I know I post about this all the time, but dammit, it’s important. Another weblog has a fine rundown of a recent Nightline segment wherein Ted Koppel examines PATRIOT and questions its supporters and critics. Frankly, it’s some astounding stuff. The blog author, Lisa Rein, has some trouble with punctuation and spelling in her transcripts, but she’s also providing some fine clips from the show. Please take a few minutes and read, if nothing else, the transcript of Barbara Comstock’s defense of the act, and note — as Koppel does — how she seems to keep forgetting that those “terrorists” she mentions are actually only “suspected terrorists;” none have sat for any trial.

Koppel closes with this, which is as clear an evisceration of Ashcroft’s DOJ as any I’ve seen:

The men who drafted our constitution, who framed our civil rights and protected our various freedoms under the law would, I suspect, retch at some of the bone headed, self-serving, misinterpretations of their intentions that they so often use these days to undermine the very freedoms they pretend to safeguard. The miracle of American Law is not that it protects popular speech, or the privacy of the powerful, or the homes of the priviledged, but rather, that the least among us, those with the fewest defenses thoses suspected of the worst crimes, the most despised in our midst, are presumed innocent until proven guilty. That remains as revolutionary a concept now as it was in the 1780s. It makes protecting the country against terrorism excruciatingly difficult, but we cannot arbitrarily suspend the rights of one catagory of suspects without endangering all the others.

Food for thought, kids. Remember, too, that on this past 9/11, our president was insisting that PATRIOT didn’t go far enough.