In the San Jose Mercury News Friday (10 June 2005), L.A. Chung wrote a thoughtful piece on the "Patriot Act". In it she noted that people are starting to think about national security issues and worrying about the act. (See "It's high time to debate the Patriot Act" at
http://www.mercurynews.com.)
People like Fremont resident Cecilia Chang have peppered me with e-mails lately about developments on the civil liberties and security fronts. . . . It doesn't inspire much confidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee, during closed-door deliberations this week, approved provisions easing the FBI's ability to watch my mail or look at my hospital, hotel, bank and employment records without a judge. On just their own say-so, called an "administrative subpoena."
I'm certainly concerned. So, I sent Ms. Chung my own e-mail message.
Here is my missive to her:
Dear Ms. Chung,
Thank you for writing about the "USA PATRIOT ACT" (UPA). It's a very misleading name, isn't it, since it wasn't written by patriots.
For over two hundred years courts alone have issued subpoenas. Why did we always give this power to the courts? By dividing the power to authorize searches between two branches of government our country has avoided the abuse of power that so often comes when one group gets to make all decisions. It's one of the things that has given us a relatively professional government, instead of the tin-pot dictatorships so many other countries have endured. So, when anyone suddenly proposes that we change this, one has to ask, "What kind of abuse are you planning?"
We only need to look to Iraq to see what happens when one group gets control of all the levers of power. An executive decides that certain people need to be killed "for the good of the country." A weakened court system looks the other way. Intimidated legislators remain silent and watch from the sidelines. The bodies pile up in unmarked graves.
If this scenario plays out in the U.S., which country will invade us to "restore our freedom"?
The real and serious danger in this act is its subversion of a fundamental mechanism in our government, a device designed to keep it honest. The act weakens the judiciary to the profit of the executive branch. Though these attacks on our structures look small they are very important.
The little knives inserted into the judiciary by this legislation are part of a larger picture. A very focused and determined group within our country is now trying to weaken the judiciary across the board. We have seen this in repeated assaults on the decisions of judges as "activist" and the attempt to appoint obviously biased people to the bench.
These people probably think they are saving the union. They are misguided in that. But they may also have ulterior motives and may be taking advantage of a natural tendency of systems to absorb power and keep it. In this regard our government is no different from any other system. All systems try to absorb power and increase control. This tendency is an opportunity for those who see ways to use it for their personal profit--and have no scruples about doing so at the cost of society.
I'm afraid that terrorism is being used, just as other trends have been used in the past, to justify a concentration of power. This was the danger that the founders of the United States feared most and took the greatest pains to guard against. We have seen a steady erosion of their defenses (levels of government, separation of powers, free press, and so on) for many years as power has become increasingly concentrated in Washington, D.C. (and a shrinking set of major corporations).
Consider how many wars have been promoted to the American people and then used to justify taking away individual rights. Just in my lifetime there has been the threat of communism and the danger that it would destroy life in the U.S. by taking over South Vietnam. When that fell apart, there was the threat of drugs, which were supposedly eating away at the country from within. Then that fell apart and now we have the threat of terrorism to take its place. Look at how the end of each "war" brought on the advent of the next.
Do any of these problems, though arguably serious, justify a war? Is a war an appropriate response to these threats? Well, no. But the war isn't really the objective. The objective is to take away our rights so that power can be concentrated in the heart of the system.
Every time we wage war the government reaches deeper into our pockets to fund it and uses the threat as an excuse to curtail liberties and increase surveillance. The real drug problem here is that our government is hooked on the drug of war. It can't stand to kick the habit and it will do anything, literally anything, break any law, drop any nuclear bomb, stockpile biological or chemical weapons, scatter land mines in fields around the world, to get its fix.
It will take the concerted effort of all concerned citizens to get Uncle Sam off the war habit.
The benign sounding UPA is a real problem. Everything about it suggests that it is killing off the very thing it purports to save. It is a little damage here and a little damage there to the body politic. How far away are we from the tipping point where we can't repair this kind of damage?
So, thanks for putting this discussion in your column. This is real news. When, do you suppose, are we going to see a full day of CNN devoted to this topic?
[Signed by me]
Her published e-mail address is lchung@mercurynews.com, in case you want to write her your own message.