Hady Hassan Omar's Detention
By MATTHEW BRZEZINSKI


Hady Hassan Omar had made up his mind. He was going to kill himself if he wasn't released by New Year's Eve.

It wouldn't be easy. Three cameras recorded his every move. The lights in his cell weren't turned off for weeks at a time. And the guards watching him through the plate-glass wall were rotated round the clock. He would lie under his prison-issue blanket for as many as 20 hours a day. It was the only privacy he could get.

Since his arrest on Sept. 12, 2001, Omar had been fighting a losing battle. No one would believe that he had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He passed polygraph tests, but the F.B.I. still seemed convinced that he was linked to Al Qaeda. The guards in the isolation wing of Pollock maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana kept telling him that under new antiterror measures, he could sit in jail forever. He wrote the attorney general. He even went on several hunger strikes. But the corrections officers just threatened to strap him to a gurney and force-feed him through a tube up his nose.

Omar was running out of the little hope he had left. His only solace now was prayer. He became convinced that he would never leave this place. His baby daughter, Jasmine, would take her first steps, utter her first words and grow up without him. If he could not be with her on her first birthday in December, he decided, life was not worth living.


There are many ways to break a man, to make sure he is not holding anything back. Causing physical pain may be the quickest method, but it is not necessarily the most effective. To be absolutely certain that someone is telling the truth, you have to crush his spirit.

That is what Hady Hassan Omar says the United States government tried to do to him in the days and weeks that followed Sept. 11. He was one of hundreds of Muslim immigrants held in solitary confinement for months without charges while the F.B.I. investigated their backgrounds. His 73 days of captivity, he claims in a lawsuit recently filed in the Western District of Louisiana, rose ''to the level of torture.'' Hoping that publicity about his ordeal might help his case, Omar and his family agreed to give details of it in a series of interviews arranged by their attorney, Robert Rubin of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco.

Though his suit is the first of its kind, Omar is not alone in making such serious allegations. ''We have documented many instances in which immigrants from the Middle East and South Asian countries like Pakistan have faced cruel and degrading treatment at the hands of U.S. authorities,'' says William F. Schulz, the executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. ''Those are the sort of practices we usually see in the most repressive regimes in the world.''

No one knows exactly how many young Muslim men were rounded up in the aftermath of 9/11. As of November of last year, when federal authorities stopped issuing information on the subject, the tally was 1,147. What is known is that thus far, of those initial 1,147 arrests, only 3 have resulted in terrorism-related indictments, and more than 400 people have been deported following lengthy internment periods and closed hearings.

At issue is the key question lawmakers have been grappling with since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: just how far can America go to protect itself, both at home and abroad? For the attorney general's office, it is a delicate balancing act. The interests of national security must be weighed against constitutional guarantees, the safety of 280 million citizens squared against the rights of a few, or a few thousand, individuals -- mostly foreign nationals.

The United States has not faced such a quandary since the attack on Pearl Harbor, when it was deemed necessary to intern 110,000 Japanese and people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were United States citizens, to stop possible sabotage or espionage. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been wrestling with the difficult task of arming the justice system with the legal weapons needed to fight the new threat. Much of the work has had to be veiled in secrecy for fear of tipping off the terrorists, and the emergency measures have sought to curtail some of the freedoms that extremists could employ to avoid detection, arrest and prosecution.

But as time passes since the trauma of Sept. 11, the cost to individual rights is beginning to come into focus. David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, argues that ''the policy of keeping people in jail until the F.B.I. clears them is essentially 'guilty until proven innocent.'''

Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, agrees. ''It's fundamentally un-American,'' he says. ''What's most troubling is that the American public is being kept in the dark about what is being done in the name of the war on terror.'' The A.C.L.U. has sued under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the names of some of the detainees.

In New York, a class-action suit filed in April on behalf of at least 87 detainees, separate from the A.C.L.U. suit, accuses the Justice Department of wholesale violations of the constitutional rights to which both American citizens and noncitizens in the United States are entitled. Several rulings by federal judges over the past few months indicate that the detainees could get a sympathetic hearing.

There are many who believe that the necessity of preventing future terrorist attacks supersedes the rights of any individual, that standards of due process must be amended to suit extreme circumstances. ''Human rights norms recognize that in times of grave emergency, governments can take steps that are different from peacetime so long as they are strictly necessary and proportional,'' says Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at Yale and a former federal prosecutor. ''On Sept. 11 no one knew the extent of the threat, whether Al Qaeda succeeded in finding fissile materials, so there was great concern that the other shoe might drop.''

Ultimately, the issue will be for the Supreme Court and historians to decide. With Al Qaeda sleeper cells still possibly in the United States and Osama bin Laden still possibly at large, officials in Washington are reluctant to reveal tactics or discuss specifics or even to answer the charges leveled against them in particular cases. For now, what little is known about the methods used on the domestic front of the war on terror comes largely from the personal accounts of former detainees like Omar.

is trouble began on Sept. 12 with a knock at the door of the house in Fort Smith, Ark., that Omar was staying in with his second wife, Candy (his first marriage, also to an American, ended in divorce), and Jasmine. The visitor was a man wearing jeans and a white polo shirt. A service revolver hung from his belt, and he carried a gold shield identifying him as a deputy from the nearby sheriff's office. Two other men were waiting outside, next to an unmarked S.U.V. parked in the driveway.

''They just want to ask me a few questions,'' Omar told Candy. She remembers that Omar didn't look especially worried, just a little tired. The day before, he had spent 14 hours at the Houston airport after his Sept. 11 flight from Florida was grounded, along with all air traffic in the country. ''I'll be home soon,'' he promised, with only a hint of the Egyptian accent that Candy had found exotic when he first asked for her phone number at the Electric Cowboy club some 16 months back.

Candy might have been more concerned had she seen the F.B.I. agent handcuff her husband. But even when she went to the small F.B.I. office in Fort Smith to answer questions later that afternoon, the gravity of the situation had not yet dawned on her. ''I wasn't scared or anything,'' she recalled.

The F.B.I. agents, after all, were relaxed and friendly, she remembers, and assured her that they simply needed to ask routine questions about a concealed-weapons permit Omar had applied for after joining a local gun club. Still, the line of questioning seemed somewhat incongruous. ''One kept asking if Hady was a good Muslim,'' she says. ''I said not really.'' It was true that Omar would not eat pork. But he didn't pray five times a day, go to mosque or deny himself the occasional vodka or Marlboro Ultra Light. An affable federal agent named Ed sat next to Candy in the waiting room, passing the time watching the television news. He would periodically point at the photos of the 19 hijackers that the networks showed and ask Candy if she'd ever seen any of them before. Candy didn't have a clue how the F.B.I. could possibly have linked her husband to the lead hijacker.


"Am I here because I'm Egyptian?'' Omar asked once as he was being taken into the F.B.I. interrogation room, where he was joined by another agent who introduced himself as Mike. The F.B.I., he says, had taken his weapons permit, his driver's license, Social Security card, work permit and the 13 credit cards he accumulated during his two years in America. ''I'll need those back,'' Omar said. He had an interview with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to get a green card in a few days, and he was going off on holiday with Candy to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. Don't worry, he was assured, just tell us about your friends. The F.B.I. wanted names and numbers, and whenever Omar gave them one, an agent would scribble it down on a piece of paper and leave the room. (The Fort Smith F.B.I. branch office declined to comment on this account, as did Brian Marshall, a spokesman for the Bureau's Arkansas headquarters in Little Rock.)

Candy, meanwhile, had signed a consent form allowing the search of their apartment; agents removed their home computer, documents, credit-card statements and correspondence, his collection of Arabic-language videos and a copy of ''Scarface,'' the Al Pacino gangster movie.

At that point, Omar says, he was still most worried that all this would somehow affect his credit rating. He had signed up for all those credit cards and even taken a few small bank loans because he was told that was how one built a credit history in America, and he dreamed of owning his own business someday. On Sept. 11, he had been in Florida, working out the details, he says, of an Egyptian antiques store he was hoping to open with a friend who worked for Lucent Technologies in Cairo.

Candy stayed at the F.B.I.'s Fort Smith office answering questions until just after 11 p.m. Then she was told she could leave. Her husband, though, would not be coming with her.

The next morning, Candy Omar woke to find the banner headline ''Terror Strikes Home'' blazing across the front page of the Fort Smith newspaper, The Times Record, over a four-column photograph of her handcuffed husband being led away to the county jail.

His arrest was on all the local stations as well, as were neighbors and former co-workers expressing varying degrees of shock, disbelief and outrage. Omar had not, in fact, been charged with any crime, but the media accounts glossed over that. On his papers, the line reserved for charges read vaguely: ''Hold for I.N.S.''

The F.B.I., it turned out, did have some potentially damning evidence: Omar bought his Sept. 11 plane tickets from the very same computer terminal in the same Boca Raton, Fla., Kinko's outlet that Mohamed Atta had used, around the same time too. And he fit the hijackers' profile perfectly: young, from a well-to-do background -- his father was an engineer working in Qatar - computer-literate, with a taste for vodka and nightclubs, just like Atta. It made sense that the F.B.I. would want to talk to him. But was his ticket purchase merely a coincidence? Or was Hady Hassan Omar part of the plot?

At Candy's apartment, the phone rang incessantly. Omar's friend Gary called to say she should forget about her husband and move on with her life. Omar called, too, from jail. ''He sounded hysterical,'' Candy says. ''He begged me to believe that he wasn't a murderer or involved in any way.''

Around noon, the F.B.I. agents returned to Omar's holding cell in the county jail, this time in suits and ties. They had with them another agent flown up from Little Rock who asked Omar if he knew what a lie-detector test was. ''Yeah,'' Omar said. ''Like in 'Meet the Parents''' -- the comedy where Robert DeNiro plays a retired C.I.A. officer who subjects prospective sons-in-law to polygraphs.

After the electrodes were strapped to his chest and index and ring fingers and a blood-pressure gauge was wrapped around his bicep, a series of seven questions began -- repeated three times in different order. Some were innocuous: Is your date of birth Jan. 19, 1979? Others less so: Were you planning on hitting U.S. targets or hurting Americans?

The test lasted 90 minutes, then Omar waited. Good news, said the agent from Little Rock when he finally returned, all smiles now and patting Omar on the back. Omar was told he had passed. ''I was so relieved,'' he recalled. He would make his green-card hearing after all, and in a few days he'd be celebrating his wedding anniversary with Candy at a spa in Hot Springs, all this a bad memory. ''I can go now, right?'' he asked eagerly.


What Omar did not know was that in Washington, officials were working round the clock to come up with emergency legal guidelines to fight the war on terror. No one knew where or when Al Qaeda would strike next, and the F.B.I., Immigration and Naturalization Service and other government agencies were under fire for what was seen as their failure to detect the Sept. 11 attacks.

It would take six weeks for the final package of antiterror measures, known as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, to get through Congress and be signed into law by President Bush. But in the meantime the dangers facing America were very real, and the I.N.S. was enlisted to buy time for the F.B.I. Leads had to be followed up, stories checked out, bank records and phone logs verified. All this was painstakingly slow work, and by law suspects could not be detained for more than 24 hours without being charged with a crime.

Though married to an American, Omar did not yet have permanent-resident status, which made him vulnerable. The I.N.S. can hold immigrants for overstaying tourist or student visas, taking too few college credits or any number of other violations. They could begin deportation proceedings against illegal aliens and keep them locked up if they were deemed a risk to flee or a danger to the community. It was all perfectly legal, as long as the detainees were charged under immigration statutes within 24 hours. After 9/11, that time frame was extended to 48 hours by the Justice Department, then seven days. In special ''emergency'' cases, says Bill Strassberger, a spokesman for the I.N.S. in Washington, detainees can now be held without charges for a ''reasonable'' period.

On Sept. 21, 2001, the Justice Department issued a memorandum reversing the detainee's right to open immigration hearings. In ''special-interest cases,'' according to the memorandum, hearings would be held behind closed doors. The immigration courts would not be required to confirm whether such cases were on the docket, and not even the relatives of detainees would be allowed to attend the secret hearings. ''Opening sensitive immigration hearings could compromise the security of our nation and our ongoing investigations,'' Barbara Comstock, a Justice Department spokeswoman, later elaborated in a statement. ''We are at war, facing a terrorist threat from unidentified foes who operate in covert ways and unknown places. This makes it essential that the United States take every legal step possible to protect the American people from acts of terrorism.''

Attorney General John Ashcroft himself recently defended the Bush administration's decision to beef up security measures at the expense of individuals' rights. ''History instructs us,'' he said, during a September 2002 address to United States attorneys in New York, ''that caution and complacency are not defenses of freedom: caution and complacency are a capitulation before freedom's enemies -- the terrorists.''


In several conversations and in the details of his suit, Omar has laid out his version of what happened next. While the case remains to be tried, this is the picture that emerges from his allegations.

Though Omar was told that he had passed his lie-detector test, he was hardly in the clear. Late in the afternoon of Sept. 13, 2001, he says, an armed I.N.S. agent in a cowboy hat served him with a document known as ''a notice to appear.'' Omar had no idea what that meant. It was not a criminal charge, he assumed, yet he was being taken for mug shots and fingerprinting.

You overstayed your tourist visa, the I.N.S. agent declared. ''But I'm legal,'' Omar stammered, perplexed, since his marriage to an American citizen made him eligible for permanent residency. ''I've got a work permit and everything.''

Sometime after midnight, he says, several I.N.S. agents slapped leg irons on him and cuffed him to a thick chain that was wrapped around his waist. Omar was put in the back of a tan Chevy sedan. ''Where are we going?'' he asked as they sped off. ''What's happening?'' No one said anything. They drove through the night, listening to country music.

''I kept asking for an attorney,'' Omar recalls. ''Finally one of the agents in the car lost his temper and yelled: 'Listen, let me explain this to you. We're not going to baby-sit you like the F.B.I.'''

Omar still had no idea where they were taking him, though he could tell by the road signs that they had crossed over to Louisiana. The sun was already up when they pulled into a gas station, where an unmarked Ford Explorer and a police cruiser were waiting for them.

Their destination was an I.N.S. office in Oakdale, La. Omar, still in shackles, was taken into a room with a large glass partition. ''Everyone in the office was staring at me as if I was something nasty or dirty,'' he says. He had been handcuffed for 12 hours and was dizzy with hunger. ''I asked them to take off the cuffs. But the guard just said hell no.''

Several hours later, Omar was moved again, this time to the New Orleans Parish Prison. He says he was ordered to strip and spread his legs before being searched, issued a jumpsuit and allowed to call Candy.

She had been frantic and afraid to leave her apartment. The call from her husband, however, galvanized her into action. She arranged to drop Jasmine off with her mother, emptied their $700 bank account and drove south to Louisiana. The trip took more than 12 hours, and by the time she arrived at the New Orleans Parish Prison, Omar was already gone. He had been transferred in the middle of the night to a maximum-security prison, and when Candy called, no one would tell her if he was even there.

''I begged the administrator,'' Candy recalls. ''I said, 'He is my husband -- I need to find him!' But the woman just said, 'I think national security is more important right now.'''


All across America, Muslim men were literally disappearing into the prison system. On Sept. 20, 2001, Shakir Baloch, a Canadian citizen of Pakistani origin, was arrested in New York by the I.N.S. and F.B.I., and despite official inquiries from Ottawa, his detention was not disclosed for more than three months. He was held for half a year before being sent back to Canada. In California, an Egyptian-born dentist was taken into custody at a Los Angeles-area gas station, and while his friends searched for him in local jails, he was flown to a detention center in Brooklyn. In New Jersey, Anser Mehmood's wife spent six weeks searching for her husband, who was arrested in late September, not formally charged with a visa violation until March 2002 and held in an isolation cell with 24-hour lighting for seven months. The wife of an Egyptian national arrested in early September did not see her husband until Dec. 19, 2001. She passed on a letter he wrote to Amnesty International. ''I have now been in solitary confinement for three and a half months. . . . Why am I imprisoned? What are they accusing me of?''


It was only when he got to the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Pollock, La., sometime after 2 the next morning, that Omar realized the severity of his situation, as he charges in his lawsuit against the government. No one even knew he was there, and he was not permitted to make any calls. Strip, he was told, once again. A dozen officials, including two women, he recalls, looked on. Someone produced a camcorder and began taping as Omar undressed. Omar stood naked while his body cavities were searched for the third time in less than four days.

He still has trouble speaking in front of his wife about what happened next. ''They told me to lift my testicles,'' Omar remembers, blushing slightly. ''One of the guards pointed at my backside and said, 'You sure you're not hiding anything in there?' I said no. 'I think he's got something in there,' he told the others.'' One of the corrections officers, he says, placed a call, and a man in white medical scrubs entered the room. He wore a latex glove. Bend over, he said. Squinting from the pain, Omar looked up at one of the I.N.S. guards who had escorted him from the New Orleans prison. She was laughing, he says. (A Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington, Traci Billingsley, said that intrusive searches are performed ''extremely rarely'' in the penal system.)

Isolation Cell No. 1 measured 10 feet by 10 feet. At its center was a concrete bunk. The only other furnishings were a plastic chair and a metal toilet. Now dressed in an orange jumpsuit, Omar desperately needed to use the bathroom but was still shackled. ''Can you take these off?'' he asked. The answer was no. ''But how am I going to --?'' The question was cut off by a corrections officer who motioned for another guard to join him. Each grabbed one of Omar's elbows and steered him to the bowl. But with the handcuffs still on, he could barely manage his zipper, much less aim. Urine began running down his pant leg as, he maintains, the guards laughed.

Warden Carl Casterline came to visit him the next morning. ''He said he had orders from Washington to keep me there until further notice,'' Omar says. Omar again asked to telephone an attorney but says his request was denied. The warden was polite but firm on the matter; he had instructions from D.C., he said. The warden asked if he any special dietary needs. ''I don't eat pork,'' Omar said. Lunch was brought to him soon after. It consisted, he says, of bologna and ham. The lawsuit contends that the warden deprived Omar of his right to a religious diet.

Casterline's office declined to comment on any aspect of this account, referring queries to the Bureau of Prisons in Washington. Billingsley, the B.O.P. spokeswoman, said she could not speak to Omar's case specifically but explained that federal policy allows inmates access to telephones for up to 300 minutes a month, provides alternative religious diets and mandates that prisoners be given exercise periods outside their cells.

Omar decided to go on a hunger strike until he was allowed to call counsel. The guards were unmoved. ''One of them said, 'The attorney general just signed a new law today,''' Omar remembers. ''We can keep you here as long as we like.'''

For the next 10 days, Omar was not allowed out of his cell. ''I thought I had died and this was hell.'' He kept having recurring dreams that his mother and little brother in Egypt were dead and that he was holding his daughter, Jasmine. He would wake crying and hide under his blanket so that the guards did not see.

The F.B.I. returned a few days later with a consent form they wanted him to sign allowing the search of a crate of sample antiques he had received from Cairo. He signed the papers, he says, and again asked for a lawyer.

By the time the attorney Candy had hired to find her husband, Lawrence Fabacher, finally reached his client, it was too late to prepare for Omar's immigration hearing, which had been scheduled for Oct. 2. The hearing was pushed back two weeks.

''I tried to sleep as much as possible to make the time go faster,'' Omar recalls. He did push-ups and sit-ups to keep fit, but his cell was so cold that he got the chills whenever he broke a sweat. They had turned off the hot water to his shower, so he stopped bathing. Pork was served at least twice a day.

He had a newfound desire to practice his religion and tried to guess the correct hours for prayers by following the changing of the guards. They would congregate outside his cell and make faces whenever he tried to pray.

On Oct. 16, two days before his I.N.S. hearing, two F.B.I. agents appeared. Omar recognized one as the polygraph technician from Little Rock. They wanted to know about his financial affairs; around that time, the hunt for Al Qaeda had shifted to tracing the money trail. For more than four hours, they pored over his banking and credit-card statements. Omar was questioned about every deposit, withdrawal and major purchase he had made since coming to America and asked about the nature of the antiques business he wanted to start.

Again, he was shown photographs of the hijackers and of Osama bin Laden and asked if he recognized any of them. ''Sure,'' Omar said, pointing to bin Laden. The agents pounced: Where do you know him from? Television, Omar answered.

He submitted to another lie-detector test, similar to the one he'd taken in Fort Smith, except that it now included questions about whether he had ever lied on I.N.S. application forms and if he was currently married to Candy.

The results of the test apparently were not conclusive. The exam was re-administered, with the same result. We have to send for a specialist, the technician said.

The specialist arrived from Houston the following day, lugging a digital polygraph machine that was hooked up to a laptop computer. Omar, by this time, could recite the questions by rote. But the F.B.I. was still not satisfied. One answer in particular kept coming up as inconclusive. And it happened to be the most important one: shown a picture of the hijackers, he was asked if he knew any of them.

''The specialist from Houston freaked out,'' Omar recalls. ''He leaned in so close that his nose was almost touching mine. You know somebody, he shouted. No, I yelled back. Yes, he screamed. I can see your mind on my computer screen.''

Eventually everyone simmered down. ''We can help you,'' Omar remembers the specialist saying, ''if you help us. We can get you a new identity. We can get you money. You know there's a $25 million reward for Osama's capture. We can move you anyplace and protect Jasmine and Candy.''

The next morning, Omar's immigration hearing went surprisingly well. The judge seemed sympathetic and ordered him released on the relatively low bond of $5,000. ''I was so excited,'' Omar recalls. He says he ate his first complete meal in days and cleaned his cell. He could barely sleep that night and woke early. Candy would be coming to collect him at the opening of business hours. He sat expectantly on his bunk, his few belongings in a neat pile. The hours passed: 9, noon, 3 in the afternoon, then 4 and, finally, 5. At 6, he called a prison administrator. The I.N.S. prosecutor had appealed his bond. Under the new antiterror measures, the government could overturn judges' decisions in ''special-interest cases.''

Even today, Omar gets emotional when describing how he felt when he heard the news. He stopped eating. For 68 hours, he didn't touch food or drink, until, he says, they threatened to put tubes up his nose. ''It was like part of me just died,'' he remembers.

Omar was in a near-catatonic state. He couldn't tell the difference between day and night, weekdays and weekends any longer. As the weeks passed, his depression grew deeper. He lost 20 pounds. A second closed immigration hearing in mid-November did not go well. The judge was apologetic but said there was nothing he could do; the government had made the call.

Omar now hardly moved from his concrete bunk. His feet grew swollen from inactivity. ''I thought I would have to stay in that room forever,'' he recalls. He couldn't take it any longer. He decided to kill himself -- and to make this intention known.

Suddenly, everyone seemed very concerned. The warden visited and sent a psychiatrist. The F.B.I. man came and kept asking if he was serious about suicide. They could probably tell he had reached the end of his rope. And maybe, in the end, that was what saved him.

t's impossible to say precisely why the authorities finally decided that Omar must be telling the truth. One senior law enforcement official in Washington did, however, agree to share a theory, on the condition that neither his name nor the agency he works for be revealed.

''If your subject has a complete breakdown,'' he said, ''the barriers to resistance are lessened. Once a person is at that point, he has lost the will to deceive, and you can be pretty certain that he's not lying.''

Omar had apparently passed his final test. Is he innocent? It is, of course, impossible to know, just as it is impossible to frame the question. Innocent of what? Charges were never presented. Perhaps the most important indication of his innocence is that for 73 days the government could find nothing beyond its original suspicions to hold him on. On Nov. 20, he was told to get his things together. ''Do you want to go home?'' a cheerful I.N.S. official asked. Three days later he was with Candy, on the freeway driving to Arkansas to see Jasmine.

The ordeal, however, is not entirely over. The couple is broke; they have been forced to sell their car and furniture and move in with Candy's father, a postal worker. Many of their friends have deserted them. Employment prospects for Omar are bleak: he was fired by his pre-9/11 employer, and the only work he can find now is volunteering for a charity for disadvantaged children. And the government, citing Omar's first marriage, which it says was a sham (a charge Omar denies), has continued deportation proceedings against him. They just want him out of here, for reasons they still will not explain.



Matthew Brzezinski is a contributing writer for the magazine. His last article was about the heroin trade.

summarize, please...

nevermind...thanx for the article.
[This message was edited Tue Oct 29 8:27:33 PST 2002 by mrchristian]

made me cry

Great article.

Outlines once again how the "anti-terror" laws have overturned so many of the individual's rights and freedoms outlined in the American constitution. As much of a dictatorship as any place, although less and less people are accepting the changes now that the whole thing has died down.