Susan Collins, Norm Coleman sponsor troubling domestic terrorism bill
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3319
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2781
by Steve Perry
Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman is the Senate co-sponsor of a little-noticed domestic anti-terrorism bill that could carry us several steps closer to the good old days of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joe http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3243) is currently in committee after passing the House last year with no media scrutiny and no real debate by a 404-6 margin. The primary sponsor of the Senate bill is fellow Republican Susan Collins of Maine.
The purpose of the measure is to create a permanent federal commission to scrutinize radicals and would-be terrorists, and to fund a series of university-based centers devoted to ferreting out and tracking the dangerous subversives among us. The latter would operate under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. A handful of critics from the blogosphere and the legal world have called out the measure on grounds that it its vague mandate amounts to criminalizing dissent. But even in the civil liberties demi-monde, it seems to be making little impact. One reason the bill has attracted so little attention: It’s a thoroughly bipartisan push that actually originated in the Democratic party. Though the Senate version is sponsored by two Republicans, the House version that passed last year was introduced by a Democrat, Jane Harman of California, and 10 of her 14 co-sponsors were also Democrats.
I contacted Peter Erlinder, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild and a constitutional criminal law professor at William Mitchell in St. Paul who has spoken up against the bill. “If politically motivated violence is what this war [the ‘war on terror’ is about,” he tells Minnesota Monitor, “we can put virtually any definition to it that we choose to. Even, for example, something like a demonstration against the World Trade Organization where there might be some broken windows. Even the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this fall would carry with it the possibility that there might be some acts that are not completely passive. Under this definition, anyone associated with those acts, even if they didn’t intend the result, could conceivably find themselves being investigated by a commission like this.”
Currently S.1959 is before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Asked about the status of the bill at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day appearance in St. Paul, Coleman reportedly told the audience that he had no plans to try to bring it to the floor in this session. Even if true, that suggests it could well be an early item of congressional business during the administration of President Clinton/McCain/Obama.
More from Peter Erlinder regarding S.1959:
“We’ve had experience with this sort of thing before,” notes Erlinder. “The legislation not only sets up a study mechanism. It sets up a commission structure that would permit the Congress to organize commissions that would travel around the United States to see who, in any local area, might fit the definition.
“It’s similar to the hearings that the House Un-American Activities Committee had from the ’30s through the ’70s. ‘Un-American activities’ is a term that’s just as broad as ‘homegrown terrorism’ or ‘violent radicalization.’ There is no there there. [HUAC was set up in order to study Nazi infiltration in the United States. After WWII, however, its character changed as the political climate changed. It then became the committee that was used to investigate alleged communist ties that people had. And because ‘un-Americanism’ is something that’s in the eye of the beholder, the committee would travel around the country having hearings to find out who was un-American in any particular community.
“The problem is that legislative commissions like this have the power of contempt, so that if a person either doesn’t answer questions because they don’t want to expose their friends to liability, or they don’t appear, they can be held in contempt of Congress and be sentenced to prison as a result. Under the HUAC period, that was about two years. So the Hollywood 10, when they refused to name names, were given two years. Under the current state of the law, however, the terrorism enhancements for criminal sentences have been used to extend contempt sentences from two years to 10 years. So people who don’t appear before this commission, or don’t answer questions the way the commission thinks they should, could face up to 10 years in prison for failing to cooperate.”
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