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August 7, 2002
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
August 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Signs
of the Elites
Bruce Gagnon
We Must
Come Alive
David Krieger
From
Hiroshima to Hope
Jerre Skog
Global
Reach of Corporate Crime or What the Hell are
They Teaching at Harvard?
Robert Fisk
Return to
Afghanistan:
Collateral Damage
Alexander Cockburn
The
Fox in the Pension Fund
August 5, 2002
Rahul Mahajan
Iraq
and the New Great Game
Jordy Cummings
The
Last Frontier of
Israel and Palestine
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Saddam's Diary
Mike Leon
US Mute
to Israeli Brutality
Norman Madarasz
Brazil:
the Most Important Election of 2002?
August 4, 2002
Susan Davis
Fat Americans
August 3, 2002
David Krieger
Nuclear
Apartheid
Gilad Atzmon
The End
of Innocence
Gavin Keeney
Everybody's
a Critic
Alexander Cockburn
Can the Times' Jeff Gerth
Save Dick Cheney?
August 2, 2002
Ralph Nader
The Labor
Party
Chris Floyd
Moral Maze:
Bankruptcy Made Easy
Jeremy Scahill
Saddam,
Chemical Weapons and Donald Rumsfeld
Jeffrey St. Clair
Dark Deeds in the Black Hills:
Daschle Dooms the
Sacred Land of the Sioux
August 1, 2002
Steven Higgs
Activists
Under Siege
Anthony Gancarski
Draft
Picks:
Staffing the Latest War
Zeynep Toufe
Invisible
Children: AIDS,
Africa and Selective Vision
Alexander Cockburn
Drivel and Squawk:
Angelina Jolie, the NYT
and the Attack on McKinney
July 31, 2002
Amelia Peltz
Inside
Ramallah:
How Can the World Witness Such Suffering and Do Nothing?
M. Shahid Alam
The Academic
Boycott of Israel
Bernard Weiner
20 Things
We've Learned Since 9/11
Philip Cryan
Discourse
and War in Colombia
Neve Gordon
A Feast
of Bombs:
Sharon's Endgame for Palestine
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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August
7, 2002
The First 21st
Century Police State
by Anis Shivani
The New York Times wrote recently about Russia
getting a new "Western-style" legal code: "The
code enshrines the fundamental concept of presumption of innocence
and gives new responsibilities--and, in theory, independence--to
judges, while it will gradually strip prosecutors of the enormous
powers they have wielded over almost every step of any prosecution,
from arrest to trial. Defense lawyers will have the right to
challenge the admissibility of evidence, throwing out, among
other things, evidence collected by wiretaps without a warrant."
The Times writes without a sense of irony.
None of these constitutional protections exist anymore in the
U.S.
The Times goes on to describe Russia,
but unwittingly provides a perfect description of the new Aschroftian
fascist state in America: "...is...a country where suspects
can be detained indefinitely, where arbitrary, politically...motivated
prosecutions are common, where coercion of suspects is rampant,
where the police can stop anyone on the street without any reasonable
cause."
In Tom Cruise's new movie, Minority Report,
based on Philip K. Dick's story, individuals can be arrested
before they've committed a crime. It's not much different in
America today.
Consider, from Matthew Rothschild's Progressive
magazine, these few instances from his McCarthyism Watch. At
the Milwaukee airport on April 20, high school students were
detained before going to peace demonstrations in Washington,
D.C. because their names were on a no-fly list. Stephen K.
Jones, a graduate student at the University of Maine at Orono,
was fired for developing a lesson plan on Islam and Islamic
civilization as part of his world history course at Old Town
High School. Musical group Alma Melodioso, on their way from
Monroe to Park City, Utah were surrounded by cops, asked harassing
questions, and had their bus subjected to a search by FBI and
Secret Service agents, because they had earlier asked at a gas
station if there were any Olympics security checkpoints along
the way. Like several other journalists, Tim McCarthy, prize-winning
editor of the Courier in Littleton, New Hampshire, was fired
for questioning the rush to war.
A Palestinian activist has been in detention
for six weeks, on minor, unrelated vehicular charges, after
he joined in a demonstration outside the Israeli embassy in
Boston. His teeth were forcibly pulled out while in jail. Another
Palestinian student activist in the Chicago area has suffered
a nearly identical fate.
Legislators are considering the formation
of a domestic intelligence agency, like Britain's MI-5. The
new Homeland Security agency, which will lead overt martial
rule in the event of a future "attack," is seeking
to be exempted from access to information, conflict of interest
rules, and whistle-blower protections. The military is extending
its involvement in all phases of day-to-day "security."
The category of "enemy combatant"
is arbitrarily being applied to an American citizen named Yaser
Esam Hamdi who is being held indefinitely in a naval brig in
Virginia to evade constitutional protections. Mr. Hamdi was
born in Louisiana and grew up in Saudi Arabia. He has been denied
access to a lawyer, and is being held indefinitely without a
crime being charged. The judge in this case asked the public
defender, "What is unconstitutional about the government
detaining that person and getting from that individual all the
intelligence that might later save American lives?"
Similarly, Jose Padilla, the American
citizen accused of being a "dirty bomber" (on flimsy
evidence) is being held in a navy brig in Charleston, S.C. A
petition for a writ of habeas corpus, filed on his behalf in
Manhattan and asking a federal judge to return him to New York,
is being fought by the government as interfering with the president's
conduct of war. As constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe argues,
members of an enemy force with which a nation is engaged in
armed combat may be held in military confinement for the duration
of war. But the rationale for such imprisonment is narrowly
defined, not, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would
have it, to find out what the detainees know.
In recent months, there have been some
positive signs as lower courts have sought to deny the government
the fascist powers it seeks. But on its first opinion on the
rollback of civil liberties, the Supreme Court on June 28 blocked
a federal judge's order to open immigration hearings for detainees
to the public. The First Amendment, according to the federal
judge, requires immigration hearings to be open. But the Supreme
Court has sided with the government, which has adopted a blanket
policy of barring the public and media from detention and deportation
hearings. To justify secret trials, the government claims that
sensitive intelligence information may leak out; however, adequate
provisions are in place to protect sensitive information.
Across the nation, FBI agents are visiting
public and university libraries, and checking up on the reading
habits of people. The FBI does not require probable cause for
a search warrant to conduct this type of inquiry under the USA
Patriot Act. Bookstores can also have their records searched
by the FBI.
On May 29, the FBI was "reorganized"
to give it carte blanche to spy on speech and thought--libraries,
the Internet, religious groups, political meetings, all will
be subject to surveillance in cooperation with the CIA. Last
year, federal and state police legally intercepted 2.3 million
conversations and pager communications, not including secret
surveillance done under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act. The FBI, without any court order, without any evidence
of a potential crime, can now monitor chatrooms, political or
religious meetings, and commercial databases that include subscriptions
to publications, travel records, credit profile, and medical
records. This takes us right back to the infamous days of COINTELPRO,
the bureau's program in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s to spy on
radical and dissident groups. COINTELPRO infiltrated dissident
groups to push them through agents provocateurs into unlawful
actions, engaged in disinformation campaigns, and drove civil
rights activists toward burnout and desperation.
An unknown number of detainees remain
held in secret. The INS has been reorganized into an arm of
the spy state. Visitors from certain countries will be fingerprinted
and made to report their whereabouts with a registry. Colleges
are singling out students on the basis of ethnic identity,
asking them to carry special identity papers. Committees of
local vigilantes are being encouraged around the country as
legitimate militias to root out suspicious people.
Much of the fascist agenda is being implemented
by back channel means. This is how the national ID card is being
developed. The planned unique identifier will instantly provide
cops with every possible information--credit history, student
loans, welfare payments, drug arrests, minor traffic violations,
not to mention citizenship status. If one is poor, one is by
definition criminal and suspect, subject to harassment and imprisonment.
If one so much as raises one's voice or violates a traffic rule,
the result could be jail.
Boston's pleasant Logan airport is being
transformed by an Israeli security chief into a nightmare of
surveillance including biometric devices matching employees'
identity cards to their facial features or retinas, closed-circuit
cameras that match the faces of terrorists and criminals, and
wireless handheld computers that allow troopers patrolling terminals
to instantly check a vehicle's license plate or the criminal
history, outstanding arrest warrants, or immigration status
of anyone they choose.
The real reason for the war on terror
is to suppress domestic political dissent and to fully realize
the authoritarian state. Americans must be radically separated
into the privileged minority and the oppressed majority. Nearly
a century and a half after Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas
corpus during the civil war, historians single out this dictatorial
act for condemnation. Bush has appropriated all the civil liberties
violations of the past--the Alien and Sedition acts, the Palmer
raids, the Japanese internment, McCarthyism--and added new technological
twists that didn't exist before.
American public schools look more and
more like prisons. On June 26 the Supreme Court approved random
drug-testing for high school students participating in any extracurricular
activity. Precisely those participating in extracurricular
activities are least likely to be involved in drugs, as dissenting
Justice Ginsberg observed. The idea is to ingrain an absolute
prison and surveillance mentality in all institutions of society.
Recently, Martina Navratilova said in
the German weekly Die Ziet: "The most absurd thing about
my escape from injustice [from Czechoslovakia] was that I simply
exchanged one system which oppressed opinion for another."
Tom Cruise has said that he wouldn't raise his kids in the U.S.
because "the U.S. is terrifying and it saddens me."
These kinds of denunciations used to be reserved for the nightmares
instigated by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. The world is scared
of the brutal fascist regime emerging in this land whose ruling
elite is deluded of a pax Americana lasting for the next millennium,
as recent articles in Foreign Affairs repeatedly testify.
Holding Jose Padilla and other citizens
indefinitely on no charges, and monitoring citizens' reading
habits, is tantamount to creating thought crimes. Liberal cities
like Northampton, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor are defying
enforcement of the Patriot Act. But this only proves the point
about two Americas: small oases of relative freedom for a few
(but for how long?) and the surrounding garrison state for everyone
else.
Anis Shivani
studied economics at Harvard, and is the author of two novels,
The Age of Critics and Memoirs of a Terrorist. He welcomes comments
at: Anis_Shivani_ab92@post.harvard.edu
Today's
Features
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 5: the Call of Democracy?
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