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Express-News December 6, 2003 Trash Patriot Act and Start Over
Forty years ago this month six men presented a search warrant at the door to a small white house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of San Antonio, authorizing them to search for books, papers and records of the communist party. In their four-hour search they didn't find any.
But they carted off more than 2,000 items, including John and Cecilia Stanford's marriage license and a pile of books, including some written by John Paul Sartre, Pope John Paul XXIII and Hugo L. Black.
When Maury Maverick, Jr., the ACLU attorney representing John Stanford before the Supreme Court, got to the bit about Hugo Black, the court broke out in laughter. As well they might. Justice Hugo L. Black was sitting on the bench with the eight other justices hearing the argument. Stanford won his case against the State of Texas - and got his not-so-subversive books back.
When John Stanford told this story Thursday night at the City Council meeting, the audience broke out in applause. What happened to him could happen to any of us. The Patriot Act makes such fishing expeditions legal.
About fifty opponents of the Patriot Act attended the City Council meeting, presenting a four page resolution "affirming civil rights and liberties and declaring opposition to federal measures that infringe on civil liberties."
To date, three states - Alaska, Hawaii and Vermont - and more than 200 cities and counties have passed resolutions opposing the Patriot Act. Two Texas communities are on the list: Austin and Sunset Valley, a town of 327 brave souls six miles from the state capital.
Chicago. Philadelphia. Tucson. Minneapolis. Missoula. Boise. Kalamazoo. Two hundred and twenty-two communities, big and small, liberal and conservative, in 27 states.
The resolution proposed to city council Thursday leads off with two pages of "whereas's." Two of the most chilling criticisms of the Patriot Act are that it:
Expands the authority of federal agents to conduct "sneak and peak" searches, never notifying the subject of the search.
Other proposals are more concrete, such as directing libraries to notify patrons that records of books they borrow could be demanded by federal agents, and directing Bexar County's homeland security official to request information on federal monitoring of political and religious gatherings and other meetings protected by the First Amendment.
The next step is for a council person to propose the resolution. District 5's Patti Radle has indicated her support.
The Patriot Act, all 342 pages of it, was passed only 45 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks. It is a hastily compiled compendium of everything that law enforcement has dreamed about over the past thirty years.
Some of it is perhaps needed, updating old laws to accommodate today's sophisticated technology. Most of it is repugnant to those who treasure liberty. The sensible action, now that we've had time to calm down, would be to trash the act and start over from scratch.
Instead, the U.S. Attorney General has proposed Patriot Act II that, among other provisions, would expand the authority of the government to hold citizens indefinitely without disclosing the charges made against them. Bye-Bye habeas corpus.
John Stanford ended his talk quoting Justice Potter Stewart, who delivered the opinion in his case:
"Vivid in the memory of the newly independent Americans were those general warrants known as writs of assistance under which officers of the Crown had so bedeviled the colonists. . . . "They were denounced by James Otis as "the worst instrument of arbitrary power, the most destructive of English liberty, and the fundamental principles of law, that ever was found in an English law book," because they placed "the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer."
Susan Ives can be reached at suives@texas.net. |