Bush attacks American "evildoers" and "madmen" who want to exercise their First Amendment rights.
By Regis Sabol
Once again John Ashcroft's Department of Injustice has taken bold steps to protect the freedom we Americans possess from what George Bush has often described as "evildoers" and "madmen." Last week, prosecutors in the United States attorney's office for the southern district of Iowa began handing out subpoenas to Drake University and participants in a forum at the university last November on how they could use acts of civil disobedience to best convey their opposition to the occupation of Iraq. Among the 21 participants in the forum were the executive director of the Catholic Peace Ministry at Drake and a 52-year-old file clerk. Both were arrested the day after the forum for "illegal trespass", along with ten others when they demonstrated outside the nearby Camp Dodge National Guard base.
I've had a couple experiences with the Bush regime's efforts to protect America's freedoms. Twice in September, 2002, I was caged in "Free Speech Zones" established, under direct orders from the White House, to keep anti-war, anti-Bush demonstrators out of sight and out of mind of our Fearless Leader. Those who attempted to express their right to free speech by stepping even one foot outside the Free Speech zones were immediately arrested. Some things never change.
In the latest attack in the "War on Terrorism," at least four participants in the conference have been subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury on Tuesday to explain just what they were doing by discussing the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Nov. 15 anti-war forum sponsored by the Drake University chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. Lawyers for the Guild went to court Monday to block the demands of the federal prosecutors.
Prosecutors stressed they were limiting the scope of their investigation to learning more about one person who they claim had tried to scale a security fence at the National Guard base during the following day's protest.
Stephen Patrick O'Meara, the prosecutor, issued a written statement that claimed, "The United States attorney's office does not prosecute persons peacefully and lawfully engaged in rallies which are conducted under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States." O'Meara added, "The narrow purpose and scope of that inquiry has been narrowed to determine whether there were any violations of federal law, or prior agreements to violate federal law, regarding unlawful entry onto military property--and specifically to include whether there were any violations as a result of an alleged attempt to enter within the fenced, secure perimeter at Camp Dodge."
I'm relieved that the Justice Department wants to protect our rights to freedom of speech and assembly as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution by instituting a grand jury investigation to determine who that evildoer was who the federal prosector thinks might have tried to climb that chain-link fence at Camp Dodge. Lord only knows what that madman might have done to endanger our homeland security if he had made to the other side of that fence and into that National Guard base somewhere north of Des Moines. While O'Meara contends some dangerous miscreant attempted to scale the fence, no one at the rally recalled seeing anyone getting even a foot off the ground.
Brian Terrell, executive director of the Des Moines Catholic Peace Ministry, who helped conduct "nonviolence training" at the forum, entitled, "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" got his subpoena last week. Terrell said he'd been involved in anti-government protests and sometimes was arrested over a number of years. Wendy Vasquez, who was also arrested outside the National Guard base, had also been subpoenaed. Coincidentally, Vasquez said that she too had been arrested in the past for such heinous crimes as protesting U.S. support for the war in El Salvador and advocating for homeless people. Terrell and Vasquez sound like a couple of danger hombres to me.
In an insidious effort to disguise their nefarious schemes, organizers mailed a leaflet about the forum to a sergeant in the Des Moines police department and had at least one local television station filming the forum activities. "Everything we did was completely in the open," Terrell said. "We've been doing this sort of thing a long time. The police know the routine. We know them. Usually things here in Iowa are very friendly." Clever ploy.
In its earnest attempt to narrow the narrow scope of the Justice Department's investigation, the U.S. attorney's office has also subpoenaed Drake University demanding detailed information on the Lawyers Guild and its members, including the names of those who are officers, and Guild meeting agendas and annual reports since 2002. In other words, they want to know everything. That should certainly help the government ferret out that phantom evil-doing, fence-climbing madman endangering our precious freedoms protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It's comforting to know that the government is vigilantly on guard to protect our precious freedoms etc., etc.
As I said earlier, I've encountered previous efforts by the Bush Regime to protect our First Amendment rights. Back in the fall of 2002, while Rummy and the boys were putting the finishing touches on their plans to invade Iraq, George W., himself, attended a Labor Day picnic on Neville Island, ten miles down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh. He was the guest of honor of the Carpenter's Union. Neville Island was once crammed with factories and chemical plants, but all that's left now are old homes, a couple neighborhood bars where Toby Keith and the boys can be heard on the juke box, and a little league baseball field next to the main drag without a tree or any other shady place within 500 yards.
The baseball field was the "Free Speech Zone" where about 50 anti-Bush protestors were directed politely but firmly by local and county police. When I walked about a hundred feet outside the zone to take a picture of the place, a county cop alertly spotted me, hustled that one hundred feet over to where I was standing on the grass, and, with a smile on his face, told me to get back inside the "Free Speech Zone" where I belonged.
When .I asked him why I couldn't stand there on public property and take a couple pictures, he pleasantly told me to get behind the fence or get arrested. I headed for the fence. A fellow named Bill Neel and his sister stood just outside the fence with anti-Bush signs in their hands and were promptly arrested when they refused to leave the public sidewalk and get behind the fence protecting their right to Free Speech.
Meanwhile, local folk lined the street leading up to the picnic ground. They held up signs that said, "We Love You, Mr. President" and "We Love Bush" and similar expressions of patriotic fervor and admiration. They were prohibited from going to the "Free Speech" zone a half-mile away to exercise their First Amendment rights. Those poor folks were forced to sit in lawn chairs and stand in front of their houses and stay cool under the shade of trees that lined the curb. Then there were the two to three hundred invited guests who were not allowed to stand in the sun-baked free speech zone because they had to sit at picnic tables under the shade of tents and eat fried chicken and ribs and baked beans and other instruments of torture. I pitied them.
Oh, the injustice of it all! The inhumanity!
They were forced to hear George Bush tell them what great economic shape the country was in even though about two million Americans had lost their jobs since he became president and that his tax cuts would put a whopping three hundred dollars into some of their pockets, just enough maybe to pay the utility bills when the snow would start flying in a few months and most of those carpenters wouldn't have any work, what with the weather and all.
But we, "we happy few," stood in the sun with the temperature near 90 degrees in the Free Speech Zone. We couldn't even tell which of the three limos Bush was riding in when his entourage whizzed by protected by a phalanx of police cars and motorcycle cops, sirens wailing.
A couple weeks later I was in New York City. It was the day after the first anniversary of 9/11 and Bush was to speak to the United Nations to demand that the international organization devoted to world peace join him in a war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Once again, I was in a Free Speech zone. This time it was at Daj Hammarskjöld Plaza, named after the U.N.'s first president. The fenced in plaza must have been named after Hammarskjöld because his car probably passed there on the way to work. All the several hundred demonstrators participating in the protest could see wasthe monolithic main building of the U.N. two blocks away. But there was no way George Bush could see us.
I guess he doesn't like to know that Americans who disagree with him exist. And if they do exist, it's Ashcroft's job to take care of them. Perhaps that explains what the Iowa grand jury investigation is all about.
(Posted Wednesday, February 11, 2004)
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