Patriot Act belongs next to Alien and Sedition acts

Attorney General John Ashcroft is not a fan of the Bill of Rights.

If you only look at his… Attorney General John Ashcroft is not a fan of the Bill of Rights.

If you only look at his words you might be fooled. You will see an eloquent and patriotic man dedicated to preserving liberty and genuinely outraged by the actions of terrorists.

Last December, he told a Senate judiciary committee, “To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”

Sounds good after a first read, but let’s look at what this really means. The “phantoms of lost liberty” are the First Amendment rights that Ashcroft has worked to take away, and the people who cite them are American citizens exercising their right to redress their government. So what Ashcroft really said was that those who protest for their rights, or the rights of others, are aiding terrorists.

That sounds fairly radical; he is the Attorney General after all. But let’s look at his actions.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Ashcroft asked Congress to give the Justice Department several new police powers. When Congress began to, heaven forbid, debate the bill and criticize how it infringed on fundamental civil liberties, Ashcroft publicly inferred that if Congress didn’t pass the 342-page bill, it would be responsible for any new terrorist attacks. Ironically, the bill was called the USA Patriot Act.

According to an American Civil Liberties Union report called “Insatiable Appetite,” one of the provisions of this act granted the FBI the power to access information held by third party organizations such as libraries, universities and businesses. Another provision allowed Internet communication to be reviewed. Who you e-mail, what Web sites you visit, the books you check out, and your grades are all pieces of information the government could get by simply saying the information is relevant to an ongoing investigation. That’s any investigation, not just those relating to terrorism.

In fact, most of the provisions weren’t terrorist-specific.

Ashcroft’s directive, which limits compliance to the Freedom of Information Act, pertains to all government information, not just terrorist-sensitive material. Another interesting aspect of the Patriot Act is, though its provisions are only justified by the present threat our nation is under, only a few of the intrusive government powers will expire when the “War on Terror” is over.

The same ACLU report describes how, immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, the Justice Department apprehended some 75 Arabic and South Asian men, and held them in secretive federal custody – these men were not tied with the terrorist attacks but held on minor immigration violations. Men continued to be arrested and, by early November of last year, the number of those being detained grew to 1,147. The Justice Department continued to make more arrests but announced it would no longer give a tally of those being held. Some were eventually released in early March – after six months of being detained without being charged with terrorist activities – but many remain detained more than a year later.

The names of the detainees, the charges brought against them and whether counsel represented them are all pieces of information the Justice Department has refused to disclose. On Aug. 2, a district judge ordered the information to be disclosed. But to undermine the order and ensure the information didn’t get out, the Justice Department adopted a new regulation, which barred certain Immigration and Naturalization Service departments from complying with the Freedom Of Information Act.

Now, I don’t want to make it sound like all of this is being done without precedent. Ashcroft has plenty of history to back his actions up. There are the Alien and Sedition acts, the Counterintelligence Program that monitored activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. in the ’60s, and of course the Japanese internment camps of World War II.

The thing about all these precedents is that today these actions are now seen as unnecessary and wrong. No doubt history will place the Patriot Act among them.

Will Minton would like to know what happened to the checks and balances he learned about in middle school. He can be reached at wminton@pittnews.com.