Nominee for Attorney General - Thoughts on Librarians

Got this via SG - no link because the bulk of it is NSFW. Anyways, the Politics article, by FearTheReaper, today points out something about the potential nominee for US Attorney General, retired federal judge Michael B. Mukasey.

In May 2004 he wrote an editorial in the WSJ entitled 'The Spirit of Liberty'
Before attacking the Patriot Act, try reading it. In it he had this to say about ALA's criticism of the PATRIOT Act.

..More recently, a statute called the USA Patriot Act has become the focus of a good deal of hysteria, some of it reflexive, much of it recreational.

My favorite example is the well-publicized resolution of the American Library Association condemning what the librarians claim to believe is a section of the statute that authorizes the FBI to obtain library records and to investigate people based on the books they take out. Some of the membership have announced a policy of destroying records so that they do not fall into the hands of the FBI.

First a word on the organization that gives us this news. The motto of this organization is "Free people read freely." When it was called to their attention that there are 10 librarians languishing in Cuban prisons for encouraging their fellow countrymen to read freely, an imprisonment that has been condemned by Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel, among others, this association declined to vote any resolution of condemnation, although they did find time at their convention to condemn their own government.

In addition to the library association, many towns and villages across the country, notably Berkeley, Calif., and Amherst, Mass., have announced that they will not cooperate with any effort to gather evidence under the statute. A former vice president has called for the statute's repeal, and a former presidential candidate has called the act "morally wrong," "shameful" and "unconstitutional." ...

Yeah - just interesting.