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The Alien Acts under John Adams and the Palmer Raids under Woodrow Wilson are only two of the many instances of Department of Justice of abuses of lawful aliens, carried out under the guise of national security, but in fact intended to stifle political debate in the United States. Attorney General Palmer used a series of Washington bombings to attempt to eradicate what he called the "disease of evil thinking."
When the Department of Justice can imprison an alien for life, the potential to intimidate political speech is immense. And the American people, who are entitled to hear the broadest range of political debate, are the losers.
This extremely dangerous provision would be better with a definite sunset date.
Indeed, so would the entire bill. This bill is touted as an emergency wartime measure. We are going to win this war, and we should ensure that once the war is over, America is just as free as before. We should not repeat the mistakes of World War I and World War II, in which wartime emergency powers were allowed to continue into peacetime.
As immigration-reform groups have documented in great detail, immigration-law enforcement in this country is a joke. There are many thousands of aliens in this country who arrived in student visas, and who are no longer students. As with gun laws, properly enforcing the existing laws ought to precede calls for enacting more laws.
The proposed statute (section 302) allows a life sentence for the "terrorist offenses" — which at first blush seems unnecessary, because life sentences (or sentences of hundreds of years and more) are already available for homicide and acts of mass arson or bombing.
But when one reads the statute's new definition of "terrorism" (section 309), one sees that minor offenses are suddenly turned into "terrorism" (with a potential life sentence). The definition of terrorism includes actual terrorist offenses (e.g., homicide, arson, assassination), but includes so many other federal crimes that it covers teenagers who throw rocks through a post office window (18 USC section 1361, destruction of government property, no matter how little), or human-rights activists who vandalize the sign outside a dictatorship's government's office building (18 USC sec. 956, conspiracy to injure property of a foreign government), as well as many, many other nonterrrorist offenses.
I am not arguing against punishing people who commit these low-level crimes, but I am arguing against calling them "terrorists" and subjecting them to life in prison. No matter how much faith one has that the Ashcroft DOJ will not abuse this very over-inclusive definition, Mr. Ashcroft will not be attorney general forever, and the history of the DOJ — including under the Janet Reno, John Mitchell, and Mitchell Palmer regimes — suggests that almost any power which can be abused eventually will be abused.
The Center for Democracy and Technology has identified many more problems with the bill, in addition to the ones detailed in this article. Plainly, this is a very flawed bill that cannot be fixed with an amendment or two.
It is very important that our nation have all the powers necessary to win the war. America's greatest power — and the reason that the dark ages tyrants fear and envy us — is our open society. America did not panic when the British burned Washington, D.C., to the ground in the War of 1812, and America must not panic today.