In his campaign to renew the USA PATRIOT act, President Bush misled the US public about the success his administration has had in combating terrorist violence, say several sources.
According to the Washington Post, while Bush claimed in a Ohio speech last week 200 convictions out of 400 arrests in the last four years, an analysis of the Justice Department’s own sources indicate that only 39 people have been convicted of crimes related to terror or national security since September 11th.
“The White House is now pushing for ‘administrative subpoenas,’ which would allow the FBI to issue and sign its own search orders – without prior judicial approval. If this became law, we would go from diminished judicial approval to none at all: this is the administration’s idea of checks and balances.”
--Lisa Graves, ACLU
In addition to the Post’s findings, a study by Syracuse University found that the vast majority of the people Bush boasted to have convicted as part of the war on terror were minor, non-terrorism offenses. Most served no jail time. In fact, at recent hearings government witnesses said there had been only a dozen or fewer terrorism prosecutions in the past four years.
Further, minor scandals over the administration’s efforts to hide or deflect attention from the growing number of terrorist incidents globally over the last three years suggest the need for closer scrutiny.
In April, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ordered scrapping the government’s legally mandated “Patterns of Global Terrorism,” which reportedly showed at least a threefold growth in terrorist incidents in 2004 over 2003.
Large exaggerations of the success of fighting terrorism isn’t the only form of misleading the administration has undertaken, says the ACLU, a leading non-partisan civil liberties organization. The President’s attempt to link terrorist convictions to the need to renew portions of the USA PATRIOT Act also proved to be on shaky ground.
In a published statement, the ACLU characterized the President’s speech in Ohio as “both misguided and disingenuous.”
While many of the people the President spoke about, says the ACLU, were prosecuted under terrorism statutes, these were not all the result of the PATRIOT Act. They were simply described by the government as being related to terrorism.
“The most offensive portion of the President’s remarks,” says Lisa Graves, ACLU Senior Counsel for Legislative Strategy, “was his claim that the PATRIOT Act is constitutional.”
The ACLU is actively involved with litigation challenging the constitutionality of the PATRIOT Act and the powers it expanded. Some legal changes imposed by the PATRIOT Act have already been ruled unconstitutional.
Graves cited the PATRIOT Act’s sections (such as sect. 215) that enhanced secrecy and allowed FBI and other federal authorities to sidestep Constitutionally mandated judicial review of subpoenas, warrants, and other requests for private records as sections that need to be struck in the current review process of the Act.
In fact, says Graves, “the White House is now pushing for ‘administrative subpoenas,’ which would allow the FBI to issue and sign its own search orders – without prior judicial approval. If this became law, we would go from diminished judicial approval to none at all: this is the administration’s idea of checks and balances.”
Graves also argued that despite the President’s claim that there have been no reported abuses of the PATRIOT Act, “the government’s refusal to disclose how key parts of the PATRIOT Act is being used as well as the permanent gag orders in the act, it remains highly likely that many more abuses remain out there.”
Meanwhile, the Civil Liberties Oversight Board, the mechanism designed to track any abuses of the PATRIOT Act, remains unfilled and unfunded.
“It’s no surprise that the administration hasn’t admitted any abuses.” Graves insisted.
Grave concerns with the new powers created by the PATRIOT Act are broad and nationwide. About 400 communities and seven state legislatures have passed resolutions calling on Congress to bring the PATRIOT Act in line with the Constitution. Leading conservative, liberal and nonpartisan organizations have found common ground in reforming the PATRIOT Act.
--Reach Joel Wendland at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.
