[Nettime-bold] (Fwd) RMS: Police state minus one day and counting (fwd)

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

I thought this was dead?

ivo


------- Forwarded Message Follows -------


                RMS: Police state minus one day and counting

   Monday October 22, 10:18 AM EDT    [ General News ]
   - By Richard Stallman -
   If things go according to plan, one day from today many basic 
legal rights will be abolished in the United States. According to the 
ACLU, the Uniting and Strengthening America Act of 2001 (S.1510) 
has been passed in both the Senate and the House; they just have 
to pass it once more having ironed out some details, and due 
process of law will be no more. The drafting was hasty in the 
Senate; the House was in such a rush to pass the bill that most 
representatives didn't bother to read it (even though some of them 
said that it was dangerous).

   The page http://www.aclu.org/action/usa107.html gives some 
basic information about this bill. The ACLU told me that more 
information is available about this and other post-Sept. 11 bills at
   http://www.aclu.org/safeandfree. According to the ACLU, S.1510 
would, among other things:

     * Allow for indefinite detention of non-citizens, denying them the
       chance to defend themselves in court.
     * Expand secret searches.
     * Grant the FBI broad access to sensitive business records 
about
       individuals without having to show evidence of a crime. See
       http://www.aclu.org/congress/l100801a.html.
     * Allow officials to designate domestic groups as terrorist
       organizations. Membership in such an organization would 
become a
       deportable offense; see
       http://www.aclu.org/congress/l100801d.html.

   It could also, I have read, be the occasion for confiscation of
   property of anyone connected with these organizations. And that 
can be used as a mechanism of censorship by intimidation.

   Additional power for the FBI worries me, and it should worry you,
   because the FBI has a history of abusing its power. In the 1960s, 
it conducted a systematic large-scale campaign to undermine 
political opposition, using methods that ranged from provocateurs 
to death threats to framing of activists. For more information, see
   
http://www.derechos.net/paulwolf/cointelpropapers/coinwcar3.htm.

   As part of that campaign, the FBI conducted thousands of secret
   searches without warrants. This put the FBI in a bad light, 
because those searches were against the law. S.1510 would 
eliminate the problem by making it easy to authorize secret 
searches. According to the ACLU, government agents would be 
allowed to take away your papers as well as look at them, but only 
if they say it was necessary. So if something vanishes from your 
house, you won't know if it was a thief or the government. See 
http://www.aclu.org/news/2001/n101901b.html.

   The bill would also allow officials to designate an organization as
   "terrorist" and prohibit any kind of support for it. This worries me
   because I am the leader of an organization. The FBI director has
   already called Reclaim the Streets "terrorist" (they put on surprise
   street parties), so who knows what would not be called 
"terrorist?"

   But it gets worse when you combine this with civil forfeiture.
   Government officials would have the power to confiscate your 
property, simply by alleging that it has been connected with one of 
these "terrorist" organizations. They would not have to charge you 
with a crime, and they won't have to prove anything.

   Actual confiscation is bad enough, but as Go players know, the 
threat is more powerful than the act. If the government can 
confiscate your property, it can use the threat of confiscation to 
enforce whatever demands it wishes to make.

   Censorship by decree appears to have begun already in 
anticipation of  the bill's passage. Last week I read that a Web site 
containing old WBAI radio broadcasts had been shut down 
because the Office of Homeland Security had told the ISP to cut 
them off. The ISP told the site's operator that it had been 
threatened with confiscation of its assets if it did not obey. This 
information came with a reference to the URL 
http://savewbai.tao.ca, where more information can be found.

   One of the programs on that site, Radio Free Eireann, advocated
   removing Northern Ireland from the UK -- a cause which was also
   supported by terrorists (or should I say former terrorists, since 
they have since entered the Northern Ireland parliament). It is 
possible that that weak connection was the basis of the threat. But 
the issue is a political one, and many peaceful citizens of Ireland 
held similar views. I do not agree with them: Ireland has the same 
sort of unjust anti-terrorism laws as the UK, and oppressive laws 
on divorce and abortion as well. But if we tolerate censorship of 
political views just because we do not support them, we allow 
tyranny.

   Courageous citizens may resist tyranny on principle, but we 
cannot expect businesses to do so. And it is hard to carry out any 
organized activity, including political opposition, without the 
services of business, such as phone lines, meeting halls, printing, 
and ISPs. One call from the Office of Homeland Security, and any 
business will cut off these services.

   For non-citizens of the United States, the bill will present an even
   more terrible danger: they could face life-long imprisonment 
without trial. The movie A World Apart showed how detention 
without trial operated in South Africa under the apartheid system. 
Its heroine was imprisoned without charges for 30 days, which the 
government had the power to do arbitrarily. At the end of that 
period, they had to release her -- for just five minutes, which is how 
long it took the police to arrest her again. In the United States, 
even that occasional five-minute release won't be necessary. If the 
bill passes, I plan to warn my foreign friends to stay away from the 
United States.

   Little time remains, but if we value our freedom it is worth one 
more
   try to save it. The ACLU says that Congress has received tens of
   thousands of phone calls opposing this bill, and hardly any 
supporting
   it, but that legislators feel that they cannot say no to what the FBI
   wants. If they get a barrage of phone calls today, it may do
   something. The House is shut down, so call your representative's 
local
   office. A fax is good also, but there is no time left for a letter to
   arrive. Call your senators as well.

   Please call, even if you do not usually call Congress. Ask them to
   start over, and this time think carefully about what they are doing!

   Copyright 2001 Richard Stallman
   Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are 
permitted
   in any medium provided the copyright notice and this notice are
   preserved.

U.S. NOW INSISTS CRITICS ARE ITS ENEMIES
by George Monbiot

The US, founded to protect basic freedoms, is now insisting that its 
critics are its enemies

[The Guardian - UK - Tuesday October 16, 2001]: If satire died on 
the day Henry Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize, then last 
week its corpse was exhumed for a kicking. As head of the United 
Nations peacekeeping department, Kofi Annan failed to prevent the 
genocide in Rwanda or the massacre in Srebrenica. Now, as 
secretary general, he appears to have interpreted the UN charter as 
generously as possible to allow the attack on Afghanistan to go 
ahead.

Article 51 permits states to defend themselves against attack. It 
says nothing about subsequent retaliation. It offers no licence to 
attack people who might be harbouring a nation's enemies. The 
bombing of Afghanistan, which began before the UN security 
council gave its approval, is legally contentious. Yet the man and 
the organisation who overlooked this obstacle
to facilitate war are honoured for their contribution to peace.

Endowments like the Nobel Peace Prize are surely designed to 
reward self-sacrifice. Nelson Mandela gave up his liberty, FW de 
Klerk gave up his power, and both were worthy recipients of the 
prize. But Kofi Annan, the career bureaucrat, has given up nothing. 
He has been rewarded for doing as he is told, while nobly 
submitting to a gigantic salary and bottomless expense account.

Among the other nominees for the prize was a group whose 
qualifications  were rather more robust. Members of Women in 
Black have routinely risked their lives in the hope of preventing war. 
They have stayed in the homes of Palestinians being shelled by 
Israeli tanks and have confronted war criminals in the Balkans. 
They have stood silently while being abused and spat at during 
vigils all over the world. But now, in this looking-glass world in 
which war is peace and peace is war, instead of winning the 
peace prize the Women in Black have been labelled potential 
terrorists by the FBI and threatened with a grand jury investigation.

They are in good company. Earlier this year the director of the FBI 
named the chaotic but harmless organisations Reclaim the Streets 
and Carnival Against Capitalism in the statement on terrorism he 
presented to the Senate. Now, partly as a result of his 
representations, the Senate's new terrorism bill, like Britain's 
Terrorism Act 2000, redefines the crime so broadly that members 
of Greenpeace are in danger of being treated like members of
al-Qaida. The Bush doctrine - if you're not with us, you're against 
us - is already being applied.

This government by syllogism makes no sense at all. Osama bin 
Laden and al-Qaida have challenged the US government; ergo 
anyone who challenges the government is a potential terrorist. That 
bin Laden is, according to US officials, a "fascist", while the other 
groups are progressives is irrelevant: every public hand raised in 
objection will from now on be treated as a public hand raised in 
attack. Given that bin Laden is not a progressive but is a 
millionaire, it would surely make more sense to round
up and interrogate all millionaires.

Lumping Women in Black together with al-Qaida requires just a 
minor addition to the vocabulary: they have been jointly classified 
as "anti-American". This term, as used by everyone from the US 
defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Daily Mail to Tony 
Blair and several writers on these pages, applies not only to those 
who hate Americans, but also to those who have challenged US 
foreign and defence objectives. Implicit in this denunciation is a 
demand for uncritical support, for a love of government
more consonant with the codes of tsarist Russia than with the 
ideals upon which the United States was founded.

The charge of "anti-Americanism" is itself profoundly anti-
American. If the US does not stand for freedom of thought and 
speech, for diversity and dissent, then we have been deceived as to 
the nature of the national project. Were the founding fathers to 
congregate today to discuss the principles enshrined in their 
declaration of independence, they would be denounced as "anti 
American" and investigated as potential terrorists.
Anti-American means today precisely what un American meant in 
the 1950s. It is an instrument of dismissal, a means of excluding 
your critics from rational discourse.

Under the new McCarthyism, this dismissal extends to anyone 
who seeks to promulgate a version of events other than that 
sanctioned by the US government. On September 20, President 
Bush told us that "this is the fight of all who believe in progress and 
pluralism, tolerance and freedom". 
Two weeks later, his secretary of state, Colin Powell, met the Emir 
of  Qatar to request that progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom 
be suppressed.
Al-Jazeera is one of the few independent television stations in the 
Middle East, whose popularity is the result of its uncommon regard 
for freedom of speech. It is also the only station permitted to 
operate freely in Kabul.
Powell's request that it be squashed was a pre-emptive strike 
against freedom, which, he hoped, would prevent the world from 
seeing what was really happening once the bombing began.

Since then, both George Bush and Tony Blair have sought to 
prevent al-Jazeera from airing video statements by bin Laden, on 
the grounds of the preposterous schoolboy intrigue that they "might 
contain coded messages".
Over the weekend the government sought to persuade British 
broadcasters to restrict their coverage of the war. Blair's spin 
doctors warned: "You can't trust them [the Taliban] in any way, 
shape, or form." While true, this applies with equal force to the 
techniques employed by Downing Street. 
When Alastair Campbell starts briefing journalists about "Spin 
Laden", it's a case of the tarantula spinning against the money 
spider.

If we are to preserve the progress, pluralism, tolerance and freedom 
which President Bush claims to be defending, then we must 
question everything we see and hear. Though we know that 
governments lie to us in wartime, most people seem to believe that 
this universal rule applies to every conflict except the current one. 
Many of those who now accept that babies were not thrown out of 
incubators in Kuwait, and that the Belgrano was fleeing when
it was hit, are also prepared to believe everything we are being told 
about Afghanistan and terrorism in the US.

There are plenty of reasons to be sceptical. The magical 
appearance of the terrorists' luggage, passports and flight manual 
looks rather too good to be true. The dossier of "evidence" 
purporting to establish bin Laden's guilt consists largely of 
supposition and conjecture. The ration packs being
dropped on Afghanistan have no conceivable purpose other than to 
create the false impression that starving people are being fed. Even 
the anthrax scare looks suspiciously convenient. Just as the 
hawks in Washington were losing the public argument about 
extending the war to other countries, journalists start receiving 
envelopes full of bacteria, which might as well have been
labelled "a gift from Iraq". This could indeed be the work of 
terrorists, who may have their own reasons for widening the 
conflict, but there are plenty of other ruthless operators who would 
benefit from a shift in  public opinion.

Democracy is sustained not by public trust but by public 
scepticism. Unless we are prepared to question, to expose, to 
challenge and to dissent, we conspire in the demise of the system 
for which our governments are supposed to be fighting. The true 
defenders of America are those who are now being told that they 
are anti-American.

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral,
begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy.  Instead of diminishing
evil, it multiplies it.  Through violence you may murder the liar, but 
you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth.  Through 
violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate.  In fact, 
violence merely increases hate…Returning violence for violence 
multiples violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already 
devoid of stars.  Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can 
do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate:  Only love can do that.”


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