LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Civil Liberties: Japanese Americans
built 186 days ago
Americans do not believe the government should violate citizens' basic civil liberties in order to combat terrorism. At the same time, most Americans do not think the Bush administration has gone too far restricting civil liberties to fight the war on terror. The balance between liberties and fighting terrorism is the important determinant of attitudes in this issue area. Most recently, polling shows that more than half of Americans object to the government program that obtains records from three of the largest U.S. telephone companies to create a database of billions of telephone numbers dialed by Americans. Dealing with the Patriot Act per se has a low priority for Americans, although terrorism remains a very high priority.
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In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, many politicians are using the crisis as an excuse to push for severe restrictions on basic American civil liberties. Many of these are the same old proposals friends of liberty have been fighting for years, now dusted off and re-introduced as “anti-terrorism” bills. Others are new threats.
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S[O] when did the assault on Americans' civil liberties get jump-started? The current liberal establishment seems to deem 9/11 the chief catalyst. Many of the most loathsome specimens within this haughty club imply that drastic incursions on Americans' civil liberties only began after 9/11, while the Clinton administration represented a civil-liberties paradise.
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Americans’ civil liberties will surely be affected by the aftermath of September 11. Some substantial changes have already been made. A bill called the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001—... known as the Patriot Act—was passed by Congress late in 2001 to help the antiterrorism effort. Among other things, the law:
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Although civil liberties are now considered an integral part of democratic government, it would be a mistake to see this period as a democratic one in a modern sense. These principles were developed when political power in England was in the hands of an aristocratic upper class and of a mercantile class almost as small. Many of the American founding fathers did not favour democracy in the modern sense. Conversely, democracy as a means of determining the composition of government has historically been no guarantee of civil liberties: enforcement of the law may be arbitrary or despotic, and minorities may have no effective safeguards against tyranny.
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Americans continue to give the president's overall handling of civil liberties the benefit of the doubt. More than half of Americans say the Bush administration has been about right or has not gone far enough in restricting people's civil liberties in order to combat terrorism. However, there has been a steady increase since 2002 in the percentage saying the administration has gone too far in this regard, now at a high of 41%.
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