PAT RIOT ACT

Posted by tomo at 06:08 PM in politics . | 9 Comments

The so-called Patriot Act is back in the news with our angry president demanding that it not be fixed at all. But the Act is also in the news for harassing shady-looking non-white businessmen without charging them for anything.

A few weeks ago, some FBI agents came to Ann Arbor to try to dispel some myths, according to them, about the USA PATRIOT Act. One of them was that this Act was specifically for countering terrorism. They strongly stressed that it was not and somehow we'd all just been listening to the wrong people if we thought it was. In fact, despite having the word "terrorism" in the acronym, it seems to be all about fighting the drug war. Because we are all willing to lie down and give up our civil liberties so that the FBI has an easier time pursuing weed merchants. In almost every example the agents gave for how the new Act helps their agency, the criminals were drug dealers and in no example did they show how it helped them fight terrorism. They blamed rumor-mongers for making us all think this was about fighting terrorism. Rumor-mongers like George W. Bush.

It may be the case that some or even most of the very long (hundreds of pages) Act should remain. But it's a long document that many who voted for it did not read. It was passed in a moment of emotional confusion and vulnerability. Now it's time to be more rational. PATRIOT Act apologists say that if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about. Tell that to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Hampton.