Defense of civil liberties and constitutional procedures in the face of claims of national security is a never-ending task that requires constant vigilance and public awareness.

Under our Constitution, government powers are subject to control by the courts, the Congress, and ultimately by the American people, informed by a free press.  Checks and balances help ensure both safety and freedom.  They ensure that government actions taken for very important purposes, such as to prevent terrorism or other crime, do not violate the rights of ordinary citizens, and that government is held accountable when they do.  They also help the government, ensuring that its resources are concentrated on arrests of real criminals - not on ineffective, feel-good solutions advanced by political leaders anxious to reassure a frightened public.

Since the horrendous attacks of September 11, we have seen a steady assault on fundamental liberties that has served only to make us less free, and not more secure.  The USA PATRIOT Act (officially the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) was quickly developed as anti-terrorism legislation in response to the attacks. 

When the legislative proposals were introduced by the Bush administration in the aftermath of September 11th, Attorney General John Ashcroft gave Congress one week in which to pass the bill - without changes.  He warned that further terrorist acts were imminent, and that Congress could be to blame for such attacks if it failed to pass the bill immediately.  

Though the Act made significant amendments to over fifteen important statutes, it was introduced with great haste and passed with little debate, and without a House, Senate, or conference report and was signed into law by President Bush Oct. 26, 2001.

PATRIOT gives sweeping search and surveillance powers to domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence agencies and eliminates checks and balances that previously gave courts the opportunity to ensure that those powers were not abused.  The Patriot Act also amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to permit secret surveillance to be used more extensively in criminal, as opposed to foreign intelligence, investigations.

Post 9-11, unfair enforcement of immigration and related laws has caused great hardship in immigrant and ethnic minority communities.  Citizen's privacy and due process protections continue to be eroded.  American libraries, bookstores, and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have been faced with ever-increasing demands from federal and state law-enforcement agencies for records, e-mail, and other information for "dragnet-style" fishing expeditions.

The government has always had the authority to prosecute anyone whom it has probable cause to believe has committed or is planning to commit a crime.  It also has the authority to engage in surveillance of anyone whom it has probable cause to believe is a foreign power or spy - whether or not the person is suspected of any crime.

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Anti-terrorism policies that infringe on basic rights - such as ethnically-based roundups of innocent persons, or intrusive surveillance of peaceful political activists - not only make America less free, they make our nation more vulnerable to terrorism.  Such policies waste scarce government resources that should be used to track down real criminals, and help sow the seeds of mistrust among communities that might otherwise be willing to assist the government in arresting terrorists.  There's also a real possibility that setting the FBI loose on the American public will have a profound chilling effect on public discourse.  If people think that their conversations and their e-mails and their reading habits are being monitored, people will inevitably feel less comfortable saying what they think, especially if what they think is not what the government wants them to think.

The Green Party calls for the repeal of the USA PATRIOT Act.  Many of its provisions, along with many of the other so-called National Security Acts, undermine and erode our Bill of Rights, and contribute to the destruction of the democratic foundation of checks and balances between the branches of government.

Greens believe that all such systematic degradation or elimination of our constitutional protections must stop, and that corrective measures need to be taken in a timely manner by Congress to fully reinstate all such losses of guaranteed citizen protections.

The so-called war on terrorism must not become an assault on the civil liberties that are enshrined in our Constitution.  The price of freedom is not the loss of liberty.  Constitutionally protected rights - fought for by American patriots - are rights the Green Party holds in the highest regard.  Greens demand that the Justice Department cease and desist its wholesale rollback of constitutional protections and its daily dismantling of legal safeguards.

The use of Homeland Defense monies to spy on citizens exercising First Amendment rights is particularly onerous, as are "sneak and peek" provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act that allows surveillance of libraries, readers, the Internet, and computer users.  Basic rights ensuring individual privacy are under attack.  The U.S. government's use of high-tech tools, including intrusive monitoring and data mining and analysis to identify and disrupt citizen activists, should be seen as an attack on fundamental rights of an engaged, active citizenry.

The Green Party calls on Congress and the courts to reign in constitutional and civil-liberties abuses that have become prevalent under the Bush administration.

Our system's checks and balances not only ensure that the government does not violate the rights of law-abiding citizens, they also help maintain the legitimacy of law enforcement.

There is a better way.  Our nation should embraces its system of checks and balances and look on judges, Congress, and the American people as partners in the fight against terrorism, rather than inconvenient obstacles to the Executive Branch.