pilotbraden wrote:
huge-O-chavez wrote:
YAY for the patriot act... I mean. It has the word patriot in it right? How bad could it be..
Good job people who voted for Bush.
It is my understanding that the "patriot" act had been written for several years( Billy was in office) before it was enacted.
Indeed: http://www.globalissues.org/article/342/the-usa-patriot-act-was-planned-before-911
From the article:
James X. Dempsey and David Cole state in their book, "Terrorism & the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security," that the most troubling provisions of the pre-USAPA anti-terrorism laws, enacted in 1996 and expanded now by the USAPA, "were developed long before the bombings that triggered their final enactment."
Dempsey is the former assistant counsel to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and Deputy Director at the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Cole is professor of law at Georgetown University and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Looking back at the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, Dempsey and Cole declare that "the much-touted gains in law enforcement powers" under that Act, "produced no visible concrete results in the fight against terrorism." They add that the principles espoused in the Act "were shown in case after case to be both unconstitutional and ineffective in the fight against terrorism." And importantly, the authors comment that the United States government has not shown that the expanded powers it has asserted in the USAPA are necessary to fight terrorism.
Dempsey and Cole trace the origins of the national security trend back to the "intolerant approaches of the 1950s," when association with Communist or anarchist groups was made a ground for exclusion and deportation. Congress removed the guilt by association law in 1990, but it was revived only six years later by law enforcement proponents in the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, immediately following the Oklahoma City Bombing.
More specifically, however, Dempsey and Cole show that it was the Reagan Administration which initially proposed some of the most troubling provisions which eventually became part of the USAPA. When Reagan proposed these provisions, Congress rejected them on constitutional grounds. The first Bush Administration then made similar proposals, which were again rejected by lawmakers. Congress twice refused to enact the secret evidence provisions proposed by Bush I. (Indeed, just prior to 9/11, Congress was about to pass a law repealing the secret evidence provisions of the 1996 Antiterrorism Act.)
Elements of the law date back to the Reagan administration but were never implemented. The Clinton administration was more successful......