"I told them to wait
until we opened at 11:00," she recalls. "Then they pulled
their badges out."
The two men were
Terrence Donahue of the FBI and Steven Smith of the Secret
Service.
"They said they had
several reports of anti-American activity going on here and
wanted to see the exhibit," she says. The museum was running a
show called "Secret Wars," which contains many anti-war
statements that were commissioned before September
11.
"They just walked
in, so I went through with them and gave them a very detailed
tour. I asked them if they were familiar with the artists and
what the role of art was at a critical time like this," she
says. "They were more interested in where the artists were
from. They were taking some notes. They were pointing out
things that they thought were negative, like a recent painting
by Lynn Randolph of the Houston skyline burning, and a devil
dancing around, and with George Bush Sr. in the belly of the
devil."
There was a surreal
moment when they inspected another element of the exhibit. "We
had a piece in the middle of the room, a mock surveillance
camera pointed to the door of the museum, and they wondered
whether they were being recorded," she says.
All in all, they
were there for about an hour. "As they were leaving, they
asked me where I went to school, and if my parents knew if I
worked at a place like this, and who funded us, and how many
people came in to see the exhibit," she says. "I was
definitely pale. It was scary because I was alone, and they
were really big guys."
Before the agents
left the museum, Huanca called Tex Kerschen, the curator of
the exhibit. "I had just put down a book on COINTELPRO," he
says, referring to the FBI's program of infiltrating leftwing
groups in the 1960s. "Donna's call confirmed some of my worst
suspicions. Donna was frightened, and we're all a little bit
shocked that they were going to act against a small art space,
to bring to bear that kind of menace, an atmosphere of dread.
These old moldy charges of 'anti-American,'
'un-American'--they seem laughable at first, like we can't be
accused of anything that silly. But they've started coming
down with this."
The director of the
Art Car Museum is James Harithas, who served as the director
of the Corcoran Art Museum in Washington, D.C., in the late
1960s. "It's unbelievable," he says of the visit from the
G-men. "People should be worried that their freedoms are being
taken away right and left."
Robert Dogium, a
spokesman for the FBI in Houston, says the visit was a routine
follow-up on a call "from someone who said there was some
material or artwork that was of a threatening nature to the
President." He says it was no big thing. "While the work there
was not their cup of tea, it was not considered of a
threatening nature to anybody or terrorism or
anything."
She is a freshman at
Durham Tech in North Carolina. Her name is A.J. Brown. She's
gotten a scholarship from the ACLU to help her attend college.
But that didn't prepare her for the knock on the door that
came on October 26. "It was 5:00 on Friday, and I was getting
ready for a date," she says. When she heard the knock, she
opened the door. Here's her account.
"Hi, we're from the
Raleigh branch of the Secret Service," two agents said.
"And they flip out
their little ID cards, and I was like, 'What?'
"And they say,
'We're here because we have a report that you have un-American
material in your apartment.' And I was like, 'What? No, I
don't have anything like that.'
" 'Are you sure?
Because we got a report that you've got a poster that's
anti-American.'
"And I said
no."
They asked if they
could come into the apartment. "Do you have a warrant?" Brown
asked. "And they said no, they didn't have a warrant, but they
wanted to just come in and look around. And I said, 'Sorry,
you're not coming in.' "
One of the agents
told Brown, "We already know what it is. It's a poster of Bush
hanging himself," she recalls. "And I said no, and she was
like, 'Well, then, it's a poster with a target on Bush's
head,' and I was like, nope."
The poster they
seemed interested in was one that depicted Bush holding a
rope, with the words: "We Hang on Your Every Word. George
Bush, Wanted: 152 Dead." The poster has sketches of people
being hanged, and it refers to the number who were put to
death in Texas while Bush was governor, she
explains.
Ultimately, Brown
agreed to open her door so that the agents could see the
poster on the wall of her apartment, though she did not let
them enter. "They just kept looking at the wall," which
contained political posters from the Bush counter-inaugural, a
"Free Mumia" poster, a picture of Jesse Jackson, and a Pink
Floyd poster with the quotation: "Mother, should I trust the
government?"
At one point in the
conversation, one of the agents mentioned Brown's mother,
saying, "She's in the armed forces, isn't she?" (Her mother,
in fact, is in the Army Reserve.)
After they were done
inspecting the wall, one of the agents "pulled out his little
slip of paper, and he asked me some really stupid questions,
like, my name, my Social Security number, my phone number,"
she says. "Then they asked, 'Do you have any pro-Taliban stuff
in your apartment, any posters, any maps?'
"I was like, 'No, I
don't, and personally, I think the Taliban is just a bunch of
assholes.' "
With that, they
left. They had been at her apartment for forty minutes.
"They called me two
days later to make sure my information was correct: where I
lived, my phone number (hello!), and my nicknames," she says.
Brown says she's
"really annoyed" about the Secret Service visit. "Obviously,
I'm on some list somewhere."
Welcome to the New
McCarthyism. A chill is descending across the country, and
it's frostbiting immigrants, students, journalists, academics,
and booksellers.
"I'm terrified,"
says Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes:
McCarthyism in America (Princeton University,
1999). "What concerns me is we're not seeing an
enormous outcry against this whole structure of repression
that's being rushed into place by the Bush
Administration."
"I've been talking a
lot about the parallels between what we're going through now
and McCarthyism," says Nadine Strossen, president of the ACLU.
"The term 'terrorism' is taking on the same kind of
characteristics as the term 'communism' did in the 1950s. It
stops people in their tracks, and they're willing to give up
their freedoms. People are too quickly panicked. They are too
willing to give up their rights and to scapegoat people,
especially immigrants and people who criticize the
war."
Attorney General
John Ashcroft is rounding up or interrogating thousands of
immigrants in what will go down in history as the Ashcroft
Raids. The FBI and Secret Service are harassing artists and
activists. Publishers are firing anti-war columnists and
cartoonists. University presidents are scolding dissident
faculty members. And rightwing citizen's groups are demanding
conformity.
In this article, I
focus on the threats to free speech, which go well beyond the
much-publicized attack on Bill Maher of Politically
Incorrect. These threats are real. They are frightening
people. They are ruining some livelihoods. And they may be
just a taste of sour things to come.
Barbara Wien worked
as a program officer and a conflict resolution trainer at the
United States Institute of Peace for five years. She doesn't
work there anymore.
On September 11,
while at an official function of the Institute, Wien spoke
out. "I said that I would hope that the United States would
not resort to military retaliation and that we need to do a
great deal of soul-searching in this country about how U.S.
policies might have contributed to the emergence of terrorist
policies," she recalls.
Her comments were
not well received. "My conservative colleagues became
outraged, and said, 'You're the most leftwing person we've
ever met, and you should not be leading any trainings here.
While the buildings are still smoldering, you're blaming the
U.S.' "
This wasn't the
first time Wien had raised hackles inside the Institute, which
is, according to its web site, "an independent, nonpartisan
federal institution created and funded by Congress to
strengthen the nation's capacity to promote the peaceful
resolution of international conflict." She had clashed with
her colleagues before over U.S. policy regarding sanctions on
Iraq, Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the
Sudan, and the bombing of Belgrade, she says.
"There was generally
a hostile work environment for my peaceful activism at the
Institute," she says. After her colleagues jumped all over her
on September 11, Wien objected. "I went to the management and
said a pacifist position here is being punished, and they
said, 'It's time for you to go, Barbara. You don't fit
into
the culture,' " she recalls. "Then they basically
hounded me for about two weeks for my letter of resignation,
so I finally caved under duress."
Harriet Hentges is
the executive vice president of the United States Institute of
Peace. "She submitted a letter of resignation to me October
17, and beyond that I don't have a comment," says Hentges.
"But we would never make an individual staff member's personal
views a litmus test for employment."
You are no longer
free to patronize a bookstore without fear of government
scrutiny. On November 1, the American Booksellers Foundation
for Free Expression (ABFFE) sent a disturbing letter to its
members.
"Dear Bookseller,"
it begins. "Last week, President Bush signed into law an
antiterrorism bill that gives the federal government expanded
authority to search your business records, including the
titles of the books purchased by your customers. . . . There
is no opportunity for you or your lawyer to object in court.
You cannot object publicly, either. The new law includes a gag
order that prevents you from disclosing 'to any person' the
fact that you have received an order to produce
documents."
The letter
recommends that booksellers who get hit with such an order
should call their attorney or the foundation, but "because of
the gag order . . . you should not tell ABFFE that you have
received a court order. . . . You can simply tell us that you
need to contact ABFFE's legal counsel."
Marsha Rummel of
Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative in Madison, Wisconsin, denounces
this new government policy as a "terrifying encroachment on
the privacy rights of citizens." Noting that "the danger to
booksellers is just one small part of this new landscape," she
says, "We must collectively take a stand to defend our
democratic rights, including the right to protest our
government and oppose the war, and the right to read whatever
we like."
Katie Sierra is a
fifteen-year-old sophomore at Sissonville High School in West
Virginia. On October 22, she notified her principal, Forrest
Mann, that she wanted to form an anarchist club. He denied her
request. It was the only club he has ever disallowed,
according to the lawsuit Sierra and her mother filed against
the school.
Sierra had already
made up fliers for the club, which she wasn't able to
distribute. The fliers said: "Anarchist club. Anarchism
preaches to love all humans, not just of one country. Start a
newspaper, a food-not-bombs group, a book discussion group.
Speak your point of view, and hear others. Please
join."
The next day, Sierra
came to school with a T-shirt on that said, "Racism, Sexism,
Homophobia, I'm So Proud of People in the Land of the
So-Called Free." The principal suspended her for three
days.
"I've never been in
trouble before," Sierra says. "I was kind of upset at first:
How could he? Then I was crying. How could he suspend me for
something so ridiculous as that?"
On October 29, she
was told that before she could come back to school, she would
have to provide the principal with authorization to obtain her
medical records, she would have to meet with a school
psychologist, and she couldn't wear T-shirts like the one she
wore or organize her anarchist club.
At a school board
meeting on October 29, the school board president, Bill
Raglin, said, "What in the hell is wrong with a kid like
that?" Another school board member, John Luoni, accused her of
treason, according to her court papers.
To make matters
worse, says Sierra, Principal Mann mischaracterized her
T-shirt in the Charleston Gazette, falsely stating it
included statements such as "I hope Afghanistan wins" and
"America should burn."
As a result,
students at school ganged up on her. "I got shoved against
lockers," she says. "People made pictures of me with bullet
holes through my head and posted them on, like, the doors in
the school. They said some really harsh things. It was
scary."
Sierra and her
mother sued the school district but lost in the lower courts
and in the state supreme court by a 3-to-2 vote. "We sought an
injunction to force the principal to allow her to form the
anarchy club and wear her peace T-shirts and void her
suspension," her attorney, Roger Forman, says. Forman, a
former president of the West Virginia ACLU, says her free
speech rights have been violated.
Sierra plans to
appeal. "I'm really disgusted with the courts right now, and
with the school," she says. "I'm being punished for being
myself."
Because she felt
unsafe at Sissonville High, Sierra is now being
homeschooled.
Until recently,
Jackie Anderson was a staff reporter for the Sun
Advocate in Price, Utah. She had worked there for three
years, and she was encouraged to write editorial columns as
part of her job. So, on September 18, she wrote a column that
said, "War is not the only action available to us. Seeking
justice is action. Making peace is action."
The column never
ran, though several pro-war columns did. Six days after filing
her column, Anderson says she asked her editor, Lynnda
Johnson, whom she considered a good friend, why it wasn't
running, and Johnson told her to talk to the publisher, Kevin
Ashby. "This is not the direction I want my newspaper to go
in," he told her, as Anderson recalls it.
"Well, I don't know
if I can continue to work here, and I certainly can't continue
this afternoon," she says she told him, adding that she got
permission from her editor to take a personal day.
"The next day I went
in to work, I was called into the publisher's office, and he
asked me to clear my desk," she recalls. "I asked him if I was
being fired, and he said, 'No, you quit. I'm accepting your
resignation.' And I said, 'I didn't quit.' "
Johnson explains the
paper's side. "Look, this is a personnel issue," she says.
"The bottom line is Jackie Anderson walked out on a production
day and said she couldn't work here anymore. Period. She
quit."
As to not running
the column, Johnson says, "She was not told it wouldn't run.
She was told there were problems with it. I'm not going to
discuss this. This was a personnel issue. She said she quit
her job and then decided she could unquit at her
convenience."
Anderson is now
collecting unemployment. "My options are very, very limited,"
she says. "This is a depressed economy. There aren't many
other jobs in journalism. And it's put stress on my husband,
who is a coal miner, which is why we are very limited as to
where we can go."
"This was a job that
I loved and believed in. I thought journalists were warriors
for freedom in at least as significant a way, if not a greater
way, than a soldier in the military. If people can lose their
jobs for their opinions this early on, then it does not bode
well."
At least two other
journalists have been fired for their columns. Both received
some attention in the media. Dan Guthrie worked at the Grants
Pass Daily Courier in Oregon for ten years and was a
columnist, on and off, for seven of them. "During that time,
I'd won quite a few awards, including best columnist in
Oregon," he says. But one recent column cost him his job. It
was called, "When the Going Gets Tough, the Tender Turn Tail,"
and it ran September 15.
Guthrie was the
columnist who said Bush "skedaddled" on September 11. "The
picture of Bush hiding in a Nebraska hole" was "an
embarrassment," he wrote. "The President's men are frantically
glossing over his cowardice."
A week later, the
publisher fired him, even though the city editor and the
editor had signed off on the piece, Guthrie says. "I told them
this was going to be hot, and they approved it as it stood."
A few days later,
the editor, Dennis Roler, issued a front-page apology,
entitled, "This Is No Time to Criticize the Nation's Leader:
Apology for Printing Column." The final paragraph reads: "In
this critical time, the nation needs to come together behind
the President. Politics, and destructive criticism, need to be
put aside for the country's good. Unfortunately, my lapse in
judgment hurt that positive effort, and I apologize."
Today, Guthrie is
picking up unemployment, and he's almost philosophical about
journalism: "You wish newspapers would be better than they
are. You think they have this covenant with the First
Amendment. But they don't, especially in times of
crisis."
Tom Gutting worked
for the Texas City Sun, and on September 22, he, like
Guthrie, criticized Bush for not returning to Washington on
September 11. "There was W. flying around the country like a
scared child seeking refuge in his mother's bed after having a
nightmare," he wrote, adding: "What we are stuck with is a
crippled President who continues to be controlled by his
advisers. He's not a leader. He's a puppet."
The day the piece
ran, says Gutting, "the publisher assured me straightaway that
he wouldn't fire me." But a few days later, the publisher, Les
Daughtry Jr., changed his mind.
Daughtry, too,
issued a front-page apology, saying Gutting's column was "not
appropriate to publish during this time."
Gutting is
unemployed. "I'm still looking for a job," he says. "I'm
hoping it will end soon. I think I've been pretty much
blacklisted from the small papers the company
owns."
The St. George,
Utah, newspaper, The Spectrum, apologized on November
13 for a cartoon it ran the previous day from Pulitzer
prize-winner Steve Benson. The cartoon depicted President Bush
dropping bombs that carried scrawled messages, such as
"starving millions of Afghans" and "killing innocent
civilians." Many local veterans descended on the paper,
threatening to cancel their subscriptions if it didn't issue
an apology, according to The Salt Lake
Tribune.
Aaron McGruder, who
draws The Boondocks, has seen his strip taken out of
many papers after September 11 for its anti-war content. And
lesser known cartoonists may be especially vulnerable.
Todd Persche drew a
cartoon for the Baraboo News Republic in Wisconsin once
a week for the last three years. Not anymore. After September
11, he drew a couple of cartoons that got him canned. One
said, "When the media keeps pounding on the war drum . . .
it's hard to hear other points of view." Another was about Big
Brother "turning our civil rights upside down."
Persche says, "In
these times, they make you feel like you're not a patriot just
because you're dissenting."
At the moment,
professors who criticize the U.S. government aren't being
fired as they were during the McCarthy days. But some are
being taken to the woodshed.
At the University of
New Mexico, history professor Richard Berthold made a comment
to his class that he now regrets: "Anyone who can blow up the
Pentagon gets my vote," he said. The university president has
said "he will 'vigorously pursue' disciplinary action" against
Berthold, the Chronicle of Higher Education
reported.
Robert Jensen,
associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas
at Austin, wrote a column for the Houston Chronicle on
September 14 entitled "U.S. just as guilty of committing own
violent acts." In it, he said that the terrorist attacks of
September 11 "were reprehensible and indefensible . . . but
this act was no more despicable [than] the massive acts of
terrorism--the deliberate killing of civilians for political
purposes--that the U.S. government has committed during my
lifetime."
For this, Jensen was
publicly ridiculed by the school president, Larry R. Faulkner,
who wrote a letter to the Houston Chronicle, which was
published on September 19. "Jensen is not only misguided, but
has become a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of
public policy," he said.
"I've been
marginalized on this campus," Jensen says. But he takes pains
not to exaggerate the threat against him. "I'm a tenured white
male professor at a major university. I'm so protected I have
no fears. But an untenured brown professor is not so
protected."
Jensen worries that
untenured faculty may censor themselves, and he and many
others are concerned about Lynne Cheney's group, the American
Council of Trustees and Alumni, which she co-founded in 1995
with Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut.
That group issued a
report after September 11 called "Defending Civilization: How
Our Universities Are Failing America, and What Can Be Done
About It." It said, "When a nation's intellectuals are
unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its
adversaries." And it cited more than 100 examples of what it
considers unpatriotic acts by specific academics.
"What's analogous to
McCarthyism is the self-appointed guardians who are engaging
in private blacklisting," says Eric Foner, professor of
history at Columbia University. "That's why the Lynne Cheney
thing is so disturbing: Her group is trying to intimidate
individuals who hold different points of view. There aren't
loyalty oaths being demanded of teachers yet, but we seem to
be at the beginning of a process that could get a lot worse
and is already cause for considerable alarm."
We've been here
before. From the Alien and Sedition Acts to Lincoln's
suspension of habeas corpus and his imprisonment of anti-war
editors, from the suppression of speech during World War I and
the Palmer Raids to the internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II and the repression of the McCarthy days,
the government has seized upon times of peril to scapegoat
immigrants and to suppress liberties.
"We're talking about
exactly the same phenomenon," says the ACLU's
Strossen.
"No analogy is ever
perfect, and history doesn't repeat itself exactly, but
there's a pattern of the government restricting freedom of
expression and running roughshod over traditional protections
for the accused," Foner says. "Anybody concerned with freedom
of expression and civil liberties should be very, very
concerned."
Matthew
Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive.