ENGLISH
FOR
CONGRESS POSITION PAPER (Revised April 2014)
Preserving Constitutional Liberties
The
passage of the Patriot Act and its continuing extensions
represents a most serious threat to our constitutional
protections contained in the Bill of Rights and subsequent
Amendments, as well as other civil rights legislation enacted to
protect the citizens from abuses of government power.
Revelations about the treatment of prisoners taken abroad, the
denial of due process, and flaunting of our Constitution by
assassinations of American citizens and their residents
have severely tarnished the reputation and standing of this
country with the rest of the world. The recent
imprisonment of Bradley Manning for almost nine months in
solitary USMC confinement at Quantico and subsequently an Army
stockade for a total of 1,000 days before being charged and his
Abu Ghraib style mistreatment (forced to stand naked) by the
marines are outrageous.He was only transferred to Army custody after 600,000
Amnesty International protests were sent to the White House.He is now serving a 30
year sentence imposed by a single military judge without a jury
trial. Apparently, his offense of releasing a video of an
American helicopter deliberately making two passes to gun down
an unarmed group of Reuters video journalists in the Middle East
was a greater threat to national security than the event itself! In contrast, Robert
Hanssen, the worst traitor in American history since Benedict
Arnold, was accorded full constitutional protections and was
able to preserve full spousal pension benefits for his innocent
wife.In my
opinion, Bradley Manning’s detention and abuse while imprisoned
and his conviction by a "Stalinist star chamber" trial are
direct violations of the President’s oath and duty to preserve
and protect the Constitution and are most serious impeachable
crimes.
Additional
revelations about the extent of domestic spying upon American
citizens in direct defiance of our laws and traditions are the
worst threat to our civil liberties since the witch hunts of the
McCarthy era. What makes the current abuses of power so
worrisome is the fact that modern computer-based information
technology has given the government vast surveillance and
intrusive capabilities beyond anything remotely imaginable 50
years ago. Every email message, every telephone call,
every electronic financial transaction, every computer based
information search, all data transmitted by land lines or the
airwaves, even mail processed by electronic sorters, has now
been accessed and collated into totally secret information
profiles and electronic data sets for every resident and visitor
in this country. Even street lights might now be used
for surreptitious surveillance.
There is no effective safeguard to prevent the electronic
surveillance and intrusion capabilities of the NSA that has been
extended to invade the privacy of all persons living within the
United States.Unfortunately, the passage of
the National Defense Appropriation Act containing a provision
allowing the military to detain indefinitely citizens and others
living in the United States by large majorities in both the
House and the Senate is the final and most worrisome threat to
our civil liberties. The President had the
opportunity to threaten a veto of this onerous legislation but
chose not to do so, stating that his Administration would not
abuse the power granted by the Act.The issuance of
National Security Letters (NSL) by the FBI should be immediately
suspended until it is made subject to rigorous prior judicial
search warrant authorization with the rights restored for all
recipients to be represented by legal counsel and seek
injunctive relief.At
the present time, recipients of these National Security Letters
have no legal recourse to challenge their issuance or protest
the demands made upon them by the FBI. They are currently
forbidden to speak with anyone about them, even their own
lawyers. Monthly reporting of the number, kind, and
general categories of previous NSL issuances should be made
public for each state and U. S. territory affected.
Special closed door quarterly briefings of each state's
assembled Congressional delegation should be implemented to
report about and discuss the number, details, and specific
purposes justifying the issuance of these letters in that
state. As the first item discussed by the next
Congress, the Patriot Act must be reviewed and abolished to
restore the civil liberties threatened by its current provisions
and their ongoing enforcement. Similarly, the recent
activities of the FBI should be reviewed for their intrusion
upon the privacy of law-abiding citizens. The abuses of
constitutional liberties committed by the FBI and others during
the 1960s must not be permitted to recur.Trashing our
constitutional protections under the guise of saving them is as
illogical as the Vietnam War excuse for “destroying the village
in order to save it”.
Finally,
the legal fiction that corporations are entitled to the full
protection as persons under the Bill of Rights by the Supreme
Court’s Citizens United decision must be repealed by
Congressional legislation and/or a constitutional amendment.The pernicious power
of unlimited corporate money corrupting our political process is
an outrage and must be ended if truly representative Democracy
is to be preserved in the United States. If corporations now
have the same constitutional rights as citizens, why aren't they
taxed upfront off the top as human beings are before receiving
their sales receipts instead of any residual (i.e., profit) left
at the end of the year? Our sales of our labor are no
different than corporations sales of their products and services
and corporations: both should be taxed on the same basis!