This section of DiscoverTheNetworks examines groups that refer to themselves as the "legal left" and claim to promote civil liberties, but whose true focus is on defending fellow radicals, often including terrorists, whose political agendas reflect or advance their own. These groups seek, in some cases quite overtly, to undermine the efforts of America's security institutions to combat domestic criminals and international enemies. Legal radicals justify these agendas through an ideological framework that casts the United States government as an "oppressive" regime at home and an imperialist intruder overseas.

Civil liberties activists have directed their wrath most consistently toward the Patriot Act, the cornerstone of America's post-9/11 homeland security measures. They characterize the Act as an assault on civil liberties and the invasion of personal privacy that could only come from a totalitarian state.

The major organizations in America's contemporary civil liberties establishment include the Center for Constitutional Rights; the American Civil Liberties Union; the Bill of Rights Defense Committee; the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom; the National Lawyers Guild; the Humanitarian Law Project; People for the American Way; and the National Coalition to Repeal the Patriot Act. These groups share many common agendas with such Muslim advocacy organizations (which also identify the protection of civil liberties as a principal mission) as the American Muslim Alliance; the American Muslim Council; the American Muslim Union; the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the Council on American-Islamic Relations; the Islamic Circle of North America; the Islamic Society of North America; the Muslim American Society; the Muslim Public Affairs Council; and the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada.

Accusing the U.S. government of waging a post-September 11th attack on the Bill of Rights, these organizations have: condemned the Bush administration for expanding the authority of security agencies to conduct wiretaps and surveillance on suspected terrorists; denounced policies permitting the detention of suspected terrorists for longer

periods than ordinary criminals; complained that law-enforcement agencies were engaged in "racial profiling" when they sought to interview Middle Eastern men in the U.S. on temporary visas; lamented that the new Patriot Act regulations permitting law-enforcement and intelligence authorities to share (with one another) information about possible terrorist plots amounted to assaults on people's privacy; opposed as "discriminatory" an INS/Justice Department program requiring males visiting the U.S. from Arab and Muslim nations to register with the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services; protested an FBI anti-terrorism initiative to count and document every mosque (where calls for violent jihad often originate) in America; opposed a new Aviation Transportation Security Act policy prohibiting non-citizens from working as airport security screeners; lobbied against the heightened scrutiny of individuals from terrorism-sponsoring countries at airports and border checkpoints; and opposed the Computer-Assisted Passenger Profiling System (CAPPS) used by airlines to check for various passenger characteristics that have historically been correlated with terrorist motives.
 
At the root of these organizations' positions is their belief that the U.S. has literally brought terrorism upon itself; that terrorism would stop if  the U.S. would improve its behavior; and that the perpetrators of Islamist terrorism are in fact rational individuals trying to air legitimate grievances.  These organizations are inclined to defend even self-declared enemies of the United States such as the radical attorney Lynne Stewart, defender of and conspirator with the "blind sheik" Abdel Rahman who masterminded the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Stewart has openly advocated "violence directed at the institutions which perpetuate capitalism, racism, sexism, and at the people who are the appointed guardians of those institutions and accompanied by popular support." In an interview with the Marxist magazine Monthly Review, she described the Muslim jihadists who have declared war on America as "basically forces of national liberation."

Civil liberties organizations have also been in the vanguard of support for Sami Al-Arian, an indicted terrorist and the former head of North American operations Palestinian Islamic Jihad. In 1997, Al-Arian founded the National Coalition to Protect Political Freedom for the specific purpose of trying to repeal the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," the precursor to the Patriot Act.