posted 04-21-2004 07:57 PM            

Bush says it's vital to make Patriot Act permanent

San Francisco Chronicle| April 20 2004

Hershey, Pa. -- President Bush said Monday that he considered it vital for Congress to pass a permanent version of the USA Patriot Act, which has been criticized by some liberals and conservatives for giving the federal government too much power in the name of fighting terrorism.

Bush told a convention of Pennsylvania township officials that those concerned about the expanded wiretapping and surveillance powers provided by the act were laboring under a false hope about safety from terrorism.

"The Patriot Act defends our liberty," Bush said, repeatedly thumping the podium. "The Patriot Act makes it able for those of us in positions of responsibility to defend the liberty of the American people. It's essential law."

Bush made the case during his 27th visit to a swing state he lost in 2000 but is laboring to capture in 2004.

The purpose of the trip was twofold as Bush, for the first time this year, was raising cash for another candidate -- four-term Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who is trying to fend off a primary challenge from conservative GOP Rep. Pat Toomey. The primary is April 27.

Bush's message on the Patriot Act didn't mesh with Specter, who is among 18 co-sponsors of legislation that would amend the law. Specter, a moderate, has questioned the administration's use of the Patriot Act and has said the Justice Department needs more congressional oversight.

Key provisions of the Patriot Act aren't set to expire until the end of 2005, but Bush argued that the law was critical for keeping tabs on terrorists and should be renewed. He mentioned the Sept. 11, 2001, crash of a hijacked airliner 140 miles away in Shanksville, Pa.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic nominee, voted for the measure but now says the law needs to be fixed. He has said the administration has "used the Patriot Act in ways that were never intended and for reasons that have nothing to do with terrorism."

In an ad, the Bush campaign has already attacked Kerry for questioning the Patriot Act. Republican officials said that Bush planned to make the Patriot Act a central theme of his campaign to show his plan to combat terrorism and that he had taken specific action after the attacks.

Bush has also used the vote to portray Kerry as a waffler. At the Specter fund-raiser, Bush said of Kerry: "If he could find a third side to an issue, I'm confident he'd take it."

Lawmakers of both parties, including Kerry, said at the time the Patriot Act passed that the sunset provision would allow Congress to ensure that the administration did not abuse its new power. But Bush asserted that by including an expiration date, Congress was saying that "maybe the war on terror won't go on very long." He called on lawmakers to renew the Patriot Act and to make all of its provisions permanent.

Under the law, the government's expanded ability to monitor and search the belongings of people targeted in terrorism investigations includes conducting secret searches and seizing records from banks, libraries and other businesses without disclosing that it has done so.

Bush said the Patriot Act had solved an important problem identified last week by the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks: that intelligence and criminal investigators believed they were prohibited from sharing some information, causing missed opportunities to unravel the plot.

"Different people had a piece of the puzzle, but because of law, they couldn't get all the pieces in the same place," he said.

Kerry's campaign said Bush was trying to "rewrite history to show that the Patriot Act has been a cure-all for the intelligence failures that were exposed by the 9/11 attacks."

When Bush arrived in Pennsylvania, aides hustled Specter up the steps at the back of Air Force One so that he could pop out atop the front stairs next to the president. The two men stood side by side, waving at a bank of cameras. They did it again when Bush arrived in Pittsburgh.

The Specter fund-raising reception generated $400,000. Republican officials said that because of the importance of independent voters in Pennsylvania, Bush would have a better chance on a ticket with Specter than with Toomey.

Toomey said Bush's appearance showed Specter's weakness, because he needed the president "to carry him over the goal line."

posted 04-21-2004 08:10 PM            

Patriot Act needs wholesale changes to be lawful

http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Apr/04182004/commenta/158075.asp

By Iqbal Hossain

I came to the United States from a country where government safeguards of civil liberties are virtually nonexistent and government intrusion into citizens' personal lives is commonplace. I moved to Salt Lake City from Bangladesh 23 years ago to obtain my doctorate degree, but I ended up making it my home for one reason: the American Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, though, Americans have seen these liberties eroded in the name of fighting terrorism. The USA Patriot Act, an enormous counter-terrorism bill passed in haste a mere eight weeks after the attacks, had nestled in it several radical expansions of government surveillance and investigative power, which have served to bolster neither safety nor freedom.
Utah's senior U.S. senator, Orrin Hatch, Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, held a field hearing on the Patriot Act here this past week. I applaud Sen. Hatch and his colleagues for their willingness to scrutinize the act and raise questions about the propriety of certain provisions in the law, which went too far, too fast during the frantic weeks after 9-11.
Hopefully, this congressional scrutiny will result in an overhaul of the law.
The extraordinarily complicated act was agreed to in late October 2001 even though many lawmakers had not read the final version. In the wee hours of the morning of Oct. 24, the House leadership replaced a compromise version of the bill, arrived at after long negotiation between Democrats and Republicans on that chamber's judiciary committee, with a sweeping piece of legislation that weighed in at almost 350 pages. Lawmakers voted later that morning.
Now many regret the haste. Don Young, the powerful Republican representative from Alaska, has said, "It was stupid . . . it was what you call 'emotional voting' because we didn't follow through, we didn't study it."
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For instance, in what many consider to be the most telling example of the law's problem provisions, Section 215 permits the FBI to obtain special court orders from a secret intelligence court for the production of a huge array of business, personal and medical records, under dramatically more lenient standards than before. Attorney General John Ashcroft testified before Congress that this could be used to obtain educational records, e-mail, and even genetic information.
As a professor of criminology, I know that information like this can be crucial to effective law enforcement. But here's the problem: The provision does not require criminal probable cause, nor does it even require a showing of probable cause to believe that the subject of the court order is acting as an "agent of a foreign power," the pre-Patriot standard. Rather, agents seeking these court orders simply need assert that the request is relevant to an ongoing intelligence or terrorism investigation. The judge presumably then has no grounds to deny the application.
Accordingly, Section 215 court orders do not require the FBI to have any specific information that the person investigated is engaged in any wrongdoing, let alone terrorism. Finally, such investigative tools come with a blanket gag order, meaning that a librarian, for example, who is approached by the FBI to produce the list of everyone who has borrowed a Quran over the past three weeks, cannot tell anybody, not even a lawyer.
Another revealing problem with the Patriot Act is Section 213, which expands federal access to so-called "sneak and peek," or delayed-notification, search warrants. Prior to October 2001, the government could make use of such warrants -- which allowed agents to enter your home, search your belongings and peruse the contents of your computer hard drive without telling you for weeks or months -- as long as they could show to a judge that notice would endanger evidence, lives, or create a risk of flight.
The Patriot Act, however, put this power in statute and added a catch-all justification for delaying notice: if it would unduly delay a trial or have another adverse result, which any prosecutor worth his salt could easily argue. While, at first blush, this might seem appropriate, I can tell you that, coming from a place like Bangladesh, when the government makes extraordinary powers ordinary, it endangers democracy.
In response to concerns such as these, conservative Republican Sen. Larry Craig from Idaho and liberal Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois have introduced the Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act of 2003. The act would bring the new powers granted to the Department of Justice in the Patriot Act back in line with the Constitution by adding modest new judicial review and other reasonable checks on abuse. It is a necessary first step toward bringing the counterterrorism law back in line with our principles and our Constitution.
In the aftermath of 9-11, the Bush administration was quick with rhetoric such as, "We will not let the terrorists change our way of life." However, if we keep the Patriot Act in its current form, without modest and necessary revisions and improvements, that is exactly what they will have succeeded in doing.
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Iqbal Hossain is a management consultant and an adjunct professor of criminology at the University of Utah. He is the past president of the Islamic Society of Greater Salt Lake and currently is chairman of Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City.