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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (38859)	11/26/2001 6:04:38 PM
From: MulhollandDrive	Respond to of 82486

I still have concerns that we are staring at a "slippery slope" The New Anti-Terror Laws May Be Only The Beginning Once upon a time in America: Thousands of people could be arrested without official charges and jailed for months on the order of the president. 100,000 people could be relocated to internment camps. Habeus Corpus rights were suspended. Federal agents were infiltrating and disrupting lawful organizations. All of these things have happened at various times in our history, generally when the United States was at war. To what extent could such incursions on the liberties we take for granted happen again today? The day after hijacked passenger planes crashed with unprecedented devastation into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, Trent Lott, the Republican leader in the U.S. Senate, declared "when you are at war, civil liberties are treated differently — We're going to have to be prepared to take whatever action is required." What did Senator Lott mean? Numerous phone calls and inquiries from lexisONE to Sen. Lott's office over a two-week period went unanswered. That partly may be because there are no answers. Action will depend on the dangers "real and perceived" that we face as a nation. But, as shown by congressional debate over broader law enforcement surveillance powers signed into law by President Bush on Oct. 26, action will not come without serious thought. So far, Congress has not formally declared war, a move that would trigger presidential emergency powers. But there is a broad consensus that changes are coming. Williams Goodman, a director of the left-leaning New York Center for Constitutional Rights, told lexisONE "we are heading into a scary time. I expect there will be powerful opposition to any attempt to fashion a protest movement. Internment, loyalty proceedings, crackdowns on dissenters — all of these things are possible." Douglas Kmiec, a conservative constitutional scholar who serves as dean of Columbus Law School at Catholic University in Washington believes the guiding principle is proportionality. "The test is whether a particular restriction is necessary to meet the threats that we face. In war and peace, the concept of clear and present danger is defined differently." But Kmiec, who lost a member of his faculty in the attack on the Pentagon, warned that vigilance is necessary. "There are those in our country who would like to make changes in our constitutional system — who stand on the order side of law and order. I'd rather not name them. But they would like more restrictions on freedom, and this situation might enable them to take advantage of that." Clint Bolick, a self-described libertarian and staff attorney at the Washington-based Institute for Justice, agreed that civil liberties change in times of war. "Historically, that's been true," he told lexisONE "but I can't think of a single instance where we didn't live to regret it." "In times of crisis, we suffer inconveniences and sacrifices, often severe ones. But... our civil liberties must be protected as ever — even more so now, because they are vulnerable to attack both internally and externally." Or, as the conservative Kmiec put it, "We don't want the constitution to be the ultimate target of terrorism." Copyright 2001 lexisONE