How effective is the PATRIOT Act?

It is a bit difficult to evaluate whether the law changes that are gobbling up our Bill of Rights and targeting millions of citizens are effective or not when we don't get good information.

Our stalwart defender of the State - John Ashcroft - would have us believe that his new powers are rounding up terrorists right and left and making us all so much safer. Based on the "improvements" in criminal "justice" (sic) the Department of Justice prepared a new round of encroachments known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 (see earlier post "Read and Spread the Word).

But now we have some new information .....

In Saturday's 2/22/03 Oregonian, take a look at the right hand column of page A2.

There you will see an interesting little side bar article reporting on the GAO investigation of the effectiveness of prosecutions for the year after 9/11/2001.

"federal prosecutors exaggerated their success in convicting would be terrorists by wrongly classifying three of every four cases originally labeled as international terrorism."

EXCUSE ME???????

Misclassifying 75% (YES 75%) of the cases is not an issue of "exaggeration" - it is an OUTRIGHT LIE.

"One category of the reported terrorism convictions , 'international terrorism,' was particularly misreported. Of 174 convictions originally classified under that category, 43 were verified as such, the GAO said."

One could argue that the DOJ was attempting to make itself look good, but there is a much darker side here ....

Who are the non-terrorists that were convicted? What were they really convicted of? How IS DOJ interpretting its powers? Are people (or certain demographic groups) being swept up and charges trumped up? It sure looks like it from where I sit!

And what about those who were convicted for "terrorism?" What did they actually do? What does DOJ and the PATRIOT act deem to be "terrorism?"

It is a certainty that the DOJ and others will make the attempt to extend their reach even further than it currently goes. Keep this little tid bit in mind to include in your letters to elected (selected?) officials.

Knowledge IS Power.

Posted by rowan at February 22, 2003 10:15 AM | [eMail this article!] |