"There was no public hearing, no notice to the judiciary, the bar, the Sentencing Commission or other interested parties, and no debate. A vote against Amber Alert would have been like a vote against motherhood and few legislators were willing to have to defend such a vote to their constituents."

The Feeney Amendment -- named for US Rep. Tom Feeney (R- FL), who is a founding member of Washington Waste Watchers, a group working to "Combat Government Waste, Fraud and Abuse" -- has further complicated the benefits the PROTECT Act was meant to provide crime victims by taking authority away from judges to give reduced prison sentences. The claim was that the amendment would eliminate "much-abused grounds of departure such as 'diminished capacity, aberrant behavior,' and 'family and community ties' in 'downward sentencing,' or sentencing for less than the mandatory minimum.

While there well may have been some cases of abuse or misuse of 'downward' sentencing before this bill was passed, there are certainly a lot of people in prison -- a record of 2.1 million men and women as of 2002 -- belying the claim that without federal legislation, judges are soft on crime, or crimes against children in particular. In fact, the record shows that prosecutors, who presumably take the more adversarial position against defendants, make four out of five 'downward-sentencing' requests.

Justification for sentencing guideline changes within the PROTECT Act was that "last year, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a federal law that criminalized the possession of "virtual" child pornography, materials whose production may not have involved the use of real children." This decision has made it immeasurably more difficult to eliminate the traffic in real child pornography," according to the DOJ factsheet.

However, justification for the Feeney Amendment had nothing to do with children. The case cited in the amendment was Koon v United States, an opinion written by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy which rejected the District court's departure from guideline sentencing by giving lighter sentences to two ex-policemen convicted in the beating of Rodney King.

Another troubling aspect of the PROTECT Act is how it fits in with the Bush administration's actions to fight terrorism. The Act makes it more difficult for defendants accused of serious crimes against children to obtain bail, similar to other existing provisions for drug, firearms, and violent crimes. This too opens a door, and more people can be kept behind bars for indefinite periods -- a direct violation of our rights under the constitution.

Moreover, who is going to decide what is child pornography? If you take a photo of your new smiling baby lying butt-naked on a blanket, a common portrait sometimes even taken by professional photographers in times gone by, could you be prosecuted for child pornography? The US already incarcerates 476 out of every 100,000 citizens, more per capita than any other developed country. Those inclined to conspiracy theories might assert that the erosion of judicial freedom under the PROTECT Act is a brilliantly calculated solution to protect a Fascist regime in order to deprive enemies of the power to buck the system.

At a press conference in Arizona this week, President Bush was campaigning for his environmental policy which will allow cutting of protected forests by lumber companies under the pretext of fire-prevention. Bush said:

"We believe in bringing people together to try to reach agreement on forest projects. We believe all voices should be heard. But we want to expedite the process to avoid the legal wrangling and the delays that take place in our courts. Delays in our courts prevent us from doing the job necessary to maintain healthy forests."

In other words, he wants the appearance that we are all having our say and that the government is considerate of our concerns. But in reality, his administration has already decided what needs to be done and is going to do it their way over anyone's objections.

This attitude has become abundantly clear in every aspect of his administration's activities, and bodes ill for our rights as citizens and our freedom as individuals. In the case of the PROTECT Act, legislation empowering the government to take them from us was hidden in a bill to protect children. What's next?

The National Security Council has determined that "major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet different requirements. All of them must be transformed." With the events of 9/11, no one disagrees that we need to protect ourselves against terrorism. However, how far should this transformation go?

"We must strengthen intelligence warning and analysis to provide integrated threat assessments for national and homeland security. Since the threats inspired by foreign governments and groups may be conducted inside the United States, we must also ensure the proper fusion of information between intelligence and law enforcement."

In a speech made when he signed the PROTECT Act into law, President Bush said: "Every person who would think of abducting a child can know that a wide net will be cast. They may be found by a police cruiser, or by the car right next to them on a highway. These criminals can know that any driver they pass could be the one that spots them and brings them to justice."

As the "fusion of information between intelligence and law enforcement" takes place, other 'integrations' will surely be in store. We already have cameras pointed at us, wherever we drive, wherever we walk in our cities. The government is under pressure to act to protect us from terrorism. When tools designed for public safety come under the domain of the federal government, will they care about our rights?

In an article published on May 1, 2003, columnist Michael Stephens made this assessment:

"Terrorist acts are theatrical challenges to the status quo. Successful, high-profile strikes like 9/11 cast grave doubts on the government's ability to protect their citizens and maintain order. To strike back, the government must show it can generate control mechanisms that are at least more muscular than the terrorists' power to undermine their control. The shadowy, nomadic character of terrorism, and the continuing ability of Al Qaeda members to elude capture, humiliate the government. The antidote is the theatre of confinement: the creation of internment camps that represent the containment of terrorism and place symbolic limits on the disturbing idea of uncontrollably proliferating terrorist forces. What matters is not that real terrorists are locked up, but that someone is locked up to reassure the public."

The next person facing a judge for sentencing could be you -- would you want the judge's hands to be tied by the federal government? Worse may be yet to come, if the treatment of captives from the war in Afghanistan is any indication.

Under the jurisdiction of the military, we are still holding 680 prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay without benefit of legal council, identification to outside sources, or even basic shelter afforded ordinary prisoners in the US. They are not US citizens, though some are British and Australian, according to some sources. They are not afforded the rights of US citizens under the 6^th amendment to the Bill of Rights, and even if they were US citizens, they are subject to military trials held in secret because they were captured while, as the Bill of Rights states, "in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger." However, while being treated as military prisoners, the Geneva Convention is not being applied to them and they are not being afforded POW status. There is no accountability for their captors to any outside authority.

From the same article quoted above, columnist Michael Stephens writes:

"In both Britain and America, dramatic terrorist attacks provoked hastily conceived and poorly thought out legislation that was generated more or less overnight to provide a quick fix for complex, long-standing, historical problems. In both cases, many innocent people have been incarcerated indefinitely to impress a public that cares little about legal niceties and wants to see results. The American government admits that at least 60 of the prisoners that it is currently holding without due process at Guantanamo Bay are innocent."