CONCERN FOR OUR LIBERTIES AT HOME???
I sure am & read with interest what's going on in other parts of the world...


Fighting for privacy in an era of terror

http://www.timesstar.com/Stories/0,1413,125~1511~1355802,00.html

WHILE American troops have been winning the war in Iraq, privacy rights continue to come under
assault back here at home. Fortunately, we have those fedayeen of free-speech advocacy,
America's librarians, fighting back.
Arousing their dudgeon are provisions of the controversial USA Patriot Act, a 340-page
anti-terrorist law passed by Congress in October 2001 in the heat of post-Sept. 11 fears and loathings.

Sensing a threat to individuals' constitutional rights, about 90 local governments have passed
resolutions condemning provisions of the law that compel libraries and bookstores to assist
federal investigators in monitoring the reading habits of suspect American citizens. Some
libraries have acted on their own to post warning signs for patrons and even destroy paperwork
that might provide a trail of the book browsing or Web browsing of library users.

The town of Arcata went even further in March by outlawing voluntary compliance with the Patriot Act
by town officials, subject to a fine of $57. City Councilmember David Meserve, who drafted the ordinance,
called the move "a nonviolent, pre-emptive attack."

Obviously, council members are itching for a court fight. I wish them luck, but even in the unlikely
event of a confrontation with the feds in Arcata, I don't expect their protest or the rest to get very far,
at least not in the current courts. Federal law trumps local laws under our Constitution and, so far,
the higher courts have handed Attorney General John Ashcroft's office considerable latitude in detaining,
deporting, eavesdropping and other civil liberties intrusions.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia underscored that point in a March 18 speech at John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland. "The Constitution just sets minimums," he said, according to the Associated Press. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires."

Indeed. Anyone who thinks we may have too many rights already cannot be expected to fight very hard to hold onto them, even when the erosion may extend beyond wartime needs.

Ashcroft's office says the public alarm over the Patriot Act is misplaced. After all, they say, investigators must have probable cause to conduct an investigation into the books you purchase or borrow from a library, or the Web sites you visit at a library.

And that may be true, although it's hard to tell how true it is as a matter of law. Passed in the heat of post-9/11 passions in October 2001, the USA Patriot Act was approved without being fully understood, even by those who voted for it, let alone those who must enforce it.

"I don't know that 5 percent of the people who voted for that bill ever read it," David Keene, president of the American Conservative Union, quipped at a recent panel on the act held by the American Civil Liberties Union.

"You're always an optimist," quipped former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., a 1998 House impeachment manager and more recently, a consultant to the ACLU.

The gathering of well-known conservatives like Barr and Keene at an event hosted by the liberal-leaning ACLU shows how worries about Patriot Act abuse cross party lines.

Yet, Democrats did not fight its passage much. Even Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the Senate's lone vote against the bill, was moved to fume from the Senate floor that then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle had told their party's caucus to "fold." With Democrats putting up such weak resistance then, one wonders how long Republicans can resist now before they put their megaphones down.

Fortunately, before the Patriot Act left Congress, "sun-

set" provisions were added to phase its powers out in 2005.

This was smart. If any rule holds true in Washington, it's the durability of a law, once passed, to resist ever being repealed, even when it has become obsolete. (Can you say "mohair subsidy"?)

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has proposed removing the sunset provision, instantly making the hastily passed Patriot Act permanent. And waiting in the wings is a proposed "Patriot II" the Justice Department has been working on that would further enhance the powers granted under the first Patriot Act.

What's the rush? At times like these, our national leaders need to ponder Benjamin Franklin's wise observation back in 1759: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

YES, it's a common belief that security in a time of war or national crisis requires a suspension, at least for a while, of civil liberties. But the opposite is not necessarily true. Giving up civil liberties without enough thought behind the action doesn't necessarily make us any safer.

But it does give us new reasons to worry, not only about terrorists, but also about our government.

Clarence Page writes for the Chicago Tribune

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ALSO

Shelving civil liberties?

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~26~1348201,00.html
Librarians, bookstore owners see new threat from Patriot Act
By Heather Grimshaw, Special to The Denver Post
The book community is casting a wary eye on the so-called U.S. Patriot Act, particularly now that there is a move afoot by Republicans in Congress to make parts of it permanent. Bookstore owners and librarians are trying to walk a fine line between being good citizens and protecting the rights of their customers. It's a growing debate that promises to heat up in the months to come.

Franklin Graham's Christian Empire
In Jesus's Name
By JOHN CHUCKMAN

http://www.counterpunch.org/chuckman04262003.html

My subject is Franklin Graham, one of President Bush's very-public religious confidants.
Franklin's father, Billy, served President Nixon in a similar capacity. Billy's efforts were
crowned with a kind of earthly immortality: he's on those White House tapes in the National
Archives sharing anti-Semitic remarks with Nixon and never flinching or clearing his throat
over the idea of using atomic bombs in Vietnam.

Franklin has pretty well replaced his ailing father in leading the huge Billy Graham organization.
You may wonder about religious ministries being handed down like fifteenth-century dukedoms,
but the practice is fairly common in America, and several of the nation's big ministries - the type
of outfits that might be characterized as Las Vegas Showstoppers for Jesus - have been handed
down in this fashion. This happens in American politics, too. After all, a hand-me-down evangelist
serves a hand-me-down President who ran against (and lost the popular vote to) a hand-me-down
politician from Tennessee.

It's not that Americans accept aristocracy, but in a nation of insanely-frenzied consumers, an
established brand name always still has some juice worth squeezing.

The youthful Franklin seems to have been a bit of a trial for his mom and dad, reportedly exhibiting
more interest in sowing oats than saving souls. He had an obsession with guns one could interpret
as slightly at odds with the message of the Prince of Peace. He may just have been reflecting the
quaint traditions of America's Appalachian subculture - his home is the mountains of North Carolina
- when he once cut down a tree by blasting away at it with an automatic weapon (I did not make this up).
Apparently, he used to be fond of giving automatic pistols as gifts.

Well, at some point, I guess the lad realized he was burning out and going nowhere, and
automatic weapons are expensive when you like to give the very best, so Franklin had something
like the President's road-to-Damascus experience. I doubt he recalled Henry the Fourth's saying
Paris was worth a mass (Henry of Navarre became King of France by adopting Catholicism).
It would have weighed heavily that dad's ready-made, super-slick organization offered a
handsome, steady income, all expenses paid, especially if Franklin had come to recognize
that his next-best career option might be itinerant bingo caller.

Redemption is one of America's great ongoing themes. It's the spiritual extension of all the
plastic surgery, injections, drugs, youth-inducing potions, diets, and tales of lives changed by
lotteries or get-rich-quick schemes, but it does have to be the right kind of redemption. None
of your consolations of philosophy, peace of the Buddha, wisdom of the Great Spirit, or
following the Prophet will do. Lives lived decently and peacefully from beginning to end
are not admired because they don't make juicy entertainment.

The approved American redemption-story template includes years of inflicting hell on others, often
by abusing whisky or drugs, finally being overcome by frightful (drug-induced or otherwise) visions
of going to hell yourself, and then spending the rest of your life annoying every person who crosses
your path with the opinion that he or she does not know the truth. About 85% of the nation's
country-and Western singers and about 95% of its evangelists spend their declining years sharing
such tales in magazines, tapes, interviews, and sermons. It's a major industry.

This is all by way of background to Franklin's words about his new mission. I suppose it's possible
Franklin thinks Nazareth is a trailer park somewhere in North Carolina or Texas which would
account for his thinking that the people in the Middle East haven't heard about Jesus, but, in any
event, Franklin is now going to tell them about Jesus, at least his gun-totting Appalachian version.
Well, almost, but Franklin has probably been advised that proselytizing for conversion from Judaism
is against the law in modern Israel. With a Bush-appointed Proconsul, that kind of law shouldn't
get in the way of bringing the good word to Iraqis, although he'll be a bit late to save the souls
of those smashed and broken by American bombs.

Franklin's organization, Samaritan's Purse, claims that it intends only to bring relief services
and not evangelism to Iraq, but how valid can this claim be? The Billy Graham organization for
decades has worked only to convert people to its narrow notion of Christianity. It has been
criticized even by other Christians for the nature of its work - cranking out converts like
sausages in a vast Midwestern meat-packing plant. Perhaps when Franklin created his
offshoot relief organization, Samaritan's Purse, it was in part a response to this kind of criticism.

Franklin's own words on Islam over the last year hardly resemble a second Albert Schweitzer
yearning to help fellow beings. His tone is militaristic and has the same nasty, parochial feel
as the President's "us and them." One looks in vain for any generosity of spirit associated with the words of Jesus.

"We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God.
He's not the son of God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God, and I
believe it is a very evil and wicked religion."

Franklin here makes no distinction between the nineteen individuals responsible for 9/11
and the world's hundreds of millions of Muslims, yet he seems never to have made the same
kind of connections between criminals of other religious backgrounds and the religions themselves
. Did the IRA's outrages elicit such comments about Catholicism?

"the persecution or elimination of non-Muslims has been a cornerstone of Islam conquests and rule for centuries."

I suppose it would be foolish to expect any sensible perspective on history from a man of Franklin's
limited learning. The work of people calling themselves Christians in countless wars, religious persecutions,
and exterminations just since the Renaissance dwarfs the volume of spilled blood in all the rest
of human history. The Holocaust, the African slave trade, and the extermination of many aboriginal
peoples were the work of people calling themselves Christians.

"I believe it is my responsibility to speak out against the terrible deeds that are committed
as a result of Islamic teaching."

Why should it be his responsibility to speak against these particular deeds and no others?
Franklin certainly is not known as an advocate for the world's abused and downtrodden. One
does not find him shouldering this responsibility over other terrible deeds, a number of them the
dirty work of his own government. No, his time goes to "crusades," the word used for decades
by the Billy Graham organization to describe its assembly-line salvation gatherings.

The denomination with which the Graham family generally has been associated, the
Southern Baptists, has an ugly history in the United States. Extreme segregationists
founded this denomination to keep blacks out of their churches and a century later, t
hrough the Civil Rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, Southern Baptists were better
known for opposing Dr. King's work than supporting it. The denomination's official view o
n a woman's role in marriage is among the most parochial in the United States. Incidentally,
the Southern Baptists' Mission Board also aims at providing aid in Iraq. Jerry Vines, former
president of the Southern Baptists, described the Prophet Muhammad not very long ago as a
"demon-possessed pedophile."

"There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement,
the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism."

These are the words of a man teaching suspicion and fear rather than understanding and
brotherhood. One has to ask what such comments have to do with evangelism or Christianity, but
American fundamentalists often ignore Jesus' clear teaching on the matter and put their visions
of government and secular affairs at the heart of sermons and pronouncements. This suggests that
politics, and a particularly nasty kind of politics, is at least as much a driving force here as religion.

Franklin recently gave a Good Friday service at the Pentagon. Reading that, I had the absurd image
of an early Christian preacher praying for Rome's Tenth Legion. True, there were probably no Christian
legionaries at the time, but the fact remains that the purpose of the Pentagon is exactly the same
as that of the legions, professional killing for the state and its policies, a purpose totally incompatible
with any words of Jesus.

But of course, the more apt comparison would be a few centuries later when the legions did t
heir bloody work for a so-called Christian empire.

John Chuckman can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org