By Chip Pitts, KERA 90.1 commentator
Dallas, TX – The Patriot Act provides new tools to fight terrorism. It also promotes cooperation between the FBI and CIA, and through new federal and local "Joint Terrorism Task Forces." Those aren't bad ideas. Except broad new executive branch powers in the hastily passed law sidestep basic checks and balances and judicial review. So, cities and police departments are concerned about liability risks from constitutional rights violations, about the largely unfunded mandates, and about undermining the hard-won community trust required for truly effective security.
The law's expanded definition of terrorism discourages free speech by criminalizing peaceful dissent and civil disobedience. Your home can now be secretly searched without your knowing it. Your most intimate library, bookstore, web surfing, medical, university, and even genetic information can be accessed without probable cause. Individuals can now be secretly arrested and detained indefinitely merely upon the Attorney General's say-so. And the CIA is back in the business of spying on peaceful activists of all sorts, whether pro-life or pro-choice, pro-environment or pro-consumption - even on religious services. Hence the opposition, not only from local mosques whose congregations have been harassed by law enforcement, but by leading Christian and Jewish groups as well.
The mere existence of such laws chilling our First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment freedoms makes us less safe as well as less free. These rights help us determine truth, and monitor security abuses, vulnerabilities, and errors, both directly and through the press.
But reports from local librarians, peaceful activists, and wives of husbands secretly arrested indicate concrete local abuses are already occurring. Given the climate of fear now existing, you can be sure these are just the tip of the iceberg. But three local librarians have contacted me to complain about demands for patron records without showing of probable cause. Several other nonviolent local animal rights, environmental, and peace activists have had houses searched by the FBI without charges being brought. And the Algerian husband of Janna Zeeb, here for decades and with U.S. citizen children, is typical of others who have been held for months on minor immigration charges. Yet her husband had previously been safe enough to have flown President Bush while he was governor of Texas.
Focusing on the innocent instead of the guilty diminishes security for all Dallas residents by wasting scarce law enforcement resources and alienating communities we depend on for intelligence concerning true terrorists. Wednesday's resolution would obligate Dallas libraries to inform patrons of privacy rights, and reaffirm the Dallas police commitment to nondiscriminatory law enforcement.
The many city resolutions confirm that these vital issues of local liberty and security are properly within City Council purview, and it is appropriate to ask its members to respect their oath to uphold the Constitution as the highest law of the land. Cumulatively, the resolutions create the context for intelligent judicial and legislative reform. By voting yes on Wednesday's resolution, Dallas council members can and should join counterparts from around the nation in doing so.
Chip Pitts is volunteer Chair of the nonpartisan Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Greater Dallas.