Kucinich on civil liberties
This information is taken from the official Kucinich campaign site issues page on civil liberties. Kucinich's strong support of civil liberties and opposition to the Patriot Act (he promises to repeal it) is one of the major reasons I support him.
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The unfolding of the promise of democracy in our nation paralleled the striving for civil rights. That is why we must challenge the rationale of the Patriot Act. We must ask why should America put aside guarantees of constitutional justice?
We all agree that terrorists should be brought to justice, but what kind of justice? The American jurisprudence system is the envy of the free world with its emphasis on due process. Yet a recent Executive Order of this administration substitutes our American justice system for military tribunals where officers sit as judge and jury, with secret evidence, secret witnesses, secret verdicts and even secretly handed down death sentences.
We cannot justify widespread wiretaps and Internet surveillance without judicial supervision, let alone with it. We cannot justify secret searches without a warrant. We cannot justify giving the Attorney General the ability to designate domestic terror groups. We cannot justify giving the FBI total access to any type of data that may exist in any system anywhere such as medical records and financial records.
We cannot justify giving the CIA the ability to target people in this country for intelligence surveillance. We cannot justify a government that takes from the people our right to privacy and then assumes for its own operations a right to total secrecy.
This is not reflective of Jeffersonian Democracy. This is Kafka's "The Trial", writ large. We should not let the actions of terrorists cause us to reject our American system of justice. The ultimate terror in a democracy is the destruction of constitutional principles. Let us defend against terrorism. And may we always remain "one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all."
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