it can't happen here *said all echoey*

[Guest guest]

It Must Have Been Another Country

Fri May 9, 6:48 PM ET

By Steven Mikulan

LA Weekly Writer

 

We Americans like to think we’d never allow our rights to be

traded away and shake our heads at grainy photographs and

newsreels of the soldiers, cops and politicians responsible

for herding the Indians onto reservations, rounding up the

Japanese for relocation camps and sending the Rosenbergs to

the chair. What were they thinking? we ask in a brave,

enlightened voice that slyly asks the same question of the

persecuted as well.

 

We may soon be finding out the answer in our own responses

to the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, known more

colloquially as the PATRIOT Act II. When a draft of the new

act was leaked in January to the Center for Public

Integrity, it created an outcry that the war with Iraq and

Oscar chatter quickly drowned out. Among other things, it

calls for legislation that will place American citizens in

the company of those hapless history-book victims, as well

as on equal footing with Afghan prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

 

It will permit authorities to legally abduct and "disappear"

citizens pending charges; it will repeal current restraints

preventing local police departments from spying on religious

and political groups and give the government the power to

obtain financial credit reports "without issuing multiple

time-consuming subpoenas." It will also authorize the

government to strip U.S. citizenship from anyone who belongs

to an organization it deems terroristic. And, of course, it

will add the death penalty (always a plus in Mr. Bush’s

eyes) to a new range of offenses. Oh yes, and Section 205

grants tax breaks to Cabinet members, Congress members and

others who require bodyguards and security details. Can’t

forget those tax breaks.

 

The first PATRIOT Act passed Congress 45 days after 9/11

when the smoke was still rising from the World Trade Center

debris. So far, its sequel has not been formally introduced

for debate, which is just fine with one Long Beach man

facing jail time because of Act I. Sherman Austin, whose

Valley home was raided early last year by the FBI (news -

web sites) and a joint anti-terrorist SWAT team of local

law-enforcement agencies, has become something of a

firsthand expert on the consequences of tripping the

administration’s radar. The then-18-year-old anarchist ran

the http://www.raisethefist.com Web site, which the

government had long been monitoring before pulling the plug

on it when the site ran a link to another Web page posting

explosives and firearms information. Austin was not arrested

or charged with anything then, but shortly after the raid he

was seized with about two dozen people near New York’s

Central Park during the February 2002 World Economic Forum

protests.

 

Dreadlocks and a thin beard give Austin the appearance of a

young Bob Marley, but his troubles with the U.S. government

more resemble the travails of novelist Bernard Malamud’s

persecuted character in The Fixer. Following his Central

Park bust, Austin was whisked to a processing station near

the United Nations, put in a detention cage at the Brooklyn

Navy Yard, then bused back to a cell in Manhattan. He was

served bread and oranges as men who identified themselves as

FBI and Secret Service agents questioned him — Who did he

come to New York with? Was he part of a terrorist agency?

After 30 hours he was taken to a courthouse in Manhattan

where G-men arrested Austin for "distribution of information

relating to explosives" and where the feds tried to persuade

a judge of the threat Austin posed to the republic.

 

"What the FBI said was totally bogus," Austin says. "That I

was a man on a mission, that I was going to blow up the

Olympics."

 

From Manhattan, Austin was driven to an Air Force base

upstate, then flown to a federal prison in Oklahoma where,

after 13 days in custody, he was finally kicked free when a

prosecutor declined to file charges at the time. Half a year

later, the government changed its mind.

 

"The prosecutors called and told my lawyers they didn’t want

to let me off the hook," Austin recalls, "because they’d

spent all this money and paperwork on my case."

 

Last September the prosecutor’s office and Austin’s lawyer

worked out a plea arrangement in which he would serve only

one month in custody and three years on probation. But in

L.A., California Central District Judge Stephen V. Wilson

threw out the agreement as too lenient and scheduled the

trial for sometime in May 2003. At first Austin considered

fighting the case in court, but was then told by a federal

probation consultant that, with PATRIOT Act "enhancements,"

his crime could land him 20 years if convicted.

 

"We’re like, Yeah, take any plea you can!" Austin says. His

defense’s new proposal seeks a sentence in the same range as

the first plea, and could get him anywhere between one and

12 months’ jail time, but he won’t know until he goes up

before Judge Wilson on June 30. In the meantime, Austin

waits, tending the raisethefist Web site and "keeping my

distance" from the Long Beach police, who, he claims,

regularly stop or follow him and make a point of letting him

know they’re familiar with his name.

 

Austin’s case, like a few similar ones around the nation,

has received almost no press attention or interest in a

country whose citizens simply don’t want to believe such

things are happening — or don’t care. It might remind some

of us of the lines from an old Phil Ochs song about murder

and legal violence in America:

 

I know that couldn’t happen here.

Oh, it must have been another country —

Yes, it must have been another land.

 

And yet it is happening here, because we are about as

interested in what happens to some 19-year-old dreadlocked

citizen as we are in a 13-year-old foreigner held in

Guantánamo. The past, when viewed only as images, always

seems outlandish, its crimes so avoidable. What Americans

don’t realize, perhaps, is that our government’s innate

taste for repression and intolerance has never gone away, it

just wears nicer clothes and speaks softer — Bill O’Reilly

for Joe McCarthy, PATRIOT Act II for Executive Order 9066.

Then again, maybe we don’t care that our library visits

could be monitored, or maybe we’ve always assumed the

government had that right anyway. What are we thinking?