The day after New Year's will mark the 90th anniversary of one of the darkest moments in the history of civil liberties, the Palmer Raids against suspected radicals, which took place on January 2, 1920. Ordered by then Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, the raids that occurred that night involved a dragnet of over 33 cities in 23 states, directed against suspected members and supporters of the recently formed Communist and Communist Labor Parties, resulting in the round-up of over four thousand people.
Describing the raids in his history of free-speech titled The First Freedom, author Nat Hentoff wrote:
"Government agents enthusiastically engaged in such massive violations of the Constitution as unlawful searches and seizures, holding prisoners incommunicado and thereby denying their right to a lawyer, making arrests without warrants and detaining prisoners for excessive periods of time without having a chance to be heard by a judge."
The true quarry of the raids, according to Hentoff, was less the documents and 'evidence" seized which turned out to be minimal) than what Attorney General Palmer called "A disease of evil thinking".
It's safe to say that the 90th anniversary of the raids, which marked the apogee of the first American "Red Scare" (to be followed by another in the 1950s) will pass in near total obscurity, with little note by either politicians or the popular news media.
This is unfortunate, because, as Jeff St. Clair and Joshua Frank document in an important new book previewed in Counterpunch, using the specter of domestic threat as an excuse to selectively suspend the Constitution in pursuit of a war against "evil thinking" is an all too contemporary topic.
St. Clair and Frank chronicle the evolution of what they call the Green Scare and its analogies to earlier Red Scares.
As the Espionage Act of 1916 provided the legal pretext for the first Red Scare, so the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006 and a raft of state legislation broadly seeking to equate non-violent activism against enterprises employing animal cruelty in the production of their goods with terrorism, are seeking to create the legal underpinning for chilling free speech and dissent.
In a new investigative report the National Lawyer's Guild
exposes how many of these laws are crafted by industry lobby groups seeking to
brand animal rights and other activist groups as terrorists organizations.
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While the 2006 Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) has received a great deal of attention from animal and environmental activists--as well as supporters of free speech--similar state-level legislation has faced little to no scrutiny. A conservative organization of state legislators known as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has produced model legislation that is similar to AETA but more extreme in many ways. ALEC's model legislation:
- Suggests adding the phrase "politically motivated" to the definition of an "animal or ecological terrorist organization," which clearly shows that the bill is designed to suppress speech based on its content.
- Defines illegal activity so broadly that anyone using the Internet or email to plan (or even express support for) an act of "animal or ecological terrorism" can be charged.
- Creates a "terrorist registry"--an online database open to the public which contains names, addresses and photos of everyone convicted of "animal or ecological terrorism."
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