Naked City

THE (BAD!) SMELL OF VICTORY

If you thought the federal government couldn't possibly create legislation
more draconian and reprehensible than the PATRIOT Act, RAVE Act, CLEAN-UP
Act, or Ecstasy Awareness Act, you thought wrong -- really, really wrong.

Late last month ABC News shagged a copy of a proposed bill quietly making
the Capitol rounds, and reportedly slated for introduction this fall, that
would create the crime of "narcoterrorism" -- making it possible for the
feds to redefine any and all drug crimes as acts of terrorism.

"This bill would treat drug possession as a 'terrorist offense' and drug
dealers as 'narcoterrorist kingpins,'" a Democratic aide for the House
Judiciary Committee told ABC News. "To say that terrorist groups use a
small percentage of the drug trafficking in the United States to finance
terrorism may be a fair point, but this bill would allow the government to
prosecute most drug cases as terrorism cases."

The draft legislation, titled the Vital Interdiction of Criminal Terrorist
Organizations Act of 2003 -- or, quaintly enough, the VICTORY Act -- is
authored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chair of the Senate Judiciary
Committee. A Hatch spokesperson told ABC that the senator is merely
"examining legislative options" but hasn't yet "submitted anything for
consideration." The bill would expand law-enforcement powers that lawmakers
couldn't stuff into the USA PATRIOT Act, against which criticism continues
to mount.

Among VICTORY's provisions: raising the threshold for court rejection of
information gained through illegal wiretaps; giving law enforcers authority
to issue "nonjudicial" subpoenas to gain access to individuals' financial
records; and extending the U.S. Department of Justice's power to issue
"sneak-and-peek" subpoenas in drug cases. That means cops and prosecutors
could subpoena communications, financial records, or other information for
perusal before notifying the subject of the search. A host of the sweeping
and invasive provisions aren't directly related to terrorism, but would
"severely undermine basic constitutional rights and checks and balances,"
notes a recent ACLU press release.

Also only tenuously related to security, homeland or otherwise, is the
bill's creation of a charge of narcoterrorism that could apply to anyone
who "knowingly" sells, manufactures, or possesses drugs whose profits "may"
end up in the hands of groups the government has designated as terrorist
organizations. Convicted narcoterrorists would receive a 20-year
mandatory-minimum sentence. "They're thinking that Americans are scared of
drugs and scared of terrorists, so they should be really, really scared of
narcoterrorists," the Drug Policy Alliance's Bill Piper told the Drug
Reform Coordination Network. "We already have laws against drugs and
against terrorism. We don't need this."