Bush Aide Calls Criticism of Patriot Act Uninformed

A senior Bush administration official defended the Patriot Act on Tuesday as a "smart, ordinary and constitutional" tool in fighting terrorism and rejected attacks on it as rash and misinformed.

The comments by James B. Comey Jr., the deputy attorney general, coming in a speech before the American Bar Association on the third anniversary of the passage of the act, offered a preview of what is likely to be a fierce fight in Congress next year over its future.

With key elements of the act set to expire at the end of 2005, President Bush has urged Congress to renew the law as a valuable weapon in tracking terrorists. But liberals and some conservatives in Congress have repeatedly raised concerns about whether the law has given the federal government too much power and have urged a go-slow approach in considering whether it should be renewed in its entirety.

In the face of frequent criticism of the law, Bush administration officials have mounted an increasingly aggressive and public defense of the legislation and attacked what they regard as distortions about what it does. Mr. Comey's speech came on the same day that Attorney General John Ashcroft, in an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal, called the act "an indispensable tool" in fighting terrorism and said it was "often portrayed in an outright false light."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/politics/27patriot.html

Mr. Comey is a menace.

accurate. Effing republican nazi wannabes.

for not backing Bush and the war, they might want to use it to put us in check sometime in the near future. With their 'if you're not for us, you're against us' mentality, any opposition could be considered aid and comfort to the enemy!

Coz they're "uninformed". Suuuure. Uh huh. Riiiight.

And asscroft won't use the PA for non-terrorist activities.

and if we had to pay for his transportation???