It’s increasingly common that newspapers from London, England — the intellectual ones, not the nipple-baring trashy tabloids — provide deeper perspectives on American politics than do mainstream American media. This week’s reading across the pond reveals two troubling trends in the workings of American justice that haven’t received much coverage in the Charlotte region. The unrelated incidents paint a picture of America sliding toward tyranny under this current Republican administration.
Rest assured that I use the harsh word “tyranny” advisedly. Under the Orwellian concept of “freedom” promulgated by American neoconservatives in Washington, American citizens and citizens of allied nations are being systematically deprived of their protections under law — the personal guarantees of civil liberty that once proudly raised America above corrupt and despotic regimes. The USA Patriot Act, and the ideology behind it, now demands subservience of individuals to the state, in flagrant contradiction of the principles of the Constitution.
The first incident concerns poor Steven Kurtz, a professor of art at the University of Buffalo in New York. During the night of May 10-11, Hope Kurtz, the professor’s wife of 25 years, died of heart failure. The anguished husband called the emergency services, but it was too late to save her. There was no suspicion of foul play, but by the following afternoon the professor was in custody. While government agents ransacked his home, the bereaved Mr. Kurtz was being aggressively questioned for links to bio-terrorists, and subsequently his colleagues and publisher were subpoenaed for all manner of documents.
What prompted these emergency measures? In some of his art, Professor Kurtz made powerful statements about the dangers of genetically modified crops, contradicting the official government position about their supposed safety. Among such works, the artist created an installation that carried a scary message, with bacteria growing under laboratory conditions. When police answered Mr. Kurtz’s emergency call, they found lab equipment in his home as well as the bacteria used in the artwork. The newly widowed Mr. Kurtz then found himself threatened with charges under the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act of 1989, the provisions of which were drastically expanded by the Patriot Act. This legislation prohibits the possession of any “biological agent” unless used for “bona fide research or other peaceful purposes.”
Despite the fact that the materials found by the Feds had previously been on public exhibition, and that artists and academics across the USA lined up to vouch for Mr. Kurtz and his peaceful protests, the government continues (as of late June) to expand the investigation. The full apparatus of the state is hounding an innocent artist at the very time his personal life has fallen tragically apart. Is this just an appalling case of post-9/11 paranoid overreaction, or is the Justice Department trying to silence a pesky critic of government and its big business donors?
My second example of American justice gone haywire concerns the outrageous extradition requirements demanded by the Bush administration regarding suspected terrorists in foreign countries. Under the headline “One law for the Americans, another for us,” an article in London’s Spectator describes how the 2003 Extradition Act allows the Bush administration to drag British citizens stateside for trial “without the requirement of anything so irksome and tricky as a burden of proof.” All that’s required is for an American official to claim there is new evidence about a crime or intended crime. There’s no requirement that this “new evidence” be produced, or shared with the British government.
At the same time, the Bush administration actively protects other terrorists — if they’re Irish. When the US government drew up a list of banned terrorist organizations after the attack on the World Trade Center, the Irish Republican Army and its American fundraiser, Noraid, were pointedly omitted. And this despite the FBI’s own evidence that Noraid raised money in American-Irish bars to fund the murderous activities of the Provisional IRA, with its sidelines of knee-capping punishment gangs, arms dealing and drug running.
Recently, London wanted to extradite an Irishman living in the USA who was implicated in the murder of two British soldiers, but Washington refused to send him back for trial. In fact, the American government has never extradited any alleged IRA member for trial in Britain. This is because there’s a pervasive but rather nasty mythology on this side of the Atlantic that IRA murderers are heroic “freedom fighters” rather than terrorists. There is indeed a troubled and difficult history of conflict between the Irish and the English that spans more than a millennium with wrongs on both sides, but it’s hard to differentiate bombs that kill innocent civilians in British and Irish cities from the Middle East versions of these heinous actions by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and al-Qa’eda.
But, as the Spectator ironically suggests, for the blinkered Bush administration there’s one sort of terrorism that’s loudly denounced and another type that’s quietly tolerated. Luckily for them, however, the US press has yet to tell its readers about the problem.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2004.
