Much of this is outright lies. Warrants are still required for almost
all activities such as monitoring communications and searches.

Many of
these criticisms were also made against the RICO statute and to date
there have been so few abuses of the statute I've never personally heard
of one. The opposition to the Patriot Act come from those who oppose
America defending itself, mostly idiot liberals and ACLU types
attempting to discredit the Bush administration.

grub@internet.charitydays.uk.co wrote:

What is the USA Patriot Act?
by Kellie Gasink & William Pleasant
Green Party of Chatham County, Savannah Georgia

The USA PATRIOT ACT is an acronym standing for: "Uniting and Strengthening
America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism Act." This legislation was signed into law on October 26, 2002
as Public Law No: 107-56. The USA Patriot Act is composed of 342 pages.
Most lawmakers admit that they never read the bill before voting on it.
Put simply, from October 23 to October 26, a massive piece of legislation
was rammed through both the House of Representatives and Senate, without
public hearings of any sort. It was sold as the legal measures required to
prevent future terroristic attacks on U.S. soil. In the wake of the
September 11, 2001, attacks, the American people were gripped in fear. Any
and all measures of self-protection seemed desirable. But in the hysteria,
the President, aided and abetted by both houses of the federal
legislature, violated the U.S. Constitution and, in turn, stripped away
the basic civil liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights, in the name of
"national security."

The USA Patriot Act (PA) is composed of many laws already on the books
that are designed to counter terrorism in the U.S. What distinguishes the
PA from these pre-September 11 laws is its ENABLING characteristics. Put
simply, the criminal statutes, investigative rules and court procedures
which safeguarded our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties in
previous anti-terror legislation were stripped away by the Patriot Act.
They have been replaced by a system of Executive Branch fiat, now
institutionalized in the department of Homeland Security. How did the USA
Patriot Act accomplish this feat? The USA Patriot Act clamps down on:

FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious labor, and
political institutions without suspecting criminal activity, to assist
terror investigation.

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration
hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and
has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any
other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed
information related to a terror investigation.

RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison
jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to
Americans accused of crimes.

FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize
Americans' personal records, business documents and telephone/internet
activity without probable cause to assist terror investigation.

RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans
indefinitely without a trial.

RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being
able to confront the witnesses against them.

While many Americans were led by the Bush administration to believe that
the Patriot Act was soley directed at foreign nationals in the U.S. who
may pose a military threat to citizens and property (specifically people
of Southwest Asian and North African descent--a version of racial
profiling), it swiftly emerged that the actual day-to-day targets of the
Patriot Act were U.S. citizens and legal aliens. Overwhelmingly, they have
suffered the abuses of federal police policies which have led to public
humiliation, invasion of personal privacy, intimidation, movement control
and monitoring, capricious arrest and detention, and denial of legal
remedy in the court system.

This document will demonstrate the following:

1.. The USA Patriot Act was not necessarily a response to the September
11, 2001 Massacre, but an anti-civil liberties agenda that has gray
whiskers, which found political life in the fear and confusion that
followed September 11, 2001.


2.. The USA Patriot Act targets the civil liberties of Americans, and
effectively stifles domestic political dissent, religious freedom and
labor union activism. It also promotes racial profiling as federal
government policy.


3.. City and county governments can play a leading role in the popular
movement to resist and repeal the USA Patriot Act and all legislation and
Executive Orders that violate the Bill of Rights.


SEDITION OR SEDATION

In an ironical twist of history, the federal government, once viewed as
the guardian of constitutional values against the political caprice of
local governments--especially in the South--is now the chief promoter of
repressive extra-constitutional police policies, primarily based upon
race, religion and national origin, or perceived sympathy for proscribed
categories of citizens and legal aliens.

In 1798, the United States almost went to war with France, because the
French objected to the U.S. Treaty with England and, consequently, began
attacking U.S. shipping. The famed XYZ Affair emerged as the bloody shirt
of the time. The official U.S. government story was that three French
officials demanded bribes from U.S. diplomatic envoys in exchange for
receiving them. President John Adams refused to divulge the names of the
alleged French extortionists, hence they became known as X, Y and Z.
Nonetheless, Adams released the alleged and inflammatory diplomatic
exchanges between the Frenchmen and the U.S. government. America became
outraged and furiously rattled its saber. The war cry was: "Millions for
defense, not one cent for tribute!" The jingoistic Federalist Party led
the war-chant. The political products were the first surge in U.S.
military spending and the first instance of "bi-partisan" support for the
limitation of Americans' civil liberties as a matter of law.

Anti-French fever swept the land. Refugees from the French Revolution fled
in terror. In retaliation for the alleged insult by the French government,
Congress produced the Alien and Sedition Acts.

The Alien Act allowed the President to arrest, imprison, and deport
"dangerous" immigrants on mere suspicion of "treasonable or secret
machinations against the government." If a deported alien returned, the
President could imprison him for as long as he thought "the public safety
may require."

The Sedition Act made it unlawful for any person to write, print, publish,
or speak anything "false, scandalous and malicious" about the government,
either Congress or the Executive, if it was done with the intent to defame
or to bring the government "into contempt or disrepute," or to excite the
hatred of the people against the United States. The President determined
who were the dangerous aliens and who was defaming the U.S. government.

French high seas piracy and alleged diplomatic insult aside, the Alien and
Sedition Acts were actually targeted at American citizens and employed as
a political tool of the Federalist Party. The Alien Act was used by
Federalists to keep out of Congress qualified Democratic candidates who
had only recently become U.S. citizens (such as Swiss immigrant, Albert
Gallatin, who two years later became Secretary of the Treasury under
President Thomas Jefferson). The Sedition Law was used to arrest,
prosecute and jail Democratic newspaper editors who dared to oppose the
John Adams administration.

The 1798 war hysteria gave the Federalist Party the green light to enact
laws that were employed to scapegoat immigrants and silence political
dissent by violating the civil liberties of U.S. citizens. Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison answered President John Adams' attack on the
Bill of Rights with the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions.(1,2) These
documents emphasized that states should and could reject unconstitutional
laws that are enacted by Congress. This resistance, lodged over 200 years
ago, stands as the historical and constitutional bedrock of today's local
government resolutions to resist and repeal the USA Patriot Act; they take
aim at both Congressional enactments and Executive Orders that abrogate
the U.S. Bill of Rights.(3)

THE PALMER RAIDS

The Alien and Sedition Acts got a new lease on life in the wake of World
War One, during the anti-labor union strike hysteria. In 1919, President
Woodrow Wilson appointed A. Mitchell Palmer as his Attorney General.
Worried by the revolution that had taken place in Russia, Palmer declared
that communist agents were planning to overthrow the American government.
His view was reinforced by the discovery of thirty-eight bombs sent to
leading politicians and the Italian anarchist who blew himself up outside
Palmer's Washington home. Palmer recruited J. Edgar Hoover as his special
assistant and together they used the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition
Act (1918) to launch a campaign against labor unionists, social radicals
and leftist organizations.

As a consequence, at least ten thousand legal immigrants and citizen
dissidents were rounded up in the so-called Palmer Raids. They were
subjected to indefinite detention without charges or due process under the
14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. At least 240 legal aliens were
deported, including the radical feminist Emma Goldman.

During World War II, Japanese Americans were placed in internment camps
simply because they were Japanese. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Executive
Order No. 9066 led to the wholesale loss of jobs, businesses and homes by
U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. Not until 1990 did the U.S. government
acknowledge this breech of constitutional norms and apologize. Ultimately,
the wartime internment of Japanese Americans cost the U.S. taxpayer $1.2
billion in reparations to the victims of illegal detention.

During the 1950s, McCarthyism ushered in an era of social paranoia that
resulted in public denunciations, witch hunts, black-listing and, in a few
instances, jailings. The operative legal policy was guilt by association
with any organization or activity that threatened "national security,"
relative to the Cold War competition between the US and the USSR. Under
the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI carried McCarthyism into the
1960s and 1970s, long after the political influence of Senator Joseph
McCarthy had been discredited and dismantled.

The FBI's COINTELPRO (The Counter-intelligence Program) became the
extra-constitutional vehicle by which social activist organizations such
as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the American Indian
Movement, the nascent Lesbian/Gay Liberation Movement and the broad
organized opposition to the Viet Nam War were targeted for espionage,
infiltration and disruption by the U.S. government. These
extra-constitutional activities were carried out under Hoover's belief,
endorsed by successive presidential administrations, that the upsurge of
social activism and the Black-led demand for civil rights in the U.S. were
merely tactics in a strategy for the Soviet takeover of America.

LESSONS FOR TODAY

It is apparent that whenever this country has been faced with military,
political or social crisis, the leading sectors of society have resorted
to violating the Bill of Rights and other Constitutional protections in
the name of an often dubious notion of national security. The costs of
these measures to individuals and classes of victims have been enormous,
and have, historically speaking, accomplished little in promoting social
cohesion or respect for government institutions. They have only left
generations of wounded and embittered people.

The USA Patriot Act is a direct descendant of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act,
a Clinton administration answer to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. James
X. Dempsey and David Cole state in their book, "Terrorism and the
Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National
Security," that the most troubling provisions of prior anti-terrorism
laws, enacted in 1996 and expanded now by the USA Patriot Act, "were
developed long before the bombings that triggered their final enactment."
Dempsey is the former assistant counsel to the House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and Deputy Director at the
Center for Democracy & Technology, and Cole is professor of law at
Georgetown University and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional
Rights.

Reviewing the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, Dempsey and Cole declare that "the
much-touted gains in law enforcement powers" under that Act, "produced no
visible concrete results in the fight against terrorism." They add that
the principles espoused in the Act "were shown in case after case to be
both unconstitutional and ineffective in the fight against terrorism." And
importantly, the writers insist that the United States government has not
shown that the expanded powers it has obtained in the USA Patriot Act are
necessary to fight terrorism.

More specifically, the legal scholars show that it was the Reagan
Administration that initially proposed some of the most troubling
provisions that eventually became part of the USA Patriot Act. When Reagan
proposed those provisions, Congress rejected them on constitutional
grounds. The first Bush Administration then made similar proposals, which
were again rejected by lawmakers. Congress twice refused to enact the
secret evidence provisions proposed by the first Bush administration.
Ironically, just prior to 9/11, Congress was about to pass a law repealing
the secret evidence provisions of the 1996 Antiterrorism Act.

The anti-constitutional provisions proposed by Reagan and the first Bush
administration included the resurrection of guilt by association--a relic
of the McCarthy Era --political association as grounds for exclusion or
deportation, the ban on supporting lawful activities of groups labeled
terrorist, the use of secret evidence and the empowerment of the Secretary
of State to capriciously designate any political or social group as a
terrorist organization without needing judicial or congressional review.

Several members of the House Judiciary Committee, both Democrat and
Republican, balked at the 1996 Anti-Terrorism Act. Lawmakers repeatedly
asked why new legislation was needed and how it would help fight
terrorism. Administration witnesses literally refused to answer lawmakers'
queries.

The Anti-Terrorism legislation was doomed to defeat--but the Oklahoma City
Bombing gave it a new life. The carnage was used as political
justification for the enactment of the very provisions lawmakers had
previously found constitutionally suspect, and even more. Senator Orrin
Hatch tagged on one of his pet projects, namely the limitation of habeus
corpus. This amendment severely constrained people -- nothing to do with
terrorism -- who were convicted in state courts from contesting their
convictions in federal court.

The USA Patriot Act, in the same vein, amplifies the political goals of
making it more difficult for citizens and legal aliens alike to review or
appeal government wrongdoing. It allows for indefinite detention of
suspected (not "proven") aliens, without probable cause of a crime,
without a hearing or an opportunity to defend or challenge the evidence
against them, when they have not even been proven to be a threat and have
already established a legal right to remain here. The only process allowed
the suspected alien is the "right" to go to federal court and sue the
government for its abuses. And the USA Patriot Act even makes that a
dubious affair, since it allows, for the first time in US history, the
introduction of secret evidence and testimony in civil court proceedings.
Moreover, a lawsuit against the federal government for abuses under the
Patriot Act can only be conducted before a judge, no juries allowed.

Dempsey and Cole warned that the changes in fundamental law produced by
the USA Patriot Act "are not limited to terrorist investigations at all,
but apply across the board to all criminal investigations."

"It's not a stretch to imagine that such a vague definition [of terrorism]
could be applied to labor unions, peace activists, and even political
parties, if one or more members engaged in a violent protest that a law
enforcement officer concluded was intended to terrorize another group,"
charged Professor Peter Erlinder of Minnesota's William Mitchell College
of Law. "Homicide, first-degree murder, burglary-historically those are
well-defined crimes. This definition is so malleable, because it allows
for law enforcement to make judgment calls on a case-by-case basis."

TERMS IN USA PATRIOT ACT PRE-DATE 9-11

Without a doubt, the USA Patriot Act is the fruit of a pre-existing
political agenda. This is best illustrated by Section 218, which amended
the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Under FISA, intelligence agencies could use extra-constitutional means to
gather information on foreign powers and their agents. When an
intelligence agency wanted to, for example, conduct a wiretap or search of
a foreign agent it needed only to get an executive certification that the
purpose of the surveillance was to gather foreign intelligence
information. The USA Patriot Act modifies this language to say that it may
only be a "significant purpose" for surveillance. The upshot is that,
without probable cause or judicial review, a member of the executive
branch of government (FBI, CIA, DIA, etc...) can spy on anyone, and the
information may be used in a federal prosecution. In short, the Fourth
Amendment of the U.S. Constitution has been slaughtered by the USA Patriot
Act.

Since 1980, federal courts have consistently thrown out intelligence
information gathered under FISA when it has been established that foreign
intelligence gathering was not the primary purpose of the surveillance.
The USA Patriot Act removes that obstacle to investigative fishing by
federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Furthermore, under the
information sharing provision of Section 203 of the USA Patriot Act,
information gathered in this way can now be shared between intelligence
and law enforcement agencies, for use as they see fit.

The USA Patriot Act is a political animal, composed of claws, hair and
teeth that have been growing for over two centuries. There has always been
hostility to the Bill of Rights and other constitutional measures which
give citizens (and legal aliens) the right to judicial and political
remedy for govermental abuses. The USA Patriot Act is the latest and most
dangerous expression of that political tendency.

When Abraham Lincoln tried civilians in military courts during the Civil
War, the Supreme Court held, in Ex Parte Milligan 71 U.S. 2 (1866): "Those
great and good men foresaw that troublous times would arise, when rulers
and people would become restive under restraint, and seek by sharp and
decisive measures to accomplish ends deemed just and proper; and that the
principles of constitutional liberty would be in peril, unless established
by irrepealable law. The history of the world had taught them that what
was done in the past might be attempted in the future. The Constitution of
the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in
peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at
all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more
pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any
of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of
government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism." (4)

Even in times of this nation's greatest domestic upheaval, there remained
the principles and courage to uphold the basic values of the U.S.
Constitution. Can we, in 2003, dare to fail to do the same?


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For more information, contact the National Coalition to Repeal the USA
Patriot Act, 22 West Bryan St., Savannah, GA 31401. www.repealnow.com.
Toll Free phone: 1-866-237-7563. email: repealnow@lycos.com.

Kellie Gasink is the coordinator of the National Coalition to Repeal the
USA Patriot Act annd is the Chair of the Green Party of Chatham
County/GPUSA. William Pleasant is the Communications Director for the
Green Party of Chatham County.

NOTES 1. Kentucky Resolution 1798

2. Virginia Resolution 1798

3. U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights 1791

4. (http://www.constitution.org/ussc/071-002a.htm)