Do you believe the USA Patriot ACT was written after 9/11?

[NightWatcher]

at 300+ pages, do you think it was just thrown together by some policy maker after 9/11 while this country was in disarray and then signed into law on October 26, 2001? How long after 9/11 did most representatives not even show up to their offices? DC was shuttered for days/weeks while everything was assessed and secured.

Or had it been written months-years ago and was just waiting on an excuse to sign it into law?


If you believe it was just thrown together, why was anthrax sent to two Democratic Senators who could have opposed the Patriot Act and no other politicians?

[lame54]

1. it was a wish list compiled over the years...

of bad ideas that had no chance of being passed in saner years

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. I'd heard that it had been written prior to 9/11...

and that the Bush cabal had tried to get it through the Congress also before 9/11...

But that nobody would buy it.

Till after the attacks...

I don't know if this is true, though...

:shrug:

[nadinbrzezinski]

3. It was seating on a shelf

Waiting to go, and the bones were put together after OKC. No, don't ask me how I know.

See Echelon...fuck Hoover as an early implementation related to OKC.

[RZM]

4. Probably, but who the hell knows

Rather than sitting on a shelf as it was, I'd say more likely scenario was that it was cobbled together from a numerous policy options proposed, discussed, debated, rejected or whatnot in the normal course of government business over a long period of time.

[arcane1]

5. My guess: written by PNAC before Bush was even elected n/t

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Anyone who has read the PNAC and some history about Cheney/rumsfeld

and Feith knows the development of the Act.
Well worth the time to check into it.

[saras]

19. Yep. NT

[SusanaMontana41]

30. Absolutely. nt

[AsahinaKimi]

7. In the movie Fahrenheit 911

Michael Moore showed a Congressman (or Senator) who said the Patriot Act had been sitting around waiting for this kind of event to be brought out into the open. I watched it last night.. and was amazed by that.

[demoblemocratic]

11. lazy congressmen

most of them signed WITHOUT reading it. great.

[alsame]

8. Not a chance. nt

[housewolf]

9. According to Wikipedia, this guy was the chief architect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_D._Dinh



Viet D. Dinh (Vietnamese: Đinh Đồng Phụng Việt; born February 22, 1968) is a lawyer and a conservative legal scholar<1> who served as an Assistant Attorney General of the United States from 2001 to 2003, under the presidency of George W. Bush. Born in Saigon,<2> in the former South Vietnam, he was the chief architect of the USA PATRIOT Act.

I can't really find much more information than that, though.

Some say the Patriot Act was based on legislation Joe Biden put together in the mid 1990s in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, though I don't know whether there's any truth to that or not.

[pnorman]

25. a vote of 96 to 1, with the sole No vote coming from Hillary Clintom

Interesting

[housewolf]

34. Russ Feingold voted no

I thought his was the only no vote

[demoblemocratic]

10. before

bush probably had it written up the day he got into office.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

12. Welcome to DU, demoblemocratic!

I hope you enjoy the conversations!

:hi:

[bigwillq]

27. Hello.

Welcome to DU! :hi:

[H2O Man]

13. It is an updated

version of the Nixon administration's "Huston Plan." Tom Charles Huston created the blueprint for this very "national security act," which many historians mistakenly say was accepted, then rejected a couple of days later, by Richard Nixon. In the Senate Watergate Hearings, John Dean made clear that it was actually operational. (J. Edgar Hoover did attempt to reduce FBI responsibility, should the operations be exposed. After Hoover's death, Mark Felt coordinated two significant HP operations.)

[Drew Richards]

20. Exactly right H20

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. I am a translator, and if I were given a 300-page manuscript to TRANSLATE

(not write from scratch, TRANSLATE an existing text), I would ask for at least three months to do it. (I have translated books, and I typically get a month for each 100 pages, and that's for non-legal, non-technical texts.)

The Patriot Act went to committee early in October, less than a month after 9/11.

At the time, I knew a retired law professor who had advised the Oregon legislature on drafting legislation. I asked him if he could fathom writing completely new legislation of that scope and reach in less than a month.

His verdict: It couldn't be done. He said that if they didn't have the Act fully written, they at least had it sketched out before hand, but he thought it must have been fully written ahead of time.

[jberryhill]

15. Every agency has their legislative wish list ready to go

That's what administrative policy offices do.

[nenagh]

16. Slightly OT: Read 'The Bush Agenda" Invading the World,

One Economy at a Time" by Antonia Juhasz, an economist..

The economic plan for Iraq was mind-blowing.. Those plans, so detailed, took time to write.

[rhett o rick]

17. Damn it, I thought this was behind us. Please can we look forward?

:sarcasm: for those with a chip on their shoulder and apt to over react, like I often do.

[elehhhhna]

18. The P.Act was the first powerepoint slide in the 9/11 attack sales brochure.

it's the reason for the season

[eppur_se_muova]

21. All the bits and pieces were there; it was a cut and paste operation. nt

[Dover]

22. And the Dems haven't revoked it or many of the other Bush era

illegal activities and general destruction of civil liberties.

[astral]

23. Facts or sacred cows?

Once again, in America, it is about "Beliefs" not "Facts."

You do also not "believe" it was passed without being read, of course.

[whatchamacallit]

24. Shock Doctrine Document assembled for the planned "shock"

Only a fool believes otherwise.

[KT2000]

26. I thought it was written

years before, as suggestions from a panel Clinton set up to study future threats to America. I recall the asymmetrical attacks idea and the protection of the "Homeland." Then many other things were thrown in as well.

[Liberal_in_LA]

28. nope. I bet there are other laws waiting for some excuse to be enacted

[Fire Walk With Me]

29. 'Cause if they can actually get that sort of shit together on short notice, why can't they balance

the budget? Monsters.

[sofa king]

31. Someone should ask Jack Abramoff.

That summer Jack had devoted himself to stealing my tiny law firm's tribal clients, so I knew all sorts of shit about him before those attacks went down (my sources told me it was Abramoff, not Roger Stone, who orchestrated the Brooks Brothers Riot). Then, after the attacks, Homeland Security became one of my legislative assignments.

Abramoff's firm was bouncing around proposals for a Homeland Security department within a matter of days or weeks after the attack, had an entire legislative team devoted to it, and went out of his way to define Indian tribes as "local governments" within the bill so that tribes (some two dozen of which border the open ocean, Mexico or Canada) could not receive Homeland Security funding (so that they would have to pay Jack to fix the problem). It was obvious to me at the time that the legislation was already written, and Abramoff's plan to further rip off tribes was already written into it. My certitude was only reinforced in subsequent years when the Abramoff-Delay scams against tribes showed a similar pattern of pre-poisoning legislation and making tribes pay to fix it.

Jack got busted and the problems were never fixed, making those points of entry the very places most likely to be tested and the easiest to succeed against. So when somebody does get through and attacks us again, and those someones are traced back to entry into the US through a reservation, remember who made that possible, and why.

[quaker bill]

32. It was "written" after

but I am pretty sure most of the ideas in it were not new or original.

[badtoworse]

33. You need to loosen up your tinfoil a little. - nt