First impression of Ashcroft’s lifeandliberty.gov

Daniel Cornwall writes “As reported elsewhere, the Justice Department has unleashed a new web site to coincide with it’s “education” campaign about the benefits of the PATRIOT Act. The site is http://www.lifeandliberty.gov and is a must visit for students of propaganda and civil liberatarians who will be bombarded with it’s misleading reassurances.

Read on for the rest of Daniel’s review.

Daniel Cornwall writes “As reported elsewhere, the Justice Department has unleashed a new web site to coincide with it’s “education” campaign about the benefits of the PATRIOT Act. The site is http://www.lifeandliberty.gov and is a must visit for students of propaganda and civil liberatarians who will be bombarded with it’s misleading reassurances.

Read on for the rest of Daniel’s review.The site’s front page are words from the Declaration of Independence.

The site is divided into eight major sections:

Major speeches – from Ashcroft, et. al.
Dispelling the Myths
Passed by Congress
Congress Speaks
Support of the People
Stories and Articles
Text of the PATRIOT Act
Anti-Terror Record

Many better people than me can bust the Dispelling the myths section, but several sections deserve negative comment.

Passed by Congress includes shiny graphics showing how the Act passed with 98% support in the Senate and 83% support in the House, but doesn’t tell that no hearings were held or that many members of Congress have had misgivings since. which leads us to…

Congress Speaks – A very long list of supportive Congresspersons and Senators. Looks very good until you see that nearly all of the comments were from October 24-26, 2001, during the Anthrax scare in which this Act was passed. I’m positive that a news search would turn up less positive comments from many of the same people.

Support of the People – two mindless questions with pretty graphics showing that Americans like the PATRIOT Act and that few people have felt the loss of their civil liberties. DOJ does list the actual survey questions, though. No indication of how knowledgable the people questioned were or whether it was a DOJ sponsored study. No mention of the 150 jurisdictions containing 16,000,000 people who’ve registered opposition to the Act.

Stories and Articles – All positive, none negative, most implying that the opposition is solely sponsored by the ACLU.

MY Favorite, a story that contains this quote:

““Civil libertarians aghast at the intrusive provisions of the USA Patriot Act may find some comfort in the Justice Department’s 60-page report to the House Judiciary Committee. . . . [The] numbers hardly suggest the mass usurpation of individual rights. And the willingness of the Justice Department to submit to congressional oversight in an open manner is reassuring.â€?”

The 60 page report is freely available on the web at http://www.house.gov/judiciary/patriotresponses101 702.pdf . Why doesn’t DOJ link to it? Could it be their worried about all of their “classified” responses to simple questions like “How many bookstores/libraries were served with sec 215 orders?”

Anti-Terror record – general statements of how DOJ is fighting terrorism w/o references to SPECIFIC sections to the PATRIOT Act, along with the technically true statement of “No provision of the Patriot Act has been held unconstitutional by any court.” Of course specific sections have only been recently challenged.

This is reassurance only for the close-minded.”