RAGE. MISTRUST. HATRED. FEAR.
UNCLE SAM'S ENEMIES WITHIN
The alarming rise of a new tyranny
SUNDAY HERALD
International News
Sunday, 29 June 2003
By Neil Mackay
WHEN the Hollywood actor Tim Robbins took to his feet before the
National Press Club in Washington DC in April this year, he delivered
a speech laced with deliberate echoes of Bob Dylan's protest song
Blowin' In The Wind. While Dylan, however, sang of freedom and
liberty one day triumphing over repression and control, Robbins was
saying that the greatest democracy on earth, the United States of
America, was heading in the opposite direction under President Bush:
to a future where freedom had lost out to repression and liberty
to control.
'A chill wind is blowing in this nation,' said Robbins -- who, along
with his wife, the actress Susan Sarandon, has been routinely
denounced by the American right. 'A message is being sent through
the White House and its allies in talk radio ... if you oppose this
administration, there can and will be ramifications. Every day the
airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats,
spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And
the public ... sit in mute opposition and fear.'
Just days before this speech, Saddam's statue in Baghdad was wrapped
in the Stars and Stripes and dragged to earth by US tanks. To
millions of Americans like Robbins, the image must have been replete
with irony. Here was democratic America destroying one of the most
tyrannical regimes on earth in the name of freedom -- yet in the
process of fighting for democracy abroad, America's own freedoms
were being systematically eaten away at home.
A few things have happened recently that show just how powerful --
and, perhaps, unstoppable -- is the march of the right-wing machine
in the US. This month the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a
right-wing think tank umbilically tied to the Bush administration,
declared open warfare on non-governmental organisations (NGOs)
deemed too left-wing and set up an organisation called NGOWatch to
monitor these liberal pressure groups. NGOs that have fallen foul
of its wrath include groups promoting human rights, women, the
environment and freedom of speech; among its targets are the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Amnesty International, Greenpeace and
the World Organisation Against Torture. Only this February, George
Bush boasted that 20 AEI members were working for his administration.
AEI fellows include Lynne Cheney, the vice- president's wife, and
Richard Perle, the most influential of all neo-conservative hawks
NGOWatch has issued scathing reports on the following groups:
Human Rights Watch, which investigates government abuses around the
world. According to NGOWatch, it is an organisation that 'recommends
groups that promote same-sex marriage', 'promotes sexual orientation
rights', 'denounces abstinence [from sex] programmes', 'advocates
gays in the military' and 'demands release of some detainees at
Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay'. Nearly 700 men are held at the camp
without charge, trial or access to legal help.
CARE International, which works in the third world. It is attacked
because its president, Peter Bell, criticises Bush's Mexico City
Policy, which prohibits international groups that perform or promote
abortion from receiving tax dollars to teach family planning.
The NOW (National Organisation For Women) Foundation, which promotes
abortion rights and equality in the workplace. NGOWatch says: 'With
lesbianism and left-wing politics, NOW conferees cling to the
fringe.'
Naomi Klein, author of the anti-corporate bestseller No Logo, points
out that Andrew Natsios, head of the government-run United States
Agency for International Development (USAID), attacked NGOs this
May 'for failing to play a role many of them didn't realise they
had been assigned: doing public relations for the US government'.
Klein says NGOWatch is a 'McCarthyite blacklist, telling tales on
any NGO that dares speak against the Bush administration's policies
or in support of international treaties opposed by the White House'.
But the Bush administration might not find the term 'McCarthyite'
all that insulting if the poster-girl of the American right, Ann
Coulter, gets her way. Coulter is set to knock Hillary Clinton, the
former first lady, off the top of the US bestseller lists with her
book Treason: Liberal Treachery From The Cold War To The War On
Terrorism. Its central thesis is that Senator Joe McCarthy, the man
behind the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, was a good guy and
an all-American patriot. Coulter is the woman who said after September
11: 'We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert
them to Christianity.' She also said US citizens should carry
passports on domestic flights to make it easier to identify any
'suspicious-looking swarthy males'.
McCarthy was censured by his Senate colleagues: despite levelling
charges of communism at all and sundry, he was unable to produce
the name of a single card-carrying communist in the US government.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says he was seen by his detractors as
a 'self-seeking witch-hunter who was undermining the nation's
traditions of civil liberties', yet his accusations led to the
persecution of many of those he condemned.
Coulter says: 'The myth of McCarthyism is the greatest Orwellian
fraud of our times. Liberals are fanatical liars, then as now.
Everything you think you know about McCarthy is a hegemonic lie ...
Liberals denounced McCarthy because they were afraid of getting
caught ... McCarthy was not tilting at windmills. Soviet spies in
the government were not a figment of right-wing imaginations. He
was tilting at an authentic communist conspiracy.'
Coulter's article of faith is that liberals have managed to shout
harder than the right and twist society with propaganda. It is a
remarkable claim given the approach to journalism by one of the
US's most popular TV stations, Fox News. Vilification of liberals
is almost a sport on Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. One of
its main anchors, Bill O'Reilly, told viewers the US should 'splatter'
Iraqis; one of its other anchors referred to the veil worn by a
Muslim-American woman as a 'thing'.
While Europeans might recoil at a subservient press and a government
with such blatantly right-wing policies, others will say: 'So what?
The Bush administration is simply pushing its agenda and the media
is reflecting the support of the public.' But that is not the case.
Scratch the surface and more and more disturbing examples of
government control and attacks on dissent in the name of patriotism
spring to light -- and it is obvious that a vast swath of the US
public is horrified by what is happening.
Take the case of John Clarke, an organiser with the Ontario Coalition
Against Poverty (OCAP). In February 2002 he was crossing into the
US from Canada to speak at Michigan State University. He was taken
into the immigration offices and asked what anti-globalisation
protests he had attended and whether he 'opposed the ideology of
the United States'. His car was searched and he was frisked. He was
denied entry to the US, then interrogated by a special agent with
the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service. He was asked
if the OCAP was a cover for anarchism and if he was a 'socialist'.
The agent had a file on the OCAP, leaflets from public-speaking
engagements Clarke had taken part in and the name of a man Clarke
had stayed with in Chicago. Clarke was accused of being an 'advocate
for violence' and threatened with jail. Astonishingly, the interrogator
asked him questions about Osama bin Laden.
Sounds like a rogue agent? Not if you take into account the six
French journalists who arrived at Los Angeles Airport this May to
cover a video games conference. They were detained -- three of them
in cells for 26 hours -- interrogated, subjected to body searches
and then forcibly repatriated.
It is not just foreigners that are deemed dangerous and un-American.
There was Tom Treece, a teacher who gave a class in 'public issues'
at a high school in Vermont. A uniformed police officer entered his
classroom in the middle of the night because a student art project
on the wall showed a picture of Bush with duct tape over his mouth
and the words: 'Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth.'
Local residents said they would refuse to pass the school budget
unless Treece was sacked. He was eventually removed from that class.
Or how about Jason Halperin? This March he was in an Indian restaurant
in New York when it was raided by five police officers with guns
drawn. Halperin says they kicked open the doors, then pointed guns
in the faces of staff and made them crawl out of the kitchen. Ten
other officers from the Department of Homeland Security then entered.
One patron said the police had no right to hold him; he was told
the Patriot Act allowed his detention without warrant. Halperin
asked if he could see a lawyer; he was told only if he came to the
station, and then in 'maybe a month'. When he told police he was
leaving, an officer walked over, his hand on his gun, saying: 'Go
ahead and leave, just go ahead.' Another officer said: 'We are at
war and this is for your safety.'
The American Civil Liberties Union had to take court action to help
15-year-old Bretton Barber, who faced suspension from school when
he refused to take off a T-shirt showing Bush with the words
'International Terrorist' beneath. AJ Brown, a college student from
North Carolina, was visited at home by secret service agents who
told her: 'Ma'am, we've gotten a report that you have anti-American
material.' She refused to let them in, but eventually showed them
what she thought they were after -- an anti-death-penalty poster
showing Bush and a group of lynched bodies over the epithet 'We
hang on your every word'. The agents then asked her if she had 'any
pro-Taliban stuff'.
Art dealer Doug Stuber, who ran the presidential campaign in North
Carolina for the Green Party's Ralph Nader, was told he could not
board a plane to Prague because no Greens were allowed to fly that
day. He was questioned by police, photographed by two secret service
agents and asked about his family and what the Greens were up to.
Stuber says he was shown a Justice Department document that suggested
Greens were likely terrorists.
Michael Franti, frontman of the progressive hip hop band Spearhead,
says the mother of one of his co-musicians, who has a sibling in
the Gulf, was visited by 'two plain-clothes men from the military'
in March this year. Franti says: '[The military] came in and said,
'You have a child who's in the Gulf and you have a child who's in
this band Spearhead who's part of the resistance.'' The military
had pictures of the band at peace rallies, their flight records for
several months, the names of backstage staff and their banking
records.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter, was
booed off stage after making what was perceived to be an anti-war
speech at a graduation ceremony at Rockford College in Illinois.
College officials unplugged his mic twice while he was making the
speech, which he had to cut sharply in order to keep the situation
under control ; some students blared foghorns and turned their
backs, while others rushed up the aisles screaming and throwing
caps and gowns.
A report by the ACLU called Freedom Under Fire: Dissent In Post-9/11
America says: 'There is a pall over our country. The responses to
dissent by many government officials so clearly violate the letter
and the spirit of the supreme law of the land that they threaten
the underpinnings of democracy itself.'
The words of Justice Antonin Scalia, an avid Bush supporter and
member of the Supreme Court, seem to support these fears. In March,
during a lecture at John Carroll University in Ohio, Scalia told
his audience: 'Most of the rights you enjoy go way beyond what the
Constitution requires.' He added that in wartime 'the protections
will be ratcheted down to the constitutional minimum.'
Under current laws, anyone even suspected of terrorism can be held
indefinitely without charge or access to a lawyer. A new proposed
law would lead to anyone deemed a sympathiser of an organisation
classed as terrorist having their US citizenship revoked; they would
also be deported. The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness plans
will allow the state to analyse every piece of data held on each
US citizen.
Many are frightened to fight back. In September 2002, around 400
peaceful demonstrators near the White House were attacked and
arrested; in Oakland, California, police used rubber and wooden
bullets at a peace rally. Yet there is resistance. The Bill Of
Rights Defence Committee has been supported by more than 114
legislatures in cities, towns and counties, as well as the states
of Alaska and Hawaii. They have all passed resolutions opposing
draconian legislation: that accounts for 11.1 million people.
Still, with massive donations rolling in from corporate backers,
many fear it is unlikely Bush will be dethroned in 2004. With a
supine Democratic Party, save a few maverick voices, and a craven
media, it is left to a handful of fringe voices to speak out for
Americans who are angered and disgusted at the state of their nation.
These voices belong to people such as Bruce Jones, an author and
Vietnam veteran. He recently wrote about what he saw as 'the ugly
side of patriotism ... those who insist that 'you are either with
us or against us''. He added: ' There is no more important patriot
in this nation than the citizen who has the guts to stand up and
tell the official establishment that it is wrong.
'I know who my enemies are -- the idiots who burned down the
dry-cleaning establishment I use here in Modesto because it had the
word French in its name, or because it had Assyrian owners who
immigrated from the Middle East. I know who I must fear the most
-- those Americans who do not understand what freedom of speech
means; those who equate patriotism with blind obedience.'
Copyright 2003 smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088
to the source: http://www.sundayherald.com/34917
-- Until the lions have their own historians, tales of hunting will
always glorify the hunter.
-African Proverb