PROVIDENCE -- Local high school students were well along in a dispassionate debate on national security and terrorism yesterday -- until the adult education director of the International Institute of Rhode Island spoke up.
Nezneen Rahman, the director and a Muslim, said she knows fear.
Rahman said she was reluctant to be candid at the debate, in the auditorium of the Providence Public Library, for fear that the new law that was being discussed could be invoked against her.
On the table was the USA-Patriot Act, which became federal law in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. It aims to strengthen the nation's ability to deter more such attacks.
As she understands it, Rahman said, the law allows increased government surveillance of citizens as well as noncitizens. Rahman, a native of what is now Bangladesh and who has lived in the United States for 23 years, is a naturalized U.S. citizen.
She is proud to be an American, she said, "but right now the flag holds a certain amount of fear for me."
The government is detaining people on the basis of their religion and ethnicity, she charged. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft has contended that the government is taking a close look at immigrants and visitors based on which nation issued their passport, not their religion and ethnicity.
There was no conclusion about whether Rahman's fear is legally well-grounded, but there was plenty of reasoned discussion by debaters ThiRann Neang, Danny Khim and Evelyn Ng Duran of Hope High School, Massiel Frias and Johanna Lince of Mount Pleasant High School, and Jesse Vander Does of the Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center.
They clashed -- but only rhetorically -- in the last of a lecture series dwelling on civil liberties in the wake of Sept. 11 that has been co-sponsored by the library and The Providence Journal.
Yesterday's session involved students who participate in the Providence Urban Debate League and it concentrated on the impact of the new law on immigrants' civil liberties. Nearly half of the students who participate in the Debate League are members of immigrant families.
"We have learned the cost of letting our guard down," said Neang, who said the USA-Patriot Act is an appropriate response to what the terrorists did. Neang likened passage of the law to a homeowner installing an alarm system to deter burglary.
The law necessarily infringes on the freedom of a handful of people, she argued.
"Ten people losing their liberty is bad. Ten million people losing their liberty [due to terrorism] is much worse," she said.
In rebuttal, Vander Does quoted President Bush, who said after the attacks that the U.S. would not let terrorists steal Americans' rights. In a strange way that is true, he said, because Americans eroded their own rights with the passage of the act.
Ng Duran joined him, saying that the United States has done something in the name of safety that makes the immigrant community unsafe. The new law is a surrender to fear, she contended.
As a modest crowd listened, the students, occasionally halting, occasionally assertive, took turns speaking from behind a lectern on a stage. Dorick Scarpelli, a Debate League administrator, said the students' positions did not necessarily reflect their personal opinions.
At one point, with the audience involved, the discussion swung to related topics, including whether the USA-Patriot Act limits public information and whether illegal immigrants have the right to organize and become members of labor unions.
Rahman was one of three guest panelists who joined the event, including Julio Aragon, founder and president of the Mexican Association of Rhode Island, and John T. D'Amico Jr., senior assistant city solicitor for Providence.
As a member of the city's Public Security Task Force, D'Amico said he has spoken to investigators in Rhode Island who say the USA-Patriot Act has been a help by expanding information-sharing about terror threats among law enforcers.
Violations of the U.S. Constitution by the executive and legislative branches of government tend to be corrected, over time, by the U.S. Supreme Court, D'Amico said. He expressed confidence that the same thing will happen, if warranted, with the USA-Patriot Act.
