Here we are, more than ten years after the initial passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, and Hollywood keeps (inaccurately) flogging it as the source of authority for everything bad about the war on terrorism. I actually like ABC's "Scandal" quite a bit, but it falls into the same predictable trap of having bad government agents justify kidnapping, detaining, and torturing an American citizen under the PATRIOT Act.
Um, no. The PATRIOT Act does have a provision for detaining suspected terrorists without charges, but only aliens, not citizens; and it says nothing about torturing those detainees. Moreover, I don't think this provision has ever actually been used, since Guantanamo detention has been justified under the President's Commander-in-Chief powers.
Now, one of the government baddies does say that the citizen detainee is an "enemy combatant," which is closer to the mark, but that just raises the question of why the writers/producers felt it necessary to invoke the PATRIOT Act?
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