McCarthy's ghost
By Gary Younge, The Guardian
March 27, 2003
It's drive time with WABC's
rightwing talkshow host, Curtis Sliwa, and Bill is on the line from
the Poconos in Pennsylvania with a tale so funny he can hardly share
it for giggling.
He was carrying an American flag and yelling support for the troops
in a delayed St Patrick's Day parade over the weekend when he saw one
woman carrying a sign saying: "No blood for oil".
"She was wearing black
and she was an older lady," says Bill. "And then our sheriff
saw her and she didn't have a permit. So they put her in the back of
the truck car and hauled her away."
On its own, Bill's story
would be aberrant - the tale of an overzealous legal official and an
unfortunate woman in smalltown America. Increasingly though it is becoming
consistent. The harassment, arrest, detention and frustration of those
who are against the war is becoming routine. Relatives of victims who
died on September 11, who are opposed to the war, have been prevented
from speaking in schools. Last month Stephen Downs was handcuffed and
arrested after refusing to take off a Give Peace a Chance T-shirt in
a mall in Albany. He was told he would have been found guilty of trespass
if the mall had not dropped the case because of the bad publicity.
As Iraqi civilians and American,
British and Iraqi soldiers perish in the Gulf, this war is fast claiming
another casualty - democracy in the US. This process is not exclusive
to America. Civil liberties have suffered in Britain because of the
war in Northern Ireland, and are undergoing further erosion because
of the conflict.
But it has a particular resonance
here because of the McCarthyite era during the 1950s when those suspected
of supporting communism were forced to testify before the Senate to
recant their views and divulge names of progressives. Comparisons with
McCarthyism are valid but must be qualified. These popular and sporadic
displays of intolerance may be gathering pace, but no federal edict
has been issued to support them and many who support the war are opposed
to them.
Bush has not launched a campaign
to derail the Dixie Chicks, the all-American girl band whose CDs were
crushed by a mob and whose latest release fell from the top of the charts
after one of its singers made an anti-war remark in London. Downs says
the officer who arrested him spent an hour-and-a-half trying to persuade
his superiors that the case was not worth pursuing. Even Curtis Sliwa
told Bill he should "ignore the protesters and get out the flags".
While these popular expressions
of intolerance appear sporadic, not all are spontaneous. The rally to
smash the Dixie Chicks' CDs and much of the impetus for the boycott
of their single came from radio stations owned by Clear Channel Communications
of Texas, which has close ties with Bush. The company's stations also
called for the pro-war rallies that have cropped up in the past week.
And while they have not received
the state's imprimatur, Bush's administration has certainly created
the climate in which they can thrive.
Under Big Brother monikers
like the Patriot Act and Operation Liberty Shield, the state has stepped
up the scope of its surveillance and the wiretapping of American citizens
and will authorise the indefinite detention of asylum seekers from certain
countries. Last year, surveillance requests by the federal government
under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - originally intended
to hunt down foreign spies - outnumbered all of those under domestic
law for the first time in US history.
Under a proposed new bill,
entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement act, the government could
withhold the identity of anyone detained in connection with a terror
investigation and their names would be exempt from the Freedom of Information
act, according to the centre for public integrity, a Washington-based
advocacy group.
Barry Steinhardt, director
of the American civil liberties union programme on technology and liberty,
told the New York Times that authorities have been demanding records
from internet providers and libraries about what books people are taking
out and which websites they're looking at.
The result is a symbiotic
relationship between the mob and the legislature, whereby official repression
provides the framework for public scapegoating with each gaining momentum
from the other.
Most vulnerable are those
who are most vulnerable anyway - Arab immigrants and non-white Americans.
Men from countries regarded as potential sources of terrorism and who
do not have a green card, are now required to be registered, fingerprinted
and photographed by the immigration service. Many who have committed
no crime but simply have their applications for a work permit pending
are routinely arrested. "Basically, what this has become is an
immigration sweep," said Juliette Kayam, a terrorism expert at
Harvard. "The idea that this has anything to do with security,
or is something the government can do to stop terrorism, is absurd,"
she told the Washington Post.
The growing surveillance
compounded by discrimination adversely affects black Americans too.
"It places those of us of colour under increased scrutiny and we
get caught up in the web of racial profiling," says Jean Bond,
of the Radical Black Congress.
The fact that all the incidents
mentioned above happened to white, American-born natives is an indication
of just how deep the rot has set in. Downs is the chief lawyer in the
Commission on Judicial Conduct. Such are the targets of the war on terror.
From the outset Bush has
insisted that: "Those who are not for us are against us,"
and so it follows that anyone opposed to his way of dealing with the
terrorist threat becomes the enemy, at home or abroad. Terrorism is
the new communism. Even before the first body bags have arrived, the
war has already reached the home front.