa applications affecting men, ages 16 to 45, from 25 Middle Eastern and African countries. All such applicants will face intense scrutiny and long delays in the processing of their requests. Their names will be checked against databases maintained by the FBI.

* The suspension of running tallies by the Justice Department of the number of people rounded up by law enforcement agencies in the anti-terror dragnet. The last figure released by federal authorities was 1,187.

These sweeping changes have been enacted by executive proclamation, over the heads of the people, with no discussion or vote in Congress. Coming on top of the far-reaching provisions of the "anti-terrorism" bill passed last month by Congress, they are major steps toward establishing the institutional and legal framework for police-state rule in America.

Seizing on the events of September 11 as a pretext, the Bush administration has instituted measures that would have been politically unthinkable prior to the terror attacks. They are components of a reactionary agenda long-sought by the most right-wing sections of the political establishment.

The military tribunals authorized by Bush would be the envy of any totalitarian state. According to Bush’s order, they can be employed against suspects who are non-citizens, with the proceedings being held in the US, abroad or even at sea. Trials conducted by these tribunals will be held in secret. The military prosecutors will not be required to reveal any information about the proceedings to the public. The tribunals can render sentences up to and including life imprisonment or execution.

The president will designate who is to be tried by these tribunals. According to the November 15 New York Times, the Pentagon is already preparing for the possible transfer to military custody of immigrants currently detained by federal authorities.

The accused will have no recourse to appeal, and will be barred from seeking remedy from any US state or federal court, any foreign court or any international tribunal, such as the World Court at The Hague. This means that, on George W. Bush’s directive, a suspect could be arrested, tried in a foreign country in a secret trial, and summarily executed.

A unanimous verdict is not required to convict. Defendants can be convicted and sentenced by a two-thirds majority of the military officers presiding, who will be selected by the secretary of defense. The qualifications of these officers are not specified by the presidential order, and their identities could be concealed from the public. The effect would be similar to the use of hooded army officers in Latin American military courts, as in the recent trial in Peru of American Lori Berenson, a left-wing journalist.

The tribunals will not be required to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt and will not be obligated to follow established rules of evidence. This license for frame-up violates the most elementary principles of legal justice and discards procedures that are required not only in civilian courts, but also in existing military courts.

According to Eugene R. Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, "The accused in such a court would have dramatically fewer rights than a person would in a court-martial."

In comparison to the process laid down in Bush’s executive order, the 1999 trial of Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan by a Turkish military court—condemned around the world as a judicial frame-up—looks like a model of due process. In the Ocalan trial, representatives of the media and international observers were permitted, and the defendant was able to appeal his death sentence to a Turkish appeals court.

Bush’s military tribunals and all of his other "anti-terror" measures violate one of the most basic democratic principles of US law: the presumption that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. Now defendants can be stripped of their right to due process by virtue of presidential fiat. If the president names a non-citizen as a terrorist suspect, he can be turned over to the military for summary conviction and execution.

Defending Bush’s order, Vice President Dick Cheney said terrorism suspects "don’t deserve the same guarantees and safeguards that would be used for an American citizen going through the normal judicial process," and that a military tribunal "guarantees that we’ll have the kind of treatment of these individuals that we believe they deserve."

While the executive order specifically refers to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, these kangaroo courts could be used against any non-citizens alleged to be involved with terrorism. It should be kept in mind that Bush—who wields absolute power in deciding who is to be prosecuted by these tribunals—demonstrated his instincts for fair play and compassion by presiding over 152 executions during his five-year term as governor of Texas.

The official justifications provided by the Bush administration for establishing these military star chambers do not hold water. The major claim is that civilian trials of terrorists would compromise US intelligence. This assertion, however, is belied by the existence of provisions allowing federal courts to keep sensitive information sealed from the public record.

What the government is really concerned about is concealing from the American people the truth about its operations. The holding of swift, secret trials would allow the authorities to continue to keep the public in the dark.

In particular, military tribunals would serve two purposes:

First, the government would be able to prosecute and convict those, such as bin Laden, who it alleges are guilty of terrorist crimes, without having to prove its charges. Various government spokesmen have acknowledged since September 11 that they do not have sufficient evidence to convict bin Laden in a court of law. By bringing terrorist suspects before secret military tribunals, where the outcome is guaranteed and the defendant has no legal rights, the government would be able to claim it "proved" its allegations without fear of public scrutiny or independent review.

Such a legal farce has obvious political advantages, since the Bush administration’s justification for going to war against Afghanistan hinges on the claim that bin Laden and Al Qaeda are responsible for the September 11 attacks, and the Taliban regime is guilty of sponsoring and protecting them. A public trial which revealed that the government had no serious evidence to back up the claim that bin Laden and Al Qaeda organized the hijack-bombings would have serious political consequences, both in the US and abroad.

Second, a closed military process would negate the possibility of information emerging that might undermine the government’s version of the September 11 disaster. A host of unanswered questions remain about the strange and murky circumstances that allowed men identified as Islamic terrorists to organize and execute a complex plot to attack key centers of American economic and military power, supposedly without any advance knowledge on the part of American police and intelligence agencies.

A normal trial might expose facts suggesting that US authorities were not as oblivious to the terrorist conspiracy as they claim, or even the existence of prior contacts between some of the perpetrators and American intelligence operatives. In one way or another, a normal trial would be certain to bring forward politically damaging information about the greatest security breach in US domestic history.

The authorization of secret military tribunals clearly flies in the face the Bill of Rights of the US Constitution, which applies to "persons," not just citizens. Under current legal standards, anyone in the US—citizens and non-citizens alike—can file a writ of habeas corpus, asking for a judge to take up his or her case.

Inevitably, Bush’s authorization of military tribunals will be challenged in the courts and end up before the Supreme Court. It is likely, however, that a majority on the high court will back the measure.

Comments made in the aftermath of the terror attacks by Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor—generally considered a "swing vote" on the Court—indicate that behind-the-scenes discussions have been going on about sanctioning "military justice." In a speech on September 30, O’Connor said the terror attacks "will cause us to reexamine some of our laws pertaining to criminal surveillance, wiretapping, immigration and so on."

She continued, "It is possible, if not likely, that we will rely more on international rules of war than on our cherished constitutional standards for criminal prosecutions in responding to threats to our national security."

Predictably, the fascist-minded editorialists of the Wall Street Journal defend the tribunals "as a matter of common sense, as a way to shield an essential part of the war effort from the excesses of the modern US criminal justice system." The Journal, which reflects the views of major sections of the corporate elite, adds in a November 16 editorial: "Do we really want to give people bent on destroying the US the right to throw out evidence based on the exclusionary rule?"

However, Bush’s barrage of executive orders has provoked unease and concern within parts of the political establishment and sections of the press. In a column in the November 15 New York Times, entitled "Seizing Dictatorial Power," long-time Republican operative William Safire writes that "a president of the United States has just assumed what amounts to dictatorial power ... with the replacement of the American rule of law with military kangaroo courts." "On what legal meat does this our Caesar feed?" he asks.

A November 16 editorial in the Times, headlined "A Travesty of Justice," comments, "With the flick of a pen, in this case, Mr. Bush has essentially discarded the rulebook of American justice painstakingly assembled over the course of more than two centuries."

That the Times, which has disgraced itself in the recent period by praising Bush’s "statesmanship" and political "maturity," should feel obliged to make such a pointed comment, testifies to the vast scope and extreme character of the Bush administration’s assault on democratic rights.

Some senators from both parties have called for hearings on the setting up of military tribunals, the monitoring of lawyer-client discussions and other measures enacted by the Bush administration without congressional input. However, working people can place no confidence in the liberal media or the Democrats to wage a struggle against the assault on democratic rights. They have consistently adapted themselves to the drive by the most reactionary layers of the ruling elite to curtail basic rights.

A lack of affordable housing and economic woes that have worsened since Sept. 11 have sent the homeless population in some of the nation's largest cities climbing, experts say.

There are now nearly 30,000 homeless adults and children in New York City shelters -- an all-time high, the Coalition for the Homeless said Monday. New York lost nearly 80,000 jobs following the World Trade Center attack, and many people have turned to soup kitchens and food pantries.

``The number of people coming here was rather dramatic after the 11th of September,'' said Clyde Kuemmerle, a programs coordinator for Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen in Manhattan who estimated the increase in the hundreds. The nation's largest city isn't alone. San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston are also seeing more homeless, said Steve Berg, spokesman for the National Alliance to End Homelessness. He warned that additional job losses may add to the problems.

Last week, the Labor Department said the number of laid-off workers drawing jobless benefits had reached an 18-year high. The nation's unemployment rate soared to 5.4 percent in October and companies eliminated 415,000 jobs, the biggest one-month drop in 21 years.

Nationwide, the homeless numbers are grim. A March 2000 survey by the Census Bureau found 280,527 homeless people around the country. The bureau reported that on the first day of the three-day survey, 170,706 people were in homeless and emergency shelters -- including 59,000 combined in New York and California.

New York homeless shelter resident Christina Anderson, a mother of four children ages 5 months to 15 years, fell behind on her $700 monthly rent. Then she started missing work because she lacked child care and because of frequent court appearances related to her eviction. She said she was fired from her $21,000-a-year job at the state Department of Motor Vehicles.

``It's very hard on my children,'' Anderson said at a news conference held by the homeless coalition. ``I feel like they've experienced separation anxiety because I have had to ask family members to help house them.''

Like Anderson, shelter resident Joseph Franklin wants a job and a place to live. But it's proven to be a tough task.

``I'm running into all kinds of closed doors,'' Franklin said. ``At times, when people look at us and sometimes think we could do a little bit better, it's not our fault. The help is not there.''

Housing families like Anderson's costs the city $3,000 a month; it's a little less to shelter single homeless adults, said Patrick Markee, the coalition's senior policy analyst.

Markee called on the city to expand programs that provide emergency grants to keep at-risk families in their homes. But he said the biggest problem is a lack of affordable housing.

The number of homeless people has steadily increased in New York since early 1998; last month, the shelter census reached 29,498 adults and children. Nearly 6,600 families live in shelters and hotels each night.

Markee estimated that thousands more are on the streets.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said the homeless shelter population is higher than it has been in the past but said he didn't know if it was at record levels. ``It's not quite over capacity yet, so we're going to have to expand the emergency system to make sure we don't get there,'' he said. ``The emphasis is going to have to be on making sure the system expands to fit the need, and maybe some of that need will subside as we move farther away from Sept. 11.''

James Berger was one of hundreds of people who ate at Holy Apostles on Monday. He has been getting some of his meals from soup kitchens since he lost his janitorial job over the summer.

Berger has been able to share a two-bedroom apartment with six other people by doing odd jobs, but that leaves little money for food.

MONTPELIER, Vt. -- U.S. Sen. James Jeffords says his defection from the Republican Party has helped the nation respond to terrorism by providing Democrats a check on GOP power.

"You can see it in just about every issue," Jeffords, I-Vt., told The Associated Press on Monday. "We have seen compromises that would not have happened."

Jeffords, whose switch put the Senate in Democratic hands, said he is afraid of the "damage that might have been done" to the country if the GOP still controlled the Senate, White House and House of Representatives.

He said the economic stimulus package, the anti-terrorism package and the airline safety legislation "are different or will be different because the Democrats are in charge of the Senate."

"I am very concerned about my good friend (Attorney General) John Ashcroft," Jeffords told the AP. "Having 1,000 people locked up with no right to habeas corpus is a deep concern."

His comment referred to the more than 1,100 people arrested or detained since Sept. 11. Civil liberties groups have complained that the Justice Department has refused to release their identities or status.

"If there is one single thing that made the switch worthwhile," Jeffords said, it is that it gave fellow Vermonter Patrick Leahy the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee in time to fight administration plans to combat terrorism by increasing police powers.

Jeffords' comments came as he discussed the publication of his new book, "My Declaration of Independence," which chronicles the events leading up to his announcement to switch parties.

The Democrats gained control of the Senate following Jeffords' decision on May 24 to abandon the Republican Party and become an independent.

The switch was a setback for President Bush, whose popularity dropped after the Jeffords' decision. In making his announcement, Jeffords said he thought the Republican Party in general and Bush in particular were too conservative.

Making his decision was hard, Jeffords writes. His wife Liz "thought it was a bad idea" and so did his son Leonard. Longtime chief of staff Susan Russ also fought against the switch.

Jeffords writes that it was an emotional time, describing a May 23 meeting of his Republican colleagues.

"It was gut-wrenching trying to explain what impelled me to think of leaving the party, handing control of the Senate to the Democrats and wresting it from my friends and colleagues," he writes.

The doubts were gone by the next day when Jeffords declared the GOP had simply become too conservative for him. "I was not elected to this office to be something I am not," he said in his historic announcement.

Jeffords' book, published by Simon & Schuster, is the first of two he is writing. "A Declaration of Independence" focuses on the events of this year; his second book will be a more formal autobiography and is scheduled for release next year.

Jeffords said that he has been overwhelmed by the highly favorable response he has received from the public, but added "I have to believe it is about a lot more than me.