This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
Always unfair, American justice is now worse than ever, unjustly affecting undocumented immigrants, Blacks and Latinos, anyone of color, Muslims for their faith, ethnicity, activism and prominence, and those challenging state authority, its imperial marauding, and sweeping homeland repression, turning America into a police state.
Activists were always targeted, noted civil liberties writer Stephen Kohn documenting nearly 1,000 cases in his 1994 book titled, "American Political Prisoners: Prosecutions Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts." Today, it's under the 1996 Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act, and post-9/11 ones, including:
-- the 2001 USA Patriot Act, eroding Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment due process rights; First Amendment free expression and association ones; and Fourth Amendment freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, enabling vast extralegal surveillance powers to destroy the right of privacy;
-- the 2001 Military Order Number 1, letting the president usurp authority to capture, kidnap, arrest and torture accused terrorists, holding them indefinitely without charge; trying them in Military Commissions with no right of appeal; denying them due process and judicial fairness;
-- the 2002 Homeland Security Act, a sweeping anti-terrorism bill creating a national Gestapo, centralizing unprecedented military and law enforcement power in the executive branch, enhanced by US Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), established in 2002 to militarize the homeland, Canada, Mexico, Gulf of Mexico, Straits of Florida, and, for the first time, let troops deploy on US streets to protect "national security," and
-- other repressive laws, Executive Orders, National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, and other measures targeting anyone threatening state authority by any means, including those advocating nonviolent political or social change.
Using previously unavailable FBI, Bureau of Prisons and other DOJ divisions files, Kohn covered earlier cases, including activists for "blowing the whistle" on WW I participation, unionists fighting for worker rights, pacifists, socialists, and others for having unpopular political or religious beliefs.
In three parts, he chronicled the history and use of the law to imprison anyone for their political or religious views, described prison life in their own words, and covered hundreds of people affected, discussing their beliefs, length of imprisonment, and treatment.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
7
7
4
