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Politics : Clinton's Scandals: Is this corruption the worst ever? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sea_biscuit who wrote (10123)	1/6/1999 9:36:00 PM
From: Catfish	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13994

Raid on Rights By Nat Hentoff Saturday, January 2, 1999; Page A19 As the House voted the two articles of impeachment, the criers of coup d'etat and sexual McCarthyism failed to mention that William Jefferson Clinton is, in addition, a serial violator of the Bill of Rights, among other parts of the Constitution. These other attacks on the Constitution are not impeachable offenses because the Framers could not have imagined them. For example, the president has not been so distracted by the current scandal as to forgo a raid on the Fourth Amendment. On Oct. 20 this year, he signed the Intelligence Authorization Act for fiscal 1999. It includes a provision -- long desired by the president and FBI director Louis Freeh -- for roving wiretaps, despite the fact that neither the House- nor the Senate-passed versions of the bill did. The wiretap language was slipped into the conference report by Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.) and has become a law of the land without hearings or public debate. So much for the people's democratic process -- a mantra intoned these days by the president's protectors. The Fourth Amendment came into being because the Framers were smarting from the abuses of the general search warrant used by British customs officers to search colonial homes and businesses at will. And that's why the Fourth Amendment requires law enforcement agents to get a warrant based on probable cause of criminal activity that must "particularly describe the place to be searched or the persons or things to be seized." A wiretap is a search and seizure of communications on the targeted phone. Since 1986, a very limited multipoint wiretap was permitted if the target showed a clear intent to evade a conventional wiretap. Under the new law, a specific intent is no longer required. Now the person subject to a roving wiretap will be followed, and all phones to which he or she is "reasonably proximate" while the court order is in effect will be tapped. The ACLU -- which led the fight against this offense to the Constitution -- points out that "this includes the phones in the private residences of a subject's friends, neighbors or business associates." The FBI can listen to the rovingly tapped phones even if the owner of a phone and his or her family -- and not the target -- are using it. In 1997, each time federal or state electronic surveillance was used, it stayed in place for an average of 45 days and intercepted an average of 2,081 conversations by 197 people. The president's attack on the Fourth Amendment is part of a long line of assaults on the Constitution. His 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act has so weakened the constitutional right of habeas corpus that innocent prisoners on death row -- convicted since 1996 -- will be executed because they now have only one year to get a federal court to review the fairness of the state trial that doomed them. Clinton (with a majority of Congress) also is responsible for that part of the 1996 act that authorizes the deportation of aliens, including long-term legal resident aliens, suspected of ties to terrorism -- without defendants or their lawyers being allowed to see the evidence against them. The president also pressured the Justice Department to persuade the Supreme Court to affirm the Communications Decency Act, which would have censored everything on the Internet that was insufficiently "decent" for children. The Supreme Court unanimously rejected Clinton's summary dismissal of the First Amendment. His defenders -- as they blame his plight on "right-wing extremists" -- do not mention his legacy as the president in this century who has inflicted the most harm on our constitutional rights and liberties. What is most disturbing, however, is that the polls showing widespread approval of Clinton also reflect the popular ignorance of the Constitution that his defenders invoke to save him. © Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com