NEW WORLD ORDER

Librarian's stand against US Patriot Act

As America gears up for the presidential elections more and more attention is being focussed on the so-called USA Patriot Act, which in the wake of 9/11, gave the intelligence agencies new powers to keep watch on American citizens.
Jacky Griffin is large, elegant, with close cropped hair, she speaks with the confidence of youth and enormous intellect. She has a bulky bag slung across her shoulders, it is full of books, and if anyone messes with books, they get Jacky's wrath.
"An FBI agent would not be welcome here," she says, standing in the lobby of the cavernous library in Berkeley, California. She is its director.
The Berkeley City Council, in time-honoured fashion for this counter-culture community, has decided not to obey George W Bush's Patriot Act should the FBI try to impose it here.

This is much more dangerous than the other periods," says Robert Schechtman, a 35-year-old student of German studies, who was instrumental in passing the Berkley University's resolution against the law.
"One of the early things Hitler did was to create a separate court system that was responsible only to him. And with the Patriot Act and the military tribunals we have a separate legal system in the United States which completely goes around the checks and balances that our system of government was founded on."

[Four US states -- Alaska, Hawaii, Maine and Vermont, and more than 300 towns -- have passed resolutions against it, although now, the Justice Department is looking to introduce a Patriot Act Two which would be even tougher, and George Bush says he plans to make it an election issue.]