The big political news this summer, I believe, is the passage of the USA Patriot Act extension in the US House of Representatives. Making fourteen of the act’s sixteen provisions permanent, the bill was originally passed in the emotional days following the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. The renewal of the act comes in the aftermath of the twin attacks in London, first on July 7 and again on July 21.
The act is a gross over-reaction to the threat of terror and gives the terrorists exactly what they want, an over-reaction and a sense of fear among the people and their “leaders.” The restrictions on civil liberties are completely unnecessary. The report of the 9/11 Commission showed that the FBI and various other Federal and state law enforcement and intelligence agencies had all the information they needed to stop the 9/11 attacks. The only problem was a lack of communication between and within agencies and field offices; that and childish competition and turf-protection between agencies and field offices. Remedy that and the country has all the tools necessary to defeat terrorism with out running the Bill of Rights through the shredder.
We were promised in 2001 that the restrictions on privacy and personal freedom imposed by the mis-named Patriot Act would be temporary and would come up for periodic review. At the time, opponents of the act who warned that this was not true were attacked as disloyal and emotional. We now see they were correct. The bill will be permanent.
We can only hope the President’s new nominee to the Supreme Court, John Roberts, is the traditional kind of libertarian conservative who opposes government intrusion on personal freedom and not one of the new conservatives who seem to love expanding government power over the individual. We hope that he also understands that a society which values security more than freedom gets neither.
And, deserves neither.
