Jon Christian Ryter

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From The Mailbag

20 years

October 27, 2001

In the aftermath of the terrorist bombing of the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, Congress—which had been trying to legislatively abrogate not only the 2nd Amendment, but to limit free speech and religious liberty under the 1st Amendment in the United States since the mid-1960s—Congress responded by trying to push the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 through both Houses of Congress while America was still in shock and would not resist the illegal abrogation of their rights under the guise of protecting Americans from domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

It almost worked. The Senate version of the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 flew through that chamber and passed on a 96 to 4 vote. Four members, who realized that the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 violated the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 10th Amendments, knew that the House and Senate had no authority to vote on the measures they were attempting to legislate since they were forbidden, by the Constitution of the United States, from voting on them.

Before the House of Representatives had a chance to vote on their version of the same bill, H.R. 666, a rare coalition of liberals and conservatives joined forces to fight the abrogation of the Bill of Rights. Had they not been stopped, Congress would have illegally and unconstitutionally abridged the rights of the American people under the guise of protecting them—from themselves.

H.R. 666 (which actually did not pass under that number) would have abrogated the following rights under the 1st Amendment: freedom of speech, the right to petition the government; and, under extraneous circumstances, freedom of the press. Under the 2nd Amendment, the loss of the right of private citizens to own firearms. Under the 3rd Amendment, the use of military force to assist local police; under the 4th Amendment, the loss of the right to privacy from unreasonable search and seizure, and the repeal of habeas corpus. Under the 5th Amendment, the suspension of due process. Under the 6th Amendment, the loss of the right to face your accuser, and the enhanced right of authorities to hold anyone accused of a crime for an indefinite period of time without a trial. And finally, the 10th Amendment which forbids the government from assuming authority not specifically granted it by the Constitution, would be legislatively abolished, giving the federal government full and complete dictatorial power over every aspect of life in the United States when the President of the United States chose to declare a national emergency existed in America.

Had H.R. 666 been enacted as part of the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995, the Bill of Rights would very likely have not existed as of September 11, 2001 since it would probably have already been abrogated by Bill Clinton when TWA Flight 800 was shot down by two guided missiles off the coast of Long Island, New York on July 17, 1996. The Congress of the United States attempted to do in 1995 what they managed to pull off in 2001. They managed to give law enforcement officers authority they did not constitutionally possess the right to delegate. The United States Supreme Court made that very clear in 1935 when they started to dismantle the New Deal. In 1934 Congress—which never bothered to read the legislation the leadership told them to vote on—began to enact illegal legislation, giving the Executive Branch judicial authority, thereby breaching the separation of powers. In 1935, one-by-one, the high court began dismantling the New Deal because Congress delegated authority to the Executive Branch that it did not constitutionally possess. In other words, Congress cannot delegate authority it does not possess. Congress does not possess the authority allow the Executive Branch to abrogate the Bill of Rights since it does not, itself, have the power to abrogate it. Only a constitutional amendment, properly ratified by the States can weaken or abolish any of the rights conferred on the people under the Constitution. Apparently only jury nullification can fix this latest abrogation of citizen rights. It’s going to make some judges mad, and its going to make some prosecutors mad, but when Congress runs amuck and those who know better allow them to do it, the American people, who have the power of “veto” in the jury box, must nullify these latest infractions of the Constitution.

Tragically, while those in Congress and the White House who argued on April 20, 1995 that the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 would protect America from another terrorist attack like the Murrah Building bombing, those in Congress knew full well that it would not—nor were the abrogations of liberty provided by H.R. 666 designed to stop those who act outside the law. The restrictive measures found in the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995, or any piece of legislation ostensibly enacted by Congress to prevent acts of terrorism by lawless citizens or aliens, are designed specifically to unconstitutionally weaken the foundation of the Constitution and to fray the tethers of the Bill of Rights that bind the hands of government from assuming a superior position over the American people who, Constitutionally, Congress must answer to.

Joining together to fight H.R. 666 was an unlikely coalition that included the American Civil Liberties Union, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Gun Owners of America, the National Black Police Association, the Free Congress Foundation, the American Policy Center, and the National Rifle Association. The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor and the Los Angeles Times attacked the coalition and argued that the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 would provide an added measure of security to the United States and that Congress was not over-reaching its authority. (Of course, we know the only part of the Constitution these liberal rags have read is that portion of the 1st Amendment that allows them to slander conservatives with impunity.)

Whenever Congress attempts to rewrite our Constitutional insurance policy, or alter the “fringe benefits” we are guaranteed under the Bill of Rights, they illegally exceed their constitutional authority because Congress has no authority on their own to “amend” the Constitution legislatively. And every Congressman and Senator on Capitol Hill knows it. For that reason, the minute they do, as they just did on October 24, 2001 when the Senate confirmed the House’s voice on the matter and unconstitutionally enacted the Anti-Terrorist Act of 2001 (known as the USA Act) We the People, through jury nullification, need to step on their tongues—and then we need to impeach those Congressmen and Senators who used a crisis like the World Trade Center tragedy to deceive the voters. Congress exceeded its authority. Whenever Congressmen and/or Senators exceed their authority, they need to be impeached—and they need to be held liable for the damage they have done to the electorate who placed their trust in them. When Congress steals authority that constitutionally belongs to the people at State level, that transfer of power constitutes genuine theft. The Constitution mandates that the Bill of Rights can be weakened or abolished outright only if an amendment to accomplish that end is duly proposed and passed by a 2/3 majority in the House and Senate and then ratified by 3/4 of the States.

Had the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 been passed, unaltered by Congress that year, it would not, nor could not, have stopped the 19 Shi’ite Islamic terrorists who hijacked four 757s and flew two of them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon. The terrorists accomplished the takeover of those planes because of the passive policies of the airline companies whose rules mandated that if a terrorist attempted to hijack their plane, the pilot was obligated to allow him to do it. A decade ago when hijacking American planes was a common terrorist pasttime, and the FAA was authorized to put sky marshals on a majority of the flights, the airlines managed to wrest control of the sky marshall program from the FAA and demand that the sky marshalls be as passive as their pilots.

Flying became safe again not because of the security precautions being taken by the airlines, or from laws enacted by Congress, but because the terrorists simply found more effective ways with less risk to take hostages and terrorize people.

It was Saddam Hussein, at the end of the Gulf War, who began to devise the scheme that would eventually evolve into the September 11 tragedy in the United States. Saddam, like every terrorist in the world, knew that airline pilots for U.S. carriers were required to surrender their planes to terrorists. The problem the terrorists had in the past was that even though they were “in control” of the airliners, they were only in tactical control. They still needed the pilot to fly them wherever it was they wanted to go. And, it was clear that American pilots, even with a gun to their head, would not crash their planes into skyscrapers, government buildings, or into heavily populated areas. Their instinct has always been to save lives or minimize loss—even at the risk of their own. Most commercial pilots in the United States are former Navy, Marine or U.S. Air Force pilots.

Saddam originated the plan to train Islamic terrorists to fly jetliners the size of a 747, 757 or 767. Saddam wanted these terrorists go to “jet school” in the United States.Saddam, like most terrorist national leaders knew that the American bureaucrats that controlled temporary educational access into the United States, believed if they exposed militants from terrorist nations to the “liberty” that was available in the United States, that the fundamentalists would see how much better life was in America, and it would influence their thinking so much that they would give up their terrorist thinking and help convert their nations into democracies just like the United States. (That thinking permeated throughout the Immigration and Naturalization Service during the Clinton-Gore years when the INS allowed an extreme increase in the number of student visas. Today, there are over 300,000 missing “students” from terrorist Mideast nations, Islamic Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China who have burrowed deep into the American landscape. While the INS didn’t seem too concerned about finding these missing “students,” there are no screaming, frantic parents from those nations trying to find their children.) What does that tell us? Many of these 300 thousand missing “students” were “sleeper agents” for either communist China or one of a dozen or so Islamic countries. The Clinton-Gore INS did not notify either the FBI or the CIA that they had created a potential national security problem, or the extent of the problem they created. Creating new laws that restrict the liberties of law-abiding American citizens will not reveal the identities of these illegal aliens since they have grown accustomed to surviving in the shadow society of the lawless.

According to John Ashcroft, that has now changed. The attorney general pledged that students who overstay their visas by as little as one day will be arrested and jailed. Time will testify as a mute witness the error of Ashcroft’s boast for two reasons. First, the INS, which has been charged with the responsibility of keeping track of the aliens within our shores, has not been diligent in their task. Second, the liberals among us—particularly those on the judicial bench—have not allowed Americans, regardless of the degree of our anger, to mistreat criminal aliens on our soil. If anything, because the liberal thinks the terrorist is simply “underprivileged” or “misunderstood,” social justice is liberally applied when the rule of law should be the yardstick used to measure justice. There is no reason to believe that a new law specifically designed to abolish our rights will abrogate, in any way, the rights of aliens accused of crimes simply because they never have in the past. There are too many social justice liberals on the benches in our federal courts. Bill Clinton made sure of that. And, if they are anything else, Americans remain creatures of habit. Saddam counted on that when he devised his scheme to train pilots. We are so set in our habits that it was easy for Islamic terrorists to predict the success of their mission in America.

Saddam also knew that once he got his terrorist “students” into the United States they would be allowed to stay until they had completed their mission. The toughest part of his mission was getting his students “cleaned up” enough to get them into the country. And since terrorists seem to “clean up” better in Saudi Arabia than anywhere else in the Middle East, most of them—even the Egyptians within their group—were provided Saudi passports.

If we, as a nation, continue to allow terrorists (or those we should naturally suspect as potential terrorists) into the United States on unsupervised temporary visas on the mistaken belief that once they experience democracy they will become “converts” and go back to their homeland and overthrow the despots who lead their nations, we are fooling ourselves. This kind of thinking comes from the intelligentsia of the liberal think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations who really doesn’t care what type of government leads the world as long as only one government does, since the CFR knows that, in the final analysis, it is a small core of rich elites behind government and not the government that controls the decisions government makes.

Saddam also counted on the greediness of the capitalistic entrepreneurs who operated the myriad of airline pilot training schools (which use computer simulators to train students). The “flight school” from which Muhammed Atta (who is believed to be the cell leader of the September 11 attack) graduated from was located in Florida. Atta, like the other wannabee pilots, paid $2,000.00 per month to attend flight school. Since the World Trade Center attack, federal agents have learned that this school—and others like it in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas and one or two other western States—charged similar amounts to students who were almost exclusively from Islamic terrorist nations. And, waving a big red flag, those students—including Atta (who claimed to be a member of the Saudi royal family)—were only interested in learning how to pilot jetliners already in flight. None of them were interested in learning how to take off or land a 747 or 757. Tragically, the owner of only one flight training school found that unusual enough to report it to the FBI.

The FBI investigated that one student and arrested him in August—almost a month before the September 11 attack. Nobody in the FBI, the FAA or any other agency of the federal government with the responsibility to do so, investigated the other flight training schools in the United States, or even inquired if they had any Islamic students who were interested only in piloting planes in flight rather than taking off and landing them as well. This is sheer stupidity—and it was the type of stupidity that Saddam Hussein anticipated. America is too secure on its moated island. If the FBI had done its job, the Bureau would have discovered those schools were graduating ten to twenty times more students than the potential for jobs within their nations existed or would ever exist—and those students were paying $2,000 per month to attend classes with no possibility of a “job” in that industry when they completed their training. Because it didn’t add up, at least one reasonably intelligent FBI agent should have been asking why Islamic fundamentalists were paying $2,000 per month to learn how to maneuver a jumbo jet in air...but not land it.

Then, when the Mossad warned the CIA on September 9 that Islamic terrorists were going to hijack 20 airliners and crash them into skyscrapers like the World Trade Center in New York and quite likely, targets like the Sears Tower in Chicago, the White House, Congress, the Pentagon, Camp David, Fort Detrick, Maryland (which contains one of two key biological weapons storage facilities), John Hopkins University Military Research facility, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Hoover Dam, and the LA Freeway during morning rush hour. Rumors surfaced in Washington over the past couple of weeks that they also believed that an aircraft carrier off Newport News was also targeted, that warning would not have gone ignored as “too vague to act upon.” It was revealed on Fox News on October 27 that several Islamic children in several schools in or around New York and New Jersey had chided their Christian classmates several days before the World Trade Center tragedy that planes would crash into the Twin Towers, testifying to the power of Allah. The planned attack on the World Trade Center was not a well-kept secret. Granted, they were rumors. But, they were rumors coming from such varied sources at precisely the same time that someone should have been paying attention. That someone was the FBI. They ignored the rumors.

Saddam, whose intelligence told him that American law enforcement and bureaucratic agencies typically never share information, counted on that traditional lack of cooperation between the FAA, the INS, the FBI and the CIA. If they failed to share information, the pieces of the puzzle that each agency had would never be assembled, and the frightening picture of what Saddam, Bashar Assad and Osama bin Laden had prepared for America would remain concealed until it was too late.

There are no “anti-terrorist” laws that can be passed by the United States Congress that will protect us from terrorist acts since those charged with the responsibility of law enforcement in the United States are reactive only. Something has to happen before they react. Nineteen terrorists were allowed into our country not because we didn’t have laws in force to keep them out, but because the bureaucrats within the Clinton Administration believed they could passively convert our enemies into friends by showing them how nice democracy was.

Abrogating the Bill of the Rights

If the Comprehensive Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 been passed in its “Senate-form,” abridging the basic rights of American citizens, it would not have prevented the World Trade Center disaster. What it may have done on September 12 was to make it easier for the FBI to conduct its post-tragedy investigation since, when American citizens have no rights that interfere with a federal investigation, there is nothing standing in the way of any federal or state law enforcement organization to investigate in any way they desire—including abridging the rights of American citizens that are legislatively abrogated, albeit illegally. Within two weeks of the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center, Attorney General John Ashcroft (who as a US Senator was viewed as a pro-life, pro-Bill of Rights conservative) proposed a stringent curtailment of some liberties in order to expedite justice.

Granted, when a federal court authorizes the wiretapping of the cell phone of an individual suspected of participating in ongoing criminal activity (something a County or State court should not be able to do since wiretapping invades a constitutional privilege, a federal issue over which a local court has no jurisdiction) law enforcement agencies should be able to construe that court order to mean that any telephone subscribed to that individual should be included in the authorization. Ashcroft should not need additional legislation to tap any telephone subscribed to the suspect the FBI or U.S. Attorney is investigating. However, if the Justice Department wishes to expand its wiretap prerogative to include any telephone the FBI or the U.S. Attorney thinks might be used by their “suspect"—even if that phone is subscribed to someone else—then they are exceeding their constitutional prerogative unless they secure a new court order...as it should be. And those requests should be denied because they violate the privacy of someone who is not under investigation for the commission of a crime. However, it is a moot point now. The USA Act grants not the Justice Department but any law enforcement agency in the United States unlimited authority to wiretap and eaves drop without a court order. While most Americans believe that this legislation was concerned only with terrorism based on what their elected lawmakers are telling them, the fact is, their elected officials have lied to them—once more. This expanded authority is universal. It can, and will, be used by both federal and State law enforcement officers to unconstitutionally intrude on those suspected of domestic crimes or violence, with “fishing trip” wiretaps being used to find enough evidence to arrest and detain American citizens when the government possesses only suspicion, but no evidence, of wrongdoing.

Demand for National ID Card

Compounding the demands of the proponents of increased federal power, within days of the World Trade Center disaster, Dick Gephart [D-MO], the Minority Leader in the House and Mary Bono [R-CA] both called for the swiftimplementation of the National Identity Card (which has been suspended in moneyless limbo since 1998 when Congressmen Bob Barr and Ron Paul with the help of Tom DeLay, stopped Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, Tom Daschle and Dick Gephart from implementing it in 1998). In 1998, without a national catastrophe to garner support, 92% of the American people were opposed to having to carry what amounted to an internal passport. Within 24-hours of the Twin Towers disaster Gephart was already spinning the need for the National ID Card (which was touted in 1995 as the only thing that would save American jobs from illegal immigrants) which he and the other leaders of Congress illegally passed in the Senate version of the Immigration Reform Act of 1996 and the House version of the 1996 Omnibus Budget Bill—something that cannot legally be done. Then, when America was not looking, they created the UN’s personal identifier and tacked it into the Healthcare Portability Act of 1997. In the summer of 1998 the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], treating the National Drivers’ License as a valid law when in fact it was fraudulently declared “enacted” by the Clinton Administration, attempted to implement it.

It is important for the reader to understand that the National ID Card (or National Drivers’ License, or more appropriately, the internal passport) is not an American vision. It is a global need that has been demanded by the United Nations as a means of monitoring the global population which will shortly become the human capital of the New World Order. For that reason, one can understand Dick Gephart attempting to revive it at this time. Gephart was, after all, one of the key players in the Congressional and Senatorial subtrafuge which was used to pretend that a piece of legislation that could never stand the light of day could outrageously be declared enacted, and have Congressmen and Senators pretend they were baffled how it was done. What is surprising is that Mary Bono—the widow of arch conservative former California Congressman Sonny Bono—would champion a Nazi style Internal Passport as something good for America. Clearly, only a tragedy like the World Trade Center/Pentagon disaster could make the national identity card palatable to the American public. Shockingly, when Gephart began talking about the National ID Card, the media began spinning it as a “protective devise” to keep enemy aliens out of America, 52% of the American people polled by a Washington Post/CNN/Newsweek poll bought the argument and felt that a National ID Card should be implemented. Even more surprising, roughly 70% of those polled seemed convinced that Americans would willingly surrender much of the liberty provided to them by the Bill of Rights to tighten national security.

In Germany in 1934, when Chancellor Adolph Hitler was given extraordinary authority to “temporarily” curtail the rights of the people, Germany fell. When Prime Minister Benito Mussolini was given temporary extraordinary power in Italy ten years earlier, Italy fell. “Freedom is generally won through bloodshed; liberty is lost by apathy. Colonial Americans paid a high price for liberty and cherished their hard-won freedom so much they carefully crafted a Constitution that would guarantee liberty for all time. However, Depression-era Americans, like Depression-era Germans and Italians, sold those hard-won freedoms for the promise of a stipend at the taxpayer’s expense, and the price of a meal at the feast-laden table of the State.” (Whatever Happened To America; Jon Christian Ryter; pg. 391-392; Hallberg Publishing @ 2000—Available at www.jonchristianryter.com or available at WaldenBook Stores; call [540] 665-0070 if your local store cannot get the book.)

In the case of Americans, we appear willing to surrender our liberty for an empty promise. The United States government has been trying to abridge our rights under the Constitution since 1933 when Franklin D. Roosevelt, in modifying the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917 on March 9, 1933, reclassified the American people as the enemy of its government (ibid, pgs. 271-275). No President other than Bill Clinton tried harder to eliminate the rights of the American people than Franklin D. Roosevelt, who used the “national emergency” triggered by the Stock Market Crash of 1929 when America’s bankers and key industrialists engineered the crash in order to “modify” America’s monetary system by removing it from the gold standard, and to create a “new society” in America that would be unconstitutionally controlled by the overseer in the White House. At the same time, as FDR seized all gold owned by American citizens, and imprisoned those who failed to surrender their gold certificates for very elastic debt notes that would be reduced in value to 41¢ on the dollar the following January, he allowed $486 billion in gold bullion to be sent by the Treasury to the wealthiest investors who did their banking through the central banks of Europe.

The unconstitutional bureaucracy that now controls the administration of government in Washington, and the “rule-making” agencies whose unconstitutional regulations become law after 90-days, was created by Roosevelt in secret, without Congressional approval or sanction. They became “legitimate” only because they were not challenged by Congress—and, of course, since Roosevelt controlled Congress from 1933 to 1946 without a break, the bureaucracy became legal by unchallenged precedent. (The legal argument was that if the bureaucracy was not legal, Congress should have challenged it when it was created, not a decade later when they didn’t like what the bureaucracy was doing.)

Had there not been a national emergency—a decade long depression—Roosevelt could never have gotten away with what he did. At the end of that decade, the superior authority of the States over the federal government was gone forever. It took a decade-long national emergency to abrogate the superior rights of the States over the federal government. During that decade, text books were changed and students in American schools were taught that the federal government was the superior government, followed by the States, then the counties and finally the municipal governments. Most Americans today were taught that hierarchy structure in post-FDR classrooms. And, for that reason, most Americans accept fiction as truth.

War on American Soil

Now, the first time since the American Civil War, an enemy has launched an attack on American soil. The opportunity for the proponents of stricter government controls over the population-at-large to exploit the fear of Americans in order to strip them of whatever liberty they have left has never been better. Republicans and Democrats alike eagerly proposed the shocking curtailment of whatever constitutional liberties they regarded as inconvenient to the smooth transition of a government searching for a peaceful way to abrogate its own sovereignty to an invisible multi-national nation called the New World Order. They knew, this time, they would succeed. Even Bob Barr and Ron Paul, who single-handedly stopped the Clinton’s internal passport were now going along. While Barr told the CATO Institute on September that he didn’t think we needed to implement a National ID Card, most of the conservatives in Congress went along because this was George W. Bush’s program. Only Russell Feingold, the holdout Democratic Senator from Wisconsin seemed to understand that Congress was passing a bad law that they actually had no authority to pass. Senator Orrin Hatch, the former Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who (for a “conservative”) has been all too eager to surrender the civil liberties of Americans, insisted that the deal Congress struck with the White House to increase police powers to combat terrorism was necessary and “...takes into account each of our principled beliefs and is based on our views on the proper balance between the role of law enforcement and our civil liberties.”

As expeditiously as possible, the Anti-Terrorist Act of 2001 was steam-rolled through the House and Senate at break-neck speed just as the Anti-Terrorist Act of 1995 passed the Senate in about three heart-beats of a track star. Only, this time in addition to calling it an “anti-terrorist” bill, the legislation would also be patriotically called the United and Strengthening America Act (the USA Act). According to the ACLU, Congress didn’t call it an anti-terrorist bill because the legislation went far beyond the tools needed by law enforcement to combat terrorism. “If the USA Act becomes law,” the ACLU warned, “banks will be required to share your bank deposit information with the CIA...” on the oft chance that you might be a terrorist. Now, because you failed to threaten your Congressmen and Senators with unemployment if they passed this terrible piece of legislation, you no longer have any banking privacy. In 1992, you will recall, Congress amended the Bank Security Act, mandating that banks report all suspicious deposits (cash deposits of $10 thousand or more) that appear to be “money laundering” to the Treasury. Under USA Act, any deposits of $5,000 or more (cash, bank check or payroll check) will have to be reported to the CIA. Section 340 of the new legislation gives any law enforcement or intelligence agency the right right to secure any piece of information about you they feel they need to build a case against you. They have access to your credit history, your medical history, your scholastic history and, of course, any criminal background. They may do this without a court order—and without your knowledge and consent. The reality is laws already existed to deal with all of the issues the USA Act dealt with except one: a legitimately and legally enacted National Identity Card. Ever other issue hyped by Congressmen and Senators were covered by other legislation—even the expanded wiretap authority.

The USA Act expands the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, permitting wiretaps and searches of the private homes not only of resident aliens without search warrants in matters of national security, but to any person suspected of being involved in breeches of national security whether they are American citizens or not. In other words, the Bill of Rights has been waived. In addition, the USA Act will allow police agencies to hold immigrants for up to seven days without filing charges (citizens can only be held for 24-hours before charges must be filed). However, keep in mind, that loopholes in the USA Act were deliberately inserted into the legislation to allow any smart prosecutor to hold those suspected of domestic crimes almost indefinitely without filing charges as they search for enough evidence to actually charge them.

The USA Act would allow the government to confiscate the assets of any resident alien (and, under certain circumstances, American citizens). To get their assets back, the accused would have to prove that he, or they, are innocent of the charges—a violation of the principles of the Bill of Rights which mandates that Americans charged of a crime are theoretically innocent until proven guilty.

The USA Act also mandates that all computer systems in the United States be manufactured with CARNIVORE, an email eavesdropping program designed for the Clinton Administration. CARNIVORE will allow the government to eaves drop on any “suspect” for a limited period of time without a court order. The Clinton Administration implemented this program in 1999 without congressional approval. Before the 2000 election Congress forced the FBI to abandon the program.

It should be noted that CARNIVORE did not give the government anything that ECHELON had not been giving them for the past decade. “Evidence” collected against a suspect with CARNIVORE can be used as evidence against them. “Evidence” collected by ECHELON cannot since ECHELON is an extralegal CIA/NSA spy system that illegally eavesdrops on everyone in the world.

The USA Act allows the government to lock up any foreigner who is suspected of being a terrorist for 48 hours, and then deport them without presenting any evidence of wrongdoing. And finally, the USA Act will force every American to carry an internal passport which they will now have to produce on demand to prove they are an American citizen. Unfortunately, this card will also have a tracking chip tied to your personal identifier. When your personal identifier is punched in to the computer system, GPS will pinpoint where you are—to within 3 feet of where you are actually standing at that moment.

What America needed was an Anti-Alien Act that closed our borders until this crisis was absolutely and completely resolved. To do that, all we needed to do was void all temporary visas, whether student visas, visitor visas, or work visas from any nation which has a history of sponsoring terrorism. Then we needed to expel those visa holders. The FBI, the NSA and the CIA needs to investigate all Green Card holders if the resident aliens from those nations wish to remain in the United States. (It would seem to me that Shi’ite Muslims visiting this nation, or working here on temporary visas, would want to leave since they are theologically waging a Jihad against us.) The federal government must be held accountable for knowing the exact whereabouts of every alien is in the United States. When they are found, they need to be detained and expelled from the United States within 48 hours. Those who have gone underground can be assumed to be terrorists. The job of finding them—and finding them quickly—should be assigned to a special law enforcement task force comprised of CIA, INS and FBI agents working for Homeland Czar Tom Ridge. Since those who will be targeted by this legislation will likely not be American citizens, they should not be allowed to demand the protection of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. For that matter, any American citizen—like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols—who would wage war against their fellow citizens should not be accorded constitutional privilege, either. I believe when you wage war against your neighbors or fellow citizens you are not entitled to claim the protection offered by the Stars and Stripes.

Focusing on foreign terrorists and perhaps a handful of renegade American terrorists who have decided to declare war on the United States of America, the Homeland Security Czar Law Enforcement Team should operate under War Powers authority that would go into effect whenever a terrorist act is committed against the United States (providing the Executive Branch has activated the military to assume a role in protecting the nation from that threat), and expire when the emergency is over and hostilities end. Interestingly, this would allow the Executive Branch to use quasi-military authority without violating the Posse Comitatus Act. It may well be that President George W. Bush had that in mind when he appointed Ridge to the cabinet-level slot of Homeland Security Czar.