|
Guest
|
Quote:
Originally posted by Timber Loftis:
Thanks a lot TL [img]smile.gif[/img] . It is good that it is noted that these "bullets" are basicly this guys interpretation and not actually what is said or really meant by the associated articles. I mean if they had not pointed it out, it would be readily apparent that these are not "officially listed" items in teh act. This shows a basic level of openness which I like in a source.
The professor's not-so-brief list of problems:
____________________________________________
It is a crime for anyone in this country to contribute money or other material support to the activities of a group on the State Department's terrorist watch list. Organizations are so designated on the basis of secret evidence, and their inclusion on the list cannot be challenged in court. Members of any such targeted organization can be deported even if they have not been involved in any illegal activities. The government freely admits that some of the groups it will designate are broad-based organizations engaged in lawful social, political, and humanitarian activities as well as violent activities.
The first part seems logical and reasonable to me. simply put. Don't support illegal actions and you are safe from prosecution. The State Department actually has a fairly liberal view as to who and what constitutes a terror group so I think there is no danger there. Deporting members of groups antithetical to civilized legal societies is no sad thing either. Don't want to get deported? Don't be a member of an illegal terror group. I have no sympathy for charitable organizations that do good works AND at the same time cause the death and dismemberment of others by funding terror groups.
The FBI can monitor and tape conversations and meetings between an attorney and a client who is in federal custody, whether the client has been convicted, charged, or merely detained as a material witness. New York City attorney Lynne Stewart (the court-appointed representative of Sheik Abdel Rahman, who was convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) has been indicted for aiding and abetting terrorism based on conversations with her client. Her trial is set for January 2004, and the prosecution is clearly intended as a warning: Attorneys representing people charged with terrorism-related crimes will be watched as closely as the defendants.
So everyone is clear that the taping is going to happen..so don't incriminate yourself by admitting guilt. Holding the attourneys who represent the evil scum who commit the terror acts is no big deal..teaches the lawyers to be a little choosey who they associate with and represent. Sorry TL, I should be nicer to lawyers but..then I am..to prosecution lawyers..to civil business lawyers..its the sleazey types of defense lawyers who will get nailed here so my heart doesnt bleed much. If this lady was not involved directly with any criminal acts, she will be found innocent I think.
Americans captured on foreign soil and thought to have been involved in terrorist activities abroad may be held indefinitely in a military prison and denied access to lawyers or family members. No federal court can review the reason for the detention. Such is the plight of Yaser Hamdi, detained in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Virginia, whose family and attorney made valiant efforts to gain access to him. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a federal trial judge's order that Hamdi be allowed to meet with the federal public defender.
Align yourself with foreign powers..you take the risk. If you want to commit treason..be prepared to pay the price. Again all this concern for people who have strong cases of treason against them just doesn't get a lot of ire out of me.
The FBI can order librarians to turn over information about their patrons' reading habits and Internet use. The librarian cannot inform the patron that this information has been provided. Librarians, on the whole, are outraged at their new role; some have taken to posting signs in the library warning users not to use the Internet, others to destroying their logs of Internet users. One librarian said to a Washington Post reporter, "This law is dangerous.... I read murder mysteries--does that make me a murderer? I read spy stories--does that mean I'm a spy?"
First off, PUBLIC library's being in fact PUBLIC carry no expectation of privacy. Read one bomb making book, does not make you a bomber...read 56 of them in two months when tied together with questionable purchases of fertilizer means you get caught before you slaughter thousands of innocent men women and children. In my opinions Librarians have gotten waaaaay too big for their britches ever since they took the stance that they have a duty to make porn available to kids. They need to get over themselves. The rules are being posted with pertinent portions highlited?? Great good idea.
Foreign citizens charged with a terrorist-related act may be denied access to an attorney and their right to question witnesses and otherwise prepare for a defense may be severely curtailed if the Department of Justice says that's necessary to protect national security. Jose Padilla, the American Muslim fingered by Ashcroft last year as a would-be "dirty bomb" builder, is a case in point.
And this is bad because? The bill of rights pertains to Citizens, not foreign nationals. Natioanl Security contrary to some Liberals is in fact a Legitimate reason for not making some things public. One reason why you should be careful who you vote for and be informed on the issues...and why I believe not every citizen should be allowed to vote.
Resident alien men from primarily Middle Eastern and Muslim countries must report for registration. And hundreds of the ones who have reported have been detained and arrested for minor immigration infractions. It recently came to light that immigration authorities are refusing to let the men appear with their attorneys, a refusal that is a violation of Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services (BCIS, formerly the INS) regulations.
Minor immigration violations...another way to say...broke the law and should be deported. Again this in my view is completely fair and reasonable. Now if they started watching Swedish nationals in the same way, I would have to say that it was kind of silly.
Lawful foreign visitors may be photographed and fingerprinted when they enter the country and made to periodically report for questioning.
Sounds reasonable, and is hardly likely to be abused seeing as how much man power it would take to be used indescriminately. As long as the rules are made known to you before you come accross the border. You come here, you play by the rules that are in place or you have problems.
The government can conduct surveillance on the Internet and e-mail use of American citizens without any notice, upon order to the Internet service provider. Internet service providers may not move to quash such subpoenas.
Internet service providers have no business seeking this action in the first place. As for monitoring things...too late, already being done.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can search any car at any airport without a showing of any suspicion of criminal activity.
This is just the authors opinion and not an actual provision of the act.
The TSA can conduct full searches of people boarding airplanes and, if the passenger is a child, the child may be separated from the parent during the search. An objection by a parent or guardian to the search will put the objector at the risk of being charged with the crime of obstructing a federal law enforcement officer and tried in federal court. Travelers in Portland and Baltimore have reported such arrests.
yet another non-issue. You are already being searched in airports. This goes right along with not being allowed to yell fire in a theatre...you know the regs going in. Don't make a fuss over it after you get int here or yes you will draw attention. Having witnessed some peoples behaviour at Baltime Wachington International airport, I can fully understand why they got arrested. Behave and be civil and you won't have a problem.
The TSA is piloting a program to amass all available computerized information on all purchasers of airline tickets, categorize individuals according to their threat to national security, and embed the label on all boarding passes. The Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS II) program is designed to perform background checks on all airline passengers and assigns each passenger a "threat level." Passengers will not be able to ascertain their classification or the basis for the classification.
Oh my, you might be watched to ensure you don't get a chance to blow the plane up or attack the flight crew...geez
The TSA distributes a "no-fly" list to airport security personnel and airlines that require refusal of boarding and detention of persons deemed to be terrorism or air piracy risks or to pose a threat to airline or passenger safety. This is an expansion of a regulation that since 1990 has looked out for threats to civil aviation. Names are added daily based upon secret criteria. Several lawsuits that challenge these regulations are now pending, some from irate passengers who were mistaken for people on the list.
So do nothing instead because a mistake was made? Nope, I think passengers that survive to their destination will be happy and I have no sympathy for criminals who have their freedom of movement hampered.
American citizens and aliens can be held indefinitely in federal custody as "material witnesses," a ploy sometimes used as a punitive measure when the government does not have sufficient basis to charge the individual with a terror-related crime. The 1984 material witness law allows the government to detain citizens at will for an arbitrary period of time to give testimony that might be useful in the prosecutions of others. A Jordanian man picked up a few days after September 11 was held more than nine months before being released. And last week a federal judge in Oregon ordered that Mike Hawash, a software engineer and long-time naturalized American citizen who has been held in solitary confinement in a federal prison for more than a month, be questioned by April 29, 2003. It is notable, however, that the judge has already conducted a secret hearing that determined Hawash's detention to be lawful.
I think the last line pretty much summs it up...they told the judge what they had on the guy and he changed his mind...pretty sweet that one more bad guy got stopped.
Immigration authorities may detain immigrants without any charges for a "reasonable period of time." The BCIS need not account for the names or locations of the detainees, and what constitutes a "reasonable period of time" is not defined.
Would have to see the specific provision for this, otherwise I have to think tis BS. No one does anything for no reason whatsoever...ESPECIALLY Civil Servants who do as little as legally possible.
American colleges and universities with foreign students must report extensive information about their students to the BCIS. BCIS in turn may revoke student visas for missteps as minor as a student's failure to get an advisor's signature on a form that adds or drops classes. College personnel cannot notify students to correct the lapse in order to save them from deportation. To a very large extent, campus police and security personnel have become agents of the immigration authorities.
This is LOOOONG overdue. Campuses have been breeding grounds for some serious anti-nonmuslim sedition in recent years. Bout darn time things got looked at.
As for foreign nationals..it is their RESPONSIBILITY to make sure they stay on top of their Visa requirements and abide by the laws that govern their stay here.
Accused terrorists labeled "unlawful combatants" can be tried in military tribunals here or abroad, under rules of procedure developed by the Pentagon and the Department of Justice. All it takes to be named an unlawful combatant is the affidavit of a Pentagon employee, who is not required to provide the rationale for his or her decision, even to a federal judge. (In the case of Yaser Hamdi, the federal appellate court ruled that it has no authority to look behind this affidavit and question the determination.) Unlawful combatants are also denied counsel and contact with family members. In fact, hundreds of "unlawful combatants" are still being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without attorneys, without family contact, and under conditions said by some to be tantamount to physical and psychological torture. A federal court ruled in March that these persons had no access to the federal courts since they were on Cuban, not American, soil.
Not real concerned here either (big surprise eh?) The Prof, from his ivory tower doesnt realize that said "Pentagon Employee" being a civil servant would never bother to do any paperwork without serious reason to actually end his or her coffee break.
A warrant to conduct widespread surveillance on any American thought to be associated with terrorist activities can be obtained from a secret panel of judges, upon the affidavit of a Department of Justice official. If arrested as a result of the surveillance (as was the case with the attorney, Lynne Stewart), the defendant has no right to know the facts supporting the warrant request.
What is a "secret Panel of Judges" and if it is so secret....how did the Prof. find out about it?? Perhaps heshould be picked up for questioning [img]smile.gif[/img]
The FBI can conduct aerial surveillance of individuals and homes without a warrant, and can install video cameras in places where lawful demonstrations and protests are held. Facial recognition computer programs are used to identify persons the FBI deems suspicious for political reasons. An ACLU employee in South Carolina was recently indicted for the federal offense of being in a "restricted area" at the Columbia, South Carolina airport in October 2002, when President Bush made a political campaign appearance. (The South Carolina AG, who happens to be the son of retired Senator Strom Thurmond, authorized the indictment.)
So basicly people who have a record and a mug shot might be spotted before they repeat a crime? Who cares? And whats it matter if it was strom thurmond, his grandson or his dog skippy that authorized an indictment? Sounds like the Prof. has some serious personal dislike issues here.
Most of these restrictions on liberty were not part of the letter of the Patriot Act; they were shaped by means of rules and regulations adopted in agencies and departments of government with little notice to the public. That's because the Patriot Act granted sweeping new powers to agencies like the Department of Justice, the FBI, and BCIS to go their own way in prosecuting the war on terror.
Actually it allows them to go from inept hands tied beuracracies to effective law enforcement agencies. Cool [img]smile.gif[/img]
Will the Clinton/Bush expansion of federal powers help much in protecting the country from terrorism? That is an imponderable, since we can't know what might have happened by now, or what might happen going forward, in their absence. But the arrests hyped by Ashcroft so far don't suggest that his new powers are yielding much. One of the most notorious cases involved Jose Padilla, an American-born Muslim arrested for allegedly plotting to build a dirty bomb. Padilla is still being held without charges, and many believe it's because the government has no real case against him. (The file on Padilla is secret, obviously, but some news accounts have suggested his sole crime was attempting to download "dirty bomb" construction plans from the Internet.) Several people charged with terrorist-related acts have pled guilty to some charges, such as visiting an al Qaeda training camp (as defendants in Buffalo have recently done), or to lesser non-terrorist-related offenses (money laundering instead of financing terrorist activities), in order to avoid the risk of conviction and longer sentences. The Justice Department seeks grand jury indictments of the "kitchen-sink" variety--throw in everything remotely chargeable, and then declare victory when the defendant pleads to one or two charges.
Yup don't know what "Might have been" however we can measure how many thousands of people have died in 9/11 like attacks since they were installed and acted on...which to my counting is ZERO. Even when the Alqueda could have made a major impact on the Great Satan....nothing has happened. The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance.
What we do know about these laws is that they allow government agents to be more aggressive and, when they wish, more abusive. Most of the people indicted in Buffalo and Portland have been charged with being terrorist sympathizers because they were in the presence of people themselves labeled as terrorist sympathizers (visiting their homes, for instance) or because they had contributed to a non-profit organization that the government has decreed to have a connection to terrorism somewhere in the world. Attorney Lynne Stewart was indicted for the "crime" of zealously representing a convicted terrorist she was court-appointed to defend.
This whole paragraph is disingenuous, the people caught in that bust had/have evidence against them..the person who wrote this is just peeved that he isn't privey to it [img]smile.gif[/img] get over it bud!
|
There my honest reactions to the points. I do see that there MAY be possibilities for abuse, but I have faith in our system that it will move quickly to squash any true abuses that are comitted. Agree or disagree thats your right and priveledge [img]smile.gif[/img] I will wait and watch and see what comes to pass.
|