One of the most dangerous provisions in the so-called Patriot Act permits the FBI to use national security letters, which allow the Bureau to obtain vast amounts of personal information on American citizens without a warrant or subpoena. Subjects of national security letters are not told that they are under federal scrutiny.

More than 30,000 national security letters are issued annually. A recent random sample of fewer than 300 discovered widespread abuses of the practice that compromised the privacy of innocent people.

The Bush administration has promised to punish the Bureau. But the fault lies with President Bush himself. When he signed the Patriot Act renewal about a year ago, Bush used a presidential signing statement to nullify a provision requiring him to report to Congress on the FBI's use of its expanded surveillance powers.

While not exempting the FBI's leadership from blame, the national security letters scandal illustrates the need to repeal the so-called Patriot Act. It also adds to the growing case for the impeachment of President Bush.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

It is quite likely that Alberto Gonzalez, the Bush administration's Attorney General, may soon find himself out of a job.

This would happen not because of the role he has played in large-scale violations of constitutional principles ? for instance, abetting the president's use of ?signing statements? to nullify laws, or the use of warrantless surveillance programs, or the institutionalization of torture, or the abolition of the habeas corpus guarantee.

Rather than being evicted from office for those abuses, Gonzalez may be forced out for pressuring federal prosecutors to target Democratic officials for corruption probes just prior to last fall's elections. Eight US attorneys who resisted that effort were fired last December.

There's abundant political corruption on both sides of the aisle. But under Gonzalez, roughly three-quarters of these cases have been filed against Democrats, which seems a little disproportionate.

What is really revealing, however, is how Gonzalez could undermine the Bill of Rights for years, but find his job imperiled for targeting other members of the political class.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

A bill of attainder is a law that imposes punishment without trial. This is forbidden by the US Constitution, and the constitutions of most states.

An anti-gang ordinance passed in January by the City of Ontario, Oregon, and adopted by Malheur County, involves the use of a bill of attainder as a counter-gang measure.

Under the measure, police are permitted to identify suspected gang members on the basis of several criteria that do not necessarily involve commission of a crime. People thus designated are informed by mail that they are on a watch list, and subject to arrest should they be seen in the company of others on the list.

Appeals of a gang affiliate designation begin with a law enforcement officer before being handed to the courts. This is another patently unconstitutional facet of the measure.

While police work is difficult, the objective should be to protect the rights of the public, not to serve the convenience of the state. Abolition of due process is never useful nor justifiable.

Let us stand firm in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.

Amazing as it may seem, the Bush administration has attempted, on more than one occasion, to extradite US citizens to stand trial before Iraqi courts.

On February 9, the US Court of Appeals for Washington, DC ruled unanimously against the administration's effort to deliver Shawqi Omar, a veteran of the Minnesota National Guard, into Iraqi custody for trial. Another federal court is examining the case of naturalized American citizen Mohammed Munaf, who was handed over to an Iraqi court for trial last year. Munaf was convicted of kidnapping charges and sentenced to death.

?Trials? in the Iraqi court system are conducted according to Islamic Sharia law. They offer none of the due process protections of Anglo-Saxon law. Even when dealing with capital offenses, Iraqi trials usually consist of a fifteen minute interrogation by a judge followed by a plea for mercy from an inept public defender.
Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

When our nation was attacked on September 11, 2001, our military ? particularly the National Guard and Reserves -- was already critically overstretched because of ongoing peacekeeping operations in the Balkans, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

With ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the prospect of a broader war in the Persian Gulf, the demands on our National Guard and Reserves have become unsustainable.

Last week, a 13-member Commission on the National Guard and Reserves, established by Congress in 2005, reported that nearly 90 percent of Guard and Reserve units are ?not ready? for action in domestic crises, or for deployment abroad. Equipment shortages, inadequate training, and increasing difficulty in recruitment and retention of personnel have severely compromised the Guard and Reserves.

This isn't because of a lack of money. Historian Andrew Bacevitch, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, points out that In 2002, American defense spending exceeded the combined military spending of all other nations in the world.

The problem isn't that our military is too small. It's that the unconstitutional demands placed on it are much too big.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

Link: http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2007/02/perverts-with-power-revisited.html

Doug Melvin, former head of the Boise office of the Federal Transportation Security Administration, was recently forced to resign after he was found walking nude through a hotel in Idaho Falls.

Melvin's degenerate behavior came roughly a year after a TSA airport screener in Ketchum identified as Robert Joe Harrison, Jr. was arrested for enticing a young boy to his home for the supposed purpose of watching a movie. A police search of the TSA official's home turned up five sets of personal identification. Mr. Harrison ? assuming that is his name ? was eventually convicted of child enticement.

Melvin's immediate reaction to Harrison's arrest was to assure the public that the TSA has a ?zero tolerance? policy for deviant behavior. Thus it's ironic that a year later Melvin would be arrested for indecent exposure; what makes this even odder is the fact that the TSA insists that Melvin's resignation came about for ?personal reasons? unrelated to that bizarre episode. Taken at face value that insistence would demonstrate that the TSA's policy regarding employee deviance falls substantially short of the ?zero tolerance? standard.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

All over the Middle East, writes religious affairs scholar Robert Spencer, Christians are finding it increasingly difficult to locate a safe haven.

?Christian communities that date back to the dawn of Christianity have been steadily decreasing in numbers,? he writes; ?now the faith is on the verge of disappearing from the area altogether.?

Since the beginning of the current Iraq war four years ago, more than half of that nation's 700,000 Christians have fled, many of them to Syria and many others out of the region altogether. The US-led invasion has led to the installation in Iraq of a radical Islamic regime akin to that ruling Iran.
This was an entirely predictable outcome of the war, as is the increasing militancy of Middle Eastern Muslims. Should the war spread to Iran, and possibly to Syria, the region where the faith was born may soon be effectively rid of it.
Our suffering middle eastern brothers and sisters in Christ deserve an interest in our prayers. Both they and we deserve a more rational foreign policy from Washington.

Let us stand in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

For roughly the past two decades, the federal government has been tabulating so-called ?hate crimes.? Many states have laws which impose additional penalties to sentences for assault and other violent offenses if they are identified as hate crimes against protected classes of people.

That this approach violates the principle of equal protection under the law is obvious. Defenders of this approach insist that the State must use such means to combat improper retrograde attitudes This is by definition a totalitarian concept of law, since it gives the State jurisdiction over an individual's thoughts and beliefs.

Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson-Lee of Texas has introduced HR 254, a bill that would mandate separate federal prosecution of crimes allegedly motivated by prejudice against ?the actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or disability of any person.? This bill would impose penalties up to life imprisonment. And it could lead to federal criminal prosecution of religious leaders who oppose homosexuality as a soul-destroying sin.

Obviously, HR 254 must be defeated, but the entire Orwellian system of hate crimes prosecution must be abolished as well.

Let us stand in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.