It's not so worrisome that Jane Harman, U.S. Representative from California's 36th District, filed a bill called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. The times are such that somebody was bound to file a bill like this. What's disturbing is that the bill has passed the House 404 to 6, and is under consideration in the Senate.
Massachusetts Reps. John Olver and Richard Neal voted for the bill; none of the six voting against it were from Massachusetts. They were Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), Jerry Costello (D-Ill.), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), John Duncan (R-Tenn), and, perhaps most predictably, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has consistently opposed attempts to erode civil liberties in response to the events of 9/11.
What most alarms critics of the bill is that it would establish a commission to travel around the country (on Air Force planes, if "necessary") and hold hearings about domestic terrorism, actual or potential. Exactly what would be material for the hearings is not clearly spelled out, and neither is what would happen as a result of the information they would harvest. Critics conjure up images of a new McCarthy era: would there be informants, arrests, blacklists, what?
Though its exact mission is not well filled in, the commission has some important powers. One is the power to commandeer workers from other government agencies, who could be directed to do stints with the commission while still being paid for the permanent jobs they held to begin with. This is worrisome because, even if the neo-McCarthian imagery doesn't materialize, there seems a lively potential for waste of taxpayer money.
Another concern is that the commission's members would be political appointees, selected by the president and congressional leaders. So the character of the commission could be dependent on the character of the administration that appoints it—an alarming idea considering the evidence that this administration has exaggerated some terrorist threats while deliberately compromising the work of people such as Valerie Plame, whose function as a CIA operative was intimately involved with promoting the national security. In short, the potential for manipulation of such a commission is troubling.
So is the bill's definition of homegrown terrorism: "the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."
Social objectives? Would this include so-called "ecoterrorists?" Would this commission work to ferret out al Qaeda cells in Buffalo, or PETA activists "planning" to rough up a lab that tests cosmetics on animals? To protect people, or corporations? What does "threatened" use of force mean? There are ways of quantifying "planned"; it's much harder to form guidelines about what a threat is.
One sensible statement in the bill deserves more attention from its writers themselves, and those who voted for it: "Certain governments, including the United Kingdom… have significant experience with homegrown terrorism and the United States can benefit from lessons learned by those nations."
Fact: the United States was not the first nation in the world to experience a significant terrorist attack on its own soil. Let's learn a few things from the British. First, you don't bomb the attackers' country of origin (i.e., Ireland). Secondly, you don't grossly curtail civil rights in your own country because of the attack. Third, you don't invent phony legal limbos to deal with situations that fall under already existing laws against murder, assault, destruction of property and against conspiracy to commit those acts.
And, as is British policy under current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, you don't create a climate of faux militarization—and a pretext for consolidating executive power—by constantly repeating shibboleths like "war on terror."
