STOP THE PATRIOT ACT AND THE EMERGIN... 
Wizard
21 y
1,978
R
TAKE ACTION NOW... STAND UP AND BE HEARD!
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11904&c=206
Hi all,
I am preparing to do battle against the Patriot Acts I and II. (I have just joined the ACLU and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee)
I believe this legislation is the biggest enemy of freedom we have in the US today... these bills trash the constitution and give the government unprecedented police state powers.
I have posted html links (or PDF links ) to the actual bills, lots of commentary, and suggestions on what we can do to stop this madness. I have already called and faxed my Congressman and both Senators on this. (link at top to auto fax your reps) I suggest ALL of us in the US cause a stink over this. I plan to.
THIS is how we are going to lose our freedoms in the US. By letting the Congress make the Patriot Act I 'permanent' & pass into law the Patriot Act II. The Bush administration will then be able spy on, jail and ultimately strip opponents of their citizenship.
I am doing a lot research on Pat. Act 1 & 2 . I started reading the Constitution the other night, and I have the complete 'US Government manual 2001/2002' -- the laws and structure and organization of the whole Federal government (legislative executive and judicial, along with all boards, commissions and agencies) on CD along with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
I don't plan to become a Constitutional scholar (yet), however if you want to save your liberties in the US, you'd better damn well get off your butt and learn what they are trying do.
It is my understanding that the Patriot Acts strips 6 of the 10 Bill of Rights...
That is unacceptable.
Anyone wanting to help me on this, please do.... [email protected]
Wizard
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Some articles and thoughts:
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***PATRIOT ACT I
GOP wants to keep anti-terror powers
Broad spying tools would become permanent
New York Times
Wednesday, April 9, 2003
Washington -- Congressional Republicans, working with the Bush administration, are maneuvering to make permanent the sweeping anti-terrorism powers granted to federal law enforcement agents after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Tuesday.
The move is likely to touch off strong objections from many Democrats and even some Republicans in Congress who believe that the Patriot Act, as the legislation that grew out of the attacks is known, has already given the government too much power to spy on Americans.
The landmark legislation expanded the government's power to use eavesdropping, surveillance, access to financial and computer records and other tools to track terrorist suspects. When it passed in October 2001, moderates and civil libertarians in Congress agreed to support it only by making many critical provisions temporary. Those provisions will expire, or "sunset," at the end of 2005 unless Congress reauthorizes them.
But Republicans in the Senate in recent days have discussed a proposal, authored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, that would repeal the so-called sunset provisions and make the expanded powers permanent, officials said. Republicans may seek to move on the proposal this week by trying to attach it to another anti-terrorism bill that would make it easier for the government to use secret surveillance warrants against "lone wolf" Terrorism suspects.
Many Democrats have grown increasingly frustrated by what they see as a lack of information from the Justice Department on how its agents are using their newfound powers. The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said Tuesday that without extensive review, he "would be very strongly opposed to any repeal" of the 2005 time limit. He predicted that Republicans did not have the votes to repeal the limits.
A senior Justice Department official on Tuesday said the Patriot Act has allowed the FBI to move faster and more flexibly to disrupt terrorists before they strike. "We don't want that to expire on us," the official said.
With the act's provisions not set to expire for more than 2 1/2 years, officials expected that the debate over its future would be many months away.
But political jockeying over separate, bipartisan legislation sponsored by Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., appears to have given Hatch the chance to move on the issue much earlier than expected.
The Kyl-Schumer measure would eliminate the need for federal agents seeking secret surveillance warrants to show that a suspect is affiliated with a foreign power or agent, such as a terrorist group. Advocates say the measure would make it easier for agents to go after "lone wolf" terrorists who are not connected to a foreign group.
The proposal was approved unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Republicans were upset because several Democrats said that when the measure reaches the Senate floor for a full vote, perhaps this week or later in the month, they plan to offer amendments that would impose tougher restrictions on the use of secret warrants.
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***PATRIOT ACT II
Patriot Act's Big Brother by DAVID COLE
In early February, the Center for Public Integrity disclosed a leaked draft of the Bush Administration's next round in the war on terrorism--the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (DSEA). The draft legislation, stamped Confidential and dated January 9, 2003, appears to be in final form but has not yet been introduced in Congress. Presumably the Administration had determined that the timing would be more propitious for passage--meaning less propitious for reasoned debate--after we go to war with Iraq. But it is one thing to play politics with the timing of a farm bill; it is another matter to do so with a bill that would radically alter our rights and freedoms.
If the Patriot Act was so named to imply that those who question its sweeping new powers of surveillance, detention and prosecution are traitors, the DSEA takes that theme one giant step further. It provides that any citizen, even native-born, who supports even the lawful activities of an organization the executive branch deems "terrorist" is presumptively stripped of his or her citizenship. To date, the "war on terrorism" has largely been directed at noncitizens, especially Arabs and Muslims. But the DSEA would actually turn citizens associated with "terrorist" groups into aliens.
They would then be subject to the deportation power, which the DSEA would expand to give the Attorney General the authority to deport any noncitizen whose presence he deems a threat to our "national defense, foreign policy or economic interests." One federal court of appeals has already ruled that this standard is not susceptible to judicial review. So this provision would give the Attorney General unreviewable authority to deport any noncitizen he chooses, with no need to prove that the person has engaged in any criminal or harmful conduct.
A US citizen stripped of his citizenship and ordered deported would presumably have nowhere to go. But another provision authorizes the Attorney General to deport persons "to any country or region regardless of whether the country or region has a government." And failing deportation to Somalia (or a similar place), the Justice Department has issued a regulation empowering it to detain indefinitely suspected terrorists who are ordered deported but cannot be removed because they are stateless or their country of origin refuses to take them back.
Other provisions are designed to further insulate the war on Terrorism from public and judicial scrutiny. The bill would authorize secret arrests, a practice common in totalitarian regimes but never before authorized in the United States. It would terminate court orders barring illegal police spying entered before September 11, 2001, without regard to the need for judicial supervision. It would allow secret government wiretaps and searches without even a warrant from the supersecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when Congress has authorized the use of force. And it would give the government the same access to credit reports as private companies, without judicial supervision. Historically, we have imposed a higher threshold, and judicial oversight, on government access to such private information, because government has the motive and the wherewithal to abuse the information in ways private companies generally do not.
But the trajectory of the war on Terrorism is probably best illustrated by an obscure provision that would eliminate the distinction between domestic terrorism and international terrorism for a host of investigatory purposes. The Administration's argument sounds reasonable enough--terrorism is terrorism, whether it's within the United States or has an international component. But in the Patriot Act debates, the Administration argued that it should be afforded broader surveillance powers over "international terrorism" because such acts are simultaneously a matter of domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence. Because foreign intelligence gathering has traditionally been subject to looser standards than criminal law enforcement, the government argued, the looser standards should extend to domestic investigations of "international terrorism." But now it proposes to extend the same loose standards to investigations of wholly domestic crimes.
The DSEA's treatment of expatriation and domestic terrorism are harbingers of things to come. Thus far, much of the war on terrorism has been targeted at foreign nationals and sold to the American people on that ground. Americans' rights are not at stake, the argument goes, because we're concerned with "international" crime committed mostly by "aliens." With the DSEA, however, the Administration seeks to transgress both the alien-citizen line, by turning citizens into aliens for their political ties, and the domestic-international line, extending to wholly domestic criminal-law-enforcement tools that were previously reserved for international terrorism investigations.
How will Congress respond? Thus far, when citizens' rights have been directly threatened, Congress has taken civil liberties seriously. Most recently, it blocked the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness data-mining program. But it blocked it only as applied to US citizens. As long as the Pentagon violates only foreign nationals' privacy, Congress in effect said, Go ahead. But that tactic--protecting citizens' rights while ignoring those of foreign nationals--is untenable, not only on moral grounds but because if the Administration gets its way, we are all potentially "aliens."
about David Cole Legal Affairs Correspondent David Cole ([email protected]), The Nation's legal affairs correspondent and a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, is the author of No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System (New Press) and co-author, with James X. Dempsey, of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties for National Security (New Press). more...
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Good PDF and html file from Kaminski:
http://www.uwplatt.edu/~meinhard/patriotact.pdf
http://www.ccmep.org/hotnews/newusa110901.html
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Patriot Acts I
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/usa.act.final.102401.html
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_bills&docid=f:h3162enr.txt.pdf
http://www.worldsangha.net/USA_Patriot_Act-2.html
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and the 'confidential draft' Patriot Acts II ....
http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/patriot2-hi.pdf
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The ACLU has a number of articles on both Patriot Acts.
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=12126&c=207&Type=s
Here is a detailed summary of PA-2--
http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11835&c=206
http://www.infowars.com/print_patriotact2_analysis.htm
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/ramasastry/20030217.html
http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_newsom_021003_patriot.html
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Bill of Rights & US constitution
http://www.USconstitution.com/
http://www.loc.gov/law/guide/usconst.html
http://www.cis.umassd.edu/~g_ptu/CIS110/Assign/Hw2/US%20Constitution.pdf
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http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFree.cfm?ID=11904&c=206
- Re: STOP THE PATRIOT ACT AND THE EME... Lapis
21 y
1,535
This is a reply to # 571,207Good to here Wizard. I am doing my part. I encourage everyone that sees the globalist plot to get the word out and just maybe we can stop them or at least slow them down.
- Re: STOP THE PATRIOT ACT AND THE EME... NakedLunch
21 y
1,523
- Re: STOP THE PATRIOT ACT AND THE EME... SwedeFox
21 y
1,578
This is a reply to # 571,207hey wizard,
you know, ironically enough, when all this hallaballoo began rearing its ugly head shortly after Sept 11, i was cleaning out my library, donating old books to the local prison. i found an old copy of orwell's "animal farm" which i had read in 9th grade. i wasn't in the middle of a book at the time, so i re-read it that evening, and had an astonishing revelation - george orwell was a freaking GENIUS! even if you've already read it, read it again. although depressing, it was enough to rouse my suspicions and make me angry and paranoid enough to begin looking deeper into what's going on. i'm definitey getting involved one way or another. i come from a healthy stock of hungarian fighters where we've always worn defiance like a medal of honor. somehow, we just need to get the word out there. that's the big challenge. and i hope people look at the invasion of iraq and the overthrowing of that government as an example of what NOT to do. when one does something so serious, one must have a COMPLETE plan to FOLLOW THROUGH. we don't want looting in our streets.- CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm Lapis
21 y
1,719
This is a reply to # 571,220Published on Saturday, March 18, 2000 in the New York Times
How the Central Intelligence Agency Played Dirty Tricks With Our Culture
by Laurence Zuckerman
Many people remember reading George Orwell's "Animal Farm" in high school or college, with its chilling finale in which the farm animals looked back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the exploitative human farmers but found it "impossible to say which was which."
That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans, leaving only the nasty pigs. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film's secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.
The C.I.A., it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell's pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and Communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to "Animal Farm" from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-Communist.
Rewriting the end of "Animal Farm" is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the C.I.A. went, as recounted in a new book, "The Cultural Cold War: The C.I.A. and the World of Arts and Letters" (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist. Published in Britain last summer, the book will appear here next month.
Much of what Ms. Stonor Saunders writes about, including the C.I.A.'s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 1960's, generating a wave of indignation. But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Ms. Stonor Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the agency's activities between 1947 and 1967.
This picture of the C.I.A.'s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critics Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the C.I.A.'s largesse. There are also bundles of cash that were funneled through C.I.A. fronts and several hilarious schemes that resemble a "Spy vs. Spy" cartoon more than a serious defense against Communism.
Traveling first class all the way, the C.I.A. and its counterparts in other Western European nations sponsored art exhibitions, intellectual conferences, concerts and magazines to press their larger anti-Soviet agenda. Ms. Stonor Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were ordered not to publish articles directly critical of Washington's foreign policy. She also shows how the C.I.A. bankrolled some of the earliest exhibitions of Abstract Expressionist painting outside of the United States to counter the Socialist Realism being advanced by Moscow.
In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidized the distribution of 50,000 copies of "Darkness at Noon," Arthur Koestler's anti-Communist classic. But at the same time, the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book. Koestler received a windfall in royalties courtesy of his Communist adversaries.
As it turns out, "Animal Farm" was not the only instance of the C.I.A.'s dabbling in Hollywood. Ms. Stonor Saunders reports that one operative who was a producer and talent agent slipped affluent-looking African-Americans into several films as extras to try to counter Soviet criticism of the American race problem.
The agency also changed the ending of the movie version of "1984," disregarding Orwell's specific instructions that the story not be altered. In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. In the very last line, Orwell writes of Winston, "He loved Big Brother." In the movie, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: "Down with Big Brother!"
Such changes came from the agency's obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent. But instead of illustrating the differences between the two competing systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.
"If the other side can use ideas that are camouflaged as being local rather than Soviet-supported or -stimulated, then we ought to be able to use ideas camouflaged as local ideas," Tom Braden, who ran the C.I.A.'s covert cultural division in the early 1950's, explained years later. (In one of the book's many amusing codas, Mr. Braden goes on in the 1980's to become the leftist foil to Patrick Buchanan on the CNN program "Crossfire.")
The cultural cold war began in postwar Europe, with the fraying of the wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow. Officials in the West believed they had to counter Soviet propaganda and undermine the wide sympathy for Communism in France and Italy.
An odd alliance was struck between the C.I.A. leaders, most of them wealthy Ivy League veterans of the wartime Office of Strategic Services and a corps of largely Jewish ex-Communists who had broken with Moscow to become virulently anti-Communist. Acting as intermediaries between the agency and the intellectual community were three colorful agents who included Vladimir Nabokov's much less talented cousin, Nicholas, a composer.
The C.I.A. recognized from the beginning that it could not openly sponsor artists and intellectuals in Europe because there was so much anti-American feeling there. Instead, it decided to woo intellectuals out of the Soviet orbit by secretly promoting a non-Communist left of democratic socialists disillusioned with Moscow.
Ms. Stonor Saunders describes how the C.I.A. cleverly skimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Marshall Plan to finance its activities, funneling the money through fake philanthropies it created or real ones like the Ford Foundation.
"We couldn't spend it all," Gilbert Greenway, a former C.I.A. agent, recalled. "There were no limits, and nobody had to account for it. It was amazing."
When some of the C.I.A.'s activities were exposed in the late 1960's, many artists and intellectuals claimed ignorance. But Ms. Stonor Saunders makes a strong case that several people, including the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Stephen Spender, who was co-editor of Encounter, knew about the C.I.A.'s role.
"She has made it very difficult now to deny that some of these things happened," said Norman Birnbaum, a professor at the Georgetown University Law School who was a university professor in Europe in the 1950's and early 1960's. "And she has placed a lot of people living and dead in embarrassing situations."
Still unresolved is what impact the campaign had and whether it was worth it. Some of the participants, like Arthur M.
Schlesinger Jr., who was in the O.S.S. and knew about some of the C.I.A.'s cultural activities, argue that the agency's role was benign, even necessary. Compared with the coups the C.I.A. sponsored in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work. "It enabled people to publish what they already believed," he added. "It didn't change anyone's course of action or thought."
But Diana Josselson, whose husband, Michael, ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, told Ms. Stonor Saunders that there were real human costs among those around the world who innocently cooperated with the agency's front organizations only to be tarred with a C.I.A. affiliation when the truth came out. The author and other critics argue that by using government money covertly to promote such American ideals as democracy and freedom of expression, the agency ultimately stepped on its own message.
"Obviously it was an error, and a rather serious error, to allow intellectuals to be subsidized by the government," said Alan Brinkley, a history professor at Columbia University. "And when it was revealed, it did undermine their credibility seriously."
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company
- Re: CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm SwedeFox
21 y
1,576
This is a reply to # 571,223and people wonder why i say i'd much rather read the book than watch the movie. i did not know that was done to the move, i've never seen the movie. i wonder how much longer until "Fahrenheit 451" plays out... i'm also a bradbury fan...
- Re: CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm Lapis
21 y
1,673
This is a reply to # 571,224Me too. Bradbury is another great thinker who crashes through the illusion of the myth makers. George Orwell had a close relative who worked for the CIA and reportedly told him of the globalists plans to dominate the world and thus 1984 came about.
- Re: CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm Lapis
21 y
1,673
- Re: CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm SwedeFox
21 y
1,576
- CIA Propogandizes Animal Farm Lapis
21 y
1,719
- Re: STOP THE PATRIOT ACT AND THE EME... Lapis
21 y
1,535
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