I never understood why Bush wanted the power to demand library loan lists. Even aside from the more important civil liberty, the right to be let alone, not having your reading scrutinzed by the U.S. government, would agents really think they could efficiently generate a list of terrorists by watching who checks out what books?
Turns out,
the answer is yes. Agents tracked down, met and interviewed a UMass Dartmouth history student because he checked out a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book". The book is on a "watch list", the agents told the student, and, combined with the fact the student had spent a lot of time abroad, they thought they would drop by, make sure he wasn't planning to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches, or something like that.
This sort of exercise is not a dismissable joke. The Bush administration has asserted the power that they could take into custody people like the student above -- not "arrest" them, because they take them without charge -- and hold them without a lawyer, without judicial review forever.
We have become the Soviet Union. There is no nice way to put it. You combine the above to powers, and we have arbitrary and capricious arrest powers in the hands of our government. This does not make us safer -- in fact, it puts us in danger, but not at the hands of terrorists: at the hands of our own government.
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