Beverly Hills, California – H. Louis Sirkin, likely best known for defending Larry Flynt during one of the HUSTLER Magazine publisher’s Ohio obscenity cases, claims the Bush administration subjected the United States to a culture of fear in order to peel away the constitutional protections of its citizens.

In the second part of a wide-ranging interview in the February issue of HUSTLER magazine, Sirkin says, “People have to understand today that you really have no right of privacy. The dramatic changes came after 9/11. They claimed we needed to curtail civil liberties for national security reasons.”

Sirkin says he believes lawmakers likely thought the moves would be temporary, done to protect the homeland in the face of violence never before seen in modern America.

“People think it’s all right to violate civil rights, it’s all right to infringe upon your privacy, it’s all right to listen in on your conversations and look at the thoughts you put in writing”, Sirkin says,

“We need to remember what America was about.”

While saying Bush and company ran with the ball, he makes clear this problem started with the previous administration. “We should remember the changes in habeas (corpus) really started with Bill Clinton. People forget that, blaming it all on George W. Bush.”

The interview appears in the February issue of HUSTLER on sale now.