USA Patriot Act: Vital to protect our freedom

The USA Patriot Act and successor legislation are vital to provide the security that ensures our liberty.

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald explains the laws magnificently in this issue of City Journal.

Leading the attack on the laws – designed in part to prevent terrorists from being able to kill – is a loose group that includes the ACLU, Hamas front groups operating as Arab-American or Muslim “civil rights” advocates, and a few elements in the libertarian and conservative camp, shepherded by GOP operative Grover Norquist, whose Islamic Institute has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from Wahhabi sources in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

As MacDonald notes, the New York Times has been egging them on with “news” stories whose political bias and faulty analysis have twisted the truth and fueled the controversy, and set the group-think tone for much of the rest of the American media.

This combination of forces is trying to gut some of the most crucial counterterrorism laws passed since the 9/11 attacks, and to prevent Congress from passing follow-on legislation to allow law-enforcement not only to arrest people after Americans are murdered, but to prevent the attacks before they are perpetrated.

At stake right now are provisions in the 2001 USA Patriot Act and in new legislation the Bush Administration has pending before Congress. Some of the opposition is based on “misinformation about the law and misunderstandings about the real-world challenges the law-enforcement community faces in preventing future September 11ths,” as the Washington Times recently commented.

Preserving the Patriot Act and giving counterterrorism forces new legal tools are so important that Attorney General John Ashcroft has been touring the country to educate the public. The Justice Department also has an informative website, www.lifeandliberty.gov, that explains the laws – and the stakes – in detail.