-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 4, 2007 10:52:08 AM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: You're Not Going Anywhere
Bush Restricts Travel Rights of
More Than 100,000 Americans
by Sherwood Ross
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0709/S00044.htm
The freedom to travel of more than 100,000 Americans placed on
"watch" and "no fly" lists is being restricted by the Bush-Cheney
regime.
Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are
being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports', strip
searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author and
political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, "The End of
America."(Chelsea Green Publishing)
"Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to
travel back and forth across borders is a classic part of the
fascist playbook," Wolf says. She noticed starting in 2002 that
"almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I
was called aside by the Transportation Security Administration(TSA)
and given a more thorough search."
During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her "You're on the
list" and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected terrorists but
of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians "who have
criticized the White House."
Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator
Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports in
March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe from
Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been
mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American
citizen, described the "humiliation factor" he endured:
"I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I
had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal," Wolf
quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas Maduro,
Venezuela's foreign minister, said he was detained at Kennedy
airport by officers who "threatened and shoved" him. And that was
mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant was detained at
Kennedy and "rendered" to Syria where he was imprisoned for more
than a year by goons that beat him with a heavy metal cable.
After the Canadian furor over Arar's illegal kidnapping and
torture, he was eventually released as he had zero ties to
terrorists. Yet the Bush gang refused to concede error; refused to
provide documents or witnesses to Canadian investigators; and
claimed last January it had "secret information" that justified
keeping Arar on the watch list, Wolf noted.
Again, Chaplain James Yee, an American citizen born in New Jersey
who had converted to Islam and had the Christian compassion to call
for better treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, was nabbed in Sept.,
2003 on suspicion of "espionage and possibly treason" and flung
into the Naval brig at Charleston, S.C., where he was manacled, put
in solitary for 76 days, forbidden mail and family visits,
demonized in the media and warned he could face execution.
Wolf writes, "Within six months, the U.S. government had dropped
all criminal charges against Yee," claiming it did so to avoid
making sensitive evidence public, not because he was innocent.
Over and again, the Bush gang claims it can prove terrible crimes
about suspects but, like the men imprisoned at Guantanamo, it
repeatedly turns out to have "conspiracy" zilch in its briefcase
rather than hard proof of actual misdeeds. Yet it goes on punishing
hundreds of suspects with solitary confinement and worse without
ever bringing them to trial. Globally, the number of such detainees
is in the tens of thousands. Stalin would have understood.
Apparently, favorite targets of the Bush tyranny are peace
activists like Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, detained at the San
Francisco airport; a political leader such as Nancy Oden, of the
Green Party, prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago; King
Downing and David Fathi, both of the American Civil Liberties Union
and both detained (proves ACLU's case about Bush, eh what?); and
Constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, of Princeton University,
who had attacked the illegalities of the Bush regime. He was put on
notice his luggage would be ransacked.
"When you are physically detained by armed agents because of
something you said or wrote, it has an impact," Wolf writes. "You
get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can
redirect you physically, and can have armed men and women, who may
or may not answer your questions, search and release you."
Wolf traces the "watch list" back to a 2003 directive from Bush to
his intelligence agencies to identify people "thought to have
terrorist intentions or contacts." After the list was given to the
airlines, CBS-TV's 60 Minutes got a copy. The list was 540 pages
long and there were 75,000 names on it of people to be taken aside
for extra screening.
The more stringent "no fly" list has 45,000 names on it, Wolf
reports. Prior to 9/11, the list had just 16 names, but 44,984
suspects were quickly manufactured to justify the creation of the
vast airport security apparatus at God knows what cost to American
taxpayers.
One ludicrous "no fly" story concerns John Graham, president of the
nonprofit Giraffe Heroes Project, an organization that honors
people who stick their necks out. A former government careerist
who served in Viet Nam, Graham is an inspired speaker that receives
standing ovations from groups such as West Point cadets, yet is
kept from flying from his Langley, Wash., base by the National
Security Agency. NSA won't tell him why, either. Maybe they have
"secret" information on him, too.
Author Wolf notes that dictatorships from Hitler's Germany to
Pinochet's Chile have employed arbitrary arrests to harass critics.
And Bush's airport detention policies are more of the same.
As Wolf writes, "being free means that you can't be detained
arbitrarily."
Somebody ring the fire bell!
*************
Sherwood Ross is a Miami, FL-based writer who has worked in the
civil rights movement, and for major dailies and wire services.
Reach him at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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