American Civil Liberties Were Actually Violated By Liberals

Lee P. Butler

Just ask yourself one question.

Before you give a knee-jerk reactionary answer, pause for a moment and give yourself time to clear your mind of all political affiliations, ideologies, or subjective rationale so all that is left in your cognitive reasoning is just a clean slate humanistic thought process.

Now ask yourself, do you really believe that there has ever been a government with the capacity to monitor its populace in one form or another, that hasn’t in some manner used that ability under the auspices of protecting its citizens from some harm?

Even in America with it’s checks-and-balances, it’s constitutional protections, it’s belief in the power of states’ rights or the daily exercise of freedom by the American citizenry, that ability has never truly been removed from the existential relevancy of our lives.

Some haughty, intellectually self-aggrandizing liberal elitists want to make believe that prior to the tragedy of September 11, 2001 there was no way the American government, or anybody else for that matter, could invade the privacy of American citizens.

Except, according to them, during the Nixon administration.

Well, actually they meant without a court ordered warrant, outside the Nixon administration.

Check that, for better clarification, they mean to say, as long as a warrant is obtained within a certain amount of time AFTER the invasion of privacy has taken place.

Wait, hold on a minute, maybe they need to be a little more specific here. This activity is only allowable in situations where the American citizen is in contact with a determined foreign terrorist interest, which would necessitate the involvement of the FISA court after the transgression has taken place.

And even if the court rules after-the-fact that a justification for a warrant was not provided, notification to the person whose civil liberties were violated can be withheld for an indeterminable amount of time.

Okay, now we’re clear on that, right?

But, you see, according to these liberal elitists none of this, with exception to the Nixon administration, has ever happened before President Bush forced Congress to overwhelmingly pass the dreaded Patriot Act and is now destroying the country with his newfound dictatorial power.

All right, all right, let’s be somewhat clearer on this subject too. Every provision in the Patriot Act, with very little exception, were laws that already existed but were being implemented in other areas of law enforcement, such as fighting Mafia activity and dealing with the drug trade.

All the Patriot Act did was gather those laws together in one bunch and direct their attention towards the War on Terror, specifically dealing with terrorist activity inside this country. Even the hated and much publicized ‘library book reading list invasion of privacy’ law has been in existence for many years and has been used in numerous cases, but was only noticed by the elitist media once it became part of the Patriot Act.

Suddenly it became a mantra for liberals and their media brethren that the imperialistic Bush administration needs to be in your business.

Then came the report that the President had authorized the National Security Agency to perform surveillance on suspected terrorists who may be in contact with people inside this country. What’s worse, he did so without the issuance of warrants to intercept these foreign calls from suspects involved in terrorist activities where immediate Intel could prevent an attack against Americans.

Then he admitted to doing it!

How dare he have the temerity to admit to utilizing authority at his disposal by the Constitution in an attempt to protect American citizens from another terrorist attack on our soil by infringing the civil rights of terrorists and intercept their phone calls.

Sorry, phone calls between terrorists and American citizens. This may not be ‘politically correct’, but if an American citizen is cavorting with terrorists, that American has jeopardized his rights as an American citizen, become a terrorist and is only of concern to the government in that capacity.

What’s wrong with this whole issue isn’t that American’s don’t have a better grasp of the importance of this activity especially in the post-9-11 world, because based on polls, Americans of all stripes overwhelmingly support what the President is doing. It’s the hypocrisy espoused by the Left that smells like a septic sewage system.

During the Nineties, Clinton promoted a bill, “to conduct warrantless searches in highly violent public housing projects,” which would have specifically targeted surveillance without court-ordered warrants on mostly African-American families.

There were no New York Times stories then. There was no political outrage from liberals then. So, liberal hypocrisy clearly shows that spying on American citizens by them was acceptable to liberals and their media brethren, its only when President Bush spies on terrorists that they have a problem.

Now that we are in a War on Terror where terrorists have already adroitly displayed their disdain for America and killed thousands in an attack that those same elitists also assert should have been prevented, and the President is doing all he can to prevent another attack, they slam him with being imperialistic.

As with so many issues and their supposed pertinence to liberals, the President is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Plus, these liberals mendaciously charge those they oppose with taking part in an illegal activity that those they support actually did take part in, in the past, but they turn a blind eye to that because it doesn’t mesh with their political attack plan.

Remember, as was reported by the television show ‘60 Minutes’, the Clinton administration actually spied on Americans with a ‘domestic spy operation’ called Echelon where the program collected, “virtually every electronic conversation around the world” as it processed, “everything from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors to ATM’s”.

The Bush administration’s policy is to limit their program to only intercepts of international phone calls of suspected terrorists into and out of this country.

Ask yourself another question.

Which administration do you think truly committed an illegal infringement of your civil liberties and was acting ‘imperialistic’?