The
dangerous assault on civil liberties and political
freedoms.
Donna
Huanca works as a docent at the Art Car Museum, an avant-garde
gallery in Houston. Around 10:30 on the morning of November
7, before she opened the museum, two men wearing suits
and carrying leather portfolios came to her door.
“I told them to wait until we opened at 11:00,” she
recalls. “Then they pulled their badges out.”
The two men were Terrence Donahue of the FBI and Steven
Smith of the Secret Service.
“They said they had several reports of anti-American
activity going on here and wanted to see the exhibit,”
she says. The museum was running a show called “Secret
Wars,” which contains many anti-war statements that
were commissioned before Sept 11.
“They just walked in, so I went through with them and
gave them a very detailed tour. I asked them if they
were familiar with the artists and what the role of
art was at a critical time like this,” she says.
“They were more interested in where the artists were
from. They were taking some notes. They were pointing
out things that they thought were negative, like a recent
painting by Lynn Randolph of the Houston skyline burning,
and a devil dancing around, and with George Bush Sr.
in the belly of the devil.”
There was a surreal moment when they inspected another
element of the exhibit. “We had a piece in the middle
of the room, a mock surveillance camera pointed to the
door of the museum, and they wondered whether they were
being recorded,” she says.
All in all, they were there for about an hour. “As they
were leaving, they asked me where I went to school,
and if my parents knew if I worked at a place like this,
and who funded us, and how many people came in to see
the exhibit,” she says. “I was definitely pale. It was
scary because I was alone, and they were really big
guys.”
Before the agents left the museum, Huanca called Tex
Kerschen, the curator of the exhibit. “I had just put
down a book on COINTELPRO,” he says, referring to the
FBI’s program of infiltrating leftwing groups in the
1960s. “Donna’s call confirmed some of my worst suspicions.
Donna was frightened, and we’re all a little bit shocked
that they were going to act against a small art space,
to bring to bear that kind of menace, an atmosphere
of dread. These old moldy charges of ‘anti-American,’
‘un-American’ - they seem laughable at first, like we
can’t be accused of anything that silly. But they’ve
started coming down with this.”
The director of the Art Car Museum is James Harithas,
who served as the director of the Corcoran Art Museum
in Washington, D.C., in the late 1960s. “It’s unbelievable,”
he says of the visit from the G-men. “People should
be worried that their freedoms are being taken away
right and left.”
Robert Dogium, a spokesman for the FBI in Houston, says
the visit was a routine follow-up on a call “from someone
who said there was some material or artwork that was
of a threatening nature to the President.” He says it
was no big thing. “While the work there was not their
cup of tea, it was not considered of a threatening nature
to anybody or terrorism or anything.”
She is a freshman at Durham Tech in North Carolina.
Her name is A.J. Brown. She’s gotten a scholarship from
the ACLU to help her attend college. But that didn’t
prepare her for the knock on the door that came on Oct.
26. “It was 5:00 on Friday, and I was getting ready
for a date,” she says. When she heard the knock, she
opened the door. Here’s her account.
“Hi, we’re from the Raleigh branch of the Secret Service,”
two agents said.
“And they flip out their little ID cards, and I was
like, ‘What?’
“And they say, ‘We’re here because we have a report
that you have un-American material in your apartment.’
And I was like, ‘What? No, I don’t have anything like
that.’
“‘Are you sure? Because we got a report that you’ve
got a poster that’s anti-American.’
“And I said no.”
They asked if they could come into the apartment. “Do
you have a warrant?” Brown asked. “And they said no,
they didn’t have a warrant, but they wanted to just
come in and look around. And I said, ‘Sorry, you’re
not coming in.’ “
One of the agents told Brown, “We already know what
it is. It’s a poster of Bush hanging himself,” she recalls.
“And I said no, and she was like, ‘Well, then, it’s
a poster with a target on Bush’s head,’ and I was like,
nope.”
The poster they seemed interested in was one that depicted
Bush holding a rope, with the words: “We Hang on Your
Every Word. George Bush, Wanted: 152 Dead.” The poster
has sketches of people being hanged, and it refers to
the number who were put to death in Texas while Bush
was governor, she explains.
Ultimately, Brown agreed to open her door so that the
agents could see the poster on the wall of her apartment,
though she did not let them enter. “They just kept looking
at the wall,” which contained political posters from
the Bush counter-inaugural, a “Free Mumia” poster, a
picture of Jesse Jackson, and a Pink Floyd poster with
the quotation: “Mother, should I trust the government?”
At one point in the conversation, one of the agents
mentioned Brown’s mother, saying, “She’s in the armed
forces, isn’t she?” (Her mother, in fact, is in the
Army Reserve.)
After they were done inspecting the wall, one of the
agents “pulled out his little slip of paper, and he
asked me some really stupid questions, like, my name,
my Social Security number, my phone number,” she says.
“Then they asked, ‘Do you have any pro-Taliban stuff
in your apartment, any posters, any maps?’
“I was like, ‘No, I don’t, and personally, I think the
Taliban is just a bunch of assholes.’ “
With that, they left. They had been at her apartment
for forty minutes.
“They called me two days later to make sure my information
was correct: where I lived, my phone number (hello!),
and my nicknames,” she says.
Brown says she’s “really annoyed” about the Secret Service
visit. “Obviously, I’m on some list somewhere.”
Welcome to the New McCarthyism. A chill is descending
across the country, and it’s frostbiting immigrants,
students, journalists, academics, and booksellers.
“I’m terrified,” says Ellen Schrecker, author of Many
Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton University,
1999). “What concerns me is we’re not seeing an enormous
outcry against this whole structure of repression that’s
being rushed into place by the Bush Administration.”
“I’ve been talking a lot about the parallels between
what we’re going through now and McCarthyism,” says
Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU. “The term ‘terrorism’
is taking on the same kind of characteristics as the
term ‘communism’ did in the 1950s. It stops people in
their tracks, and they’re willing to give up their freedoms.
People are too quickly panicked. They are too willing
to give up their rights and to scapegoat people, especially
immigrants and people who criticize the war.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft is rounding up or interrogating
thousands of immigrants in what will go down in history
as the Ashcroft Raids. The FBI and Secret Service are
harassing artists and activists. Publishers are firing
anti-war columnists and cartoonists. University presidents
are scolding dissident faculty members. And rightwing
citizen’s groups are demanding conformity.
In this article, I focus on the threats to free speech,
which go well beyond the much-publicized attack on Bill
Maher of Politically Incorrect. These threats are real.
They are frightening people. They are ruining some livelihoods.
And they may be just a taste of sour things to come.
Barbara Wien worked as a program officer and a conflict
resolution trainer at the United States Institute of
Peace for five years. She doesn’t work there anymore.
On Sept. 11, while at an official function of the Institute,
Wien spoke out. “I said that I would hope that the United
States would not resort to military retaliation and
that we need to do a great deal of soul-searching in
this country about how U.S. policies might have contributed
to the emergence of terrorist policies,” she recalls.
Her comments were not well received. “My conservative
colleagues became outraged, and said, ‘You’re the most
leftwing person we’ve ever met, and you should not be
leading any trainings here. While the buildings are
still smoldering, you’re blaming the U.S.’ “
This wasn’t the first time Wien had raised hackles inside
the Institute, which is, according to its web site,
“an independent, nonpartisan federal institution created
and funded by Congress to strengthen the nation’s capacity
to promote the peaceful resolution of international
conflict.” She had clashed with her colleagues before
over U.S. policy regarding sanctions on Iraq, Israel’s
occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the Sudan, and
the bombing of Belgrade, she says.
“There was generally a hostile work environment for
my peaceful activism at the Institute,” she says. After
her colleagues jumped all over her on Sept. 11, Wien
objected. “I went to the management and said a pacifist
position here is being punished, and they said, ‘It’s
time for you to go, Barbara. You don’t fit into the
culture,’” she recalls. “Then they basically hounded
me for about two weeks for my letter of resignation,
so I finally caved under duress.”
Harriet Hentges is the executive vice president of the
United States Institute of Peace. “She submitted a letter
of resignation to me October 17, and beyond that I don’t
have a comment,” says Hentges. “But we would never make
an individual staff member’s personal views a litmus
test for employment.”
You are no longer free to patronize a bookstore without
fear of government scrutiny. On Nov. 1, the American
Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) sent
a disturbing letter to its members.
“Dear Bookseller,” it begins. “Last week, President
Bush signed into law an antiterrorism bill that gives
the federal government expanded authority to search
your business records, including the titles of the books
purchased by your customers.... There is no opportunity
for you or your lawyer to object in court. You cannot
object publicly, either. The new law includes a gag
order that prevents you from disclosing ‘to any person’
the fact that you have received an order to produce
documents.”
The letter recommends that booksellers who get hit with
such an order should call their attorney or the foundation,
but “because of the gag order ... you should not tell
ABFFE that you have received a court order.... You can
simply tell us that you need to contact ABFFE’s legal
counsel.”
Marsha Rummel of Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison,
Wisconsin, denounces this new government policy as a
“terrifying encroachment on the privacy rights of citizens.”
Noting that “the danger to booksellers is just one small
part of this new landscape,” she says, “We must collectively
take a stand to defend our democratic rights, including
the right to protest our government and oppose the war,
and the right to read whatever we like.”
Katie Sierra is a 15-year-old sophomore at Sissonville
High School in West Virginia. On Oct. 22, she notified
her principal, Forrest Mann, that she wanted to form
an anarchist club. He denied her request. It was the
only club he has ever disallowed, according to the lawsuit
Sierra and her mother filed against the school.
Sierra had already made up fliers for the club, which
she wasn’t able to distribute. The fliers said: “Anarchist
club. Anarchism preaches to love all humans, not just
of one country. Start a newspaper, a food-not-bombs
group, a book discussion group. Speak your point of
view, and hear others. Please join.”
The next day, Sierra came to school with a T-shirt on
that said, “Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, I’m So Proud
of People in the Land of the So-Called Free.” The principal
suspended her for three days.
“I’ve never been in trouble before,” Sierra says. “I
was kind of upset at first: How could he? Then I was
crying. How could he suspend me for something so ridiculous
as that?”
On Oct. 29, she was told that before she could come
back to school, she would have to provide the principal
with authorization to obtain her medical records, she
would have to meet with a school psychologist, and she
couldn’t wear T-shirts like the one she wore or organize
her anarchist club.
At a school board meeting on Oct. 29, the school board
president, Bill Raglin, said, “What in the hell is wrong
with a kid like that?” Another school board member,
John Luoni, accused her of treason, according to her
court papers.
To make matters worse, says Sierra, Principal Mann mischaracterized
her T-shirt in the Charleston Gazette, falsely stating
it included statements such as “I hope Afghanistan wins”
and “America should burn.”
As a result, students at school ganged up on her. “I
got shoved against lockers,” she says. “People made
pictures of me with bullet holes through my head and
posted them on, like, the doors in the school. They
said some really harsh things. It was scary.”
Sierra and her mother sued the school district but lost
in the lower courts and in the state supreme court by
a 3-to-2 vote. “We sought an injunction to force the
principal to allow her to form the anarchy club and
wear her peace T-shirts and void her suspension,” her
attorney, Roger Forman, says. Forman, a former president
of the West Virginia ACLU, says her free speech rights
have been violated.
Sierra plans to appeal. “I’m really disgusted with the
courts right now, and with the school,” she says. “I’m
being punished for being myself.”
Because she felt unsafe at Sissonville High, Sierra
is now being homeschooled.
Until recently, Jackie Anderson was a staff reporter
for the Sun Advocate in Price, Utah. She had worked
there for three years, and she was encouraged to write
editorial columns as part of her job. So, on Sept. 18,
she wrote a column that said, “War is not the only action
available to us. Seeking justice is action. Making peace
is action.”
The column never ran, though several pro-war columns
did. Six days after filing her column, Anderson says
she asked her editor, Lynnda Johnson, whom she considered
a good friend, why it wasn’t running, and Johnson told
her to talk to the publisher, Kevin Ashby. “This is
not the direction I want my newspaper to go in,” he
told her, as Anderson recalls it.
“Well, I don’t know if I can continue to work here,
and I certainly can’t continue this afternoon,” she
says she told him, adding that she got permission from
her editor to take a personal day.
“The next day I went in to work, I was called into the
publisher’s office, and he asked me to clear my desk,”
she recalls. “I asked him if I was being fired, and
he said, ‘No, you quit. I’m accepting your resignation.’
And I said, ‘I didn’t quit.’ “
Johnson explains the paper’s side. “Look, this is a
personnel issue,” she says. “The bottom line is Jackie
Anderson walked out on a production day and said she
couldn’t work here anymore. Period. She quit.”
As to not running the column, Johnson says, “She was
not told it wouldn’t run. She was told there were problems
with it. I’m not going to discuss this. This was a personnel
issue. She said she quit her job and then decided she
could unquit at her convenience.”
Anderson is now collecting unemployment. “My options
are very, very limited,” she says. “This is a depressed
economy. There aren’t many other jobs in journalism.
And it’s put stress on my husband, who is a coal miner,
which is why we are very limited as to where we can
go.”
“This was a job that I loved and believed in. I thought
journalists were warriors for freedom in at least as
significant a way, if not a greater way, than a soldier
in the military. If people can lose their jobs for their
opinions this early on, then it does not bode well.”
At least two other journalists have been fired for their
columns. Both received some attention in the media.
Dan Guthrie worked at the Grants Pass Daily Courier
in Oregon for ten years and was a columnist, on and
off, for seven of them. “During that time, I’d won quite
a few awards, including best columnist in Oregon,” he
says. But one recent column cost him his job. It was
called, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tender Turn
Tail,” which ran Sept. 15.
Guthrie was the columnist who said Bush “skedaddled”
on Sept. 11. “The picture of Bush hiding in a Nebraska
hole” was “an embarrassment,” he wrote. “The President’s
men are frantically glossing over his cowardice.”
A week later, the publisher fired him, even though the
city editor and the editor had signed off on the piece,
Guthrie says. “I told them this was going to be hot,
and they approved it as it stood.”
A few days later, the editor, Dennis Roler, issued a
front-page apology, entitled, “This Is No Time to Criticize
the Nation’s Leader: Apology for Printing Column.” The
final paragraph reads: “In this critical time, the nation
needs to come together behind the President. Politics,
and destructive criticism, need to be put aside for
the country’s good. Unfortunately, my lapse in judgment
hurt that positive effort, and I apologize.”
Today, Guthrie is picking up unemployment, and he’s
almost philosophical about journalism: “You wish newspapers
would be better than they are. You think they have this
covenant with the First Amendment. But they don’t, especially
in times of crisis.” Tom Gutting worked for the Texas
City Sun, and on Sept. 22, he, like Guthrie, criticized
Bush for not returning to Washington on Sept. 11. “There
was W. flying around the country like a scared child
seeking refuge in his mother’s bed after having a nightmare,”
he wrote, adding: “What we are stuck with is a crippled
President who continues to be controlled by his advisers.
He’s not a leader. He’s a puppet.”
The day the piece ran, says Gutting, “the publisher
assured me straightaway that he wouldn’t fire me.” But
a few days later, the publisher, Les Daughtry Jr., changed
his mind.
Daughtry, too, issued a front-page apology, saying Gutting’s
column was “not appropriate to publish during this time.”
Gutting is unemployed. “I’m still looking for a job,”
he says. “I’m hoping it will end soon. I think I’ve
been pretty much blacklisted from the small papers the
company owns.”
The St. George, Utah, newspaper, The Spectrum, apologized
on Nov. 13 for a cartoon it ran the previous day from
Pulitzer prize-winner Steve Benson. The cartoon depicted
President Bush dropping bombs that carried scrawled
messages, such as “starving millions of Afghans” and
“killing innocent civilians.” Many local veterans descended
on the paper, threatening to cancel their subscriptions
if it didn’t issue an apology, according to The Salt
Lake Tribune.
Aaron McGruder, who draws The Boondocks, has seen his
strip taken out of many papers after Sept. 11 for its
anti-war content. And lesser known cartoonists may be
especially vulnerable.
Todd Persche drew a cartoon for the Baraboo News Republic
in Wisconsin once a week for the last three years. Not
anymore. After Sept. 11, he drew a couple of cartoons
that got him canned. One said, “When the media keeps
pounding on the war drum . . . it’s hard to hear other
points of view.” Another was about Big Brother “turning
our civil rights upside down.”
Persche says, “In these times, they make you feel like
you’re not a patriot just because you’re dissenting.”
At the moment, professors who criticize the U.S. government
aren’t being fired as they were during the McCarthy
days. But some are being taken to the woodshed.
At the University of New Mexico, history professor Richard
Berthold made a comment to his class that he now regrets:
“Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote,”
he said. The university president has said “he will
‘vigorously pursue’ disciplinary action” against Berthold,
the Chronicle of Higher Education reported.
Robert Jensen, associate professor of journalism at
the University of Texas at Austin, wrote a column for
the Houston Chronicle on Sept. 14 entitled “U.S. just
as guilty of committing own violent acts.” In it, he
said that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 “were reprehensible
and indefensible ... but this act was no more despicable
[than] the massive acts of terrorism - the deliberate
killing of civilians for political purposes - that the
U.S. government has committed during my lifetime.”
For this, Jensen was publicly ridiculed by the school
president, Larry R. Faulkner, who wrote a letter to
the Houston Chronicle, which was published on Sept.
19. “Jensen is not only misguided, but has become a
fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public
policy,” he said.
“I’ve been marginalized on this campus,” Jensen says.
But he takes pains not to exaggerate the threat against
him. “I’m a tenured white male professor at a major
university. I’m so protected I have no fears. But an
untenured brown professor is not so protected.”
Jensen worries that untenured faculty may censor themselves,
and he and many others are concerned about Lynne Cheney’s
group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni,
which she co-founded in 1995 with Senator Joseph Lieberman,
Democrat of Connecticut.
That group issued a report after Sept. 11 called “Defending
Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America,
and What Can Be Done About It.” It said, “When a nation’s
intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization,
they give comfort to its adversaries.” And it cited
more than 100 examples of what it considers unpatriotic
acts by specific academics.
“What’s analogous to McCarthyism is the self-appointed
guardians who are engaging in private blacklisting,”
says Eric Foner, professor of history at Columbia University.
“That’s why the Lynne Cheney thing is so disturbing:
Her group is trying to intimidate individuals who hold
different points of view. There aren’t loyalty oaths
being demanded of teachers yet, but we seem to be at
the beginning of a process that could get a lot worse
and is already cause for considerable alarm.”
We’ve been here before. From the Alien and Sedition
Acts to Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus and his
imprisonment of anti-war editors, from the suppression
of speech during World War I and the Palmer Raids to
the internment of Japanese Americans during World War
II and the repression of the McCarthy days, the government
has seized upon times of peril to scapegoat immigrants
and to suppress liberties.
“We’re talking about exactly the same phenomenon,” says
the ACLU’s Strossen.
“No analogy is ever perfect, and history doesn’t repeat
itself exactly, but there’s a pattern of the government
restricting freedom of expression and running roughshod
over traditional protections for the accused,” Foner
says. “Anybody concerned with freedom of expression
and civil liberties should be very, very concerned.”
— Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.
