The Politics of Free Speech
August 9, 2008
No, I am not talking about China. That is easy, and meaningless. I am not moved when some designer anarchist from California privileged enough to afford the ticket to Beijing makes a statement about — Tibet. As if things were hunky dory back home; as if being a Brit or an American grants one the moral authority to dispense such admonition. And there is ignorance. I have never heard any of these peaceniks speak about the Uighurs. Or about the sweatshop labourers. Tibet is sexy, it comes with a patina of Hollywood legitimacy. Uighurs – who are they again?
Does any citizen of the US or UK have business telling the Chinese how to run their affairs when their own countries are busy inflicting genocide abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) and curtailing rights and liberties at home? Guantanamo, Bagram, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, rendition, shock-and-awe, 42 days without charge — and we have the chutzpah to lecture China, Zimbabwe etc? How many are aware that both UK and US have a higher incarceration rate than China, Saudi Arabia or even Burma?
And all the talk of ‘freedom of speech’ rings a little hollow when neither US nor UK has done much to ensure it at home. Remember those whistleblowers who were last year put in jail by the British state? Can any country which has laws like the Official Secrets Act claim it upholds freedom of speech?
So here comes the latest revelation. Tom Feeley, who runs the excellent news resource Information Clearinghouse is being threatened by armed goons to shut down his operation. Here is a mail Mike Whitney recently sent (thanks Liz):
My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info <http://informationclearinghouse.info/> which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.
Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.
Dubya is…The Dark Knight!
July 30, 2008
![[What Bush and Batman Have in Common]](http://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-BX473_oj_kla_20080724191516.jpg)
So I am not the only one drawing this analogy. It appears the Murdoch press has also seen the parallels. Andrew Klavan tells readers of the Wall Street Journal ‘What Bush and Batman Have in Common‘. (via TruthDig)
A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .
Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”
There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
Stop the New FISA
July 11, 2008
‘Allowing the new surveillance law to stand would seriously cripple our free press,’ writes Chris Hedges.
If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday — giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans — is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.
The new FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance. It allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The court will not be told specifics about who will be wiretapped, which means the law provides woefully inadequate safeguards to protect innocent people whose communications are caught up in the government’s dragnet surveillance program.
The law, passed under the guise of national security, ostensibly targets people outside the country. There is no question, however, that it will ensnare many communications between Americans and those overseas. Those communications can be stored indefinitely and disseminated, not just to the U.S. government but to other governments.
The FBI’s Plan to ‘Profile’ Muslims
July 11, 2008
Fascism has returned to Italy, and Juan Cole shows, US is not very far behind.
The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask “open-ended questions” concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person’s travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.
The rumored changes have provoked protests from Muslim American and Arab-American groups. The Council on American Islamic Relations, among the more effective lobbies for Muslim Americans’ civil liberties, immediately denounced the plan, as did James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute. Said Zogby, “There are millions of Americans who, under the reported new parameters, could become subject to arbitrary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling.” Zogby, who noted that the Bush administration’s history with profiling is not reassuring, warned that all Americans would suffer from a weakening of civil liberties.
Left supports Right defending liberty
June 29, 2008
Tony Benn’s principled support for David Davis’s reelection. (thanks Tom)
Libertarians from the Left and Right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state. In 1961, having served for 10 years as an MP for Bristol South East, I was declared disqualified because my father had been a peer and he had died. It was argued that I had inherited his peerage.
A by-election was called, and, despite my disqualification, I decided to contest it to argue a point of principle. Winston Churchill, the former Conservative Prime Minister, sent me a letter of support for which I am, to this day, most grateful.
I must be the only Labour candidate who has ever circulated 30,000 copies of a letter from a Tory leader to my constituents. The law that prevented me sitting in the Commons was later changed as a result of that by-election.
Fortress Britain
June 26, 2008
Variant, Issue 32, Summer 2008; Spinwatch, June 23, 2008; Scoop (New Zealand), June 25, 2008; UK Watch, June 25, 2008; Media Monitors Network, June 25, 2008; Dissident Voice, June 27, 2008
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“The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.[1] Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.
In the post-September 11 world, Naomi Klein writes, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’”. Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear should suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
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Lady Liberty Fights Back?
June 13, 2008
Kucinich tries to impeach Bush on the 9th, the Supreme Court voted to restores the rule of law to Guantánamo on the 12th and today Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP as a stand against the government’s “assaults” on civil liberties. Newton states that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction: are we starting to see a swing back for civil liberties? I bloody hope so. Nice to see Bush, Blair and their cabal getting a little scare.
Truthdig: As I listened to Rep. Kucinich invoke the great engine of impeachment—he listed some 35 crimes by these two faithless officials—we heard, like great bells tolling, the voice of the Constitution itself speak out ringingly against those who had tried to destroy it.
ACLU: NEW YORK – In a stunning blow to the Bush administration’s failed national security policies, the Supreme Court ruled today 5-4 that the U.S. Constitution applies to the government’s detention policies at Guantánamo. The Court concluded that detainees held at Guantánamo have a right to challenge their detention through habeas corpus.
BBC Online: Shadow home secretary David Davis has resigned as an MP. He is to force a by-election in his Haltemprice and Howden constituency which he will fight on the issue of the new 42-day terror detention limit. Mr Davis, 59, told reporters outside the House of Commons he believed his move was a “noble endeavour” to stop the erosion of British civil liberties.
Turkeys for Thanksgiving
June 10, 2008
Lo and behold! Gordon Brown, the man who has been forlornly playing the pipe still wet with Tony Blair’s spit, has failed to lure many vermin with his call for for more draconian legislation. So when finally a rat does come out, it bears a Muslim name. According to the Daily Telegraph, Brown’s call for 42-day detention — a political move according to Jacqui Smith to present the Tories as soft on terrorism — has received the endorsement of one Khurshid Ahmed, Chairman of something called the ‘British Muslim Forum’. ( It is worth reading the current article in conjunction with this article by Gareth Peirce; it provides necessary context about the draconian “anti-terror” legislation in Britain). My friend Paul de Rooij comments:
The British government is seeking to pass a law allowing 42-day-detention without trial for “terror suspects”. Note, that Britain already has draconian “anti-terror” legislation in place from the days it fought Irish nationalists. All the recent measures added to this legislation are specifically targeting Muslim “terror suspects”, and thus it is truly bizarre to find a Muslim organization favoring the government’s proposed measures. It is a bit like an organization of turkeys popping up stating that they are in favor of Thanksgiving.
The history of terrorist arrests in the UK is appalling. Many wrongful convictions, brutality in prison and under questioning, horrendous conditions in jail causing prisoners to lose their minds… and the cases that led to many arrests and were trumpeted in the media resulted afterwards in the release of suspects without charges and without any apology. And there are other frivolous cases: imprisoning a woman who wrote a poem lauding the resistance fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan…
Freedom under threat
May 26, 2008
‘The arrest of a Nottingham University student for downloading an al-Qaida manual is an outrage and undermines the university’s academic integrity,’ writes Ayesha Christie.
On May 14, Rizwaan Sabir, a student of politics and Hicham Yezza, a former student currently employed at the University of Nottingham, were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Their crime? Sabir, a graduate research student, who is writing his MA dissertation on Islamist extremism and international terrorist networks, had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaida training manual from a publicly accessible US government website. He had sent it to Yezza to print, and the material was noticed by staff who passed it on to university authorities. The university reported it to the police, and the two men were arrested. Kept in detention for six days, they were released without charge on May 20.
The university has argued that it was well within its grounds to contact the police. After all, what was Yezza, employed in a non-academic role, doing printing a terrorist manual? Arguably, the university was only acting in the interests of the safety of its students and staff. In the current climate of fear and surveillance constructed by the government and much of the media, we are all encouraged to be on “terror alert”.
With friends like these . . .
April 23, 2008
David Mamet, the writer behind Wag the Dog, is the latest to join the ranks of Arthur Koestler to Kinglsey Amis to Christopher Hitchens: people who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of deserters (thanks Paulo).
One striking aspect of the 1968 and post-1968 generation has been overlooked in the current nostalgia fest. Despite Robert Frost’s stern warning against the dangers of youthful idealism (”I never dared to be radical when young, for fear it would make me conservative when old”), remarkably few of those formed by 1968 and its aftermath have moved to the right in middle age. That is, until now.In the same way that a surprising number of Thatcher and Reagan’s key thinkers were former communists, the ideological campaign for the war on terror abroad and against multiculturalism at home has been dominated by people who were formed by the student revolt, feminism and anti-racist movement of the 1970s. As with the political defectors of the past, their critique of the left is validated by personal experience. Just as past generations sought to reposition the fault-lines of 20th-century politics (notably, by bracketing communism with fascism as totalitarianism), so, now, influential writers seek to redraw the political map of our own time. And, intentionally or not, they are undermining the historic bond between progressive liberalism and the poor.
