What You Should Really Fear

The Patriot Bill, H.R. 3162, does many awful things. It expands government, both in power and in funding requirements. In creating new funding requirements, it promises to help eat up any future federal budget "surpluses" that might have resulted in tax cuts for you. It reduces your rights and your privacy, handing over more of both to the government. It further inures an already docile, naïve, unambitious, and ignorant population to Big Brotherly central-governmental intrusiveness and domination.

But it would be easy to make the case that nearly every document produced by Congress does all of that.

The Patriot Bill makes it easier for your government to interfere with financial institutions, both in the US and overseas. A little suspicion of terrorism, however established, has your government freezing accounts, tracing transactions, and threatening banks.

But the government has been doing all of that already, in waging the War on Drugs.

The Patriot Bill ridiculously condemns discrimination against Arab and Muslim Americans; but we’ve already been force-fed multiculturalism until we’re ready to vomit.

The bill increases, or makes easier to apply, all sorts of penalties for behavior that was already illegal, such as "money laundering." The bill makes it easier for various law enforcement bodies at different levels to cooperate with each other, further centralizing the aiming of our own government’s guns at us; and it makes it easier to use DNA evidence against terrorists and "other violent criminals" (and you thought it was just an anti-terrorism bill).

But the government has had the power to pursue lawbreakers for as long as there’s been a government.

The Patriot Bill, for the most part, merely makes it easier for the government to go on doing the things it’s been doing – mainly taking more freedom and property from us while giving more power to itself – since Thomas Jefferson took office and immediately commenced violating the Constitution and good judgment.

You should always be afraid of new legislation. Lovers of freedom have long recognized that the creeping expansion of government is a hazard. For the most part, this bill is merely another incremental expansion of government. The real threat from this bill is not the new provisions, procedures, funding, and penalties – these are more of the same old things we’ve been fighting, and must continue fighting. No, the real threat from H.R. 3162 is the new set of definitions.

When you increase the ease with which government can pursue criminals, you expand government incrementally, and you threaten primarily people who already knew they were criminals. It is an entirely different matter to change the definition of "criminal," however, and this insane bill makes the definition so broad the government can engineer a case against any citizen.

The Patriot Bill expands the definition of "domestic terrorist" so much that it includes virtually all of us. H.R. 3162 defines as a domestic terrorist anyone who appears to intend to change government policy through intimidation (and intimidation is not defined, so the term easily could be used in court to include protest activities the Constitution was intended to protect). Your infraction doesn’t even have to be intentional; it just has to appear so. The wording of H.R. 3162 has other absurd implications, such as: If you accidentally destroy a railroad-crossing signal with your car, all a lawyer has to do is convince a judge or jury that you did it willfully, and you’re a domestic terrorist. Does anyone believe a crooked sheriff wouldn’t jump on the opportunity to use such a provision against a political rival?

George Orwell proposed, in 1984, that a powerful tool for government control of a populace was control over their vocabulary. Over time, by removing certain words from the language, the government might minimize subversive thoughts – you can’t think about freedom if you’ve never encountered the concept. In reality, it’s impossible for a government to remove words from a language; in fact, our government has found an even more effective device: They’ve invented new definitions of words to the extent that anyone, with the possible exception of submissive, freedom-hating couch potatoes, can be accused of domestic terrorism, and taken away at gunpoint.

Anyone who’s been thinking that the erosion of civil liberties following 9/11 would be minimal, justified, nonintrusive, nonthreatening, or would contribute to the security of American civilians, should have known better. More to the crux of the matter, the next time you examine a new piece of legislation, just skim the parts that outline new procedures, funding, and government powers – you know what’s there without looking. Instead, put your primary focus on new definitions. The devil’s in the definitions.

Brad Edmonds, MS in Industrial Psychology, Doctor of Musical Arts, is a banker in Alabama.

Yes you're right on all counts in your asessment of the danger. I didn't mean to imply that you're deluded, because you've made it plain that you're watching carefully. The most dangerous threat from wihin lies in our own elected officials. The entire Senate seems to be nothing but a nest of traitors, along with a very large portion of the House. The judiciary has been the enemy for many decades.

(5) the term `domestic terrorism' means activities that-- `(A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; `(B) appear to be intended-- `(i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; `(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or `(iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and `(C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.'.

Watch where you smoke cigarettes, people! It isn't just Montgomery County, Maryland anymore.

This gives them plausable deniability, while, at the same time, giving them exactly what they most desire.....more power with which to rule/control the peasants.

They no longer rule. The branch of goverment that was once the most equal has been reduced to debating about junk like desecrating the American flag while the country is run by the Executive bureaucracy in partnership with the courts. Passing vague bills to be enforced by the bureaucrats gives them deniability when their constituents start complaining: "We never intended that."

The people who want to be cared for by an omnipotent government are now in the majority and have been for the last 7 decades. It isn't going to get any better.

Just wait 'till they find out that all the laws and bills in the world won't prevent another terrorist attack.

"Just wait 'till they find out that all the laws and bills in the world won't prevent another terrorist attack. "

Precisely why our government feels that the greatest threat to it's survival comes from "within". The elected ones are much more afraid of we the people than they are of outside threats. Expect even more crackdowns on OUR civil liberties in their fraudulent display of concern for "our" protection. They are only concerned with protecting themselves. From us.

the country is run by the Executive bureaucracy in partnership with the courts.

Bingo. Bump.

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