|
The Picture of Authoritarian Gray
By David Glenn Cox (author)
It's growing ever more frustrating, living in a nation afraid of itself, afraid to look at itself in the mirror or to even think about what is being done in our name. I've read the sponsored stories of Neda; oh, poor Neda, a young life cut short by a brutal and viscious regime. Damn them all! Why must they kill a young girl who dreamed only of freedom?
Why are there no similar stories for young Rachel Corrie? She, too, was a young and beautiful woman who died trying help those less fortunate to hold on to what little they had against a brutal regime intent on taking it away from them. If we look honestly, with partisanship aside, it becomes clear that speech is not so much free as political. According to the Constitution you have free speech, but I wouldn't lean too heavily on that document because it was written long before the government discovered the advantages of terror.
The government, by declaring war upon a tactic rather than an enemy, has made the identification of enemies completely arbitrary. The Supreme Court today upheld a federal law that bans support of terrorist organizations. This law first passed in 1996 and then was updated and incorporated into the infamous Enabling, I mean Patriot Act. The law was passed to inhibit Americans from supporting terrorist organizations. But it is the government who decides who or what is a terrorist organization, and under the terms of the Patriot Act it is a federal crime to provide "training," "expert advice or assistance" or "service" to a terrorist organization.
The law effectively makes it a crime for you to have communications with anyone the government decides is a terrorist organization. These decisions are sometimes made by unelected career bureaucrats working in the bowels of the State Department. Their decisions are guided as much by policy as principle. An aid organization working in Colombia might be acceptable while the same organization working in Cuba or Venezuela might be declared a terrorist organization.
This inhibits your freedom of speech and makes you guilty before the fact. If you communicate with an Iranian Revolutionary Guard who maybe is your cousin you could be found guilty. If, however, you're Halliburton and your branch in Dubai is selling drilling supplies to the Iranian government, that's different.
It all becomes an arbitrary game, but imagine if we had a time when we had true free speech and Hamas could have bought air time on all three networks in America and asked for humanitarian aid to be sent to the Red Crescent for allocation. That is today a Federal Crime! And if you write them a check for ten bucks, you're a criminal, too. The government has decreed and the courts have backed them up that you can still say whatever you like, but the government decides who you can say it to.
Jimmy Carter has complained that the ruling will inhibit the work of the Carter Center. It's a federal crime for anyone to call Hamas and to offer to broker peace negotiations. "We are disappointed that the Supreme Court has upheld a law that inhibits the work of human rights and conflict resolution groups," Carter said in a statement distributed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The Los Angeles-based Humanitarian Law Project said in court documents that they want to teach ways of using "international law and other nonviolent means to advance human rights." The federal government has effectively muzzled all unpopular free speech. There are no hard guidelines as to what qualifies a group as terrorist, just because we say so, that's why.
In the Supreme Court's January ruling it said that campaign spending limited corporate free speech even if those corporations are controlled by foreign agents. The Court assumed that only good things would result because it supported the academic idea of free speech over the practical idea of free speech. In today's ruling the Court took the alternate tact. Chief Justice John Roberts said that even teaching non-violent strategies and giving legal advice about international court litigation was, in effect, supporting terrorism.
"Money is fungible," Roberts wrote. "Congress logically concluded that money a terrorist group such as the PKK obtains using the techniques plaintiffs propose to teach could be redirected to funding the group's violent activities." So in this case Roberts assumes the worst; corporations will do no wrong and so-called terrorist groups will do no right. That is a decision based on a preference not on a principle. It is a policy decision and not a legal decision. To the Roberts mind any aid flotilla headed for Gaza had to be loaded down with weapons even if the cargo looked like food an medicine as helping children and aiding the suffering was also helping Hamas.
Last year I watched Medea Benjamin confront Donald Rumsfeld. She was about six inches from his face yelling, "War Criminal! Murderer! War Criminal!" and throughout the whole spectacle I could not help but think, "I'd have punched him right in the nose! Just give me one good swing!" Had she done that, Code Pink could now be considered a terrorist organization. The fastest way to get on the list would be to threaten the present or former government, the same government that decides who you may legally speak to and who you may not speak to.
If President Chavez of Venezuela came to speak at the UN and a reporter was offered an hour-long interview, would that be supporting terrorism? Or President Ahmadinejad, would that be supporting terrorism by exchanging ideas? That is why I feel that this ruling is even more chilling than the Court's January ruling. In January the Court said that corporations had free speech and the right to spend as much money as they like. Popular opinions and corporate opinions have free rein of the field but unpopular opinions and unpopular points of view can be criminalized with the stroke of a pen when the sole purpose for a constitutional amendment protecting free speech is to protect unpopular speech.
Had this ruling been made by the Supreme Court of Panama or Latvia or Belgium it wouldn't matter so much. This ruling, however, came from the United States Supreme Court and it rules on terrorism with an iron fist. The same iron fists that invaded Panama and Grenada and Lebanon and Afghanistan and Iraq and Pakistan. The iron fists that fired cruise missiles into Yemen and supported bloody coups against democratically-elected governments. The same iron fists that have killed thousands of civilians and women and children now dare to tell us who the terrorists are.
"Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough." Franklin Delano Roosevelt
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(614 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
