WASHINGTON -- On the evening of Feb. 13, Andrew
O'Conner, 40, was at St. John's College library in New Mexico when city
police arrested him at his computer terminal, cuffed him and took him to
the state capital, Santa Fe, for questioning by federal Secret Service
agents. According to the American Library Association, O'Conner said they
accused him of having made threatening remarks about President George W.
Bush in an Internet chat room. O'Conner said he recalled saying Bush is
"out of control," and added, "I'm going to sue the Secret Service, Santa
Fe Police, St. John's and everybody involved in this whole thing."
That same evening
on the opposite coast, New York police arrested two young people, Lytle
Shaw and Emilie Clark, for taping up photos of everyday life in Baghdad.
Shaw and Lytle say they were told putting up posters was a "quality of
life" infraction, i.e. a minor one. They both had identification on them
-- driver's licenses -- and Emilie was seven months' pregnant, so they
asked if they could just be written tickets. Police instead cuffed them,
took them to jail and hassled them all night about how they ought to avoid
a planned anti-war protest.
In Chicago a week
later, immigration officials detained Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, 55, a
well-known Irish political activist who has been coming to the States for
more than 30 years.
McAliskey had
previously been handed the "key to the city" -- an honor that symbolizes
one is always welcome -- of New York and San Francisco. At age 21, she was
the youngest person ever elected to the British Parliament. But on Feb.
21, immigration police said they had paperwork warning she was a "national
security" danger; they deported her. "Somebody in Washington, with the
mind of a rodent, has to order that," complained Newsday columnist Jimmy
Breslin. "This has to be all about her making a speech against the war
someplace and the British put in a complaint to our
authorities."
A man complaining
about the president in a chat room. Two young people taping up anti-war
posters. A famous Irish moral authority. All of them targeted by teams of
government and/or police agents.
It's tempting to
dismiss these incidents as contemptible, but isolated. Yet the pattern
grows ever-harder to ignore. Three days after McAliskey's deportation,
cable news channel MSNBC fired its top-rated anchor, Phil Donahue.
(Russians will remember the American-Soviet talk-show bridge Donahue built
with journalist Vladimir Pozner.)
Donahue, it seems,
is "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace
... a difficult public face for [parent network] NBC in a time of war. ...
He seems to delight in presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and
skeptical of the administration's motives."
So says an
internal NBC report obtained by a television industry journal,
Allyourtv.com. The report warns Donahue's show could become, gasp, "a home
for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are
waving the flag at every opportunity."
They certainly
are. Antiwar groups complain they can't get national networks to accept
ads questioning the drive to invade Iraq. And CNN confirmed as much to The
Washington Post: CNN spokeswoman Megan Mahoney is quoted saying the news
channel's policy is that "we do not accept international advocacy ads on
regions in conflict." (What?) An NBC spokeswoman tells The Post the
network refused an antiwar ad because "It pertained to a controversial
issue which we prefer to handle in our news and public affairs
programming." (What?) Fox, hands-down the most pro-war and partisan of all
the major networks, apparently shrugged and smirked -- it declined to even
comment.
Over at the UN,
they've hung a blue curtain to hide Pablo Picasso's antiwar masterpiece
"Guernica," which depicts the horrors of carpet-bombing. Meanwhile, the
worst case of pro-government censorship my generation has seen -- a
refusal by the Washington area's main cable company, Comcast, to run some
innocuous antiwar ads on CNN and other channels the night of the
president's State of the Union speech -- has been met with a big fat yawn.
Check out the ads
yourself at awvf.org, you'll see a series of Americans voicing concerns
that aren't even remotely radical -- statements along the lines of "we
have other priorities," or "this war will not make us safe."
View the ads and
you'll agree this is a clear-cut case of pro-government censorship -- not
"spin" or "bias," but Soviet-style censorship -- on CNN, in the nation's
capitol, on a topic as deeply serious as whether to go to war, and on one
of the most important days of that debate.
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