Dr. David Marlett, Editor	21 November 2001	Vol II, No. 80
tcn@wilderness-cry.net http://www.wilderness-cry.net/tcn

Save the Constitution

Before we burn the Constitution in this war on terrorism, why don't we try living under it?

In an emergency executive order, President Bush has pushed the panic button, thrown the baby out with the bathwater and discarded 200 years of the rule of law in this country.

It's just a short step to dictatorship when one man has the power to jail or even execute aliens in secret kangaroo courts. And those are just some of the powers assumed by the president in an order released last week.

I don't think there is anyone who takes a harder line than I against Islamist terrorism of the kind we witnessed Sept. 11. But turning America into a police state is not the answer.

We've seen other evidence of this kind of extra-constitutional reaction in the last two months. We've seen federal power grabs - as if centralization of authority has proved effective in the past.

Clearly Bush wants to act decisively, but this is the wrong way to go. There's plenty the U.S. government can and should be doing to protect the country without Talibanizing us.

• No matter what his new-found friend Vladimir Putin says about it, the U.S. has a duty - an obligation - to protect against the inevitable next wave of attack by terrorists and terrorist states. If we're lucky, it might not come for two years, three years or five years. But it is coming. The unthinkable happened Sept. 11, and it will happen again. But instead of hijacked airliners crashing into buildings, it will be missiles carrying nuclear warheads crashing into cities. That's why we must build a missile-defense system.
• The U.S. must begin mobilizing its people and its resources to renew a commitment to civil defense. Russia has civil defense. China does. Do those countries care more about their people than we do?
• We must cut off all aid to terrorists. That's right. We're still subsidizing terrorists around the world - from Yasser Arafat in the Mideast to the Kosovo Liberation Army in the Balkans. What kind of a crazy war against terrorism is this when we are ready to resort to summary executions of suspected terrorists on the one hand, but on the other we are providing them with taxpayer cash?
• Work to achieve energy independence for our nation. It's time to stop relying on Saudi Arabia for our nation's lifeblood. We have oil within our own borders. If this is truly a national emergency, as the president says, let's go get it. Let's drill.
• I'll keep repeating this one until others pick up the cry: Repeal all restrictive gun laws so that every law-abiding American can take part in national defense against this elusive enemy. There obviously aren't enough FBI agents to do the job. Empower the American people. Tell them they have a duty to their country. Deputize 300 million.
• Require all airline crews to be armed. Train them in self-defense. Hasn't unilateral disarmament on planes proven to be a disastrous policy?
• And last, but certainly not least, it's time to realize that a country without borders is not a country at all. It's time to admit we as a nation made a mistake when we relaxed enforcement of immigration laws. An estimated 1 million foreigners per day enter the country. That needs to be stopped. We need to beef up the Border Patrol - five times, 10 times, 20 times if necessary. We need to secure our borders on the north as well as the south. We need to recognize that this enemy we are fighting will never be stopped if we don't control the flood of people over our porous borders.

There's much more we can do - and must do - without so much as smudging the spirit or the letter of the Constitution that sets us apart from other people around the world. This is no time to forget who we are - or who we aspire to be.

Protecting our country isn't the responsibility solely of the president of the United States. It's up to all of us. President Bush has a much bigger army at his disposal than he evidently realizes. It's time to call us as a nation to action - not time to suspend the contract that makes us a nation.
[ Joseph Farah, © 2001 WorldNetDaily.com ]

CONSERVATIVES DEMAND JUSTICE FROM BUSH ADMINISTRATION

*** Nearly 120,000 Citizen Petitions Sent To President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft

*** Petitions Demand Action on Hillary Clinton, UN, and IRS Corruption

(Washington, DC) Judicial Watch, the public interest law firm that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today conveyed 119,218 citizen petitions asking President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft to take specific actions against corruption by Bill and Hillary Clinton, the IRS and the United Nations. Judicial Watch gathered the petitions from its supporters across the United States.

** 59,535 petitions were sent to Attorney General John Ashcroft demanding that he hold Bill and Hillary Clinton accountable using the evidence available to him from Democratic donor Peter Paul. Mr. Paul, who is represented by Judicial Watch, donated over $2 million to Mrs. Clinton's Senate campaign as part of an effort to cement a deal for post-Oval Office employment for Bill Clinton with his companies. Mr. Paul's story has been largely confirmed by ABC News and is backed up by evidence which includes copies of checks, financial records, and candid video and photos. Rather than indict Bill and Hillary Clinton, Peter Paul was indicted on alleged stock fraud by a U.S. attorney from Hillary Clinton's New York. The petitions ask the Attorney General to work out a deal with Peter Paul so that everyone, including Bill and Hillary Clinton, is held accountable.

** 33,580 petitions were sent to President Bush requesting that he rehire Linda Shenwick, the State Department official who singlehandedly uncovered numerous instances of waste, fraud, and abuse of authority at the United Nations and State Department. Shenwick, a Judicial Watch client, was retaliated against by the Clinton State Department for exposing to the Congress and the media the U.N.'s waste of American tax dollars and was fired the day after the presidential elections.

** 26,103 petitions were also sent to President Bush demanding that he fire IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti, a Clinton holdover responsible for illegal audits against conservatives organizations and other perceived adversaries of Bill and Hillary Clinton. For example, under Rossotti's watch, Judicial Watch client Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who was raped by Bill Clinton, was audited. Rossotti has also been caught red-handed in illegal conflicts of interest. Rossotti, as IRS commissioner, has overseen the awarding of IRS contracts to AMS, a company which he founded and in which he still has a major financial interest.
[ Judicial Watch ]

Multiculturalism's Nascent Stress Points

by Paul Craig Roberts

Do you know that there are 15,000 Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces? Are you aware that the U.S. military has Muslim imams?

Following September 11, Capt. Abd Al-Rasheed Muhammad, Imam of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C., asked the North American Islamic Jurisprudence Council if it is permissible for Muslim troops in the U.S. military to fight other Muslims in the war against terrorism.

The council referred the matter to Muslim clerics abroad, who issued a fatwa permitting U.S. Muslims to fight if there was "no alternative."

Whew. The chain of command of the U.S. military remained intact. But not for long. The Middle East Media Research Institute reports that the Arab clerics reconsidered and withdrew permission on Oct. 30, issuing a new fatwa prohibiting U.S. Muslim troops from participating in U.S. attacks on Muslim forces.

Can you see where multiculturalism has brought us? The chain of command in the U.S. Army has Arab clerics at its head.

The idea of a multicultural state is an obvious insanity. The problems of multicultural politics led to the breakup of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In our own time we have witnessed the breakup of the multicultural Yugoslav state and the Russian Empire.

Why do so many educated people believe multiculturalism will work in the U.S.? Or do they believe it?

The political left endorses multiculturalism as an assault on U.S. national identity. Libertarians endorse multiculturalism, because they favor anything that dissolves the state, and there's no better way to dissolve a state than to dissolve national identity.

Neoconservatives endorse multiculturalism, because they see it as endorsement of American values by outsiders. The unending flood of immigrants from different cultures is the neoconservatives' answer to the denigration of American values by the political left.

These positions are understandable if incompatible, but none are legitimate reasons for constructing a political Tower of Babel.

Even under the old rules of the "melting pot," it is doubtful the U.S. could assimilate the high rate of Third World, non-European immigration it has been experiencing for the past three decades. Under the multicultural Balkanization policy in effect, nonassimilation is a guaranteed outcome.

Of all the hyphenated-Americans, Muslims pose the greatest challenge. Islam assimilates neither into a Judeo-Christian civilization, nor into a secular one. Secular Muslim states are experiencing difficulties themselves and have to rely on force to remain in power.

The assimilation of Muslims in the U.S. would be daunting even for a culture aware of the challenge. It became impossible when civil rights policy turned every hyphenated-American into a "preferred minority" and endowed them with special legal privileges.

U.S. civil rights policy not only turned native-born whites into second-class citizens, but also prevents the implementation of sensible airport security measures.

WorldNetDaily reports that in 1999 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced Argenbright Security Inc., which provides airport security, to rehire seven fired Muslim noncitizens, five of whom are citizens of countries on the State Department's terrorist blacklist.

According to the EEOC, "preferred minorities" do not have to be U.S. citizens in order to benefit from elevated group rights.

Argenbright was forced by the U.S. government to rehire, make a cash settlement, apologize, and institute a "Muslim-sensitivity training program for all Argenbright employees."

There you have it. Homeland Security, airport security, and in-flight security are all jokes. U.S. civil rights privileges for "preferred minorities" prevent profiling of suspect religious and ethnic populations, even if the suspects are not citizens and hail from terrorist-friendly countries.

The seven Muslims were fired because they refused to stop wearing their telltale head wraps, making U.S. citizens very nervous passing through airport security after the Muslim bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

With the help of the EEOC, Muslim noncitizens have established that they must make no concession whatsoever to the Western culture that hosts them.

So much for the claims that the unassimilable are being assimilated. The U.S. has forsaken national identity for a Tower of Babel.
[ Washington Times ]

Notable Quotes

"By creating his new Office of Homeland Security and ramming through Congress his so-called anti-terrorism bill, Bush has accrued new power to the federal government not seen since the FDR administration." - Chuck Baldwin

"We must act today in order to preserve tomorrow. And let there be no misunderstanding -- we are going to begin to act, beginning today." --Ronald Reagan

"Only by removing ourselves from NATO and the UN can we reassert our fundamental right to defend our borders without the approval or participation of any international coalition." --Rep. Ron Paul

"Either we abandon the utopian globalism of open borders and 'ally-ally-in-free' immigration or we lose the war on terrorism and our freedoms with it." --Pat Buchanan

"Can we still say it was wise to remove all the locks and doors to our lovely home, so strangers could enter at will?" --Pat Buchanan

"America's heart and soul is more embedded in our love of liberty, self-reliance, and tolerance than by our foreign policy, driven by powerful special interests with little regard for the Constitution." --Ron Paul

"Bear in mind that our system of government preserves not only the rights of people but also our authority over government. One way to make sure this remains so is to avoid open-ended authorization of power in times of crisis." --Paul M. Rodriguez

"The disinformation campaign about our enemies will succeed in proportion to the ignorance level of our citizens." --Cal Thomas

"It is permissible to burn the American flag on university campuses. But don't try waving one." --Paul Craig Roberts

"The elites in our society who openly condemn difficult decisions and sacrifice usually do so because they prefer a comfortable life where no real sacrifice is required of them. This is the life that our society has allowed them for a very long time." --Sterling Rome

The New USA PATRIOT Act

by John Kaminski

The USA Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has eliminated the Constitutional guarantee of probable cause when investigating a crime, and now allows the police - at any time and for any reason - to enter and search your house, your files, your bank account - and not even tell you about it.

Are you a patriot? Well, the fact of the matter is, you are whether you want to be or not. But are you an American or a mindless corporate stooge? Well, that's another question.

The recent passage and signing of the Patriot Act has effectively nullified at least six amendments of the Bill of Rights addendum to the U.S. Constitution. As a result of this, America is longer America, but a police state, pure and simple. This Patriot Bill is, in fact, a massive violation of the Constitution it purports to uphold and improve.

Among other things, it mandates that judges give police search warrants when they ask for them, for any reason. In fact, judges can't deny these warrants to police, because police don't need a stated reason to ask for them.

The Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of American freedom. During the debates on the adoption of the Constitution in the 1790s, its opponents repeatedly charged that the Constitution as drafted would open the way to tyranny by the central government. Many states would not have signed the original Constitution without knowing that these amendments would be added, according to the federal website which displays the Constitution. These amendments became known as the Bill of Rights, which Americans have cherished, protected and fought for for over 200 years.

The Patriot Act rushed through Congress and signed by President George W. Bush is a major step toward a totalitarian state in which individual liberty is crushed by the whim of police and corporate demagogues masquerading as patriots.

The Patriot Act:

• Violates the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee, right to peaceably assemble provision, and petition the government for redress of grievances provision; it violates the First Amendment to the Constitution three times. More on this below.
• Violates the Fourth Amendment guarantee of probable cause in astonishingly major and repeated ways. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution reads: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons of things to be seized." The Patriot Act, now passed and the law of the land, has revoked the necessity for probable cause, and now allows the police, at any time and for any reason, to enter and search your house - and not even tell you about it.
• Violates the Fifth Amendment by allowing for indefinite incarceration without trial for those deemed by the Attorney General to be threats to national security. The Fifth Amendment guarantees that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law, and the Patriot Act does away with due process. It even allows people to be kept in prison for life without even a trial.
• Violates the Sixth Amendment guarantee of the right to a speedy and public trial. Now you may get no trial at all, ever.
• Violates the Eighth Amendment (cruel and unusual punishment).
• Violates the 13th Amendment (punishment without conviction).

Most of the following information is taken from the ACLU's written objections to Congress before and after the passage of the Patriot Act. My comments are in brackets [].

The Patriot Act does the following (I'm putting the immigration stuff at the bottom because that least affects most of the people who will be reading this):

• [It keeps judges out the process and lets cops do what they want (cops meaning FBI, CIA, etc.)] It minimizes judicial supervision of telephone and Internet surveillance by law enforcement authorities in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism - that means anything. How long do you think before that includes political dissent? Oops, too late, that's already happened.]
• It expands the ability of the government to conduct secret searches - again in anti-terrorism investigations and in routine criminal investigations unrelated to terrorism. [Unrelated to terrorism - that means anything they want it to mean. If we don't agree with Nazi Republican ideas, they can now arrest us.]
• It gives the Attorney General and the Secretary of State the power to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations and block any non-citizen who belongs to them from entering the country. Under this provision the payment of membership dues is a deportable offense. [That means, among other things, that Bush and Ashcroft can decide Greenpeace and Ralph Nader are terrorists, and under this law, it can put them in jail.]
• It grants the FBI broad access to sensitive medical, financial, mental health, and educational records about individuals without having to show evidence of a crime and without a court order. [It means they can do what they want for no good reason, except to persecute and imprison people with humanistic, noncorporate rip-off views.]
• It could lead to large-scale investigations of American citizens for "intelligence" purposes and use of intelligence authorities to by-pass probable cause requirements in criminal cases. [Bye bye peace movement. You're all going to jail; me too.]
• It puts the CIA and other intelligence agencies back in the business of spying on Americans by giving the Director of Central Intelligence the authority to identify priority targets for intelligence surveillance in the United States. [This is what America worked so hard for all those years to eliminate.]
• It allows searches of highly personal financial records without notice and without judicial review based on a very low standard that does not require probable cause of a crime or even relevancy to an ongoing terrorism investigation. [They can do any of this stuff without any reason whatsoever. This is the kind of freedom these fascists always wanted - freedom to put everyone who disagrees with them in jail.]
• It creates a broad new definition of "domestic terrorism" that could sweep in people who engage in acts of political protest and subject them to wiretapping and enhanced penalties. [This means they can jail anyone who disagrees with them, and keep them in jail for life without a trial.]

On immigration specifically, the new law permits the detention of non-citizens facing deportation based merely on the Attorney General's certification that he has "reasonable grounds to believe" the non-citizen endangers national security. While immigration or criminal charges must be filed within seven days, these charges need not have anything to do with terrorism, but can be minor visa violations of the kind that normally would not result in detention at all. Non-citizens ordered removed on visa violations could be indefinitely detained if they are stateless, their country of origin refuses to accept them, or they are granted relief from deportation because they would be tortured if they were returned to their country of origin.

It permits the Attorney General to indefinitely incarcerate or detain non-citizens based on mere suspicion, and to deny readmission to the United States of non-citizens (including lawful permanent residents) for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. [Or, what used to be the First Amendment. Now, it doesn't exist.]

Let me just take a bit more of your valuable time to make a couple of points crystal clear, again using material from the ACLU's objections to passage of the Patriot Act.

*** Wiretapping and Intelligence Surveillance

The wiretapping and intelligence provisions in the USA Patriot Act sound two themes: they minimize the role of a judge in ensuring that law enforcement wiretapping is conducted legally and with proper justification, and they permit use of intelligence investigative authority to by-pass normal criminal procedures that protect privacy. Specifically:

1. The USA Patriot Act allows the government to use its intelligence gathering power to circumvent the standard that must be met for criminal wiretaps. Currently FISA surveillance, which does not contain many of the same checks and balances that govern wiretaps for criminal purposes, can be used only when foreign intelligence gathering is the primary purpose. The new law allows use of FISA surveillance authority even if the primary purpose were a criminal investigation. Intelligence surveillance merely needs to be only a "significant" purpose. This provision authorizes unconstitutional physical searches and wiretaps: though it is searching primarily for evidence of crime, law enforcement conducts a search without probable cause of crime.

2. The USA Patriot Act extends a very low threshold of proof for access to Internet communications that are far more revealing than numbers dialed on a phone. Under current law, a law enforcement agent can get a pen register or trap and trace order requiring the telephone company to reveal the numbers dialed to and from a particular phone. To get such an order, law enforcement must simply certify to a judge - who must grant the order - that the information to be obtained is "relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." This is a very low level of proof, far less than probable cause. This provision apparently applies to law enforcement efforts to determine what websites a person had visited, which is like giving law enforcement the power - based only on its own certification - to require the librarian to report on the books you had perused while visiting the public library. This provision extends a low standard of proof - far less than probable cause - to actual "content" information.

3. In allowing for "nationwide service" of pen register and trap and trace orders, the law further marginalizes the role of the judiciary. It authorizes what would be the equivalent of a blank warrant in the physical world: the court issues the order, and the law enforcement agent fills in the places to be searched. This is not consistent with the important Fourth Amendment privacy protection of requiring that warrants specify the place to be searched. Under this legislation, a judge is unable to meaningfully monitor the extent to which her order was being used to access information about Internet communications.

4. The Act also grants the FBI broad access in "intelligence" investigations to records about a person maintained by a business. The FBI need only certify to a court that it is conducting an intelligence investigation and that the records it seeks may be relevant. With this new power, the FBI can force a business to turn over a person's educational, medical, financial, mental health and travel records based on a very low standard of proof and without meaningful judicial oversight.

The ACLU noted that the FBI already had broad authority to monitor telephone and Internet communications. Most of the changes apply not just to surveillance of terrorists, but instead to all surveillance in the United States. [All surveillance. The WTO geeks will love this one. Now we can be just like China.]

Law enforcement authorities -- even when they are required to obtain court orders - have great leeway under current law to investigate suspects in terrorist attacks. Current law already provided, for example, that wiretaps can be obtained for the crimes involved in terrorist attacks, including destruction of aircraft and aircraft piracy.

The FBI also already had authority to intercept these communications without showing probable cause of crime for "intelligence" purposes under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. In fact, FISA wiretaps now exceed wiretapping for all domestic criminal investigations. The standards for obtaining a FISA wiretap are lower than the standards for obtaining a criminal wiretap.

*** Criminal Justice

The law dramatically expands the use of secret searches. Normally, a person is notified when law enforcement conducts a search. In some cases regarding searches for electronic information, law enforcement authorities can get court permission to delay notification of a search. The USA Patriot Act extends the authority of the government to request "secret searches" to every criminal case. This vast expansion of power goes far beyond anything necessary to conduct terrorism investigations.

The Act also allows for the broad sharing of sensitive information in criminal cases with intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the NSA, the INS and the Secret Service. It permits sharing of sensitive grand jury and wiretap information without judicial review or any safeguards regarding the future use or dissemination of such information.

These information sharing authorizations and mandates effectively put the CIA back in the business of spying on Americans: Once the CIA makes clear the kind of information it seeks, law enforcement agencies can use tools like wiretaps and intelligence searches to provide data to the CIA. In fact, the law specifically gives the Director of Central Intelligence - who heads the CIA -- the power to identify domestic intelligence requirements.

The law also creates a new crime of "domestic terrorism." The new offense threatens to transform protesters into terrorists if they engage in conduct that "involves acts dangerous to human life." Members of Operation Rescue, the Environmental Liberation Front and Greenpeace, for example, have all engaged in activities that could subject them to prosecution as terrorists. Then, under this law, the dominos begin to fall. Those who provide lodging or other assistance to these "domestic terrorists" could have their homes wiretapped and could be prosecuted.

[If you have any doubt that these are the trappings of a police state, then you need to go back to elementary school and read about the Constitution, which we no longer have.]

[Fox News Channel reports tonight that 90% of the American people are really happy with what Bush has done. I think somebody wrote this all in a book once, that when a free people gave away their freedom, they did it happily and with much fanfare.]

John Kaminski lives in Englewood Florida. E-mail: skylax@home.com
[ Common Dreams NewsCenter ]

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