Silent but deadly.

[professor rat]

Nancy Chang’s book, Silencing Political Dissent, is a detailed analysis of 
recent legislation, such as the USA PATRIOT Act, the detention of up to two 
thousand immigrants without charges, and various Draconian executive orders 
and policy changes. She also analyzes other instances when the U.S. 
government has taken repressive measures in history. Parenti’s book, The 
Terrorism Trap, steps back from the events of September 11th to look at the 
historical and political-economic context in which they took place, 
including a chapter on Afghanistan’s recent history. Howard Zinn’s book, 
Terrorism and War, is based on a series of interviews conducted by Anthony 
Arnove, a member of the International Socialist Organization (ISO). Despite 
his affiliation with this authoritarian organization, Arnove asks 
well-informed, interesting questions which help to create a well-rounded 
presentation by Zinn. Of the three, Zinn has the best politics, being a 
libertarian socialist or anarchist, Chang is a liberal who defends the 
Constitution and the highest ideals of the United States, and Parenti is an 
Old Left Marxist.
The Assault on Civil Liberties Nancy Chang works as a senior litigation 
attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is basically 
a left-wing American Civil Liberties Union. Her work there focuses on 
protecting the First Amendment rights of political activists and the 
constitutional rights of immigrants, as well as fighting against racial 
profiling.
A large part of Chang’s book examines the ideological nature of the USA 
PATRIOT Act. This legislation (hastily drafted and spanning 342 pages) was 
passed overwhelmingly by Congress just over a month after the September 
11th attacks, in the near hysterical climate of the time. Chang summarizes 
her critique succinctly: “First, the Act places our First Amendment rights 
to freedom of speech and political association in jeopardy by creating a 
broad new crime of ‘domestic terrorism’ and denying entry to noncitizens on 
the basis of ideology. Second, the act reduces our already low expectations 
of privacy by granting the government enhanced surveillance powers. Third, 
the act erodes the due process rights of noncitizens by allowing the 
government to place them in mandatory detentions and deport them from the 
Untied States based on political activities that have been recast under the 
act as terrorist activities.”3
Just what constitutes “terrorism” and “terrorist activities” is defined 
broadly enough to allow the inclusion of just about anyone who might 
question unlimited state power or the right of the market to rule all 
social life.4 The Act creates the crime of “domestic terrorism,” which 
applies to “acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the 
criminal laws” if they “appear to be intended … to influence the policy of 
a government by intimidation or coercion.”5
The application of the term terrorist to people using extra-legal means to 
influence government—and corporate—policy has a precedent in the case of 
the Earth Liberation Front (ELF). The ELF uses illegal means such as arson 
to cause economic damage to those they see as profiting from damaging the 
ecosystem. They go out of their way to ensure no humans are endangered when 
they carry out their acts of economic sabotage, primarily aimed at 
multinational corporations, yet they are labeled terrorists by the 
government and corporations, eco-terrorists, to be precise.
Of course history is propelled by illegality. The world we live in today 
has been shaped by illegal actions, from the Boston Tea Party, to the 
sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan in the 1930s, to the Civil Rights 
campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. They all were illegal, and one could 
argue that some of those actions would fit the new definition of terrorism.
In the current climate, political repression will go hand in hand with 
racism and thus Muslims will be most vulnerable, but so will dissidents in 
general. As Chang points out, “the government will use this new crime to 
target Muslim nationals of Arab and South Asian countries, political 
activists, and dissident organizations for surveillance, infiltration, and 
prosecution.”6
In fact, the targeting of Muslims began immediately after the attacks, with 
the detention of well over one thousand people, perhaps exceeding two 
thousand.7 As Chang explains: “With little concern for the rule of law, the 
government has interrogated without suspicion, arrested without charge, and 
detained without justification numerous individuals who are not involved in 
terrorist activities but who match this religious and ethnic profile.”8
This is racial profiling with a vengeance. Chang documents several examples 
of how these two thousand people wound up behind bars: “a Moroccan youth 
was arrested and detained for four months as he sought to enroll in high 
school when a guidance counselor reported to the police that his tourist 
visa had expired. In another case, a man from Jordan was arrested and 
detained as he was seeking to renew his driver’s license. In a third case, 
an Egyptian man was arrested when a police officer he had flagged down to 
ask for directions asked to see his passport.”9 All these folks and more 
ended up behind bars.
Traditionally, the constitutional protections enjoyed by American citizens 
have also applied to non-citizens. That is no longer the case, and the 
change has come about primarily through executive initiative. As Chang 
reports, “Freshly minted rules permit the INS to detain noncitizens 
indefinitely without charge, exclude the press and the public from 
immigration hearings of detainees of special interest, automatically 
override immigration judges’ decisions ordering the release of detainees on 
bond, withhold the names of detainees, and subject noncitizens and their 
representatives to protective orders barring them from disclosing what took 
place at their immigration hearings.”10 Those held, some for well over a 
year, have been subjected to less than humane conditions while 
incarcerated: “Untold numbers of detainees with no links to terrorism or 
records of violence, charged with no more than minor immigration 
violations, have been placed in solitary confinement for months at a 
stretch. They have been housed in small windowless cells under bright 
lights that remain on twenty-four hours a day.”11
Chang’s book also does an excellent job documenting similar occurrences in 
U.S. history, going back to the Sedition Act of 1798, up through the 
Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1960s and 1970s, and the 
FBI’s campaign against Central American solidarity activists in the 1980s.
Of particular relevance to the current situation are the Palmer Raids 
during World War I. Then, like now, an immigrant community was targeted for 
political repression. At that time, a bomb went off at the home of Attorney 
General Palmer. The administration of Woodrow Wilson used this as a pretext 
to attack the radical immigrant community. The U.S. government 
“interrogated, arrested, and detained as many as ten thousand resident 
aliens who had been targeted based on their political ideology . . . and 
[this] resulted in the deportation of more than five hundred immigrants, 
not one of whom was proved to pose a threat to the United States.”12 Those 
deported included anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.
Another important historical precedent outlined by Chang is COINTELPRO, 
which the USA Patriot Act officially and openly returns us to.13 Originally 
established by the FBI in 1956 to investigate the Communist Party, by the 
1960s COINTELPRO widened its targets to include the movements of that era. 
Today we are treated to empty assurances that government surveillance is 
meant simply to protect Americans, but looking back a mere thirty years—or 
twenty in the case of the FBI’s attempt to disrupt and stop the movement 
against U.S. intervention in Central America—we can see what happens when 
the government increases its attention to those it perceives as a threat. 
As Chang points out: “In the case of the FBI’s investigation of the black 
nationalist movement, agents were instructed to ‘prevent groups and leaders 
from gaining “respectability” by discrediting them’ and prevent the rise of 
a ‘messiah’ such as Dr. King . . . ‘who could ‘unify and electrify’ the 
movement.”14 In fact, from 1963 until his assassination in 1968, Dr. Martin 
Luther King Jr. was “the target of a ferocious FBI smear campaign, the goal 
of which was to ‘neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader.”15
All of this and more came out when a group of citizens used direct action 
to uncover the government’s war against dissent. In 1971, the Citizens’ 
Committee to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI Field Office in Media, 
Pennsylvania and turned over seized documents to the press. This led, some 
five years later, to the Church Committee Congressional Report which 
“condemned COINTELPRO for having accumulated, in a manner ‘indisputably 
degrading to a free society,’ massive intelligence information on lawful 
activity, including protest activity and domestic dissent, and on 
law-abiding citizens, for purposes ‘related only remotely or not at all to 
law enforcement and the prevention of violence.’”16
Despite the extensive and well-publicized findings of the Church Committee 
on government surveillance and dirty tricks aimed at its own citizens, the 
new guidelines proposed by the committee to set limits on the FBI were 
never enacted. Instead, the FBI itself established new guidelines, which 
were loosened by Attorney General Smith in 1983 and then replaced by even 
more permissive guidelines by Attorney General Ashcroft. According to 
Chang, these new guidelines have set “the stage . . . for a replay of the 
worst abuses of the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO program.”17
Chang documents with depressing detail every change in the law and its 
interpretation that has occurred since September 11th, and the historical 
and political context within which these new developments take place, 
making this book well worth reading. Ultimately, however, she believes in 
the U.S. system and seems to think recent developments are an aberration, 
rather than the continuation of a long history of control and, when 
necessary, outright repression.
Throughout the book Chang expresses the opinion that those targeted by the 
government were “innocent” and not doing anything to deserve the harsh 
treatment they encountered. The implication is that the state is justified 
in violating some people’s rights, as long as they do something to deserve 
such treatment. Chang also seems to subscribe to a liberal belief in the 
inherent goodness of the U.S. State and its Constitution, which is simply 
being perverted by the Bush Administration. Despite her liberal naiveté 
about the history and intentions of the U.S. government, everyone 
interested in freedom and direct democracy should read Chang’s book.