America must end this war, defend human, civil rights
By Kathryn Spangler
Editorials Editor

On Nov. 3 I attended a North Carolina Anti-War Conference, which was sponsored by Amnesty International, the Piedmont Triad Anti-War Committee and the International Socialist Organization, on the campus of UNC-Greensboro. The conference was an opportunity for anyone to learn more about issues such as Islamic fundamentalism, the origins of terrorism, the history of Afghanistan, the role of media propaganda, U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and alternatives to war.

The consensus of the conference was threefold: the war in Afghanistan must be ended, the civil liberties of all U.S. citizens must be protected and prejudice against Arabs and Muslims must stop.

President George W. Bush’s now-familiar threat of “You are either with us or against us” leaves precious little room for dissent against the war; perhaps this is also the reason that so many Americans don’t seem to notice – or care – when their civil liberties are threatened in the name of defense against terrorism.

The patriotic rhetoric that we have been inundated with since Sept. 11 has made one thing clear: a great many Americans believe that the United States is genuinely the land of the free, a beacon of liberty and civil rights not found anywhere else. Bush said it himself – America has been “called to defend freedom.” So why is it that many Americans have not been granted freedom from racial profiling, and that many other Americans have been working to deny the freedom of speech to their fellow citizens?

For example, Chancellor James Moeser’s office at UNC-Chapel Hill has reportedly been flooded with phone calls and e-mails in protest of a teach-in held on the university’s campus last month that discussed alternatives to war.

According to the Chapel Hill News, threatening phone calls have been received by at least two professors, including Elin Slavick, an associate professor of mixed media, who received seven phone calls protesting her “spitting on the graves of the dead in New York and Washington.”

On this very campus, students themselves have attempted to stifle free speech. Fliers hung in Tribble Hall advertising the anti-war conference were torn down and shredded. I wonder what the intention was of those responsible – did they misconstrue this action as a form of free speech? Free speech does not include silencing other speech; if the perpetrators disagreed so strongly with the conference, they should have had the guts, as two people did, to attend the conference and present the pro-war point of view.

Their cowardly actions, unbecoming of a university student, not to mention any American who claims to love and defend freedom, can only lead me to believe that they are so fearful of another point of view, they felt they had no other choice but to silence it.

Joshua Salaam of the Council on American-Islamic Relations has reported receiving more than two-dozen reports of airline-related racial profiling. One victim of this discrimination is Vahid Zohrehvandi, an Iranian-born software developer, who said he was reading his paper aboard an American Airlines plane flying from Seattle to Dallas when an airline employee approached him and told him to grab his belongings and get off the plane. Zohrehvandi says he was told, “The pilot does not feel comfortable flying” and that “the pilot does not like how you look.” Zohrehvandi, who is a U.S. citizen and an American Airlines frequent flyer, was also questioned for more than an hour by three police officers.

The civil liberties of all U.S. citizens are being threatened by the USA-PATRIOT Act, which gives extensive new powers to both domestic law enforcement and international intelligence agencies, and eliminates the checks and balances that previously gave the courts a chance to ensure that these powers were not abused. Most of these checks were put into place after previous misuse of surveillance powers by these agencies.

Legal experts such as Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of Southern California Law School say intelligence agencies have used times of national crisis to push through legislation giving them more authority to monitor people’s private lives. For example, the FBI obtained approval for its controversial Carnivore system of tapping into e-mail through wireless telephone carriers after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Good, old-fashioned American hypocrisy is also present in the support the United States is offering for the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. How can Bush say, “If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents, they have become outlaws and murders themselves” while the United States forms a partnership with the Alliance, which matches the Taliban in human rights violations. The United States also continues to house the School of the Americas, which has trained some of the most notorious human rights abusers from Latin America.

The Northern Alliance includes commanders such as Rashid Dostum, whose militia dropped cluster munitions on residential areas of Kabul in 1997, Ahmed Shah Massoud, whose forces were responsible for raping and looting in a Kabul neighborhood in 1995, and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, whose forces worked with Massoud’s during a 1993 raid in west Kabul where civilians were raped and murdered.

The School of the Americas, recently renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is a U.S. Army training school that trains soldiers and military personnel from Latin America in subjects like counter-insurgency, infantry tactics, military intelligence and commando operations. Graduates have included those responsible for crimes such as the Uraba massacre in Colombia, the El Mozote massacre of 900 civilians in El Salvador, the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the Jesuit massacre in El Salvador, the La Cantuta massacre in Peru, the torture and murder of a U.N. worker in Chile, and so on.

And what of this intense bombing campaign cloaked in the guise of a humanitarian mission? Bush is living in a dream world – regardless of whether or not he intended for the bombing to be against the Afghan people, it is against them. For the president to believe that America is easing the suffering of millions of Afghans by dropping a few hundred thousand packets of food from the sky is absurd (not to mention the fact that the food packets are the same color – yellow – as cluster bombs, and that many of them land in minefields, as Afghanistan is the third most heavily mined nation in the world).

It is not until the citizens and government officials of the United States end our own terrorist activities and defend the civil liberties of all that we can preach to the world about democracy and freedom, and it is not until we stop bombing the hell out of innocent Afghan civilians that we can claim to have their best interests in mind.