Yahoo carried this news item today, in which the FBI is said to have admitted repeated violations of portions of the USA Patriot Act. My fellow citizens, we have some house claening to be done…
The FBI has broken the law by going beyond the extended powers given them by the USA Patriot Act passed after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. That law allows them to conduct certain kinds of surveillance within the US without needing to first obtain a public court order in the hopes that they would have an easier time breaking up future terrorist plots. We have not had any large-scale attacks since then, so it looks like the law has worked as designed. (We have had announcements over the years of various plots which have been broken up and people have been caught in what looked like practice operations.)
I view surveillance by the government with a very, very suspicious eye. Our Constitution was written by people with similar views, who held so strongly that government power must always be kept in check that they wrote the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to our Constitution and insisted that they be ratified along with the Constitution — or they would separate themselves from the emerging USA. The Patriot Act relaxes some of the traditional checks we have on government police power — for a set period of time. We are at war and need to protect ourselves from an enemy that walks among us — but we also must very carefully watch the people to whom we give such powers so that they do not become corrupted by that power. We are now at a time for testing, to see if we as a people still believe in protecting the freedoms which we talk about and think that the rest of the world should adopt. (I have dealings in Ukraine, and our State Department has just issued a report which states that there are some such abuses of power there — and I tend to agree with that report from my reading of English-language Ukrainian news sources.) It was a certainty that there would eventually be a misuse of power — to abuse power is the nature of people — including me and you. We shall now see whether those who broke the law are held accountable to the law as in years past. It has been over 30 years since the last large-scale incident — and it cost Richard Nixon the presidency and several of his underlings went to jail.
The news story about the violations of the Patriot Act states, “The nation’s top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans. They apologized and vowed to prevent further illegal intrusions.” An apology is not good enough — people need to go to jail!!! If President Bush, who’s handling of the terrorists I tend to support, was an active participant, he needs to be impeached like Nixon was. Those who apologize and are not made to pay for their actions eventually become the Soviet KGB or the Nazi SS. It has been stated that, “all evil needs in order to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” I have contacted the President, and my Congressman and Senators to demand investigations and prosecutions. I will also ask the same of anyone else who will listen. I believe there will be prosecutions and jail time for some, but only if We The People demand it and do not rest until we have it.
