Zeitgeist Zephyr

Below is a letter you can send to your Senators and Representatives in Washington to encourage them to rework the Patriot Act.

Find your Representative here.
Find your Senator here.

Copy the below text into the e-mail text field most congressmen have on their webpages for e-mail correspondences:

It has recently come to my attention that a 16 year old home-schooled student from Oxford, North Carolina, Ashton Lundeby, was arrested under the Patriot Act as a suspected terrorist. As of now, there is little evidence that is known to the public that he is guilty of being an enemy to the state. That being said, there is no way to definitively prove if he is innocent or guilty, and if there is, under the Patriot Act he is stripped of his rights to due process under the law.

As a concerned citizen of this country, I feel strongly that the government has overstepped its bounds in this area regarding our national security, despite its best intentions. I feel that it threatens our civil liberties and could be the gateway to more restrictive pieces of legislation in the future.

I urge that you and your colleagues consider, on behalf of Ashton, that the Patriot Act be reworked to allow for those accused of being terrorists to have a chance to defend themselves in a court of law. I fear that a cornerstone of our democracy is under attack and that if nothing is done now, things could only get worse.

Thank you.

WARNING!: I’m about to launch into a tirade on an issue that hits all too close to home for me.  I ask my readership to forgive me if I offend them at any point; this is an issue that needs all emotions to be thoroughly expressed.

First of all, I encourage you to read the story that has ignited this: Mom says Patriot Act strips son of due process. 

A relic from the Bush Administration has returned to haunt us, a ghost from the past out to wreck a twisted vengeance upon the innocent citizens of the United States.  That relic, of course, is the Patriot Act.  For those who follow my blog, you will know that I believe firmly this is the most un-patriotic piece of legislation ever devised by a modern democracy.  It takes the cornerstone of modern democracy, the Magna Carta, and turns it on its head.  A key piece of the legislation states that those who are accused of terrorism are stripped of their rights to due process under the law that other criminals enjoy.  Well, as I’ve long suspected and feared in my own actions (in retrospect actions that were irresponsible), the Patriot Act has reared its ugly head and someone has been held unfairly under the law with no signs at the present time of any imminent release.

The juvenile terrorist in question is Ashton Lundeby, a 16 year old home-schooled teen from North Carolina who’s bedroom is adorned with American flags.  He was taken into custody in the middle of the night by 12 armed federal agents at 10 PM on March 5, effectively taken into custody in his sleep.What has this nation come to?  

I don’t need to remind anyone of the historical parallels this has with Hitler’s rule in Germany.  Recall Kristallnacht in 1938, when Hitler’s S.S. swept through the night taking into custody some 30,000 Jews and killing 91 in what was the start of the Nazi’s attempted extermination of the Jews.  What has been committed here, in my opinion, is far worse, simply out of the fact that anyone who the government deems to be an enemy combatant, whether true or false, is vulnerable to this kind of “justice.”Ashton’s arrest was prompted by phone calls of reported bomb threats that were traced to the IP address on his computer.  The problem?  He wasn’t at home when the phone calls were made.  He was at church.  IP addresses can easily be hacked and they have been hacked more frequently lately for the purpose of making mass scam phone calls.  This isn’t a stretch by any means that something like this could happen and someone could be wrongly accused like this.

Will Ashton be able to defend himself by himself?  It’s not likely.  It will be left up to the government to decide how legitimate of a threat he poses and if he deserves to receive any justice.  Mirroring a technique used by Walter Cronkite during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, I will be counting the days that Ashton is being held without receiving, at a bare minimum, the justice so that it can be determined by a trial and jury of his peers if he is a legitimate threat to our national security.

This is an atrocity of democracy and represents a failure of the American justice system.  Am I proud to be an American?  We’ll wait and see after this crisis of liberty is resolved.