WARS COLLIDE BILL WILL COMBINE WAR ON DRUGS WITH WAR ON TERRORISM

It parades as an anti-drug bill under the near-acronym VICTORY (Vital
Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist Organizations) Act of 2003. The
rationale for the bill is to "combat narco-terrorism.'' The
legislation sweeps far wider than that. If Congress passes the VICTORY
Act, Americans will lose more of their freedom and terrorists can
claim the victory.

Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah,
authored the bill. It is scheduled to be introduced in the Senate this
fall.

The Department of Justice claims it has nothing to do with the
legislation, even though it contains provisions that are on the
department's current wish list.

LibertyThink.com obtained an updated version (July 30) of the VICTORY
Act and posted it. The July 30 version is 33 pages shorter than the
89-page, June 27 version of the act.

The newer version eliminates provisions making it easier for federal
prosecutors to seize tax records and attorney fees. It also drops
sections that would allow longer prison sentences for nonviolent drug
offenders.

One provision of the June 27 version of the VICTORY Act that was
quietly eliminated made offshore banking for the purposes of tax
evasion a money-laundering scheme. Anyone found guilty of this type of
money laundering would have spent up to 20 years in a federal prison.

The updated version of the bill grants the Justice Department the
authority to freeze the property of suspects until that property can
be turned over to the government in a forfeiture process.

Both the earlier version and the updated one allow the federal
government to freeze all bank accounts of anyone charged with money
laundering.

One of the money-laundering crimes, according to the Hatch bill, is
"reverse'' money laundering.

One commits this crime by concealing "more than $10,000 on his person
or in any vehicle, in any compartment or container within any vehicle,
or in any container placed in a common carrier, and transports,
attempts to transport or conspires to transport such currency'' across
state lines or out of the United States "knowing that the currency was
derived from some form of unlawful activity, or knowing that the
currency was intended to be used to promote some form of unlawful activity.''

The message being: don't travel far with more than $10,000 on your
person -- even if you plan to use it as a down payment on a house.

Section 207 of the updated bill makes any account and any assets at
any financial institution through which suspected drug or terrorist
"tainted'' funds have passed subject to forfeiture. And, according to
the Hatch bill, "the government shall not be required to identify the
specific property involved in the offense that is the basis for the
forfeiture.''

Section 209 of the VICTORY Act deals with the crime of "commingled
funds.'' If a person in an otherwise honest transaction receives more
than $10,000 of "criminally derived property,'' that person is guilty
of money laundering. If you sell your car to someone for $12,000, you
better hope that at least $2,000 of that money had been honestly gained.

The Hatch bill creates a new crime, narco-terrorism, and defines that
crime so broadly that anyone who manufactures, distributes or
possesses with the intent to distribute controlled substances risks
being charged with narco-terrorism.

The government only has to show the individual intends to use those
drugs to provide support, directly or indirectly, to "a foreign
terrorist organization or any person or group involved in the
planning, preparation for, or carrying out of, a terrorist offense.''

Under this section of the bill, the government doesn't even have to
prove a drug defendant knew a group was designated as a "foreign
terrorist organization.''

The bill, in effect, combines the "war on drugs'' with the "war on
terrorism.''

President Nixon began the war on drugs in the 1970s. It has already
cost the American taxpayer hundreds of billions of dollars.

The combined war on drug-terrorism would ensure a continuous flow of
taxpayer money, with about the same level of triumph - maximum
penalties, minimum success; loading up our prisons, chopping down our
liberties.

The war on drugs has led to the gutting of the Fourth
Amendment.

Before to the war on drugs, American citizens had much greater
constitutional protection from government searches and seizures of
their property.

The war on terrorism has also had an impact on Fourth Amendment
protections, since search warrants granted by Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) courts are a much lower standard than probable
cause.

The passage of the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 already allows the
Department of Justice, under the rationale of fighting the war on
terrorism, to tap phones, to search through a citizen's electronic
communications and to conduct secret searches of homes and offices.

The currently proposed Victory Act sweeps much too broadly. Honest
people who have no intent of committing crimes or supporting terrorism
can be swept up by its provisions and suffer the dire
consequences.

Looking at what each homefront "war'' has done to civil liberties, one
sees that combining the war on drugs with the war on terrorism can,
and more than likely will, escalate the loss of our freedoms.

Charles Levendosky, editorial page editor of the Casper (Wyoming)
Star-Tribune, has a national reputation for Bill of Rights commentary.