ACLU says White House is engaged in
PATRIOT Act Misinformation Campaign

March against IMF World Bank mostly peaceful

Negroponte: From Honduran death
squads to Baghdad’s embassy

ACLU says White House is engaged in
PATRIOT Act Misinformation Campaign

Washington, DC, Apr. 22 — The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today released an item-by-item rebuttal to a slew of false claims that President Bush made in Buffalo this week about the controversial USA PATRIOT Act.

“The president’s speech was misinformation, pure and simple,” said Anthony D. Romero, ACLU Executive Director. “The administration is making a series of deliberate misstatements to deceive the American public.”

In response to the president’s new campaign to remove the PATRIOT Act’s sunsets, the ACLU said it would prepare and release periodic detailed rebuttals on White House misinformation. Romero noted that the ACLU has taken similar issue with information presented by Attorney General John Ashcroft and produced a report, “Seeking Truth From Justice: The Justice Department’s Campaign to Mislead The Public About the USA PATRIOT Act.”

Point-by-point rebuttal

The President: “By the way, the reason I bring up the PATRIOT Act, it’s set to expire next year. I’m starting a campaign to make it clear to members of Congress that it shouldn’t expire. It shouldn’t expire for the security of our country.”

The Truth: Less that 10 percent of the PATRIOT Act expires; most of the law is permanent and those portions that do sunset will not do so until Dec. 31, 2005.

The President: “And that changed, the law changed on- roving wiretaps were available for chasing down drug lords. They weren’t available for chasing down terrorists, see?”

The Truth: Roving wiretaps were available prior to Sept. 11 against drug lords and terrorists. Prior to the law, the FBI could get a roving wiretap against both when it had probable cause of crime for a wiretap eligible offense. What the PATRIOT Act did is make roving wiretaps available in intelligence investigations supervised by the secret intelligence court without the judicial safeguards of the criminal wiretap statute.

The President: “… see, I’m not a lawyer, so it’s kind of hard for me to kind of get bogged down in the law. (Applause). I’m not going to play like one, either. (Laughter.) The way I viewed it, if I can just put it in simple terms, is that one part of the FBI couldn’t tell the other part of the FBI vital information because of the law. And the CIA and the FBI couldn’t talk.”

The Truth: The CIA and the FBI could talk and did. As Janet Reno wrote in prepared testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, “There are simply no walls or restrictions on sharing the vast majority of counterterrorism information. There are no legal restrictions at all on the ability of the members of the intelligence community to share intelligence information with each other.

“With respect to sharing between intelligence investigators and criminal investigators, information learned as a result of a physical surveillance or from a confidential informant can be legally shared without restriction.

“While there were restrictions placed on information gathered by criminal investigators as a result of grand jury investigations or Title III wire taps, in practice they did not prove to be a serious impediment since there was very little significant information that could not be shared.”

The President: “Thirdly, to give you an example of what we’re talking about, there’s something called delayed-notification search warrants. … We couldn’t use these against terrorists [before the PATRIOT Act], but we could use it against gangs.”

The Truth: Delayed-notification -- or so-called sneak-and-peek search warrants -- were never limited to gangs. The circuit courts that had authorized them in limited circumstances prior to the PATRIOT Act did not limit the warrants to the investigation of gangs. In fact, terrorism or espionage investigators did not necessarily have to go through the criminal courts for a covert search - they could do so with even fewer safeguards against abuse by going to a top secret foreign intelligence court in Washington.

For criminal sneak-and-peek warrants, the PATRIOT Act added a catch-all argument for prosecutors -- if notice would delay prosecution or jeopardize an investigation - which makes these secret search warrants much easier to obtain.

The president’s sneak-and-peek misstatement clearly demonstrates that the Patriot Act is not limited to terrorism. In fact, many of the law’s expanded authorities can clearly be used outside the “war on terrorism.”

The President: “Judges need greater authority to deny bail to terrorists.”

The Truth: The new presumptive detention that the president is proposing takes judicial authority away from the bail process. The presumption would take away the prosecution’s burden of showing that the accused is a danger or flight risk and instead puts it on the accused.

“Presidential recklessness with the facts is deeply troubling,” Romero said. “We’ll be watching the president and his statements very closely during this campaign. He is clearly fighting a losing, defensive battle for the PATRIOT Act.”

“President Bush clearly is attempting to silence his critics within the Republican Party, who believe that the PATRIOT Act went too far, too fast,” Romero added.

Source: ACLU

PATRIOT II

On Apr. 21, a key House subcommittee considered a proposal to expand the PATRIOT Act’s controversial definition of “terrorism” to provide a death penalty for any federal crime punishable by more than one year in prison if the crime was intended to influence government policy and results in death.

The proposed legislation would do two things. First, it would make 23 crimes eligible for the death penalty. Second, it would create an unprecedented “catch-all” death penalty for any other federal crime punishable by more than a year in prison if it meets the PATRIOT Act’s overbroad definition of terrorism and results in death. The ACLU said that protestors and activists from groups including Greenpeace and Operation Rescue could risk being sentenced to death for participating in certain civil disobedience events if they involved a federal crime punishable by more than a year in prison and resulted in a death of one of the participants or someone else.

Laws such as the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act and the federal gun control regime at 18 U.S.C. § 922, among many other crimes, could carry death sentences if the bill passed.

Source: ACLU

March against IMF World Bank mostly peaceful

By Jasmine Armour

Washington, DC, Apr. 26(AGR) -- On Saturday, Apr. 24 in Washington, DC roughly 3,000 people, with only two arrests, marched from Franklin Square Park to the World Bank and back again in protest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank’s policies. Traditionally, the annual actions in DC against these financial institutions have been attempts to shut down their annual meetings, which have taken place every April in DC for the past 60 years. This year, all of the events, including a three day symbolic fast, were permitted, which allowed for a street festival type of atmosphere.

The park across the street from the World Bank saw the beginning of the weekend’s protests against economic policies that continue to spark resistance all over the world. On Friday Apr. 23, there was a street theater performance discussing the destructive qualities of IMF and World Bank policies that drew the attention of local media, and those out on the street around noon in the financial district of DC, across the street from the World Bank. The International Accountability Project’s three day symbolic fast also started on Apr. 23. There were scattered groups in the park that day, participating and observing, in contrast to a heavy police presence, and the foundation for very solid barricades surrounding the park.

The Apr. 24 march was organized by the Mobilization for Global Justice (MGJ), a group that was thoroughly prepared to deal with possible arrests, despite permits, and meeting as many of the needs of the activists coming from around the country, as possible. The idea for this year’s resistance in DC was to have a festival celebrating a vision of another world, as opposed to an attempt to stop the annual IMF and World Bank meetings.

The MGJ events happened almost entirely without incident. The day started at noon with a cacerolazo, a festive Argentinian style of protest adopted by the MGJ, in Franklin Square Park. Around 1:20 pm the march started after a performance by David Rovics, and a few speakers representing different groups against IMF and World Bank policies. The march was headed by a truck with a portable sound-system and a host of speakers and poets in the back. The route wound its way through the streets of DC, stopping off at various corporations, such as Halliburton, Bechtel, and Vivendi, that profit off World Bank and IMF policies. The march finally reached the turnaround point of the World Bank itself.

Two arrests happened on Apr. 24 right before the march turned around somewhere around 18 and I streets, according to eyewitness reports. Abdulla Alnouri said this of one the arrests, “The first arrest…I saw this line of cops breaking through the black bloc, I didn’t know what was going on, I was shoved, I saw people elbowed in the face, people were definitely falling down, and the cops grabbed someone’s arm. ”

An anonymous eyewitness said this of the arrest they saw: “They were rough with him, they had four cops on him.”

None of the eyewitnesses reported heard any police orders issued to the crowd before the arrests were made. The charges were brought down from felony destruction of property, to misdemeanor destruction of property for the two arrestees.

Despite aspersions cast on activists associated with World Bank and IMF protests, everyone present seemed to be in no mood for confrontation.

One eyewitness said this of activists he saw actually confronted with a police order, “I was over on the other side of the park, and a couple of kids had gotten up in a tree, with duct tape and signs, and had duct taped signs to the tree, and the police just came up and told them to get up there and take the signs down, essentially, the thing’s pretty much over and winding down, they didn’t want any hassle or anything like that, so just to take it down, and they left them alone, and the cops left.”

Though there were many heavy police barricades, and a vast police presence, people involved in the Apr. 24 events seemed be in the festive mood all day. MGJ organizer Jon Spulnick said of April 24, “I would definitely say it was success, for two reasons -- the first is the fact that we can make a better world, that we can have all these people come together. The second reason is that we need to be in it for the long haul. This is just one step in many, many more protests, and community building actions, and liberations; in that sense, we built a relationship. We learned a lot about what needs to be done besides the mass protest.”

This year is the 60 anniversary of the IMF and World Bank meeting, and creating various financial policies activists say that don’t meet the needs of the people in countries around the world that are being “redeveloped,” as IMF and World Bank funded mining projects and dams are wreaking environmental havoc in these nations. Protesters contend that the cause of corporate globalization is responsible for a nationwide loss of jobs for US industry workers. Overall, these financial institutions are running unchecked by any organizations, governmental or otherwise, outside of themselves leaving them unaccountable for their actions.

The Mobilization for Global Justice is just one group in a worldwide resistance against the IMF and World Bank. The MGJ has helped organize the DC protests against the IMF and World Bank every year since April 2000.

They have several demands of the IMF and World Bank including: open all IMF and World Bank meetings to the public, cancel all impoverished country debt using the institutions’ own resources, end all IMF and World Bank policies that hinder people’s access to food, clean water, shelter, healthcare, education, and the right to organize. As well as stopping all World Bank support for socially, and environmentally destructive projects such as oil, gas, mining activities, and dams that include forced relocation of people. Finally, they demand that the US government, the largest shareholder, and most influential government in the IMF and World Bank, adopt the MGJ demands, and work to make the IMF and World Bank implement them.