AFSC
Professor backs local anti-Patriot Act movement
Wed Aug 6 13:01:53 2003
64.140.158.135

Professor backs local anti-Patriot Act movement

"It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government." - Thomas Paine

I am a member of the Borough Council in my small town of Lansdowne, Pa. (Delaware County, population 11,044). Recently the Lansdowne Council passed a resolution declaring Lansdowne a "Bill of Rights Protection Zone." Among other things, the resolution expresses the Council's concern that The USA Patriot Act and certain executive orders and policy decisions made by the executive branch of the US government violate important constitutional protections. Why was this action taken? Why is a little town in Southeastern Pennsylvania concerning itself with national issues? The answer is simple: we are patriots.

Following the terrorist acts of Sept. 11, Congress passed the USA Patriot (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act. The law was signed by the President Oct. 26, 2001. Passed with little debate, the act was a Christmas list of previously unsuccessful law enforcement legislation that had been hanging around Capitol Hill since the early 1980s. In the days following the attacks, what had once seemed an unwarranted subversion of civil liberties suddenly seemed prudent.

Concerns about security are a reasonable response to events which have shocked, horrified, and badly frightened us, but the Patriot Act is seen by some as having placed the United States on a slippery slope that will lead to the abrogation of the very rights that it purports to protect.

Americans claim to be a people who cherish liberty, but we are often ambivalent about that value. This ambivalence arises from the certain knowledge that, in a truly free society, people are as free to be bad as they are to be good. To minimize badness we inculcate in our citizens the desire to act in the larger interest of society and then restrict, penalize or ostracize those who choose to violate our rules and laws.

Today we are subject to acts by those who do not live by our concepts of rationality. They do not respect our laws or our values and make deliberate decisions to use the freedom of our society against us. The unpredictability of these individuals puts them outside the reach of our rational system, leaving us with the apparent choice to restrict ourselves in order to better restrict them.

Laws like the Patriot Act and legislation creating the Homeland Security Department promise security. Unfortunately, there is no system of security designed by human beings that cannot also be defeated by them. Determined and clever people will always find a way to defeat security systems. If you doubt this, just ask anyone who has tried to develop a "hack-proof" computer network: as soon as the "next best thing" in security comes out, a group of ne'er-do-wells sets out to beat it. Eventually they do. They always do. And they always will.

The real danger to our society lies in the steps that we allow our government to take to maintain the illusion of security. Each time security is breached ­ as it inevitably will be ­ we will be tempted to take stronger measures to assure the unassurable.

The history of "homeland," internal or state security has been one of terror perpetrated, not by external sources, but by duly empowered agents of that very organ that was designed to protect the citizenry. Internal security departments, with few exceptions, have been the mechanisms that governments have used to wage war on their own citizens. Every time a department of internal security has been proposed that proposal has been couched in language that claimed its intention to support the social structure.

By declaring war on a political device ­ terrorism ­ our government has established a policy of aggression that knows no border, no limits. As our President has stated there are no shades of gray in this war, one is either on the side of our government or an enemy of our government. Yet the nebulousness of our enemy endows this conflict with necessarily vague foreign and domestic components.

Under the Patriot Act, domestic terrorism is defined as an act that is "dangerous to human life" that is "intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population [or] to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion." In addition to real acts of terror, this definition can include acts committed on the basis of conscience, formerly called civil disobedience, as terrorist acts.

Once a person is called a terrorist, or a group is classified as a terrorist organization under the Patriot Act, that person or that organization and its individual members lose all manner of constitutional privacy and search and seizure protections. If those members are naturalized citizens or resident aliens they could lose the right to a public trial by jury and even centuries old common law protections such as habeas corpus.

The definition of terrorism has become a moving target with the potential to morph into the concept that is a formula for totalitarianism: a tool for the oppression of those who oppose the actions of the government. It is easy to dismiss these concerns as paranoia or the ravings of conspiracy theorists, but consider this statement: "I think it's imperative after 9/11 that the police department and security agencies have an obligation to track suspicious people, in order to keep the citizenry alive." Denver Councilman Ed Thomas made this statement in a meeting of the council to consider imposing restrictions on police intelligence-gathering after it was revealed that the police had been maintaining files on "criminal extremists." The definition of "criminal extremists" ­ terrorists ­ in Denver included nuns and members of church organizations including the American Friends Service Committee, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning pacifist organization.

The essential flaw in the reasoning related to the Patriot Act is that the attacks of 9/11 derive from laws that were too lax to aid the government in tracking down potential terrorists. There is no data extant that supports this assumption. In fact, evidence exists that there were investigations that identified strong potential for a terrorist attack, they were just ignored by the very people who now wish to subrogate police control for civil liberty.

In an effort to stem the tide of fear borne attacks on the civil liberties that have defined us as a nation, more than 125 government entities representing 16 million citizens across the country have passed resolutions condemning the Patriot Act and declaring themselves Civil Rights or Bill of Rights Protection Zones.

These resolutions have frequently included language that prohibits the accumulation of intelligence data on individuals without probable cause, prohibits local police from supporting the actions of the FBI under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), or prohibits profiling by the police ­ something encouraged by the Patriot Act and current Department of Justice policy. In Pennsylvania, four municipalities including York, Reading, Philadelphia and my town of Lansdowne, have passed such resolutions.

In times of national conflict American patriots fight to preserve liberty. Today that fight has two fronts: one outside our society and one inside our society. The idea that people who oppose the erosion of our civil liberties are somehow less patriotic than those who fight oppression in other countries is propaganda, pure and simple. Dissent is patriotic; in some ways it is the essence of patriotism in America. It is the person who would seek to quiet dissent whose patriotism is suspect.

Norman Council is the associate director of the behavioral counseling sciences program and a member of the Landsdowne, Pa. Borough Council.

http://edop.thetriangle.org/2003/06/27/patriotact.html
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