|
Bush restricting the travel
rights of over 100,000 U.S. citizens
Sherwood Ross
Prisonplanet
Wednesday September 5, 2007
The freedom to travel of more than 100,000 Americans placed
on “watch” and “no fly” lists is being
restricted by the Bush-Cheney regime.
Citizens who have done no more than criticize the president are
being banned from airline flights, harassed at airports’,
strip searched, roughed up and even imprisoned, feminist author
and political activist Naomi Wolf reports in her new book, “The
End of America.”(Chelsea Green Publishing)
“Making it more difficult for people out of favor with
the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic
part of the fascist playbook,” Wolf says. She noticed starting
in 2002 that “almost every time I sought to board a domestic
airline flight, I was called aside by the Transportation Security
Administration(TSA) and given a more thorough search.”
During one preboarding search, a TSA agent told her “You’re
on the list” and Wolf learned it is not a list of suspected
terrorists but of journalists, academics, activists, and politicians
“who have criticized the White House.”
(Article continues below)
Some of this hassling has made headlines, such as when Senator
Edward Kennedy was detained five times in East Coast airports
in March, 2004, suggesting no person, however prominent, is safe
from Bush nastiness. Rep. John Lewis of Georgia has also been
mistreated. And it can be nasty. Robert Johnson, an American citizen,
described the “humiliation factor” he endured:
“I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers,
then I had to take off my socks. I was treated like a criminal,”
Wolf quotes him as saying. And it gets worse than that. Nicolas
Maduro, Venezuela’s foreign minister, said he was detained
at Kennedy airport by officers who “threatened and shoved”
him. And that was mild. Maher Arar, a Canadian software consultant
was detained at Kennedy and “rendered” to Syria where
he was imprisoned for more than a year by goons that beat him
with a heavy metal cable.
After the Canadian furor over Arar’s illegal kidnapping
and torture, he was eventually released as he had zero ties to
terrorists. Yet the Bush gang refused to concede error; refused
to provide documents or witnesses to Canadian investigators; and
claimed last January it had “secret information” that
justified keeping Arar on the watch list, Wolf noted.
Again, Chaplain James Yee, an American citizen born in New Jersey
who had converted to Islam and had the Christian compassion to
call for better treatment of Guantanamo prisoners, was nabbed
in Sept., 2003 on suspicion of “espionage and possibly treason”
and flung into the Naval brig at Charleston, S.C., where he was
manacled, put in solitary for 76 days, forbidden mail and family
visits, demonized in the media and warned he could face execution.
Wolf writes, “Within six months, the U.S. government had
dropped all criminal charges against Yee,” claiming it did
so to avoid making sensitive evidence public, not because the
chaplain was innocent.
Over and again, the Bush gang claims it can prove terrible crimes
about suspects but, like the men imprisoned at Guantanamo, it
repeatedly turns out to have “conspiracy” zilch in
its briefcase rather than hard proof of actual misdeeds. Yet it
goes on punishing hundreds of suspects with solitary confinement
and worse without ever bringing them to trial. Globally, the number
of such detainees is in the tens of thousands. Stalin would have
understood.
Apparently, favorite targets of the Bush tyranny are peace activists
like Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, detained at the San Francisco
airport; a political leader such as Nancy Oden, of the Green Party,
prevented from flying from Maine to Chicago; King Downing and
David Fathi, both of the American Civil Liberties Union and both
detained (proves ACLU’s case about Bush, eh what?); and
Constitutional scholar Walter F. Murphy, of Princeton University,
who had attacked the illegalities of the Bush regime. He was put
on notice his luggage would be ransacked.
“When you are physically detained by armed agents because
of something you said or wrote, it has an impact,” Wolf
writes. “…you get it right away that the state is
tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can have
armed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions,
search and release you.”
Wolf traces the “watch list” back to a 2003 directive
from Bush to his intelligence agencies to identify people “thought
to have terrorist intentions or contacts.” After the list
was given to the airlines, CBS-TV’s 60 Minutes got a copy.
The list was 540 pages long and there were 75,000 names on it
of people to be taken aside for extra screening.
The more stringent “no fly” list has 45,000 names
on it, Wolf reports. Prior to 9/11, the list had just 16 names,
but 44,984 suspects were quickly manufactured to justify the creation
of the vast airport security apparatus at God knows what cost
to American taxpayers.
One ludicrous “no fly” story concerns John Graham,
president of the nonprofit Giraffe Heroes Project, an organization
that honors people who stick their necks out. A former government
careerist who served in Viet Nam, Graham is an inspired speaker
that receives standing ovations from groups such as West Point
cadets, yet is kept from flying from his Langley, Wash., base
by the National Security Agency. NSA won’t tell him why,
either. Maybe they have “secret” information on him,
too.
Author Wolf notes that dictatorships from Hitler’s Germany
to Pinochet’s Chile have employed arbitrary arrests to harass
critics. And Bush’s airport detention policies are more
of the same. As Wolf writes, “being free means that you
can’t be detained arbitrarily.” Somebody ring the
fire bell!
|
INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
|
|
