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FROM: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,922632,00.html
McCarthy's Ghost
Democracy is under
threat in the United States; anyone who objects to the conflict in Iraq
is not allowed to say so.
Gary Younge
Thursday March 27, 2003
The Guardian
It's drive time with
WABC's rightwing talkshow host, Curtis Sliwa, and Bill is on the line
from the Poconos in Pennsylvania with a tale so funny he can hardly
share it for giggling.
He was carrying an American
flag and yelling support for the troops in a delayed St Patrick's Day
parade over the weekend when he saw one woman carrying a sign saying:
"No blood for oil".
"She was wearing
black and she was an older lady," says Bill. "And then our
sheriff saw her and she didn't have a permit. So
they put her in the back of the truck car and hauled her away."
On its own, Bill's story
would be aberrant - the tale of an overzealous legal official and an
unfortunate woman in smalltown America.
Increasingly
though it is becoming consistent. The
harassment, arrest, detention and frustration of those who are against
the war is becoming routine.
Relatives of victims
who died on September 11, who are opposed to
the war, have been prevented from speaking in schools.
Last month Stephen
Downs was handcuffed and arrested after refusing to take off a - "Give
Peace a Chance" - T-shirt in a mall in Albany.
He was told he
would have been found guilty of trespass if the mall had
not dropped the case because of the bad publicity.
As Iraqi civilians and
American, British and Iraqi soldiers perish in the Gulf, this
war is fast claiming another casualty - democracy in the US.
This process is not exclusive to America. Civil liberties have suffered
in Britain because of the war in Northern Ireland, and are undergoing
further erosion because of the conflict.
But it has a particular
resonance here because of the McCarthyite era during the 1950s when
those suspected of supporting communism were forced to testify before
the Senate to recant their views and divulge names of progressives.
Comparisons with McCarthyism are valid but must be qualified. These
popular and sporadic displays of intolerance may be gathering pace,
but no federal edict has been issued to support them and many who support
the war are opposed to them.
Bush has not launched
a campaign to derail the Dixie Chicks, the all-American girl band whose
CDs were crushed by a mob and whose latest release fell from the top
of the charts after one of its singers made an anti-war remark in London.
Downs says the officer who arrested him spent an hour-and-a-half trying
to persuade his superiors that the case was not worth pursuing. Even
Curtis Sliwa told Bill he should "ignore the protesters and get
out the flags".
While these popular expressions
of intolerance appear sporadic, not all are spontaneous. The rally to
smash the Dixie Chicks' CDs and much of the impetus for the boycott
of their single came from radio stations owned
by Clear Channel Communications of Texas, which has close ties with
Bush.
The company's stations
also called for the pro-war rallies
that have cropped up in the past week.
And while they have not
received the state's imprimatur, Bush's administration has certainly
created the climate in which they can thrive.
Under Big Brother monikers
like the Patriot Act and Operation Liberty Shield, the
state has stepped up the scope of its surveillance and the wiretapping
of American citizens and will authorise the indefinite detention of
asylum seekers from certain countries. Last year, surveillance
requests by the federal government under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act - originally intended to hunt down foreign spies - outnumbered all
of those under domestic law for the first time in US history.
Under a proposed new
bill, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement act, the government
could withhold the identity of anyone detained
in connection with a terror investigation and their names would be exempt
from the Freedom of Information act, according to the centre
for public integrity, a Washington-based advocacy group.
Barry Steinhardt, director
of the American civil liberties union programme on technology and liberty,
told the New York Times that authorities have
been demanding records from internet providers and libraries about what
books people are taking out and which websites they're looking at.
The result is a symbiotic
relationship between the mob and the legislature, whereby
official repression provides the framework for public scapegoating with
each gaining momentum from the other.
Most vulnerable are those
who are most vulnerable anyway - Arab immigrants
and non-white Americans. Men from countries regarded as potential
sources of terrorism and who do not have a green card, are now required
to be registered, fingerprinted and photographed by the immigration
service. Many who have committed no crime
but simply have their applications for a work permit pending are routinely
arrested.
"Basically, what
this has become is an immigration sweep," said Juliette Kayam,
a terrorism expert at Harvard. "The idea
that this has anything to do with security, or is something the government
can do to stop terrorism, is absurd," she told the Washington
Post.
The growing surveillance
compounded by discrimination
adversely affects black Americans too.
"It places those
of us of colour under increased scrutiny and we
get caught up in the web of racial profiling," says
Jean Bond, of the Radical Black Congress.
The fact that all the
incidents mentioned above happened to white, American-born natives is
an indication of just how deep the rot has set in.
Downs is the chief
lawyer in the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Such are
the targets of the war on terror.
From the outset Bush
has insisted that: "Those who are not
for us are against us," and so it follows that anyone
opposed to his way of dealing with the terrorist threat
becomes the enemy, at home or abroad.
Terrorism is the new
communism. Even before the first body bags have arrived, the
war has already reached the home front.
Gary Younge appears
in J'Accuse Uncle Sam on Channel 4 tomorrow.
FROM: http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,922632,00.html
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