POLITICAL REPRESSION
Open Letter Calling on the University of Colorado to Reverse its
Recommendation to Dismiss Professor Ward Churchill
Derrick Bell, Noam Chomsky, Juan Cole, Drucilla Cornell, Richard Delgado, Richard Falk,
Irene Gendzier, Rashid Khalidi, Mahmood Mamdani, Immanuel Wallerstein, Howard Zinn
(New York Review of Books, April 12, 2007)
War on terror or on constitutional rights?
The attacks of 9/11 have been used as a convenient excuse to implement repressive measures which have long been on the government’s wish list. These include extensive surveillance of phone calls and e-mail, the placing of informants in political and religious organizations, massive round-ups, detentions and deportations of immigrants, the charging of defense attorneys with aiding terrorism, the expansion of “domestic terrorism” charges and prosecutions, the labeling of environmental activists as “eco-terrorists”, and the “normalizing” of torture
These are not new developments or changes “necessitated” by the so-called war on terror. National security crises, real or imagined, have been used to increase the police powers of the state, from the earliest indigenous resistance and slave rebellions, to the “red scare” of the early 1900s, the mass internments of World War II, and the civil rights movement and anti-war protests of the 1960s. To effectively resist the subversion of democracy, we must know our histories:
RESOURCES:
"Know Your Rights!" (ACLU &National Lawyers Guild
Heidi Boghosian, Punishing Protest
Political Prisoners: Jericho Movement
