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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wayners who wrote (490208)	11/10/2003 1:35:57 PM
From: sylvester80	Respond to of 769670

NEWS: Gore: War Pretext for Curbing Liberties THE WASHINGTON POST November 10, 2003 newsday.com Washington - In his second major policy speech in three months, former vice president Al Gore took aim yesterday at what he said was the Bush administration's exploitation of the terrorist attacks of 2001 to justify an undemocratic suspension of domestic freedoms and to create a government built on "secrecy and deception." Gore told 3,000 cheering supporters in Washington's DAR Constitution Hall that President George W. Bush was taking the wrong approach to protecting the nation from terrorist threats. "I want to challenge the Bush administration's implicit assumption that we have to give up many of our traditional freedoms in order to be safe from terrorists," Gore said in the speech sponsored by MoveOn.org and the American Constitution Society. "Rather than defending our freedoms, this administration has sought to abandon them. Rather than accepting our traditions of openness and accountability, this administration has opted to rule by secrecy and unquestioned authority. Its assaults on our core democratic principles have only left us less free and less secure." Gore urged Congress to repeal the Patriot Act, with its broad enhancements of government powers that allow federal agents to "sneak and peek" at citizens' private records; enter citizens' homes in secret; and hold citizens indefinitely without access to legal counsel or a hearing before a judge. "I believe strongly that the few good features of this law should be passed again in a new, smaller law, but that the Patriot Act must be repealed," he said. Gore said the Bush administration's actions might represent the beginning of a new and lasting era of repression because of the new technologies of surveillance. He said the threat of terrorism is so open-ended that it offers Republicans a grand opportunity "to use fear as a political tool to consolidate its power and to escape any accountability for its use."