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The Department of Justice secretly drafted a sweeping sequel to the PATRIOT Act. The draft was discovered on February 2, 2003, by the Center for Public Integrity, which posted the plan on its website. This plan was prepared by Ashcroft’s staff and has not been officially released; elected officials were not informed. Among its provisions, PATRIOT II would

• empower the government to strip Americans of their citizenship if they participate in the lawful activities of any group the attorney general labels “terrorist.”

• no longer require the government to disclose the identity of anyone, even an American citizen, detained in connection with a terror investigation—until criminal charges are filed, no matter how long that takes. Thus, an American suspected of being part of a terrorist conspiracy could be held by investigators without anyone being notified. He could simply disappear.

• repeal current limits on local police spying on religious and political activity, reactivating the old Red Squads that used to do such useful things as spying on Unitarians in Dallas. (Unitarians are such a menace.)

• allow government to obtain credit records and library records without a warrant.

• permit wiretaps without any court order for up to fifteen days after a terror attack.

• restrict release of information about health or safety hazards posed by chemical and other plants.

• expand the reach of the already overbroad definition of terrorism—individuals engaged in civil disobedience could lose their citizenship, and their organizations could be subjected to wiretapping.

• permit the extradition, search, and wiretapping of Americans at the behest of foreign nations, whether or not treaties allow it.

• strip lawful immigrants of the right to a fair deportation hearing, and bar federal courts from reviewing immigration rulings.

• authorize a DNA database of “suspected terrorists”—a group so broadly defined it could include anyone associated with “suspected” groups, and any “noncitizens suspected of certain crimes or of having supported any group designated as terrorist.”*

Those are the grand themes of the GeeDubya years, but we mustn’t neglect the little things. As Robert Earl Keen sings, “It’s those little things, those itty-bitty things, that really piss me off.”

• On the day a major earthquake struck the Northwest in February 2001 Bush killed a federal program designed to help communities deal with the effects of natural disasters.

• In June 2002 Bush made an Ohio commencement address about “a new ethic of responsibility” and “a culture of service,” which his advisers claimed had been inspired by his reading from Aristotle, Adam Smith, James Madison, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Cicero, Lincoln, and the founding fathers. In his new ethic, Bush called upon us all to reject “a culture of selfishness” and to embrace “some cause larger than his or her own profit.”

The day before that speech, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove went to speak at a conference of business leaders in Washington. “This is a war,” said Rove, “and we need to make an ongoing commitment to winning the effort to repeal the death tax.” Under current law, the estate tax applies only to estates of over $1 million, and that is set to rise to $3.5 million in 2009. The gross campaign of disinformation claiming the estate tax causes people to lose family farms and small businesses has repeatedly been shown to be false.

• On October 12, 2001, General Ashcroft sent out a memo instructing federal agencies to stall on all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for documents. Such requests should be subject to “full and deliberate consideration.” FOIA has been in effect since 1966, and its acronym has become a verb, as in, “I just FOIAed the guy.” Janet Reno’s 1993 FOIA policy was to put the burden on federal agencies to justify any withholding of “FOIAed” documents.

• John Snow, Bush’s new secretary of the treasury, was CEO of CSX Corporation,