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Most lawmakers admit that they never read the bill before voting on it. Put simply, from October 23 to October 26, a massive piece of legislation was rammed through both the House of Representatives and Senate, without public hearings of any sort. The USA Patriot Act was sold as the legal measures required to prevent future terroristic attacks on U.S. soil. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 Massacre, the American people were gripped in fear. Any and all measures of self-protection seemed desirable. But in the hysteria, the people of this country allowed its President, aided and abetted by both houses of the federal legislature, to essentially violate the U.S. Constitution and, in turn, strip away the basic civil liberties embodied in the Bill of Rights. This was done in the name of "national security".
The USA Patriot Act (PA) is composed of many laws already on the books that are designed to counter terrorism in the U.S. What distinguishes the Patriot Act from these pre-September 11 laws is its ENABLING characteristics. Put simply, the criminal statutes, investigative rules and court procedures which safeguarded our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties in previous anti-terror legislation were stripped away. They have been replaced by a system Executive Branch fiat, now institutionalized in the department of Homeland Security. How did the USA Patriot Act accomplish this feat?
The USA Patriot Act effectively eliminated:
FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION: Government may monitor religious labor, and political institutions without suspecting criminal activity to assist terror investigation.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: Government has closed once-public immigration hearings, has secretly detained hundreds of people without charges, and has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records requests.
FREEDOM OF SPEECH: Government may prosecute librarians or keepers of any other records if they tell anyone that the government subpoenaed information related to a terror investigation.
RIGHT TO LEGAL REPRESENTATION: Government may monitor federal prison jailhouse conversations between attorneys and clients, and deny lawyers to Americans accused of crimes.
FREEDOM FROM UNREASONABLE SEARCHES: Government may search and seize Americans' personal records, business documents and telephone/internet activity without probable cause to assist terror investigation.
RIGHT TO A SPEEDY AND PUBLIC TRIAL: Government may jail Americans indefinitely without a trial.
RIGHT TO LIBERTY: Americans may be jailed without being charged or being able to confront the witnesses against them.
While many Americans were led by the Bush administration to believe that the Patriot Act was solely directed at foreign nationals in the U.S. who may pose a military threat to citizens and property (specifically people of Southwest Asian and North African descent--a vulgarian version of racial profiling), it swiftly emerged that the actual day-to-day targets of the Patriot Act were U.S. citizens and legal aliens. Overwhelmingly, they have suffered the abuses of federal police policies which have led to public humiliation, invasion of personal privacy, intimidation, movement control and monitoring, capricious arrest and detention, and denial of legal remedy in the court system.
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