Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [49]
America has always stood for the principle that the government may not spy on its citizens unless there is probable cause to believe that a citizen is involved in wrongdoing. Even then, the spying must be approved by a judge. When we are being questioned lawfully, we have always had the constitutional right to refuse to answer any question. Those rights are out the window with programs like TIA.
There is usually very little in the way of an electronic or paper trail when it comes to terrorists. They pay cash and lay low. You and me, however, we leave trails everywhere—credit cards, cell phones, medical records, online; everything we do. Who is really being watched here?
Never mind that this was just another layer of bureaucracy created by the party that spends most of its time railing against the federal government and its layers of bureaucracy.
And then there are those who exist in some sort of terror limbo—the prisoners of Guantanamo Bay. All of a sudden, we were really excited to have Cuba right next door—what better place to put all our newly captured evildoers? Six hundred and eighty people—including three children ages thirteen to sixteen—are incarcerated there indefinitely. No charges, no sentence to serve, no lawyers, no nothing. Is it any wonder there have been 28 suicide attempts among those imprisoned there?
To date, there are already at least thirty-four documented cases of FBI abuse under the Patriot Act—and at least another 966 individuals have filed formal complaints. Many of these people were just minding their own business, or seeking to partake in our free and open society. Consider these examples:
• John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), was detained at the American border by immigration officials on his way to a speaking engagement at Michigan State University. A State Department agent drove in from Detroit and interrogated Clarke about his participation in anti-globalization protests, about whether he “opposed the ideology of the United States” and even about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. The agent presented a State Department folder on OCAP that included the name of a man with whom Clarke had stayed in Chicago, and leaflets from Clarke’s previous speaking engagements in the U.S.
• A suburban New York judge asked Anissa Khoder, a U.S. citizen of Lebanese descent, if she was “a terrorist” when she appeared in court over parking tickets.
• In May 2002 six French journalists were stopped at Los Angeles International Airport, interrogated and subjected to body searches. They were detained for more than a day and expelled from the United States before they could reach their final destination: a video game trade show.
• At a high school in Vermont, a uniformed police officer entered teacher Tom Treece’s classroom at 1:30 a.m. to photograph a student art project that depicted “President Bush with duct tape over his mouth” and the caption, “Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth.” Treece was removed from teaching his current-events class.
• A college student from North Carolina, A.J. Brown, was visited by two Secret Service agents who questioned her about her possession of “anti-American” material. Without inviting them in, Brown showed the agents what she assumed they came for: an anti-death-penalty poster showing Bush and a group of lynched bodies with the caption: “We hang on your every word.”
• North Carolina Green Party activist Doug Stuber was detained and questioned while trying to fly to Prague, then told that no Greens were allowed to fly that day. His interrogators showed him a document from the Justice Department that showed that Greens were likely terrorists, and the Secret Service took a mug shot. Stuber was forced to turn back.
There are other incidents that, while they may not be the work of the Feds, they represent the chilling effect this has had on our society. Here are two examples:
• CBS fired a producer of Hitler: The Rise of Evil for statements