This is the type of 'radical' and reactionary material that is being spoken of lately concerning President Bush. I must say I don't disagree with the unconstitutionality they perceive the 'Patriot Act' to possess. There are indeed American Citizens of these United States being detained with no charge, trial, or sentence scheduled. It could well happen to any of us, and we do well to be aware of it. Yet, I don't see the action of the Supreme Court as applicable to him. It was their decision to uphold the acts in question as Constitutional, not his. He did as all Presidents will do, seek to erode rights to increase lhis own powers. This was known to the founders and they all made it known to us in their writings. The Judicial branch has had it wrong since Marbury v. Madison, and this is but an extension of the poisonous Federalist doctrine that case introduced. Feel free to comment or e-mail: wahkonta@graffiti.net
EXCERPT BEGINS
January 14, 2004

Bush and the Supreme Court
Amputating the Bill of Rights
By KURT NIMMO

http://www.counterpunch.org/nimmo01142004.html

The Sixth Amendment was lopped off the Constitution earlier this week.

AG Ashcroft can now have you arrested -- more accurately, abducted and
detained -- and thrown in a military brig or sent to the Guantanamo
concentration camp. Like military dictators in Chile or Guatemala, or the
Gestapo in Nazi Germany, the Bushites don't have tell your family where you
are, or even acknowledge your detention.

They can detain you for years, decades -- or until Bush's war on "terr'sim"
is over -- that is to say forever.

All of this is now perfectly legal -- or so the Supreme Court ruled the
other day when it refused to consider whether the government properly
withheld names and other details of hundreds of people detained after 9/11.
In other words, Bush may continue abducting people and throwing them in
secret prisons without charge.

"In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a
speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district
wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been
previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause
of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have
compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the
assistance of counsel for his defense," states the Sixth Amendment of the
Constitution.

Thanks to the Supreme Court there's now a big bloody hole in the Bill of
Rights.

The First and Fourth Amendments are hanging precariously from the "living
document" by threads. Give the Supreme Court time and they will hack those
amendments away as well.

Recall Justice Sandra Day O'Connor predicting a few hours before the
Supreme Court's 2001-2002 session that Americans are "likely to experience
more restrictions on our personal freedom than has ever been the case in
our country."

Bush will trump Abraham Lincoln when it comes down to stripping Americans
of their civil liberties.

Lincoln had a habit of arresting people who disagreed with him during the
Civil War. He threw them in military prison, sort of the way Jose Padilla
was tossed in a military brig for the crime of searching the wrong thing on
the internet ("dirty bomb") and visiting the wrong country (Pakistan).

"President [Lincoln] suspended the writ of habeas corpus and subjected all
persons discouraging volunteer enlistments to martial law," writes author
Jay Winik. "To enforce this decree, a network of provost marshals promptly
imprisoned several hundred anti-war activists and draft resisters,
including five newspaper editors, three judges, a number of doctors,
lawyers, journalists and prominent civic leaders."

Maybe Dubya will one-up Lincoln and imprison several hundred thousand --
instead of several hundred -- antiwar activists and draft resisters. Of
course, thanks to the Supreme Court, Bush will not be required to tell
their families and lawyers where they are. Maybe a whole lot of them will
be deported as well after Patriot II is rushed through Congress like its
predecessor.

This will occur during Bush's second "term," actually his first term since
he was appointed by the Supreme Court on the first go-round. Howard Dean,
Wesley Clark, John Kerry, Al Sharpton, Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman -- none
of these guys will make it to the White House, and even if one per chance
does he will not do things a whole lot different than Junior. Remember, a
"new Democrat" is basically "Republican Lite."

As for Dennis Kucinich and Carol Mosely Braun... well, they may end up with
the aforementioned antiwar activists in the hoosegow. Lincoln jailed
"prominent civic leaders," although none were members of Congress. Bush may
best him yet. Anyway, sweating it out in prison sure beats following in the
footsteps of Paul Wellstone.

Besides, AG Ashcroft had a point to make on December 6, 2001, when he
admonished: "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost
liberty ... your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national
unity and ... give ammunition to America's enemies."

In other words, we're putting you on notice.

So Bill of Rights unfriendly is our New Caesar that he's going after the
First Amendment, considered by many the foundation of the Constitution.

Bush's Secret Service march out ahead of Junior when he travels around the
country. They get in touch with local cops and make sure those who disagree
with the non-president are quarantined into "designated free speech zones"
far away from the protest-adverse president and the media.

"Here's a place where the people can be, and we'd like to have any
protesters put in a place that is able to be secured," the Secret Service
told the Allegheny County Police Department when Bush visited the
Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002. When Bush visited the St. Louis area on
January 22, 2003, not only were protesters pushed far away from the
president, but the media was prevented from talking with them.

In South Carolina, a protester was prosecuted by the Justice Department for
possessing a sign -- "No War for Oil" -- in a crowd of people holding up
pro-Bush signs. A policeman told the protester he was being arrested for
the content of his sign. The protestor, Brett Bursey, was convicted of
illegally protesting this month and fined $500. "He's no hero for First
Amendment free speech rights,'' said the prosecutor after the verdict.
"He's a criminal."

Most of us protesting last year against Bush's illegal invasion of Iraq are
criminals, too. Bush called us a "focus group," but what he really meant to
say is that he considers us criminals. Like Ashcroft said, if you disagree
with Bush you aid terrorists. "You're either with us or against us in the
fight against terror."

You see, the First Amendment pisses Bush off. His Christian soul has no
tolerance for those who disagree with him.

After all, God talks to Dubya, he's a chosen instrument. He informed the
ersatz Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas: "God told me to strike at
al-Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam,
which I did."

Bush's Methodism works in mysterious ways, as did the Methodism of
Rutherford B. Hayes, another president who lost the popular vote and yet
won the White House after a contested dispute over balloting in Florida.

Lot's wife was reduced to a pillar of salt for disobeying God. One has to
wonder if Bush beseeches his God, asking Him to turn disagreeable antiwar
demonstrators into pillars of salt.

For now "free speech zones" will have to do.

Bush doesn't cotton to demonstrators. For instance, according to a lawsuit
filed by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1999 (Texas United Education
Fund, Inc. vs. Bush) when Bush was governor of Texas he had protesters
arrested and thrown in the pokey on more than one occasion for criticizing
environmental legislation that served his own interests. "The rules have
changed," Bush averred when asked about his violations of the First
Amendment and the freedom of speech and peaceful assembly.

Now he's changing the rules again -- and the highest court in the land
refuses to take him to account for his deconstruction of the Bill of Rights.

Since Bush was coronated three years ago, he instructed Ashscroft to fiddle
with the Freedom of Information Act; warned the media not to air tapes of
Osama bin Laden; forced through the passage of Patriot I -- wiretaps,
indefinite detention, warrantless searches -- and greased the skids for an
even more draconian bill, Patriot II (it will not only allow secret
arrests, but will strip citizenship from persons for their political
associations); authorized snooping of attorney-client conversations;
allowed the FBI to snoop on political groups not engaged in criminal
activity (remember, the "rules have changed"); proffered Operation TIPS, or
the Orwellian neighbor-spying-on-neighbor program; attempted to aggregate
credit-card, travel, medical, school, and other records of everyone in the
United States into the Total Information Awareness project (the brainchild
of this supposedly abandoned exploit was former Iran-Contra criminal John
Poindexter), and other laws, guidelines, and proposals designed to chip
away at the Bill of Rights.

More recently, Bush and the Ministry of Homeland Security devised a plan to
set up databases -- containing bank records, credit ratings, and medical
records -- on every air passenger in the country. "We want these programs
to be efficient to the extent it makes them more efficient to have them
rolled together, we will be looking at that," said Nuala O'Connor Kelly,
the chief "privacy officer" for the Ministry of Homeland Security (note the
oxymoron). In other words, since most Americans fly at one time or another,
John Poindexter's discredited program (see above) has come back in a
different guise. You have to hand it to these Bushites for their dogged
effort to convert America into a police and surveillance state.

Naturally, there will be lawsuits against all of this -- that is, while
lawsuits are still permitted -- and in such cases the arch-conservative
Supreme Court will likely come down on the side of their pothunter, the man
they ushered into office, the man two of Antonin Scalia's sons worked for
as lawyers and Clarence Thomas' wife helped out by collecting applications
for people who wanted to work in the Bush administration. On May 11, 2003,
while speaking before the Alaska Bar Association Convention, Scalia
reflected on Bush's Patriot act and society in general. Surveillance and
quashing dissent is necessary, Scalia explained, because society is
becoming more violent and irresponsible. Moreover, US citizens tend to
believe the Constitution affords them more rights than it actually does,
said Scalia.

Or, as Scalia told an audience at John Carroll University in March of last
year, during wartime "protections will be ratcheted right down to the
constitutional minimum."

Because Dubya's war is indeterminate, a "ratcheted right down" Bill of
Rights will certainly become the norm. In distant future, will
Constitutional liberty be as foreign to the people of America as democracy
was to the people of Russia after nearly three generations of totalitarianism?

It would seem Bush and Scalia think so.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at
www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St.
Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for
CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, will soon be published by
Dandelion Books.