Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! - Jesse Ventura [120]
The fact is, the Bush administration hasn’t uncovered a single al-Qaeda “sleeper cell” yet inside our borders. The only terrorist convicted since 9/11 is the shoe bomber—even though, in the name of prevention, thousands of Arab and Muslim immigrants have been singled out for FBI interviews and mandatory registration and detention. I saw a cartoon in the Minneapolis paper recently. It had Bush lecturing Castro about continuing sanctions against Cuba because of human rights violations, while Bush stood there next to Guantanamo. The point was well-taken: at Guantanamo, people are being held against their will, without trials, without any human rights. How can one guy accuse another of something he’s doing, too?
I would rather face the terrorists than lose my civil liberties. If protecting our safety means taking away our Bill of Rights, then could I be so crass and bold as to scream “Give me liberty or give me death”? Once freedom is gone—the bedrock foundation that built our country—what’s left to stand for and believe in? Maybe we’ve forgotten the words of James Madison: “If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
To me, the most frightening part of Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11 was the moment he walked into the office of Congressman Conyers to confront him about the Patriot Act. “With your voting record, Congressman, how could you have possibly voted for this?” Moore cried, or something to that effect. Then Conyers grabbed him by the elbow and said, in essence, “Sit down here, young man, there’s something you need to know. Michael, we don’t read any of the bills that we vote on!” Call me naïve, but when I heard that, I almost tipped over in my chair. In other words, they’re told how to vote? It’s all pressure from their party to say yea or nay?
The Patriot Act was rushed into law in those first scary weeks after 9/11. Most people don’t know that its official title was: “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act.” Hence, USA PATRIOT Act. I hesitate to mention this but, after the Reichstag fire in Germany in 1933, Hitler pushed through legislation equally quickly called “The Law To Remove the Distress of the People and State.” That has a little pithier, but eerily similar, ring to it.
The Patriot Act is 342 pages long. It alters some fifteen different statutes, most of which got passed after abuses of surveillance power by the FBI and CIA came to light in the mid-seventies. It’s almost as if somebody had it all ready to be unveiled, but just had to wait for the right moment—a Reichstag fire, a Pearl Harbor type event, to make it a reality.
What does the Patriot Act enable, inside all that fine print? Oh, things like a secret court that meets whenever it chooses to approve undercover surveillance on both foreigners and Americans. Violations of various parts of the Bill of Rights, like illegal search and seizure, indefinite time in jail without a trial, seizure of private property.
And when the Patriot Act came up for reauthorization in 2007, the Democratic Congress fell hook, line, and sinker for White House propaganda. Some aspects give the federal government even broader power than before. The homes, offices, and phone records of Americans can now come under surveillance without a warrant. We can be spied on overseas. The Fourth Amendment is basically gutted.
The New York Times reported, in 2007, that the Pentagon and the CIA are now using a little-known power—known as “national security letters”—in order to get access to the banking and credit records of thousands of Americans. Banks, according to a new book I read called The Terror