It's a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11

by Danny Goldberg (Editor), Robert Greenwald (Editor), Victor Goldberg (Editor)

Overview

—Debut title from RDV Books

—Foreword By Cornel West

“A terrific collection of personal stories, legal arguments, and historical reminders about civil liberties in our society. We must never forget that we live in our faith and our many beliefs, but we also live under the law—and those legal rights must never be suspended or curtailed.” —Reverend Jesse Jackson

A groundbreaking collection of new pieces examining the effects of President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft’s legislative assault on civil liberties following the terrorist bombing of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Foreword by Cornel West, author of Race Matters, with original essays by Michael Moore (Stupid White Men, Downsize This!), Congresswoman Maxine Waters, Steve Earle, Tom Hayden (former California senator, author of Irish on the Inside), Congressman Jerrold Nadler, Robert Scheer (LA Times columnist), Ira Glasser (former head of the ACLU), cartoonist Matt Groening, historian Howard Zinn, Lillian Nakano, Congressman Bob Barr, Michael Isikoff, Anthony Romero, Norman Siegel, Kenneth Roth, Nadine Strossen, Michael Tomasky, Helen Zia, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, interviews with Nat Hentoff and Congressman Barney Frank, and many more. Also, firsthand stories from Middle Eastern and American victims of civil-liberty infringement, such as the chief of police in Portland, Oregon who resisted federal pressure, and Fathi Mustafa, a Palestinian caught in the wave of racial profiling.

This debut title from RDV Books is edited by the company’s three publishers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780971920606
Publisher:	Akashic Books, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/01/2002
Pages:	250
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

DANNY GOLDBERG is the author of the acclaimed books How the Left Lost Teen Spirit, Bumping into Geniuses, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea (Akashic, 2017) and Serving the Servant: Remembering Kurt Cobain. He began his career in 1969 with Billboard, for whom he reviewed the Woodstock Festival, and later wrote for Rolling Stone and Crawdaddy. He worked as a personal manager for Nirvana, Bonnie Raitt, the Allman Brothers Band, and Sonic Youth, and was president of several major record companies. He currently runs Gold Village Entertainment, a management company whose clients include Steve Earle and the Waterboys. Goldberg is former chair of the ACLU of Southern California, serves on the board of Public Citizen, and frequently writes about politics and culture for the Nation. His latest work is Bloody Crossroads 2020: Art, Entertainment, and Resistance to Trump.

ROBERT GREENWALD has produced and/or directed more than forty-five television, cable, and theatrical films, including the award-winning NBC-TV movie The Burning Bed, and the recent theatrical film, Steal This Movie, about Abbie Hoffman. Through his newly formed “Public Interest Productions,” Greenwald is executive producing Unprecedented—a documentary about the 2000 election. Greenwald is on the Board of Directors of “A Place Called Home,” a gang-prevention program in South Central Los Angeles, and of the Venice Community Housing Corporation, which provides low income housing in Los Angeles. He also works with “Homies Unidos,” a gang-violence prevention and intervention program with projects in El Salvador and Los Angeles. He is coeditor of It’s a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11.

VICTOR GOLDBERG was a longtime activist for civil liberties. He was an executive of the Collins & Aikman Corp., was president of the Hudson Valley Broadcasting Corporation, and was the president of Victor Goldberg Associates. He was copublisher of Tikkun, associate publisher of the Nation, and coeditor of It’s a Free Country: Personal Freedom in America After September 11.

Read an Excerpt

A Primer: Wartime Erosion of Civil Liberties" by Howard Zinn
Americans are proud of the Bill of Rights, and especially of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which declares that Congress may make no new law “abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” Not many of them know that the First Amendment, while it looks good in print, becomes inoperable when the nation is at war, or when there is some tense international situation short of war (a “cold war”).

It is ironic that exactly when a free marketplace of ideas is necessary, when matters of life and death are the issues, when Americans may be killed in war, or may kill others, our freedom of speech disappears. Yet that is exactly what the Supreme Court decided at the time of the First World War, when the venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes, speaking for a unanimous court, said that freedom of speech cannot be allowed if it creates “a clear and present danger” to the nation. In fact, the case before the Supreme Court at that time was that of a man named Schenck, who had been imprisoned under the Espionage Act of 1917, which made it a crime to say or write things that would “discourage recruitment in the armed forces of the United States.” That was interpreted by the courts to mean that any statement made in criticism of the United States’ entry into World War I would constitute such discouragement, and was therefore punishable by up to ten years in prison.

But long before that “clear and present danger” criterion was enunciated by Holmes, it was, in effect, operating to negate the First Amendment. Indeed, barely seven years after that amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress did exactly what the amendment said it could not: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.” That was 1798, when, oddly enough, both the new revolutionary government in France and the new one in the United States were in a tense situation of “cold war.” Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts which made it a crime to say anything “false, scandalous and malicious” about government officials “with intent to bring them into disrepute.” A number of people who criticized the administration of John Adams were arrested and sent to prison under this Act.

But it was in the twentieth century, and especially during World War I, that suppression of free speech made the constitutional guarantee meaningless. Two thousand people were prosecuted, and a thousand imprisoned, for speaking against the conscription law, or against the war. An atmosphere was created in which it became very difficult to speak one’s mind, either because of fear of government prosecution, or because zealous citizens, catching the war fever, harassed and persecuted fellow citizens who opposed the war.

As an example of the absurdities that accompany wartime hysteria, the World War I period saw the prosecution of a filmmaker who made a movie about the American Revolution. Since the “enemy” in that movie was Britain, and since the U.S. was now allied with Britain, the court ruled that the film violated the Espionage Act. The title of the film was “The Spirit of ’76,” and the name of the court case was U.S. vs. Spirit of '76.

At the end of World War I came the notorious “Palmer Raids,” named after Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Thousands of non-citizens were arrested, detained, and deported without hearings or any of the due process guarantees of the Constitution.

World War II brought more repressive legislation in the form of the Smith Act, which made it a crime to “teach and advocate” the overthrow of the government by force and violence. During World War II, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party in Minneapolis were given prison terms, not for specifically advocating such ideas, but for distributing literature like the Communist Manifesto. And over 100,000 Japanese-Americans were put in detention camps simply because of their national origin, a cruel act of wartime excitement.

The Cold War period that followed the Second World War created an atmosphere in which a hysterical fear of Communism led to loyalty oaths for government employees, imprisonment for Communists, and jail terms for anyone refusing to answer questions put to them by the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their political affiliations. It was a time when the FBI was compiling lists of hundreds of thousands of Americans who had in some way registered their dissent from government policies. Congress passed legislation allowing the deportation of non-citizens who were members of organizations listed by the attorney general as subversive. Although the United States was by far the most heavily armed nation in the world, there was an induced fear of the Soviet Union, and then of Communist China, which enabled the government to ignore the Bill of Rights. The fear was far out of proportion to the actual danger, to the point where children were told to hide under their schoolroom desks as protection against nuclear bombs.

Thus, there is a long history of loss of liberty in wartime which forms a precedent for what is happening in the United States since September 11: the intimidating proliferation of American flags, the harassment of people from the Middle East or indeed anyone looking like a Middle-Easterner, the mass detention of non-citizens without trial or due process. The question is whether Americans will at some point begin to understand that the “war on terrorism” has also become a war against the liberties of Americans, and will demand that these liberties be restored. Without the right to speak freely, to dissent, we cannot evaluate what the government is doing, and so we may be swept into foreign policy adventures with no oppositional voices, and later lament our silence.

Howard Zinn was a bombardier during World War II. As a professor at Atlanta's African-American universities in the 1950s, he took part in civil rights picket lines. He wrote the controversial and influential A People's History of the United States (Harper Perennial, 1980) and was one of the first academics to strongly oppose the war in Vietnam.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Lift Every Voice by Cornel West
Introduction by Danny Goldberg

PART 1: THE CRISIS IN CIVIL LIBERTIES, PAST AND PRESENT
More Safe, Less Free: A Short History of Wartime Civil Liberties by Ira Glasser
A Primer: Wartime Erosion of Civil Liberties by Howard Zinn
American Presidents and Civil Liberties by Paul Starr
We Can Learn From History by Paul Simon
Expert Perspective on Civil Liberties Curtailment: An Interview with Nat Hentoff
It’s Empire Versus Democracy by Tom Hayden
Conservatives and Liberals Unite to Conserve Liberty and Security by Nadine Strossen
The Sorrow and the Pity of Racial Profiling by Ralph Temple
The Chilling of Dissent Post–9/11 by Chris Mooney
Poem: Self-Evident by Ani DiFranco

PART 2: CONGRESSIONAL COMMENTARIES
Selections from House Floor Statements by Congressman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
Freedom Versus Security Issues by Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA)
Common Sense, Security, and Freedom: An Interview with Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA)
Our Loss of Civil Liberties in a Post–September 11 World by Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA)
A Prayer for America by Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

PART 3: ACLU VOICES
The “Secret” War Against Civil Liberties by Anthony Romero
America: “Land of the Free”? by Norman Siegel
Casualties of War: Anti-Terror Hysteria by Ramona Ripston
The Danger of Remaining Silent by Donna Lieberman
Matt Groening Cartoon

PART 4: THE INVESTIGATORS
The Misuse of "Intelligence" in the Name of Security by Michael Isikoff
"Patriochialism": September 11 and the Death of Debate by Michael Tomasky
How the Media Threatens Civil Liberties by Danny Schechter
The Knock at the Door by Eve Pell
Against a Twenty-First Century Star Chamber by Jeremy Voas
David Rees Cartoon

PART 5: LOOK AT IT THIS WAY . . .
What the Hell Do I Know? by Robert Greenwald
All I Am Saying is Give War a Chance: The Private Correspondence Between Michael Moore and George W. Bush by Michael Moore
Civil Liberties and Bare Breasts: Me and My John Post–September 11 by Jenna Malamud Smith
An Open Letter to Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney by Martin Sherwin
The Politics of Retribution by Steve Earle

PART 6: DETENTIONS AND RIGHTS
Is This a Dark Age for Fundamental Legal Protection? by Michael Ratner
Human Rights and the Campaign Against Terrorism by Kenneth Roth
Legalized COINTELPRO by Kit Gage
Military Tribunals by Arthur N. Eisenberg
Dehumanization via Indefinite Detention by Judith Butler
The Ashcroft Raids by David Cole
National and International Court Systems to Fight Terror by Anne-Marie Slaughter
Human Rights Violations and Discrimination in San Francisco in the Wake of September 11 by Nichole Truax and Hadas Rivera-Weiss

PART 7: PERSONAL TESTIMONY
Tale of the Mustafas by Dan Gerson
The Weight of a Nation by Andrew Kirkland
Horror at Home: An Innocent’s Victim’s Story by Michel Shehadeh
Academic Freedom and Free Speech in the Wake of September 11 by Dr. Sami Al-Arian
The Return of Xenophobia--An Asian-American Commentary by Helen Zia
How Muslims Have Been Hurt by Governmental Action Since 9/11 by Mohammed Sohail
Racial Profiling in the Pursuit of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. by Mervat Hatem
Psychological Loss of Freedom Since the Attacks by John Tateishi
Braving the Storm: American Muslims and 9/11 by Hodan Hassan
A Fear of Flying by Asma Gull Hasan
The Japanese Internment Experience by Lillian Nakano
AUTHORBIO: Danny Goldberg is Chairman of Artemis Records, an independent company with an artist roster that includes Steve Earle, Rickie Lee Jones, Warren Zevon, Boston, Kittie, and Khia. A longtime political activist, Goldberg is on the Board and Executive Committee of the NYCLU, and is President of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. He has written for The Nation, The American Prospect, Los Angeles Times, and Tikkun, for which he served as co-Publisher along with his father Victor.

What People are Saying About This

John Ashcroft

To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve .

Editorial Reviews

The dozens of contributors to this volume range from journalists and writers (Michael Moore, Michael Isikoff) to members of Congress (Maxine Waters, Jerrold Nadler) to current and former ACLU leaders (Nadine Strossen, Ira Glasser) to cartoonists Matt Groening and David Rees. But perhaps most original here are the personal testimonies of civil rights violations, such as the tale of the Mustafas, a Palestinian-American father and son, both American citizens, detained (the son for 67 days) on the baseless suspicion of having "altered" their passports. (Sept.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

9/11 The attacks of September 11 precipitated a range of governmental actions in the name of national security that, while supported by most Americans, alarmed a significant vocal minority: those people who worry about civil liberties. These dissenting voices are collected in their many and varied forms in this book edited by three publishers at RDV Books who have connections to the ACLU. It should not be surprising that many of the articles are by past and present leaders of or lawyers for the ACLU. But this eclectic mix of rather short (mostly two- to three-page) pieces essays, interviews, cartoons, a poem, congressional testimony, monologs, and personal accounts from historians, lawyers, representatives, a movie director, a singer-songwriter, and others demonstrate the complexity and fragility of civil liberties in a crisis environment. While the quality of the pieces is uneven, the book's greatest weakness is that, with the exception of an entry by Rep. Bob Barr, all the writing comes from thinkers on the Left. There should have been greater attention paid to balancing the opinions. Despite this shortcoming, this lively book should be added to the collections of larger public libraries. With a foreword by Cornell West. Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, PA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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