Page 30 - Fruits from a Poisonous Tree

14 Fruit from a Poisonous Tree

7. Section 802 creates the crime of “domestic terrorism.” This
criminalizes any acts of any member of the public that merely appear to
the government’s determination to be intended to “influence the policy of
the government by intimidation or coercion” or to “intimidate or coerce
a civilian population.” This section would make just about any act of civil
disobedience in protest against government policy into an act of domestic
terrorism. Anyone who responds in writing to the IRS by objecting to one
of its decisions could and probably will be labeled a domestic terrorist. There
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goes the 5 Amendment.
Our Congress, at the urging of the President and the Attorney General,
has enacted criminal, unconstitutional legislation. As an example of its new
application, we now see what is planned for the rest of us.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said, “If you don’t agree with the
government, YOU are a terrorist.”
Attorney General Ashcroft pushed the U.S. Patriot Act through an
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overwhelmingly dim-witted Congress soon after September 11 . He has
subverted more elements of the Bill of Rights than any Attorney General in
American history. This is the same man who was beaten by a dead man in his
bid for the Senate.
Under the Justice Department’s new definition of “enemy combatant”
(which won the enthusiastic approval of the President and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld) anyone can be defined as an “enemy combatant,” very
much including American citizens, and they can be held indefinitely
by the government, without charges, a hearing, or a lawyer – in short,
incommunicado. Good-bye the entire Bill of Rights.
Now more Americans are also going to be dispossessed of every
fundamental legal right in our system of justice and put into camps.
Ashcroft’s terrorism FBI guidelines:
“The nature of the conduct engaged in by a [terrorist] enterprise will justify
an inference that the standard [for opening a criminal justice investigation] is
satisfied, even if there are no known statements by participants that advocate
or indicate planning for violence or other prohibited acts.”
That conduct can be simply “intimidating” the government, according
to the USA Patriot Act. This book would qualify under those guidelines.
The following words of Thomas Jefferson from the Kentucky Resolutions
sound as though they were written yesterday in describing the Patriot Act.
“That if the acts before specified should stand, these conclusions would
flow from them; that the general government may place any act they think
proper on the list of crimes, and punish it themselves whether enumerated
or not enumerated by the constitution as cognizable by them: that they may
transfer its cognizance to the President, or any other person, who may himself