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Get Ready for PATRIOT II
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The "fog of war" obscures more than just news from the battlefield. It also provides cover for radical domestic legislation, especially ill-considered liberty-for-security swaps, which have been historically popular at the onset of major conflicts.
The last time allied bombs fell over a foreign capital, the Bush Administration rammed through the USA PATRIOT Act, a clever acronym for maximum with-us-or-against-us leverage (the full name is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism").
Remarkably, this 342-page law was written, passed (by a 98-1 vote in the U.S. Senate) and signed into law within seven weeks of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack. As a result, the government gained new power to wiretap phones, confiscate property of suspected terrorists, spy on its own citizens without judicial review, conduct secret searches, snoop on the reading habits of library users, and so General John Ashcroft wants to finish the job. On Jan. 10, 2003, he sent around a draft of PATRIOT II; this time, called "The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003." The more than 100 new provisions, Justice Department spokesperson Mark Corallo told the Village Voice recently, "will be filling in the holes" of PATRIOT I, "refining things that will enable us to do our job."
Though Ashcroft and his mouthpieces have issued repeated denials that the draft represents anything like a finished proposal, the Voice reported that: "Corallo confirmed ... that such measures were coming soon."
You can read the entire 87-page draft here. Constitutional watchdog Nat Hentoff has called it "the most radical government plan in our history to remove from Americans their liberties under the Bill of Rights." Some of DSEA's more draconian provisions:
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