Bill of Wrongs is Molly Ivin’s final book and her third collaboration with Lou Dubose. In January 2007 Molly left us while this book was in production. Her voice will be missed by a public who could always rely on her to tell it like it is in plain English. Bill of Wrongs does not disappoint. Molly’s acerbic wit shines through page after page. By the end of the book you find yourself wondering whether we all might be safer without the security mechanism than with them. Molly and Lou Dubose carefully detail, through the stories of ordinary Americans who come into the sights of a paranoid and heavy-handed government, how constitutional guarantees are simply being ignored. The use of material witness warrants to get around habeas corpus by holding people indefinitely as witnesses against themselves, national security letters that may leave recipients in breach of the law if they consult their attorney and extraordinary rendition to relocate prisoners to places where torture is acceptable are among the many practices highlighted in the book. Ivins and Dubose will have you fuming angry and shaking your head laughing as you travel through this asylum of paranoids, fumblers and ne’er do wells that American agencies have become. For instance the following quote from the book concerns an illegal wiretap log which was inadvertently sent to the accused’s lawyers.
In October — two months after the inadvertent leak — an FBI agent showed up at Wendell Belew’s law office in Washington. The agent demanded the “top secret” material that Bernabai had sent Belew. Then — stealing a page from the sitcom special agent Maxwell Smart — the FBI agent warned Belew that he’d better not try to remember anything he’d read in the classified document.
And some people wonder why some of us make jokes about these people. They invite abuse. It would be impolite not to oblige.
This is a must read for anyone under the mistaken impression that you have nothing to worry about if you have done nothing wrong. Be afraid, be very, very afraid.
Bibliographic information:
Ivins, Molly and Lou Dubose. Bill of Wrongs: The Executive Branch’s Assault on America’s Fundamental Rights. New York: Random House Trade Paperback, 2008. 214 pages including notes and index. ISBN: 978-0-8129-7308-2 Canada $17.00.
Rating: 
