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World>Terrorism & Security
posted July 14, 2004, updated 12:00 p.m.

New skirmishes in the Patriot Act battle

Ashcroft report praises it, but opponents call report 'suspect.'

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

US Attorney General John Ashcroft mounted a strong defense of the Patriot Act Tuesday. The Washington Post reports that Mr. Ashcroft gave Congress nearly three dozen examples of how the Patriot Act had been used to prosecute terrorists and other criminals. Ashcroft's statement comes as the administration tries to prove the act doesn't harm civil liberties, and a week after a controversial provision in the Act was nearly overturned in Congress. The White House is also hoping to stop a move to let key provisions of the act expire in 2005.

"This report is an unprecedented compilation of dozens of real-life cases from across the country in which the FBI and other law enforcement officials have used the tools of the Patriot Act to protect America's families and communities and even to save lives," Ashcroft said after meeting with House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.).

As Ashcroft made his remarks, Bloomberg News reported that other administration officials were also defending the act. In a speech to business leaders in Cleveland, Ohio, Secretary of the Treasury John Snow said that said that "by enabling the sharing of information between agencies and financial institutions, the act had helped his agency wage a war on terrorism finance."

"Hatred fuels the terrorist agenda; cash makes it possible," [Snow] said. "A decrease in terrorist prosperity will lead to an increase in American prosperity."


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But Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, accused the Justice Department of selectively releasing information and refusing to address civil liberties concerns in its report to Congress.

"Coupled with the department's consistent record of exaggerating their record about terrorism, this entire report is suspect," Conyers said.

United Press International reports this view was echoed by Anthony Romero, head of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Romero specifically criticized Ashcroft for not dealing in his report with section 213 of the Patriot Act, which allows " sneak and peek" search warrants. ("Sneak and peak" warrants have come under scrutiny following recent cases where US citizens were wrongly charged by the FBI with terrorist offenses.)

The expanded powers of the government to gather personal records, including library records and medical information, (are) also ignored. And while lawmakers and the ACLU have made repeated requests to find out how, exactly, the act has been used, the attorney general leaves those questions unanswered.

Former Attorney General Edwin Meese III defended the act recently, writing a piece for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank in Washington, saying the antiterrorist legislation was getting a "bum rap."

The Patriot Act has become something of a political football. Inflammatory TV commercials show hands ripping up the Constitution, with a voice-over blaming Attorney General John Ashcroft. Print ads show an elderly gentleman leaving a bookstore with text decrying the use of government powers to get his reading list. But the hysteria is based on false premises, embodied in the proposed amendments.

The "proposed" amendments referred to by Mr. Meese were part of a bill voted on in Congress last week. The amendments sought to delete Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Section 215 allows law enforcement officials to order libraries and bookstores to show them what books people have been reading or buying, and has generated enormous controversy. An editorial, for instance, in the Sunday edition of the Delaware County {PA} Times called it a " stain on the constitution.")

The Statesman Journal of Salem, Oregon reports that the amendment was defeated when the vote tied 210-210. At one point, however, the vote had been 219-201 in favor of the bill, but the Republican leadership added 23 extra minutes to the debate on the floor of the House in order to " whip recalcitrant colleagues back in line," and defeat the bill.

McCall.com writes that the last week's vote in Congress shows the nation is ambivalent, at best, towards the act.

On one hand, its reach cramps the freedoms that make the United States unique. On the other, terrorists have taken advantage of those freedoms to attack. The Justice Department says terrorists used library computers to access the Internet, but where's the evidence? Is the nation persuaded that the USA Patriot Act has made the nation safer? It'll take another vote to answer that.

The Justice Department also came under criticism last week for reclassifying public documents in a case involving a former FBI translator. Although many of the documents in the case had been available publicly – for almost two years, some via the Internet on US government sites – the Arizona Republic says Ashcroft ordered them " retroactively classified."

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, [Sybil] Edmonds – who is fluent in Turkish and Farsi – learned that a number of intercepted documents that had been poorly translated into English would have given solid clues to the imminent attacks had they been properly translated. The information even included references to skyscrapers. After uncovering still more of what she contends were security lapses within the FBI, Edmonds was fired some months later. She has since sued the government in federal court over what she discovered, but her suit was thrown out earlier this week by a judge who said Edmonds' testimony could expose the now-reclassified government "secrets." Ashcroft's heavy-handedness strongly smells of a bureaucrat attempting to cover up deficiencies in his own agency.

The Patriot Act is also raising concerns in the Canadian province of British Columbia, reports the London [Ontario] Free Press. The province's privacy commissioner is examining "whether the act would give US authorities access to information on B.C. residents held by US-linked service providers."

The province has a law which "requires every public body to protect the personal information of individuals it has in its custody and control." The question of the Patriot Act interfering with Canadian rights was raised by unions in British Columbia as the provincial government there moves to outsource public sector work to US companies.