I'm convinced these measures were a put-up job sold to Bush under the stress of (his) trying to prevent a recurrence of a big terrorist strike in the U.S. .... by people with further agenda, who did not fully disclose their intentions for these new powers and assets. People like, oh, the Federal Reserve and their Wall Street playmates, like elite players at CFR and the Chamber, and so on and so on, and other people with a vested interest in helotizing the American People.
I was afraid at the time, fears fully realized now, that laws like the Patriot Act would prove very empowering to would-be despots like Obama and his gang.
I just cannot buy the old idea that “The Czar is a good man, but surrounded by unprincipled villains”, that the Russians used to explain why their beloved Czar imposed such cruelties on them.
W. Bush knew exactly what he was getting, and was all in favor of it. It didn’t take a “rocket surgeon” to figure out that warrantless searches will almost exclusively be used against non-terrorists.
If you asked the FBI at that time how many terrorists and potential terrorists were in the US, they would have given you a low number, likely in the low hundreds. Oppressing 330 million people to sniff out a few hundred bad ones cannot be explained as a good faith technique.