NEWSCIVIL LIBERTIES

In just a few days, more than 65,000 people have joined the campaign led by UC Davis student David Buscho, calling for the immediate resignation of UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi after student demonstrators were brutally pepper-sprayed while peacefully sitting on the ground.

David was one of the students who was pepper-sprayed. In an interview about the incident, he recaps what it was like for he and his girlfriend to be pepper-sprayed:

"I had my arms around my girlfriend. I just kissed her on the forehead and then he sprayed us. Immediately we were blinded," Buscho told The AP. "So I was sitting their blind, suffocating. My girlfriend was writhing in pain. I wanted to touch her but my hands were covered in pepper spray."

When the University of California, Irvine (UCI) last year asked the ambassador of a government widely considered to be guilty of war crimes to deliver a lecture on campus, student activists upset over their tuition money being used to provide him a platform for propaganda staged a protest, shouting phrases like "murder is not free speech," that ultimately prevented the lecture from being delivered.

Had the ambassador been from, say, Sudan, and had he rationalizing the slaughter of civilians in Darfur, the students would likely be heralded as heroes who bravely stood up for their beliefs. But he wasn't: the ambassador, Michael Oren, was from Israel. And so last week Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas announced he was pursuing criminal charges against the 11 UCI students for disrupting the speech – charges that could land them in jail.

In a February 4 statement, Rackauckas justified charging the students with “conspiring and disrupting a lawful assembly” by citing his duty to uphold the Constitution. “Freedom of speech is a precious constitutional right that goes to the heart of our democratic form of government,” he said.

The right to free speech is recognized by the First Amendment and given lip service by most U.S. politicians – whenever they're not trying to ban rap music or bar people from saying mean things about them.

In practice, though, the right to voice one's opinions is more tenuous than it is on paper; just ask Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned by the “progressive” Woodrow Wilson for speaking out against the draft during World War I, the “war to end all wars.”

And so it is today with those who organize opposition to another self-styled progressive's attempts to make the world safe for democracy by way of heavy munitions and military occupations. Since September, the Obama administration has raided the homes and offices of a half-dozen prominent anti-war activists, issuing 23 people subpoenas to testify before a grand jury, all ostensibly as part of an FBI investigation into whether a group of pacifists and peaceniks provided “material support” for terrorist organizations.

The peace group Code Pink recently delivered a “report card” to the White House where they gave President Obama a 'D' for his administration's treatment of Americans' civil liberties, noting that his Justice Department has raided the homes and offices of antiwar activists whose only offense was exercising their right to dissent.

But in an interview with Change.org, co-founder Medea Benjamin suggests that the president was perhaps a bit more deserving of an 'F,' pointing out that Obama has declared it his unilateral right to assassinate American citizens without charge or trial – a right even former President George W. Bush dared not assert. And his administration's treatment of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, which Vice President Biden says is headed by a “high-tech terrorist,” and accused leaker Bradley Manning indicates he's no friend of civil liberties – or government accountability.

Founded in 2002 and named for the government's much-mocked, color-coded terror threat levels, Code Pink, like the antiwar movement writ large, has fallen on something of hard times – and not because of a lack of wars to protest. Since taking office, Obama has more than doubled the troops in Afghanistan, dropped more bombs in Pakistan than the previous administration did in eight years, and launched deadly missile strikes in both Yemen and Somalia. At the same time, his administration has supported repressive regimes from Israel to Egypt.

But be that as it may, “the movement just fizzled after Barack Obama got elected,” Benjamin says. “It's been very difficult as an organizer. I mean, we feel very inadequate ourselves that we haven't found a way in these new times under Obama to bring people out. Many people in the movement thought he was going to change things."

He hasn't.

“Karen Sullivan” and “Daniela Cardenas” pretended to care about peace, about justice – and about solidarity with those working for the same.

They were lying.

As the Minnesota Anti-War Committee revealed this month, the characters known as Karen and Daniela were not who they seemed. Though they appeared to be committed peace activists, even going so far as to organize protests and fundraise, they were in fact FBI agents. Their great service to the country? Disrupting peaceful antiwar activism.

“When I speak of disruption, I am referring to an August 2009 solidarity delegation to Palestine,” says Jess Sundin, a founding member of the Anti-War Committee. “Officer Sullivan made public her plans to join this delegation, she helped to promote it and fundraise for it here in our community. At the same time, she was secretly working to sabotage the trip entirely. Through her work, reports were passed onto Israeli authorities, who then barred entry to the two Minneapolis women traveling with Karen Sullivan.”

At this point, even supporters of the war on terror ought to be asking just what the hell is the FBI doing wasting taxpayer money and its finite resources on infiltrating groups of non-violent peaceniks when – as the government never tires of reminding us – there are dangerous terrorists out there that need to be stopped? It's all about priorities, it seems, and respecting First Amendment-protect speech isn't one of them.

Another police raid and yet another innocent family caught up in a failed war that sends heavily armed, masked and hyped up cops in search of largely nonviolent offenders. This time the raid happened in Spring Valley, New York, and left a 13-year-old child vomiting and gasping for air in an asthma attack triggered by the over-the-top and misdirected actions of police and DEA agents.

Several agencies executed numerous search warrants before dawn early in January. But when the SWAT team, complete with guns drawn, forced their way into the home at 36 Sharon Drive, they didn’t find the “Michael” they kept screaming for. It wasn’t because Michael was hiding or even out for the night -- it was because Michael lived down the street at 46 Sharon Drive.

The McKay family, including husband David, wife, 13-year-old daughter, and brother-in-law, were all roused from their sleep and rounded up by masked law enforcement agents. The child was pulled from her bed and “drug” down the stairs. She would later be taken to the emergency room for the resulting asthma attack, vomiting, and fainting episode. The entire family was led outside while officers searched inside for Michael, with the father in his underwear on the front lawn desperately trying to explain that no such person lived there.

What can it mean when a citizen of the United States, living abroad, can be detained with the cooperation of American officials, and -- without a warrant, without charge, without explanation -- be allegedly beaten, tortured and then put on a no-fly list so that he cannot return to the U.S. even he wanted to?

Civil liberties groups and Muslim-American activists are saying that's the case with 19-year-old Gulet Mohamed, a Somali-American who has been living in Yemen and Kuwait since March 2009, and is now barred from re-entering America. And activists say he's not the first, indicating that the rights Americans enjoy may be more tenuous than we think.

In fact, the ACLU is suing the U.S. government on behalf of 10 citizens and legal permanent residents (three of them U.S. military veterans), some of whom are living abroad, but are now on the amorphous no-fly list, which, according to The Washington Post's latest estimate, is about 4,000 individuals long. According to the ACLU, the individuals stranded include one American in Mexico, another in Columbia and four in Yemen.

According to the lawsuit, the individuals have no idea how they got on the list, nor have they been given the opportunity to appeal or redress the situation -- they just cannot fly.

The war on drugs has been a miserable failure, with prohibition doing little more than boosting the black market profits that have helped fuel an increasingly violent drug trade. But politicians, notoriously willing to admit mistakes and adjust public policy accordingly, are beginning to acknowledge that failure.

Kidding!

As Georgia paper The Daily Citizen reports, state Rep. Tom Weldon thinks the problem isn't the war on drugs. No, it's his constituents' medical privacy – they have too much of it, you see. Thankfully, the Republican lawmaker has plan to fix that by, well, doing away with it.

“We don’t have a searchable database that sheriffs and law enforcement can go in and see who has been buying meth products and who has been buying an excessive amount of pills,” Weldon said during a recent meeting with a local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce. So he's proposing to create one – and to allow law enforcement to access it without so much as obtaining a warrant, something even his fellow drug warriors in the GOP question as perhaps a bit much.

But his intent isn't to eviscerate the rights of Georgia residents, of course: it's to protect the children.

Members of Congress are the representatives of we the people – at least if you believe your high school civics teacher – but, boy, do they hate being treated like us mere citizens.

Exploiting the recent tragic shooting Arizona, as politicians are wont to do, Rep. James Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership from South Carolina, took to the airwaves to opine about how the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) treats some lawmakers like – gasp! – their constituents.

“I really believe that that is the place where we feel the most ill at ease, is going through airports,” Clyburn said on Fox News Sunday. “We’ve had some incidents where TSA authorities think that congresspeople should be treated like everybody else,” he said. “Well, the fact of the matter is, we are held to a higher standard in so many other areas, and I think we need to take a hard look at exactly how the TSA interact with members of Congress.”