President Bush doesn’t think the current Patriot Act is good enough. In an attempt to “close loopholes” in the original legislation, he’s proposed three very frightning changes, examined here by Robyn Blummer of the St. Petersburg Times:
Bush wants three additional powers from Congress.
First, he wants to give the Justice Department the authority to confiscate records and compel testimony without review by a court or grand jury.
[…]
Second, Bush wants to chip away at the right to bail. …he wants passage of the “Pretrial Detention and Lifetime Supervision of Terrorists Act of 2003,” a bill that would keep people accused of a whole range of new crimes behind bars pending trial by making those crimes presumptively “no bond” offenses.
[…]
And third, Bush wants to expand the reach of the federal death penalty by making it applicable to “domestic terrorism.”
Under the Patriot Act, the crime of “domestic terrorism” couldn’t be more broadly written. Any criminal act intended to influence the government through “intimidation or coercion” involving “dangerous acts” qualifies. Aggressive protesters of all stripes from Greenpeace activists to abortion foes could easily fall within this definition, opening the door for politically motivated executions.
Bush also wants the death penalty for those convicted of providing “material support for terrorism,” a law that can be violated even when people think they are giving money to a charity and don’t know the group is a designated terrorist organization.
Put simply, Bush wants to finalize the process of turning America into a police state, where the slightest suspicion of dissent could land you in jail without bail, and possibly on death row.
Hi, found your page through slashdot (cough cough), and was really interested in the stuff you have to say about all this. I assume you frequent The Smirking Chimp, as it sounds from your rather literate understanding of the current “state of affairs.” Down here at the ever-conservative USC we have a non-school-funded paper called the Trojan Horse (the offical paper is the Daily Trojan) which has an excellent article on how much more quickly we are evolving into a 1984-esque type of country (coughdictatorshipcough) then ever thought before. http://www.troho.com
Other sites of interest: http://www.blackboxvoting.org – this is an excellent source for information about our friends the Touch Screen Voting Machines (Do Touch Screen Voting Machines Dream of Electric Chads? – my own innovation…)
Beyond this, it was a pleasure to find you site, even if it is through such circumstances as the ones you have to endure at the moment. I’m glad I’ve found it and I wish you good luck in your search! I’m sure now due to your celebrity status you will have little trouble finding a job… or so one would hope :P
Hi, my name is Kaila and I am in the eighth grade. My history teacher has students in the her honors class- that would be me- doing a series of research papers on current threats to our civil liberties. Our second paper in the series of four is due January third and is on Bush’s changes to the Patriot Act and the changes Congress arrived at in regards to the Patriot Act.Any help in finding information would be greatly appreciated.
Paper topics…
. Paper #3
write a 300-500 word essay describing which civil liberties you believe are the most threatened and why they need to be protected and how. (due 1/17)
.Paper #4
Write a 10-15 page formal research paper explaining the threat to the liberties that you have chosen as the topic of your paper. Explain how these liberties are threatened and what can be done to protect them. (due 3/6).
Any information is greatly appreciated, but the web site is needed, so a list of web sites to check out and i would love you forever.