The One Thing I Want Congress To Investigate - Patriot Act

[ThomWV]

Who wrote it? That is all I want to know, who wrote the Patriot Act? It was ready to go and every Senator and Congress person you run across tells you that not only did he or she not write it but that they didn't even have the chance to read it befor voting it into law.

So who wrote the damned thing? When? Where?

[spanone]

1. P N A C

[illinoisprogressive]

2. I would too. I'd like them to rip it up and burn it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

3. Exactly, one of THE most suspicious aspects of the whole post 9/11

orgy of "patriotism."

I'm a translator, and if a client gives me a 120-page document to translate (translate, not write from scratch), they know they'd better give me a good long lead time, at least a month, if not longer, depending on the difficulty of the text.

The Patriot Act was introduced to committee less than a month after 9/11. That raised my suspicions immediately.

At the time, I knew a retired law professor who had advised the Oregon legislature on drafting bills, and I shared my suspicions with him. He agreed that it should take more than a month to write a 120+ page bill, no matter how many people they had working on it. (And even if they gave one page each to 120 people, the end product would have to be checked and rechecked for internal consistency and possible overlap or conflict with existing laws.)

This law professor completely supported my guess that the Busheviks had had at least a first draft of the Patriot Act ready to go before 9/11.

I'm sure that many members of Congress found this short lead time suspicious, too, yet almost all of them voted for it without reading it. I wonder if they were bribed, threatened, or blackmailed.

[texasclarkie]

5. Agreed...

I've been suspicious of this too. I'd be willing to bet they used any means they could to get the votes.

[ThomWV]

6. That and more it seems to me

I agree with you entirely, the time required alone seems to make it impossible to believe it was put to paper as a result of the attack on us. Its more than that though. It is the intricacy of the document and the hidden powers it contains. Its a thread here and a thread there but it all weaves together into an executive-kevlar with spikes.

[liberalnurse]

4. I know, I know....

but the Democrats were lazy and chose not to read any of it before voting in that writ of Constitutional abuse. They voted with blind trust....A shameful act as they were more concerned with their poliyical image than risking a honorable knock-down debate on it.....

[Greeby]

7. Weren't the Congress working on their own bill for two weeks

And then this thing got dropped on em in the middle of the night. Or did I hear wrong :shrug:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. Hmm, that I hadn't heard

All the more reason for them to have demanded to read the Bush version before voting.