In a post-9/11 climate, the right of free expression is under attack and endangered in the age of George Bush when dissent may be called a threat to national security, terrorism, or treason.  But losing that most precious of all rights means losing our freedom that 18th century French philosopher Voltaire spoke in defense of saying “I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”  Using it to express dissent is what noted historian Howard Zinn calls “the highest form of patriotism” exercising our constitutional right to freedom of speech, the press, to assemble, to protest publicly, and associate as we choose for any reason within the law. 

 

Even then, there are times more forceful action is needed, and Thomas Jefferson explained under what circumstances in the Declaration of Independence he authored.  When bad government destroys our freedoms, we the people have the right and duty to disobey civilly and resist.   Henry David Thoreau called it “Civil Obedience” in 1849, and men like Gandhi and Martin Luther King practiced it successfully 100 years later.  That’s our challenge today at a time our constitutional rights are more compromised and threatened than at any previous time in our history.  Resistance is the antidote to restoring them, and freedom-loving people have a duty and obligation to do it.

 

That’s what democracy is all about and what our Founders had in mind when they crafted what they called “the great (democratic) experiment” that became our Constitution and Bill of Rights, imperfect as they are with omissions and ambiguities.  In words first written by Thomas Jefferson, they “declared their independence” in 1776 from the British king who ruled the colonies with “repeated injuries and usurpations (by his) absolute Tyranny” using language considered audacious then or now:

 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal (and) endowed….with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government….to effect their Safety and Happiness.”  Try doing that today, and it’s called treason, a capital offense.  Jefferson, Madison, Franklin and others thought otherwise saying we must act in our own defense when government won’t do it for us.

 

Their “experiment” was glorious, even flawed, and never before tried in the West in any form since its few decades of existence in ancient Athens under its system of “demokratia” or rule by the entire body of Athenian citizens – or at least the non-slave adult white male portion of it meaning a selective democracy for an elite minority excluding all others the way it’s always been here.  It began in 1776 with our Declaration of Independence followed by our Constitution ratified in 1789 and Bill of Rights in 1791.  This extraordinary document’s Preamble said what our country’s liberties are in 52 historic words even though the language belied the reality:

 

“WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”  And so it was with all its flaws in a nation beholden to privileged white male property owners, doing little for others including women, nothing for black slaves who were property, and even less for “original Americans” exterminated to make way for “newer ones.”  We called it democracy Winston Churchill once said was the “worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”  Today it’s also called “Western civilization” Gandhi thought “would be a good idea” when asked what he thought about it.

 

At best, our form of it is a flawed, unfinished project.  At worst, it’s heading in reverse at a time of our single-minded pursuit of empire in an age of:

 

— Predatory capitalism and corporate dominance, incompatible with democracy;

 

— Sparta-like iron-fisted militarism and all its fallout: mass killing and destruction, occupation, torture and overall inhuman barbarism;

 

— The most secretive, intrusive, repressive and lawless government in our history;

 

— An unprecedented wealth disparity former US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once warned about saying: “We can either have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both;”

 

— The rollback of civil liberties and essential human rights and needs;

 

— A contempt for the rule of law;

 

— A deepening social decay;

 

—  The absence of checks and balances and separation of powers and a president usurping “unitary executive” powers to claim the law is what he says it is; and

 

— The loss of our constitutional freedoms heading the nation toward tyranny and ruin unless reversed. 

 

More than ever, the right to freely express dissent is crucial to surviving.  Lose it, as is happening, and lose everything.

 

The Constitution’s First Amendment explicitly bestows that right no government can lawfully remove, but this one’s doing it anyway. It states: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”  No other nation in history ever granted more of these freedoms, and few, if any, matched them in law or practice. 

 

Nonetheless, there were numerous examples of abusive earlier laws violating various constitutionally guaranteed rights including that of free expression.  The Sedition Act of 1798 (with the ink barely dry on the Bill of Rights) did it making it a crime to publish “false, scandalous, and malicious writing” against the president (John Adams) or Congress but allowed it against the vice-president and Adams rival (Thomas Jefferson).  It thus illegally banned dissent the Constitution allows.

 

During WW I, the Espionage Act was passed (under Democrat Woodrow Wilson) in 1917 imposing a maximum 20 year sentence for anyone causing “insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or (encouraging) refusal of duty in the military or naval forces of the United States.”  It was aimed at First Amendment speech protesting the war and US participation in it everyone lawfully has the right to do.  The Sedition Act in 1918 went further criminalizing “disloyal, scurrilous (or) abusive” anti-government speech.  Shamefully, the Supreme Court upheld the Espionage Act, most notably in (Eugene) Debs (five time socialist presidential candidate) v. United States resulting in his serving prison time for speaking out against militarism and the US entry into WW I.

 

Other High Court Rulings Affirming or Infringing on First Amendment Rights

 

— On war protests when the Warren Court in 1968 disallowed draft card burning claiming it would disrupt the “smooth and efficient functioning” of the draft system.  But in 1969 the Court said students had free speech rights and could wear black arm bands protesting the Vietnam war.  And it ruled for KKK leader Brandenburg against Ohio in 1969 holding that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it directly incites lawless action.  Then in 1971, the Court upheld Cohen against California ruling four-letter word anti-war profanity was permissible on a jacket in Los Angeles country courthouse corridors.  Don’t try it in the halls of Congress.

 

— On flag burning in 1989 in Texas v. Johnson when Justice William Brennan, writing for the majority, said “if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable,” and that includes the right to protest by burning the flag in public.

 

— On obscenity where Courts ruled against pornographic speech especially to protect children from it but held no government can prohibit its possession in the home.

 

— On slander and libel impermissible in cases of intentional instances of “actual malice” or speech provably false, but acceptable for opinions which cannot be held legally defamatory.

 

— On political speech in the famous Buckley v. Valeo 1976 ruling when the High Court held that limits on campaign contributions “serve the basic governmental interest in safeguarding the integrity of the electoral process without directly impinging upon the rights of individual citizens and candidates to engage in political debate and discussion.”  However, the Court found expenditure limits imposed “substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech.”  The Court also ruled in 2003 upholding provisions barring the raising of “soft money” contributions to a political party, not a candidate.

 

Now the High Court is considering arguments on that restriction in the five year old McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and may soon rule to weaken it.  At issue is a provision barring corporations and unions from funding campaign ads 60 days before an election and 30 days before a primary naming a candidate for federal office.  In their 5 – 4 December, 2003 decision, the court upheld the provision, but its new majority may rule otherwise inviting a tsunami of paid political speech as the 2008 federal elections heat up.

 

— On press freedom with High Courts ruling for and against the media on matters of taxes and content issues involving political speech, religious speech, “criminal syndicalism,” defamation, obscenity, personal injury, hate or other offensive speech, and other constitutional issues affecting press freedom.  Various High Courts have had differing notions of free speech and press rights with some like the current hard right sitting one unlikely to be shy ruling they’re not what the Constitution says they are. 

 

The Post 9/11 Climate of Fear and Attack on Dissent

 

Thomas Jefferson said “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance.”  He also said free speech “cannot be limited without being lost.”  Former US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall added “Above all else, the First Amendment means that government has no power to restrict expression (regardless of its) ideas…subject matter (or) content….Our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship.” Former Bush White House spokesperson Ari Fleicher’s response was: “There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say (and) watch what they do….” implying those who don’t at best are unpatriotic and at worst are terrorists or sympathetic to them meaning you’ll be targeted for prosecution. 

 

Indeed they will and have been, with a vengeance, with lots of help from the dominant media, the courts and even academia, one of the latest examples being Catholic liberal arts Emmanuel College adjunct professor Nicholas Winset April 23.  He lost his academic freedom and job when the Massachusetts-based college fired him by letter ordering him to stay off campus for holding a five minute classroom demonstration on the Virginia Tech mid-April shootings school officials deemed inappropriate even though students hearing it felt otherwise and seemed supportive.

 

Though now unemployed, Professor Winset is a free man.  Other academics like former South Florida University (USF) Professor Sami Al-Arian are not.  He was arrested, indicted, exonerated in court but remains imprisoned under harsh conditions in isolation reserved for dangerous hardened criminals because of his courageous and effective public advocacy for human and civil rights and liberation for his Palestinian people long oppressed for six decades (http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2007/04/long-ordeal-of-sami-al-arian-civil-and.html).

 

Dr. Rafil Dhafir’s fate was the same for his “Crime of Compassion” (see dhafirtrial.net, Katherine Hughes).  He, too, was arrested, indicted, tried, convicted and is now imprisoned for violating the Iraqi Sanctions Regulations (IEEPA) and 58 other trumped up charges including his public stance against gross injustice and for using his own funds and what he could raise through his Help the Needy charity to bring desperately needed essential to life humanitarian aid to Iraqi people the Clinton and Bush administrations disgracefully wished to deny them.

 

The (Professor) Ward Churchill Solidarity Network web site defends the academic freedom and right of free expression for one of the nation’s most courageous advocates of those rights and much more for his own Native Indian peoples and all others.  Churchill was viciously and unjustifiably attacked for his essay analyzing the 9/11 attacks he later included in his important 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.  It detailed the stunning history of US military interventions since 1776 at home and abroad, the fact that this nation has been at war every year since inception (without exception) to the present day with one or more adversaries as well as our post-WW II obstruction, subversion and violation of constitutional and international law proving this country is and always was arrogant and lawless. 

 

For his public stance on this and other injustices, Churchill receives a steady stream of death threats, and his home has been vandalized.  He’s also been viciously vilified in the corporate media and by University of Colorado (CU) officials (taking orders from the state’s governor) who announced June 26, 2006 Churchill would be fired even though he’s a distinguished award-winning tenured professor of ethnic studies guilty of no misconduct.  His case continues so far unresolved while he remains suspended on pay from academic duties but backed in his struggle by CU students, noted academic members of “teachers for a democratic society,” and many other supporters speaking out publicly in his behalf.

 

Another noted academic is also under attack and may be denied his well-deserved tenure because of his courageous writing and outspokenness.  He’s political science Professor and Israeli-Palestinian history and conflict expert Norman Finkelstein of DePaul University in Chicago.  As a prominent public figure, he became a target of the hard right in the age of George Bush, but it was that way earlier for him as well.  Finkelstein completed his doctoral dissertation at Princeton in 1988 on the theory of Zionism also exposing Joan Peters’ “colossal hoax” in her 1984 best seller From Time Immemorial in which she falsely claimed Palestine was uninhabited when the Jews arrived.  Ever since, Finkelstein’s been practically radioactive for supporting the Palestinians’ struggle for freedom and justice after decades of Israeli oppression and occupation.

 

Finkelstein is a major scholar known worldwide and a highly regarded DePaul academic evaluated by his students as “truly outstanding, and among the most impressive” of all university political science professors.  That’s why his Department of Political Science recommended he be granted tenure when it said of him his academic record “exceeds our department’s stated standards for scholarly production (and) department and outside experts we consulted recognize the intellectual merits of his work.”  Nonetheless, Finkelstein is being attacked and vilified by DePaul officials making his tenure struggle a much greater issue. It’s for his academic freedom right to dissent publicly and in his writings and for his constitutional right of free expression no one should be denied use of even when exercised on the most sensitive of all political issues most public figures won’t touch – criticizing Israeli policies openly, harshly and deservedly.  For that he should be praised.

 

Instead, Finkelstein is assailed and denounced.  He’s called a self-hating Jew, an anti-semite, a Holocaust- denier and more.  Unmentioned is that his now departed parents survived the Warsaw ghetto and years in concentration camps including time at Auschwitz, and that he lost all other family members on both sides at the hands of the Nazis who exterminated them.

 

Nonetheless, university officials want to deny him tenure even though two campus committees voted he be granted it.  For now, the issue is very much in play with his Department of Political Science and College Personnel Committee supporting him and administration officials opposed including College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Dean Chuck Suchar who incredibly wants Finkelstein judged according to Vincentian,” or religious, values, not on his merits as a teacher and scholar.  What he’s saying, of course, is that faculty members expressing views other than ones DePaul considers acceptable will be punished for them.

 

Like his CU counterpart, Ward Churchill, Finkelstein’s struggle continues unresolved thus far with DePaul students, academics around the world and others expressing their support through the Norman G. Finkelstein Solidarity Campaign gathering signatures on his behalf and on a letter sent to the school’s administration.  It says “Dean Suchar’s letter sets a dangerous precedent, and also sends the signal that arts and sciences are now endangered at DePaul University and in the American academy in general” where free expression and dissent no longer will be tolerated.

 

The Corporate-Controlled Media’s Assault on Free Expression

 

The dominant major media have always functioned to achieve what noted Australian academic, author and psychologist Alex Carey called “taking the risk out of democracy” to “protect corporate power against democracy” by acting as national thought-control police gatekeepers controlling what information reaches the public and what’s suppressed.  It’s worse than ever now resulting from virtually uninterrupted media consolidation with friendly Democrat and Republican administrations allowing five giant global media cartels today to control most newspapers, magazines, radio, television, book publishing, and films.  Other than the internet, they hold a stranglehold over the kinds of news, information, entertainment and other programming and material most people get from which they form their views of the nation’s state, its government, and the world. 

 

The media giants supplying it are master manipulators.  They make sure the public gets their one-sided corporate/state-friendly views in their role as government/business partners instead of their watchdogs.  It’s called censorship, the willful suppression of free expression, ideas and thought in an age of sophisticated mind control “manufactur(ing) of consent” (see Manufacturing Consent – Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky) in a democracy where it can’t be done by force.  It’s an effort to program the public mind to go along with whatever agenda best serves wealth and power by effectively suppressing dissent against it.

 

The work of three noted print journalists are prominent cases in point, but shamefully what’s true for them applies across all the entire dominant media landscape that ranges from pathetic to appalling.  One example is Washington Post columnist and so-called dean of the Washington press corps and political “pundits” at age 77, David Broder.  In many ways he’s the worst of a bad lot because of his ill-deserved image as a man of integrity, decency, honor and perceived wisdom.  It hides his dark side unprincipled support for the rogue administration in power and his willingness to cover for it and suppress its indisputable record of lawlessness and contempt for ordinary people everywhere.

 

Since George Bush took office in 2001, Broder has been out in front characterizing him as a strong, decisive, effective, and principled leader protecting the nation against threats to our national security including waging just wars for it.  His harshest comments are reserved for Bush critics he attacks maliciously like calling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid a “loose cannon” and “an embarrassment” for daring to say Iraq is a lost war even though anyone with common sense knows it is including high present and former Washington officials unwilling to deny what Broder does. 

 

Broder is an “award-winning” journalist.  It’s long past time he took his ill-deserved trophies and ended his morally corrupt and intellectually dishonest lifetime career of misreporting at the Washington Post where he’s done it for the past 40 years.

 

The New York Times never met a Republican president or US-instigated war of aggression it didn’t love, fully support and be willing to give plenty of front page space to journalists like Judith Miller assigned to wave the flag and lead the journalistic charge.  Miller had the dubious honor leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 and held it until she was forced to resign in disgrace in late 2005 ending her controversial 28 year career at the Times but not her presence in the corporate media where she’s welcomed on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal never shy to publish material extremist enough at times to make a Nazi blush.

 

Miller is picking up there where she left off in shame across town with her latest near-full page “When Activists Are Terrorists” piece defending New York police Gestapo thuggery against anti-war protesters.  Removed from leading the charge to wars of aggression, Miller’s now out in front supporting police brutality and illegal political spying against people exercising their First Amendment right to protest publicly she can’t tolerate so she’s taking aim against them in a venue always friendly to her kind of extremist views.

 

With Miller gone, the New York Times continues its pro-war stance with military correspondent Michael Gordon, and former Miller co-conspirator, now putting out regular propaganda like they both once did together and Gordon always was comfortable doing alone.  Michael Munk in an online February 11, 2007 After Downing Street.org article calls him “The Ghost of Judith Miller” citing one example of his reported “evidence” that Iran is supplying Iraq resistance fighters with “more effective IEDs” without a shred of evidence to prove it because there is none.  The New York Times shamelessly ran Gordon’s preposterous piece February 10 (and all his others prominently) titled “Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran (and) Used Against US Troops” citing anonymous sources only to back up his unsupportable claim.

 

Like Miller, Gordon excels in state and corporate supportive Times-speak suppressing the free and open kind his readers want but never get from him.  Most often he cites as sources unnamed “American intelligence (or) Western officials (or those old faithfuls) high administration (or) Pentagon officials” while almost never quoting others with contrary views debunking his and theirs.  Gordon, like Miller, is important because he writes lead stories on what media critic Norman Solomon calls the most valuable print real estate in the country – the front pages of the New York Times that are read by government and business leaders and opinion-makers everywhere.  He’s also the same Michael Gordon who wrote the false and discredited story on Saddam’s aluminum tubes.  He now continues putting out regular falsified reports on the Times front pages as an agent of the state he and his employer serve.

 

One of his latest efforts is titled “General Says Iraq Pullback Would Increase Violence.”  In it he parrots Iraq military commander General David Petraeus’ administration-friendly line that reducing US forces would increase “sectarian violence” and increase internal instability caused, in fact, by the military occupation the general’s in charge of running.  Without a US presence, the generalissimo says, “It can get much, much worse (and) right now (with the troop surge) it’s a good bit better” claiming “sectarian” killings declined two-thirds since January while ignoring how out-of-control things really are and the reverse of how he and Gordon portray them.

 

Gordon also goes along with Petraeus’ assessment that “The new hydrocarbon law is of enormous importance,” ignoring how it’s structured to suck out Iraq’s enormous oil wealth transferring most of it to Big (US) Oil from Iraqis who own it.  Finally, comes the key part of the article with Gordon trumpeting the general’s unsubstantiated claim of continued (unrevealed) evidence showing Iran is providing Shiite “militants” military and other support.  Citing computer documents supposedly seized in a March Karbala raid, Petraeus claims “There are numerous documents which detailed a number of different attacks on coalition forces, and our sense is these records were kept so they could be handed in to whoever it is who is financing them” – pointing his finger directly at Iran from his previous comments with Gordon obligingly implying the same view on the Times front page.

 

Along with falsifying news, the Times also excels in suppressing it as willing Pentagon partners going along with Department of Defense (DOD) rules on reporting on Iraq.  An absurd one on its face states: “Names, video, identifiable written/oral descriptions or identifiable photographs of wounded service members will not be released without service member’s ‘prior’ written consent.”  Of course, the Times and rest of the dominant media rarely ever do what this DOD regulation forbids so, rule or no rule, the Bush administration’s happy-face-of-war is preserved to suppress its true ugly hidden one.

 

One other recent example of intimidation and censorship also deserves mention.  It’s a story reported April 27 by AP, the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere that a straight ‘A’ Chicago area Cary-Grove High School senior of Chinese ethnicity, with no history of disciplinary problems or trouble with the law, was arrested on charges of disorderly conduct for comments he made in an assigned creative-writing classroom essay.  Students were told to “write whatever comes to your mind.  Do not judge or censor what you are writing” and apparently were also told to exaggerate.  Lee followed instructions, made comments his teacher thought were violent, and she reported it resulting in his arrest and removal to an off-campus learning program. 

 

This is a small incident, likely to be easily resolved, about one student in one school.  Yet it

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