Feds meet resistance on terror tactics
Add Oakland, Calif. and Flagstaff, Ariz. to the list of nearly two dozen cities that have broken ranks in the domestic war on terror. They join such liberal bastions as Cambridge, Mass., Madison, Wisc., and, of course, Berkeley, Calif.
Last week, the radically-chic city councils of Oakland and Flagstaff approved resolutions opposing the USA Patriot Act, which Congress passed shortly after last year’s terror attacks. Among other features, the year-old law makes it easier for federal authorities to conduct electronic surveillance, to obtain search warrants and to detain terror suspects.
Oakland’s resolution orders city staff to refuse to cooperate with the feds in “investigations, interrogations or arrest procedures, public or clandestine” that, in the city council’s estimation, abrogate civil rights or civil liberties.
Flagstaff’s measure is not quite so straightforward. It is merely written with such ambiguity that it can be interpreted to give local police and city departments a legal defense for failure to cooperate with federal authorities investigating terrorist threats.
Meanwhile, efforts are under way in more 60 other cities and towns, according to The New York Times, to pass resolutions similar to those approved last week by Oakland and Flagstaff. Of course, it bears noting that New York City is not one of the municipalities that has either passed or considered such a resolution. For the residents of America’s largest metropolis understand all too well why the domestic war on terror is so necessary.
New Yorkers are no less concerned about civil rights than residents of Oakland and Flagstaff, and Cambridge, Madison and Berkeley. They are no less fond of the Bill of Rights. It’s just they recognize that the sworn enemies of the United States aim to follow up the terror attack of Sept. 11 last year with attacks that cause further death, further destruction. And they appreciate that the federal law enforcement agencies charged with ferreting out the terrorists in our midst must use every means at their disposal to prevent future atrocities.
The Patriot Act was supported last year not just by Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has been caricaturized as some sort of law-and-order bogeyman by such left-wing groups as the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way, but also by law enforcement figures widely respected on the left like Eric Holder Jr., deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.
The Patriot Act “increases the capability of our country to detect the kinds of threats that we’re going to be, I think, inevitably facing over the coming years,” Holder told Congressional Quarterly. “At some point,” he continued, people have to understand this: that you have to have faith in people in law enforcement and understand that they are good Americans who abide by the law.”
As to the suggestion that the Patriot Act transforms federal law enforcement authorities into some latter day American version of the Gestapo, Holder — a racial minority who almost certainly would be concerned about such a thing — strenuously disagreed. “You don’t have within the Justice Department executive branch people who wear jackboots,” he said, “and who are intent on somehow trampling the rights of American citizens or even the rights of people who are not American citizens.”
Yet, the city councils of Oakland and Flagstaff and Cambridge and Madison and Berkeley beg to differ. They insist that their resolutions opposing the Patriot Act, advising their city workers that they can refuse to cooperate with the feds in the domestic war on terror, are reasonable.
(Joseph Perkins is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune and can be reached at [email protected].)