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Patriot Act faces lawsuits

The ACLU plans to challenge the act in Portland and Detroit, Mich.

Staff, news services
July 30, 2003

DETROIT, Mich. — A coalition of groups led by the American Civil Liberties Union plans to file federal lawsuits today asking judges to declare key sections of the USA Patriot Act unconstitutional.

The ACLU will file lawsuits in Portland and in Detroit.

Passed in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Patriot Act has been heralded by the U.S. Justice Department as a crucial weapon in the war on terrorism.

Federal authorities claim that the act safeguards against abuses of civil liberties, but critics repeatedly have attacked its law as discriminatory and intrusive.

Last week, the Republican-controlled U.S. House voted to repeal a section of the act over the Justice Department’s objections. To date, 143 communities in 27 states, including seven in Oregon, have passed resolutions opposing the law.

The ACLU’s Detroit office said Tuesday that it would announce Wednesday “the first-ever direct constitutional challenge to the USA Patriot Act,” and said separate lawsuits would be filed in Portland and Michigan.

Six Portland-area residents face terrorism-related charges under the Patriot Act.

The U.S. attorney general’s office in Portland handled a complex, 10-month investigation that eventually cracked what U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft called a terrorist cell operating in Portland in 2002.

Five people were arrested in October. A sixth person, computer engineer Mike Hawash, was arrested in the spring. The seventh person charged, Jordanian national Habis al Saoub, remains at large.

The case is expected to serve as a test of the FBI’s new domestic spying powers under the USA Patriot Act, the sweeping expansion of law enforcement powers after the Sept. 11 attacks which Ashcroft supported. It is farthest along of any that challenge secret search warrants.

The lawsuit, to be filed in Detroit by the ACLU, the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and several other groups, seeks to overturn provisions that allow the government wide latitude to seize records, books and papers in investigations of international terrorism, said Mo Abdrabboh, a Dearborn, Mich., lawyer who is on the ACLU’s at-large board.

The area’s large Arab-American community is a major reason for filing the lawsuit in Detroit, he said.

“People are worried about their privacy, and when they check out books they want to feel safe,” said Haaris Ahmad, who heads Michigan’s branch of the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations. “In a free society, people have freedom of thought.”

Said Abdrabboh: “The Constitution is being attacked. This is a position of principle. We hope this is going to be precedent-setting and work to slow the momentum of the government running rampant.”

Abdrabboh pointed to a provision of the law that makes it illegal for a person to disclose that he or she received an order for personal information from federal investigators. Librarians, for example, may be required to disclose to the FBI a list of books a person checked out. And they couldn’t tell the patron that the library had turned over the records to the federal agency.

“Anyone who would come forward could be charged with a felony,” Abdrabboh said.

He said groups that could be subject to future search warrants, like the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, are part of the lawsuit.

Today’s announcement of the lawsuits in Portland and Detroit comes on the same day that U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins plans to hold a forum at Wayne State University defending the Patriot Act. Collins didn’t return telephone calls seeking comment on the planned lawsuits.

Michigan has been a key battleground in the government’s war on terrorism. More than 50 FBI agents are assigned to anti-terrorism efforts working with two dozen federal, state and local task force agents.

Collins has called counter-terrorism “our top priority.” Six assistant U.S. attorneys are assigned to the Anti-Terrorism Task Force here.

In July, two men in metropolitan Detroit were convicted of conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists in the country’s first criminal case to go to trial stemming from the Sept. 11 investigation. They were found with the documents that allegedly plotted attacks against the U.S. air base and a hospital in Jordan. Another man was cleared of all charges and a fourth convicted of a lesser charge.

Critics of the war on terror said they hoped the ACLU lawsuit would point the spotlight on the Patriot Act. The act toughened federal surveillance and law enforcement powers, added new rules to prevent terrorism funding and removed barriers to the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies from sharing information with federal law enforcement.

“I want to see awareness out of this,” said Abed Ayoub, president of the Detroit chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of several civil rights groups partnering in the legal challenge.

Ayoub said he hopes the lawsuits would result in “a sense of relief (in the Arab-American community), a sense that somebody is standing up for our rights.”

Late Tuesday, drafts of the lawsuit still were being circulated between lawyers for the various civil rights groups. The lawsuit will seek to overturn Section 215, which allows the FBI broader access to personal records under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The ACLU’s Abdrabboh said the groups are prepared to fight it out in court.

“All the groups are prepared to take this issue all the way to the top.”


http://news.statesmanjournal.com/article.cfm?i=65449