Sept. 9, 2002--Do you feel safer, or that your civil liberties are endangered, since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act strengthening the government’s power to spy?

Has student life changed as a result of 9/11?

Two open discussion forums, being held Wednesday, Sept. 11, at UD, may help sort out these issues.

Both forums will be held in Memorial Hall, immediately after the Candlelight Commemoration that begins at 6 p.m. on The Green.

“Casualties at Home: Civil Liberties and Freedom of Speech” will focus on the impact passage of the USA Patriot Act will have on Americans, on civil liberties and on future acts of terrorism. James J. Magee, chairperson of the Department of Political Science and International Relations, and Leland Ware, Louis L. Redding Chair for the Study of Law and Public Policy, will facilitate this forum, which will be held in Room 111. Faculty members will begin each session and encourage the exchange of ideas.

Ware said he’ll give a “broad outline of the Patriot Act” and assess the impact it can have on domestic civil liberties as U.S. intelligence agencies begin conducting investigations under the new rules. The 342-page law, passed a little over a month after the terrorist attack, eases or eliminates restrictions on the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance and leaves a lot of First Amendment legal questions unanswered.

“My goal is to facilitate a dialog,” Ware said. Topics will include the legal status of people who were captured in Afghanistan and are now being held at Guantanamo Bay and the status of persons of Arab descent who live in this country.

Lesa Griffiths, faculty director of the Center for International Studies, and Bahram Rajaee, director of international projects, will conduct the second forum, entitled “The UD Campus and the World.” This forum will meet in Room 037.

“We want to focus on how our students’ relationship with the world changed as a result of 9/11,” Griffiths said.

“We’ll be asking questions like, do they read the paper more, travel less, feel animosity towards people they may not have before 9/11, even how the things they do on a daily basis have changed. We also want to know how students reacted to the display of anti-American feeling in some parts of the world just after the attack and how their world and they have changed as a result.”

Story by Barbara Garrison