Slashdot Mirror
The Continuing Hunt for PATRIOT Act Abuses
Throtex writes "Orin Kerr, Associate Professor of Law at George Washington University writes at The Volokh Conspiracy that the Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act. This follows from the fact that what the media originally aired as abuses were merely allegations of abuse at the time. Could it be that there has just been a lot of fuss over nothing?"
"Department of Justice is having trouble finding abuses of the USA PATRIOT Act"
These assholes covered up the murder of a Federal inmate at the Oklahoma City Transit Center, among numerous other situations.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
it will be very difficult to prove wrongdoing as long as all the evidence is kept classified. any incriminating evidence can just be hidden.
But what if American citizens are being detained there? I can't seem to find any report one way or the other, and since apparently no one is allowed to visit all of those detained there (at least that I have heard of) how can we know who or even how many people are detained there?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
It doesn't matter if there have been any abuses or not.
What matters is whether the potential is there for abuse or not.
America has stayed free for 200+ years because her people learned a lesson earlier than most others: you don't wait for the secret police to show up at your door to start demanding your rights. Because by then it's too late.
Read my blog.
Defenders of the USA Patriot Act love to defend it by asking its critics how the Patriot Act has personally affected them. Well, I love to turn this argument against them by asking how terrorism has personally affected them, because for the vast majority of the public, terrorism has not affected their lives in any way. The government's response to terrorism, OTOH, has made life much more difficult though for law-abiding citizens.
The reality is that the 9/11 attacks resulted in very few people being killed compared to the number of people that die in, say, auto accidents. The potential for abuse by government officials is simply too great, and even if no abuses have yet been found, the track record of the government is pretty poor in this regard.
"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." -- Ambrose Bierce
Besides which, how on earth could you know that any of the detainees were guilty of crimes? They haven't been charged with any, let alone had their cases heard in any form of court. Or are people now guilty of crimes simply because the US military thinks they are?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
There is nothing in the Patriot Act about Guantanamo Bay. There is nothing about torture, or deporting people to countries where it is practiced. Nothing about depriving anyone of the right to counsel. Nothing about secret trials. Nothing about the way people who aren't subject to the Geneva Conventions are treated.
Do these things happen, and should we be concerned about them? Absolutely. Do they have anything to do with the PATRIOT Act? Nothing whatsoever. Do people who complain about the PATRIOT Act being responsible for these things spread FUD and cloud the real issues? Yes. Is that a real problem? I think so.
I'm saying that if you don't find abuses, it is bad news, because it almost certainly means that you are missing something.
I'm also saying, yes, that in any sufficient large and loosely controlled human organization, if there is scope for abuse, it will happen. Can you think of a counter-example?
Which is more likely?
a) in every instance, reported and unreported, of the use of PATRIOT act powers, even those where the person involved was forbidden from revealing the act had been invoked, all governmental agencies and operatives behaved precisely within the rubric of their powers under the act; or
b) they missed something?
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
If you really want to talk about the Patriot Act, then let me be so bold as to suggest that even if it isn't being abused now it will eventually be abused and probably not even against terrorists. Recall how the RICO statures were intended to be used against organized crime. Nowadays the Feds will threaten RICO prosecutions against just about anybody to force a favorable plea or seek harsher sentences then the normal laws will provide.
just as an aside to you, William S. Cooper's 1991 book entitled 'behold a pale horse' has a chapter that goes into great lengths about FEMA and various other bits of (pending) federal regulations that are frighteningly similiar to our current day patriot act. the word PATRIOT appears many many times, i always found it interesting, especially when his thoughts and fears and whatnot about the 'coming legislation' and the conditions that will exist prior to a [he claims] 'new world order'. it's conspiracy hooplah, so take it at face value, but the similarities are uncanny.
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
Yes, because as we all know, would-be suicide bombers and people on "martyrdom operations" don't want a glorious death.(/sarcasm)
Even for normal crime, the death penalty appears, if anything, to be a negative deterrent. Yes, it might make you feel better - if you believe that the criminal justice system should be about retribution instead of prevention, then you can certainly justify it. But from a prevention standpoint, it's a pretty hard claim to make.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
The fact that you don't care about those human beings or their loss of due process in the slightest demonstrates to me that our education system truly has failed as it has produced a nation of voting age adults who have no idea what the words "freedom", "liberty", "rights", or "critical thinking" mean. The government said it, you believed it.
It frustrates me so much that sometimes I just want to cry about where this country is going. In your eyes, that probably makes me an "America hater".
in a recent 'the Week' (theweekmagazine.com, a wonderful 'get the world news at a glance' publication), a survey of american highschool students said: (and i'm close, but not accurate, i cannot find the origional wording)
39% of high school americans believe the first ammendment is too vague, and the government should provide more regulation.
i will continue to try to find the article, but it's absurd. what kind of propoganda do they show the kids in highschool these days that makes (some/most of) them spineless apathetic boobs? is this really the future of america?
you can't have everything, where would you put it?
"ACTUALLY", the framers were quite varied in their views. From Hamilton's Jay's, and Madison's strong central government to Gerry's, Monroe's and S. Adams's ideals of a weaker one (in favor of stronger states). If there was ONE lesson we could ALL learn that seems to have been forgotten by the right AND the left is that COMPROMISE is was what built this nation and has held it together for the past 200+ years. Longer than ANY other democratic type of government in the past.
The rest of your post is so full of actual ignorance of the facts as to defy comprehension. Unless you are intentially trying to decieve people. Are you?I suggest you re-take your high-school US history class. It's obvious that you've slept through quite a bit the first time.
Ahh /.
;-)
Breeding ground of intelligent discussion for almost a decade
My entire post is open to interpretation. Thats just one possible scenario. I thought it would be fun to point it out. You can argue both ways but I hate the presumption that we are outright denying these guys rights. Maybe we are, maybe we aren't. How can we really judge since we don't even know who most of these terrorists or would be terrorists, or maybe terrorists, or "folks" as GWB puts it are? I am just saying, the Geneva convention doesn't instantly apply because we have them detained at Gitmo.
There will always be collateral damage. My heart goes out to the truly illegally detained. Its a messy world. How can we possibly make everyone happy?
Jeremy
es, because as we all know, would-be suicide bombers and people on "martyrdom operations" don't want a glorious death.(/sarcasm)
Being captured by the enemy and given the death penalty isn't the same esteem as dying on a sucide mission. If you don't believe that you don't understand middle eastern culture.
Even for normal crime, the death penalty appears, if anything, to be a negative deterrent. Yes, it might make you feel better - if you believe that the criminal justice system should be about retribution instead of prevention, then you can certainly justify it. But from a prevention standpoint, it's a pretty hard claim to make.
The criminal justice system should be about justice, and the only justice for a murder victim is for the murderer to be put to death.
If you don't believe that you don't understand middle eastern culture
As an example:
"A shaheed, which means martyr, is a person who is killed as a result of the efforts he makes in support of Allah's cause. Whether he is felled by an enemy bullet or assassinated or taken prisoner and executed is immaterial. As long as the prime reason for killing him is the effort he is making in support of Islam, then his death is martyrdom. He is a shaheed and a shaheed is admitted into heaven without having to account for his sins."
the only justice for a murder victim is for the murderer to be put to death
That is known as "retribution", not prevention. I didn't say that believing in retribution instead of/more than prevention is an invalid concept; only that it is quite hard to validate the death penalty in terms of prevention.
Pinkypants -- my favorite!
Actually, it wouldn't be illegal to detain the suspected terrorists at Gitmo even on US soil. I suspect the only reason the Bush Administration is doing it in Cuba is to quell fires from the extreme left before the start. The fact is, these were all people captured on the battlefield engaged in some kind of resistance or another. There's no need for a trial, there's no need for Geneva Conventions, etc. They were foreign nationals committing organized acts of war against the US, most or all of them weren't in battlefiend dress, none of them are operating as part of a foreign army.
We have to have some way of protecting ourselves against things like this. Why wouldn't we throw these people in the can and forget about them? Who cares about civil rights? It's not like these are citizens that we picked up off the street on suspicion of doing something--we got these guys red-handed, on the battlefield. They don't operate under our Constitution. I just don't see any problem with this whole thing. Can someone explain it to me?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
From what I understand, the Patriot Act consists most of legislation that law enforcement agencies (notably the FBI) have been trying to pass for years. Bascially, they wanted the powers the lost after the excesses of the Vietnam era back again. I don't know much about this personally, but a lawyer who is purportedly an expert on the act told me very little of it was drafted around the time it was introduced. The took all these old, failed bills, slapped them together with some language about terrorism, and rammed it through using some dirty tactics. Not many copies were actually distributed before it was voted on, and it was only distrubuted less than a day before the vote. This is a gigantic legal document, so there was no possibility to know what was in it before the vote. Another lawyer i spoke with, from the ACLU, told me that the day after this passed they received calls from numerous congressman who wanted to know what the hell they'd just voted for. Democracy in action!
I would like to address a reality regards "martyrdom operations." We have seen thousands of suicide bombings in the middle east in recent years. These appear to be some religeous zeolotry and a few of them are. Most are not! What is going on in the middle east is mostly a case of gangsters of the worst type (even worse than the mafia) who will come and hold a family hostage unless they sacrafice one or more of their children to such operations. This has been exposed in Iraq by the Iraqi TV stations of late and it has cut into the support for such dramatically.
These people are nothing but cold blooded gangsters of the very worst sort ever to appear on earth. Any other presentation is a serious mistake. These gangsters use drugs to completely "Zombify" some persons into doing this as well. Their history of doing so is where we in the English Language get the word Assassin. This accounts for most of what we in the west mistakenly think is religious extremism.
Regards using life in prison to deprive these people of "Martyrdom" is another western IDIOTIC MORONIC notion. I have in my past worked as Registered Nurse in the Tennesse State Prison Hospital. (1996-1997 time period) During that time I learned about the internal dynamics operation in a prison. Essentially prisons are run by the inmates. They splinter into 3 groups in order to survive. Whites join the Skinheads or die at the hands of the Black Gangs. (Prison population is about 80% Black) The only alternative is to join Islamic Gangs. Odd man out dies or has a miserable life. Islamic Gangs being the dynamic power brokers they dominate the prison evironment and did so well before 911. Sentancing someone to life in prison who is a genuine Al Qaeda type leader claiming Islamic Status is like giving them a life tenured position in an Al Qaeda College. They train all the short term persons. It is like putting an Al Qaeda recruiter on perminant state payroll.
This is what we saw when the orginal WTC Bombers were organizing and running the 911 coordination from a New York State Prison. Please note that my experience is prior to 911! Our prisons were already inflitrated by Al Qaeda prior to 911 and I saw it then.
I simply do not understand the idiotic notions of people that our prisons punsh or rehabilitate. They do neither. They function mostly as schools for crime. I also do not understand the idiotic notions running round about the death penalty not being a deterrent to crime. Anyone believing this has never worked in a prison. When will people see that the death penalty has nothing to do with corrections it is simply taking out the trash!? Mods get a life if you disagree.
A final note on the Patriot Act, what about SECRET don't people understand. Of course abuses are not being found to be documented. Do you think the Government is going to let you read the records? Heck they are not even keeping records at least not public ones anyway.
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
One everyday consequence of the Patriot Act is that your government is making your bank spy on you. I recently moved some money from a money market account that I have with one bank to my checking account at another bank. I then wired the money from that account to make an investment. (It was easier for me to wire money from my checking account). I got a call on my answering machine from the bank saying that it was about my checking account. I figured they just wanted to be sure it was me who was wiring that money, not some thief with my drivers license and bank card. So I called them back. The lady at the bank started asking all sorts of questions -- who I worked for, where the money I had deposited came from, what the "business purpose" of my investment was, etc. I asked what this was all about and she said it was required by the Patriot Act.
You have no privacy any more.