The arrests came quickly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. There was the Muslim man suspected of making anti-American statements. The Middle Eastern grocer, whose shop, a tipster said, had more clerks than it needed. Soon hundreds of men, mostly Muslims, were in American jails on immigration charges, suspected of being involved in the attacks.
They were not.
After shootings last week at a satirical newspaper and a kosher market in Paris, France finds itself grappling anew with a question the United States is still confronting: how to fight terrorism while protecting civil liberties. The answer is acute in a country that is sharply critical of American counterterrorism policies, which many see as a fearful overreaction to 9/11. Already in Europe, counterterrorism officials have arrested dozens of people, and France is mulling tough new antiterrorism laws.
Many European countries, and France in particular, already have robust counterterrorism laws, some of which American authorities have studied as possible models. But the terrorist rampage at the Charlie Hebdo newspaper offices and the Hyper Cacher market prompted calls to go even further. Valérie Pécresse, a minister under former President Nicolas Sarkozy, said France needed its own version of the USA Patriot Act, which gave the United States more authority to collect intelligence and pointed America’s surveillance apparatus at its citizens.
Politicians and civil rights advocates on both sides of the Atlantic bristled at that suggestion, and at a string of arrests in which French officials used a new antiterrorism law to crack down on what previously would have been considered free speech. One man was sentenced to six months in prison for shouting support for the Charlie Hebdo attackers. Up to 100 others are under investigation for remarks that support or tried to justify terrorism, authorities said.
Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, warned against the urge for “exceptional” measures. “The spiral of suspicion created in the United States by the Patriot Act and the enduring legitimization of torture or illegal detention has today caused that country to lose its moral compass,” he wrote in Le Monde, the French newspaper.
François Fillon, the former prime minister under Mr. Sarkozy and now a rival for the center-right, said he opposed a Patriot Act for France. “No freedom should be abandoned,” he said. “I do not support fundamental legislative change.” Otherwise, he said, “we give justification to those coming to fight on our land.”
That the Patriot Act has become shorthand for limiting freedom underscores France’s strong criticism of American surveillance. A Pew Global Attitudes poll last year found that 82 percent of French respondents said it was unacceptable for the United States to monitor its own citizens, a figure nearly as high as the opposition to American surveillance of foreigners. Among European countries, only Greece was more fervent in its objection.
“In the United States, restricting the field of liberty has not produced conclusive results,” said Razzy Hammadi, a Socialist legislator from Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. “No legislation could ever overcome the madness of a single actor of this kind of barbarism.”
The United States is still, more than a decade later, facing fallout from decisions made after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Congress is expected to reconsider the scope of American surveillance as it decides whether to reauthorize the Patriot Act this year. A scathing Senate report released last month outlined in new detail the brutal interrogation carried out in secret by the Central Intelligence Agency.
And on Friday, the Obama administration paid $385,000 to settle a lawsuit from Abdullah al-Kidd, an American citizen who was arrested in 2003, imprisoned for 16 days, repeatedly strip searched and left naked in his cell. He was held, like many others, on the grounds that he was a potential witness in a terrorism case.
There were many arrests but they were Jews.
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