Your rights, their rights.(on the right)(Column)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 12

WE hear the clamor in the matter of the Patriot Act and other measures associated with retiring attorney general John Ashcroft. Just rubbing a hand lightly over U.S. history reminds us that these questions arose in the past, notoriously with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Abraham Lincoln liked to have his own way when pressures were rife, and of course he suspended habeas corpus, to the dismay of members of his own cabinet. Somebody should do something about that situation? Well, somebody is doing something, not surprisingly, under the auspices of Harvard University.

They have going there something called the Harvard Long-Term Legal Strategy Project. Its co-directors are the scholars Philip Heymann snd Juliette Kayyem.

A few people have been sent drafts of the project's tentative findings with, however, a warning that direct quotations are as yet forbidden--a warning so direly repeated on each of eleven pages that one wonders if a bolt of lightning would come down on any transgressor.

But without direct quotation from the project's summaries, we can usefully study the divisions in the questions being posed. The thinking is done logically. Under "Coercive Interrogation," for instance, one sees: "National security viewpoint"--which is elaborated, but in the forbidden language. There follows: "Democratic freedoms viewpoint--which the imaginative reader can easily supply--and then "Recommendations."

We move on to questions of Detentions; Military Commissions; Targeted Killing; Communications of U.S. Persons or Others within the United States Intercepted During the Targeting of Foreign Persons Abroad; Information Collection; Identification of Individuals and Collection of Information for Federal Files; Surveillance of Religious and Political Meetings; Distinctions Based on Group Membership (Profiling); and Oversight of Extraordinary Measures.

I take a single liberty and give the text of Information Collection--"National security ...