Just thought folks might find interesting a brief report on my experience this Friday, when I debated the USA Patriot Act with Gary Shapiro the first Deputy US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois at my synagogue. The Justice Department has sent out its minions to defend the Patriot Act even against critics such as I.
<snip>
The synagogue (a humanist atheist schul) was probably a harder audience for him than for me. Still, I thought that his defense of the Act was fairly weak. It was fun debating him.
============
Very interesting.
I think that Mr. Shapiro's weak arguments were a result of the thin foundation upon which the act was built.
We are told, by everyone from Ashcroft on down, that the problem facing intelligence and law enforcement prior to 11 Sept 2001 was a complex of constraints upon their freedom of action.
If only our guardians' hands had not been tied by the checks and balances put in place following abuses such as COINTELPRO then surely the *evil-doers* would have been thwarted.
Even during the hysterical moments that immediately followed the collapse of the towers, a few sensible voices said that the problem wasn't constraint, but ineptitude and criminal neglect.
How many Arabic speaker/writers do the FBI and CIA have on their respective payrolls these folks asked.
As we know, few listened to reason, Congress leapt to the call of unreason and voila! PATRIOT ACT.
Although he's quieted down recently, for a while it seemed Ashcroft was on television every five minutes announcing how, because of the *new cooperation* between law enforcement and intelligence agencies and the expanded powers granted via the act, a horde of terrorists, armed with radioactive dirty bombs, bio-weapons and perhaps even anti-matter blasters (or at least blueprints for such bits of kill-tech), were in custody.
So long as no new incident occurs the act's supporters will be able to fool at least some of the people some of the time with this sleight of hand.
DRM
__________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree