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The
Martial Plan
Police State Tactics Transform
A Nation - Our Own
Mondo
Washington
By James Ridgeway
The Village
Voice
12-25-03
- WASHINGTON-Every day the
U.S. looks more like a police state.
-
- An internal Justice Department probe, based on
surveillance videos made by the government inside federal detention
facilities, shows that the U.S. harassed, beat, and kept in solitary
confinement without access to family or lawyers men it picked up off the
streets of New York after 9-11. More likely than not, these men were
seized on grounds that some cop or FBI agent thought they looked like
Osama followers. Or that a business partner or neighbor decided he could
get the man's money or property by charging him first with theft and
then telling the cops, "Oh, by the way, I think the guy is Al Qaeda," a
claim that one magistrate after another accepted as the reason to set
bails so high no one but a millionaire could pay to get out.
-
- And this doesn't even scratch the surface of what's
been going on. Lawyers were not told the numbers of courtrooms to where
their clients were being shuttled because the room locations were
secret. Members of Congress, government, the press, and the judiciary
knew from the very get-go that any FBI agent, acting on his or her own,
could make an affidavit asserting that any individual was a suspected
terrorist.
-
- Every day, Ashcroft and Bush work the country toward
something like martial law, though the administration has suffered
setbacks, like last week's rulings by two federal appellate courts in
Padilla v. Rumsfeld and Gherebi v. Bush. Both of those decisions, for
now at least, hamper the government's ability to simply lock up suspects
indefinitely.
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- But the government has other targets and other ways of
dealing with them. The most recent crackdown seems to be on the foreign
press-the source of much of the substantial critique of its
policies.
-
- U.S. immigration authorities are detaining foreign
correspondents on grounds they have not obtained special visas
permitting them to operate here, reports the Associated Press. True,
there is a law stipulating a special visa for journalists, but few have
ever heard of it and it is seldom enforced. No more. No one ever told
the visiting journalists it had suddenly been revived. As a result,
immigration officials aren't allowing reporters from abroad to come in
under ordinary 90-day tourist visa waivers.
-
- Peter Krobath, chief editor for the Austrian movie
magazine Skip, was seized and held overnight in a cold room with 45
others who landed without visas. Is he an Osama follower? A disguised
fedayeen from Saddam's clan? No. He is guilty of flying to the U.S. to
interview Ben Affleck.
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- Thomas Sjoerup, a photographer for the Danish paper
Ekstra Bladet, had to give the American authorities fingerprints, a mug
shot, and a DNA sample, and he was promptly sent back home
anyway.
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- Six French journalists were marched across a terminal
at Los Angeles International Airport in handcuffs, having had their
belts and shoelaces removed. The International Press Institute, based in
Vienna, along with the International Federation of Journalists,
headquartered in Brussels, is protesting this treatment.
-
- The U.S. response? An embassy official in Vienna
insisted that the government was only acting in accordance with the
letter of the law.
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- Additional reporting: Ashley Glacel, Phoebe St John,
and Alicia Ng
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The
Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in
anarchy"
Groupe de communication Mulindwas
"avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans
l'anarchie"
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