"USA Patriot Act" Threatens Constitutional Rights

Nancy Murray is director of the Bill of Rights Education Project of the Massachusetts ACLU.

Back in 1917, as the US government was heading into the First World War, Rose Pastor Stokes wrote a letter to a St. Louis newspaper which stated: "I am for the people, and the government is for the profiteers." She was sentenced to ten years in prison for sedition.

Nancy Murray © Marilyn Humphries

During the same year, Robert Goldstein of Los Angeles made a film about the American Revolution entitled "The Sprit of '76." It depicted British soldiers committing massacres and shooting women. He was fined $5000 and given ten years in prison on the grounds that the film "tended to question the good faith of our ally Great Britain and made us a little bit slack in our loyalty to Great Britain."

After the war ended things didn't get much better as far as civil liberties were concerned. The new fear was the threat of "Bolshevism." The young J. Edgar Hoover was asked by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to draw up a list of radicals for the new FBI; he soon had a card index of 200,000 names. The Attorney General then ordered raids on homes, meeting places, pool halls, and bowling alleys in some 33 cities, resulting in some 4000 arrests. Over 200 immigrants (possibly as many as 1000) were deported. Here in Massachusetts, our Secretary of State Albert P. Langtry stated about political radicals: "If I had my way, I would take them out in the yard every morning and shoot them, and the next day would have a trial to see whether they were guilty."

How the "USA Act" Threatens Rights

That was the mentality then, Is it so different now, some 80 years later, as we face a war with no clear enemy and no foreseeable end? Are we prepared to put the Bill of Rights in cold storage, and wait until terrorism everywhere is over before trying to thaw it out?

Marchers, Boston, 10/14 © Ellen Shub

Unfortunately, that is where things are tending. In the weeks after September 11, intense lobbying efforts managed to stall Attorney General Ashcroft's draconian Anti-Terrorism legislation. But after compromise legislation was offered by the House Judiciary Committee, a new Senate bill, the so-called "Uniting and Strengthening America (USA) Act (S.1510)" was rushed onto the floor. This legislation would undermine civil liberties on a scale far surpassing the 1940s and '50s "Red Scare."

The legislation defines "terrorism" in very broad terms, so broad that it could conceivably lead to a large-scale investigation of American citizens for engaging in civil disobedience. Anti-war protestors, for instance, could be labeled as conspirators in a terrorist plot. "Terrorism" could be applied to a range of criminal acts, from scrawling graffiti to computer hacking.

The bill would permit the indefinite detention of non-citizens, even of those who have successfully challenged the government's effort to deport them. It would greatly expand the ability of the government to conduct secret searches in criminal investigations, and to have access to sensitive business records without even having to show evidence of a crime.

Under the legislation, there would be no meaningful judicial supervision of federal telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement agencies. It would permit the Attorney General and Secretary of State to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations, and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Simply paying membership dues to such an organization could lead to deportation. The legislation would also open the door to large-scale investigations of citizens for "intelligence" purposes.

Legitimate Security Measures

Now I don't mean to imply that we should do nothing at all to improve security in the aftermath of September 11. Clearly some things make a lot of sense--like overhauling airport security. Like getting the FBI and CIA to shape up, to use the considerable powers they already have, to overcome their bureaucratic inertia and entrenched turf issues, and to stop dropping the ball.

The extent of the intelligence failure is laid bare in an article by David Rose for the British newspaperThe Observer (re-printed in the Oct. 10 Guardian Weekly ). Rose states that for four years leading up to the September 11 attacks, the government of Sudan repeatedly offered security chiefs in the USA and UK "the chance to acquire a vast intelligence database on Osama bin Laden and more than 200 members of his al-Qaida terrorist network," including material about their financial interests and plans. They were also given "an opportunity to extradite or interview key Bin Laden operatives who had been arrested in Africa because they appeared to be planning terrorist atrocities." They refused all offers because the official US/UK policy was to keep Sudan at arms length.

A senior CIA source told Rose: "This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data, we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks."

As for the FBI, revelations of what the agency has been doing in Boston should serve as a cautionary tale. It was recently revealed that FBI agents knowingly put four innocent men in prison--two served over 20 years and the other two died in prison. They collaborated with murderers, and never did find Whitey Bulger, their alleged target. In earlier decades the FBI brought us COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) aimed at disrupting anti-Vietnam War protests and the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements.

No, agencies like the CIA and the FBI do not need the enhanced power to spy on citizens. The Attorney General does not need the unprecedented authority to incarcerate non-citizens indefinitely. What they do need is an enhanced respect for the Bill of Rights.

Postscript: On Oct. 26, President Bush is poised to sign into law the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by the Senate the day before by a vote of 98-1 (Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin alone dissenting) and by the House on October 24 by 357-66.

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