The Sedition Laws are back. Be afraid, be _very_ afraid. http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20011108/us/attacks_sedition_1.html Some excerpts: Thursday November 8 2:28 PM ET Sedition Law Used to Hold Suspects By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON (AP) - Prosecutors seeking to hold people they suspect were in the early stages of terrorist plots may turn anew to a very old weapon - the Civil War-era law on sedition. Last week, prosecutors cited the rarely invoked law in the case of a student being detained in New York, and hinted they might make fuller use of it in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. ... Law enforcement officials, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said prosecutors are examining other cases in which they might use the sedition law against people who did not carry out attacks but had been in various stages of planning. ... The government used the sedition law after World War I to convict anarchists. In the 1950s, the Supreme Court upheld convictions of communists on sedition charges for teaching doctrines that were held to be subversive. ``These weren't people blowing things up; they were basically basement seminars where people would read Marx,'' said constitutional law professor Richard Primus of the University of Michigan. ... Chicago attorney Jeremy Margolis successfully prosecuted four Puerto Rican nationalists for seditious conspiracy in the 1980s for planning to bomb a Marine training center and an Army Reserve facility. The object of the conspiracy was to change the policies of the U.S. government ``as opposed to doing a particular criminal act - blow that up, take that down, shoot that person,'' Margolis recalled. --end excerpt-- TCM comments: -- How is what we on this list, in our physical meetings for the past 9 years, our other activities, any different from the cases just cited, of "they were basically basement seminars where people would read Marx,'' (*) and of being "anarchists" and of "The object of the conspiracy was to change the policies of the U.S. government"? (* except we read folks nearly the polar opposite of Marx, but just as dangerous to the American Way) -- the witch hunts of the 50s are coming back with a vengeance, faster than anyone predicted...we've got Alan Dershowitz suggesting that the rack be brought back ("with proper torture warrants"), we've got airline passengers surrounded by soldiers and questioned about the novel found in their luggage, we've got a thousand or so persons detained without due process/habeas corpus, and we've got got drastic new police state measures in the offensively-named "USA PATRIOT Act." -- I wonder who'll star in the new CBS production of "I Led Three Lives"? --Tim May "You don't expect governments to obey the law because of some higher moral development. You expect them to obey the law because they know that if they don't, those who aren't shot will be hanged." - -Michael Shirley