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USA using Patriot Act against its own citizens
Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.
But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.
Court sides with ACLU, strikes down Patriot Act gag provision
by Stephen C. Webster
Published: Tuesday December 16, 2008
ACLU victorious as federal court declares Patriot Act provision a violation of the First Amendment
A federal appeals court ruling late Monday is the cause célèbre of the American Civil Liberties Union, as another provision of the Bush administration’s Patriot Act falls to the judicial system.
Until the ruling, recipients of so-called “national security letters” were legally forbidden from speaking out. The letters, usually a demand for documents, or a notice that private records had been searched by government authorities, were criticized as a cover-all for FBI abuses.
“The appeals court invalidated parts of the statute that wrongly placed the burden on NSL recipients to initiate judicial review of gag orders, holding that the government has the burden to go to court and justify silencing NSL recipients,” said the ACLU in a release. “The appeals court also invalidated parts of the statute that narrowly limited judicial review of the gag orders – provisions that required the courts to treat the government’s claims about the need for secrecy as conclusive and required the courts to defer entirely to the executive branch.”
Because of the ruling, the government will now be forced to justify individual gag orders before a court, instead of casually wielding the power of a blanket gag as the Bush administration has done since the blindingly fast passage of the Patriot Act in Oct. 2001.
In Sept. 2007, a federal judge ruled unconstitutional provisions within the Patriot Act which allowed the government to obtain search warrants without probable cause.
The ACLU’s complete press release follows.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 15, 2008
NEW YORK – A federal appeals court today upheld, in part, a decision striking down provisions of the Patriot Act that prevent national security letter (NSL) recipients from speaking out about the secret records demands. The decision comes in an American Civil Liberties Union and New York Civil Liberties Union lawsuit challenging the FBI’s authority to use NSLs to demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet Service Providers and then forbid them from discussing the requests. Siding with the ACLU, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that the statute’s gag provisions violate the First Amendment.
This week Visibility 9-11 welcomes Constitutional expert Michael Badnarik. Mr. Badnarik ran for President of the United States in 2004 and was actually arrested when he dared to cross police lines in protest of being excluded from the Presidential debates of 2004. He also teaches an 8 hour class as an introduction to the Constitution and has written a book about the Constitution titled Good to be King; Foundations of Freedom. For more information, visit Michael’s website at Constitution Preservation.
This interview includes a frank discussion about the usurpation’s of the Constitution since 9-11 through the USA PATRIOT Act and the Military Commissions Act, George Orwell, and some of Mr. Badnarik’s doubts about the official story of 9-11 and his support for a new investigation.
Intermission music by Lynn Ahrens.
Ending music by High-C.
Direct download: visibility911_badnarik.mp3
Legislating Tyranny
by Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence M. Stratton
Posted at Lewrockwell.com
June 7, 2008
The George W. Bush administration responded to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon with an assault on U.S. civil liberty that Bush justified in the name of the “war on terror.” The government assured us that the draconian measures apply only to “terrorists.” The word terrorist, however, was not defined. The government claimed the discretionary power to decide who is a terrorist without having to present evidence or charges in a court of law.
Frankly, the Bush administration’s policy evades any notion of procedural due process of law. Administration assurances that harsh treatment is reserved only for terrorists is meaningless when the threshold process for determining who is and who is not a terrorist depends on executive discretion that is not subject to review. Substantive rights are useless without the procedural rights to enforce them.
Terrorist legislation and executive assertions created a basis upon which federal authorities claimed they were free to suspend suspects’ civil liberties in order to defend Americans from terrorism. Only after civil liberties groups and federal courts challenged some of the unconstitutional laws and procedures did realization spread that the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights is a greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.
The alacrity with which Congress accepted the initial assault from the administration is frightening. In 2001, the USA PATRIOT Act passed by a vote of 98 to 1 in the Senate and by 357 to 66 in the House. The act was already written and waiting on the shelf before the 9/11 attack. Indeed, the FBI and Department of Justice have tried for years to introduce PATRIOT Act provisions into the law. That act was introduced immediately after the attacks, and few members of Congress read its contents prior to passing it.
Ich bin ein Berliner (That goes for you too.)
As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air – however slight – lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.
– Justice William O. Douglas
I was born the very day World War II ended. My fellow postwar “Baby Boomers” grew up on old black and white documentaries of that war and the events leading up to it. But those films never really answered the most important question, a question that has nagged me, and I suspect most of my generation
How did Germany and the German people become the Mrs. O’Leary’s cow of an entire continent? How could a culture, re-formed during the Renaissance, create a horror like Auschwitz?
How does something that extraordinary happen? It’s a question that has not only burdened American Baby Boomers, but three generations of postwar Germans as well. But for them it’s much more than just a historical curiosity. For postwar Germans it’s also been a nagging sense of collective guilt – guilt about events they had nothing to do with, but guilt nonetheless. It’s a guilt built on the realization that their parents and grand parents either participated in, supported and/or enabled what happened over half a century ago — or, at the very least, did nothing to prevent or stop it.
Of course the fascist rulers of the Third Reich ruled with a heavy hand. So it’s not hard to understand why so many Germans simply laid low rather than oppose the regime.
“Nazi terror from above and the demise of the rule of law started just a few days after Hitler’s assumption of power in January 1933. The penalties of opposition became higher and higher. In the first nine months alone, at least 100,000 people, most of them leftist Germans, were thrown into hastily erected concentration camps. Others ended up in ordinary prisons and many died. Countless more were roughed up by rampaging brownshirts in broad daylight or taken into police custody on trumped-up political charges. By 1936, a brutal police state had penetrated virtually all spheres of life.” ( New York Times books.)
While the rules have tightened here since 9/11, we’ve not experienced anything near that scale. Speaking out is remains a survivable exercise.
Which begs the question; what will be our excuse? How will we explain the things we’ve allowed this administration to get away with — the torture, the “renditions,” the secret prisons, the warrant-less wiretapping, the lies we and our media allowed to stand? What are we going to tell our grand children when they ask us what the hell we were thinking, feeling and doing while all that was afoot?
I understand it’s against the rules of polite society to recklessly throw the “f” word around by comparing anything that’s happening today to the kind of atrocities that occurred under Hitler. It”s even worse to compare any contemporary American political/religious/social leader to Hitler.
So I won’t. I won’t go that far, because it hasn’t gone that far – yet.
Neo-Cons: Make Bush Dictator Of The World
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Friday, August 17, 2007
If you thought Stu Bykovsky’s call for a new 9/11 was the lowest the Neo-Cons could sink, think again. A right-wing foundation with links to Dick Cheney has called for Bush to be made lifetime president, ruler of the world, and for Iraq to be ethnically cleansed of Arabs by means of a nuclear holocaust.
The Family Security Matters organization masquerades as an independent “think tank” yet was highly influential in President Bush’s re-election in 2004 and has links to top Neo-Con ideologues.
The outfit poses as an advocacy group for a new breed of goose-stepping brownshirts – so-called “security moms,” who are noted for their blind obedience to neo-conservatism as a result of believing every ounce of fearmongering that emanates from the Bush administration on the inevitability of mass casualty terror attacks.
“In late 2004, Media Matters for America discovered that the phone number listed on FSM’s website actually belonged to the Center for Security Policy (CSP), a rabidly hardline foreign policy outfit run by former Reagan administration figure Frank Gaffney,” reports Right Web.
The Center for Security Policy is an umbrella organization that includes the National Security Advisory Council, whose members hold senior positions within the Bush administration itself. Former and current members include Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams and the organization has also given awards to Donald Rumsfeld.
The FSM foundation itself also has ties to the Anti-Defamation League, the International Women’s Forum, numerous nationwide television and print media outlets, and includes on its board of advisors Neo-Con radio host Laura Ingraham and former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, James Woolsey.
Representatives of FSM also routinely appear as guests on Fox News and their website is a cesspool of anti-American fervor – acting as a cheerleader for the invasion of Iran, the warrantless wiretapping program (opponents of which are labeled “traitors”) and lauds the Patriot Act as “An irreplaceable tool utilized by our Secret Service to keep us safe.”
Read the rest of this article here.
Editor’s note: The Family Security Matters website was taken down but not before it was cashed on the internet and can be found here.
The Timeline to Tyranny
Ten advances towards the end of freedom and privacy in the United States
by Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
The top ten advances towards tyranny in the United States during the tenure of the Bush administration, from the Patriot Act to the latest expansion of the illegal eavesdropping surveillance program.
1) The USA Patriot Act
The party line often heard from Neo-Cons in their attempts to defend the Patriot Act either circulate around the contention that the use of the Patriot Act has never been abused or that it isn’t being used against American citizens. Here is an archive of articles that disproves both of these fallacies.
The Patriot Act was the boiler plate from which all subsequent attacks on the Constitution were formed.
2) Total Information Awareness
“Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as “a virtual, centralized grand database,” infamously wrote New York Times writer William Safire, announcing the birth of Total Information Awareness, a kind of Echelon on steroids introduced a year after 9/11.
TIA was not canned, it was simply removed from the newspaper, renamed and continues to operate under a guise of different programs.
3) USA Patriot Act II
The second Patriot Act was a mirror image of powers that Julius Caesar and Adolf Hitler gave themselves. Whereas the First Patriot Act only gutted the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and seriously damaged the Seventh and the Tenth, the Second Patriot Act reorganized the entire Federal government as well as many areas of state government under the dictatorial control of the Justice Department, the Office of Homeland Security and the FEMA NORTHCOM military command.
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act 2003, also known as the Second Patriot Act is by its very structure the definition of dictatorship.
Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance
White House Applauds; Changes Are Temporary
By Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
August 4, 2007
The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government’s terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.
The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.
The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government’s authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.
As currently written, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already gives U.S. spies broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects, but the 30-year-old statute requires a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where the calls begin or end.
At the White House, where officials had voiced concern about that requirement, a spokesman praised the Senate vote and called on House leaders to quickly follow suit. The legislation will “give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation,” spokesman Tony Fratto said.
Democratic leaders expressed disappointment about the result, but they pointed to language that would require lawmakers to reconsider the key provisions in six months.
“My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration’s past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Iraq war veteran and experienced demolitions expert blows the cover on 9/11 inside job.
Written by Gibbwake
Meet Torin Wolf. He has a broad and varied background as a US Army Combat Nurse during Operation Iraqi Freedom…
…building construction contractor, certified structural welder, certified asbestos and hazardous materials worker, experienced demolitions expert, teacher, radio show host, and well studied 9/11 truth activist. Torin knows how to put a building up, and bring the same building down in its own footprint. Torin’s free presentation, “Taking the Red Pill” was hosted by Brave New Books on 1904 Guadalupe in Austin last Saturday, June 23rd at 7 pm.
Torin is proud of his native Cherokee heritage and his mother is the Band Historian of the White River Band Cherokee from the central United States. Since he received his GED at age 14, saying he is a smart guy is putting it lightly. For over 12 years he worked as a hazardous materials contractor specializing in asbestos abatement and concrete construction sampling. Add to his resume the fact that he designed and implemented well over 100 controlled demolitions. He was not just helping at a lower level in the demolitions – he was the guy responsible for calling the shots. Afterwards, he became a certified structural steel welder and worked in heavy and mega construction for over 5 years in locations around the world including several skyscrapers.
Ironically, Torin signed his papers to join the army on September 11th, 2000. He knew something was wrong with the official 9/11 story when his army handlers took his squad into a room just in time to watch the buildings collapse. With his demolitions experience, he immediately knew those towers could not have fallen like that without explosives. He went on to serve “with honor and distinction” with the 21st Combat Support Hospital in Mosul, Iraq during the first part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and earned the Bronze Star with V device for valor in combat.
Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out
by Steve Watson
Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 adviser thinks it is.
Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bio-weapons adviser in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.
“After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress,” Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. “That would have set up a police state.
“Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, come these anthrax attacks.”
“At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined with] special electro-static treatment. This is super weapons-grade anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you could have gotten that.”
Boyle’s assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding America’s bio-weapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.
After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job, Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism and counterterrorism, Marion “Spike” Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School. Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.
Librarians Describe Life Under An FBI Gag Order
by Luke O’Brien
Life in an FBI muzzle is no fun. Two Connecticut librarians on Sunday described what it was like to be slapped with an FBI national security letter and accompanying gag order. It sounded like a spy movie or, gulp, something that happens under a repressive foreign government. Peter Chase and Barbara Bailey, librarians in Plainville, Connecticut, received an NSL to turn over computer records in their library on July 13, 2005. Unlike a suspected thousands of other people around the country, Chase, Bailey and two of their colleagues stood up to the Man and refused to comply, convinced that the feds had no right to intrude on anyone’s privacy without a court order (NSLs don’t require a judge’s approval). That’s when things turned ugly.
Amendment IV of the Bill of Rights
“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 or things to be seized.”
