To: Sidney Reilly who wrote (412337 ) 6/6/2003 8:38:11 PM From: Lazarus_Long Read Replies (2) | Respond to meaning FBI & CIA failed us again Bush is using fear of "terror" to take away our freedoms. The Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of a total of 4 laws. The first, the Alien Enemies Law, vested the president with extraordinary wartime powers. On his own authority, he could detain or deport citizens of nations with which the United states was at war and who behaved in a manner he thought suspicious. However, since wartime did not occur for as long as this bill existed, it was not able to be put into use at any time. A second act, the Alien Law, empowered the president to expel any foreigner from the United States simply by executive decree. The third act, and the most blatantly political one, the Naturalization Law, doubled the probationary period for which foreigners had to wait before applying for full U. S. citizenship, from 7 to 14 years. The Sedition Law made it the equivalent of criminal libel to criticize the U. S. government. usahistory.com In a series of orders from 1861 to 1864, Lincoln gave local and military authorities the right to arrest whomever they saw fit, simply based on vague allegations of disloyalty to the Union. In what historian Mark Neely calls "the lowest [point] for civil liberties in all of American history," the government arrested at least 354 civilians in just one month, from Aug. 8 to Sept. 8, 1862. Newspaper editors were arrested for opposing the war. Ordinary citizens were thrown in jail based on anonymous tips from political enemies or even from angry neighbors looking to settle old scores. businessweek.com
