We hope you remember the sad case of Canadian Maher Arar. If not, please go here and refresh your memories.

We're very happy to learn that after a year in custody, Syria has released Arar and sent him back to Canada.

Maher was minding his own business, changing planes at JFK, when U.S. authorities seized him and deported him, not to Canada, where he had lived since 1988, but to Syria, where he had not been since he was a teenager.

The 32-year-old Ottawa engineer was returning, via Zurich, from a family vacation to Tunisia, when he was detained during a stopover at Kennedy airport in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. U.S. officials then deported him to Syria.

Yes, Ashcroft is using the Patriot Act to subpoena reporters' records. Elaine Cassel over at Civil Liberties Watch reports:

The FBI has sent out letters to reporters who wrote about the [Adrian] Lamo case. The letters warn that subpoenas under the USA Patriot Act will be forthcoming for all of their notes, emails, interviews, content of conversations and investigations, and expense and travel reports related to stories they wrote about Lamo. The journalists are ordered to preserve these records for three months, this in spite of the fact that the articles were written a year ago.

Using the Patriot Act for forthcoming subpoenas is an effort to circumvent journalists’ privilege of preserving confidential sources under the First Amendment. Furthermore, reporters who talk to anyone—including their editors or lawyers (!) about the subpoenas will be subject to criminal prosecution under the Act. The gag order that violates the 1st Amendment right of speech, the 5th Amendment right to due process, and 6th Amendment right to counsel.

For more on Adrian Lamo, known as the 'homeless hacker" go here. For more on subpoenas to reporters, go here.

Have you been thinking of opening a new bank account? You may wish you had done it yesterday. The Patriot Act kicks in at banks today and banks will be requesting a lot more information from customers opening new accounts. Details are available here.

For existing account holders, banks will be on the lookout for suspicious transactions. Should they find and report one, they are not allowed to tell you. You might just find your account frozen with no explanation.

Krista Shonk, regulatory specialist with America's Community Bankers, says ....banks will continue to check all customers against a list of known terrorists and money launderers that's issued by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, but she adds that there is some concern about a list generated by law enforcement agencies of people who are merely suspects.

While the new rules will be expensive for the banks, particularly small ones, they are not cost-free to you, the customer. For example, the cost of opening a new checking account is expected to jump from $7.75 to an estimated $22.

The FBI says it regrets labeling Dr. Steven Hatfill a "person of interest" in the Anthrax probe.

[FBI Anthrax probe leader Michael] Mason told reporters Monday that giving out "person of interest" information publicly "leads to the same sort of calamity" that occurred when Richard Jewell was wrongly accused in the 1996 bombing at the Atlanta Olympics. "It's very hard to take that back if you're wrong," Mason said.

Meanwhile, Hatfill's suit against the FBI and Ashcroft, "accusing the government of "a campaign of harassment" and unfairly singling him out," is pending.

So "person of interest" now becomes a justly deprecated term. We hope "under the umbrella of suspicion" is next.

Buzzflash interviews John Dean on Attorney General John Ashcroft...the genesis of the interview is Dean's column here, discussing whether lying about wmd is an impeachable offense.

Today, we are interviewing Dean --a noted author, political and legal analyst, and FindLaw columnist -- on the efforts of John Ashcroft to create a de facto policy of prosecuting Americans for disclosing government information, even if it is not classified. It is another example of Ashcroft, on behalf of Bush and Cheney, seeking to turn America into a Soviet style state, where an elite group of rulers control all the information that belongs to the American people.

Dean's column comes at an ironically timely moment. Right now, the White House is furiously trying to spin its way out of a traitorous act of betrayal, exposing a CIA operative who specialized in tracking legal and illegal trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. Ashcroft is no doubt spending time with his staff trying to find inventive ways to AVOID holding anyone at the White House accountable. At the same time the Department of Justice is probably conspiring to let an act of treason go unprosecuted at the White House, it is also, according to Dean, trying to figure out ways for sending American to jail for disclosing or transferring information that belongs to the American people, not the Bush Cartel.

Go read.

If you have ever wondered to what extent Bush and the Justice Department would go to obtain expanded powers in the name of the terror war, the answer is becoming very clear. The Administration is becoming a master at using the media to condition us to their next power grab.

Take Sunday's New York Times, for example. Two journalists, Eric Lichtblau and Don Van Natta, Jr., write two separate articles, on related but different subjects. Neither takes note of the topic in the other's article. Yet the two articles are inextricably linked and clearly demonstrate where Bush & Co. is headed.

A few hours ago we wrote about Lichtblau's article, U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling. It's about how the Justice Department is using the Patriot Act in non-terror cases, ranging from:

....suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders... Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise.

The focus of the article is whether using the Patriot Act in non-terror criminal investigations....for garden-variety crimes, if you will....is legal or just or even in sync with what Congress intended when it passed the Act. There is no mention of terrorist's involvement in routine crimes in an effort to hide their money to finance more terrorism.

Now we move to the Sunday Times Week in Review section and Van Natta Jr.'s article, Terrorists Blaze a New Money Trail. The article is about how terrorists are not using banks or other institutions to launder money. Instead, the article claims, they've decided to hide money by going into the petty crime business which generates non-traceable cash. There is no mention of the Patriot Act or other terror laws being used to catch such activity.

In May, 2003, the House Judiciary Committee released a report from the Justice Department that acknowledged that the Patriot Act was being used for non-terror crimes. But it gave scant information about the details. The New York Times follows up:

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers, child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders, federal officials said.

Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise. But critics of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law is evidence the administration has sold the American public a false bill of goods, using terrorism as a guise to pursue a broader law enforcement agenda.

The Justice Department has not denied it is using the Patriot Act in routine criminal investigations:

Did you fly Jet Blue before September, 2002? Then there may be a file on you and the ACLU says you're entitled to a copy.

If you flew on JetBlue before September 2002, a file containing a variety of personal information about you may have been created by a Department of Defense subcontractor called Torch Concepts. On this page you will find information about what kind of information may be in your dossier, and how you can find out.

Here's the ACLU's FOIA form you can fill out and send online to the Pentagon and TSA.

The Total Information Awareness Program(TIA) is no more! Congress passed a bill Thursday dismantling the program and the office.

The House vote Wednesday was 407-15. The Senate voted to pass it Thursday, 95 to 0.

Under the legislation, TIA -- which had been housed in the Pentagon -- would be shut down and the government forbidden from using the technology envisioned by TIA in any other successor program.

....Had it been implemented, the ACLU said TIA would have used data-mining technology to sift through vast amounts of personal transactional data in the unproven hope of discerning obscure patterns that would suggest terrorist activity is intended or ongoing. The ACLU said that this approach would not only violate privacy, but would make all Americans terrorism suspects as the system would have scoured credit card purchases, travel records, financial statements and even Internet viewing habits.

The ACLU also reminds us to remain vigilant:

The bill, however, does authorize a separate, classified program for “processing, analysis, and collaboration tools for counter terrorism foreign intelligence” but the legislation prohibits its domestic use against Americans. “While TIA may be dead and buried,” Edgar added, “we must remain on a constant lookout for other super-snoop programs.”

Patriot Watch congratulates Sen. Ron Wyden and links to this press release from his office.

Attorney General John Ashcroft is avoiding print reporters on his Patriot Act tour. What's he afraid of? Or is he just a paranoid conspiracy theorist at heart? Columbia University Journalism professor Todd Gitlin and Department Chair Jay Rosen suggest the latter:

Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, who is continuing his tour of the country to promote the Patriot Act, has at several stops, including Buffalo and Philadelphia, refused to speak to print reporters. While television correspondents can often breeze right in, their newspaper colleagues are kept at bay by Secret Service agents doing the bidding of the nation's chief law enforcement official, who prefers audiences of handpicked enthusiasts and interviews with local television reporters.

According to Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock, Ashcroft wants to explain "key facts directly to the American people" and not have to subject himself to "as much of a filter from people who are already invested in having a different view of it."

Former President Jimmy Carter attacks the Patriot Act:

"Former President Jimmy Carter warned Americans against curtailing human rights in the name of homeland security, saying it undermines the country's credibility in nations struggling with oppressive governments.

Carter, speaking Tuesday at the Carter Center in Atlanta, said the Patriot Act, profiling of Muslims and holding suspected terrorists in Guantanamo Bay run counter to the principles of democracy the United States preaches to the rest of the world.

They have been held in prison without access to their families, or a lawyer, or without knowing the charges against them, Carter said. We've got hundreds of people, some of them as young as 12, captured in Afghanistan, brought to Guantanomo Bay and kept in cages for what is going on two years."

[link via Patriot Watch, the best site around for monitoring Patriot Act developments.]

In case you had any doubts that the Administration has not been truthful about its intentions vis a vis the Patriot Act, read this article in today's Washington Post that informs us that Bush is resorting to the Patriot Act in a 16-year-old deportation case . Here's a snippet:

The Bush administration has decided to pursue a 16-year-old effort to deport two Palestinian activists who as students distributed magazines and raised funds for a group the government now considers a terrorist organization, despite several court rulings that the deportations are unconstitutional because the men were not involved in terrorist activity.