May 17, 2003
The freedom to assent.
Brooke at the bitter shack of resentment points out this press release from the ACLU about their report "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in Post-9/11 America." (The report is a PDF file; you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view it.) This report details the suppression of dissent in the United States since September 11, 2001. It is pretty chilling.
The report talks about the February, 2003, antiwar protest in which hundreds were arrested and interrogatedwithout counsel present "about their political affiliations and prior activities," which information was methodically entered into a database. When embarrassed by NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman, the NYPD halted the program abruptly.
In another case, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit against the police of Washington, D.C. "with deliberately violating the constitutional rights of more than 400 peaceful anti-war demonstrators and bystanders by directed them into a police trap and them arresting them — though they had not violated any law." The arrestees "were charged with failing to obey a police order — though no order to disperse was ever given." The ACLU contends that people who tried to leave were in fact physically prevented from doing so. There are also allegations of police misconduct in this affair.
There have also been FBI agents on college campuses; agents questioned a faculty member and a campus organizer at the University of Massachusetts in December, 2002. Protesting students at Grinnell College were threatened with arrest for hanging a flag upside-down. A freshman at Durham Technical College in North Carolina was questioned by the Secret Service after an anonymous report of her so-called "anti-American" wall poster opposing the death penalty.
Of course they mention the debacle in Oakland, CA, in which police used rubber bullets, wooden pellets and tear gas to break up an anti-war protest.
The report also gives attention to the nasty habit of the Bush administration to move dissenting protesters well away from sight and sound of President Bush's appearances and speeches. People who refuse to move are arrested. However, people with views that support the Administration are allowed to remain. One of the best is this story:
ACLU HEAD ARRESTED IN PHOENIX: There had been complaints of police misconduct at demonstrations in Phoenix in the past, so on Sept. 26, 2002, when President Bush attended a dinner there, the head of the ACLU of Arizona went to the protest site as a legal observer and was herself arrested. The protesters had only just gathered, Executive Director Eleanor Eisenberg said, when suddenly, with no apparent provocation, mounted police and officers in full riot gear charged into the crowd. She was across the street taking pictures of them beating a young man when she was arrested. Eisenberg spent nine hours in custody, most of it incommunicado. She was "bruised and shaken, sore from being in handcuffs for more than an hour with my hands behind my back in a police car. It was a horrible experience," she said afterwards. The only charge against her, resisting arrest, was dropped four months later.
The report mentions suppression of dissent on military bases, in schools, in places of business, pretty much everywhere Americans can gather. The report concludes:
As the Bill of Rights makes clear, the values and principles embodied in the United States Constitution are not subject to shifts in the political climate. Wary of government excesses abroad, and seeing the importance of informed debate, the authors made the protection of dissent their first order of business.
Congress "shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances," the First Amendment declares. The health of the fledgling democracy depended on it. It encouraged Americans to participate fully in their democracy and speak their minds, without fear or favor.
Refusing even to draw lines between acceptable and unacceptable speech, assembly or worship, the Bill of Rights affirmed that no future government of the United States would be empowered to make such determinations, under any circumstance. Not even if confronted with threats from abroad or challenges to their control.
The responses to dissent by many government officials, as described in this report, so clearly violate the letter and the spirit of the supreme law of the land, that they threaten the underpinnings of democracy itself.
Hostility toward dissent should alarm us all. Government officials and political leaders must not be allowed to chill the free and robust debate that has made our way of life the envy of nations and our Constitution a beacon to the world.
And you thought we lived in a free country. I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU for just this reason. Are you?
Posted by Frank at May 17, 2003 10:21 PM