America the Damned

Tim May tcmay at got.net
Thu Nov 8 21:49:41 PST 2001


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





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