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Middle East Studies Under Siege
Also in the summer of 2002, in Colorado, state legislators and the governor urged the administrations of Colorado College and the University of Colorado at Boulder to withdraw an invitation to Palestinian spokesperson Hanan Ashrawi to speak on their campuses. The administrations held firm and the lectures occurred without incident. These were examples of local, popular reactions to 9/11, but they show clearly the tendency to treat anything Middle Eastern as a threat. In this period, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, already part of an American story, acquired new significance: the defense of Israel became ever more associated with the war against terror. THE USA PATRIOT ACT The war against terror was quickly launched in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. Its domestic front has been implemented by the USA Patriot Act, passed hurriedly in October, 2001. Some parts of the Act, such as the broadening of the legal definition of terrorism and the criminalization of certain kinds of association, do not have sunset or expiration provisions. Others parts, which give the government widened powers of surveillance, were set to expire by the end of 2005 unless reauthorized by Congress. But Congress was divided: the House wanted to give the government wider investigative powers, while the Senate wanted to add more safeguards in protecting civil liberties. On December 16, 2005, the U.S. Senate blocked reauthorization, saying the bill did not adequately protect the civil liberties of American citizens. Five days later, with time running out, the Senate agreed to extend the Patriot Act by six months. The House, however, rejected the time period, and Congress ended up extending the Act by five weeks. Many of the Act’s provisions and the Bush administration’s determination to maintain and extend them are well known. But it is worth looking at them briefly in order to get an idea of the climate within which the attacks on Middle East studies programs have taken place. The USA Patriot Act collapses previously separate powers of law enforcement and intelligence. Indeed it reverses the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 which, in the wake of various revelations about clandestine C.I.A. activities, aimed at keeping intelligence gathering separate from law enforcement. Certain provisions of the act directly affect universities in the following way: * The Freedom of Information Act is amended, reversing the Clinton administration’s 1993 “presumption of disclosure” and substituting for it Attorney General Ashcroft’s ruling that documents will not be released if there is a “sound legal basis” for refusing a request. * The Family Education and Privacy Act, which among other things protects the confidentiality of student records, is amended. Now the justice department may consult these records without the consent or even the knowledge of students and their parents. * The Electronic Communications Privacy Act is amended. Instead of wiretap authorization, law enforcement agencies may use simple search warrants to seize any voice mail messages. * The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is expanded to cover previously excluded categories of information. And the target of surveillance has been expanded as well: the definition of a “person” now includes academic libraries, bookstores and internet providers. The F.B.I. may request records from these institutions and the institutions are barred from revealing that there have been such requests. Since the Patriot Act requires no reporting, it is impossible to track requests for information except through the House Intelligence Committee, whose deliberations on these matters are classified. Various independent surveys have suggested that there have been at least 500 instances of such requests to libraries alone, but the real number is unknown since many librarians fear mentioning that these have occurred. The suit by A.C.L.U. for an unnamed private library in Connecticut is ongoing and has been tangled up in questions about whether the library’s name can even be mentioned or even if its staff can talk about the requests they received. The Patriot Act also affects the way research can be carried on: * Controls have been tightened, especially for scientists, about what is classified information and what is not. * The Act expands the use of the category of “sensitive but unclassified” to control and oversee research. * The Act now takes the country of origin as a ground for excluding scientists rather than their individual histories. Shortly after the Patriot Act was passed the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control ruled that editing manuscripts from countries on its embargo list (Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Libya, Sudan) could be considered a financial contribution to the author’s country; this effectively ended the possibility of publishing materials by scholars in these countries. After protests the most draconian provisions related to editing were dropped, but publishing the work of a scholar from one of these countries remains an issue. Last year, a noted Iranian dissident’s collection of political writings, unpublishable in his own country, was dropped by an American publisher because Iran was on the embargo list. The punishment for violating the ruling is harsh: up to $1/2 million in fines and 10 years in prison—so other publishers were reluctant to take up the project. The Patriot Act also has had a direct effect on exchanges of students and scholars: * It monitors students through the Student Exchange and Visitor Information System whose elaborate reporting requirements have discouraged many students from attending school in the United States; indeed there has been a significant decline in the number of foreigners applying to graduate schools here.
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