The Big Picture (or, I am Not Making This Up)

[elder999]

The real significance of the PATRIOT Act is how it interacts with other changes to our system of law and government beyond that of Homeland Security For example, PATRIOT Act set the stage for another act, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, also known as PATRIOT II.

In early February, as Department of Justice officials publicly stated that no new anti-terror legislation was in the making, someone inside the department leaked a draft of PATRIOT II. It ended up being posted on the website of the Center for Public Integrity.

Under PATRIOT II, which has not been introduced in Congress, a U.S. citizen can be stripped of his citizenship, if, “with the intent to relinquish his nationality,” (?!), he becomes a member of, or provides material support to, a group that the United States has designated as a “terrorist organization.”

The determination that a person intends to relinquish his nationality can be inferred by behavior-such as associating with groups who are critical of the United States, even if they are law-abiding.

Once someone is no longer a citizen, he becomes subject to the provisions of the PATRIOT Act, which mandate detention and deportation for suspicious aliens. In other words, someone born in the United States, but who took up with groups labeled by the administration as terrorist could find themselves in detention camps in Guantanamo Bay or worse.

Additionally, Section 802 of the PATRIOT Act creates the new crime of “domestic terrorism,” which has such a broad definition that it could easily be interpreted to include activists of any sort.

An example of how the interpretation of these laws might go horribly wrong lies in recent incidents involving the California Ant-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC). At an anti-terrorism conference in June, and earlier, in a May article in the Oakland Tribune, CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle said, “If you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest. You can argue that a protest of that nature is a terrorist act.”

CATIC collects data on a wide variety of activist groups, then issues alerts to local police, sometimes based more on rumor and innuendo than fact. Van Winkle acknowledges that CATIC operates without a clear definition of what “terrorism” is.

In such an environment, it would be a small step for CATIC or one of the similar agencies set up under Homeland Security, to recommend a group employing civil disobedience-a bulwark of American dissention and liberty-as a terrorist organization, and thereby, under the rules of the PATRIOT Act and PATRIOT Act II, have all those associated with the group, even those giving “material support” ($), eligible for citizenship-stripping and deportation .If a country cannot be found to take our new noncitizens, another provision provides that they may be detained indefinitely.

Does that mean Native Americans, American Indians, are subject to this law?

We are gonna have to increase the size of reservations if they start accepting the cousins and lesser blood ties of ancestors back into the tribes, eh?

And what about the illegal aliens? Let alone the legal aliens? None of them are US citiizens?

What about the people who are not technically US citizens who serve in the military or work for the federal government?

Opens up an industrial size can of worms, doesn't it?

I recall a professor that I TA-ed for stated and drafted papers about how the greatest threat to the US government will be from within. He hypothesized that a great civil unrest will happen in the next 20 to 40 years. He believed that the civil unrest would be propagated because of the increasing gap in regards to wealth, but declining civil liberties maybe be the catalyst instead.

Hopefully the laws if put into effect will be only on the books and rarely used, e.g. treason...

[Jock Armstrong]

Never give politicians more power than they need. They WILL use it- they can't help themselves..........