The NYT in an article Right to Free Speech Collides With Fight Against Terror informs,
- The Supreme Court will soon hear Mr. Fertig’s challenge to the law, in a case that pits First Amendment freedoms against the government’s efforts to combat terrorism. The case represents the court’s first encounter with the free speech and association rights of American citizens in the context of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks — and its first chance to test the constitutionality of a provision of the USA Patriot Act.
Fertig is an aging Jewish leftist who was radicalized in the sixties and won’t give it up. Nevertheless the NYT gives proper coverage to what the law says,
- The government defends the law, under which it has secured many of its terrorism convictions in the last decade, as an important tool that takes account of the slippery nature of the nation’s modern enemies.
The law takes a comprehensive approach to its ban on aid to terrorist groups, prohibiting not only providing cash, weapons and the like but also four more ambiguous sorts of help — “training,” “personnel,” “expert advice or assistance” and “service.”
“Congress wants these organizations to be radioactive,” Douglas N. Letter, a Justice Department lawyer, said in a 2007 appeals court argument in the case, referring to the dozens of groups that have been designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the State Department.
Mr. Letter said it would be a crime for a lawyer to file a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of a designated organization in Mr. Fertig’s case or “to be assisting terrorist organizations in making presentations to the U.N., to television, to a newspaper.”
It would be no excuse, Mr. Letter went on, “to be saying, ‘I want to help them in a good way.’ ”
After reading what Fertig had to say, I was “fertig”..
- “Violence? Terrorism?” he asked in an interview in his Los Angeles home. “Totally repudiate it. My mission would be to work with them on peaceful resolutions of their conflicts, to try to convince them to use nonviolent means of protest on the model of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King.”
It seems to me that Fertig could pursue his mission without challenging the Patriot Act. That suggests to me an agenda unrelated to his “mission”.
For those not in the know, “fertig” is Yiddish for “finished”.
