The Patriot Act is so dangerous that its critics have to invent stories of how big brother is trampling on our civil liberties. The latest story involved a Dartmouth student who alleged that he was visited in his home by agents of Homeland Security because he had requested Mao Tse Tung's Little Red Book over inter-library loan. Hugh Hewitt has the story on his site. He directs us to the Boston Globe.
It rocketed across the Internet a week ago, a startling newspaper report that agents from the US Department of Homeland Security had visited a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth at his New Bedford home simply because he had tried to borrow Mao Tse-Tung's ''Little Red Book" for a history seminar on totalitarian goverments.
The story, first reported in last Saturday's New Bedford Standard-Times, was picked up by other news organizations, prompted diatribes on left-wing and right-wing blogs, and even turned up in an op-ed piece written by Senator Edward M. Kennedy in the Globe.
Well, there you have it. The government is investigating anyone who might be reading subversive literature! We are a totalitarian nation after all.
The only thing wrong with this story of intrusive government snooping is that it never happened.
But yesterday, the student confessed that he had made it up after being confronted by the professor who had repeated the story to a Standard-Times reporter. The professor, Brian Glyn Williams, said he went to his former student's house and asked about inconsistencies in his story. The 22-year-old student admitted it was a hoax, Williams said.
Hewitt directs us to Anonymous Source, which has this:
OK, if the Boston Globe is right, the story about the student at U-Mass Dartmouth is wrong. Understand that it angers me. Many of us who have opposed the Patriot Act since its genesis were waiting for the day that something like this would happen; this is a major setback. But understand that the story that the student lied about is definitely within the realm of possibility; the Patriot Act allows for such a thing to happen. We must still remain vigilant so our freedom to information, however vulgar it may be, does not become a freedom from information.
I direct your attention to the portion of the post that I have colored. If you are waiting for something to happen and it doesn't; if indeed, some of those waiting got impatient enough to make it up, perhaps, just perhaps, you were wrong about the substance of the question. This is pretty good evidence that whatever the Administration has been doing with its powers of investigation, it isn't what anonymous source was waiting for.
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