Updated 19 March 2006
Franklin Freeman
copyright © the author 2002-6
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The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons provided for defense against real, pretended or imaginary dangers from abroad.(James Madison, 23 February 1799)
The "Patriot Act" was rushed through Congress in just six weeks in autumn 2001. It was given a helping hand by the anthrax attacks. Following hard on the heels of the September atrocities, these attacks "brushed up" the horror and were dovetailed with the stages in the passage of the bill. (See Richard J Ochs, 'Government By Anthrax', for the "dovetailing".) The Democrat-controlled Senate, whose leading Democratic Senators were "attacked" with anthrax letters, passed the bill with a 98-1 majority. That's how well they stood up for liberty! That's how easily they were manipulated and convinced to enact this authoritarian legislation.
The Act was signed into law by President Bush on 29 October 2001, and was valid for four years, until autumn 2005.
The Act's provisions included detention without trial for non-citizen terror suspects, surveillance of mobile phone messages and email, and internet tracking. It also empowered the CIA to extend its intelligence-gathering operations from the foreign to the domestic field (against foreign nationals in the US) for the first time.
About one thousand non-citizens of Islamic origin were initially imprisoned under the Act. They were often held incommunicado, and had difficulty accessing legal representation. On 7 December 2001, the FBI said they believed none was linked either to the September 11 attacks in particular nor to al-Qaeda in general. Not a single one! (The FBI tried to save face by saying that the attacks were planned in Europe and had little help in the US.) (Reported by USA Today.) Some still remain in detention.
...The inspector general, Glenn A. Fine, [later] criticized the lengthy detentions — some up to eight months — of many of the 762 aliens held in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terror attacks and the FBI's assumption of sole authority to decide whether individuals remained a threat.Although ostensibly aimed at "terrorists", the "Patriot Act" has been put to more general use — as was no doubt the prior intention. A report of July 2004 revealed that the Act had been central in bringing charges against 310 people and obtaining 179 convictions or guilty pleas in terrorism cases to that date. But in addition it had been used "in numerous instances ... in traditional criminal investigations, from child pornography prosecutions to the rescue of a kidnapped 88-year-old woman." Attorney General Ashcroft referred to "dozens of [such] real-life cases". However, the Justice Department didn't appear forthcoming on the actual total of non-terrorism cases involving the Act. (Dan Eggen, "[U.S.] Justice Dept. Report Details Use of Patriot Act", Washington Post, 14 July 04, p.A07; Associated Press, "Justice Dept. Details Patriot Act Cases, ABC News online, 13 July 04) (See also "The Purge of the FBI" for the FBI and the Act.)Conditions of custody were often harsh and none of the detainees were convicted of terrorism-related offenses, with such charges brought only against Zacarias Moussaoui [the "20th 9/11 hijacker"].
[Associated Press, 'FBI Promises Changes in Immigrant Terror Cases', 13 June 2003]
The "Patriot Act" inspired copycat legislation in various other countries, ranging from Britain's "anti-terrorist law", with detention-without-trial for foreign suspects (just 14 were detained in 2004)*, to India's, which has not stopped at non-citizens.
In February 2003 a draft sequel to the Act, nicknamed "Patriot 2", which had been quietly developing in Justice-Department circles, was exposed. It contained further repressive provisions. Later its provisions were split up amongst different pieces of legislation in an attempt to get them enacted. (See "US Police-State Hydra Re-Arises Threefold ...".)
Domestic resistance to the Act: By 2006, "397 city and county councils had passed resolutions calling for the repeal of all or part of the act, as had eight state legislatures." (Emile Schepers, "Patriot Act Renewed, repression continues", People's Weekly World, 17 March 2006)
After a struggle, the "Patriot Act" was finally renewed in March 2006. The new version contained
a few positive modifications, most notably that libraries functioning "in their traditional capacity" will no longer be forced to hand over client information in response to federal "National Security Letter," and there are new four year sunset provisions attacked to the Patriot Act's authorization for "roving wiretaps" (i.e. the blanket right of the government to wiretap any phone that a terrorism suspect might use) and the power to seize business records with minimal due process.But some new negative things were also added. The Secret Service will be able to arrest peaceful demonstrators at "special events of national significance" ...
[Emile Schepers, "Patriot Act Renewed, repression continues", People's Weekly World, 17 March 2006]
A list of contents of the 2001 "Patriot Act", together with the final amendments to the Act, can be found at Final text of USA anti-terrorism bill, on Don McCullagh's politechbot.com. These amendments alone run to 31 A4 printout pages; the whole Act is over 300 pages long. Napoleon remarked that a constitution should be short and obscure; the "Patriot Act" is long and obscure, if only by its very length.
Jennifer Van Bergen, in 'The Constitutional Implications of the USA PATRIOT Act', offers some criticisms of the Act.
Footnote
* But around 500 people in the UK had been in apparently continuous detention on remand since 9/11, on charges under the Terrorism Act 2000 (which came into force in Feb. 2001). ("What has become of Britain's 500 'terrorist suspects'?", BBC News online, 4 Dec. 03)