Viet Dinh Defends The Patriot Act 817
Grrr writes "Wired News has posted an interview with Viet Dinh, who worked on the PATRIOT Act for the Justice Department. In the past he said, "Security without liberty - it's not an America I would want to live in." And also, in this interview, "I think right now at this time and this place the greatest threat to American liberty comes from al-Qaida and their sympathizers rather than from the men and women of law enforcement and national security who seek to defend America and her people against that threat." Several of his replies are (predictably / necessarily / discouragingly) less than direct."
I doubt it (Score:0, Interesting)
I highly doubt the DESTROY part where you say we lose our rights. This thing had to be voted for by hundreds of senate/congress men.
Re:Read the Patriot Act (Score:5, Interesting)
The Patriot Act is already being abused to prosecute all manner of crimes that have nothing to do with its original intent. If there were any checks and balances in the act itself, this wouldn't be happening.
Pull your head out of your ass and smell the Totalitarianism!
Using 9/11 as an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess I would trust Bush'es administration a tad more if they were not using the excuse of 9/11 to prosecute organizations such as Green Peace. A more or less complete story can be found in The Miami Herald [miami.com]. If they are capable of using such antiquated law as ''sailor-mongering,'' (intended to deal with people would board a ship and use liquor and prostitutes to lure away the crew) to prosecute organization that is trying to stop illegal logging, how can you trust them they won't use Patriot act in some insidious way?
Re:Read the Patriot Act (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again the one time they did ignore the boy who cried wolf was the one real time that the wolf actually came. The price of peace and freedom is eternal vigilance.
Re:Frightening person, this Dinh. (Score:4, Interesting)
-Yoda
Re:This is an OUTRAGE (Score:3, Interesting)
Repeat after me... (Score:5, Interesting)
YOU CANNOT PRESERVE FREEDOM BY DESTROYING IT
I hate to seem like I am shouting, but I am shouting. What the Patriot Act does to the civil liberties of citizens is unconstitutional and wrong. There is no way that any part of that law should be renewed. It is essentially a declaration that the terrorists won. This is not what I want, and I don't think it is what the American people want to say to the rest of the world.
"Facts and examples" (Score:5, Interesting)
Dinh: I think it is very easy to employ sweeping rhetoric and personal denunciations. I think it is much harder to back it up with facts and concrete examples. [...]
And it is much harder still to back up any sort of reasonable discussion up with facts and concrete examples when the people defending the act in question also have discretion over the facts and concrete examples that are released for public review.
Re:I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
1. The legal process is finally getting it right
2. It is about time!! More than 2 years after it was made into law
3. There was obviously something wrong in it. Who would doubt there's more.
Read it for yourself, so next time, you'll know what you're talking about.
Re:Not justified? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing was done about what? The complete lack of threat from Iraq to any other nation?
If international law alone is so important (IE enough so to go to war because someone is ignoring some memos from the UN), why is the Emperor and his corporate advisory board so adamant that US citizens must be immune to the ICC?
The real reason wasn't just to get saddam, it has changed the middle east
You're right - in a few years, the Middle East (except for Israel of course) will be entirely under hardline Islamic law.
Re:The problems with the Patriot Act.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely.
"The suspension of due process indefinitely is an abomination to liberty, which I could've sworn was what we were fighting for in the first place."
I would argue that suspension at all is an abomination to liberty.
As for the rest of your comment, I must take issue with a number of things. First of all, you're definitely not a southerner, else you'd be calling it the War of Northern Aggression, which better illustrates the illegal nature of the war. There is nothing in the Consitution telling the Federal government that it had the power to stop secession of one or more states. Thus, as per the 9th and 10th amendments, the right to secede from the union remained with the states and those within those states. The North invaded, conquered, and ultimately burned to the ground a foreign nation because it was unable to survive, economically speaking, without it. But I digress.
You use the 'Civil War' (not getting into a semantecs debate) as one example of a time when citizens were imprisoned without due process. Luckily, we've had a court ruling on the matter, entitled Ex Parte Milligan [state.gov], in which the imprisonment of a citizen under martial law was reversed, and in which the Supreme Court held that the very declaration of martial law was, itself, unconstitutional. From the court's decision:
----------
"Martial law cannot arise from a threatened invasion. The necessity must be actual and present; the invasion real, such as effectually closes the courts and deposes the civil administration."[Emph mine]
"If, in foreign invasion or civil war, the courts are actually closed, and it is impossible to administer criminal justice according to law, then, on the theatre of active military operations, where war really prevails, there is a necessity to furnish a substitute for the civil authority, thus overthrown, to preserve the safety of the army and society; and as no power is left but the military, it is allowed to govern by martial rule until the laws can have their free course. As necessity creates the rule, so it limits its duration; for, if this government is continued after the courts are reinstated, it is a gross usurpation of power."
And most importantly:
"Martial rule can never exist where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction. It is also confined to the locality of actual war."
My personal favorite part of the decision:
"But, it is insisted that the safety of the country in time of war demands that this broad claim for martial law shall be sustained. If this were true, it could be well said that a country, preserved at the sacrifice of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of preservation. Happily, it is not so."[Emph mine]
---------------
Ergo, example 1 was shown to be illegal. Shall we look further at example 2?
In World War 2, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which called for all the 'japs' to be rounded up and put into internment camps. This already looks pretty bad, doesn't it? In Korematsu V. United States, the Supreme Court gave the 'thumbs up' to the internment camps, rolling over like trained puppies for the popular wartime President. However... Over time, people actually got their heads on straight and took a good look at what had happened. In 1976, President Ford issued Proclamation 4417 which terminated Executive Order 9066. It was called "An American Promise", and it promised that such an action would never again be taken, while acknowledging that it was wrong in the first place. In 1983, a Federal district court ruled the detention
Re:I doubt it (Score:5, Interesting)
Logical impossibility (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that the only person(s) capable of restricting, denying, or otherwise effecting MY liberty are those individuals in authority to whom I am supposed to defer. That would be law enforcement, national security and those who rule them. Al-Quaida and its sympathizers have no control over me, none. I can't recall ever having to obey their rules, or having them tell me what to do. Attitudes like this piss me off to no end. I am not an infant, I can bloody well take care of myself, and I would thank my fellow Americans if they would stop acting like babies, expecting to be coddled by the powers that be and their tools.
Always remember that a jail also protects those within from those on the outside.
Re:Listen to your elders... (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, well over 3000. The attack on 9/11 not only killed 3000 Americans, it fostered a reckless foreign policy that has killed hundreds more Americans, perhaps 10,000 Iraqi civilians, and who knows how many Iraqi and Afghani combatants. And these numbers continue to climb, despite passage of legislation like the PA. I guess we still have too many liberties, eh?
Re:Patriot Hysteria (Score:3, Interesting)
As you mention, documents "theoretically" include library records. Has there been an actual case where library records were presented as the sole qualifying grounds for more court orders, particularly an arrest warrent? How about being just one of several items of evidence? (and were any of the other items worth more as evidence?)
I don't know the answers to any of these questions offhand. You may, or you may feel the arguements you've already presented are enough for you to trust the current law. I do know who should have been asked these questions and a lot more.
Al Qaida has won... ARGH!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Did ANYONE EVER read the letter from Bin Laden to the "United States".
Here's an article [guardian.co.uk] from the Observer containing the full translated text.
Here's some key pieces of the text for those who are too lazy to click on the link:
Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its*price, and pay for it heavily.
And here's a part regarding liberty and freedom...
(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
Again, it's out of context, you need to read the letter to understand the point he's making.
I don't necessarily agree with what he's saying, but let's get the facts straight. It's not that they hate a free society, but they hate the fact that this free society allowed the oppression they've supposedly felt.
I have a feeling that if history occured differently, there would be a bit more acceptance for the things he argues against later in the letter (such as gambling, drug use,
Re:The greatest threat (Score:4, Interesting)
"It may well be that a number of citizens were not charged with terrorism-related crimes, but they need not be. Where the department has suspected people of terrorism it will prosecute those persons for other violations of law, rather than wait for a terrorist conspiracy to fully develop and risk the potential that that conspiracy will be missed and thereby sacrificing innocent American lives in the process. "
This could be interpreted as all suspected terrorist are guilty of other crimes for which they can be convicted, but I imagine its more likely that it means, if the government can't make a terrorism conviction stick, they fabricate other offenses which are an easier frame to make. An example which immediately comes to mind is Capt. James Yee, the muslim chaplain at Guantanomo who was facing a death penalty espionage charge for collaborating with the enemy. The Army's case completely collapsed but rather than let him go with an apology he is instead up on charges for adultery and using army computers to look at porn which can be used to put him in a Federal pen for a decade:
http://www.counterpunch.org/wright02022004.html
"I do recognize that our Defense Department officials have an awesome responsibility to play in not only prosecuting the war in Afghanistan and Iraq but also continuing to protect the American homeland"
I would really like to know what a DOJ official thinks "Defense Department officials" are doing to protect the Homeland that is apart from fighting foreign wars. The DOD's role in our nation's security is to prosecute foreign wars. It is the DOJ, National Gaurd and Homeland security's role to defend the homeland. The Posse Comitatus act of 1878 was put in place precisely to preclude the DOD from acting as a domestic enforcement agency because we wanted to discourage the military from seizing control of our homeland which is an all to common occurence in nation's where the military takes an active role in the homeland.
http://www.dojgov.net/posse_comitatus_act.htm
I'm cool with the DOD flying aircraft over the U.S. to secure the airspace but I don't ever want to see them practicing their trade on the ground unless we are really invaded.
"We should all applaud each other for getting into the game and risking injury because of it, because at the end of the day we all win if we do engage."
He's conveniently choosing to ignore the fact that his team has the vast resource of the DOJ, DOD, etc. on his side. Any ordinary citizens who jumped in to this game would risk grave, if not mortal, injury. He also doesn't seem to understand how games work. Unless there is a tie and no won wins, there is always a winner and a loser. The point spread is decidely in the favor of his team.
You could hope that somehow we could just all go out and vote and fix this but that is more than a little naive. The majority in this country isn't going to think about or understands the implications of the Patriot Act in their lives. They are going to hear their President, with his bully pulpit, use every speech to summon waves of fear, invoke images of 9/11 and then offer premptive warfare and the patriot act as the solution for all our fears. If we do go out and vote in November we can choose between John Kerry who voted for and cheerled the Patriotic Act when he thought it was popular and George Bush who signed it.
Re:MODS, please. Pay attention. (Score:3, Interesting)
AC comments are some of the most informative, insightful posts here these days, mainly because they don't care about karma or any of that other bullshit, they just post whats on their minds. Some of its inflammatory, some of its wrong, some of its noise, but some of its correct, just like the AC parent of your post.
So get off your high horse and start contributing to the discussion, instead of wasting time and accounts by posting drivel about people being AC or not.
For my views, I agree with the AC. Respond to his arguments, and I'll address your counter-arguments.
And yes yes, I saw the smiley. Doesn't make it any more valid.
Re:His name is Viet Dinh (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it would be both ignorant and racist to make a Hitler joke about a Swede. The Swedes have been non-aligned for a long time.
No, my German relatives were not even "broadly" related to Swedes. They were, umm, Germans.
And if you would not repeat the comment or make a Charlie joke to someone of Vietnamese descent, doesn't that speak about the offensive nature of the comment? Doesn't the AC posting speak for the hatefulness of the post?
The original comment was posted by an AC. Obviously, this is someone who does not want to be held accountable.
Re:I doubt it (Score:3, Interesting)
I did. In the end, one fact stands out: Hitler was elected. He didn't have the support of the majority of the people, but he was elected, nevertheless. He was elected according to the law of his country, just like GWB in 2000. The law was flawed, there were several circumstances, etc, but, according to the letter of the law, Hitler was democratically elected chancellor of Germany in 1934.
Re:The greatest threat to my liberty... (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's set the hyperbole aside for a minute. I'd be willing to bet that our response to 9/11 would have been identical if Gore'd been President.
There might still have been something *like* the PATRIOT act, although it would probably be less extreme.
The 9/11 Commission probably wouldn't have gotten much farther than it has under Bush -- all the same CYA interests would be involved.
We wouldn't be in Iraq, and as a result, we might actually have a stronger presence in Afghanistan at this stage.
Lacking the push to war in Iraq, we wouldn't have pissed the entire world off, and we'd likely be in a better position in the "War on Terror" because of this.
But in 9/11 what-if terms, it's not even a very interesting question. The really interesting question is this -- what if John McCain had won the Republican nomination and the national election? [google.com]
Re:The greatest threat (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The greatest threat to my liberty... (Score:2, Interesting)
It doesn't and it hasn't.
Yes! Very good point. The government is composed of, and controled by people, (not necessarily the same people)
The government isn't taking your liberty from you. Your fellow citizens are. They are responsible for voting your government into power.
While your fellow citizens are responsible for voting them in, they are hardly the ones responsible and certianly not the real people in charge. It just doesn't smell right for that. I am not sure who to lay the blame on, and it is probably several people/groups of people. My best guess is the large corporations, and those who own and/or control them bear the brunt of the blame. They seem to fit the same niche that the old aristocracy of europe (or most places/times in history) did. If true, this will not change until we can reform corporate law to limit their power. And no, I am not generally in favor of regulation. I suspect that certain aspects of corpopate law give them this power, and those need to be repealed.
Anyone know of a good place to start researching? Besides google of course.
Re:The greatest threat (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Total
Remember Isreal's decision to commit a targeted assassination of a guerilla leader by using an F-16 to bomb an apartment building full of innocent women and children.
Ethnic cleansing doesn't necessarily mean whole sale massacre. In milder forms it means targeted killing, destruction of homes and compelling an ethnic group to migrate out of their homeland. Isreal has been doing all of these to the Palastinians since World War II.
Isreal is in an akward position as it tries to maintain a democracy because Arabs constitute a large percentage of their population and the Arab growth rate is much higher than the Jewish growth rate so unless they force emmigration of Palastinians they would eventually lose control of their government which they won't allow. As a result they are obligated to force Palastinians out of Isreal popular and in to refugess camps or shrinking ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. On top of that Isreal routinely seizes Palastinian land in the west bank to create Isreal settlements decide to extend Isreal's defenses and further marginalize the palastinians. The new security wall Isreal is building is cutting deeply in previously Palastinian land in the west bank. It is essentially a new and massive land grab and will be followed by forcing Palastinians out of Isreal's newly expanded borders.
Its proven impossible to estimate the actual deaths of Kosovo Albanians in Serbia's ethnic cleansing campaign but it is in the range of a few hundred to 10,000 which is conceeded to be an extreme number created by NATO for propaganda purposes. It is certainly in the same range as Palastinian deaths in the Intafada, since 2000.
Re:The greatest threat to my liberty... (Score:2, Interesting)
Finally, to quote a famous religious conservative, a preacher with a show on every Sunday here in the Bible-Belt, and a fan of the Bushes, "even stupid people can get a college degree". Now he was referring to all those idiotic scientists with their crazy nonsense about evolution, but if *all* of those people got degrees and are still stupid, then surely Harvard can make a "mistake" every once in awhile. Hey, if the theory works for him, then it has to work for me too.
so unite the independants (Score:1, Interesting)
it's in their interest(s) the long run, because under the current system, as individuals the best they can hope for is to be irrelevant
so it should be easy, right? >)
They are doing such a good job now... (Score:1, Interesting)
9/11 ~ 3000 killed.
cars ~ 60,000+ killed every year.
smoking ~ tens of thousands killed and more every day. (Increasing your health care costs!)
Tobacco is Terrorism and
Smoking is a biological weapon.
If they want to save American Lives:
Ban the sale of tobacco.
If they want to save American Lives:
up the car safety test speeds X 2.
'Terrorism' is bad, but it is the everyday stuff that gets most people killed.
How about stopping the crack-heads?
You are far more likely to die from
'common crime' and high risk behavior
(smoking / overeating / hypertension)
than some sort of political cause.
The problem with building a police state
(with all good intentions of safety and security)
usually ends with the power in the hands of some totalitarian.
The few in power abuse that police state system to hurt the many. In the USA, perhaps the 'total information awareness' data will be exploited for economic gain, or to remove the 'unwanted' people, like democrats.
Re:The greatest threat to my liberty... (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that centralized authority always wants is more power. So it will always try to act in ways that increase it's power, and decrease the powers of the potential opposition. (Note that word "potential".)
This means that any govenment in power will act in ways that it beleives will increase the power of the government.
You can call yourself anything, an anarchist even, but once you get power, you act so as to increase your power. (If you doubt this, go to an anarchist meeting, and watch the power struggles.) Actually anarchists tend to be worse than most groups, because since they don't believe in laws and regulations, they also don't believe in checks and balences. But authoritarians can adopt the same structure for the opposite reason. I.e., they believe that power is good, so the powerful should be unchecked.
The upshot is, it's a design problem. The constitution did a pretty good job of addressing it, with the institution of checks and balences, but it's obviously drifted more and more into an authoritarianism since the very early 1900's. The main turning point was probably around the time of the Civil War. But it was inherent in the original constitution, possibly because it was a document of political compromise, and possibly because nobody ever designs things correctly the first time they do so. (And a powerful faction, Hamilton, et al., wanted an authoritarian government. They just didn't want a British authoritarian government.)
The key lesson here is that systems should be designed without centralized points of control. It's more difficult to start with, but it saves one much trouble in the long term. It's less efficient to start with, but in the long term it's much more efficient.
One compromise that FOSS has developed is to have a radically authoritarian system, which is easily forked. It seems to combine the efficiency of an authoritarian system during the early days with the liberty of an anarchy. (Forking something takes work, and you've got to convince people. But if the original project isn't treating people reasonably, that can be reasonably easy. And the work of running the project is the payment for the authority of running it.) How that could be generalized outside the FOSS context I'm not certain...but you might think about it.
Re:The problems with the Patriot Act.... (Score:2, Interesting)
FWIW, I know people who grew up in the American concentration camps. Interestingly, they don't hate all Americans of Caucasion descent. But living in a concentration camp is an experience that changes you even more than having your home and all your possessions taken from you. It's sad and infuriating that there are people who would do the same thing today to all Muslim Americans if given the opportunity.
Also, to nitpick - the Japanese-American regiment in WW2, the 442nd, was more than the most heavily decorated unit of the war. They were the most heavily decorated unit of their size and length of service in the history of the United States military. A lot of the survivors will tell you that it's because the brass back at HQ threw them into situations that they would never risk white American lives for.
Re:Hey America: (Score:2, Interesting)
Strangely enough, CIA director George Tenet made that exact point only yesterday:
"CIA chief predicts war with no end
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 25/02/2004)
America's assault on al-Qa'eda has scattered its terrorist expertise across the globe, meaning that the United States will be menaced by Islamic extremism "for the foreseeable future", the CIA director, George Tenet, said yesterday.
He offered the Senate intelligence committee a bleak vision of a war on terrorism without end, in which even the destruction of al-Qa'eda would not make America safe."
CIA chief predicts war with no end [telegraph.co.uk]
Re:Threat to liberty? (Score:3, Interesting)
The economy would recover, and the rest of the country would still have enough to eat. It would cause horrific devastation, but that is not enough to destroy liberty.
London was continuously bombed for over a year at the beginning of world war 2, as was Hanoi in 1965-66. This did nothing to threaten the people of those nations, if anything it made them more defiant.