Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2003

WASHINGTON – There is a pervasive fear among some on the right and the left that the USA Patriot Act, enacted just after 9/11, could be used against law-abiding citizens.

“Conservatives have good cause to worry that even membership in organizations such as Operation Rescue or property rights and gun owner groups could be defined by an unfriendly administration as belonging to groups engaged in domestic terrorism,” warns Steve Lilienthal, a policy analyst with the Free Congress Foundation.

Sound preposterous? Not to those conservatives who recall that Bill Clinton tried to blame the Oklahoma City bombing on Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.

Nor to those with longer historical perspectives who recall that President Franklin Roosevelt tried to imprison some prewar isolationist congressmen during World War II.

Here is the Department of Justice’s official answer:

“The Patriot Act limits domestic terrorism to conduct that breaks criminal laws, endangering human life. Peaceful groups that dissent from government policy without breaking laws cannot be targeted.”

That may be the intent of the current administration, but what about all those abuses during the Clinton years? Could a future jackboot-minded administration such as that one use the Patriot Act to throw a president’s political opponents in jail?

In an interview with NewsMax.com, veteran security investigator Herb Romerstein, who served in the Reagan administration, says the Clinton administration's many abuses violated laws that were already on the books. Yet Clinton needed no Patriot Act to feel free to stomp all over the Constitution and get away with it. Romerstein says that applies to Ruby Ridge, Waco, grabbing Elian Gonzalez and illegally accessing FBI files on former Republican White House staffers.

“So you don’t need legislation to have them violate the Constitution,” he said, “It doesn’t follow that we don’t need legislation to protect the American people.”

A Terroristic Bump

The problem, as Lilienthal sees it, is that the Patriot Act is written in such a way that “domestic terrorism” can involve any act considered to be dangerous to human life that violates federal law, “even misdemeanors!” he adds for emphasis.

“Could bumping someone on the head with a picket sign be interpreted as engaging in domestic terrorism? Given overzealous law enforcement and the way the USA Patriot Act is currently written, the answer is yes,” declares the FCF analyst.

Lists of the coalition opposing the Patriot Act include such conservative stalwarts as Free Congress Foundation and Americans for Tax Reform alongside leftist icons such as American Civil Liberties Union and People for he American Way. Romerstein suggests conservatives may experience discomfort at the company they’re keeping, but conservatives opposing the Patriot Act note that some issues inevitably result in strange bedfellows.

Further, Lilienthal says all the “draconian powers” endowed on law enforcement by the 2-year-old law “do not guarantee better coordination between law enforcement and intelligence agencies, one of the prime reasons why the 9/11 plot was not foiled.”

On the other hand, Romerstein says the Patriot Act did break down the wall against information-sharing by the FBI and the CIA. That wall was created after the much-hyped post-Watergate hearings by the Senate's Church committee. Some supporters of the law believe better communication between those two inestigative agencies alone might have saved lives on 9/11.

Next: expanding the Patriot Act.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Clinton Scandals
Homeland/Civil Defense
Privacy
War on Terrorism
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