Bush counts on media hype
Color-coded scare tactics are run-up to war
By Leslie Feinberg
From banana yellow to citrus orange--just one shade below
tomato red. The Bush administration is camouflaging
state-sponsored repression with color codes.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller
and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge
proclaimed a "Code Orange" alert at a Feb. 7 news conference.
They declared that the United States faces high risk of
terrorist attack.
"As in the past," reported the Feb. 8 Trenton Times,
"officials said they had no information regarding specific
terrorist threats and no indication of a time, place or manner
of any attack."
Yet just 72 hours later, a federal judge upheld New York
City officials' refusal to allow anti-war protesters to march
past the United Nations on Feb. 15.
Citing "this time of heightened security," U. S. District
Judge Barbara S. Jones ruled, "The city's restriction on
marching is not a restriction on pure speech, but rather a
restriction on the manner in which plaintiff may communicate
its message."
Pure double-speak.
Lawyers for anti-war activists argued that City Hall had
granted permits for other mass marches, including the St.
Patrick's Day Parade.
"National security" is the code word. The mission is to beef
up the state and dismantle hard-won civil rights and
liberties.
Arab, Muslim and South Asian people in the United States are
the first to feel it. Immigration and Naturalization
Service-forced "registrations" of these immigrants of color is
reminiscent of the roundup and internment of Japanese Americans
during World War II.
Today's mass "disappearings" have caught undisclosed numbers
in their dragnet.
In the glow of Code Orange, U.S. police agencies are using
Cold War spy tactics against Arab people. And they have
arm-twisted Canadian cops into joining them. "Spy agencies from
both countries are conducting physical and electronic
surveillance, wiretaps and planting agents in universities to
gather information," accord ing to the Feb. 10 London Free
Press.
"As part of the raised alert, several diplomats based in
Ottawa and the United Nations in New York City have been placed
under surveillance to prevent them from agitating
émigrés should the U.S. attack Iraq, U.S. police
said."
In the United States, the article continued, more than 1,000
Iraqi nationals are being monitored. Police are "interviewing"
50,000 Iraqi immigrants, "in hopes someone will blow the
whistle on possible terrorist activities."
Cynical pretexts
On Feb. 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to line up
Washington's allies at the UN behind its war against Iraq.
The next day, the U.S. State Department warned of a growing
threat of terrorists attacking with chemical or biological
weapons.
One day later, Code Orange.
Top cop Ashcroft also floated the idea that the Muslim holy
period of the hajj creates a domestic threat to the United
States. How exactly would the five-day pilgrimage to the Saudi
city of Mecca by some 2 million Muslims affect apartment
buildings, hotels, bridges, tunnels and national parks in the
continental United States? He didn't say.
Instead, the thought police rely on racist profiling,
ratcheted up to the level of official domestic policy.
For example, a "wanted poster" picturing and describing a
"manhunt" for Pakistani-born immigrant Mohammed Sher Mohammad
Khan appeared in newspapers across the country with the
announcements of Code Orange.
But this was buried in the sensational coverage: "The FBI
clarified in a statement that it has no specific information on
Khan, but it still wants to locate and question him." (The
Straits Times, Feb. 10)
Muslim prisoners being held unlawfully by the Pentagon and
CIA at Guan tan amo are evidently being tortured, according to
a widely circulated Wash ington Post article.
A crying need for
anti-racist solidarity
Many organizations that oppose the war in Iraq see the
heightened police measures as aimed at intimidating the masses
of people.
Carla Collins of San Jose summed up what many are muttering
in lunchrooms and on shop floors, unemployment lines and picket
lines. She is "very concerned they're trying to instill fear in
the public to justify the war." (Mercury News, Feb. 8)
Unions add that a big target of "Homeland Security" is the
workers' right to organize and fight back against rampant big
business. On Jan. 27 the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor
passed a resolution assailing the USA Patriot Act and Homeland
Security Act for serving "to undermine labor's right to
organize and fight anti-immigrant attacks by expanding the
government's ability to detain non-citizens, to conduct
telephone and Internet surveillance, and to carry out secret
searches."
The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the full-text
draft of the Bush administration's "Patriot Act II," which
reportedly aims to give the government broad, sweeping power to
increase its domestic spy network and muscle up its repressive
arms. (publicintegrity.org)
Ashcroft has already intervened in court cases across the
United States--even over prosecutors' objections--to call for
applying the death penalty.
Immigrants, documented and undocumented, are finding
themselves in the cross-hairs at increasingly militarized U.S.
border crossings.
But when all those threatened by this repressive blueprint
close ranks, shoulder to shoulder, this racist and reactionary
law of the land can be quashed like old Jim Crow.
And nothing will create more good will around the world than
seeing people across the United States stand up to the racist
warlords in Washington.
Reprinted from the Feb. 20, 2003, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyrighted
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