🚀 go-pugleaf

John Conyers, Jr.
Legal Times
www.legaltimes.com

James Madison, founding father and architect of the United States 
Constitution, warned, "The essence of government is power, and power, 
lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."

His words, uttered more than 200 years ago, are proving to be prophetic 
today. In the days after the 9-11 attacks, the Bush Administration rushed 
through Congress the USA PATRIOT Act - a sweeping bill that gave the 
government unprecedented authority to search, wiretap, arrest, and detain 
American citizens and residents not just for suspected terrorist activity, 
but for every type of federal investigation.

Now that the invasion of Iraq is underway, and with the nation's terrorist 
threat level again raised to "high," I fear the Administration is poised to 
unleash a so-called "PATRIOT II" bill, drafted in secret, that would 
constitute the most sweeping and broad based attack on civil liberties in 
our nation's history.

Under this Orwellian proposal, for the first time in our history, our laws 
would authorize secret arrests and detentions.  People could literally 
disappear off the street, thrown in jail, and their families will have no 
idea what happened to them.  Such clandestine tactics are routinely 
practiced by dictatorships, not democracies, and certainly not by a nation 
that has long prided itself as being the most freedom loving on earth.