The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent

A National Lawyers Guild Report 3
search large scale street demonstrations for “anarchists” and
“extremist elements,” place under surveillance citizens known to
have read the works of Leon Trotsky or the Rubbiyat of Omar
Khayyam?
Ever since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington,
no week has passed in which the government has failed to issue
warnings of a sequel. Sometimes it’s the director of the FBI,
sometimes the attorney general or an unnamed source in the CIA or
the Department of Homeland Security, but always it’s the same
message—suspect your neighbor and watch the sky, buy duct tape,
avoid the Washington Monument, hide the children. Let too many
freedoms wander around loose in the streets, and who knows when
somebody will turn up with a bread knife or a bomb? Let too many
citizens begin to ask impertinent questions about the shambles of the
federal budget or the ill-conceived occupation of Iraq, and the
government sends another law-enforcement officer to a microphone
with another story about a missing nuclear bomb or a newly
discovered nerve gas, another Arab seen driving a suspicious truck
north to New Jersey or west to Oklahoma.
Notwithstanding its habitual incompetence, the government doesn’t
lightly relinquish the spoils of power seized under the pretexts of
apocalypse. What the government grasps, the government seeks to
keep and hold, and the National Lawyers Guild performs a necessary
service by publishing its report on the American government’s
attempt to preserve the American democracy by destroying it. <strong>The</strong>
deal is as shabby as the one offered to the luckless villagers of
Vietnam. For the sake of a vindictive policeman’s dream of a
tranquil suburb, the country stands to lose the constitutional right to
its own name.
Lewis Lapham