USING IT ON COMMON CROOKS TRIVIALIZES ANTI-TERROR LAW

While U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft was touring the country, trying to
convince Mr. and Ms. American Citizen that only terrorists need fear the
USA Patriot Act, prosecutors were using the act on telemarketers and to
charge a methamphetamine manufacturer with producing a chemical weapon.

In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the
Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused
of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian
lottery.

Also, thanks to the Patriot Act, Martin Dwayne Miller, 24, of Todd, N.C.,
could get 12 years to life in prison for manufacturing methamphetamine, a
crime that usually draws a six-month sentence in North Carolina. He was
being held in the Watauga County Jail under $505,000 bond.

District Attorney Jerry Wilson charged Miller with two counts of
manufacturing a nuclear or chemical weapon in July.

"This is a two-edged sword," Wilson said. "Not only is the drug
methamphetamine in itself a threat to both society and those using it, but
the toxic compounds and deadly gases created as side products are also real
threats."

Telemarketers who rip off the elderly should go to jail, but they're not
terrorists. Methamphetamine is a threat to society and those using it, and
it does produce deadly gases, but unless Miller was making meth to fund
terrorists, or using the toxic byproducts as chemical weapons, he's not a
terrorist, either.

Congress passed the Patriot Act to prevent another Sept. 11. Bending it to
suit other purposes is perverse and cynical and justifies civil
libertarians ' fears that overzealous law enforcement officers and
prosecutors like Wilson will use it to turn the United States into a police
state.

Federal prosecutors have filed more than 250 criminal charges under the
act. How does the public know, when Ashcroft says the FBI and CIA have used
the law successfully to prevent more terrorist attacks and arrest
terrorists, that they were talking about busting up terrorist cell and not
a meth lab or telemarketing operation?

If they expect the American public to take terrorism seriously, the justice
department will, too, and not trivialize the actual threat by stretching
the law to suit other agendas.