Congress decides to show patriotism

House Democrats and a handful of Republicans voted to block the extension of the PATRIOT Act last Tuesday, a clear rejection of President Barack Obama’s position on this issue. The PATRIOT Act’s surveillance power is set to expire at the end of this month, so our president is asking for another three-year extension.

The House agrees: Obama was essentially asking for another three years of civil rights violations, alienation of minority groups and overall bad policy.

Criticisms of the PATRIOT Act, passed in the post-9/11 hysteria, have been voiced for years. It violates the Constitution. It targets Americans for surveillance and interrogation based on race, religion or national origin and not for any evidence of wrong-doing. Well-documented studies by organizations such as the ACLU and the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee have shown that the law only helped to sever the relationship between certain minority groups and law enforcement at a sensitive time of national security when cooperation was vital.

For years, Americans of Middle Eastern descent worried about expressing themselves politically or getting involved, for fear of being targeted as “questionable” in the eyes of the government. Incidents of racism and even serious hate crimes often went unreported, just to avoid calling in the police whose adherence to ethical standards were questionable after the crackdown post-9/11.

Recently, Democracy Now featured a documentary on the FBI’s use of the PATRIOT Act. The documentary revealed in shocking detail how FBI officers had used the controversial powers of the law to essentially target Muslim-Americans and force them into compromising situations, in an effort to detain “terrorists” and look tough on crime.

The FBI’s actions, which were sanctioned by the PATRIOT Act, amount to nothing more than entrapment. And how many terrorist plots were foiled by using these controversial tactics? Exactly zero.

Thus, the House decision to block these extensions after ten years is finally a step in the right direction. It’s a shame that a President who ran on a platform of inclusion and undoing past grievances would support such a bill.

The only way to repair the government’s relationship with certain minority groups and make amends for the past ten years of scapegoating is to deny the extensions and support legislation (such as the End Racial Profiling Act) to make sure these groups won’t be targeted in the future.