Saturday, April 17, 2004



Left & Right Join to Voice Concerns Over Patriot Act
In April , Senator Orrin Hatch's Senate Judiciary Committee field hearing on the USA Patriot Act in Salt Lake City made for strange bedfellows, as liberals, libertarians, and conservatives joined together to voice their concerns over a half-dozen provisions in the Patriot Act, as reported in the Salt Lake Tribune. One such provision is Section 215, which gives law enforcement officials broad authority to demand that libraries or bookstores turn over books, records, papers, and documents.
· A new politics and the culture of fear
· See Also Iraq: Regardless of ones political persuasion it must be seen at the very least as a humanitarian catastrophe

If Australia's public servants tell the Government only what it wants to hear, then politicians have an escape hatch when things go wrong - in Timor, Iraq or anywhere else...
· See Also Speak no Evil [Southerly Buster: All that's happening is that the Man of Steel is repeating his usual pattern of cherry-picking reports to make himself and his policies look good (16/04/2004)]
· See Also Lance Collins: The man they couldn't silence
[Quiggin: It's been a long time since I took on trust anything coming out of policy departments like Treasury and the Productivity Commission. Under the present government, we've already learned we can't trust statements from the armed forces, the Defence Department or the Electoral Commission. But until now, I've never seen any serious evidence of political interference with ABS. This letter suggests that the process has begun]
· See Also Price of Mistakes
· Colonel Richard Tracey is, in fact, Dick Tracey, QC [Link Poached from Backpages]
· Militants free Czech hostages
· See Also 'I'll show you how an Italian dies': hero hostage
· See Also Links to the full text of CRS reports covering homeland security, intelligence, Iraq, national defense, national security threats & issues, NATO and terrorism [Congressional-Research-Service Reports Links to Reports