Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, in an insurgent Senate debate today on the Patriot Act led by Rand Paul of Kentucky:
"In the Middle East..." people are "striving for more freedom, striving for more democracy," and we support them. "Here on the floor of the United States Senate we are not willing to analyze what this so-called Patriot Act has done to our freedom."
Paul: "We are being quieted down. We are being told to sit quietly in the back of the room and not make waves.. They call this the world's greatest deliberative body. We're unwilling to deliberate [this issue]."
On October 26, 2001 the Patriot Act was signed into law.
Sometime in November 2001 I had a conversation about it with a co-worker of a friend who insisted that it was a “good thing”. I explained that not only was the Patriot Act an invasion of every American’s privacy, but also a violation of some of the most basic of civil liberties. He insisted that the law was going to be used against terrorists only and that Americans had nothing to worry about. He further added that those who are usually concerned with civil liberties are bleeding heart liberals and he has nothing to worry about as he has done nothing wrong.
Several years later, whistle-blowers made it known that the Patriot Act has enabled a surveillance program aimed at Americans. That made some noise and then disappeared from the mass media.
Nowadays, I don’t think many Americans even recall what the Patriot Act was all about or how it came to be.
How did the PATRIOT Act come to be? That was what the anthrax letters were all about. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy were unsatisfied with the PATRIOT Act drafts coming over from the Bush administration. So, in early October 2001, their offices were sent anthrax letters, and shortly thereafter the PATRIOT Act sailed through Congress.
interesting how some folks are now asking some tougher questions around the whole anthrax event of 2001…
link to emptywheel.firedoglake.com
this argument is made all the time:
“I’ve got nothing to hide, so what’s the big deal”.
I don’t know what it will take to change these people.
When it’s their freedoms that have slowly evaporated,
they may take notice. But most of the washington slime
operates in secret about these bills, and it’s only till months
later, do many jouranalist have a handle on what exactly the
Patriot Act is comprised of. The average guy in the street
later realizes how they just got shafted, while some monkey
on about how we’re being kept safe.
It wasn’t just the American public that didn’t know what the PATRIOT Act (sic) said, full texts of the bill were not even available to members of Congress until months after the bill passed into law.
Good for Paul and Udall to insist on this.
“They call this the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Who calls it that?
The pigmies in Africa, for them anything over their size is “great”.