TAKE A LESSON FROM THE DRUG WAR BEFORE EXCHANGING LIBERTY FOR SECURITY

Americans profess to love liberty above all else, but when threatened,
we too often hurl our liberties on the barricades.

Once again, we are allowing an atmosphere of fear to be used as an
opportunity to chisel away at our freedoms.

The House and Senate are near agreement on a package of anti-terrorism
bills that will greatly expand police powers and greatly diminish
privacy and due process protections. Had the House not adjourned at
mid-week due to the anthrax scare, a bill would already be on its way
to the president.

Hopefully, Congress is using the furlough to take a second look at the
long-term impact.

Our generation has already allowed the 25-year drug war to horribly
erode the Constitution.

Protections against illegal search and seizure and self-incrimination
aren't strong enough to keep you from being yanked off the job without
cause and forced to take a drug test -- unless you work for the
government. The sanctity of property rights is weaker than the
forfeiture laws that allow prosecutors to seize and sell your car
simply on suspicion of a crime. Search warrant safeguards are now
twisted into a pretzel of exceptions and rationalizations that give
police broad authority to snoop and trespass.

The result? No less dope, but a lot less civil liberties.

We seem to have learned little from that miserable failure, and are
ready again to empty the drawers of the Fourth and Fifth amendments.

Atty. Gen, John Ashcroft is asking Congress for a laundry list of
insidious measures like the sneak and peak provision, which would open
the doors of a home or business to officers who could sort through
personal belongings, take photographs, examine computer hard drives,
without ever notifying the owner. The lack of notification makes it
awfully tough to mount a constitutional challenge to the search.

The new anti-liberty bills would also greatly expand surveillance
powers, particularly on the Internet. The government wants to monitor
the Web for suspicious activity and intercept e-mail without warrants.

Also under assault are probable cause provisions limiting when the
government can eavesdrop. The current standard of suspicion that a
crime has been, or is about to be, commited would evaporate.

Non-citizens would lose most due process rights, and could be detained
indefinitely if the attorney general -- not a judge -- suspects they
are involved in or know about terrorism. The burden of proof would be
on the accused, not the accuser.

You may think all this is reasonable given the present danger. But
even Ashcroft acknowledged that had these laws been in place prior to
Sept. 11, they may not have prevented the attacks.

"Anyone who thinks we can surrender some civil liberties and be safer
is being misled," said Timothy Lynch of the Libertarian Cato
Institute. "Because of the gradual chipping away at the safeguards of
the Constitution, the next generation is not going to have the
constitutional rights we have, and certainly not the ones our
grandparents had."

Many in Congress who might normally rise in defense of civil liberties
are silent for fear of seeming unpatriotic.

Lovers of liberty should remind them that preserving our ability to
pass to our children the rights and freedoms our parents passed to us
is the highest form of patriotism.