Wednesday, February 08, 2006

"Sedition?" Are they serious?

How's that old poem go again?

"First they came for the Department of Veterans Affairs nurses, and I did not speak out because I wasn't a Department of Veterans Affairs nurse..."

I thought investigating Americans for sedition merely for speaking out against government policies went out of style along with powdered wigs and muskets (except for when it came back for an embarassingly bad encore in 1918). I guess everything old really is new again. Jesus, what the hell is going on in this country?

From the Associated Press:

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico wants the government to apologize to a nurse for seizing her computer and investigating her for "sedition" after she criticized the Bush administration.

...

Berg, a clinical nurse specialist, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War. She urged people to "act forcefully" to remove an administration she said played games of "vicious deceit."

...

Even if Berg had used an office computer, neither that nor her criticism approached "unlawful insurrection," said Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU.

"Is the government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of sedition?" he said.


Even the government should be able to understand the substantive difference between the word "forcefully" and the word "forcibly."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am a 65-year old woman. I feel the assault on freedom of speech, women's rights from this government. Where are the Congressional committees looking into the misbehavior (or plain criminality) of this administration! Clinton unzipped his pants... Bush has unzipped his brain and let his undiciplined cohorts run the government! How much longer will we put up with this? Let them come get my computer... I'll go down fighting!