- WASHINGTON - Nineteen-year-old
Naureen Shah has been called a "Taliban," a "Nazi"
and "un-American."
-
- Three of her classmates at Chicago's Northwestern University
have been questioned by the FBI since the enactment of the Patriot Act,
the U.S. government's anti-terrorism legislation.
-
- "I've been called all kinds of names," says
Shah, a second-year journalism student. "But I think it's the Patriot
Act that's un-American. I think broadening the war to a place like North
Korea is un-American."
-
- Her experience reflects an anti-dissent environment being
fostered by law-enforcement agencies, the Republican administration and
its right-wing friends in their robust campaign to quash criticism of the
war on terrorism.
-
- Shah will jump on a bus this week and travel with fellow
students to Washington for the first major American protest against the
war on terrorism and the U.S. role in the Mideast crisis.
-
- Organizers expect "tens of thousands" from
across the country to march on the White House Saturday to demonstrate
against a wider war on terrorism and what they call the "Bush-Sharon
war against the Palestinian people."
-
- Just as a university student-based opposition to the
war begins to gel ,Äî more than 150 campuses in 40 states have
held rallies urging U.S. military restraint ,Äî it's becoming
clear that there's also a war in America against dissent.
-
- And it's being waged not just against students and professors,
although universities are where the major skirmishes are taking place.
Journalists, business people, even retirees have been targeted for speaking
out. Some have been fired from their jobs, received hate mail or been made
social outcasts for exercising their First Amendment right to freedom of
speech.
-
- Consider:
-
- Barry Reingold, a 60-year-old retired telephone company
worker in San Francisco, recently had two FBI agents visit his home to
question him about criticism of the war on terrorism he voiced while working
out at his local health club. The agents filed a report on him.
-
- Journalists Jackie Anderson of the Sun Advocate in Price,
Utah; Dan Guthrie of the Grants Pass Daily Courier in Oregon; and Tom Gutting
of the Texas City Sun have all been fired for writing columns questioning
the war. In Washington, some senior White House and Capitol Hill reporters
have been "frozen out" by lawmakers for expressing similar sentiments.
-
- The Houston Art Car Museum had a recent visit from FBI
and Secret Service agents who cited "several reports of anti-American
activity going on here." The museum was showing Secret Wars, an anti-war
exhibit set up before Sept. 11.
-
- A.J. Brown, a freshman at Durham Tech in North Carolina,
says two Secret Service agents knocked on her door to question her about
"a report that you have un-American material in your apartment."
They asked about a poster on her wall opposing the state of Texas' death
penalty.
-
- The campaign against dissent is being led by President
George W. Bush, who has said repeatedly that "you're either with us,
or you're against us." His press secretary, Ari Fleischer, has warned:
"Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do."
-
- Attorney-General John Ashcroft, the FBI's boss, told
Congress: "To those ... who scare peace-loving people with phantoms
of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists ,Äî
for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition
to America's enemies and pause to America's friends. They encourage people
of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil."
-
- More than 90 per cent of Americans support military strikes
in Afghanistan in response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But a CNN-USA
Today Gallup poll found that only a slim majority of Americans ,Äî
52 per cent of those surveyed ,Äî favour broadening the war
to Iraq, North Korea or Iran, the nations that make up Bush's "axis
of evil." Forty per cent of respondents prefer their government to
target specific terrorist groups, rather than entire countries.
-
- Given that Bush has stated his intention to broaden the
war ("inaction is not an option" he said in regard to Iraq) and
continue it through the remaining 2 1/2 years of his term, his government
and its supporters are working hard to avoid a massive build-up of student
opposition similar to the anti-Vietnam War movement of the late 1960s and
early '70s.
-
- Warned Bill Bennett, head of the right-wing Empower America
organization, at a recent Washington news conference: "Professional
and amateur critics of America are finding their voices. They're finding
their voice on campuses, in salons, in learned societies and in the print
media and on television."
-
- Anti-war protests are nothing new in the U.S., which
has always had its dissenters. But it wasn't until the Vietnam War that
student radicalism in America hit its peak, culminating in the May 4, 1970,
riot at Kent State University in which Ohio National Guardsmen shot and
killed four student demonstrators.
-
- These days, however, it's unfashionable to be an anti-war
crusader on U.S. college campuses. There has been virtual unanimity on
the need to eradicate Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist group from Afghanistan,
but students are beginning to mobilize against Bush's pledge to fight the
war over several more years, in several countries, in the name of stamping
out terrorism.
-
- Bennett, a staunch Republican who served as education
secretary in the Ronald Reagan administration and "drug czar"
under George Bush Sr., has joined former CIA director James Woolsey and
Reagan assistant secretary of defence Frank Gaffney in founding Americans
For Victory Over Terrorism, a group that intends to visit campuses and
conduct pro-war "teach-ins."
-
- Meanwhile, Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice-President Dick
Cheney, has helped organize a group called the American Council on Trustees
and Alumni (ACTA), which cites a "blame America first" bias among
hundreds of professors and is monitoring their anti-war statements.
-
- In what many professors view as a threat to their academic
freedoms, ACTA is sending mass mailings to alumni of schools where "offensive"
comments have been made, urging donations be cut off and pressuring university
trustees to take action. One Florida professor, who didn't have the protection
of being tenured, has already been fired.
-
- "It's your constitutional right to criticize,"
Bennett told educators. "But when you criticize, you take the consequences
for your words. Your words may be responded to and your words can be interpreted
in such ways that they hurt the national resolve."
-
- Bennett's warning about "consequences" is already
painfully clear to University of Texas journalism professor and activist
writer Robert Jensen.
-
- Jensen wrote a piece in which he urged Americans to confront
some of the "ugly truths" about their country's history of targeting
civilians in war as a way to understand why some fundamentalists hate America.
After a Texas newspaper published the column, more than 4,000 e-mails flooded
in, many demanding he be fired and announcing intentions to stop donations
to the school.
-
- University president Larry Faulkner publicly branded
Jensen ,Äî who has tenure and thus cannot be fired ,Äî
as someone who should be ignored because he's "misguided" and
his work contains "a fountain of undiluted foolishness."
-
- In an interview with The Star, Jensen responded, saying:
"Do we live in a society where free thought is being marginalized?
Yes. Is it being suppressed in a social sense? Yes.
-
- "The president of my university said I was a fool
who shouldn't be taken seriously. It sends a signal to the university community
that, if you want to get along and get all the perks that come with the
job, you'd better keep your comments within acceptable limits."
-
- The American Civil Liberties Union and other national
organizations have decried the Bush administration's Patriot Act for giving
the FBI vast powers to intercept Americans' conversations, cellphone calls
and e-mails, even to eavesdrop on talks between lawyers and their clients.
-
- Of course, the FBI has a long history of pushing the
privacy envelope.
-
- In the mid-1950s, the late FBI director J. Edgar Hoover
launched COINTELPRO, an enormous domestic surveillance program to monitor
the Communist party in the United States. Within a decade, it was expanded
to include the Socialist Workers party, the Black Panthers and Nation of
Islam groups and eventually most of the community and religious organizations
that became known as the New Left.
-
- "Whatever kind of intellectual climate we have is,
I think, being slowly starved," says Jensen. "It's like we're
saying to people, `You shouldn't think. You should listen to the people
in power and, if they say we should go to war, we should go to war.' That's
what disturbs me."
-
- Bush, he adds, has "announced an unlimited war against
a potentially endless enemy. Do they understand the consequences of a war
the secretary of defence has said has no `exit strategies' and will be
a `sustained engagement that carries no deadlines?'"
-
- Jensen says Bennett's organization and Lynne Cheney's
ACTA seem to believe universities are still run "by leftover hippies,
some pot-smoking intellectual commies. But there's nothing further from
the truth.
-
- "The sense one had that, in the '60s and '70s, universities
were centres of intellectual engagement has largely been lost. I'd call
that a threat to democracy.
-
- "All over the world, in Canada and in Europe, people
are dealing with these complexities. But here, we're just not."
-
- Back at Northwestern, Shah has high hopes for Saturday's
march on the White House.
-
- "This is the first protest that is going to unite
several different causes," she says.
-
- "Our opposition to the war is no joke. It's based
on facts. We want to draw together concerns about globalization issues,
the Middle East and NAFTA, to make the connections to the war on terrorism.
We don't feel that's been properly done until now.
-
- "I don't see the possibility of a larger student
movement unless we begin to understand how the war affects us all directly.
But the basis is there. It might happen yet."
|
