Constitution: 1 – USAPA: 0

Re:Don’t think the USA PATRIOT Act works.
Jefferson. One hundred.

“It is better that one hundred guilty men go free than that one innocent man needlessly suffer.” If I remember correctly.

Bush’s attitude, as proven by his actions, is that it is better that one hundred innocent people be needlessly executed than that one guilty man should escape.

Re:Don’t think the USA PATRIOT Act works.
Using the excuse that the system works is too little and too late. The system should not have been made to work in this case. After more than two hundred years of free speech your elected parasites still went ahead and criminalized a person’s speech as a terrorist weapon. It’s not like there weren’t enough other legitimate charges to bring him up on. The Bush administration neo-fascists overreached themselves in their eagerness — nay; hysteria! — to prove that USAPA is a good and consitutional law. By doing so they unjustly accused a man of committing thought crimes. Not real crimes.

And my allusion to Bush as a bloodyhanded executioner was not particlular to this case. This case is not the be all end all of Bush perfidy. He has a long history starting with his gubernatorial record; if not earlier.

But I’ll tell you what, Tomeboy. I’ll stop bashing Bush when the Bushites stop bashing Clinton.

Re:Don’t think the USA PATRIOT Act works.

The concept that you don’t think the system should have been used (made to work you said) in this case is absurd).

It is not absurd at all; and I was not suggesting a two-tier system of law enforcement. I stated that the anti-free speech charges again Al-Hussayen were absurd, and they are. There were plenty of other criminal charges the government could have used to make its case, but in their overeagerness to catch and punish a “terrorist” they acted in bad faith. And if we want to express dissent for a two-tier system of justice, shouldn’t also bring terrorism charges against whichever government department’s web site also mirrors the speech for which Al-Hussayen was criminalized? See the article for 27 May.

no terrorist attacks […] since the USA PATRIOT Act went into effect. I can’t chalk that up to coincidence.

I can. It takes time and careful work to put into effect a plan as complex and as far-reaching as the WTC attacks. In any event, this is a Cause and Effect violation, mdoneil. You cannot prove that USAPA has had any anti-terrorism effect. Any terrorist actions that might have been uncovered since Sep. 2001, could have been uncovered without resorting to any new measures in USAPA, and you cannot simply wish away the human factor. I wrote in a comment some time ago that the intelligence failure of 2001 was no doubt due in part to inter-branch rivalry; that the FBI and the CIA rarely talked to each other. Since American federal law enforcement has been amalgamated into a monster bureaucracy under Homeland Security, the lines of communication haven’t necessarily cleared up. All too often in a bureaucracy, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.

As for Clinton, I didn’t say anything about Clinton; that line was a dig at the Bushites, not Clinton.