Dragging Daylight Onto The Patriot Act
By MJ Posted in Law — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Promoted from Diaries.
Any "B" horror film director can tell you that monsters are always the scariest when they're kept lurking in the darkness. At the end of January 2004, the Justice Department's Inspector General completed its Patriot Act-mandated six-month review of civil rights and civil liberties complaints levied against actions conducted under the Patriot Act. The results were that out of 1266 complaints, the Inspector General found precisely zero abuses of the Patriot Act. That's right, in the report by the agency Congress designated to investigate allegations of abuse under the Act, the Patriot Act has been responsible for violating the civil rights of exactly no one. If you are surprised to hear this, it's no wonder. The major networks and major news papers barely breathed a word of it.
Read on....
It also doesn't match the hyperbolic statements that have been routinely espoused from groups like the American Civil Liberties Union which has stated the Patriot Act "expands the government's ability to search private property without notice to the owner" and claimed that people's "library habits could become the target of government surveillance...the secrecy that surrounds section 215 leads us to a society where the thought police can target us for what we choose to read." For nearly three years the ACLU has sounded like a gaggle of hysterical old women - and I don't mean any offense to hysterical old women.
The fact is that law enforcement has always been able to search private property, with a search warrant approved by a judge, without notice to the owner. (See the Supreme Court's Dalia v. U.S. (1979)). The Patriot Act does in fact provide, that upon the issuance of a court order, a court can delay notice of a search warrant's execution when the immediate notification may result in death or physical harm to an individual, flight from prosecution, evidence tampering, or witness intimidation. This may be a good thing (I would argue that it is) or it may be a bad thing, (What exactly is the counter-argument?) but it certainly is not a new thing.
As for the ability to search library records under the infamous section 215, the fact is that any grand jury in the United States, yes, even the one that convenes in the old courthouse in your town, can subpoena your library records if you are suspected of criminal activity. That was actually one piece of evidence leading to the capture of the Uni-bomber, years before there was such a thing as the Patriot Act. The irony is the Patriot Act is actually more protective of our privacy, as it requires approval by a judge, whereas grand juries don't: they simply have to issue the subpoena themselves, without any judicial review. Additionaly, grand juries don't have to make any exception for material protected under the first amendment - unlike the exception in the Patriot Act that prohibits the government from searching for such materials. It is also undisputed, incidently, that section 215 of the Patriot Act has never been used in the nearly three years since it has been enacted. That's right: Never.
That seems to me to be an important fact, as does the fact that of 1266 complaints investigated by the Justice Department IG: not one was substantiated as a violation of our civil liberties. To me, that seems worth commenting on. Yet such evidence of non-abuse under the Patriot Act rarely finds its way to national print or airwaves. The old saying goes that a lie will go around the world twice while the truth is getting its boots on. While the national media may not be outright lying about the Patriot Act, if refusing to report the actual evidence concerning alleged atrocities under the Act isn't dishonest, it's dishonesty's second-cousin.
Also wholly absent from mainstream print or televised media is any meaningful mention of what the benefits of the Patriot Act have been to our national security. On July 13th, 2004, the Justice Dept. Released a report partially detailing some of the successful prosecutions under the Act. The report provides 35 examples of how the law was used to prosecute alleged terror cells in New York, Oregon, Virginia. The report further stated that between the Sept. 11 attacks and May 5, 2004, the Patriot Act was instrumental in terrorism investigations that led to charges against 310 people, of whom 179 were convicted or pleaded guilty. Now I don't know how much safer we are because of the breaking up of the cells and these convictions, maybe appreciably, maybe not. But I do know that the 179 convictions brought about under the Patriot Act, literally from coast to coast: ain't nothing.
My point is this: Maybe our Congress rushed to judgment in passing the Patriot Act so quickly (October of 2001) and so overwhelmingly (98-1 in the Senate and 357-66 in the House of Representatives) after 9/11. Maybe the Patriot Act grants our Executive Branch more extensive enforcement powers then we, as a nation committed to individual liberty, are comfortable with. Maybe it strikes just the right balance between liberty and giving our government the ability to protect us from those who would harm our innocent and defenseless. Maybe.
I honestly don't know what the right answer is. But what I do know is that it is a debate worth having openly and honestly - not a debate starring the Attorney General as the boogieman when the facts just don't match the rhetoric - and not a national conversation premised on the Patriot Act as the second coming of the black plague without also considering if the Act has been a vaccine against a different malady.
It will benefit the entire country if we have this debate with light shining on all viewpoints. The media can help that debate by covering both sides of the argument. If they do, I think Americans will be surprised to find that bringing even a little daylight to bear on the Patriot Act reveals that it simply is not the monster is has been made out to be.
Michael Hunter is a Cleveland-area attorney.
« Rethinking War Powers — Comments (1) | Unintended Legal Consequences — Comments (6) »
Dragging Daylight Onto The Patriot Act 11 Comments (0 topical, 11 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
It's true that the "government" already had many of the powers in the Patriot Act - but many of those were restricted to domestic law enforcement only. Patriot extended those very same powers to terrorist/foreign intelligence investigations. So, while the existence of those powers is "not a new thing", extending them to relevant agencies is just that.
Strannix,
Two good questions.
First, these powers were never before codified and specifically available within the context of investigations about terrorism/national security; before they had been limited to criminal investigations and not available in investigations into funding of terrorism, plots targeting interests abroad...
The Act was really much more about streamlining and consolidating existing authority than breaking any new legal ground.
Second, ANY law can be abused, police CAN fabricate probable cause and illegally arrest and search every citizen, but because their powers of arrest COULD be abused does not mean that those powers do not exist for the very valid purpose of public safety. There is not only ample legal oversight built into the Patriot Act, there is, and always should be public and political scrutiny of how the Act is enforced. All I'm saying is that it should be honest scrutiny and real debate about balancing the potential costs against the actual positive aspects of what has been accomplished under the act.
Insofar as much of the Patriot Act involves abuses of civil liberties (such as having the feds start a file on you with your reading list from the library) that cannot be disclosed to the person whose rights have been violated.
And lets face it....this is the administration that lied about the number of terrorist attacks in the world. do we really think we can trust them on questions of civil rights abuses?
Dumb as it is, doing a crap job on a bureaucratic report isn't ipso facto lying.
I am consistently amazed at the following argument by the left:
THE PATRIOT ACT VIOLATES OUR CIVIL RIGHTS!
Then when not a single violation of anyone's civil rights in the entire United States has been unearthed in nearly three years:
THAT PROVES THAT THE GOVERNMENT IS DOIN IT AND LYING ABOUT IT!
The left can't lose - evidence of a violation proves their case - the lack of any evidence just proves how clever and sinister the government is.
Your first point is well taken.
I think you dodged the second question, however. Naturally, bad actors can and will commit abuses in any situation, and of course you would object to any act being used illegally. My question was more specific; in your view, are there any provisions of the Patriot Act that (used legally) give too much power to an administration that you do not support? Would you find the built-in oversight to be sufficient regardless of who is in power?
No, I'm not uncomfortable with the Patriot Act, and that is not contingent upon the President is. Again, there are not any significant "new" governmental powers created in the act - only a focusing of existing tools on the issue of domestic terrorism, which seems to me to be an entirely reasonable response to the current threat environment. I would be uncomfortable if our government hadn't learned where we were deficient in our ability to protect our citizens, and shored up those areas.
Unless and until there is evidence that the Patriot Act is being abused - it has been a positive in keeping our nation safer. And when an inevitable abuse does occur, as will always happen with any law, I hope people are thoughtful enough to evaluate the law in total instead of screaming that the sky is falling.
Lied?
Dumb as it is, doing a crap job on a bureaucratic report isn't ipso facto lying.
it is when the "crap job" is blamed on "printing schedules", as if it requires months of lead time for the report to be printed.
Everyone who was paying any attention to the news at all KNEW that terrorism was on the rise, and was certainly NOT at its lowest point in 34 years. Questions were raised about the report almost immediately. Yet it took two months for the Bush administration to admit that it had made a mistake---in other words, only AFTER the conclusions of the report had been thoroughly rebutted by the experts was neo-con Richard Armitage forced to acknowledge that it was a "crap job."
The fact is that a "bureaucratic screw-up MIGHT be responsible for the report being written. But it wasn't a bureaucratic screw-up that kept the Bush administration from trumpeting data that was CLEARLY counter-intuitive, and that any intellectually honest person would have insisted be double-checked.
As with the Iraq intelligence, it didn't matter WHAT the facts were, as long as the administration could point to a piece of paper saying what it wanted to say, that piece of paper was considered authoritative.
as if it requires months of lead time for the report to be printed.
Never worked in publishing, eh? Yeah, that's about what happens on stuff like this.
FYI, Armitage, PNAC signer or no, is hardly a neocon.
Sure Union International Ltd.is a supplier of various piping related products as well as sanitary items(include toilet seat and other bathroom accessories). Its business scope includes Pex-Al-Pex Pipe (or multilayer pipe ), pex pipe, PPR pipe, fittings and tools for these pipes, valves, faucets, drainage systems, bathroom shower, woven flexible hoses and other PVC and/or PE hoses.
All the sourcing operations are based in China. Therefore, our prices are rather competitive compared with other suppliers of the same or similar business fields. We aim at gaining more and more customers from other countries with our overall competitiveness advantages. For many ( not all ) products we supply, we can print our customers' brand names or other content on the products and on the export cartons
We also supply lamp products such as table lamps, energy saving lamps, celing lamps, pendant lamps or other art lamps in our new website www.micasa.cn
Your analysis seems to carry two main points.
The first is that the dangers of the Patriot Act have been overstated. For the two examples that you give, you note that the government already has those powers. So my question is, why is the Act necessary if the powers it gives are "not a new thing?"
The second is that the abuses of the Act have been overstated. I would argue that this is beside the point; the question we should ask is not "Has the Act been abused?" but "Can it be abused?" So my question to you is, are there any parts of the Patriot Act that you would be uncomfortable with a Democratic administration exercising?