posted on August 25, 2003 07:17:58 PM new
The Domestic Security Enhancment Act The (Patriot Act II) has already been drafted.
If we get attacked again Congress might pass this into law which will make this a Police State. Contact your Senators and Representatives and demand that they take action against the Justice Department.
These provisions are only a sampling of the civil liberties concerns in the Ashcroft proposal, the ACLU said. Specifically, the bill, if signed into law, would also:
Make it easier for the government to initiate surveillance and wiretapping of U.S. citizens under the shadowy, top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (Sections 101, 102 and 107)
Shelter federal agents engaged in illegal surveillance without a court order from criminal prosecution if they are following orders of high Executive Branch officials. (Section 106)
Authorize, in statute, the Department of Justice’s campaign of secret detentions by including a provision that would preempt federal litigation challenging non-disclosure of basic information about detainees. (Section 201)
Threaten public health by severely restricting access to crucial information about environmental health risks posed by facilities that use dangerous chemicals. (Section 202)
Harm Americans’ ability to receive a fair trial by limiting defense attorneys from challenging the use of secret evidence. (Section 204)
Reduce the ability of grand jury witnesses in terrorism investigations to defend themselves against public accusations by gagging them from discussing their testimony with the media or the general public. (Section 206)
Allow for the sampling and cataloguing of innocent Americans’ genetic information without court order and without consent. (Sections 301-306)
Permit, without any connection to anti-terrorism efforts, sensitive personal information about U.S. citizens to be shared with local and state law enforcement. (Section 311)
Undercut trust between police departments and immigrant communities by opening sensitive visa files to local police for the enforcement of complex immigration laws. (Section 311)
Terminate court-approved limits on police spying, which were initially put in place to prevent McCarthy-style law enforcement persecution based on political or religious affiliation. (Section 312)
Provide an incentive for neighbor to spy on neighbor and pose problems similar to those inherent in Attorney General Ashcroft’s "Operation TIPS" by granting blanket immunity to businesses that phone in false terrorism tips, even if their actions are taken with reckless disregard for the truth. (Section 313)
Further criminalize association -- without any intent to commit acts of terrorism -- with unpopular organizations labeled as terrorist by our government. (Section 402)
Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, unfairly target undocumented workers with extended jail terms for common immigration offenses. (Section 502)
Provide for summary deportations without evidence of crime or criminal intent, even of lawful permanent residents, whom the Attorney General says are a threat to national security. (Section 503)
Abolish fair hearings for lawful permanent residents convicted of criminal offenses through an "expedited removal" procedure, and prevent any court from questioning the government’s unlawful actions by explicitly exempting these cases from habeas corpus. Congress has not exempted any person from habeas corpus -- a protection guaranteed by the Constitution -- since the Civil War. (Section 504)
Attorney General John Ashcroft has embarked on an unusual nationwide tour to drum up support for the controversial USA Patriot Act.
August 20, 2003
Enacted six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, the law permits police to monitor e-mail and Web activity without a judge's approval in some circumstances, to obtain court orders in order to conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices and to browse medical and financial records without showing evidence of a crime.
posted on August 26, 2003 01:17:18 PM new
Are Bush, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz Protecting America or Their Own Regime?
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
Adapted from the July 2003 issue of Penthouse Magazine
"The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply."
William Colby, creator of the CIA's Phoenix Program, which targeted Vietnamese leaders for assassination during the Vietnam War
For those of you believe the war on terror and the violent occupation of Iraq will ensure world peace, you've got another thing coming; and that thing is the illegitimate Bush Regime's homeland security infrastructure.
Let me state the point of this article up front: The war on terror, and its "homeland security" counterpart, are flip sides of the same coin. They are the same ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like CIA agent Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, their evil intention is wrapped in a complex matrix of transparent lies. Pointedly, that evil intention is to provide the Bush Regime with political internal security at home, thus enabling it to plunder the world with impunity.
The foreign policy aspect of this synthesis was promulgated on September 20, 2002 in the "The National Security Strategy of the United States" (a.k.a. the Bush Manifesto) in which the Bush Regime confers upon itself the divine right to devastate any nation it dislikes, or has vast oil fields or other natural resources that it covets. This first-degree-murder strategy makes about 70 percent of Americans feel good about Bush. But Bush has an insidious ulterior motive, and if these feel-good Americans were to read the fine print of his Manifesto, they would realize that by generating more human misery around the world, the eternal war on terror will create more dissenters at home, and thus provide Bush with the mandate he needs to impose a de facto military dictatorship, as prescribed in his domestic policy statements: the Homeland Security, Patriot, and Domestic Security Enhancement Acts.
Just as waging war around the world is popular, so too will be suppressing domestic dissent. For example, Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly recently had to defend himself when he said war protesters were "un-American." His producers made him do some fast backpedaling, but the Big Mouth was expressing the true feelings of most of his listeners. The airwaves and editorial columns bombard the public with the Bill Riley message, and that is how peace activists go from being bad Americans to being enemies of the state. And that is how the war on terror translates into a homeland security infrastructure that suppresses dissent.
The Shell Game
Homeland Security is a euphemism for internal security, but that phrase has the nasty ring of McCarthyism to it, and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and racist Senator James Eastland's Internal Security Subcommittee. Before the neo-cons got hooked on terror, America's hawks were obsessed with Godless Communism. Hoover devoted his life to destroying every Communist in America, while the Dulles brothers (CIA Director Allen and Secretary of State John) harnessed the mania and used it as a convenient pretext for Cold War foreign intervention, and laid the foundation stones for the American empire after World War II. In the same way, Bush's anal obsession with terror is the new contrived pretext for solidifying world domination. But as Hoover, Eastland, and the Dulles' knew, without political internal security, Bush cannot wage war abroad, with all the economic benefits that entails.
So Bush, with the help of Joe Lieberman, the Senator from Israel, created the Department Homeland Security to pacify (a euphemism for terrorize) the American people into submission through a number of ploys. This homeland security boondoggle is the biggest reorganization of the U.S. government in 50 years. It might even bankrupt the country and, perhaps intentionally, throw it into a Depression. That remains to be seen. What is certain is that at a cost of $50 billion in taxpayer's money, the homeland security infrastructure will provide Bush with 170,000 political cadres, and the internal security he needs to assure the continuity of his political power indefinitely. Except for providing Bush with political internal security, there is no need for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a Trojan Horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve permanent political dominance.
And he is creating this police state through terror. As the Homeland Security web site assures us, the threat of terrorism "is a permanent condition" that "requires our country to design a new homeland security structure."
Terror as an Organizing Principle of Society
The underlying principle of homeland security (and the war on terror) is that terror is an organizing principle of society. This includes every type of terror, from the shock and awe bombs that liberated Baghdad, to the collective punishments Israel used to crush the Palestinian soul. It's armed propaganda in the form of National Guardsmen eye-balling us at airports, and it's the greatest psywar campaign ever waged, in the form of red white and blue color-coded warnings of terror attacks that never occur, and unsubstantiated reports brought to you by government stenographers at network news.
Terror is the underlying concept. In "Metaphoric Entrapment In Time," researcher Anthony Judge tells how the new homeland security infrastructure is actually an act of "structural violence."
"Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance," Judge notes, quoting two-time Nobel Prize winner Johan Galtung, but "structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government, and of individuals at the interpersonal level is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice."
Now that the Department of Homeland Security has been voted into law, Bush has laid the groundwork for America's new legally criminal social structure, which exploits on both personal and professional levels. This confluence blesses Bush with omnipotence. He is all-powerful. As he said before sacrificing the Iraqis on the altar of his apotheosis: "We have concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world."
Delusions of grandeur? A messiah syndrome? Penis envy? What gives?
Justice as Terror
Administrative detention is the extralegal nail upon which the forthcoming legally criminal homeland security structure hangs. It is a neat way of avoiding the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions by creating "crimes of status." Administrative detention was first used by the CIA in the Vietnam War through the notorious Phoenix "assassination" Program, and was applied against Communists, Nationalists, and anyone else opposing the puppet US puppet regime, just as CIA death squads are operating now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sympathizing with the Communists was a crime of status, as was advocating peace.
Administrative detention is structural violence for the professionals. At the personal level, the terror as an organizing principle of society relies on selective terror, which means destroying one's political opposition through acts of terror directed at individuals. It derives from the Eye of God technique, which plays on primitive fears of an all-seeing cosmic Eye of God that sees into your mind. It was used in World War One by morale officers who sent pilots in small aircraft to fly over enemy camps to call out the names of individual soldiers. CIA psywar expert Ed Lansdale, Graham Greene's model for Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, used this technique in the Philippines in the early 1950s. At night a psywar team would creep into town and paint an eye (like the one that appears atop the pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States) on the wall of a house facing a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.
In South Vietnam the Eye of God trick took a ghastly twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour Hersh that "some psychological warfare [psywar] guy in Washington thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers. When we killed the VC there, they wanted us to spread eagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in the back [of his head] and put his eye in there. The idea was that fear was a good weapon." Likewise, ears were cut off corpses and nail to houses to let the people know that big brother was listening as well. When Viet Cong leaders were found, Phoenix teams murdered and mutilated them along with their families and neighbors as a means of terrorizing the neighboring population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy. To spread the word that everyone was a potential victim, CIA psywar posters pictured a Phoenix with a blacklist trailing from its beak and a snake (i.e. a Communist) grasped in one of its talons. The message was that the omnipotent CIA selectively snatches its prey, in the most hideous way.
The Bush Regime is locked into this method of selective terror. They want you to think they know everything about you: if you've been bad or good, so to speak. Just remember what happened to Uday Hussein and his brother Qusay, and all the other Iraqis featured on the CIA's popular death cards, which are advertised on the Internet.
The modern manifestation of selective terror is the computerized blacklist - the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented: if you don't do what Bush and his clique want, your name pops up and you're suppressed. Be forewarned, the Bush Regime's blacklists include the INS/State Department's TIPOFF; CAPPS II, which uses credit information and secret databases to assess a person's security risk level each time he or she flies; the "No-Fly" blacklist of peace activists, distributed to airlines by the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration; and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department. You know about these lists. You just don't know about the secret ones, the Bush Regime's enemies list of its most powerful domestic political opponents.
Administrative detention and selective terror work in tandem and depend on informant and surveillance programs that identify, in homeland jargon, "terrorist surrogates" at the grass roots level of society. (Attorney General John Ashcroft's Terrorism Information and Prevention System, a.k.a TIPS, was the short-lived prototype.) This is how it happens: on the basis of a false accusation made by an anonymous homeland informant, counter terror teams will arrest a terrorist surrogate, detain the person indefinitely under administrative detention laws in an interrogation center until he or she dies or defects, or is sent to a military tribunal for disposition. Disposition means permanent detention in some perverse torture chambers like the ones in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ultimately, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act will allow Ashcroft to secretly incarcerate and deport U.S. citizens without any thought of ensuring them due process of law. Check out what happened to Jose Padilla.
To summarize so far: Blanket surveillance, blacklists, arrests on the word of anonymous informants, the absence of due process through extralegal administrative detention procedures, military tribunals, incarceration, and deportation are the instruments of the homeland security infrastructure, which will coordinate all existing U.S. intelligence, police, and military units in the attack on terrorists and their surrogates.
Ensuring Political Security
Bush is about to devour his domestic enemies at both the tactical (personal) and strategic (professional) levels. Upper echelon enemies will be dealt with by the Homeland Security Council, which Bush chairs, and which does not appear on any organizational chart. It sets policy for a secret political warfare program. It is the greatest danger facing America today. Like the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic senators, it takes only a few "black propaganda" operations to suppress the leaders of the political opposition. Private contactors may carry out executive actions (what the Israelis fondly refer to as "targeted kills" issued by this all-powerful Board of Directors, as they are not accountable to Congress. Or Bush will employ political action squads from the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which consists of the FBI and CIA's terror experts, and reports only to Bush.
Tactically Bush will neutralize opponents through the Department of Homeland Security, which consists of four directorates: Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection, Science and Technology, Border and Transportation Security, and Emergency Preparedness and Response. The all-important Office of Intelligence, consisting of about 1000 analysts from dozens of agencies, is cloistered within the Directorate of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. This Office, insofar as it will coordinate the other directorates in terror operations, is the nerve center of the DHS political internal security infrastructure.
The Office of Intelligence will manage the CIA's domestic action squads, interrogation, and informant programs, and will wag the homeland security dog by coordinating all in-coming intelligence, and then sending out warnings to state, local and private sector officials. Employees from the CIA's Counter-Terror Center will fill the most important positions within the Office of Intelligence, and will plan daily operations in conjunction with fellow CT Center officers posted within 93 Justice Department terrorism task forces run around the country. With the latest electronic surveillance gadgets available to them, they will reach into every corner of society, including our homes, workplaces, public facilities and computers, to sniff out terrorist surrogates and launch preemptive attacks to neutralize them before they activate.
If you don't believe that the blossoming homeland security infrastructure is already providing political internal security, consider that hundreds of businesses and institutions across the country have already been placed on the CIA's Watch List. According to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, one Bush official said that merely being on the list "could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations...without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released."
Elizabeth Becker of the New York Times reported several months ago that "the leaders of many federal departments and agencies have been scrambling to figure out... how they can influence the outcome [of the impending Department of Homeland Security] without appearing disloyal."
And James Bamford noted that "pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda," and "a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats ...charge that the administration squelches dissenting views."
This is the maximum danger of homeland security, and what it boils down to mandatory self-censorship. Already we passively permit hooded paramilitary policemen with automatic rifles to search our cars, without probable cause, for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. These policemen are helping us, right? They would never turn their guns on us, right?
As stated in a CIA terrorist training manual that came to light almost 20 years ago, "Implicit terror always accompanies weapons, since the people are internally "aware" that they can be used against them."
This is what William Colby was talking about when he was quoted in the prologue to this article as saying, "The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply."
Creating the Political Cadres
Neo-con Michael Ledeen, a certified homelander, rationalized the use of terror as an organizing principle of society when he said, "New times require new people with new standards." According to Ledeen, these new people have the will power to "stamp out" the "corrupt habits of mind" manifest in the thoughts or actions of anyone who opposes Bush Regime aggression. Says Ledeen, "The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give [Homeland Security] a chance to succeed, and us to prevail."
On the international scene, these "new people" illegally invaded Iraq, formed a puppet regime of supplitiefs, stole the nation's oil and are putting the profits in their own pockets, and are now assassinating and otherwise terrorizing, through an updated Phoenix Program, any political opposition, in what amounts to mass murder.
Information management is key in creating the "new people" who will organize the new criminal homeland social structure, and make it appear legal, moral and most importantly, popular. The first step in manufacturing these robots is through motivational indoctrination, which is based on the principle that people will do a anything you ask of them if you make them feel special. In return for adopting the right attitude, a successful career is offered. Several alumni from the CIA's Phoenix Program already enjoy important top homeland security posts, like Major General Bruce Lawlor, Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security, and Roger Mackin, the CIA officer in charge of the Department's counter-narcotics center. From mid-1967 until mid-1968, Mackin ran the Phoenix Program in Da Nang City, and managed its Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center - the organizational model for the Department of Homeland Security. Mackin is also touted as the CIA officer who nailed Colombian drug smuggler Pablo Escobar in a typical Phoenix assassination operation in December 1993.
CIA psywar experts like Lawlor and Mackin will motivationally indoctrinate the 170,000 some odd homeland security personnel to wage political warfare. A training manual on the subject was reprinted in the early 1980s by a former Phoenix officer who got caught up in the Reagan Regime's illegal Contra War. Titled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, it states that "the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the 'political animal' has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets."
Having been politically and motivationally indoctrinated, Critical Infrastructure and other homeland personnel will spy on colleagues who may inadvertently or maliciously serve as terrorist surrogates by publicly or privately revealing information about homeland infrastructure vulnerabilities, such as power grids or computer systems. These cadre will covertly identify and watch terrorist surrogates until it becomes necessary to expose the surrogates in the media. No one will want to be identified, even falsely, as an inadvertent or malicious terrorist surrogate, knowing that they are subject to being "stamped out," as Michael Ledeen suggests. In this way the Bush Regime is organizing its political cadre - Ledeen's "new people" who have been psychologically defeated by the implicit terror around them and, having reverted to the same infantile state of mind occupied by President George W. Bush, have embraced the Fascist principles they've been subliminally indoctrinated with for years through the corporate propaganda machine.
These "new people" are fast joining front organizations like the Freedom Corps, the Citizen Corps, Community Emergency Response Teams (which will train kids at school to prepare for the disasters the Bush Regime will surely visit upon America); the Neighborhood Watch Program that will allow the Bush Regime to detain its drunk and disorderly political opponents as terrorist surrogates; and the Medical Reserve Corps (MRC), through which enfranchised doctors will monitor patients within the faltering health care system.
Within these front groups are cadres trained "in techniques of persuasion over control of target groups" to support the Bush Regime. In the forthcoming national emergency, these cadres will be mobilized, will attend mass meetings, carry placards, shout slogans as part of a Popular Information Program, appeal to our cultural beliefs through Michael Savage-style radio shows, teach classes on correct thinking, organize subtle but massive screening operations designed to generate defectors, who will in turn to denounce former comrades who spoke ill of the Bush Regime. They will intervene with "problem individuals," and everywhere encourage their neighbors to report the activities of terrorist surrogates by dropping a note addressed to the police in local mailboxes. It's not hard to imagine a few of the most highly motivated cadres getting carried away, grabbing ropes, and forming lynch mobs.
Only five percent of the people need to be organized in this fashion for Bush to wield control over the indifferent ninety percent, and defeat the five percent that form the political resistance. This is why psychological operations are the Bush Regime's No. 1 priority. Case in point: when Bush publicly announced the Department of Homeland Security on 6 June 2002, he stated that the organization's primary mission was to "mobilize and focus... the American people "to accomplish the mission of attacking the enemy where he hides and plans." By which he means his political opponents.
Psywar experts prize "compromise and discreditation" operations like the one the FBI used against Martin Luther King before he was assassinated. Information about his extramarital affairs was leaked, and he was sent a message with the suggestion that he should commit suicide. "There is only one way out for you," the forged document read. "You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation." Forged documents like the one used against King are an important facet of political blackmail, and are also used to justify false arrests or conceal illegal operations. We have already seen Network News broadcast "edited" videotapes of Osama bin Laden and, in the Afghanistan war, captured (perhaps forged) documents were routinely used as a form of black propaganda to justify military actions that resulted in "collateral" damage.
The greatest example, of course, is Bush's criminal an impeachable use of forged documents to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. This was an act of treason by the President of the United States, and yet within the new legally criminal homeland security structure, it is business as usual.
We can expect a slew of false rumors from low-level homeland cadre, designed to ruin the reputations of politically incorrect families in their villages and towns, especially environmentalists who pose a threat to Critical Infrastructure corporations. The paranoia that currently infects the Arab-American community will spread until no one is sure who is a spy for the Thought Police. When the national emergency arrives, most likely the forthcoming depression, and the homeland security infrastructure goes on Red Alert, midnight arrests and disappearances into administrative detention centers will become commonplace. Amid the confusion, the CIA will form special units within the 93 terrorism task forces around the country, and other unilateral Phoenix Program-style hit teams will operate under cover of the security forces at their disposal.
The clincher is when the definition of a terrorist surrogate is expanded to include people deemed dangerous to the Public Order, at which point any person can be arrested on criminal charges for political offenses. No specific charge is required; a homelander like Ledeen or Bill O'Rilley will simply accuse someone of disturbing the peace or being un-American The definitions of sedition and treason will grow to include disseminating information about government corruption, or undermining the will of the State by challenging its authority. Calling for civil disobedience will be a really scary threat to the homeland. Cadre in the Office of Cyberspace Security will expose you as a terrorist surrogate for sending sarcastic or satirical emails. How can you prove you were only joking when you blamed Bush for the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, and said Cheney's refusal to investigate proves that Bush did it?
Ultimately, every town will form a Homeland Committee, chaired by a Bush Regime operative who will process confidential reports from concerned citizens about the activities of peaceniks, or people they don't like for personal reasons, such as business competitors. These reports will pass through an ideological filter as they work their way up to the Office of Intelligence and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, where motivated CIA officers will gleefully pull the plug on environmentalists, people espousing national health care, and anyone challenging to the Bush Regime and the internal security forces that are firmly in its grip.
Beware. Ashcroft has vowed to "employ new tools that ease administrative burdens." However benign he might think he means this, these new tools can allow the government to wage political warfare through implicit and explicit terror. And the government can do it! The Geneva Conventions guarantee protection to civilians in time of war, but do not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state. In this way indefinite detention, torture and summary execution, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, are perfectly legal, because they are the result of "administrative procedures" and do not involve a "criminal sentence."
This is what Israel is done to the Palestinians, and this is what the Bush Regime has in store for America through its eternal war on terror: that sad obsession with dominance, itself a sad projection of Bush's feelings of inadequacy, most likely brought upon by his domineering mother Barbara.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban, The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His new book The Strength of the Wolf: the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1968 will be published by Verso. Valentine was an investigator for Pepper on the King case in 1998-1999. For information about Valentine and his books and articles, please visit his website at www.douglasvalentine.com.
posted on August 26, 2003 01:19:14 PM new
Marching Off to War...on the Constitution
By ELAINE CASSEL
The other day, I conducted a continuing legal education seminar for attorneys in Virginia. The group consisted of a varied lot of practitioners_patent attorneys, corporate lawyers, and government attorneys. Among the government attorney was an employee of the Justice Department and a Capital Hill staffer. We got into a lively debate about one of my favorite topics, the Patriot Act and the "war" on terror.
The Justice Department attorney would not entertain any other notion except that the Patriot Act was not only necessary, but was actually "no big deal." The feds had done similarly before (like in the days of J. Edgar Hoover), only this time they had a law to back them up. To those who thought it should be curtailed, she had the same words Ashcroft has for the unaccepting public_I guess you want us all killed, or something to that effect.
The Hill staffer spoke eloquently. To the question from Ms. DOJ about "What would you have us do to fight terrorism?" she replied, in effect, "I would have you do what democracies do. They balance individual rights with national security interests. You don't violate the constitution because you think the threat is huge. There is no perfect security_and cannot be in a democracy."
This attorney went on to lay the blame of the Patriot Act on a Congress (with whom she is employed, on the Senate side) who did not engage in thoughtful debate and who reacted to a crisis with an overreaching, hastily drawn statute. She said that in all likelihood there would be some changes made to the law. That upset the DOJ attorney greatly. She believed, like Ashcroft, that the Patriot Act did not go far enough and Ashcroft and his troops needed yet more powers.
To the fact that many of innocent people are detained behind bars or kept off airplanes (or slowed down at security) because their names are on some list or another, she had not much sympathy. To the hill staffer's plea that Ashcroft & Co. should care that their heavy-handed tactics led to people with minor visa violations being deported, she had no concern. Simply, the only thing she cared about was Ashcroft and his law. It must stand, it must be enforced. And it must be reinforced with more powers and laws.
I wonder if she was taking names of attendees who did not share her views. As she left, she laughingly said, "What's your name again?" Ha, ha, ha. Of course she knew my name. It was meant to be a joke. I did not think it was funny.
John Ashcroft is taking names. He has a list of Congressmen who want to cut off funding for a provision of the Patriot Act that allows warrantless "sneaks and peaks" into people's records and effects. And he has given that list to no other than his 93 prosecutors_the U.S. Attorneys whose duty it is to prosecute the laws of the United States.
So now U.S. Attorneys are taking names. Ashcroft has ordered them to pay visits to those errant members. And to report back to him.
Report what? The questions they ask? Are they going to bring treason charges against the wary and dissenting? Then, too, the prosecutors are being told to "organize town meetings" and meet with citizens like us. The intent of these visits and meetings are unclear. But one thing is certain--federal prosecutors live and breathe but for one purpose--to prosecute us all for something. It is a suspicious motive Ashcroft has cooked <up.It> is Ashcroft's own "sneak and peak" into our thoughts and comments. Whoever is fool enough to talk with one of these foot soldiers better have a lawyer in the wings who will risk being branded a terrorist in order to try and save the unbelievers from Ashcroft's hellfire and brimstone.
"Onward, Ashcroft soldiers. Marching as to war." Ashcroft's war on civil liberties has a new front. The halls of Congress. Your neighborhood and mine. You and me. We should all be wary.
Elaine Cassel practices law in Virginia and the District of Columbia, teachers law and psychology, and follows the Bush regime's dismantling of the Constitution at Civil Liberties Watch. She can be reached at: [email protected]
posted on August 26, 2003 01:31:00 PM new
Victory Act no triumph for freedom lovers
The replacement for Patriot Act II would increase federal powers
CHARLES LEVENDOSKY
Casper Star-Tribune
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, reportedly plans to introduce legislation in September to further expand federal police powers.
The Hatch bill, entitled the Victory Act (Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations Act), is seen by some to be a substitute for the so-called Patriot Act II -- the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 -- which was leaked and caused a furor in Congress as well as among liberal and conservative civil liberties groups. A draft copy of the Victory Act has been posted on the Web (www.libertythink.com).
Meanwhile, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is stumping around the country to generate support for the draconian USA Patriot Act of 2001.
Taxpayers are paying for Ashcroft to tell them you're not really losing your liberties and besides we need these powers to catch terrorists. Ashcroft will be trying to sell audiences on granting the federal government even greater law enforcement authority.
The draconian Patriot Act II would have empowered the federal government to conduct secret arrests, collect DNA samples from anyone suspected of terrorism and allow the government to take away an American's citizenship. Despite its comforting title, the June 27 draft of the Victory Act contains similar provisions.
Section 101 creates a new category of crime called "narco-terrorism." A narco-terrorist would be anyone who possesses even the smallest amount of an illegal drug with the intent to distribute it to someone who is -- with or without the dealer's knowledge -- planning to carry out a terrorist attack. Section 103 increases criminal penalties for those convicted of narco-terrorism and other drug-related crimes.
Section 201 prohibits money exchanges through a money-transfer system based on trust called a "hawala." The bill calls hawalas the crime of money-laundering. Hawalas have been used throughout the world for centuries in small, rural communities where banks do not exist.
An immigrant goes to a "thakedar" who initiates the transfer of funds for a 5 percent fee. He contacts (by telephone or e-mail) a thakedar near the immigrant's hometown and confirms that funds are available for transfer. The immigrant's relative then receives the full amount of the transfer at no charge. The thakedars then settle the cash debt between them. The system is based upon trust and leaves no paper trail. In many communities, it is the only way for a son or daughter to send money to the family.
The U.S. government claims that hawalas are used to funnel millions of dollars to terrorist organizations. The unregulated nature of these transfers leaves them open to such charges.
Section 202 makes it a crime to conceal more than $10,000 on one's person or in any private or commercial vehicle with the intent to transport that money across state lines or out of the United States -- if that money was gained in an illegal activity or is "intended to be used to promote some form of unlawful activity." This newly created crime is called "reverse money-laundering."
A person arrested for transporting funds will forfeit the money upon arrest, even if no charges are filed. The bill not only expands the asset forfeiture powers of the federal government, it expands the definition of money-laundering to include offshore banking as a means of tax evasion.
The money-laundering sections of the Victory Act also extend the authority of federal law enforcement officials to issue nonjudicial or administrative subpoenas -- not needing the signature of a judge -- which require the suspect to turn over financial records and appear in a prosecutor's office to answer questions.
The final sections of the Hatch bill limit when unlawfully obtained evidence from wire or oral communications can be thrown out of court. Such evidence can only be suppressed, according to the bill, if it "involved bad faith by law enforcement," meaning a defendant has to prove the federal police intentionally broke the law.
Sections 503 and 504 increase the power of the federal government by expanding its authority to use administrative subpoenas in all terrorism investigations and to force witnesses to testify in order to apprehend fugitives.
Other sections authorize the government to obtain consumer records from telecommunication companies, Internet service providers and financial institutions such as banks. It allows the government to get these business records without a court order. An administrative subpoena for financial records includes a 30-day delay in notifying the person whose records are being investigated.
Finally, Section 505 expands the government's authority to intercept communications. Under this bill, a federal district judge could authorize a roving wiretap warrant to track all a person's wireless communications, including cell phones and laptop communications.
The ironically named Victory Act would not be a victory for freedom loving people. It's really a wish list for those who want more federal police power.
issued by this all-powerful Board of Directors, as they are not accountable to Congress. Or Bush will employ political action squads from the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which consists of the FBI and CIA's terror experts, and reports only to Bush.