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USA Patriot Act
By Laura Flanders
George W. Bush signed the USA PATRIOT Act
into law at the end of October. The acronym stands for Uniting
and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required
to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. But will it unite and
strengthen? Intercept and obstruct? Have any impact on terrorism?
The recent news from Northern Ireland held some clues to those
and other questions, but D.C. lawmakers played deaf. Just
four days before Bush put pen to paper to sign a most Draconian
anti-terror law, the Irish Republican Army announced it had
begun to get rid of its weapons. In response to the IRA move,
British forces began tearing down the hilltop forts that for
years have spied on Catholic communities in the name of stopping
terror. Was the breakthrough in Ireland the result of get-tough
legislation? The pay off for years of civil liberties “sacrifice?”
Britain, in particular Northern Ireland, has had plenty of
experience of both of those. Occupation, Special Powers, Emergency
Provisions, the Prevention of Terrorism Act; internment without
trial, mass surveillance, search and seizure; denial of the
right to travel, to privacy, a broadcast ban; arrest on suspicion,
conviction by “supergrass” or forced confession,
juryless Diplock courts, an always-denied British forces policy
of “shoot to kill”...UK history is rich in tools
to “intercept and obstruct” terrorism. Their effect?
Almost without exception, in the British experience, emergency
legislation “to defend democracy” only served to
undermine people’s rights.
To take one example, consider the 1974 Prevention
of Terrorism Act. Passed in the wake of two IRA bomb blasts
in Birmingham, England, the PTA was rushed through Parliament
within 48 hours by a Labor government. Originally supposed
to have lasted for six months, sixteen years later it was
still in place and was only abolished by the introduction
of the equally draconian Terrorism Act of 2000. Did it intercept
and obstruct? According to Home Office statistics, 97 percent
of those arrested under the Prevention of Terrorism Act between
1974 and 1988 were released without charge. Only 1 percent
were convicted and imprisoned.
Anti-terror law was used instead as an information-gathering
exercise for the British security forces, a tool to intimidate
dissent, to criminalize political activity. Demonized Irish
people were only the first victims. Soon enough, the same
laws were used against members of the British Black Power
movement, and those engaged in the struggle against police
brutality or for immigrants’ rights.
In the 1980s, working class white families
found themselves on the receiving end of the same police tactics
that had been honed in the “war on terror” in Ireland
when hordes of London cops and MI5 intelligence operatives
invaded rural coal mining communities and infiltrated the
labor unions during the decisive miners’ strike in 1984.
“I’m seeing another side of the story now,”
one miner’s wife told a reporter then. But she was seeing
it far too late.
Did get-tough law obstruct terror? During
the period of the Prevention of Terrorism Act, the UK saw
the bombings of Harrods, Enniskillen and the Grand Hotel in
Brighton. “One thing it did not do was stop, stem or
in any way combat terrorism,” wrote the Guardian newspaper’s
Washington reporter on October 1. The deadly bomb attack on
the Irish town of Omagh, wrote the Guardian, “showed
us that [these methods] could not extinguish terrorism completely
because a few dedicated people can cause enormous havoc...”
Did anti-terror law erode support for the
IRA — whose members fight for the re-unification of an
independent Ireland — or the myriad of Unionist terror
groups who fight to keep the Irish colony under British control?
Not half as much as political will did. In Northern Ireland,
where the street violence and political hostility remain,
it was not the Prevention of Terrorism Act which isolated
the street fighters and bombers, but the Good Friday Agreement
which started the talks about a political settlement.
A majority of people in Ireland, North and
South, cast their vote for the Good Friday Agreement because
at last it offered a concrete plan to build justice for all
by uprooting centuries of discrimination, deprivation and
the denial of political, social and cultural rights.
Could UK history tell US people something?
Only if those people care to listen.
November 7, 2001
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