Amnesty International, in its damning report of the Ethiopian government, Ethiopia: Dismantling Dissent (DDE),states that from March to November 2011 “at least 108 opposition party members and six journalists have been arrested for alleged involvement with various proscribed terrorist groups.” By November they were all charged with crimes under the internationally criticised Anti Terrorist Proclamation. In addition, Amnesty continues, “six journalists, two opposition party members and one human rights defender, all living in exile, were charged in absentia.”

The ‘T’ word, as former Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan called terrorism, is the umbrella term used by the Ethiopian government (amongst others) to justify the unjust, the dishonest and the criminal. If there is a terrorist organisation flourishing in Ethiopia, committing crimes against humanity and violating the human rights of the people, it is State terrorism delivered by the EPRDF government, under the leadership of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, as this UN definition of terrorism makes clear:

Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any circumstance unjustifiable.

Fear of the government, fear of reprisal, of violence and [false] imprisonment casts a deep shadow across the people of Ethiopia, whose human rights are being ignored by the Meles regime that seized power twenty years ago and has brutalised and systematically restricted the people’s freedom and human rights ever since.

Lawless Lawmakers

In 2009 the Ethiopian government passed legislation on the highly controversial Anti Terrorism Proclamation. Human Rights Watch (HRW) that year looked closely at what was then the proposed law and amongst other recommendations, stated:

If implemented this law could provide the Ethiopian government with a potent instrument to crack down on political dissent, including peaceful political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy and … it would permit long-term imprisonment and even the death penalty for “crimes” that bear no resemblance, under any credible definition, to terrorism. It would in certain cases deprive defendants of the right to be presumed innocent, and of protections against use of evidence obtained through torture.

Needless to say, the law was passed almost entirely as drafted, duly implemented and has since been used solely to silence dissent. Amnesty International, in its report, found that:

The prolonged series of arrests and prosecutions indicates a systematic use of the law and the pretext of counter-terrorism by the Ethiopian government to silence people who criticise or question their actions and policies, especially opposition politicians and the independent media.

It is the utilisation and enforcement of this law that is enabling the Ethiopian government to quash opposition and free speech within the country and intimidate those voices for fairness and justice abroad. The legislation allows the government to ban free association and to arrest and imprison anyone who has the courage to speak out against the government and their many human rights violations. The police, who were already commonly acting outside of the law, with little or no knowledge of human rights, were given new powers. HRW, in its analysis, reported:

The draft Proclamation grants the police the power to make arrests without a warrant, so long as the officer reasonably suspects that the person is committing or has committed a terrorist act. The Ethiopian constitution requires that a person taken into custody must be brought before a court within 48 hours and informed of the reasons for their arrest — a protection that is already systematically violated.

This constitutional requirement is dutifully ignored. Arrested under the Anti Terrorist Proclamation, individuals are held in confinement for weeks, sometimes months, without charge and denied legal support. Even before this draconian legislation was enforced, according to HRW,  “Ethiopian police routinely detain people without charge for months, and sometimes ignore judicial orders for release.”

Five From Many

In January five more people were convicted in the Ethiopian Federal High Court of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts, and money laundering. Evidence against the three journalists, an opposition leader, and a woman, Hirut Kifle Woldeyesus, was made up primarily of online criticism of the government and plans to stage peaceful political protest, none of which constitute acts of terrorism. This is common as Amnesty found in the 114 cases they investigated in their detailed report:

Much of the evidence against those charged involves items that do not appear to amount to terrorism or criminal wrongdoing. Rather many items of evidence cited appear to be illustrations of individuals exercising their right to freedom of expression, acting peacefully and legitimately.

Two of the journalists tried in January were sentenced to 14 years imprisonment while Elias Kifle (tried in absentia), editor of the web-based journal Ethiopian Review, received his second life sentence [emphasis mine]. These cases are simply the most recent in a long line of miscarriages of justice, where the government has exercised an abuse of power and in the name of justice imprisoned the innocent. A further 24 journalists and opposition party members are awaiting trial, many of whom could face the death penalty, for trumped up charges which amount to nothing more than journalists exercising their constitutional and moral right to freedom of speech.

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, stated in a meeting of UN human rights investigators in February:

Journalists, bloggers and others advocating for increased respect for human rights should not be subject to pressure for the mere fact that their views are not in alignment with those of the Government.

Journalists must be free to speak out against the government, to criticise policies of persecution, to highlight the suffering of the people and to draw attention to the multiple human rights abuses taking place within Ethiopia. UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression, Frank La Rue, declared:

Journalists play a crucial role in promoting accountability of public officials by investigating and informing the public about human rights violations, they should not face criminal proceedings for carrying out their legitimate work, let alone be severely punished.

However,  all those speaking out against the EPRDF’s criminality and repression are subject not simply to “pressure”, or “criminal proceedings”, but violent arrest, torture and false imprisonment or, indeed, death.

Free the Innocent

These five men and women, who were mistreated in custody, falsely imprisoned and like others, including the celebrated writer Eskinder Nega (imprisoned for life in September for writing an on-line blog), denied their liberty, must be released immediately and an independent enquiry instigated to investigate their cases, their treatment whilst in jail and their hollow convictions. During their three-month imprisonment at the Maikelawi detention center before the trial and in violation of Ethiopian and international law, the defendants were denied access to legal counsel and family members, and claim they were beaten and tortured. This is the experience of a great many whilst held in Maikelawi as Amnesty reveals in its report:

Many of the [114] detainees were forced to sign confessions and to acknowledge ownership or association by signing items of seemingly incriminating evidence.

The Ethiopian courts have not investigated any of these claims.  They are, it seems, nothing more than servants of the Government, and are as HRW states “complicit in this political witch hunt.”

This collusion of the courts contravenes the Ethiopian constitution that states in Article 78/1: “An independent judiciary is established by this Constitution.” Article 79/1: “Judicial Powers, both at Federal and State levels, are vested in the courts.”

Furthermore, 3: “Judges shall exercise their functions in full independence and shall be directed solely by the law.” The UN Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, “deplored the reported failure to ensure the defendants’ right to a fair trial,” reports the UN News Centre.

Amnesty International, in its report, calls “on the representatives of the international community in Addis Ababa to take up the role of monitoring trials.” This would be an important initial act in placing the EPRDF under international scrutiny and accountability. It is time the international community, acting through the UN, undertook its responsibility and role as advocate for justice, self-determination, “the suppression of acts of aggression” (Article 1) and freedom for the people of the world, in accordance with its Charter.

A Blind Eye to Torture

In addition to the suppression of free speech, the use of the death penalty and withdrawing the legal right of presumption of innocence, torture is allowed under the Anti Terrorism Proclamation and information gathered whilst under such duress is admissible in court. HRW reports that::

The draft Proclamation deems confessions admissible without a restriction on the use of statements made under torture.

This is illegal under international law, The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment does not allow the use of any statements made in a court of law, that were elicited under torture. The use of such information is also prohibited under the Ethiopian Constitution. Article 19 states:

Persons arrested shall not be compelled to make confessions or admissions which could be used in evidence against them. Any evidence obtained under coercion shall not be admissible.

The much-trumpeted constitution  means little or nothing to the people and even less to the EPRDF who ignore its charter.

Known Unknowables

It is an acknowledged fact within the corridors of the UN and Ethiopia’s donor countries that human rights abuses are occurring daily within the country under Prime Minister Meles and his ministerial menagerie. How do we as a world community, responsible and alert to the needs of our brothers and sisters, respond to such men, to such injustice and tyranny? Fight fire with fire many would advocate and in the face of such cruelty many of us would perhaps gladly fuel a furnace.  However, as Mahatma Ghandi said, “I cannot teach you violence, as I do not myself believe in it. I can teach you not to bow your heads before anyone even at the cost of your life.”

To be silent in the sight of injustice and persecution is to allow tyrants like Meles to maintain their stranglehold over the innocent. It is time intense political pressure from those providing and delivering the much-needed financial and developmental aid, was applied to put an end to the current regime’s human rights violations and abuse of the people, including freezing of personal assets and targeted sanctions.

The British government gives £315 million a year to Ethiopia, a spokesperson from The Department for International Development (DFID) told the Guardian (3/02/2012):

The prime minister, the foreign secretary and the secretary of state for international development have all raised concerns with Prime Minister Meles over the recent arrests of opposition leaders and journalists.

“Concern” is all well and good, but all too easy for the arrogant to shrug off, outrage and horror a more apt response from Westminster and more in keeping with the offences being committed. Criticism alone, however, will not bring change within the abysmal regime and justice to the long-suffering people.

Repeal and Release

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi presides over a dictatorship that restricts all freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the media in Ethiopia. Peaceful dissent is met with violence and false imprisonment. Intimidation and fear are the key tools in such repression.  This must end, and we, the international community, must ensure it is so.

The Anti-Terrorist Proclamation is an unjust piece of legislation designed and implemented by a corrupt and violent regime who is in breach of international law and their own constitution. It must be repealed immediately, the many innocent good men and women falsely imprisoned released and those supporting Ethiopia through development aid should insist on the implementation of these legitimate and morally right demands. Sit not in silent appeasement, but raise your bowed heads and act.

That video was the first time most Americans had heard about Wikileaks. Not long after, the name of Bradley Manning also entered the US consciousness. He would be accused of releasing that video and thousands of other documents relating to the US wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, along with thousands of diplomatic cables describing in oftentimes explicit detail the crimes and morally questionable actions and words of Washington officials. Soon, Mr. Manning would be charged with treason and aiding the enemy (among other charges) for his actions. He is currently on trial in a US military court located at Fort Meade, MD and faces life imprisonment. It is my belief that only an immense and broad popular movement could possibly change that fate.

Bradley Manning’s decision and the subsequent reaction is the subject of a newly published book by civil rights attorney and commentator Chase Madar. This book, titled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, presents Manning’s decision in the context it was meant to be understood: as a political act by a man who saw his duty to humanity to be greater than his orders to protect the Pentagon and politicians that sent him and thousands of other GIs to war.

Madar attacks the very system of secrecy Manning is charged with violating. He details the overzealous use of secret and top secret classifications by government officials, calling it a “tragic, bloated farce.” He questions the use of the Espionage Act to charge Manning and other men whose actions are not about aiding the enemy, but about exposing the misdeeds of the US government. In discussing the frequent use of strategic leaks by government officials to get a piece of legislation approved, Madar surmises that Manning’s biggest mistake is that, unlike those government officials, he didn’t break the law properly.

What did the documents Manning sent to Wikileaks contain? While it is impossible to even begin to summarize the millions of words in those documents in the brief space of Madar’s text, he does list the basics of some of the content. The documents showed a brutal pacification campaign in Afghanistan where civilian deaths were all too common and sometimes intentional. They acknowledged massive civilian casualties from US fire in Iraq and detailed Washington’s retail diplomacy with the Vatican hoping to convince the Holy See to call the US wars just. In other areas, the diplomatic cables exposed the role of the US Embassy in Haiti in fighting attempts to raise the minimum wage there to 61 cents an hour and US complicity in covering up Israeli atrocities in Gaza.

Yet, despite the revelations they contained, the US government has been unable to prove that the leaks harmed any individual. Unfortunately, neither have they changed the essence of US policy. After acknowledging this, Madar writes about two leaks that probably did matter. One was a 1968 leak by Daniel Ellsberg to presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy that detailed the Johnson administration’s plans to expand the US war to Laos and Cambodia. The leak and Kennedy’s revealing it probably prevented that expansion under LBJ. Of course, Nixon wasted little time in doing exactly what Johnson didn’t do. Another more recent example occurred in 2003 when the national intelligence assessment of Iran’s nuclear weapons capability was leaked. This document stated clearly that Iran had no nuclear weapons and was not building any at the time. That leak probably prevented the US from attacking Iran.

Like it or not, since his arrest Manning’s treatment has been shameful. His imprisonment, which includes solitary confinement and forced nakedness is nothing short of torture. Indeed it has been condemned as such by the German Bundestag and several other individuals in European governments and even some high ranking US officials. Madar’s discussion of Manning’s treatment is revealing and likely to garner a number of denials by liberals and neocons in the halls of power. This is especially true when he argues against the view promulgated by US liberals that the treatment is an aberration. The fact is, writes Madar, the abuses experienced by Manning and by prisoners in US-run prisons in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, and Afghanistan are also commonplace in US prisons. Furthermore, torture is a common occurrence in US jails at all levels of the penal system.

In the early 1970s Kris Kristofferson recorded a song whose chorus includes the lines “The law is for protection of the people/Rules are rules as any fool can see….” The song proceeds to show the use of this maxim by the powers that be to lock up those that disrupt their rule. The sarcasm of the lyrics continues, pointing out how laws are not only applied unequally, but are often written only to protect the wealthy and powerful. If Kris Kristofferson were to add a verse to his tune in 2012, it could be about Bradley Manning. When pressed to explain the charges arrayed against Manning, the reason given most often is that he broke the rules regarding classified information and that is reason enough. As Madar points out over and over in his book, these rules are broken quite often by government officials in the pursuit of certain policies and those violations are rarely challenged. Furthermore, and considerably more appalling, is the reality that the atrocities and diplomatic maneuverings revealed in the documents Manning released are not illegal. Why? Simply put, because the laws are written by the warmakers and profiteers. So, those that reveal the machinations of the powerful are more likely to go to prison than those that kill, torture, bribe and steal in the name of empire.

Simultaneously an indictment of a government obsessed with secrecy and a nation addicted to war, The Passion of Bradley Manning is also a concise and clear explanation of who Bradley Manning is. It explains why he risked his life and future by committing the overtly political act of exposing his government’s crimes and lies. Perhaps most importantly, it is a call to us to act not only in defense of Manning, but in defense of our futures.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Asres of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) rules Ethiopia with a heavy hand of control, restricting free assembly — a right written into the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) — inhibiting the freedom of the media and denying the people freedom of expression in manifold ways.

Media freedom is a basic pillar of any democratic society. Freedom of political expression, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press are essential elements of a democracy. Whilst media independence throughout the world is contentious at best, autonomy from direct State ownership and influence is a crucial element in establishing an independent media.

In Ethiopia not only are television and radio owned and controlled by the state but also access to information, as is made clear by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its report “One Hundred Ways of Putting Pressure: Violations of Freedom of Expression and Association in Ethiopia,” which states:

The independent media has struggled to establish itself in the face of constant government hostility and an inability to access information from government officials.

The report continues:

Since the 2005 elections in Ethiopia the government has systematically introduced tighter and tighter methods of control.  Over the past five years the Ethiopian government has restricted political space for the opposition, stifled independent civil society, and intensified control of the media.

Owning Information

Since the end of Ethiopia’s civil war in 1991, privately owned newspapers and magazines have been appearing, and despite heavy regulation by the Meles government, this area of Ethiopian media is expanding. The print media, however, is of little significance due to the low literacy of the adult population (48%). With high levels of poverty and poor infrastructure making distribution difficult, newspapers are not widely circulated or read; consequently, the main source of information for the majority of people is the state-owned television and radio, which serve as little more than a mouthpiece of propaganda for the EPRDF.

Internet media is also restricted, with access to the web the lowest in Africa. Research & Markets found:

Ethiopia has the lowest overall teledensity in Africa. The population is approaching 90 million, but there are less than 1 million fixed lines in service, and a little more than 3.3 million mobile subscribers. The number of internet users is dismal — below 500,000 at the end of 2009.

The World Bank puts the figure a little higher at 7.5%.

In another demonstration of democratic duplicity, the EPRDF controls all telecommunications. Internet and telephone systems must run through the State-owned Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation.  A World Bank Report, released in 2011  states that  82.40 percent of Ethiopians in 2010 live in rural areas and have no access at all to the world wide web.

By maintaining monopoly control of telecommunications, the Ethiopian Government is denying most of the population access to another key area of mass information. This is an additional infringement of basic democratic principles of diversity and social participation, as Noam Chomsky wrote:

The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations.

The EPRDF regime is, in fact, a dictatorship wherein its citizens are unable to speak freely, organize political activities, and challenge their government’s policies through peaceful protest, voting, or publishing their views without fear of reprisal.

Law Breakers

Freedom of thought, of expression, and of information are basic requirements under the UDHR.

Article 19 states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Although the UDHR is not, in itself, a legally binding document, it provides moral guidance for states and offers a clear indication of what we, as a world community, have agreed are the basic requirements of correct governance and civilized living.

As stated in the preamble:

It is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.

However, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a sister document to the UDHR, provides such legal protection and is indeed legally binding. There we find Article 19, paragraph 1:

Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.

And paragraph 2:

Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.

Ethiopia ratified this international treatise on June 11, 1993, and is therefore legally bound by its articles. By imposing tight regulatory controls on media inside and indeed outside of Ethiopia — the case of ESAT TV based in Holland, whose satellite signal is repeatedly [illegally} blocked by the EPRDF -- the government is in violation of international law.  Furthermore, by restricting the freedom of the media and inhibiting any hint of dissent, the regime is also in contradiction of its own constitution. Article 29, entitled rather optimistically “Right of Thought, Opinion and Expression” states:

1. Everyone has the right to hold opinions without interference;

2. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression without any interference. This right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any media of his choice;

3.  Freedom of the press and other mass media and freedom of artistic creativity is guaranteed. Freedom of the press shall specifically include the following elements: (a) Prohibition of any form of censorship. (b) Access to information of public interest.

Clear and noble words, indeed democratic in content and tone; however, words that sit filed neatly upon the shelf of neglect and indifference that serve only as a mask of convenience and deceit allowing the betrayal of the many to continue. Human Rights Watch states:

The 1995 constitution incorporates a wide range of human rights standards, and government officials frequently voice the state’s commitment to meeting its human rights obligations. But these steps while important, have not ensured that Ethiopia’s citizens are able to enjoy their fundamental rights.

State Suppression

In 2009 the EPRDF passed two inhibiting pieces of legislation that embody some of the worst aspects of the government’s descent towards greater repression and political intolerance. The controversial CSO law is, according to HRW, one of the most restrictive of its kind, and its provisions will make most independent human rights work impossible.

A “counterterrorism” law was introduced at the same time; this second piece of repressive legislation allows the government and security forces to prosecute political protesters and non-violent expressions of dissent as terrorism. Since the introduction of these internationally criticised laws, the UN Jubilee Campaign in its report “Human Rights Council Universal Periodic Review Ethiopia” recommends the adoption of this law [emphasis mine] be repealed.”  The umbrella term “terrorist”, meaning anyone who disagrees with the party/state line, continues to be used and manipulated as justification for all manner of human rights violations and methods of suppression and control.

What defines a terrorist or an act of terrorism remains vague and ambiguous, enabling the Meles regime to construct definitions that suit them at any given time. Amongst other travesties of justice, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveals that the legislation, “permits a clamp down on political dissent, including political demonstrations and public criticisms of government policy, it also deprives defendants of the right to be presumed innocent.“

A primary function of the media in a democratic society is to examine and criticise the government and provide a public platform for debate and participation. This law denies such interaction and freedom of expression, is in violation of the ICCPR, and contravenes the much-championed Ethiopian constitution — idealised images of goodness remaining stillborn.

The anti-terror law is a pseudonym for a law of repression and control, made and enforced by a paranoid regime, determined to use all means in its armoury to quash any dissent and maintain a system of disinformation and duplicity. Media organisations that disagree with the EPRDF party line run the risk of being branded “terrorists” under this law, arrested and imprisoned.

Dawit Kebede, editor-in-chief of Awramba Times, says:

The law provides a pretext for the government to intimidate and even arrest journalists who fall afoul of its wording. Kebede said the regulations were a government campaign to oppress all forms of dissident activity.

This new law inhibits the ability of the media to report anything that is deemed critical of the current government. All opposing voices to policy are stifled; journalists are frightened, and the facility to expose and criticize the many serious violations of human rights, and provide a balanced view of the issues facing the country, are denied. The rights to freedom of expression and association are restricted, all independent voices have been virtually silenced and freedom of speech and opinion are denied. Human Rights Watch makes clear its concern over the past five years that the Ethiopian government has restricted political space for the opposition, stifled independent civil society, and intensified control of the media.

Control flows from fear.  The greater the dishonesty, corruption and greed, the more extreme the controls become. Under the EPRDF governance, Ethiopians are subjected to a range of human rights abuses and violations.  Political opposition has been unofficially banned, making this democracy sitting in the Horn of Africa a single party dictatorship. The UN, in its human rights report, finds “resistance to opposition has become the primary source of concern regarding the future of human rights in Ethiopia” and confirms the view of HRW that “The CSO law directly inhibits rights to association, assembly and free expression.”

The Meles regime seeks, as all isolated corrupt dictatorships do, to centralize power, deny dissent and freedom of expression and suppress the people by intimidation, violence and fear, creating an atmosphere of apprehension, extinguishing all hope of justice, true human development and freedom from tyranny. Disempowerment is the aim.  The means, crude and unimaginative, are well known: keep the people uneducated, deny them access to information, restrict their freedom of association and expression and keep them entrapped.

Demanding justice

The people of Ethiopia, without an effective media, have no voice. The controls that deny media freedom, and the people the freedom of association and expression, guaranteed under the Ethiopian constitution and international law, must be repealed, and the will of the people must be done for justice and the rule of law underlies their demands for freedom, peace and the observation of their basic human rights.

In the early 1500s the Spanish Conquistadors came to the shores of what is now known as Florida (Flowery Land in Spanish). At that time the area was populated by groups of Paleo-Indigenous people whose lives were about to change drastically for the worse. The Conquistadors were out for gold and other riches to which purpose the natives were often enslaved. Along with them came Spanish priests whose goal was strictly ideological: the conversion of the natives to Catholicism. The natives would have no choice. From that time onward the sunny and flowery land of Florida proved a place both of wealth and ideological intolerance.

Even when the Spanish lost control of the territory, first to the British and then to the United States, this duality persisted. In the 19th century, for instance, what stood in the way of Florida’s ideological purity was the perseverance of those pesky “Indians.” Andrew Jackson, a rigid-minded fellow if there ever was one, thought he had the answer to this problem when he waged war against the Seminoles who had the audacity to both resist white settlement and harbor runaway black slaves. Eventually he was proved correct. Well-armed racism won the day, and from the 1830s into the 1850s the process of forced eviction cum slaughter of the natives proceeded. By 1845, when Florida became the 27th state of the Union, things were relatively in hand and most of the remaining Seminoles pushed back into the Everglades.

Over the years, the gold that the conquistadors sought transformed itself into citrus fruit and tourism. Today the tourist business brings in over 77 million people a year to Florida and is worth over $57 billion annually to the state’s economy. Three quarters of U.S. oranges are from Florida, as is 40% of the world’s orange juice. Yet, overlaying all this wealth, just like an unhealthy tan, is the persistence of Florida’s ideological obsessions. In contemporary terms, there are two that stand out and we will begin by looking at the one most recently in the news.

Obsessions

1. Cuba – Florida has a very high percentage of Cuban Americans. One third of the population of Miami has Cuban roots and in at least 18 other cities and large towns in the state the percentage approaches half. A high number of these people are staunchly anti-Castro. Among the older generation, this attitude borders on fanaticism. One can see this reflected in the behavior of the state’s political representatives in Congress who fight tooth and nail against any moderation of U.S. sanctions against the Cuban nation–despite the fact that those sanctions help impoverish the country’s people, a state of being Cuban Americans then blame on the Castro government.

For this point of view to be maintained, right-wing Cuban Americans have had to approach history in a highly selective way. When Castro took over in Cuba in 1959 the country was an economic and social wreck. It was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista who had established ties with U.S. mafia families. Gambling and prostitution were major growth industries under this regime. Poverty deepened, illiteracy was widespread, and crime was rampant; nonetheless, Batista was seen as an ally of Washington. That is because he ran an anti-communist secret police, trained and armed by the U.S., which acted as the regime’s Gestapo and SS combined.

When Castro took over in 1959 these conditions changed. To do this he had to nationalize resources, and this step was opposed by a small upper class and a portion of the middle class. It was this group who initially fled to the U.S. Subsequently, they have chosen to forget most of Cuban history prior to Castro’s revolution. They also have a deadly resentment of those who take a different attitude and regularly attempt to ruin anyone who has the audacity to publicly disagree with them. That is how fanatics behave.

Take the recent case of Ozzie Guillen, the outspoken manager of the Miami Marlins baseball team. Guillen made the mistake of saying that he respected Fidel Castro in a recent interview with Time magazine. The result was a “political firestorm” in Miami. Within hours the politicos of south Florida (sounding like the priests of the conquistadors) were calling for his head. The team suspended him for five games and Guillen publicly apologized for “betraying the Latin community” and begged forgiveness in a most groveling way. Nonetheless, elements of the area’s Cuban-American community entered into an orgy of hate and threatened to “boicot” (and therefore economically destroy) Miami’s baseball team unless Guillen was fired.

2. Israel – Florida, and particularly the southern part of the state, has the second highest Jewish population in the U.S. (the first is in New York). Notably, most of them are elderly retirees of passionate Zionist persuasion. One of Miami’s main streets is Yitzhak Rabin Boulevard. Next to the issue of pensions, Israel is what commands their interest. That is why all the Republican primary candidates (except Ron Paul) who visited the state fell over backwards in their support for Israel.

No prominent Florida Jewish resident has yet been silly enough, or brave enough, to go public with anti-Zionist declarations, or statements of admiration for Yasser Arafat. And after an example has been made of Ozzie Guillen, the probability of anyone doing so has to have diminished. This is because the right-wing elements of these two communities are allied and feed off of each other.

Back in the 1980s, when the Cuban American community leaders decided to set up their lobby, originally known as the Cuban American National Foundation, they went to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, otherwise know as AIPAC, for advice and guidance. That relationship has continued ever since.¹ A living representation of this on-going alliance is Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, U.S. Representative for Florida’s 18th Congressional District and currently the longest serving woman in Congress. That status has also made her chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Ros-Lehtinen describes herself as a “strong supporter of Israel” including its illegal settlements, and has worked hard to cut funds for any United Nations agency that recognizes Palestinian statehood. Of course, she also hates Fidel Castro.

Conclusion

Over-exposure to the “sunshine state” can obviously get you a bad burn, particularly if you are of an open mind and value the principle of free speech. But that is the way it goes when communities form around repugnant ideological cores that then come to characterize their very identity. For many of the Cuban Americans in Florida, to have something good to say about the Castro regime, even if it can be historically substantiated, is the same as betraying their community. For many Jewish Americans in the same state, having something critical to say about Israel and Zionism, even if it is fact based, is the same as declaring yourself an anti-Semite or perhaps a “self-hating Jew.”

What is particularly scary about all of this is that the entire prejudicial mind-set is carried forth unquestionably and in lock step by millions of people. Americans often would point fingers at the Soviet Union, the Chinese communists, and now the “Muslim world” for this sort of totalitarian thinking. All the while, it was right here in our own sunny backyard.

1. For more information on this please see my book Foreign Policy Inc (Kentucky U. Press 2009).

Following the news of the student’s punishment, Cambridge University Student Union (CUSU) organised a protest in support of the student. At a general meeting held after the protest, a statement of “no confidence in the university Vice Chancellor, management and Court of Discipline” was endorsed after a vote by the hundreds of students and staff present. A petition against the judgement has already garnered over 6000 signatures, with over 2000 of them coming from students and academics at the university. The university also continues to receive hundreds of letters, emails and phone calls from its alumni who are pledging not to donate any further until the university repeals the decision.

Before the hearing, sixty students and twenty dons signed a ‘Spartacus’ letter, which insisted that the protest against Willetts was a collective act and that singling out one student for punishment was “arbitrary and wrong”. In the letter the signatories asked to receive the same charge for the action. The letter has so far been ignored by the university Court of Discipline.

Gerard Tully, president of CUSU said: “The student body is demonstrating unprecedented anger over the disproportionate sentence handed down. The University has been caught out acting with no thought to precedent or to fairness, and ought to be ashamed of the message it sends. Two and a half years suspension for one person for one action is madness.”

Rachel Bower, a PhD student in English said: “Like the suspended student, I am also studying for a PhD in English. The punishment undermines the foundations of critical thought and debate that underpin our discipline, and supposedly the University as a whole. It endangers academic freedom, and makes me ashamed to be a member of the University today. I am glad so many of my fellow students have come out in support of our right to protest today.”

The laws were simply left in place. The rulers of Egypt and Syria, content with their power, decided to concede nothing to their citizens. Tens of thousands of people found themselves imprisoned for extended periods of time, simply for demanding the principles of democracy already encoded in their constitutions or being critical of the government. The emergency laws provided these autocratic regimes with the authority to force their will onto to their people without opposition.

Under a president deemed worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, the will of the authoritarian tyrant caste is being written permanently into American law.

H.R. 347/S1794, otherwise known as the “Federal Restricted Buildings and Grounds Improvement Act of 2011,” passed unanimously in the Senate and receiving only three negative votes in the House, makes it a felony—a crime defined by the federal government as punishable by death or imprisonment in excess of one year—to “enter or remain in” an area designated as “restricted.” The law makes no exception for demonstrators who unknowingly gather outside of federally-designated free-speech zones; you may not have willfully or knowingly done anything other than exercise your free speech and free assembly rights, but if you “in fact” “[impede] or [disrupt] the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions,” you’re going to prison. And since Obama’s ink dried on the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 and America was declared a battleground, you could be held indefinitely.

These laws would have made Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights luminaries felons subject to indefinite detention.
When, and if, demonstrators get released from incarceration, they will continue to suffer the long-term legal consequences termed by prisoner-rights advocates as “civil death.” Felons are barred from multitude vocations, associating with certain people or even living in particular areas, ineligible to serve on a jury or receive government assistance, and even denied the right to elect their own public servants. As of 2008, over 5.3 million people in the United States are currently left without the right to vote because of felony disenfranchisement. A sure-fire way of controlling political opposition is to deny it the ability to participate in political life.

Restricted areas spoken of in HR347, interpreted under existing law and court precedents, include any “building or grounds where the President or other person protected by the Secret Service is or will be temporarily visiting” and “a building or grounds so restricted in conjunction with an event designated as a special event of national significance.” This definition, kept intentionally broad and vague, allows anti-protest measures to be applied at the whim of the political elite. Already in Chicago, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel presides over crippling restrictions on public activity brought as a result of the upcoming NATO conference—and the simultaneous anti-globalization protests—on May 20-21st, 2012.

While the laws were called a temporary response to the G8 summit taking place in Chicago alongside the NATO conference, the Obama White House made a last minute decision to move G8 to the presidential compound at Camp David, a restricted military installation. The laws in Chicago will remain. Draconian laws enacted in the name of national defense in the Other Civil War are nothing new.

On September 14, 2001, President George W. Bush declared a national emergency due to the terrorist attacks of three days earlier. The National Emergencies Act of 1976 requires the President to renew this state of emergency on an annual basis if he wishes it to remain in effect; Bush renewed it every year he was in office and Obama has continued the trend.

The United States has been in a declared state of national emergency for the last 11 years.

According to Harold Relyea, a specialist working for the American government in the Congressional Research Service, the president “may seize property, organize and control the means of production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law, seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United States citizens.”

Combined with Patriot Act measures enacted by Congress under George W. Bush and extended by Obama, these laws provide a framework of surveillance and control only dreamed of in some Orwellian nightmare.

The nature of neoliberal globalization virtually ensures that fascist cartels will force their monopolies onto unwilling nations or unknowing populations; plurilateral agreements like the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, are created in secret by leaders of a select handful of the wealthiest countries and designed with the intention of forcing them upon developing nations. ACTA includes provisions that profoundly restrict fundamental rights and freedoms, most notably the freedom of expression and communication privacy. It also severely restricts generic drug creation and use in underdeveloped countries. They are nonnegotiable.

Kader Arif, the European parliament’s rapporteur for ACTA, resigned from his position in January 2012 denouncing the treaty “in the strongest possible manner” for having “no inclusion of civil society organizations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, [and] exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in [the] assembly,” concluding with his intent to “send a strong signal and alert the public opinion about this unacceptable situation” and refusal to “take part in this masquerade.”

As with other undemocratic measures being passed around the world, HR 347/S1794 is a ruthless and reactionary law designed to eliminate political and economic dissent.

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It is little wonder that HR 347/S1794 has been called by Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI), one of only three members of Congress to vote against the bill, the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act.” While the NDAA seeks to remove your 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights, this newest attack on self-determination is aimed at the heart of 1st Amendment rights including Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom to Petition.

The Supreme Court ruled in Boos v. Barry, 485 U.S. 312, 318 (1988), that protesting outside an embassy was worthy of Constitutional protection, recognizing that freedom of speech, even if it may interfere with normal governmental activity “reflects a ‘profound national commitment’ to the principle” and “‘debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.’”

While the right to free speech, assembly, and the petition of grievances is enshrined in the US Constitution, the right of government to conduct its business without dissent is not.

In 1783, twenty-four year old William Pitt, then the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was petitioned to change the law based on the “necessity” to save the East India Company from bankruptcy. His reply was brief.

“Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.”

The arguments of a tyrannical Congress would have you believe that HR 347/S1794 is a necessity, that demonstrations against the actions of government and business cause it undue hardship. While the government’s ability to permissibly restrict expressive conduct is limited by reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, the restrictions must, by law, be narrowly tailored to prevent unconstitutional adversity.

HR 347/S1794 flagrantly violates the First Amendment, since it is a broad and sweeping restriction based particularly on political speech in a public forum and not narrowly tailored to serve a compelling state interest.

Of course, the crypto-fascists in Congress will argue that protecting themselves from the sight of the “unwashed masses” is a compelling state interest. They wouldn’t be incorrect. The nature of power is self-preserving; by surrounding themselves with a no-free-speech zone, the State can continue its self-congratulatory paternalism, content in the false knowledge that they’re “looking out for the little guy.”

The unconstitutional socio-political deprivation embedded in these authoritarian anti-Occupy laws would arguably be unfeasible without an almost complete blackout by mass media.

Media and communication play a central, perhaps even a defining, role in the ability of police-state measures to pass. Where is the outrage over the state of emergency laws that have gripped this country for almost a dozen years? How can unelected bankers wrest power from leaders in Greece, the birthplace of democracy, while the rest of the world fumbles with “austerity measures” to save their own necks? Consolidation of the global commercial media system can be easily linked to deregulation in the name of neoliberal “progress.” That deregulation—and the resulting monopoly that keeps alternate news sources like Democracy Now! and Al Jazeera English off the air—has allowed only capitalist rhetoric to flourish.

The business interests that control the mainstream media are the same that control the United States government. They will allow no dissent as they continue their war on liberty.

American anarchist Noam Chomsky, long known for his critiques of U.S. policy, has often written about the “manufacture of consent,” something propaganda maven (and Freud nephew) Edward Bernays happily called the art of manipulating people. In his criticism of the global commercial media system, Chomsky posits that mass media, as a profit-driven institution, tends to serve and further the agendas and interests of dominant, elite groups over the social well-being of entire societies. His writing firmly rejects the kinds of censorship that HR 347/S1794 proposes.

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don’t like. Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re in favor of freedom of speech, that means you’re in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

What does this mean for us? Simply put, this is not a battle of the Left versus the moderate Right. This is a direct attack on the United States Constitution, a charter written expressly to limit the government’s power over its citizens.

This is a war of the authoritarian oligarchy upon the principles of democracy.

Around the world, the working and middle classes have risen up against the duplicity of their governments, the engineering of political realities by corporate interests, and the social stratification enforced by capitalist exploitation. In the United States, both Occupy Wall Street and the libertarian wing of the Tea Party have demonstrated against the excesses of the US federal government. These protests, however, have been relatively small compared to the injustice being perpetrated upon the American people.

Organized labor has tried to make up for their decline in membership and economic power in recent years by abandoning any pretense of non-partisan organizing and pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues money into the campaigns of Democrats. The opponents of organized labor are allowed to paint it as a partisan special interest group in the pocket of the Democratic Party. This has proven to be the case for far too long. The Democrats, in turn, have taken labor’s vote as a matter of course and done little to advance the political agenda of the working class. The vast majority of workers who remain outside of traditional unions see no use in joining one; management sees suppression of organization as just another cost of doing business. A return of radical unionization, exemplified by the Industrial Workers of the World call to organize the entire working class into One Big Union to abolish the wage system, would do much to stop the pitting of worker against worker, allowing for people over profit, cooperation over competition. The Preamble to the IWW Constitution still reflects this.

The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.

Organized labor can, and should be, a force to reckon with. It cannot do so, however, as long as it continues to blindly support a party that has forgotten the farmers, laborers, labor unions, and minorities that have made up its traditional base. Regardless of whether organized labor feels it must undergo a transitional program from capitalism to participatory economics, it must divorce itself from unwavering allegiance to the Democrats. Labor would be more effective supporting individual politicians who promote a working class agenda, whether they are Green Party, Libertarians, Social Democrats, or independents.

Civil libertarian organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the First Amendment Coalition, and the Center for Constitutional Rights have a long history of defending the inalienable rights retained by—as opposed to privileges granted to—citizens of the United States under the Constitution. As nonpartisan organizations, they have the ability to denounce legislators of any camp for transgressions of civil liberties. It is expected that they will use test cases to undermine the illegal laws being propagated by the political elite; as part of a diversity of tactic, these kinds of cases should be applauded, even as the larger movement forges ahead with broader goals. Embracing different tactics allows radical proponents of liberty and democracy to work with mainstream advocacy groups to advance our larger strategy in accordance with our common goals. The Saint Paul Principles provide a framework for that cooperation without sectarian breakdown.

The fiscal conservatives, moderates, and libertarians who make up the Republican base have seen the party of Lincoln hijacked by social conservatives like Leo Strauss, who said the “crisis of our time” was a “permissive egalitarianism” embedded in liberal democracy and neoconservatives like Jeanne Kirkpatrick, who prompted Reagan to give financial and material support to pro-Western authoritarian regimes.

Libertarians and fiscal conservatives have little in common with the state-enforced conservative social policies pushed by the religious right wing that seems to dominate the Republican Party. The interventionist war machine driven by neoconservative thought—to say nothing of the government intrusion into privacy via the Patriot Act, REAL ID, and NSA domestic spying program—runs contrary to principles of state sovereignty and self-determination held in high esteem by traditional conservatism, principles that Thomas Paine instilled into American body politic under the phrase “Common Sense.”

As encroachments on personal privacy and individual liberties continue, both the Democratic and Republican parties have forgotten their base: the working and middle class.

Communist Karl Marx borrowed the term “proletariat” as a description for the working class from the Ancient Roman Empire, whose rulers believed the only contribution the masses could make to Roman society was the ability to raise children to colonize new territories. The crypto-fascist authority today, encompassing both the Democratic and Republican Parties, continues this view; to capitalists, workers are not individuals but only the rungs of a ladder designed to lift them higher on the pyramid scheme of capitalist economics.

The time has come for the American middle and working classes to join their comrades in the campaign for liberty currently sweeping the globe.

H.R. 347/S1794, rightly nicknamed the “First Amendment Rights Eradication Act,” has been passed by both chambers of Congress. It now sits on President Obama’s desk, awaiting his signature. If his capitulation to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012—and its promise of indefinite detention—is any indication of his future action, he’ll sign it.

This issue transcends traditional party politics. Political opposition will be outlawed immediately. Pro-life rallies will effectively end with ban on public demonstrations, as well as pro-choice demonstrations. The government will not hesitate to prohibit any and all organizations it defines as dissenting or subversive, including alternative parties, labor unions, veterans’ associations, and others. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party can both kiss the promise of reforming government goodbye.

Congress has already declared America a battleground. They now want to silence us. It is time to bring the battle home.

Of course, this is more than a purely academic issue for Maher.  In June of 2002, his own ABC television show, Politically Incorrect, was yanked off the air for similar reasons.  When major sponsors (notably Sears and FedEx) withdrew their advertising in protest of Maher’s controversial remarks (interpreted to be “pro-terrorist), the Sinclair Broadcasting Group immediately pulled the plug on the show’s ABC affiliates, and Politically Incorrect was history.

Maher’s objections are interesting.  He argues that if advertisers can dictate what stays on the air and what doesn’t, we have, in effect, relinquished our right to free speech.  If media sponsors are given the final say as to which opinions are allowed to be expressed, and which opinions aren’t, it means we’ve handed over our precious, constitutional right of free expression to the corporations.  Not good.

But there’s a fine distinction here—a distinction between corporate cowardice and consumer muscle.  And the Limbaugh episode is a prime example of the latter.  Without any threat of boycotts, Rush’s advertisers nonetheless fled the show en masse, hypocritically pretending that his comments were so outrageous—so offensive, so repugnant—that they couldn’t bear to be associated with such a program, even though they’d have to be blind, deaf and dumb, and a presidential candidate not to realize this kind of material was the show’s stock in trade.  The only difference? This particular slur got some bad press–culminating in rats deserting a not-yet-sinking ship.

Frightened advertisers fleeing Limbaugh is reminiscent of the Hollywood blacklists of the 1950s, a phenomenon that, surprisingly, has been misunderstood by many.  You still hear people blame the blacklists on HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), declaring it was HUAC who forbade the studios to hire certain actors and writers suspected of subversive activities.  The opposite was true.  It was the studios themselves who voluntarily initiated the blacklists (ruining careers in the process), fearing that HUAC’s Commie smear campaign might damage their box office.

Boycotts are different.  Boycotts are manifestations of public outrage aimed at specific targets, for specific reasons, with the goal being to change specific policies or practices, with the weapon of choice being the threat of wreaking economic hardship.  While most boycotts fail, some actually do work.

Coors beer (the Coors family helped establish the Heritage Foundation) suffered a public relations setback a few decades ago when Paul Newman, among others, threatened a boycott.  In the late 1970s, an AWPPW-led west coast boycott of Scott Paper did considerable damage to sales (so much damage that some Scott facilities were forced to curtail operations, resulting in AWPPW production workers being laid off).  And wasn’t economic pressure largely responsible for South Africa abandoning apartheid?

Economic leverage isn’t the enemy of free expression; it’s a form of free expression.  Not to pick on Bill Maher (whom I enjoy and watch regularly on HBO), but if a labor union were to launch a successful boycott of a vehemently anti-union company’s products—a boycott that ultimately led to management negotiating a fair labor agreement—would Maher view this as an infringement of the company’s right to free speech?  An infringement of the company’s right to express its rabidly anti-union point of view?

Didn’t Ralph Nader say that the biggest and potentially most powerful lobby in the country—infinitely bigger and badder than the NRA, AIPAC, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce—was the American consumer?

If consumers chose not to buy new shoes for two months, the shoe business would collapse.  If consumers drank only tap water instead of Coke, Pepsi, etc, for two months, the beverage industry would go belly up.  Indeed, this is where the true power of the 99% resides, in our role as consumers.

Clearly, Limbaugh’s sponsors bailing out was an example of grandstanding and gutlessness, and once the smoke settles most of these advertisers can be expected to come crawling back.  But boycotts are different.  What’s wrong with trying to put the economic squeeze on sleaze radio?  For that matter, what’s wrong with trying to kill it? Limbaugh influences millions of people.  If the Acme Widget Company were his main sponsor, wouldn’t launching a national boycott of Acme products make eminent sense?

Let’s not conflate free speech with willful deceit, or political discourse with agitprop, or hate radio with healthy public debate.  They’re not equal.  And let’s not pretend that exerting economic leverage is unethical or off-limits, because it isn’t.  In fact, it may be the only arrow we have in our quiver.

However, the spark was lit. The eruption of popular protest against the neoliberal corporate agenda that most of the world had already experienced by the winter of 2011 had finally reached the nation most responsible for that agenda — the United States. The rest of the year would see the expansion of that protest across the United States grow in dimension and breadth. From further State Capitol occupations to the occupations of city parks, the masterminds and profiteers of the neoliberal economy were put on notice. Meanwhile, protest from like minded citizens of the rest of the world also continued to spread. Politicians scrambled as they figured out how to respond to what was clearly a left-oriented popular movement against those who had bought and sold them long ago.

Naturally, there have been millions of words written and published about this wave of people power. A very recent collection of some of those words edited by Wisconsinites Paul and Mari Jo Buhle, is titled It Started In Wisconsin. Essentially a collection of essays written by various participants and organizers of the Wisconsin protests, It Started In Wisconsin provides a reasonable and objective look at the movement. By discussing its structures and organizational strategies, the politics of the movement are also examined. Like the Wisconsin movement itself, the parameters of the discussion tend to remain limited to the parameters of the liberal-progressive spectrum.

The book begins with the first essayist attempting to place the protests firmly in the tradition of the great Progressive Robert LaFollette. However, the very fact that the movement ended up being confined to the traditional Democrat-Republican contest made even the more left elements of the Progressive philosophy irrelevant in the final outcome. It Started In Wisconsin tends to examine the uprising and its politics from a generally anti-corporate perspective but, like the movement itself, never truly challenges capitalism at its roots as an essentially unequal system that by its nature requires growing levels of inequality.

There is one essay that stands out from the rest of those that analyze the movement in that it does look beyond the façade of neoliberalism. That essay, titled “The Role of Corporations” by Roger Bybee, is the most radical in the book. Radical, that is, in the fundamental definition of the word: “of or going to the root or origin.” The essay is a clear and straightforward description of how neoliberal capitalism works, who it benefits and, to put it bluntly, who it screws. No other analytical piece between these covers quite approaches the clarity and depth of analysis like Bybee’s.

Yet, this book is not really about analysis. It is a collection of stories from those that participated in one of the most inspiring movements to erupt in the US heartland in decades. Those stories provide the observer from afar with a fairly universal and nuanced look at the daily lives of those involved in organizing, occupying, reporting and otherwise participating in those weeks of popular democracy. Interspersed between the tales of the workers, students, farmers and other protesters are a number of photographs and comics. The inclusion of these graphics truly enhances the overall effect.

One of the last two essays in It Started In Wisconsin discusses the position of the Wisconsin uprising in the global insurrections of the past eighteen months. The authors of this short essay, Ashok Kumar and Simon Hardy, briefly discuss the possibilities and take a quick look at the lessons they see to be learned. In addition, and most importantly, they broach the subject of the differences between the radical grassroots and the more conservative entrenched union and political leadership. It is here, they hint, that the real direction of this global movement will be determined. In Wisconsin that outcome has already taken one turn with the shifting of the uprising’s momentum into the recall efforts against Governor Scott Walker. The outcome of this turn to electoral politics is still being hotly debated by many of the uprising’s organizers, with some of them refusing to endorse the Democratic candidate opposing Walker because they see him as just more of the same.

Moving from the local to the global, let us consider another recently published text that takes a look at the international manifestations of this movement. This book, titled Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is authored by journalist Paul Mason. Like the Buhle’s effort, Mason’s book describes the movements against neoliberal intolerance and authoritarianism that have become part of the collective imagination this past year. Likewise, Mason’s text examines the politics of the movement from what can only be termed a new left viewpoint. What this means is that he places the emphasis on the cry for freedom implicit in these protests while under-emphasizing the economic nature of the oppression the protesters are rebelling against.

Given the broader scope of Mason’s text, there is also a broader discussion. Several different manifestations of the movement — from Greece to London to Cairo to Spain and other points in between — are reported on. These reports are good journalism. One feels as if they are present at the rallies, occupations and riots that Mason describes. The anecdotal tales he provides should remind anyone who participated in any kind of popular resistance in the past decades of the energy and hope one finds and feels at such events. These are the stuff that makes one join such movements.

When it comes to analysis, Mason’s text provides some interesting possibilities. He spends a fair number of words discussing the desire for freedom this global movement represents. The Egyptian opposed to the harshness of the Mubarak authoritarian regime and the British student fearing the limitations a life without affordable education will create are examined through what Mason calls the social laboratory of the self. He emphasizes the role of social networking and the existence of a new dimension in organizing directly related to the existence of networking technology. He rightly questions the validity of the Left, but does not really examine what he means by the Left, choosing instead to adopt the mainstream media’s definition that the Left is composed of political parties like Labour in Britain, various elements of the Democratic Party in the United States, and numerous sects espousing various versions of Leninism.

By dismissing the Left, even in its current splintered formation, Mason is also dismissing a more radical analysis of the true culprit in the global economic catastrophe. It is true, as Mason makes clear, that neoliberal policies are responsible for the numerous maladies the global uprising sprang from. However, what is unexplored in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere is why neoliberal capitalism is the dominant economic regime on the planet. That explanation can only come from an understanding of the economic works of Marx and his theoretical successors like Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxembourg and even Lenin. It was these thinkers and revolutionaries, after all, that studied and explained the stages of capitalism in the industrial world and how they would come about. So far, they have been pretty damn accurate.

Mason has it right when he places the search for freedom against the authoritarianism of a Mubarak or of neoliberalism in the context of Marx’s discussion of the alienation of the human spirit under capitalism. However, by not taking a similar look at the analysis Marxist economics provides regarding the trajectory of capitalism, the analysis he provides falls short. It would be useful for Mason and the protesters he writes about if they knew that a Marxist anti-imperialist analysis does not mean that a Leninist solution is the necessary result.

Yet, Mason is not much different from the movements he describes. Rightly opposed to the excesses of neoliberal capitalism (which is merely another phase of monopoly capitalism as described by Luxembourg, et al), the current movement runs the risk of merely removing the worst of those excesses. If this is the result, it will only be a few decades before an even harsher manifestation of capitalist greed subordinates the world. Unless, that is, the current movement undertakes a truly radical analysis that places the existence of capitalism itself at the core of the problem.

I don’t expect that capitalism will be removed from the planet. However, without an understanding that it is capitalism that is the root of the problems of inequality and sustainability we are currently facing, there can be no substantive change in the future we face. Then, again, the very fact that many elements of the movement don’t seem too concerned about the Left’s role is a call to those on the Left to get active and make it clear that what passes for the Left in today’s world is for the most part nothing of the sort. Indeed, it is a rejection of the Left’s important and earth-changing history.

Despite the aforementioned shortcomings, these two publications are worthwhile and provocative reads. The authors and editors present the primary actors in the global uprising — students, workers and the marginalized — and describe their passion, joy and fears. They also begin to explain where the global movement against neoliberalism came from and where it is now. Reading them in this context will certainly help guide us through that movement’s next metamorphosis.

The underlying principle of the first amendment was to create a “market place of ideas” in which unpopular and minority viewpoints would have a vehicle by which to challenge the mainstream positions of the day. It was thought that by allowing unpopular, fringe positions to be heard, the people would have a forum in which to accept or reject different positions and decide what the best course of action would be.

It never occurred to the framers of our Constitution that “free speech” could be transformed into the scourge of our current democracy, and an excuse for every form of oppression possible, from torture to fraudulent elections.  The examples of this transformation are everywhere:

1) The Citizens United case: By characterizing corporations as “persons,” and finding that they had “free speech” rights (with no accountability or responsibility other than to make money), the United States Supreme Court sold what vestiges of democracy were still present in the country to the highest bidder. Secret PACs and billionaires can now purchase the political officeholders of their choice, and ensure that their actions will be unregulated and free from government opposition. By refusing to regulate or control corporate abuses, Congress has undermined the entire democratic process. Within a decade or two, all politicians will be on the payrolls of their corporate sponsors. Grassroots campaigns and underdog victories will be a thing  of the past, and billion-dollar campaign chests will produce a government of corporate choice.

2) John Yoo and Jay Bybee: These despicable attorneys were the authors of the legal memos, sponsored by George Bush and Dick Cheney, that have been used to rationalize and justify the murder and torture of thousands of victims of U.S. aggression worldwide. By suggesting that waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and tearing out fingernails were merely tactics amounting to “enhanced interrogation,” they gave the green light to the monsters running our government to endorse renditions, tortures and every other war crime the Pentagon can envision. Unmanned drones, Special Operations assassinations, nuclear missiles and war crimes are now our country’s leading exports.

At a crucial point when UC students were demanding that Yoo be thrown off the staff at UC, the students at Berkeley and the law school fell victim to Dean Christopher Edley, Jr.’s (who had joined Boalt Hall as dean and professor of law in 2004) argument that to deny Yoo a chair on the faculty at the law school would deny the man free speech. Progressives and liberals were defeated when they bowed down to the fatuous  explanation that his free speech rights trumped the impact of his analysis. Likewise, free speech was the explanation given by our fearless leaders to guarantee Bybee a seat on the Court of Appeal. So, instead of spending their lives in prison, where they belong, these war criminals have been rewarded by those who thrive on slaughter and hatred.

3) Skokie, Illinois: In 1977 a 30-member Nazi organization made the announcement that it intended to march in Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The Nazis claimed that they had the constitutional right to free speech, regardless of their history of lynchings and murders of African-Americans. The citizens of Skokie claimed the right not to have  demonstrations that would instigate heinous memories and violence parading in front of them in their community.

It remains a paradox: free speech has become the code word for allowing racist, homophobic divisive organizations such as the Klu Klux Klan and Nazis to intimidate and destroy minority communities. And it has been allowed, established and expanded throughout this country — especially surrounding the issue of immigration, with its round-ups, unlimited detentions, families torn asunder, deportations, etc.  Under the rubric of “immigration reform,” xenophobic racist forces in Arizona and other states have scape-goated Mexican and Latin communities, forcing them into hiding. Does “free speech” allow racists to brand immigrant communities as communities to be feared and hated?  Should racists have the right to “protect” their privileges by claiming that free speech authorizes them to say anything they want, regardless of the consequences of their hatred? Free speech is now equated with the right to instigate fear and hatred against gays, minorities, women and anyone else the right-wing sees as a target.

The divide and conquer mentality that motivates such hate groups runs deep: blame the victims for the outrages of the oligarchy, and turn one section of the working class against the other. It has been a successful formula for years.

4) Mainstream media propaganda: All one has to do is turn on the mainstream media to hear the  propaganda being spouted by the oligarchy. Just as the American people were lied to about so-called weapons of mass destruction by the likes of Colin Powell, and an assortment of Bush’s lackeys, so now do we hear of the need to bomb Iran. Our endless wars against Muslims, our  assaults on every independent nation on earth (Venezuela and Cuba immediately come to mind) — all are brought about through “free speech” fabrications. No need to rely on the truth to  persuade the American people of anything; all one needs to do is own the media in order to create a killing frenzy directed against the enemies described by the oligarchy. The monopolized ownership of all major media outlets assures a uniform presentation of imperialist rhetoric disguised as “news.” The poor simply cannot compete and are silenced accordingly.

Even progressive forces give airtime to the torturers, right-wingers and others to appear unbiased. The handful of reporters who purport to give alternative views of what is going on in the world feel compelled to spend half of their time explaining what the fascist position is on the subject before they even dare to speak truth to such violence.

Equal time, as it applies to television reporting, fosters the belief that governmental truths are the only legitimate ones, and progressive or “fringe” reporting is to be ignored and viewed as of secondary importance. The government-controlled media never gives equal time to those  positions that are contrary to Pentagon double-speak, they merely parrot the propaganda that is currently being spoon-fed to a passive populace.

There was once a market place of ideas in this country, where unpopular or minority viewpoints viewpoints could be espoused to persuade and convince the government to change its policies. With the monopolization of the media into the hands of the oligarchy, there is no longer meaningful dialogue in the television or newspaper media. Instead, we are force-fed one-sided sloganeering and fear-mongering in the guise of news. While a handful of newspapers (the Anderson Valley Advertiser, Hightower Lowdown, Yes Magazine, etc.) and hundreds of internet blogs provide alternative news and analysis, they are simply not wealthy or powerful enough to overcome the propaganda blitzes put out by the oligarchy on a 24-hour per day basis.

In short, free speech has been turned upside down, and is now a major justification for interminable war, domestic imprisonment, torture and an economic disparity unheard of in the annals of history. The reality is that free speech is too important to lose, and progressives must find a way to regain equality in that battlefield.

Meanwhile, in the economic and military sphere, the drum beat continues essentially the same as it ever did. There is no doubt who won the battles of the Sixties in those arenas: big business and the Pentagon. Even though union membership is down drastically from its heyday years of the 1960s, a concerted drive to destroy the unions that remain has kicked into high gear. While governments and big business work together to disempower the remaining unions, the demagogues among them work overtime in their attempts to tie every problem the common man and woman has to those workers that dare to fight for their union. Instead of talking honestly about the failures of neoliberalism, right wing corporate shills denounce school teachers and nurses for demanding a decent wage while simultaneously privatizing whatever services they can. Unemployment remains high, especially among black men, who have only known full employment when they were forced to work as slaves. Indeed, the only place where most African-American men are working is in the network of prisons across the USA, where they work for minimal wages while reaping profits for Wall Street corporations that have the taxpayers pay the bills those prisons rack up. It can be reasonably argued that US prisons are the historical successors to those plantations where many of today’s prisoners’ ancestors worked.

September 13, 1971 is a day I will never forget. It was my sixteenth birthday, but that fact serves only as a marker for the unforgettable events of that historical moment. On September 8, 1971 several hundred men at Attica State prison in New York took over a part of the prison. This act was the direct result of a scuffle that occurred in what was known as D Yard. In truth, though, it was the culmination of a months-long campaign for prison reforms in Attica and other prisons in the New York system. It can actually be argued that the campaign in New York was part of a larger campaign that was occurring across the United States. This upsurge in the prison struggle had been fueled by other movements in the US and also by a growing awareness of the role prisons play in the oppression of disenfranchised groups in a society. The assassination of Black Panther George Jackson barely a month before the uprising at Attica served as a vicious reminder of how far the State would go to maintain that oppression.

Back to the story of September 13, 1971. As I sat at the dinner table that evening I simmered with anger. That morning Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had ordered an assault on Attica which resulted in the deaths of 39 men, mostly prisoners but also including nine hostages. This massacre took place after four days of negotiations orchestrated by the prisoners and conducted by a group of outside observers selected by the prisoners. Suffice it to say, the birthday celebration was muted, a cloud of death hanging over the dining room. I could only imagine how the families of the dead men felt. The primary official representing the state of New York was Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, a liberal within the prison administration. The group of observers was composed of almost two dozen men and included radical attorney William Kunstler, New York State Senator John Dunne, New York City councilman Herman Badillo, members of the Young Lords, Louis Farrakhan, and New York Times writer Tom Wicker.

Almost four years later Wicker would publish an account of the uprising titled A Time to Die. This account is a testament of the times. Wicker was an unabashed liberal when that word defined a certain political and cultural mindset that included support for civil rights, civil liberties, and the consideration that radical and revolutionary leftists not only made some valid points but that they were often right when it came to analyzing the nature of race and class in the United States. His book on Attica stands as one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the period known as the Sixties. Fortunately, it was recently republished in a paperback edition by Haymarket Books of Chicago. Written in the third person — like much of Norman Mailer’s best journalism — Wicker describes the events that took place in Attica after he arrived there sometime during the night of September 8, 1971. His chronicle reflects the genuine concern for the lives of the prisoners and the hostages and is witness to his growing disbelief that there can ever be a peaceful resolution to the situation. That awareness is accompanied by his acknowledgement that the blame for this does not fall on the prisoners but on those in the New York government apparatus that cannot or will not see the men of Attica as human beings. The tension inside the prison and between and within the various groups involved forces Wicker to reflect on his life growing up in a union anti-segregationist family in the apartheid US South. This personal history and the contrast between the prisoners desire to be treated like humans and the bureaucrats’ determination to deny that desire causes Wicker to forsake his journalistic objectivity in favor of the inmates. In what is certainly one of his finest journalistic moments, after hearing Rockefeller tell him that granting amnesty to the prisoners would undermine the basic tenets of our society, Wicker writes:

Wicker had to stop himself from laughing–not with amusement– at this astounding irony. In a country where so many wealthy or well-represented lawbreakers could go free, where the killers at Kent State and Jackson State were not even prosecuted, where minorities (blacks and Mexican-Americans, for two good examples) suffered from openly prejudiced law in whole regions, where the poor and disadvantaged of all races usually felt the whole weight of the police, the courts, the prisons–in that country, the “equal application of the laws” was to be upheld in the case of the Attica Brothers!

If the Sixties were about freedom, and I believe that they were, then the men in Attica were ready to die for theirs. And many did. There were others in associated milieus that fought for theirs and for men like the Attica Brothers. Poet, writer, counterculture mischief-maker and rock musician Ed Sanders was one of those. His recently released biography Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is a look at that battle. Sanders could be described as a member of the group of ramblers, mystics, poets, and plain old lunatics that formed a bridge between the Beatnik and hippie/freak culture. Like Neal Cassady, his age and refusal to go along with the dominant culture of the grey-flannel suit led him to places that existed on the fringes of US society, especially white US society. In the search to disengage from the mainstream culture, the men and women involved often went out of their way to offend. Given the Puritan confusion and hypocrisy about all things sexual, it was in that arena that artists and poets often played in when they wished to push the limits outward. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — two men who make occasional appearances in Sanders’ jerry-built memoir — knew this territory well. Indeed, by the very fact of their homosexuality, they were already outside of society (like Patti Smith sings in her tune “Rock and Roll Nigger”).

Sanders is the author of one of the best true crime books ever written in the United States. That book, titled The Family, is about Charles Manson and his group of twisted souls. Fug You is primarily about the decade before Sanders published that book. It was a decade that was full of activity for Sanders. He published one of the best known mimeographed poetry and art journals of the period. Like the photocopied zines of the 1980s and 1990s, mimeo journals were the samizdat of the art and poetry countercultures of the period. Sanders journal, known as Fuck You, published Burroughs, Ginsberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among others. His magazine gained him invites to parties with the burgeoning literary and artistic elite of 1960s New York. This access in turn gave him access to patrons and a ready set of defenders whenever the obscenity police came down on his magazine, as they did somewhat frequently.

All of this, however, was but a prelude to Sanders best known (and most popular) endeavor: the creation of the rock and roll band The Fugs. I gave their first album a few listens while reading this book and am still amazed not only by the fact that they got a recording contract but that they actually broke the Billboard Top 100 a couple times. On top of that, The Fugs played on bills featuring some of the biggest bands of the period. The music The Fugs created was a mixture of straight blues, some rock and roll, a little Indian influence and just plain freakin’ noise. The lyrics were a combination of beat poetry, antiwar visions, visionary hopes, sexist nonsense and just plain babble. Like I said, it’s hard to remember that The Fugs were actually somewhat popular. That fact alone is testament itself to how much the cultural boundaries were being stretched and redefined. As for that sexism, let me clarify.

Sexism was an unfortunate part of the freedom defined by the Sixties. Not because many men were more sexist than many men are now, but because their sexism had never been challenged. The sexual repression that had ruled US popular culture to that point was being broken down. Given the generally sexist nature of the culture, that sexual freedom may have opened up minds, bodies and souls, but it did little to end the objectification of the female person. That task would fall on the feminist movement that rose from the cultural revolution of which Ed Sanders writes about in Fug You.

One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

There was a genuine joy in that revolution. It would soon be tempered by the repression from the State, various religious figures and institutions and the military. Sanders memoir captures all of that. He writes snippets of remembrances that together tell a good part of the story. The Living Theatre putting on their play The Brig; the authorities shutting them down. The Human Be-Ins and the attempt to bust Allen Ginsberg for marijuana. The Yippies desire to host a festival of life and the police riot that was Chicago 1968. Sanders book covers the late fifties to 1970. Wicker’s covers four days in 1971. The men in Attica, however, were there for crimes that happened during the same period that Sanders book takes place. Their denouement was a violent end to the Sixties in a much more cataclysmic way than the Altamont concert portrayed in the film Gimme Shelter, or the police murders at Kent and Jackson State. These two books represent elements of the zeitgeist of the Sixties. They also hold both possibilities and warnings for our future.

These guys really love their acronyms. This ridiculous name – PIPA – or PROTECT IP stands for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and the Theft of Intellectual Property. This should have been our first clue that this is yet another attempt to disguise the truth and put more profits into the coffers of multibillion dollar conglomerates while eliminating infringing sites.

As Homeland Security is enhancing the profits of the Military Industrial Complex under the guise of security, PIPA is enhancing the profits of multibillion dollar corporations in the music, film and pharmaceutical industries in the name of copyright infringement. Guess what industry benefits primary from this legislation and then guess which industry has been a principle contributor to Leahy’s election efforts. Surprise surprise…..

But the public has begun to catch on.  OWS (Occupy Wall Street) efforts and the Internet are raising the consciousness of voters. The public is becoming painfully aware about how politics is run in Washington and PIPA is a perfect illustration of this process. It is entirely about the control of the politicians through legal bribery and the control of the public through a corporately owned and operated mainstream media. So what if PIPA supports no real due process?

So what if thousands of innocent and tiny websites get victimized and shut down without the opportunity to address their accuser before action is taken?

So what if all accusers are to be held harmless for any false accusations that they may make?

So what if legitimate copyright infringers are victimized by this legislation?

So what if the door is now opened to more aggressive censorship and the compromise of free speech?

It is the price we must pay to get billions more into the hands of these billion dollar industries and to silence sites attempting to inform the public through the works of others.

Does the Patriot Act ring a bell?  Without a doubt, this bill represents the most fundamental attack on our constitution ever waged. It was first launched by a Republican and then reauthorized without change by a Democrat. Money, greed and legal bribery control both sides of the isle and PIPA is just another manifestation of business as usual in Washington.  Money pulls the strings and the political puppets then dance.

Senator Leahy is no different than any other politician in Washington.  Currently it is the only way to get reelected. Those in office (the incumbents) have all the money and if they play ball with their primary contributors they are allowed to stay in office and become very rich.

Maybe Leahy can pull off a Chris Dodd special. By anyone’s measure this former Senator was one of the most legally corrupt politicians in Washington and now he resides over the Motion Picture Association to the tune of over $1 million a year. Perhaps Senator Leahy can do several dances before he leaves office and secure a fat private sector job when he retires.

This is about big money going to big business – not to the people. The people are always second-class citizens to them, and rather than point this out to the public, mainstream media perpetuates it.

Part of copyright law and conspicuously absent from all copyright infringing legislation (PIPA, SOPA and now OPEN) and almost every news outlet is a thing called Fair Use. It is section 107 of title 17 of the copyright law. It generally says for the purpose of commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archival, scholarship and the manifestation of new information,  it is perfectly legal to use the works of others (copyright infringement) without their permission.

Think about this for a moment. What invention was not created by standing on the shoulders of previous inventors? What documentarian can describe the past without using the past to illustrate his works? What political satirist can criticize the hypocrisy of Washington without exposing previous statements and previous actions in film as recorded by others?

Copyright law embraced a key concept when it was established and one that has been absent for quite some time. There is supposed to be a balance between the protection of intellectual property and the public’s right to know.  It is called Fair Use and it is part of copyright law.

Further, new copyright infringement laws are not absolutely needed to prosecute these bad boys. Megaupload.com was recently shut down without using new copyright infringement laws to accomplish such. Do not be fooled, Fair Use is not mentioned in any of these pieces of legislation for a reason. Go after the bad guys, yes. Prosecute the criminals who copy and sell unaltered and fully intact music, film and drugs, but do not trample the rights of legitimate infringers who want to do nothing more than inform an uninformed public.

Want to put this matter to bed? See how many senators will sponsor a facsimile of the words below into PIPA, SOPA and now OPEN.

This legislation is directed at all websites engaged in the sale and distribution of unaltered music, movies and drugs and as protected by U.S. trademark and copyright law.

This legislation is not about copyright infringement as it applies to thousands of bloggers, documentarians, political satirists, re-mixers, librarians, scholars and teachers who in the course of their work often use segments from another for archival purposes, to illustrate a point, to initiate a discussion or a criticism or bring new issues to light. This constitutes a fair use of copyright law and is fundamental to free speech and the constitution and will be protected at all costs.

Unfortunately these bills and these efforts are far from dead. A brief pause has been taken and now a new one OPEN (Online Protect and Enforcement of Digital Trade Act) has recently been introduced. Free speech on the Internet is just too significant a Congressional indictment to leave alone. The more we know the more obvious those responsible will become.

Fair Use allows little guys to attempt to do for almost nothing what a corporately owned and controlled Mainstream Media has failed to do with billions. My words, my film and my site are a mosaic of other peoples work. I qualify as an infringing site. Will my work someday be under attack? Will my little squeak be silenced?

I do not possess the resources to battle the DOJ and their corporate sponsors and there are thousands more much more qualified than I trying to point out the rampant injustices that are sweeping this country. Bloggers, writers and filmmakers often use the works of others to illustrate their points. Be extremely leery of any legislation that attempts to regulate the Internet.  It is the last bastion of free speech on the planet and it is definitely under attack, especially by those very forces who proclaim their innocence the loudest.

As nightfall does not come at once, neither does oppression. There is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in just such a twilight that we must be most aware of change in the air — however slight — lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness.

– William O. Douglas

“This is a slightly unusual request,” said Dr. Wagner, with what he hoped was commendable restraint. “As far as I know, it’s the first time we have been asked to supply a dissident or ‘truth telling’ website with our Automatic Traversal Algorithm. I don’t wish to be inquisitive, but I should hardly have thought that your — ah — establishment had much use for such software. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it?”

“Gladly,” replied the dissident, adjusting his woolen beret and carefully putting away the mobile-phone with which he had been messaging his co-conspirators. “Your ATA can carry out any standard tree traversal involving up to one hundred million nodes, using the most efficient path. However, for our work we are interested in traversing actual routers and web-servers on the Net, not nodes of a data-structure. As we wish you to modify the code, the software will not only traverse nodes but also execute an instruction on each node.”

“I don’t understand …”

“Here’s my other b-card,” the dissident said, handing Wagner a business-card, a different one from that with which he had introduced himself.

“Hal L. Burton, Ph.D., President, Burton Microprocessor Research?” Wagner finished on a surprised note, reading the business-card. “I see — so that’s how you earn your money then, and I suppose freedissident dot-com is where you spend it.” Wagner warmed to his visitor. “You know, I, I …” he trailed off. After fifteen years of authoritarian rule under FEMA and the so-called ‘USA Patriot Act’, personal freedoms were severely restricted and it was not wise to express admiration for any dissident activity. Still, he said, “Actually, I visit freedissident dot-com quite often. You do great work, you’re gutsy folks.”

Wagner meant it. That website was only about three years old but had quickly developed a reputation for occasionally managing to expose government secrets and lies, and breaking suppressed news-stories. The government had tried to shut it down but had failed.

Burton smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Wagner. Been in and out of prison for it.”

Wagner smiled too, feeling a new respect for his customer. “Hoder. Call me Hoder.”

“Hoder? Nordic?”

“You’re right. Norwegian and German extraction. So tell me, how I can help you — in any way.”

“This is a project on which we have been working for the last three years — since freedissident dot-com was founded, in fact. It is perfectly in keeping with your line of work, so I think you will be able to provide the solution after I explain it,” Burton began.

“Ooo-kay.”

“It is really quite simple. It’s because of the CPU-virus and worm menace that started a few years ago. Remember Stuxnet? — that was the grandpa. My team has made a self-learning firmware patch, a one-time universal patch that takes care of several entire classes of these damn things. Nobody will have to care about any CPU virus or worm for several years, especially with new server-boxes, and therefore new chips, not being available anymore. We want to traverse the Web and apply the patch to every web-server and router.”

“Excellent idea!” Wagner was enlivened. “So you wish to start at triple-a dot-com and work up to, say, uh, … zygote dot-org …”

“Exactly–”

“… not that the actual process would be executed alphabetically,” mused Wagner thoughtfully.

He had seen the immense benefits of Burton’s plan at once; it was the need of the day, literally. Only personal desktop computers were available to Joe Blow; these machines were made such that they could not be used as web-servers. Server-class computers and routers were strictly regulated and were not available to the general public. Apart from the government and the armed forces, servers could be sold only to businesses and they too had to fill out a variety of forms to establish ‘need’, and even so, permits were granted to a minority of applicants. All the personal and independent media websites in the country ran on repaired and re-repaired machines that were over ten years old. Ten years ago, after coordinated hostage-takings and bomb-blasts in Peoria, which were blamed on foreign ‘terrorists’, the Department of Homeland Security had demanded the law regulating servers and routers, and had been given what it had asked for. Wagner knew that it was critically important to take good care of the old machines that the general public and individuals were using, and to minimize their vulnerability to viruses and worms. Personally, he suspected that the N.S.A. was behind many of the viruses that regularly crippled free-thought and dissident websites.

“You know how the Baldur chip works, right?”

“In general, yes,” Wagner nodded. He thought back to the second Bush-Cheney administration when the Baldur chip had been invented and mandated as an etched integrated-circuit on every CPU. First, it had been the V-chip. Then, the RFID chip. It had been only a matter of time before something like the Baldur chip would be proposed, be legislated for electronic devices, and become ubiquitous — every web-server and router carried it now. It provided the means to disable or lock, and re-enable or unlock, any device it was on-board on by means of one kilobit lock or unlock instructions and an accompanying and suitable five kilobit key.

“Because it’s not possible to install a firmware patch when the CPU is operating, what we plan to do is to make two passes: on the first pass, we disable the CPU and install our patch. And on the second pass, we attempt to upgrade to a different version of the firmware patch by applying a delta on the old patch for any CPU that needs it, and re-enable the CPU. I am afraid it would take too long to explain why we need this dual-pass system, even if I knew all the technical details behind it.”

“I’m sure it would,” said Wagner hastily. “Go on. I’m curious about, I mean, how are we supposed to crack those one-K instructions?” Not even any single government branch possessed those two one kilobit instructions’ bit-sequences. Each instruction was split up into three components. The Federal government was the custodian of the lower-order 512-bit-sequence, and the State governments and the Judiciary were the custodians of the higher-order bit-sequence with the 512 bits of each instruction equally split between them. This would be a first, if they pulled it off. And an underground effort, at that.

“We’ve hacked it,” Burton said with a trace of smugness. “That’s what we’ve been working on for the past three years. That, and the universal patch. But for the traversal, you’re the experts. That’s why I’m here.”

“Of course, to successfully unlock a chip, the re-enable code must be accompanied by — doesn’t the key … I mean that doesn’t it have to somehow mesh … in that there has to be a — an equivalence between the bit-wise ORs and the bit-wise ANDs between the one-K disable instruction and the key’s one-K chunks … ?” trailed off Wagner in a querying tone. He was not at all sure as to just how all this worked; he was a through-and-through Language Theory & Automata man. One or two of his specialists would certainly know this Baldur-chip business backwards, however.

Burton laughed. “I’m even more in the dark than you, but we’ve got that part nailed down. My boys are all set with the keys, the instructions, the whole shebang on that end. All we need from you is a guaranteed traversal of every node, every leaf, every router, every web-server on the Net in North America. And then they’ll be safe from these virus-making crazies.”

“Thanks to you.”

Burton smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Thanks to us, if you must.” Shifting his weight to one side, he pulled out a chequebook from his hip-pocket. “There are just two other points—”

Before he could finish the sentence, Wagner replied, “Don’t even think about it, Hal — we’re in this together.” He smiled at Burton and rose to shake his hand.

The root reason behind these machinations was the fact that the World Wide Web was that greatest of ‘unknown unknowns’ — a random techno-sociological mutation in an otherwise (mostly) ordered and controlled world; an ‘unknown unknown’ whose unforeseen birth and stupendous power to capture and exhibit the evasive and coquettish Truth had thrown off-course, and was hampering, the march towards that unholy concentration of wealth and power — the ‘New World Order’ — which the European-originated money-lending power-elite clans had so carefully been planning for centuries.

This, thought Greg, was the most satisfying thing that had ever happened to him. Chuck and he were both volunteers with an activist movement, ‘Winter Soldiers & Rainy-day Patriots’ — an apt twist of a two-century-old American concept — to restore (true) Republican government, and so the nature of this project and the linkage with freedissident.com gave him a good feeling. His thoughts drifted to the erosion of civil liberties. Besides a question of ideals, he had personal reason to be concerned: he had been detained in prison for a fortnight without any charges, simply for submitting a withering short-story about the government to a publisher — someone there had probably ratted on him. A number of laws contradicting and subverting the still-constitutionally ‘guaranteed’ free-speech were on the books now. These anti-constitutional laws had various sections — ‘dissent,’ ‘incitement,’ ‘sedition,’ and so forth. They had either been in existence since 2001 by way of un-American legislation or had been enacted during Bush-Cheney II or Clinton-Lieberman I. He was a boy when it had all started, but he knew that except for a few (true) patriots who invoked Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, the majority of the populace, apathetic and afraid, had not bothered to challenge those repressive Totalitarian laws.

Greg heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck joined him on the balcony.

“Dude! Clean compile,” Chuck said. The software they had been working on that day had built successfully.

“Sounds good! Seems like we’ll beat the schedule. You told Shrub?” ‘Shrub’ was their private nick-name for Sam W. Jaffe who was nominally partnering them from Burton’s team. On their very first day, he had delivered a near-monologue about a documentary he had seen on the San ‘Bush-men’ of the Kalahari Desert. He had gone on a little too long for Greg’s liking, and had finished by telling Greg and Chuck that, in his opinion, ‘the Bush-man’s way of life is thoroughly depraved, degenerate, and inhuman.’ After that, Greg had started referring to him as ‘Shrub.’

“Yeah, he’s happy. I’m likin’ this so far. Wanna go get some coffee?”

“Sure.”

They walked back into the office and out to the corridor.

“You seem kinda … a little subdued …” ventured Chuck after a couple of minutes, as they were descending in an elevator.

“Thinking about this project made me think of the Unpatriotic Act, FEMA, and all the shit that came after that,” said Greg, and cut loose with a few obscenities. “It’s perverse to have called something so un-American and anti-patriotic the ‘Patriot Act’!” he said loudly, and punched the elevator door as it was opening.

“Well, one reason was to fool the public into buying it, so that they would not protest against it,” said Chuck matter-of-factly. “Doing anything on New Year’s?” he asked hurriedly as they turned left at the Christmas tree in the main lobby, wanting to get Greg’s mind off the USA Patriot Act.

“Maureen and I are just getting together with a few friends. And being grateful we’ve made it a quarter of the way into the century … without blowing everyone up, despite all the carnage and mayhem. Hey, you and Janie, if you don’t have plans, why don’t you join us?”

“Aw-ight, thanks dude. I’ll tell her. Guess she’ll give you guys a call,” answered Chuck as they entered the cafeteria.

He picked up a bar of chocolate from the packaged foods rack. “Wonder which of the F3 this benefits,” he groused.

“Huh? F3? — what are you talking about?” Greg said, not comprehending.

“Dude! You mean you don’t know?! The F3 — that’s Cargill, ADM, and Monsanto — they’ve a lock on all foodstuffs. Throughout the Americas. Happened during Clinton-Lieberman II. Not even a giant like McDonald’s gets its beef now without it passing through one of the F3.” Chuck kept up with the minutiae of economic developments much more than did Greg who was naturally inclined to ideologies and abstract concepts.

“Oh!” Greg sighed and shook his head in disgust. He thought back to the second Hillary Clinton-Joseph Lieberman administration and the merger of the two political parties. Soon after their increasingly lockstep economic policies had become undeniable and obvious, the show ‘Democracy’ had been dispensed with and the Democrats and the Republicans had made their marriage official. It had ostensibly been ‘to foster inclusiveness, put an end to partisanship, and bring all Americans together under one tent.’ Exalted sentiments, tawdry reasons … and Totalitarian phraseology. The new combined party — the aptly-named ‘Federalists’ — pointed to the disorganized, little-known Constitution Party as evidence of a thriving ‘Democracy’. Standing at the packaged-foods rack, Greg subconsciously smiled wryly and shook his head in the midst of his ruminations that were triggered by Chuck’s little nugget, causing one or two people nearby to stare at him. The strange part of it all was that even though large bodies of voters would agree amongst themselves that they had voted for a Constitution Party candidate, that candidate would somehow almost never win the election. The Max McKinney crisis of the previous election was evidence of that. But the strangest thing was that frequently the media’s ‘scientific polls’ too would be at odds with an honest person’s investigation of reality. Everyone and their dog would tell you that they had voted for populist, popular activist Green, yet the ‘polls’ would show capitalist, well-connected businessman Gray holding a ‘twenty percent lead.’ It was as if normal, sane people were saying one thing to their friends and families but saying something else to these ‘pollsters’… .

“Howdy guys,” replied Sam, walking into their office. “Hal just sent me a secure message. He’s not sure if you’ve been told but absolute secrecy is essential for this project; if any governmental agency — any snoop — gets wind of it, they’re going to try to halt it, sabotage it, whatever.”

“You bet,” answered Chuck. “Hode — that’s our president, Dr. Hoder Wagner — told us. Yeah, I can imagine that the Pentagon warlord, the A-G — all those Anti-American dictatorial creeps — would not like web-servers and routers getting virus and worm-proofed.”

Their concerns were well-founded. For the past two decades, the government had maintained a network of informants within the general public, reminiscent of the long-gone U.S.S.R.

“Mum’s the word,” Greg chimed in. “So, where does Dr. Burton keep himself?”

Sam made no answer. Greg and Chuck stared at him, then glanced at one another.

“He usually, er, he has another concern that … that he spends his, um, time at,” said Sam uncertainly.

“If you mean freedissident dot-com, we know about it,” said Greg.

Sam looked relieved. “Well, I wasn’t sure you did. Yes, these days he’s usually over there. That setup is in a basement, a townhouse near Tysons Corner.” Tysons Corner was an expensive commercial and semi-residential area in Northern Virginia, about half-an-hour’s drive from Washington D.C.

After a pause, Chuck said, “It’s odd that they — the government — didn’t take down at least some part of the Web by fiat. What I mean is that I’m surprised they haven’t really tried.”

“I suppose they know that … that if they messed with the backbone or the routers, the Web would go underground,” offered Sam. “People possess routers and web-servers. Activists would create an alternate mini-Web … like a bits-and-pieces Web.”

“You’re right, we could patch up something, hmmm …” Greg mused. “Yeah, one-oh-nine-B, cable hookups, plain old copper … all underground,” he continued; he was thinking out loud more than talking to Sam. “Though I wouldn’t have thought that they’d, I mean the Feds, woulda been able to think around that curve,” he finished, addressing Sam now.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to your work,” Sam said, walking to the door. “The Web is a prized freedom and this project is important. In fact, it should have been done years ago — previous generation should’ve taken care of it.” Sam winked at them conspiratorially as he left their office.

“Shrub’s a funny guy,” said Chuck. “But he’s awright.”

“The previous effin’ generation was complacent. Complacent! Those dumb-asses kept blabbering about America being the most free country in the world even though that wasn’t true and even as our freedoms were gradually being … being chopped down, like a bloody forest being clear-cut,” said Greg, turning back to his computer. “Our freedoms are like the species: once plentiful, now declining.”

“Nice, that’s a good analogy, partner. Hey, how many species are there?” enquired Chuck. Responding to his own question, he continued, “After these climate-change-related extinctions, I think there’s, hmm … The Nine Billion Names of God … I mean, er, names of God’s creations,” he corrected himself, having taken a stab at flowery speech and felt embarrassed at the results.

“Uh, not billion, but million,” Greg said. “Nine million species.”

“Oh, yeah … ‘scuse me!” Chuck laughed at his mistake. “Though our freedoms have vanished at a rate far faster than the species,” he mused, on the same bent. “Ya know, I hacked into a Fed server one night and hit paydirt.”

“Welcome to the club,” grinned Greg. “But what do you mean, ‘paydirt’?”

“Yeah, was gonna tell you — it had a bunch of Top Secret white-papers and research reports. One was about freedoms, I’ll never forget that one. A complete list, and then some, of all the freedoms that man has and has had. Sociologists have determined that there’s precisely nine thousand freedoms.”

“Like?” prodded Greg curiously, swivelling in his chair to face Chuck.

“We-e-ell, it had all types of … of details; stuff about Paine and Mill and Nietzsche, and sociometrics and ethnograms and biostatistics … and I don’t know what — government’s technocrats have waded through all kinds of crap. They’ve concluded that 21st century humans have, or can have, exactly nine thousand freedoms. Like, just take one freedom, Communication. From plain talking to coded speech to music to … um, yes, ritual gift-giving to, what was it … gypsy-camp markers to smoke-signals, would you believe we have, if I recall correctly, exactly six-hundred and-seventeen modes of Communication? At least that’s what that research report says.”

“Six-seventeen? What were some of the others? I mean the other modes of Communication?”

“Gawd, I dunno. I remember they’ve, like, enumerated different ‘elemental’ freedoms within … what was it, a ‘group-level’ freedom, and those are within a ‘top-level’ freedom. Like ‘eye movements,’ ‘head movements,’ aah … yes, ‘muscle tone,’ ‘foot shifting,’ ‘finger-tapping’ and so on fell under ‘Body Language,’ which itself falls under a ‘top-level’ freedom, ‘Communication.’ Man, it’s freaky, I tell ya. Supposed to be a ‘research report’, but what with its different volumes it’s really like a book. It’s over three thousand pages.”

Sam appeared in the doorway of their office, looking a little flushed. “Hey, guys. Just on the news. The invasion got underway.”

“Oh, great! Now we’re killing Norwegians!” exclaimed Greg, opening a web-browser and going to news.yahoo.com.

“What’s the government-controlled media gonna call this? After all the ‘Oil Wars’, now the ‘Water Wars’?” muttered Chuck morosely.

“Um, yeah,” answered Chuck sheepishly.

Seeing Greg’s querying expression, a sly, insinuating grin spreading on his face, Chuck continued, “Hey, I found it in my pocket! I don’t know — perhaps it fell in … perhaps Janie put it there. So what?” he ended on a petulant note.

Greg clapped Chuck on the shoulder and laughed out good-naturedly at his defensiveness, setting Chuck laughing too.

“So nothing … dude!” he said, in a friendly way. “That first dynlib we built, the one for the disable-and-patch, it’s still just ‘oh dot d-n-l.’ We needed a name for it. I’ll call it ‘Mistletoe’.” Greg was referring to the dynamic-library which would, at run-time, disable or lock the CPUs on the first-pass and apply the anti-virus/anti-worm patch.

They turned back to their workstations, still working but easing off for the day.

“Damn!” said Chuck suddenly. “Hey, we gotta stress-test that random key-sequence generator I wrote before we leave for the day.” Glancing at the time, he continued, “Oh hell, Greg, Hode will be here soon. We should’ve started testing it earlier today.”

“Already banged the hell out of it. It’s good to go.”

“Oh … you did? Cool! Ya know, I wonder though that there’s no test-team. I mean what’s Hode thinking, and that guy Burton? We’re testing each others’ stuff. Should’ve had a couple of good QA guys.”

“Well … I suppose Hode knows that what we write doesn’t need testers,” said Greg with a touch of conceit. Grinning and crooking an eyebrow at Chuck, he continued, “I mean, in these past few projects, how many bugs — I mean material defects — have been found in what you and I have written? All that’s happened is that the QA guys have wound up getting an inferiority complex because they couldn’t find a single, real bug!”

Chuck smiled and shook his head, and both of them ended up laughing at Greg’s hot-shot ego-stoking. Though egotistical, his vanity was not misplaced; neither was Chuck’s caution: in the three projects that they had worked on together, the testers actually had felt dispensable — Greg and Chuck were not only exceptionally talented, they were also very careful with their coding and debugging. Yet the lack of an independent, professional Quality Assurance unit in any software project considerably increased the chances of a calamitous defect being discovered post-deployment — when the software went ‘live.’

After some time, Greg rose from his chair and stretched. However, with the first step he took, he stumbled, and awkwardly and noisily toppled across a chair. Startled, Chuck got up. Grasping the edge of the table, Greg got back on his feet and voiced an oath or two.

“Dude! You okay?” enquired Chuck. “You know I’ve seen you do this before … like, stumbling, lurching — maybe there’s a balance problem?”

“Yup, there is. Inner-ear problem. In fact, that’s what saved me from my — ah — ‘elective service’,” replied Greg, holding on to the table and grimacing at the words ‘elective service.’ “Not that I’d have enlisted, I’d rather rot in prison than kill innocents abroad.” Except for the spoilt brats of the super-wealthy and powerful, who somehow received unlimited deferments or took refuge in the National Guard, all males had to enrol compulsorily with the armed forces. The draft was back in force in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Except that it was not called ‘the draft’ any more. It was called ‘Elective Patriotic Service.’ Such Orwellisms were consistent with the by-then usual government practice of redefining old terms and inventing new ones to befog the minds of the people.

“Oh — okay.” Chuck looked on with some concern as Greg settled himself in his chair. “I was deferred because of my sciatica. Same here; I’d have chosen prison over getting brainwashed by the armed forces into massacring other peoples.”

He went on, slowly, “Ya know, it’s the armed forces themselves who shoulda bailed us out of this horror. Before it got to this point.” He was voicing a thought more than talking to Greg, blankly gazing into the distance.

“I can’t understand why the national guard, the army — they all … they all attack us, arrest us, when we simply demonstrate,” said Greg. “Are they crazy? Just for holding up signs?! Don’t they understand that we’re doing it for them besides for us? They’re the ones who get traumatized and sick and maimed for life, if not killed, in these wars and invasions!”

“That’s the way it goes — you know,” Chuck replied softly, resignedly. “The oligarchy and the Zioneocons, they make sure to recruit Afros and Hispanics from poor neighbourhoods, and those they call ‘hicks’ and ‘trailer-trash’. They’re expendable — cannon-fodder — to the powers-that-be.”

After a moment of silence, Greg said passionately, “Yes. Young guys all of them, and what a waste. Those stupid, stupid lame-brains. They’re made to feel special by being told they’re heroes, by being given their purple hearts and silver stars. Heroes on their two-bit military pensions, with amputated limbs, strange illnesses. And shattered consciences … or, or brutalized humanities from the horrors they perpetrate on innocent humans. But those corporate plutocrats and Zioneocons — the scum of humanity — they make their millions off those wars and laugh all the way to the bank.” Though conscientious and a true patriot as was Chuck, Greg was seldom quite so bitter.

Chuck said nothing; he knew that staying on the subject would only get Greg wound up. Greg was right, he thought. The public had at last realized that the mega-corporation’s main function was simply to be a front behind which the super-wealthy and the privileged few hid to further their narrow interests and accumulate ill-gotten wealth, and that the ‘humanitarian’ and ‘pre-emptive’ wars had been nothing other than wars of loot and plunder for American corporate officers, stake-holders, and Zioneocons. Those ‘pen for hire’ writers who had sung to their tune earlier in the century had been rewarded with book contracts, positive publicity by the corporate-controlled media, and outright payoffs disguised as ‘grants’. But the few courageous writers who had exposed the truth had seen their works damned with faint praise or trashed altogether. And the writers themselves had had their names smeared and been hit with ruinous lawsuits; and those residing overseas had even been murdered by U.S. puppet-regimes or C.I.A. hit-men. Chuck shook his head as he gazed vacantly at his monitor, lost in his thoughts. Murdering writers had become a frighteningly commonplace activity for the American government after they, in concert with Royal Dutch Shell, had murdered Nigerian author Ken Saro-Wiwa early in the century. Neither had had to face the consequences of their crime, for the American people had remained blissfully ignorant and unconcerned. They systematically had been deceived by the controlled media into believing that Arabs, Afros, drugs, ‘terrorists’, and other such hobgoblins hiding in the bush were the enemy, so as to divert their attention while the power-elite and the Zioneocons had been proceeding stealthily with their treacherous conquest of the U.S.A. and its economic structures and financial systems, all the while subverting the ideals of the founding fathers. American citizenry had finally woken up to reality, but it was nearly too late now… .

Chuck’s thoughts were suddenly but poetically interrupted by Greg; still in a fit of passion, he burst out in declamatory tones: “You would not tell with such high zest, to children ardent for some desperate glory, That old Lie! Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!” He spat the words, with venom and bitterness.

Startled for a second time by Greg in twenty minutes, Chuck began “What was th—” when the door opened. It was Wagner.

“Hello, men,” he said, briskly walking into the room. “Now there’s a set of domains we don’t want to hit,” he said, coming up to them. “No dot-gov or dot-mil sites and apart from those, the ones written on this list. Doable, right?”

He showed them a printout; they looked at it. It had several hundred host-names or ‘domains’. Many of them were easily recognizable as being those of the largest and most powerful corporations and the rest were those of large corporate-controlled media, wealthy political foundations, and such.

“Can-do,” said Chuck, brow furrowed. “Just curious why.”

“Talked with Hal earlier today; he brought up a good point. We don’t want to virus-proof the government’s or military’s computers! And if these giant transnationals or big-media get hit with viruses and go down for a while, screw ‘em,” Wagner said with distaste.

“Oh yeah — cool!” replied Chuck. Greg grinned and nodded approvingly.

“Good. I just emailed it to both of you; encrypted of course. Stick it where needed. So, you guys ready? Meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“So? How goes it?” Wagner asked as they walked up to the elevators.

“How goes it? Great!” said Chuck. “To be honest, Hal’s guys have done all the donkey work. Greg and I have the easy part and we’re ahead of schedule. Web’s gonna get vaccinated now, thanks to the Baddler — I mean the Baldur chip. Jeez, what a weirdo name — why, why would they call it that!”

“It’s the name of some god … North European, perhaps; a god of beauty, light, and stars, I think,” Greg said, trying to be helpful, interpreting Chuck’s rhetoric literally. “And that’s apropos — you know, aren’t some websites stars of freedom dotting the vast night-sky of, of ignorance and obfuscation? …and web-servers dot the miles and miles of fibre, and … twinkle with knowledge and information.”

“That’s pretty, Greg,” nodded Chuck appreciatively and Wagner concurred.

Greg chuckled and said that he hadn’t meant for it to come out the way it did as they entered an elevator.

Greg, Chuck, and Sam were having coffee and doughnuts in the office, a very early breakfast. They had reached the office by 3:45 a.m. on Monday and had set off the live run at four.

“Let’s see what the latest is from Norway … and also how that standoff with Brazil is developing,” said Greg, turning to his computer and bringing up a web-browser on his monitor.

“You guys think and talk a lot about wars and stuff,” commented Sam.

Greg looked at Sam and then looked through him. His face broke into a half-smile, a joyless smile; his eyes communicated the pain born of a compassionate humanity and carried a jadedness unnatural to their age of thirty-two years. He spoke very softly. “Sam, we Americans have been talking of warfare and dealing in wanton wickedness for over a century. We wouldn’t have to be talking about it and confronting it now if folks at the beginning of only this century hadn’t gotten things as totally out of hand as they did.”

Nobody replied.

“You know,” said Chuck, changing the subject, “I wonder why they asked us to randomize the keys the way they did. I mean, all the CPUs are going to be disabled for what — two, three hours? Nobody’s going to be able to crack any one-K key in even months so we might as well have used the same key for every CPU.” Chuck sounded perplexed. He looked at Sam.

Sam looked at Chuck, tilted his head, and shrugged. “That’s what Dr. Burton and his chief programmer decided.”

“I suppose they had a reason,” said Greg. “Or maybe they just didn’t think of it. Anyway, we’ll find out when Hal comes in this morning — we can ask him.”

“If he knows, if there was a reason,” said Chuck, still bemused.

“Speak of the devil…” said Sam as Burton walked in the door.

“Greg? Chuck? Pleased to meet you,” Burton said, pleasantly shaking hands with them. He gave each of them a business-card.

“Hal I. Burton, Ph.D.,” said Chuck, mis-reading the business-card.

“That’s ‘L’, not ‘I’,” corrected Burton.

“Oh! Yes, sorry. What’s the ‘L’ stand for?” Chuck asked amiably, trying to make small talk.

“My middle-name? Oh, that’s kind of embarrassing!” laughed Burton. “Blame my classicist parents! And their flights of fancy. But anyway, it’s Loki.”

“Huh! Loki. Never heard that name before.”

Greg, however, had. He frowned and smiled wryly to himself. ‘Baldur’. ‘Mistletoe’. And now ‘Loki’. A peculiar coincidence … eerie, in fact… .

Six military policemen silently entered the office and stood along a wall. Greg and Chuck, quite perplexed, stared at them, looked into their faces. Not that they found any variety or even individuality: each man had the blank, glazed, obedient face of an automaton who does as he is told; the face of an ever-increasing number of Americans, in truth.

“Change of plans, boys. We’re not starting the second pass this morning,” said Burton, as two men appeared in the dim corridor outside the door.

Greg and Chuck now looked at these two new arrivals. One of the men was elderly and squat and had a shuffling gait, the other seemed equally elderly but walked with a jaunty strut. They came into the office. Both men were remarkably ugly; their countenances bespoke the arrogance and corruption of unrestrained and untrammelled abuse of power.

“We are going to have to delay that second pass; indefinitely,” the ugly squat man said. Greg and Chuck realized with a sense of confusion that this new visitor was the Attorney-General, Sandler ‘Sandy’ Farm.

“And that’s strictly confidential, strictly confidential,” the ugly jaunty man offered, flashing that roguish grin he doled out like spare change to the fawning, vacuous hacks and flacks of the American media. He shook hands in a faux-friendly manner with Greg and Chuck. They were struck dumb, for this was the Secretary of War, Ron S. Field.

“After all, you are working for the Government of the United States of America so your absolute secrecy is required,” said Farm. His usually sullen — literally ashen — face was beaming, even cheery. “But I thank you gentlemen most sincerely for bringing this project to a successful closure.”

“I guess I can tell you now why we used different bit-sequences so as to manufacture unique five-kilobit keys for every CPU that’s being locked,” Sam said. He wore a smirk and it made him look both stupid and crafty at the same time. “Even if some bunch of idealists somehow cracks the standard re-enable instruction, it would take literally years of cracking for them to figure out the five-K key with which one particular CPU has been locked. And if they do, so what? You can’t use that same key to unlock any other — virtually any other — CPU.”

Chuck looked at Greg, not making full sense of it. Greg returned his gaze.

“You’re very smart engineers, breaking into government computers and reading our white-papers and research reports,” said Field. Nodding at Chuck, he continued, “If you had read that one all the way through — I mean ‘Mankind’s Nine Thousand Freedoms’ — you would have found out that here in America, fewer than several hundred freedoms now remain for the riffraff … I mean for the common man. The top-level freedom to think straight — ‘Unconstrained and Noise-free Cognition,’ they call it — that freedom’s, of course, the fundamental one, and it plus all its derivatives has been off the table for … what, over fifty years now.”

Everyone remained silent. Field went on, addressing both Greg and Chuck, “A small group of people have been working on this project to create voluntary free-slaves for more than two centuries — since shortly after the country was founded, in fact. It is somewhat alien to your idealistic way of thought. And the Web, now –’The World-Wide Web’ is the linchpin freedom.”

“The Web was the linchpin freedom, was the linchpin!” Farm shrieked, punching the air in quite an uncharacteristic spasm of excitement. “That’s why — Yes, yes! — I, I wanted to be here! … when i-i-it it-happened!” he babbled, and started laughing in a manner that was quite maniacal. His face was twitching and his eyes were bulging and glinting as he cackled uncontrollably.

“What … what do you mean?” asked Chuck, distracted and repulsed by Farm’s demeanour. He was still not comprehending, or perhaps not wanting to comprehend. Greg realized in a flash that there would be no second pass. They had been taken. He fell back limply in his chair.

Burton answered. His demeanour too had changed, though in a different way. His very face seemed to have undergone a transformation — as if a snake had moulted its old skin. He looked triumphant, but apart from that emotion, base cunning, greed, and evil had manifest themselves, as if settling into their rightful home after a necessary absence. “I’ll tell you what he means. The Web and the Internet started off as the ARPANet. It was not meant for –and I’m not even sure how … the rabble managed to get it. But we know how to scaremonger the little people, we know how to control you, even if the process is slow and gradual. We’re the rulers, we want the Internet back, and this time we’ll keep it for ourselves. Forever,” he said, leaving nothing to interpretation.

“All right,” said Field, now wearing a cold, disdainful smile. “Time to clear out. You’ll be debriefed at a location in Fort Meade.”

“Hoder’s waiting there,” said Burton, smiling the smile of the serpent.

Someone switched off the lights. The room was now lit only by the corridor lighting seeping in and the glare of six or so computer monitors.

Chuck walked a step or two past Greg, and started to whistle but gave it up immediately. This roomful of hostile strangers silhouetted in the dim light of the monitors did not encourage such ebullience. Greg remained seated, he felt light-headed and nauseous. There was one thing whose loss he was never going to be able to get used to… .

At a signal from Burton, two military policemen walked up to Chuck and Greg to escort them out.

Chuck glanced at his watch. “Should take only an hour more,” he murmured over his shoulder to Greg. Then he added, in an afterthought, “Wonder how many hosts have been hit? It should be halfway through about now.” He felt a sense of desolation, a stark desolation, as he said that.

Greg didn’t reply so Chuck turned around to see why. Just a moment earlier, Greg had swivelled his chair to a nearby workstation, opened a web-browser, and typed in ‘news.yahoo.com’. Chuck could just see his face, a pale, drained oval staring at the monitor.

“Look,” whispered Greg, and Chuck looked at the monitor. (There is always a last time for everything. Even the Web.) Well knowing that all was lost, Greg had acted on emotion in bringing up that website, just for the sake of looking at it once more. But it was not to be. The familiar white-and-blue home-page loaded only partially before the web-browser froze –

‘Error: Server not responding.’

Across America, without any fuss, the Web was shutting down.

Patriot Act

On May 27, 2011, President Obama, over widespread bipartisan objections, approved a Congressional four year extension of controversial parts of the Patriot Act that were set to expire.  In March of 2010, Obama signed a similar extension of the Patriot Act for one year.  These provisions allow the government, with permission from a special secret court, to seize records without the owner’s knowledge, conduct secret surveillance of suspicious people who have no known ties to terrorist groups and to obtain secret roving wiretaps on people.

Criminalization of Dissent and Militarization of the Police

Anyone who has gone to a peace or justice protest in recent years has seen it – local police have been turned into SWAT teams, and SWAT teams into heavily armored military.  Officer Friendly or even Officer Unfriendly has given way to police uniformed like soldiers with SWAT shields, shin guards, heavy vests, military helmets, visors, and vastly increased firepower.  Protest police sport ninja turtle-like outfits and are accompanied by helicopters, special tanks, and even sound blasting vehicles first used in Iraq.  Wireless fingerprint scanners first used by troops in Iraq are now being utilized by local police departments to check motorists.  Facial recognition software introduced in war zones is now being used in Arizona and other jurisdictions.  Drones just like the ones used in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan are being used along the Mexican and Canadian borders.  These activities continue to expand under the Obama administration.

Wiretaps

Wiretaps for oral, electronic or wire communications, approved by federal and state courts, are at an all-time high.  Wiretaps in year 2010 were up 34% from 2009, according to the Administrative Office of the US Courts.

Criminalization of Speech

Muslims in the US have been targeted by the Obama Department of Justice for inflammatory things they said or published on the internet.  First Amendment protection of freedom of speech, most recently stated in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, Brandenberg v Ohio, says the government cannot punish inflammatory speech, even if it advocates violence unless it is likely to incite or produce such action.  A Pakistani resident legally living in the US was indicted by the DOJ in September 2011 for uploading a video on YouTube.  The DOJ said the video was supportive of terrorists even though nothing on the video called for violence.  In July 2011, the DOJ indicted a former Penn State student for going onto websites and suggesting targets and for providing a link to an explosives course already posted on the internet.

Domestic Government Spying on Muslim Communities

In activities that offend freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and several other laws, the NYPD and the CIA have partnered to conduct intelligence operations against Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere.  The CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans, works with the police on “human mapping”, commonly known as racial and religious profiling to spy on the Muslim community.  Under the Obama administration, the Associated Press reported in August 2011, informants known as “mosque crawlers,” monitor sermons, bookstores and cafes.

Top Secret America

In July 2010, the Washington Post released “Top Secret America,” a series of articles detailing the results of a two year investigation into the rapidly expanding world of homeland security, intelligence and counter-terrorism.   It found 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence at about 10,000 locations across the US.  Every single day, the National Security Agency intercepts and stores more than 1.7 billion emails, phone calls and other types of communications. The FBI has a secret database named Guardian that contains reports of suspicious activities filed from federal, state and local law enforcement.  According to the Washington Post, Guardian contained 161,948 files as of December 2009.  From that database there have been 103 full investigations and at least five arrests the FBI reported.  The Obama administration has done nothing to cut back on the secrecy.

Other Domestic Spying

There are at least 72 fusion centers across the US which collect local domestic police information and merge it into multi-jurisdictional intelligence centers, according to a recent report by the ACLU.  These centers share information from federal, state and local law enforcement and some private companies to secretly spy on Americans.  These all continue to grow and flourish under the Obama administration.

Abusive FBI Intelligence Operations

The Electronic Frontier Foundation documented thousands of violations of the law by FBI intelligence operations from 2001 to 2008 and estimate that there are over 4000 such violations each year.  President Obama issued an executive order to strengthen the Intelligence Oversight Board, an agency which is supposed to make sure the FBI, the CIA and other spy agencies are following the law.  No other changes have been noticed.

Wikileaks

The publication of US diplomatic cables by Wikileaks and then by main stream news outlets sparked condemnation by the Obama administration officials who said the publication of accurate government documents was nothing less than an attack on the United States.  The Attorney General announced a criminal investigation and promised “this is not saber rattling.” Government officials warned State Department employees not to download the publicly available documents.  A State Department official and Columbia officials warned students that discussing Wikileaks or linking documents to social networking sites could jeopardize their chances of getting a government job, a position that lasted several days until reversed by other Columbia officials.  At the time this was written, the Obama administration continued to try to find ways to prosecute the publishers of Wikileaks.

Censorship of Books by the CIA

In 2011, the CIA demanded extensive cuts from a memoir by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, in part because it made the agency look bad.  Soufan’s book detailed the use of torture methods on captured prisoners and mistakes that led to 9-11. Similarly, a 2011 book on interrogation methods by former CIA agent Glenn Carle was subjected to extensive black outs.  The CIA under the Obama administration continues its push for censorship.

Blocking Publication of Photos of U.S. Soldiers Abusing Prisoners

In May 2009, President Obama reversed his position of three weeks earlier and refused to release photos of US soldiers abusing prisoners.  In April 2009, the US Department of Defense told a federal court that it would release the photos.  The photos were part of nearly 200 criminal investigations into abuses by soldiers.

Technological Spying

The Bay Area Transit System, in August 2011, hearing of rumors to protest against fatal shootings by their police, shut down cell service in four stations.  Western companies sell email surveillance software to repressive regimes in China, Libya and Syria to use against protestors and human rights activists.  Surveillance cameras monitor residents in high crime areas, street corners and other governmental buildings.  Police department computers ask for and receive daily lists from utility companies with addresses and names of every home address in their area.  Computers in police cars scan every license plate of every car they drive by.  The Obama administration has made no serious effort to cut back these new technologies of spying on citizens.

Use of “State Secrets” to Shield Government and Others from Review

When the Bush government was caught hiring private planes from a Boeing subsidiary to transport people for torture to other countries, the Bush administration successfully asked the federal trial court to dismiss a case by detainees tortured because having a trial would disclose “state secrets” and threaten national security.  When President Obama was elected, the state secrets defense was reaffirmed in arguments before a federal appeals court.  It continues to be a mainstay of the Obama administration effort to cloak their actions and the actions of the Bush administration in secrecy.

In another case, it became clear in 2005 that the Bush FBI was avoiding the Fourth Amendment requirement to seek judicial warrants to get telephone and internet records by going directly to the phone companies and asking for the records.  The government and the companies, among other methods of surveillance, set up secret rooms where phone and internet traffic could be monitored.  In 2008, the government granted the companies amnesty for violating the privacy rights of their customers.  Customers sued anyway. But the Obama administration successfully argued to the district court, among other defenses, that disclosure would expose state secrets and should be dismissed.  The case is now on appeal.

Material Support

The Obama administration successfully asked the US Supreme Court not to apply the First Amendment and to allow the government to criminalize humanitarian aid and legal activities of people providing advice or support to foreign organizations which are listed on the government list as terrorist organizations.   The material support law can now be read to penalize people who provide humanitarian aid or human rights advocacy. The Obama administration Solicitor General argued to the court “when you help Hezbollah build homes, you are also helping Hezbollah build bombs.”  The Court agreed with the Obama argument that national security trumps free speech in these circumstances.

Chicago Anti-war Grand Jury Investigation

In September 2010, FBI agents raided the homes of seven peace activists in Chicago, Minneapolis and Grand Rapids seizing computers, cell phones, passports, and records.  More than 20 anti-war activists were issued federal grand jury subpoenas and more were questioned across the country.  Some of those targeted were members of local labor unions, others members of organizations like the Arab American Action Network, the Columbia Action Network, the Twin Cities Anti-War Campaign and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.  Many were active internationally and visited resistance groups in Columbia and Palestine.  Subpoenas directed people to bring anything related to trips to Columbia, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Israel or the Middle East.  In 2011, the home of a Los Angeles activist was raided and he was questioned about his connections with the September 2010 activists.  All of these investigations are directed by the Obama administration.

Punishing Whistleblowers

The Obama administration has prosecuted five whistleblowers under the Espionage Act, more than all the other administrations in history put together.  They charged a National Security Agency advisor with ten felonies under the Espionage Act for telling the press that government eavesdroppers were wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on misguided and failed projects.  After their case collapsed, the government, which was chastised by the federal judge as engaging in unconscionable conduct allowed him to plead to a misdemeanor and walk.  The administration has also prosecuted former members of the CIA, the State Department, and the FBI.  They even tried to subpoena a journalist and one of the lawyers for the whistleblowers.

Bradley Manning

Army private Bradley Manning is accused of leaking thousands of government documents to Wikileaks.  These documents expose untold numbers of lies by US government officials, wrongful killings of civilians, policies to ignore torture in Iraq, information about who is held at Guantanamo, cover ups of drone strikes and abuse of children and much more damaging information about US malfeasance.  Though Daniel Ellsberg and other whistleblowers say Bradley is an American hero, the US government has jailed him and is threatening him with charges of espionage which may be punished by the death penalty.  For months Manning was held in solitary confinement and forced by guards to sleep naked.  When asked about how Manning was being held, President Obama personally defended the conditions of his confinement saying he had been assured they were appropriate and meeting our basic standards.

Solitary Confinement

At least 20,000 people are in solitary confinement in US jails and prisons, some estimate several times that many.  Despite the fact that federal, state and local prisons and jails do not report actual numbers, academic research estimates tens of thousands are kept in cells for 23 to 24 hours a day in supermax units and prisons, in lockdown, in security housing units, in “the hole”, and in special management units or administrative segregation.  Human Rights Watch reports that one-third to one-half of the prisoners in solitary are likely mentally ill.  In May 2006, the UN Committee on Torture concluded that the United States should “review the regimen imposed on detainees in supermax prisons, in particular, the practice of prolonged isolation.”  The Obama administration has taken no steps to cut back on the use of solitary confinement in federal, state or local jails and prisons.

Special Administrative Measures

Special Administrative Measures (SAMS) are extra harsh conditions of confinement imposed on prisoners (including pre-trial detainees) by the Attorney General.  The U.S. Bureau of Prisons imposes restrictions such segregation and isolation from all other prisoners, and limitation or denial of contact with the outside world such as: no visitors except attorneys, no contact with news media, no use of phone, no correspondence, no contact with family, no communication with guards, 24 hour video surveillance and monitoring. The DOJ admitted in 2009 that several dozen prisoners, including several pre-trial detainees, mostly Muslims, were kept incommunicado under SAMS.  If anything, the use of SAMS has increased under the Obama administration.

These twenty concrete examples document a sustained assault on domestic civil liberties in the United States under the Obama administration.  Rhetoric aside, how different has Obama been from Bush in this area?

Under “transparency president” Barack Obama, the U.S. government initiated a criminal probe of the organization after the site began releasing a virtual tsunami of confidential military and State Department files.

In the last two years alone, WikiLeaks revealed that the United States had committed grave war crimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and other global hot-spots of interest to America’s resource-grabbing corporate masters.

This year’s release of 779 classified dossiers on prisoners housed at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag fleshed out the public’s knowledge of ongoing torture programs run by the military and the CIA under cover of it’s murderous “War on Terror.”

But it was their publication of some 250,000 secret State Department cables which sparked a new round of hysterical denunciations in Washington culminating in the witchhunt against Julian Assange and WikiLeaks supporters, a demonization campaign aided and abetted by U.S. financial institutions such as Bank of America and Pentagon cyberwar contractors.

Cable after cable revealed “the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in ‘client states’; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.”

Leading politicians, including Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell have called the web site’s founder a “high-tech terrorist,” and commentators such as right-wing Washington Times columnist Jeffery Kuhner and others have demanded that Assange and his co-workers be treated “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.”

The Obama administration, loathe to pursue criminal probes of the previous regime’s lawbreaking, the better to immunize themselves over their own contemporary lawless acts, including the torture of prisoners at Bagram Airbase, clandestine CIA drone killings and the due process-free assassination of an American citizen who was never charged, let alone convicted of a crime, was up to the challenge and empaneled a grand jury in Alexandria, Va.

And when Justice Department inquisitors first sought to seize the activist’s information, in keeping with the new “Washington consensus” that constitutional rights are nothing more than empty platitudes duly trotted out on national holidays, they demanded that Twitter turn over the files without benefit of a warrant.

American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney Aden Fine denounced the ruling. “Internet users don’t automatically give up their rights to privacy and free speech when they use services like Twitter,” Fine said.

“The government shouldn’t be able to get this kind of private information without a warrant, and they certainly shouldn’t be able to do so in secret. An open court system is a fundamental part of our democracy, and the very existence of court documents should not be hidden from the public.”

According to the ACLU, it wasn’t only Twitter that was served with record demands by the Justice Department. “Based on the file numbers that have been created, it appears likely that there are additional orders whose existence remains secret.”

The public first became aware of the government’s fishing expedition only because Twitter informed the three activists, Jacob Appelbaum, a founding member of the online anonymity network, Tor Project, Rop Gonggrijp, a founder of the Dutch web portal XS4ALL and Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a left-wing member of Iceland’s Parliament.

As Antifascist Calling reported in March, Jónsdóttir was specifically targeted for her role in helping WikiLeaks release the Collateral Murder video last year.

That scandalous video exposed the wanton slaughter of a dozen people in the Iraqi suburb of New Baghdad, including two Reuters photojournalists, by a U.S. military Apache helicopter crew. Two children were also seriously wounded in the unprovoked attack.

The Army’s thrill-kill gun camera video wasn’t concealed from the public because of any alleged threat to “national security” or to protect intelligence “sources and methods,” standard boilerplate used to hide war crimes by the U.S. Empire, but precisely to cover-up imperialism’s murderous rampage that helped “liberate” Iraqis of their lives.

Commenting on the ruling, Jónsdóttir told The Guardian, “This is a huge blow for everybody that uses social media. We have to have the same civil rights online as we have offline. Imagine if the US authorities wanted to do a house search at my home, go through my private papers. There would be a hell of a fight. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Unfortunately, under Section 213 of the oxymoronic USA Patriot Act, which was not subject to a “sunset” provision of the constitution-shredding legislation, FBI agents can do precisely that and obtain so-called “delayed notification” warrants for the search and seizure of evidence of any federal crime, not only those related to “terrorism” investigations.

Called “sneak and peek” searches, federal snoops are permitted to clandestinely seize property or conduct electronic searches on a home computer if a court deems such seizures “reasonably necessary.” Indeed, notification of a covert FBI home invasion “may thereafter be extended by the court for good cause shown.”

The sweeping ruling by Judge Liam O’Grady upheld demands by U.S. investigators that they should have virtual free-reign to pillage private records related to the users’ IP address, the unique identifier used by a computer or hand-held device to log onto the internet.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who represent Jónsdóttir along with American Civil Liberties Union attorneys, O’Grady “also blocked the users’ attempt to discover whether other Internet companies have been ordered to turn their data over to the government.”

“When you use the Internet, you entrust your online conversations, thoughts, experiences, locations, photos, and more to dozens of companies who host or transfer your data,” EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn said.

“In light of that technological reality, we are gravely worried by the court’s conclusion that records about you that are collected by Internet services like Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Google are fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

Among other things, O’Grady wrote in his 60-page decision that “the information sought was clearly material to establishing key facts related to an ongoing investigation and would have assisted a grand jury in conducting an inquiry into the particular matters under investigation.”

O’Grady, appointed to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2007 by President George W. Bush, argued that because Twitter users “voluntarily” turned over their IP addresses when they signed up for an account, they lost any expectation of privacy.

In other words, simply because users click through opaque “Terms of Service” agreements with Twitter, Google, Facebook or any other internet vendor, “petitioners knew or should have known that their I.P. information was subject to examination by Twitter, so they had a lessened expectation of privacy in that information, particularly in light of their apparent consent to the Twitter terms of service and privacy policy.”

However, as security researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed out in Slight Paranoia, “The federal judge in the Wikileaks case cited in his order a version of Twitter’s privacy policy from 2010, rather than the very different policy that existed when Appelbaum, Gonggrijp and Jonsdottir created their Twitter accounts back in 2008.”

“That older policy,” Soghoian wrote, “actually promised users that Twitter would keep their data private unless they violated the company’s terms of service. It is unclear how the judge managed to miss this important detail.”

“There is a slight problem with relying on a privacy policy created on November 16, 2010 to decide the reasonable expectation of privacy of these three individuals: They created their Twitter accounts several years before the document was written.”

Indeed, as Soghoian observes, “not only is a federal judge ruling that 3 individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy with regard to the government getting some of their Internet transaction data, but the judge isn’t even citing the right version of a widely ignored privacy policy to do so.”

“If the judge were to examine the privacy policy that existed when these three targets signed up for a Twitter account,” Soghoian concludes, “he might decide that they do in fact have a reasonable expectation of privacy and that the government needs a warrant to get the data.”

While true as far as it goes, and Soghoian should be commended for pointing out this glaring contradiction in the government’s case, readers are well aware that the WikiLeaks Twitter case is about politics not process, that is, moves by the secret state to clamp-down on dissent and dissenters, and not whether someone has read and “voluntarily” signed-off on a vendor’s “Terms of Service” agreement.

Among other things, O’Grady’s ruling revealed that the government was seeking not only IP addresses but “1. subscriber names, user names, screen names, or other identities; 2. mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, e-mail addresses and other contact information; 3. connection records, or records of session times and durations; 4. length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; 5. telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and 6. means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number) and billing records.”

It doesn’t take a computer forensics expert to conclude that the government, in obtaining “connection records,” will also get their hands on information about anyone else who corresponded or “followed” the activists on Twitter.

Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney with EFF told CNET News that the ruling means that “essentially any data about you collected by an Internet service is fair game for warrantless searches by the government.”

The District Court’s ruling can be situated within the wider context of the Obama administration’s unprecedented drive to criminalize whistleblowing.

The persecution of Julian Assange and other WikiLeaks supporters is a shot across the bow not only against those who leak sensitive information to the public that expose egregious acts by the well-connected, but at investigative journalists and researchers who in their course of their work uncover high crimes and misdemeanors by powerful corporations and governments.

As the World Socialist Web Site pointed out, “Assange’s real ‘crime’ is that, through its publication of a mass of secret US military documents, diplomatic cables and video footage, WikiLeaks has exposed the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and numerous other conspiracies carried out against the world’s people by Washington and its allies.”

Make no mistake, this ruling is a warning of further draconian moves to come.

School superintendents placed it in restricted sections of their libraries.

It is the most challenged book four of the past five years, according to the American Library Association (ALA).

“It” is a 32-page illustrated children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, with illustrations by Henry Cole. The book is based upon the real story of Roy and Silo, two male penguins, who had formed a six-year bond at New York City’s Central Park Zoo, and who “adopted” a fertilized egg and raised the chick until she could be on her own.

Gays saw the story as a positive reinforcement of their lifestyle. Riding to rescue America from homosexuality were the biddies against perversion. Gay love is against the Bible, they wailed; the book isn’t suitable for the delicate minds of children, they cried as they pushed libraries and schools to remove it from their shelves or at the very least make it restricted.

The penguins may have been gay—or maybe they weren’t. It’s not unusual for animals to form close bonds with others of their same sex. But the issue is far greater than whether or not the penguins were gay or if the book promoted homosexuality as a valid lifestyle. People have an inherent need to defend their own values, lifestyles, and worldviews by attacking others who have a different set of beliefs. Banning or destroying free speech and the freedom to publish is one of the ways people believe they can protect their own lifestyles.

During the first decade of the 21st century, the most challenged books, according to the ALA, were J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, apparently because some people believe fictionalized witchcraft is a dagger into the soul of organized religion. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series was the 10th most challenged in 2010. Perhaps some parents weren’t comfortable with their adolescents having to make a choice between werewolves and vampires.

Among the most challenged books is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the vicious satire about firemen burning books to save humanity. Other books that are consistently among the ALA’s list of most challenged are Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Chocolate War (Robert Cormier), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Forever (Judy Blume), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), regarded by most major literary scholars as the finest American novel.

Name a classic, and it’s probably on the list of the most challenged books. Conservatives, especially fundamental religious conservatives, tend to challenge more books. But, challenges aren’t confined to any one political ideology. Liberals are frequently at the forefront of challenging books that may not agree with their own social philosophies. The feminist movement, while giving the nation a better awareness of the rights of women, wanted to ban Playboy and all works that depicted what they believed were unflattering images if women. Liberals have also attacked the works of Joel Chandler Harris (the Br’er Rabbit series), without understanding history, folklore, or the intent of the journalist-author, who was well-regarded as liberal for his era.

Although there are dozens of reasons why people say they want to restrict or ban a book, the one reason that threads its way through all of them is that the book challenges conventional authority or features a character who is perceived to be “different,” who may give readers ideas that many see as “dangerous.”

The belief there are works that are “dangerous” is why governments create and enforce laws that restrict publication. In colonial America, as in almost all countries and territories at that time, the monarchy required every book to be licensed, to be read by a government official or committee to determine if the book was suitable for the people. If so, it received a royal license. If not, it could not be printed.

In 1644, two decades before his epic poem Paradise Lost was published, John Milton wrote a pamphlet, to be distributed to members of Parliament, against a recently-enacted licensing law. In defiance of the law, the pamphlet was published without license. Using Biblical references and pointing out that the Greek and Roman civilizations didn’t license books, Milton argued, “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable create [in] God’s image,” he told Parliament, “but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God.” He concluded his pamphlet with a plea, “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”

A century later, Sir William Blackstone, one of England’s foremost jurists and legal scholars, argued against prior restraint, the right of governments to block publication of any work they found offensive for any reason.

The arguments of Milton and Blackstone became the basis of the foundation of a new country, to be known as the United States of America, and the establishment of the First Amendment.

Every year, at the end of September, the American Library Association sponsors Banned Book Week, and publishes a summary of book challenges. And every year, it is made more obvious that those who want to ban books, sometimes building bonfires and throwing books upon them as did Nazi Germany, fail to understand the principles of why this nation was created.

Their letter and with a copy of the op-ed I wrote in the Finger Lakes Times are attached.

Allow me to refute the lies and innuendos that these “colleagues” have levied against me, behind my back. Since each of you received the detractors’ letter, I am sending you this rebuttal.

1. The purpose of my op-ed was to define Holocaust denial. That should be clear from the byline “What do deniers really mean?” It was submitted in response to the media frenzy and demonization of President Ahmadinejad who addressed the UN General Assembly and whose picture was shown above my guest appearance piece. Instead of acknowledging this, my faculty detractors feigned outrage that it appeared on the eve of Yom Kippur. I had nothing to do with the timing of the article and make no apology for when it appeared vis-à-vis a Jewish holiday.

2. More egregiously these faculty detractors claimed to know my “personal beliefs” and claimed that I mis-used my title of professor emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges to lend them credence. That is simply a lie. Nowhere are my personal beliefs stated. Moreover my op-ed included an exceptionally long disclaimer showing The Colleges neither condone nor condemn what I had written.

3. The faculty detractors claim that “Holocaust denial carries absolutely no weight among academic scholars in any field whatsoever.” That is simply not true. There are a number of scholars who write about the typical Holocaust narrative and are willing to fight the slime hurled at them by ardent Zionists and by others who feel it their duty to protect the narrative which serves as the sword and shield of apartheid Israel. (BTW, our former provost and former William Smith Dean both demanded that I not use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israel; granted the term was used in the Israeli press and later by President Carter, but it was not “suitable discourse” on our campus where we routinely claim to support free speech and diversity of opinion.)

4. The faculty detractors write that “denying undisputed facts of the holocaust (sic) is not a way to show support for the Palestinians.” First, the three tenets of Holocaust revisionism are clearly not “undisputed. To the contrary, they are hotly and passionately disputed; people’s lives are ruined when they even question these “facts.” In fourteen countries you can get jail time for disputing “facts” surrounding the Holocaust.

Second, disputing “facts” is what science and historical analysis is all about. We academics have no problem discussing and disputing whether or not Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, or if President Obama’s birth certificate is real, or if President Roosevelt knew a Japanese attack on Hawaii was imminent, but we are not allowed to discuss or dispute the six-million figure.

Third, what gives these detractors the credentials to pontificate on what supports or hurts Palestinians? Some of them have been responsible for feting at Hobart and William Smith Colleges anti-Palestinian demagogues including Wiesel and even Netanyahu. They helped give Madeleine Albright our highest humanitarian award, which is a disgrace in light of her statement that the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children was “worth it.” Was I the only one to protest that award?

I have team-taught a senior course on the Palestinians. I have published books and articles on the Palestinian Naqba and the massacre of Arab civilians by Jewish terrorists at Deir Yassin. I have built the only United States memorial to their dispossession and ethnic cleansing. I don’t need, nor accept, biased comments on how to support Palestinians.

5. Calling Holocaust historical revisionism “Holocaust denial” is unnecessarily pejorative. It might be fine for Fox News, but it is not conducive to academic discourse. To call Holocaust revisionism “thinly veiled anti-Semitism” is simply untrue and it demeans scholars and others, including Jews, who question the Holocaust doctrine as we are fed it in hundreds of films, books, articles, and commentaries. Terms like Holocaust Industry, Holocaust Fatigue, Holocaust professional, Holocaust wannabes, and Holocaust High Priest were not coined by “deniers” or anti-Semites; they were coined by Jews. (The High Priest quip is an obvious reference to Wiesel; it was made by Tova Reich in her book My Holocaust. Tova’s husband, Walter Reich, was the former director of the US Holocaust Museum in Washington.)

In 1946 the US government told us that over 20 million people were murdered by Hitler. Now that figure is said to be 11 million; it is literally carved in stone at the US Holocaust Memorial. For years we were told that over 4 million were killed at Auschwitz, but by the early 1990s that figure was reduced to 1.5 million. Wiesel tells us that people were thrown alive onto pyres; he claims to have seen it with his own eyes; today Yad Vashem trained guides at Auschwitz say that is not true. These are examples of historical revisionism and they are not inherently anti-Semitic.

6. It is most interesting to see academic colleagues say, “(a)s we all know … the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was introduced to make genocide sound more palatable.” That means they either deny that Palestinians have been (and continue to be) ethnically cleansed or they agree that Israel is performing genocide of the Palestinian people.

7. While the faculty detractors found my speech to be “abhorrent,” they seemed unable to find fault with a single fact I presented. So they resorted to name-calling and labeled the piece “hate speech” and “unsupported vitriol” and smeared my name to hundreds of people. I am surprised that Abe Foxman or the Mossad did not come calling.

8. The detractors genuinely were concerned about the op-ed’s impact on our Jewish students, staff, and faculty. But maybe it is time for all members of the community to see the Holocaust for what it really was and not the unquestionable, unimpeachable, doctrine that makes Jewish suffering superior to that of other people. Maybe it is time to recognize that Zionism as a political movement to create a Jewish state in Palestine began long before the Holocaust and that Zionist discrimination, dehumanization, and dispossession of the Palestinian people should not be excused by it. Maybe it is time to see that since over half the population (within the borders controlled by Israel) is not Jewish, the dream of creating a Jewish state has failed. Walling in the non-Jews or putting them in Bantustans or driving them into Jordan will not make it a purely Jewish state. The nationalist allegiance to “blood and soil” has been a failure and that should be the real lesson of the Holocaust.

9. To say that my op-ed “does not meet our expectation of minimally rational and minimally humane discourse’ is nonsense. The piece is well written, well substantiated, and quite humane.

10. But the faculty detractors are quite right about one thing; they were deeply disturbed and saddened to see a Hobart and William Smith title attached to it. Diversity and perspectives outside the mainstream are to be encouraged, but not if they question Jewish power, Israel, or Holocaust doctrine. Apparently that is beyond the pale.

11. The demand to President Gearan to remove my title of Professor Emeritus is both classic and stupid. Consider how little it would accomplish. I would be supposedly ashamed and I would have to buy a walking pass at the gym that would cost me $40 a year. Would it save HWS from being associated with my writings? Of course not; I would simply use the title of “Former Professor Emeritus at Hobart and William Smith Colleges” with no disclaimer.

But what it would really do is to cast me into the briar bush with Norm Finkelstein, Marc Ellis, Paul Eisen, Henry Herskovitz, Gilad Atzmon, Rich Siegel, and Hedy Epstein (a Holocaust survivor), all friends of mine and all anti-Zionists. Professors Ost, Linton, and Mertens apparently saw this and I credit (or blame) them for my still having the emeritus title.

Lest I seem irreverent or unscathed by this widely-circulated smear letter from my detractors, allow me to admit that I have been hurt by it. Many faculty and other HWS folks now shun me as a persona non grata largely because they only read the slime and never a rebuttal. Of course until now there could be no rebuttal because the smear letter was withheld from me. (Even the Provost’s request to send me a copy was refused.)

My former student and long-time friend, David Deming, who is now the Chair of the HWS Board does not answer my letters. President Gearan does not answer them either. Board member, Roy Dexheimer, disparages me and wonders if I fell “off my meds.” Another Board member, Stuart Pilch, took it a step further and made a threatening phone call to my home and a promise “to hunt me down.”

But the biggest disappointment is with those faculty detractors who never came to discuss or complain about what I had written, but instead chose to spin their own interpretation, which was full of lies and half truths, and then disseminate their smear as widely as possible. Should any of you be one of the signatories, my door is open for further discussion. And if you know the names of the other signatories, I would appreciate your sharing that information with me.

Ever wonder why the truth about 9/11 never got exposed? Why Americans don’t have a clue about leadership fraud surrounding the War on Terror? Why Americans don’t know if the 9/11 investigation was really successful? Why the Iraqi Peace Option draws a blank? Somebody has known the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden— or his grave—for the past 10 years. But nobody’s talking to the people.

In significant part, that’s because of the Patriot Act— a law that equates free speech with sedition. It’s got a big agenda, with 7,000 pages of Machiavellian code designed to interrupt individual questioning of government policy. In this brave new world, free speech under the Bill of Rights effectively has been declared a threat to government controls for maintaining stability. And the Patriot Act has become the premiere weapon to attack whistle blowers and dissidents who challenge the comfort of political leaders hiding inconvenient truths from the public. It’s all the rage on Capitol Hill, as leaders strive to score TV ratings, while their demagoguery as “outstanding leadership performance” on everything from national security to environmental policy.

Truth has Become Treason

But wait–Congress assures us the Patriot Act only targets foreigners, who come to our shores seeking to destroy our way of life through violent, criminal acts. Good, law abiding Americans have nothing to fear. The Patriot Act restricts its powers of “roving wiretaps” and warrantless searches to international communications among “bad guys.” Congress has sworn, with hand on heart, it’s only purpose is breaking down terrorist cells and hunting out “lone wolf” mad men.

That’s what they told you, right? And you believed them? You trust the government. Well, that was your first mistake. With regards to the Patriot Act, it’s a fatal one. Would the government lie to you? You betcha! And they have.

The Patriot Act reaches far beyond terrorism prevention. In my home state of Maryland, State Police invoked the Patriot Act to run surveillance on the Chesapeake Climate Action Network dedicated to wind power, recycling and protection of the Chesapeake Bay. They infiltrated the DC Anti War Network, suggesting the group might be a front for “white supremacists,” and Amnesty International, claiming to investigate “civil rights abuses.” Opponents of the death penalty also got targeted (in case they got violent).

Bottom line: truth tellers who give Americans too much insight on any number of issues are vulnerable to a vast arsenal of judicial weapons typically associated with China or Myanmar. In the Patriot Act, the government has created a powerful tool to hunt out free thinking on the left or right. It doesn’t discriminate. Anyone who opposes government policy is at risk

How do I know all this? Because I was the second non-Arab American ever indicted on the Patriot Act. My arrest defied all expectations about the law. I was no terrorist plotting to explode the Washington Monument. Quite the opposite, I had worked in anti-terrorism for almost a decade, covering Iraq and Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Malaysia at the United Nations. At the instruction of my CIA handler, I had delivered advance warnings about the 9/11 attack to the private staff of Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Office of Counter-Terrorism in August, 2001. FBI wire taps prove that I carried details of a comprehensive peace framework with Iraq up and down the hallowed corridors of Capitol Hill for months before the invasion, arguing that War was totally unnecessary.

I delivered those papers to Democrats and Republicans alike; to my own second cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; and to Secretary of State Colin Powell, who lived next door to my CIA handler. Gratis of the Patriot Act, we had the manila envelope and my hand written notes to Secretary Powell, dated a week before his infamous speech at the United Nations. My papers argued that no WMDs would be found inside Iraq, and that the peace framework could achieve all U.S. objectives without firing a shot.

In short, I was an Asset who loudly opposed War with Iraq, and made every effort to correct the mistakes in assumptions on Capitol Hill.

Then I did the unthinkable. I phoned the offices of Senator Trent Lott and Senator John McCain, requesting to testify before a brand new, blue ribbon Commission investigating Pre-War Intelligence. Proud and confident of my efforts, I had no idea Congress was planning to blame “bad intelligence” for the unpopular War.

Over night I became Public Enemy Number One on Capitol Hill.

Thirty days later I awoke to hear FBI agents pounding on my door. My nightmare on the Patriot Act lasted 5 years— Four years after my arrest, the Court granted me one morning of evidentiary testimony by two supremely credible witnesses. Parke Godfrey verified my 9/11 warnings under oath. Otherwise, I never got my day in Court.

The Patriot Act’s Arsenal to Stop Free Speech

If you care about America and the traditions of freedom, whether you’re progressive or conservative, you should be angry about this law.

First come the warrantless searches and FBI tracking surveillance. My work in anti-terrorism gave me no protection. I got my first warrantless search after meeting an undercover FBI agent to discuss my support for free elections in Iraq and my opposition to torture and sexual humiliation of Iraqi detainees. (Sorry guys, body wires don’t lie.)

If truth tellers don’t get the message to shut their mouths, the Justice Department ratchets up the pressure. Defendants face secret charges, secret evidence and secret grand jury testimony. Throughout five years of indictment, my attorneys and I never got to read a single FBI interview or grand jury statement. Under the Patriot Act, the whistleblower/defendant has no right to know who has accused him or her of what criminal activities, or the dates of the alleged offenses, or what laws got broken.

Of course, I was able to piece together my activities. I knew that “sometime in October, 2001″ an Iraqi diplomat gave me the English translation of a book on depleted uranium, which showed how cancer rates and birth defects had spiked in Iraqi children.

And I was quite certain that on October 14, 1999, an Iraqi diplomat asked me how to channel major financial contributions to the Presidential Campaign of George Bush and Dick Cheney. The Justice Department got the date from me, since I reported my conversation immediately to my Defense Intelligence handler, Paul Hoven.

It’s unlikely the grand jury knew that, since the Justice Department has the prerogative to keep a grand jury in the dark. In this brave new world, a grand jury can be compelled to consider indictments carrying 10 years or more in prison, without the right to review evidence, or otherwise determine whether an individual’s actions rise to the level of criminal activity at all.

That’s just the beginning. Once Congress scores an indictment against a political opponent, the Justice Department can force Defense attorneys to undergo protracted security clearances, while the whistle blower cum defendant waits in prison–usually in solitary confinement or the SHU. After the security clearance, prosecutors have an ironclad right to bar attorneys from communicating communications from the prosecution to the defendant, on threat of disbarment, stiff fines or prison sentence.

Scared yet? Once you get to trial, the situation gets much worse. The Patriot Act declares that a prosecutor has no obligation to show evidence of criminal activity to a jury at all. And the Defense can be denied the right to argue a rebuttal to those secret charges, because it requires speculation that might mislead the jury—or might expose issues that the government considers, well, secret. After all that a Judge can instruct a jury that the prosecution regards the secret evidence as sufficient to merit conviction on the secret charges. The Jury can be barred from considering the lack of evidence in weighing whether to convict.

Think I’m exaggerating? You would be wrong. That’s what happened to me. All of it—with one major glitch. All of this presumes the whistle blower’s lucky enough to get a trial. I was denied mine, though I fought vigorously for my rights. Instead, citing the Patriot Act, I got thrown in prison on a Texas military base without so much as a hearing—and threatened with indefinite detention and forcible drugging, to boot.

Americans are not nearly afraid enough.

Neither is Congress. As of this week, members of Congress should be very afraid. Anyone who votes to extend the Patriot Act should expect to pack their bags in 2012. They will be targeted for defeat. Above all, the words “freedom” and “Constitution” will never appear in their campaigns without suffering extreme public scorn—never, ever again.

Arrests at protest have been increasing each year since 2009. Those arrested include people protesting US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, strip mining, home foreclosures, nuclear weapons, immigration policies, police brutality, mistreatment of hotel workers, budget cutbacks, Blackwater, the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, and right wing efforts to cut back collective bargaining.

These arrests illustrate that resistance to the injustices in and committed by the US is alive and well. Certainly there could and should be more, but it is important to recognize that people are fighting back against injustice.

Information on these arrests has been taken primarily from the newsletter The Nuclear Resister, which has been publishing reports of anti-nuclear resistance arrests since 1980, and anti-war actions since 1990.

Jack Cohen-Joppa, who with his partner Felice, edits The Nuclear Resister, told me “Over the last three decades, in the course of chronicling more than 100,000 arrests for nonviolent protest and resistance to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, torture, and war, we’ve noted a quadrennial decline as support for protest and resistance gets swallowed up by Presidential politicking. It has taken a couple of years, but the Hopeium addicts of 2008 are finally getting into recovery. We’re again reporting a steady if slow rise in the numbers willing to risk arrest and imprisonment for acts of civil resistance. Today, for instance, there are more Americans serving time in prison for nuclear weapons protest than at any time in more than a decade.”

In the list below I give the date of the protest arrest and a brief summary of the reason for the protest. After each date I have included the name of the organization which sponsored the protest. Check them out. Remember, they can jail the resisters but they cannot jail the resistance!

2011
January 1, 2011. Nine women, ages 40 to 91, who brought solar panels to the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor were arrested for blocking the driveway at Entergy Corporation. Shut It Down.
January 5, 2011 and February 2, 2011. Five arrests were made of peace activists protesting at Vandenberg Air Force base, including a veteran of WWII. Vandenberg Witness.
January 11, 2011. Ten people protesting against the continued human rights violation of Guantanamo prison trying to deliver a letter to a federal judge were arrested at the federal building in Chicago, Illinois.
January 11, 2011. A sixty one year old grandmother protesting against excessive radiation was arrested for blocking the path of a utility truck in Sonoma County, California.
January 15, 2011. Twelve people protesting against Trident nuclear weapons at the Kitsap-Bangor naval base outside of Seattle, Washington were arrested – six on state charges of blocking the highway and six others on federal charges of trespass for crossing onto the base. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
January 17, 2011. Marking the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, people protested outside the Lockheed Martin Valley Forge Pennsylvania office where eight people were arrested. Brandywine Peace Community.
January 17, 2011. Three people protesting the US use of armed drones and depleted uranium were arrested at the Davis-Monthan air force base near Tucson Arizona.
January 29, 2011. Eight peace activists marking the 60th anniversary of the testing of the atom bomb were arrested at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Nevada Desert Experience.
February 10, 2011. Twenty three hotel workers were arrested after protesting management abuses at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. UNITE Here Local 2.
February 15, 2011. A former CIA agent turned whistleblower was arrested and battered by police for standing silently and turning his back during a speech on the need for human rights in Egypt delivered by the US Secretary of State. Veterans for Peace.
February 17, 2011. Nine people protesting against the attack on collective bargaining in Wisconsin were arrested at the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison.
February 25, 2011. Eleven people protesting federal budget cuts against the poor, including one person in a wheelchair were arrested charged with blocking traffic in Chicago.
March 4, 2011. Three people were arrested in Seattle after a protest against police abuse.
March 4, 2011. Sixteen people were arrested at a protest against tuition increases at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
March 10, 2011. Fifty people protesting the removal of collective bargaining rights were arrested after being carried out of the Wisconsin Capitol in Madison.
March 16, 2011. Seven union supporters protesting proposals to strip collective bargaining from teachers were arrested in Nashville Tennessee.
March 19, 2011. One hundred thirteen people protesting the eighth anniversary of the war in Iraq, lead by Veterans for Peace, were arrested at White House. Veterans for Peace.
March 19, 2011. Eleven military family members and veterans were arrested in Hollywood California after staging a sit protesting the 8th anniversary of the war in Iraq. Veterans for Peace.
March 20, 2011. Thirty five people were arrested protesting outside the Quantico brig where Bradley Manning was being held. Bradley Manning Support Network.
March 28, 2011. Seven people defending a family against eviction and protesting home foreclosures were arrested in Rochester, NY, including a 70 year old neighbor in her pajamas. Take Back the Land.
April 4, 2011. Seven people protesting against unjust immigration legislation barring undocumented immigrants from Georgia colleges were arrested for blocking traffic in Atlanta Georgia.
April 7, 2011. Seventeen people were arrested protesting budget cuts in assistance for the poor and elderly and calling for an end to corporate tax exemptions in Olympia Washington.
April 10, 2011. Twenty seven people calling attention to the thousands of murders of people in Latin America by graduates of the US Army School of the Americas/WHINSEC were arrested outside the White House. School of Americas Watch.
April 11, 2011. Forty one people, including the Mayor and many of the members of the District of Columbia city council, protesting Congressional action limiting how the District of Columbia could spend its own money were arrested in Washington DC.
April 15, 2011. Eight teenage girl students, some as young as fourteen, were arrested after they refused to leave their public school Catherine Ferguson Academy, which is specially designated for pregnant and mothering teens in Detroit. Also with the young women were children and teachers. The school is targeted for closure due to budget cutbacks.
April 22, 2011. Thirty seven people were arrested protesting the use of drones outside the Hancock Air Force base near Syracuse New York. Syracuse Peace Council. Ithaca Catholic Worker.
April 22, 2011. Eleven women chained and locked the gate at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant in Vernon Vermont before being arrested.
April 22, 2011. Thirty three people protesting at the Livermore Lab which designs nuclear weapons at an interfaith peace service were arrested for trespassing in California.
April 22, 2011. Four people were arrested at the Pentagon after they held up a banner and read from a leaflet outside of the designated protest zone. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker.
April 24, 2011. Sixteen protestors against nuclear weapons at the Nevada National Security Site were arrested after a sixty mile sacred walk from Las Vegas. Nevada Desert Experience. Pace e Bene.
May 2, 2011. Fifty two protestors against a nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City Missouri were arrested after blocking a gate to the construction site. Holy Family Catholic Worker.
May 9, 2011. Five people protesting against draconian immigration laws were arrested in the governor’s office in Indianapolis, Indiana.
May 7, 2011. Seven people celebrating Mothers Day and protesting nuclear weapons were arrested outside the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor twenty miles from Seattle. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
May 9, 2011. Sixty five people protesting cutbacks in education funding were arrested in Sacramento California.

2010
January 6, 2010. Over one hundred people protesting for union recognition of hotel workers at Hyatt San Francisco were arrested. UNITE Here Local 2.
January 15, 2010. A man who served nearly six months in jail and who was still on probation for hammering windows at a military recruiting center in Lancaster Pennsylvania was arrested at the recruiting center after insisting that recruiters and recruits to leave the army.
January 18, 2010. Seven people commemorating Martin Luther King’s birthday wore sandwich board messages saying “Make War No More,” “It’s about Justice,” and “its About Peace,” outside of Lockheed Martin’s main entrance in Merion Pennsylvania until they were arrested. Brandywine Peace Community.
January 21, 2010. Forty-two people protesting the ongoing human rights violations of Guantanamo prison were arrested at the US Capitol building. Twenty-eight were arrested on the steps of the Capitol and fourteen inside the rotunda. Witness Against Torture.
January 26, 2010. Thirteen people from Minnesota lobbying to stop funding for war were arrested after holding a die-in on the sidewalk in front of the White House. Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
January 31, 2010. Eight people were arrested trying to protest at Vandenberg Air Force base in California, one of those arrested, an octogenarian, was brought to the hospital for injuries suffered in the arrest. A few days later, seven protestors were arrested at the same spot. A month later, four more protestors were arrested. Vandenberg Witness.
February 22, 2010. Five people protesting against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were arrested inside US Senators’ offices in the Des Moines Iowa federal building. Voices for Creative Nonviolence. Des Moines Catholic Worker.
March 4, 2010. Four students protesting against rape were arrested after they refused to leave the administration building at Michigan State University in East Lansing Michigan.
March 20, 2010. Nine peace activists were arrested in Washington DC for lying down beside mock coffins outside the White House.
March 21, 2010. Two people protesting at the Aerospace and Arizona Days air show at Monthan Air Force base held a banner declaring “War is not a Show” in front of a Predator Unmanned Air Vehicle (drone) were arrested.
March 30, 2010. Eight protestors were arrested during a march against police brutality in Portland Oregon.
April 2, 2010. Eleven people on a Good Friday walk for peace and justice were arrested outside the USS Intrepid in New York city after they began reading the names of 250 Iraqi, American and Afghan war dead. Pax Christi New York.
April 2, 2010. Nine people carrying a banner “Lockheed Martin Weapons + War = The Crucifixion Today” in the 34th annual Good Friday protest at Lockheed Martin were arrested in Valley Forge Pennsylvania. Brandywine Peace Community.
April 4, 2010. Twenty two people protesting against nuclear weapons after the Sacred Walk from Las Vegas to the Nevada Nuclear Test Site were arrested after the Western Shoshone sunrise ceremony and Easter Mass. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 7, 2010. Three people, including a 12 year old girl, were arrested inside a US Senators office in Des Moines, Iowa with a banner “No More $$$ For War.” The mother of the 12 year old girl was called into the police station and issued a citation the next day for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Voices for Creative Nonviolence and Des Moines Catholic Worker.
April 15, 2010. A man protesting nuclear weapons was arrested inside the security fence of a nuclear missile silo near Parshall, North Dakota.
April 16, 2010. Twelve people protesting against Sodexho mistreatment of workers were arrested in Montgomery County Maryland. Service Employees International Union.
April 20, 2010. A woman was arrested for standing in the path of a bulldozer to try to prevent mining in Marquette County, Michigan.
April 26, 2010. Seventeen people protesting war and poverty inside and outside the federal building in Chicago were arrested. Midwest Catholic Worker.
April 26, 2010. Boulder Colorado police arrested five people protesting at Valmont coal power plant.
May 3, 2010. Three people protesting nuclear weapons were arrested at Bangor Naval Base outside of Seattle Washington. Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action.
May 3, 2010. Twenty two people protesting nuclear weapons were arrested at Grand Central Station in New York city after unfurling banners saying “Nuclear Weapons = Terrorism,” and “Talk Less, Disarm More.” War Resisters League.
May 9, 2010. Seven people trying to stop a foreclosure-driven eviction were arrested in Toledo Ohio. Take Back the Land.
May 15, 2010. Thirty four people protesting against Arizona’s draconian immigration laws were arrested outside the White House.
May 17, 2010. Sixteen people were arrested in NYC protesting against unjust immigration policies.
May 20, 2010. A woman US Army specialist who served as a Military Police applied for conscientious objector status while serving in Iraq and who later left her unit was sentenced to 30 days in jail.
May 24, 2010. Thirty seven people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrests in New York City.
June 1, 2010. Fifty six people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrested in NYC.
June 8, 2010. Six peace advocates were arraigned in federal court in Des Moines, Iowa for numerous actions protesting in US Senators offices for the previous several months. One activist, a grandmother and hog farmer, held weekly die-ins in Senators’ offices and was arrested frequently. Once, when police asked her to leave, she replied that she was dead and couldn’t leave. Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
June 15, 2010. Several people protesting against evictions caused by bank foreclosure were arrested in Miami Florida. Take Back the Land.
June 23, 2010. Twenty two people protesting in favor of immigration reform singing “America the Beautiful” and “This Land is Your Land,” were arrested and charged with blocking traffic in Seattle.
July 5, 2010. Thirty six people protesting for a nuclear free future were arrested at the Y12 Nuclear Weapons Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – thirteen of federal trespass charges and twenty-three on state charges for blocking a highway. Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.
July 6, 2010. Seventy eight people protesting against police brutality in Oakland California and the trial involving a shooting by a BART police office.
July 23, 2010. One hundred fifty two hotel workers protesting against management at the Grand Hyatt San Francisco were arrested. UNITE Here Local 2.
July 29, 2010. Thirteen people were arrested in Tucson Arizona protesting against the state’s illegal immigration laws.
August 9, 2010. On Nagasaki day, three people protesting against the US commitment to nuclear weapons were arrested outside the US Strategic Air Command in Omaha Nebraska. Omaha Catholic Worker.
August 15, 2010. A twenty two year old female student at Michigan State University who pitched an apple pie at a US Senator during an anti-war protest was arrested and charged with federal felony charges of forcible assault on a federal officer. Another anti-war activist was also arrested and charged with the same crime.
September 9, 2010. Twelve people protesting for equality for gay people in the workplace were arrested in San Francisco.
September 27, 2010. One hundred fourteen people protesting mountaintop removal coal mining were arrested at the White House after a conference of people from West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Prior to this protest, forty-nine activists in the Climate Ground Zero Campaign have served jail time for taking action against strip-mining in Appalachia. Climate Ground Zero.
November 5, 2010. One hundred fifty two people protesting police killings were arrested in Oakland, California.
November 8, 2010. Five people protesting wind turbines in Lincoln, Maine were arrested including an 82 year old native of Maine.
November 21, 2010. Three people were arrested on federal charges and twenty-four more on state charges at the School of Americas/WHINSEC protest in Columbus Georgia outside the gates of Fort Benning. Six others were arrested at a protest against a private prison housing immigrants in rural Georgia. School of Americas Watch. ACLU Immigrant Rights Project.
December 1, 2010. Three people protesting against unjust immigration policies were arrested at the office of a Congress rep in Racine Wisconsin. Voces de la Frontera.
December 16, 2010. One hundred thirty one protestors, including numerous veterans, gathered in the snow outside the White House challenging the war in Afghanistan, the cover-up of war crimes and the prosecution of Bradley Manning and Wikileaks were arrested for failing to clear the sidewalk. In a parallel New York City protest, several others were also arrested. Veterans for Peace.
December 17, 2010. Twenty two people protesting against unfair home foreclosures were arrested when they blocked an entrance to a Chase bank branch in Los Angeles. Alliance Californians for Community Empowerment.
December 20, 2010. Six people were arrested after protesting at Bank of America against the foreclosure of an elderly couple in South Saint Louis. Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment.
December 28, 2010. Three parents asking for the abolition of all nuclear weapons were arrested for leafleting at the Pentagon. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker.

2009
January 2009, seventeen people, clad in black mourning clothes and white masks, were arrested in the US Senate Building for reading the names of the dead in ongoing US wars and unfurling banners stating “The Audacity of War Crimes,” “Iraq,” “Afghanistan,” “Palestine,” and “We Will Not Be Silent.”
January 26, 2009, six human rights advocates were sentenced to two to six months of federal prison or home arrest in federal court in Columbus Georgia for challenging training of Latin American human rights abusers at the US Army School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) by walking onto Fort Benning. School of Americas Watch.
January 2009, a former Army specialist who refused to graduate with his Airborne Division because he realized he could not kill anybody was arrested and jailed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The former soldier had been ordered home in May 2002 to await discharge papers. Courage to Resist.
February 2009. There were fifteen arrests of activists protesting mountain top removal by Massey in West Virginia. Climate Ground Zero.
February 2009, five peace activists in Salem Oregon fasting on the steps of the state capitol building so that National Guard soldiers would not be sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were cited for trespass by state police.
March 1, 2009, six anti-nuclear activists protesting the 55th anniversary of the US nuclear bomb detonation at Bikini Atoll were arrested at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Kitsap, Washington after they knelt in the roadway. Ground Zero Community and Pacific Life Community.
March 4, 2009, nine people seeking to present a letter to CEO of Alliant Technologies outlining how weapons manufacturers were prosecuted as war criminals at the end of WWII were arrested in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Alliant Action.
March 12, 2009, four people who were arrested during a protest at Vandenberg Air Force base were fined between $500 and $2500 by federal authorities. California Peace Action.
March 17, 2009, seven people seeking a meeting with US Defense Secretary to challenge the legality of the war in Iraq were arrested at the Pentagon. National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance.
March 18, 2009, seven women, ranging in ages from 65 to 89, some in wheelchairs and walkers, were arrested protesting the war in Iraq after wrapping yellow crime scene tape around a military recruiting center and blocking the entrance for an hour in New York City. Grannie Peace Brigade.
March 19, 2009, three people protesting the war in Iraq were arrested in Washington DC. In one instance a US Army veteran scaled the front of the Veterans Administration building and unfurled a banner saying “Veterans Say NO to War and Occupation.” Protests against the war in Iraq in Chicago resulted in an arrest there after banner drop.
March 19-21, 2009, protests against the war in Iraq in San Francisco resulted in twenty-two arrests at a die-in in the financial district, eleven more for blocking a street outside the Civic Center, and ten more at the Saturday march when Palestinian marchers were confronted by pro-Israel counter protestors resulting in police using batons and tear gas.
March 31, 2009, four people were arrested in Brattleboro, Vermont, for standing in silent opposition to the Vermont Yankee nuclear power reactor.
March 31, 2009, an anti-nuclear protestor was convicted of trespassing at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons facility and sentenced to two days in jail, community service and probation. Trinity House Catholic Worker.
April 3, 2009, four people protesting injustices on Wall Street and in Afghanistan and Iraq were arrested in New York, NY, for marching down the center of the street. Bail Out the People Movement.
April 9, 2009, fourteen people were arrested at Creech Air Force outside Las Vegas Nevada base protesting against the US use of drones in lethal attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 10, 2009, eight people were arrested while kneeling and praying for peace at the Pentagon. Another, clad in an orange jumpsuit and black hood, was arrested at the White House where he was chained to the fence protesting the human rights abuses of Guantanamo. Jonah House.
April 10, 2009, sixteen people were arrested while protesting the war profiteer Lockheed Martin in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Brandywine Peace Community.
April 12, 2009, twenty one people were arrested while protesting the use of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site on Western Shoshone tribal lands. Nevada Desert Experience.
April 17, 2009. A man protesting US polices of violence, racism and poverty-production was sentenced to six months in prison for hammering out some windows in the US Military Recruiting Center in Lancaster Pennsylvania.
April 23, 2009, four people protesting lies by military recruiters were arrested after locking themselves to the door at the military recruiting center in Minnesota. Three others were arrested at the Knollwood Plaza after disrupting the recruitment center so much it had to be closed. Another woman was arrested near a recruiting center after placing a “Don’t Enlist” sticker on a police car. Antiwar committee.
April 24, 2009, a woman calling for the return of the National Guard from Iraq was arrested in the US House Appropriations during testimony by US Generals in Washington DC. Code Pink.
April 28, 2009, a US Army veteran who refused to fight in Iraq was court-martialed in Fort Stewart, Georgia and sentenced to one year in prison. Courage to Resist.
April 29, 2009, twenty-two people were arrested after trying to serve a Notice of Foreclosure for Moral Bankruptcy on Blackwater/Xe, the mercenary company responsible for so many deaths in Iraq, at its compound in Mount Carmel, Illinois. Des Moines Catholic Worker Community.
April 30, 2009, sixty three people were arrested at the White House protesting against illegal detention and torture at Guantanamo prison. Witness Against Torture.
May 20, 2009. Twenty one people protesting against the war in Iraq were arrested outside a military recruiting center in Milwaukee Wisconsin.
July 22, 2009, four people protesting against Boeing’s role in the production of drones, which have killed more than 700 people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, were arrested inside the Boeing lobby in Chicago, Illinois. Christian Peacemaker Teams.
August 4, 2009, four shareholders who sought to speak at the shareholders meeting of depleted uranium munitions producer Alliant Techsystems were arrested when they approached the microphone in Eden Prairie Minnesota. Alliant Action.
August 5, 2009, a US Army specialist who refused to deploy to Afghanistan was sentenced to 30 days in jail and given a less than honorable discharge in Killeen Texas. Courage to Resist.
August 6, 2009, a 75 year old priest, protesting the 64th anniversary of the US dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima, was arrested outside of Greeley Colorado where he cut the fence around a nuclear missile silo, hung peace banners, prayed and tried to break open the hatch on the silo.
August 6, 2009, nine antiwar activists were arrested at Fort McCoy Wisconsin after a three day peace walk protesting against US nuclear weapons and wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nuke Watch.
August 6, 2009, two people were arrested at the Pentagon entrance on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing carrying a banner stating “Remember the Pain, Remember the Sin, Reclaim the Future.” Jonah House.
August 6, 2009, twenty two people protesting the horror of Hiroshima were arrested in Livermore California when they blocked the entrance to the Lawrence Livermore weapons lab. Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment.
August 6, 2009, nine people at a vigil for peace and nonviolence were arrested for walking onto Lockheed Martin property at Valley Forge Pennsylvania and spreading sunflower seeds, an international symbol for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Brandywine Peace Community.
August 6, 2009, two people were arrested when they refused to stop praying at the gates of the Davis-Monthan Air Force base in Tucson Arizona. Rose of the Desert Catholic Worker.
August 10, 2009, nine persons calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons were arrested at Bangor Naval base, home to the Trident submarine, twenty miles from Seattle Washington. Ground Zero Community.
August 14, 2009, a US Army Sergeant who refused to go to Afghanistan and who asked for conscientious objector status was found guilty of disobeying lawful orders and going AWOL at a trial in Fort Hood. He was sentenced to one year in prison and given a bad conduct discharge.
August 17, 2009. Four people were arrested outside the Boalt Hall classroom where they were protesting John Yoo, who coauthored the memos authorizing torture on people in Guantanamo during the Bush administration.
August 22, 2009, two people protesting against nuclear missile testing were arrested at Vandenberg Air Force base and cited for trespass.
September 9, 2009. Four people protesting against Massey Energy mountain top removal were arrested in Madison West Virginia. Climate Ground Zero.
September 12, 2009, seven people who were protesting against the use of the high-tech bloodless arcade Army Experience Center in Philadelphia were arrested. Seven other protestors were arrested there earlier in the year. Shut Down the AEC.
September 24, 2009, ninety two people protesting management disregard for union rights of hotel workers were arrested at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Francisco. UNITE Here Local 2.
September 27, 2009, twenty one people protesting against the Nevada Test Site were arrested at the Mercury gate. At an action to “Ground the Drones” protesting the increasing use of lethal drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, another eleven people were arrested. Code Pink. Pace e Bene. Nevada Desert Experience.
September 28, 2009, four women, ages 66 to 90, walked past security guards at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant protesting inadequate safety at the plant. Carrying signs saying “Yom Kippur, September 28, Time to Atone, Shut Down Vermont Yankee,” this was the seventh set of arrests at the nuclear plant or its corporate headquarters since 2005.
September, 2009, the US Army accepted the resignation of Lieutenant, who refused to fight in Iraq because he believed the war violates international law, and gave him a discharge under other than honorable conditions. Courage to Resist.
October 1, 2009. A well known mixed martial arts fighter was sentenced to 90 days of work release and a fine of $28,000 for spraying symbols on an Army recruiting center and the Washington State Capitol building to help raise consciousness about the illegal war in Iraq.
October 2, 2009. Four people trying to deliver a document titled “Employee Liabilities of Weapons Manufacturers under International Law” to the weapons manufacturer Alliant Technologies were arrested in Eden Prairie, Minnesota. Alliant Action.
October 5, 2009, a couple, who married the day before and who were carrying a banner saying “Just Married; Love Disarms,” were arrested during a peace protest at Lockheed-Martin in Sunnyvale California. A priest was also arrested as the three gave out leaflets to workers entering the war contractor work site. Albuquerque New Mexico Catholic Worker.
October 5, 2009, sixty one people were arrested while protesting the ninth year of the US war in Afghanistan in front of the White House. Some of the arrested were in orange jumpsuits and chained to the fence. Secret Service officers assaulted other protestors, pushing and pulling them away from the protest site, bruising some. No Good War and Jonah House.
October 7, 2009, twelve protestors against the war in Afghanistan were arrested in Rochester, NY. Some of the arrested were treated at the hospital after being struck by police. Rochester Students for a Democratic Society.
October 7, 2009. Two people were arrested in Grand Central Station after unfurling banners which said “Afghanistan Enough!” War Resisters League.
October 11, 2009. Two women who held up banners when Tiger Woods was ready to putt, saying “President Obama – End Bush’s War,” and “End the Afghan Quagmire,” were handcuffed and escorted away from the President’s Cup golf tournament in San Francisco.
November 2, 2009. Five people calling for nuclear disarmament cut through the fence around the Naval Base Kitsap which houses the Trident nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads outside of Seattle Washington. The five walked through the base until they found the storage area for nuclear weapons and cut two more fences to get inside where they put up banners and spread sunflower seeds until they were arrested. Disarm Now Plowshares.
November 4, 2009. Two people were arrested while protesting outside Vandenberg Air Force base in California. Vandenberg Witness.
November 4, 2009. Eight protestors, including one who was 91 years old, were arrested at the Strategic Space Symposium in Omaha Nebraska while holding a “Space Weapons=Death” banner. Des Moines and Omaha Catholic Worker.
November 15, 2009. Five people protesting against US torture practices at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where military interrogators are trained were arrested. Torture on Trial.
November 22, 2009. Four people protesting the training of human rights abusers by the US Army at their School of Americas/WHINSEC were arrested in Columbus, Georgia. School of Americas Watch.
November 23, 2009. A longtime war tax resister pled guilty to avoiding paying taxes for war at court in Bangor Maine. National War Tax Resistance Coordination Committee.
December 1, 2009. Protestors at 100 cities across the country challenged President Obama’s talk at West Point to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Six were arrested at West Point, eleven in Minneapolis, and three in Madison Wisconsin.
December 9, 2009. Six people protesting that President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize were arrested outside the federal building in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Catholic Worker.
December 10, 2009. Six people protesting the use of lethal drones were forcibly escorted out of the 11th Annual Unmanned Aerial Systems Conference outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Trinity Nuclear Abolition and Code Pink.
December 29, 2009. Twelve people leafleting and praying for peace at the Pentagon were arrested. Dorothy Day Catholic Worker and Jonah House.

To help explain the absurd result of May 2, I have enlisted the aid of columnist Ethan Baron. Before I get to specifics, two things deserve special mention. First, Baron is a U.S.-born journalist who recently became a citizen after living here for 20 years. This was the first time he cast a vote in a federal election, and maybe his last.

Second, Baron’s column—a model of sobriety, candour and wit—appeared in the Province, without doubt the country’s most pathetic excuse for a newspaper. Its editors think so little of their readership, and have such little respect for the craft of journalism, that the front page, I was told, is not for reporting “news” stories but for reflecting what’s topical in the minds of its readers. This explains the endless spate of redundant full-page sports pics replete with inane headlines. I think the Province’s motto is: “No news is good news.”

I would love to reprint Baron’s entire column, but I’ll focus on one exquisite passage:

The actual explanation for the Conservative majority is more sinister than mere feeblemindedness. Canadians, in droves, turned up their noses at democracy, choosing a party that has attacked it at every turn. These voters made their electoral decision with one hand holding their wallets and the other flailing around from their eyes to their ears, willfully shutting out the endless evidence that it is the people, and not just Parliament, that Harper holds in contempt.

Pause a moment to take in the breathtaking genius of this passage. Harper’s assaults on Canadian institutions, the rule of law, and the democratic rights of Canadian citizens are public knowledge, which should have told voters that Harper is overtly subversive and a danger to Canadian sovereignty. In view of the Speaker’s finding of contempt of Parliament, Harper should even have been forced to resign his seat.

Lamentably, facts such as these did not matter come election day, nor did the idea that a political candidate had to have a modicum of intelligence to stand for office. On May 2, millions of voters looked at the “Conservative” label in their local riding, shut their brains off, internalized the negative propaganda, and cast a vote for Harper’s parrots and sockpuppets.

However, as in the U.S., party labels in Canada have long since ceased to have any useful meaning, yet “conservative” still evokes illusions of fiscal responsibility. As Baron mentioned, Harper racked up a $55.6 billion deficit in 2009-10—the highest in Canadian history. Not even the most spendthrift NDP government could have accomplished such a feat of wanton profligacy.

Baron is dead right—we did this to ourselves and did it willingly. A CTV poll even reported that 50% of respondents wanted a majority Harper government just so they wouldn’t have to vote in so many elections.

We chose fascism over democracy, and now our national traditions, civil liberties and the rule of law are vulnerable to the whims of a dictator who sees the public good as an obstacle to be overcome in the name of rampant corporatism. For example:

• The CBC, Canada’s public broadcaster has been a staple of Canadian identity and national unity since its creation as a Crown Corporation on Nov. 2, 1936. As a Crown Corporation the government of the day is forbidden to exercise operational control over it, yet Harper is talking about defunding it altogether. Meanwhile, a pro-Harper, Faux-News style disinformation channel (SunNews) was recently approved.

• The Charter of Rights guarantees freedom of opinion, yet the Israel-first Harper will doubtless try to criminalize dissent about Israeli war crimes and the Holocaust®. Already, scientists who warn of the dangers of man-made climate change have been muzzled.

Why so many Canadians “turned up their noses at democracy,” cannot be answered simply by reading the entrails of the May 2 vote. The answer goes back to 1980, when the radical individualism and unenlightened self-interest of “neo-conservatism” took hold as a secular religion. It began in the U.S. under the benighted corporatist presidency of Ronald Reagan, who successfully tapped into the cult of greed and visceral hatred of government that animates American individualism. Over the next four decades, public spending, civil liberties and the rule of law soon became treated as a moral evils.

In Canada, which was created specifically to resist the contagion of U.S. individualism, governments at all levels played an integral role in shaping and defining Canadian nationhood, and was respected for it. We had respect for the public good, but no more. Just as in the U.S., it is the norm to:

• attack public spending as tantamount to theft from “taxpayers,”
• condemn industry regulation as an attack on corporate profits,
• disparage political dissent, and
• embrace militarism and xenophobia, among other things.

Yes, Canada, you elected the first de facto fascist majority government in your history, and why? You were too lazy, indifferent or ignorant to take your electoral responsibilities seriously. You have no time for politics, and want politicians to think for you.

Welcome to Canada, Ethan Baron—make yourself at home!

Most readers are familiar with the military campaigns and siege by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza. Fewer, however may be aware of the systemic campaign of arrest and detention carried out in the West Bank. According to Sahar Francis in the web journal Electronic Intifada, “The last year has witnessed continuing mass arrest campaigns… and the detention of high-profile protest organizers and leaders from the popular committees.” Many of those arrested are held on so-called secret evidence that neither the arrestees or their defense are allowed to see. The reasons for the arrests of these organizers are the same as the reasons it opposes the Fatah-Hamas agreement: Israel fears a united and popular resistance against its occupation. Simultaneously, these arrests and detentions isolate the organizers and paint them into the same corner as those Israel and the West call terrorists.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Attorney General Eric Holder are ramping up their attempts to indict and prosecute a number of antiwar and Palestinian support activists in the Midwest. Most recently, the U.S. government (via the Treasury Department) froze the bank accounts of the Arab-American Action Network’s Executive Director Hatem Abudayyeh and his wife, Naima. Neither of these individuals have been charged with a crime. However, both were part of the series of sweeps conducted in late 2010 by the FBI and US Justice Department against antiwar activists in the Midwest. These raids were conducted under the aegis of the PATRIOT Act and the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act of 1996. Both of these laws intentionally obscure the differences between expressing support for popular struggles in other nations and providing “material support.” Of course, it is only activists supporting popular struggles opposed by the United States that face the possibility of prosecution. Those that give millions to Israel, the so-called rebel movements in Libya and other armed groups supported by Washington are hailed as supporters of freedom, much like those that traded cocaine for guns to support the contras in Nicaragua. Indeed, these latter endeavors are not only cheered but assisted by the federal government itself.

The driving force behind the subpoenas and accompanying harassment in the Midwestern cases is US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald. Of course, he would not have gone forward with the raids and grand juries without the support of US Attorney General Eric Holder. Fitzgerald is perhaps best known as the prosecutor in the Valerie Plame case that resulted in the conviction of former Vice President Cheney’s aide Scooter Libby. However, Fitzgerald has prosecuted several other high-profile cases including the corruption cases of Illinois governor Dan Ryan and Rod Blagojevich. Fitzgerald’s prosecutions have been marked by a heavy reliance on circumstantial evidence and a prosecutorial interpretation of the defendants’ conversations and statements — a fact that has aroused some criticism. Of course, when one is interpreting political statements and associations, such interpretations easily open themselves to misunderstanding and suppositions based on the prosecutor’s own politics and fears. For example, one could easily share a speaker’s platform at a rally or meeting with a political organizer from a group whose only point of solidarity is that Israel’s occupation is wrong and so is Washington’s support of that occupation. This sharing of the podium does not condone a wholesale endorsement of every group that share the opinion regarding the occupation. However, the laws currently defining “material support” can be interpreted as meaning exactly that by a Justice Department intent on doing its part to destroy the Palestine solidarity movement. Fitzgerald’s previous reliance on circumstantial evidence to make his cases makes him the ideal prosecutor to go after political activists whose primary act is speaking out in favor of groups actively opposed to the foreign policy of the United States.

As of this writing (morning May 10, 2011), the assets of the Abudayyeh family remain frozen. This means that they can not buy groceries and pay their bills. The sheer pettiness of this act reminds this writer of similar actions taken by Tel Aviv against various Palestinians. In a May 9, 2011 press release from the Committee to Stop FBI Repression, they wrote: “The Midwest activists have been expecting indictments for some time. The freezing of the Abudayyeh family’s bank accounts suggests that the danger of indictments is imminent.” Mark Twain once wrote: “It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.” These folks have used their freedoms of thought and speech and are now being attacked by the government for doing so. Should these indictments come down, anybody interested in the first amendment should do whatever is in their power to oppose them. This entire case is nothing but an exercise in political persecution designed to silence those who have moved beyond their comfort zones to challenge a foreign policy based on murder, lies and greed.

UPDATE. The Committee to Stop FBI Repression released a statement Tuesday evening May 10, 2011 regarding the Abudayyeh’s acounts. Part of the statement read: “In a strange turn of events, the bank admitted today that they shut down the accounts, stating they no longer want to provide banking services to the Abudayyeh family. Simultaneously, TCF management informed the Abudayyehs today that they were issuing them a check for the value of their accounts….

Michael Deutsch, attorney for the family, said, “In my opinion, the bank did not act out of the blue. I suspect that the FBI and U.S Attorney investigation caused the bank to overreact and illegally freeze the Abudayyehs’ banking accounts that had been there for over a decade.”

In response to the seizing of the couple’s accounts, people across the country called the offices of US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago, and those of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) demanding the return of their money and an end to the repression.

A Code Pink activist from Washington, D.C., called Fitzgerald’s office and was told, “We’ve received hundreds of calls.” The OFAC office was bombarded as well, and journalists from a National Public Radio affiliate, Al Jazeera and other agencies contacted them for an explanation.