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Irish Echo Editorial: A knock on the door

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

No, they reflected something equally worrying and even more insidious in nature: actions by police agencies in the U.S. that, intentionally or not, have served to intimidate law-abiding citizens.
One has come to expect coercive tactics from totalitarian regimes, but not from democracies, which afford their citizens an array of hard-won civil rights and personal liberties. But that is what is occurring in America today.
In the first instance, the Times reported that the FBI has been questioning political activists across the country, and in some cases subpoenaing them, in what apparently is an effort to head off disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York City later this month. In the other, Times columnist Bob Hebert reported that Florida state police officers have gone to the homes of elderly African-American voters, including participants in get-out-the-vote operations, and interrogated them as part of what the state has called, rather cryptically, an “investigation” into voting fraud.
Little yet is known about the full rationale for these operations, particularly the latter. Still, the FBI, the Times reported, has conceded that its efforts are aimed at forestalling violence or illegal disruptions in connection with the convention, presidential debates and November election during “a time of heightened concern about a terrorist attack.”
In Florida, meanwhile, the actions of the state Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to Gov. Jeb Bush, is just the latest in a series of questionable actions involving voting rights. It started with the now infamous felons list, in which many innocent people, many of them African American, were erroneously listed as felons and thus prevented from voting in the 2000 presidential election. And, as another Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has reported, this year Florida tried to keep secret a revised felons list, but when a judge forced its release, it turned out once again to wrongly disenfranchise many innocent African Americans and “almost no Hispanics,” who are more likely to vote for Republican candidates.
Such heavy-handed tactics by law-enforcement agencies will no doubt have a chilling effect on Americans’ freedom of expression and right to vote. We must ask ourselves, is this what we want for our country? Are we to be reduced to cowering behind shuttered windows for fear that anything we say or do that can be construed as political dissent may result on a knock on the door?
Few among us besides constitutional absolutists would deny that a temporary abridgement of some liberties may be necessary in a time of national crisis. But even if we make the leap and say that most citizens today agree that the United States remains in full crisis mode almost three years after 9/11, we should never accept that the full apparatus of federal and state law enforcement can be directed willy-nilly against ordinary Americans doing nothing more than exercising their constitutional right of free speech. Americans enjoy the privilege of being able to criticize public figures. If the politicians can’t take the heat, they should get out of the kitchen — and stay out of ours.

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