Pen-Elayne on the Web

Terror-Mongering Alert

As our National Mood Ring (thanks, August Pollack) shifts to orange and my dad worries that a commute from Staten Island would bring new problems because the Verrazano Bridge might be a target (and the subways aren't?), as usual I'm more worried about the domestic threats posed by home-grown liberty thieves. Particularly when so many folks, like the ones on the comic board thread I mentioned here, believe none of us is in any danger anyway. After all, said one, “If anything, it seems like people criticizing the Administration and the country are doing very well indeed for it; I'm sure Michael Moore is a lot richer than he already was after his... book and movie came out, Bill Maher has a best-selling book and a new talk show, dozens of lefty web sites have sprung up...” So obviously one must conclude, on the basis of a few privileged folks continuing to do well financially and some of us having blogs, that other people's liberties aren't being routinely trampled at all. Whew!

By this “logic,” there's absolutely no need to be concerned that (as mentioned lots around the blogosphere, and using my Magic Mirror I see Jeralyn and Kevin and Tom and Atrios and Natalie and Lisa and another Kevin and Avedon and George and Oliver and Mark and Jim and even a bit of a gallows humor from Scott) Ashcroft & co. are gearing up for round two of the USA PATRIOT Act, the proposal for which you can look at here in PDF format and which includes the lovely provision called Section 501, “Expatriation of Terrorists.” If this monstrosity were to pass, not only can an American citizen be detained if he or she is suspected or accused of being a terrorist (defined more and more broadly as everything from “breathing while Arab” to “belonging to an organization the people in power don't like”), which is already happening with PATRIOT 1; but that citizen could be expatriated “if, with the intent to relinquish his [or her] nationality, he [or she] becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United Stated has designated as a ‘terrorist organization’.” The key words are “relinquish his nationality” - a citizen formerly had to state an intent to do this, but the new law affirms that his/her intent can be “inferred from conduct.” Thus, engaging in the lawful activities of, or even giving money to, any group arbitrarily designated as a “terrorist organization” by our scarily narrow-minded Attorney General could be presumptive grounds for expatriation. That's right, you could be totally stripped of your citizenship and, I guess, deported somewhere (Guantanamo Bay for some rounds of interrogation and torture, maybe?) if They decide you're a terrorist - and “terrorist” is one of those words like “obscene” where everyone has a different definition but the one that counts is whatever the people currently in power decide. Good thing it's not like they're capricious or change their definitions to suit their political objectives or anything. Good thing it's not like Congress passed PATRIOT 1 with nary a whimper of protest. I don't know about you, my friends, but in my book this proposed expanded clamp-down merits much more of an alert than repeated unnamed and unspecified threats from without.