A brief chronological Compendium of a Few Banned or Challenged Works, and Censorship and Anti-Censorship Efforts 01 Jul - 31 Dec 2005

I should tell you that I am famous in some countries. My anti-war speeches have been translated into French, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Urdu, Bengali, and who knows what else. I have been featured in newspapers and on television and radio. A popular singer in Bombay read my speech at his sold-out concert. I've received over 3,000 emails. But in my own community, I am invisible. The principal won't let me read my speeches in school. The local papers won't print them. --Charlotte Aldebron, 19 Apr 2003, Augusta, Maine, at age 13

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2005, July 01: Law suit against newspaper struck down

By the Arizona Supreme Court. The Tucson Citizen newspaper had printed a letter to the editor that suggested American soldiers in Iraq should respond to attacks on them by killing Muslims at nearby mosques. Two Tucson men filed a class-action suit against the Gannett Co. newspaper on 13 Jan 2004; the letter having been printed on 02 Dec 2003. The letter prompted some fearful Tucson Muslims to keep their children home from religious schools and resulted in letters of protest. In a 06 Dec 2003 column apologizing for the newspaper's decision to print the letter, Publisher and Editor Michael A. Chihak said the letter's author had written a second letter to clarify that his comments only referred to military actions in combat zones. The plaintiffs argued the paper's decision to publish crossed the line into constitutionally unprotected speech because it was a direct call to violence that could extend to American Muslims.

Pima County Superior Court judge Leslie Miller ruled the law suit could go forward, but on this day the state Supreme Court reversed that decision.

By the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment in Belfast, Ireland. According to a report in London Observer, brainstorming is no longer allowed by staffers in this department. They will be allowed to think in groups, but they can't call such activity brainstorming anymore, "on the grounds that it may be deemed pejorative." The rationale is that the word, might, just perhaps, be somehow offensive to people with various brain disorders. Employees have been ordered to use the term "thought-shower" instead.

By conservative reactionaries. In 1994 high school students from around the U.S. produced a video about the role of the Lincoln Memorial in free speech exercises; it is sometimes used as the locale for massive demonstrations, such as when Martin Luther King Jr. gave his I Have A Dream speech; which is one event featured in the eight minute long video. In 2003, complaints were made about the video, alleging it intimated that Abraham Lincoln supported abortion, homosexuality, and liberal causes. Park Service documents released to two liberal advocacy groups under the Freedom of Information Act show the agency moved quickly to assuage conservative reactionism. The service bought footage of President Bush, pro-gun demonstrations, and pro-Iraq war rallies; the service went overboard however when it considered cutting out a section showing President Clinton; a Democratic president. This would certainly have constituted a clear and present case of censorship. Ilene M. Morgan of Los Angeles, who helped organize the project as a Scottsdale, Ariz., high school student, commented, "The Lincoln Memorial is America's soapbox. This was where people have stood to get America's attention. That's what we were trying to capture."

[How typical of reactionaries that they should misconstrue a historical documentary as a political polemic. Their petulance is equally typical. They are just as at liberty as the high school students were to produce a video of their own and submit that for inclusion in the exhibit instead of spoiling other people's work with their pettiness. And if Honest Abe was not a liberal, what, pray tell, was that whole Emancipation Proclamation thing about? --MN]

By American Academy of Pediatrics. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

by Ed Garvey. In a piece entitled PBS Stolen by Right Wing in Cunning Bait and Switch, reprinted at CommonDreams.org, he alleges that even though the Bush regime was made to back down on 100 million dollars in funding cuts, the regime has still taken control of the public network. He wrote in part:

Literally millions of Americans sent e-mails to Congress demanding that the 25 percent cut in funding be restored. And, voila! The money was restored almost without debate. Self-congratulatory e-mails flooded our computer screens. Eager to prove the political power of the Internet, many groups took credit for restoring the funding. In retrospect, the back-pats were premature. The battle was too easy, the results unsatisfactory. It was a set-up. As Frank Rich of the New York Times put it, Tomlinson, Bush and Harrison "castrated" public television and NPR.

We are now faced with a CPB that will mimic Fox news with its "fair and balanced" theme.

[See my commentary about this issue. --MN]

By American occupying forces and Iraqi rioters/looters. The Smash of Civilizations, by Chalmers Johnson, which is reprinted at CommonDreams.org, details how American military misadventurism in Iraq was largely responsible for the destruction of archives, artifacts, and architecture from some three thousand years of human history. The commentary reads in part:

The destruction began as Baghdad fell. Words disappeared instantly. They simply blinked off the screen of Iraqi history, many of them forever. First, there was the looting of the National Museum. That took care of some of the earliest words on clay, including, possibly, cuneiform tablets with missing parts of the epic of Gilgamesh. Soon after, the great libraries and archives of the capital went up in flames and books, letters, government documents, ancient Korans, religious manuscripts, stretching back centuries -- all those things not pressed into clay, or etched on stone, or engraved on metal, just words on that most precious and perishable of all commonplaces, paper -- vanished forever. What we're talking about, of course, is the flesh of history. And it was no less a victim of the American invasion -- of the Bush administration's lack of attention to, its lack of any sense of the value of what Iraq held (other than oil) -- than the Iraqi people. All of this has been, in that grim phrase created by the Pentagon, "collateral damage."

The commentary contains a long list of heart-breaking negligence and criminal irresponsibility of which the Germanic Vandals of the 4th to 5th centuries would be proud.

By Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. This watchdog organization issued an Action Alert about an article entitled: Straight, Gay or Lying? Bisexuality Revisited, which was published in the 05 Jul Science section of the New York Times. The Action Alert states that the article leaps to dramatic conclusions from a single study with an unrepresentative sample, and that the author, Times writer Benedict Carey, echoes the study's authors, who seem equally eager to generalize from scant evidence, as well as confusing the study's assumptions with its conclusions. Mr. Carey quotes the study's senior author, J. Michael Bailey of Northwestern University, who acknowledges that bisexual behavior exists, but argues that "in men there's no hint that true bisexual arousal exists, and that for men arousal is orientation." Mr. Bailey had come under fire recently for his 2003 book, The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism, which defended the discredited theory that transsexual women are not female-gendered people born with male bodies.

Moreover, when the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation asked the New York Times to retract the misohomonist headline, the paper argued that "gay, straight or lying" is "a commonly used phrase among many gay people", thereby promoting a derogatory stereotype about one group by attributing it to another group.

By ultra-left wing reactionaries. Former aboriginal leader David Ahenakew made anti-semitic comments in 2003. He commented that Jews are a disease and defended the Holocaust. Even though he later apologized, this sop to political correctness was not enough for Canadian Jewish groups, and he was later charged for inciting hatred. Some of these groups also started a movement to strip from him his Order of Canada honour. On this day, he was convicted and Saskatchewan provincial court Judge Marty Irwin fined him one thousand dollars (CDN). Order of Canada officials had already told Mr. Ahenakew they had started the process to strip him of his membership the day before his conviction; Mr. Ahenakew was told that he had until 09 Jul to contest that decision.

In reading his verdict, Judge Irwin said Mr. Ahenakew's comments, "clearly dehumanize the Jewish people", and that they were exactly the kind of comments that laws against hate crimes were designed to address. Mr. Ahenakew's reaction to the conviction was to blame it on anti-aborginal racism; which he says he has spent much of his life fighting.

[As far as I'm concerned, Ahenakew was convicted for uttering a non-mainstream opinion; that's my story and I'm sticking to it. There is no doubt that what he uttered was vile, despicable, and contemptible, but that only makes it stupid, not criminal. And his blaming his conviction itself on racism is rather disingenious. He is quoted, "I have learned that native people will never get good, solid justice in this country", which is bullshit. He had his day in court, and he is planning on appealing the conviction. Due process has been served in that regard and he has no kick coming on that score. What I object to is due process being politicized by a pack of snivelling, hypersensitive shits. Especially the Order of Canada. Ahenakew commented about this, "Accepting the Order of Canada comes with no injunction against free speech. I am now forced to choose between freedom of speech and the Order of Canada. I choose free speech." --MN]
(see 08 Jun 2006) < !--140705-->

By United States occupying forces in Iraq. Following a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Cyrus Kar and his cameraman were released today after being held more than 50 days in an Iraqi detention center by U.S. military forces. Mr. Kar, a Los Angeles documentary filmmaker and Navy veteran and part time college professor, had been in Iraq filming an historical documentary with his cameraman Farshid Faraji. Mr. Kar's release from Camp Cropper, a military jail near the Baghdad airport, came just days after ACLU attorneys filed a lawsuit in federal court against top U.S. officials for violating Kar's constitutional rights, federal law, international law, and just one day before a federal judge was scheduled to hear the case in Washington, D.C. Mr. Faraji had apparently been detained at Abu Ghraib. In a phone call to his family and ACLU lawyers from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad on this day, Kar said he had been kept in solitary confinement with just one hour outside his cell each day and that he repeatedly asked for access to a lawyer, but was denied. During the fifty days, he was allowed only three brief phone calls to his family. They had been assured by the FBI during his detention that Mr. Kar had been cleared of any wrongdoing, yet were unable to obtain any information from any other government agencies.

For the past three years, he has been working on a documentary and manuscript about the Persian king Cyrus the Great. He and his cameraman Faraji had traveled to Iran, Tajikistan, Turkey, and Afghanistan, collecting dozens of hours of film, but had lacked critical footage of Babylon. They had entered Iraq after securing appropriate permits and visas from the U.S. and Iraqi governments and from Kurdish authorities. He has now learned that the government destroyed all his recent footage and his equipment.

By the Yelm, Washington, city council. Some time in Feb 2005, the council, fed up with hearing private citizens bitch about Wal Mart at public meetings, prohibited mentioning Wal Mart at meetings. Forbidden to utter this phrase, citizens merely began using the code word "big-box stores" to mean Wal Mart. So the council banned any mention of big-box stores as well. This action very nicely parallels the ultra-moralist movement of the Taliban of Afghanistan; having banned one thing, and finding that the people still were not righteous enough, they then banned something else. In the end, they outlawed applause and paper bags as offensive to Islam. The futility of censorship is illustrated in this case by showing how, if a word is banned, free people will simply use another word to mean the same thing, which will force the censors to eventually ban all words. See the source article for more background.

By The Plain Dealer. Ohio's largest daily, the newspaper is holding two investigative stories based on leaked documents because they could result in the type of court showdown that led to Judith Miller's jailing. Editor Doug Clifton commented on 08 Jul that the paper is trying to find a way to publish the stories without relying on the documents. He is quoted, "It was documentation that would have been illegal to share, so there wasn't any ambiguity about what we had." However, he also made comments indicating that this decision derives in part from the Chilling Effect. This editor does not believe that Plain Dealer's reporting is being chilled, however, as committing a crime or even advocating the commission of a crime is not protected speech. See the source article for more background.

[Addendum (24 Jul 2005:) On 21 Jul the Plain Dealer published the stories it was withholding after Attorney Jerome Emoff came forward and admitted to being the leak. See the source article on that for more background. --MN]

By The National Coalition Against Censorship, et al. On this date a letter was sent to Dr. Bob New, Superintendent of Fayetteville School Distrtict, asking him to resist the mass challenge of parent Laurie Taylor and her supporters. The letter representated the viewpoint of five organizations:

• National Coalition Against Censorship;
• National Council of Teachers of English;
• American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression;
• Association of American Publishers;
• PEN American Center.

[See my commentary on this issue and ongoing coverage, including an expanded list of challenged titles. --MN]

By Senator Hillary Clinton. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By Dykes on Bikes. This nonprofit lesbian motorcycle group has become internationally known for riding in the lead position at San Francisco's pride parade every year for nearly three decades. It is formally known as San Francisco Women's Motorcycle Contingent. Since 2003, the group applied to register for a federal trademark for Dykes on Bikes. According to the report:

Twice, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has rejected the Dykes' application, on the grounds that "dyke" is vulgar, offensive and "scandalous." Patent office attorneys even point to Webster's dictionary, which says dyke is "often used disparagingly."

"The examining attorney found it to be offensive to a significant portion of the lesbian community," said Jessie Roberts, a trademark administrator with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "And we're also looking out for the sensitivities of the general public more than that of a specific applicant."

The applicants, in this case, prefer to call themselves dykes.

Vic Germany, a San Francisco environmental consultant president of the group commented, "We self-identify as dykes on bikes. To us, [the government's objection] is completely absurd."

[Kindly take note, gentle reader: "often used disparagingly" does not mean always or only used disparangingly, and even if it was so used, that could not stop the group being denigrated from attempting to recover the dignity of the phrase. Said Soni Wolf, longtime secretary for the Dykes on Bikes and a pride parade participant since the late 1970s: "That word has been used for years to tear us down. And we said, 'OK, we're going to take it back.'" Moreover, was the term described as "usu. considered vulgar" in the dictionary the Patent Office used? There are three questions raised by this issue: are the patent office attorneys being overly PC, are they being bureaucratically obstructionist, or are they kowtowing to Bush regime misohomonism? --MN]

By The Tunisia Monitoring Group. This coalition of thirteen organisations belonging to the International Freedom of Expression eXchange (IFEX), says Tunisia should show its commitment to upholding the principles of freedom of expression by ending the practice of blocking news and information websites critical of the government. TMG launched a new website on this day on which it details the state of free expression in Tunisia and challenges the government to end internet blocking in the lead-up to the November 2005 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). According to the website government censors routinely block access to at least twenty sites that provide independent news and analysis about human rights and political issues in that country. The website also contains a report entitled, Tunisia: Freedom of Expression under Siege, and which documents serious free expression and human rights abuses in Tunisia, including:

• The use of torture by security services;

• Imprisonment of hundreds of individuals on charges related to the peaceful exercise of their basic right to freedom of expression and association;

• Bans on dozens of books and publications that contain human rights information or pro-democracy writings;

• The harassment of civil society organisations and independent journalists.

The TMG says these abuses call into question Tunisia's suitability for hosting the WSIS. In a letter to President Ben Ali on 25 June 2005, the group called for an end to the abuses and for measures to improve human rights, including:

• The immediate release of lawyer Mohamed Abbou and Hamadi Jebali, editor of the banned weekly Al-Fajr;

• An end to arbitrary administrative sanctions and unrelenting police harassment against journalist Abdallah Zouari;

• The lifting of bans on all books and publications, including those written by prominent democracy advocates like Mohamed Talbi and Moncef Marzouki; and

• An end to the harassment of civil society groups, including the National Council for Liberties in Tunisia, the Tunis Center for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Association for the Struggle against Torture.

By David Swanson, www.afterdowningstreet.org. On this day, he had piece entitled How Comcast Censors Political Content Or Why My Comcast Horror Story Is Better Than Yours posted at CommonDreams.org. In it, he details a series of communications difficulties; he wrote in part:

We didn't know it, but for the past week, anyone using Comcast has been unable to receive any Email with "www.afterdowningstreet.org" in the body of the Email. That has included every Email from me, since that was in my signature at the bottom of every Email I sent. And it included any Email linking people to any information about the upcoming events.

From the flood this evening of Emails saying "Oh, so that's why I haven't heard anything from you guys lately," it seems clear that we would have significantly more events organized by now for the 23rd if not for this block by Comcast.

Disturbingly, Comcast did not notify us of this block. It took us a number of days to nail down Comcast as the cause of the problems, and then more days, working with Comcast's abuse department to identify exactly what was going on. We'd reached that point by Thursday, but Comcast was slow to fix the problem.

Given the facts as offered in his article, this appears very much to be a clear and present case of viewpoint discrimination by a corporation with a near monopoly on high-speed, internet access in the U.S.

By Raincoast, J.K. Rowling, and Bloomsbury Publishing. See the Harry Potter censorship timeline.

By Manlin Chee. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By the FBI. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. An article posted at the FIRE web site details how the Washington State University shamefully distorted the First Amendment to morally and financially support disruptive heckling and threats of physical violence at a controversial student play. The university paid for hecklers to attend Passion of the Musical, by student playwright Chris Lee. It then allowed the hecklers to repeatedly disrupt the musical through shouts and threats. Washington State's president later defended the hecklers' behavior as a "responsible" exercise of free speech. David French, president of FIRE, which has intervened on Lee's behalf, commented, "Students have a right to leave a play, protest outside of the theater, and condemn a play in the newspaper. But they do not have the right to obstruct and censor other students' protected expression. Washington State's defense of this vigilante censorship will encourage students to unlawfully silence others whenever they feel offended." The article also pointed out the university's double-standard morality in reporting that the same office that bankrolled these hecklers had sponsored Washington State's 2005 production of The Vagina Monologues, and that Washington State also played host to Tales of the Lost Formicans, in which a cast member simulated masturbating into the American flag.

By Elizabeth Solomon. See the entry on the vanity plates page.

By the Bush administration. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By a number of entertainment companies and other partners. A coalition named Pause, Parent, Play was launched on this day. This organization is endorsed by Senators Rick Santorum (R-PA) and Joe Lieberman (D-CT). According to the web site the coalition is encouraging parents to:

• PAUSE - take a minute to think about the media that is available and how their kids might react to it.

• PARENT - decide what is appropriate for their own kids, talk with them, and use the options at their disposal to help them.

• PLAY - enjoy the media with their kids.

The web site notes: "Pause, Parent, Play brings together parties that create, distribute, monitor and consume all major forms of recorded and broadcast media material - an unprecedented coalition. Although many of the members compete against each other within each industry, they are united by their commitment to caring about what kids watch, hear and play."

By the Bush administration. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Congress. In a late session on this day, the House of Representatives reauthorized the act by a vote of 257-171. This vote seeks to make permanent those provisions that would have terminated in December 2005, with two exceptions that will now be in force for 'only' ten years before 'sunsetting': allowing federal agents to use roving wiretaps and to search library and medical records.

President Bush commented, "The Patriot Act is a key part of our efforts to combat terrorism and protect the American people, and the Congress needs to send me a bill soon that renews the act without weakening our ability to fight terror." However, to this date there have been no successful prosecutions under USAPA.

[Nor does this editor see any relevance between one's medical records or what one reads and the likelihood of being a terrorist. --MN]

[Addendum (08 Aug 2005:) On 29 Jul the U.S. Senate voted unanimously to both reauthorize and make permanent much of the legislation. Bush is expected to ratify the reauthorized USAPA into law on 11 Sep 2005; once the House and the Senate iron out the points on which they do not agree. Personally, I find it bitterly ironic and fascistically iconic that this political slut will once again exploit this great American tragedy for political gain. --MN]

By Stephen Pearcy. The California Republican Party, conservative web loggers, and a Sacramento talk radio host have called on Attorney General Bill Lockyer to remove this painting from an exhibit sponsored by California Lawyers for the Arts. The painting is on display at the Department of Justice, and depicts a star-spangled map of United States being flushed down a toilet. Those demanding its removal cite the usual specious rationale of "good taste" to justify this censorial action. Republican Party spokeswoman Karen Hanretty commented, "All we want is some common sense decency from the state attorney general. [This artwork is] blatantly offensive to people who think that America does not belong in the toilet"

[This is a prime example of the logical fallacy of reification, which occurs when an abstract concept is treated as a concrete thing. Note that Hanretty regards a painting of an American symbol as the physical, geopolitical, socio-cultural object that is the U.S.A. What's more stupid is that Hanretty admitted that she had not even seen the exhibit, and only learned of the painting from listening to KTKZ talk radio host Eric Hogue. --MN]

By Governor Rod Blagojevich and the video-game industry, respectively. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By the Bush administration. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

"Abraham", his Muslim name, has been studying for his Honours in Politics at Melbourne's Monash University, and is specialising in martyrdom and terrorism. He said during an interview that was on a The World Today radio broadcast, that he was interviewed by a Federal Police Officer on 21 Jul. The officer quizzed him about the literature he had been reading for his studies. He said he is the only student in the course to be interviewed, and accused the AFP of engaging in ethnic profiling. Brian Walters SC, The President of Liberty Victoria, commented:

I think we really should be concerned about the disruption to our society that these terror laws are creating. We should be alarmed, not just alert about these terror laws.

This is the stuff of Kafkaesque nightmare. We do not want to have a situation where police are vetting the thoughts that we undertake, vetting research and doing so in an environment which cannot be justified.

[Okay, now pay attention here: Given that Australia is reacting to terrorism with much the same hysteria as the U.S., and statements have been made by U.S. officials in supporting the erosion or outright revocations of civil liberties, I should have faith in the proper and responsible use of USAPA S.215 why exactly? This action is against a guy who is studying terrorism in support of law enforcement, and he gets treated like a terrorist because of it. How exactly is this not like the schizoid paranoia of a full scale totalitarian state? --MN]

By a three judge panel of the Southern District of New York. In the case of Nitke v. Ashcroft, this panel ruled that the plaintiffs had provided insufficient evidence to prove the law was unconstitutional. However, this decision appears very much to have been based on a Catch 22; plaintiffs had not shown enough evidence proving the government wrong, because the government has never collected evidence proving it is right. Group lawyer John Wirenius said in a statement that the court declined to find the law unconstitutional "by setting a standard so high that no plaintiff could have met it. They required us to prove facts that the government has refrained from making a paper trail on for 30 years." He further commented at his web log:

The Court found that Barbara and NCSF [National Coalition for Sexual Freedom] (through The Eulenspeigel Society) had been chilled in their speech and had censored themselves because of the statute allowing the Government to choose which venue any artist using the Internet may be prosecuted in, and applying that local community's standards to all art on the Internet. The Court also found that Barbara and NCSF could not rest easy on the obvious social value of their speech, because not all prosecutors and not all juries see social importance the same way.

Then they found we had not produced enough evidence as to how many artists would be chilled, and how local community standards varied. Thus, we had not shown to what extent the standards varied from community to community, and how much speech was effected.

In view of the fact that we submitted writings from several hundred artists, and unchallenged expert testimony that the contours of local community standards could not be readily ascertained, this finding is hard to accept. I must note that a very able attorney had said to me as early as 2003 that the Court had set an impossibly high bar. At the time, I was skeptical; now I think he may have been right. It's hard to know how we could have gotten more evidence, as the Government represented to the Court that it didn't compile such evidence, and the only way to try to generate it would be a multi-million dollar empirical survey--which our expert testified would be unreliable, in any event.

See the source article for more background.

By Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Arianna Huffington. See my commentary on this issue.

By Jerry Boyle. The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Washburn University had not unconstitutionally endorsed an anti-Catholic viewpoint by installing this statue on campus. The statue was part of a larger outdoor display at the Topeka, Kansas university, and has already been removed, as it was scheduled to be.

[Addendum (08 Mar 2006:) On 06 Mar 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court ruling. --MN]
(see 27 Feb 2004)

By Karen Kinser. This painting hung in the entrance to the Chesapeake Public Library's central branch for the first two weeks of Jul, where an estimated 12,000 people walked past it. Two of them complained about it, so it was removed from view and hidden behind some bookshelves. The painting shows a woman sleeping in the nude. She is covered to her hips, so the pubic region is not visible, and one arm is draped in front of her breasts, so the nipples are not visible. Despite this, the two complainants alleged that the painting was Harmful To Minors.

By Vietnamese citizens. Vietnam's ruling communist party directive on controlling cyber-cafes, which was adopted jointly by the public security ministry and the culture and information ministry, was to take effect on this day. It reinforces a decree issued in 2004 which was not properly implemented and which was supposed to make cyber-cafe owners keep a record of all their customers for 30 days. The directive also tends to tighten controls on online journalists who, according to the authorities, "provide sensationalist news and articles while others even publish reactionary and libellous reports and a depraved culture." Reporters Without Borders said that, although the Vietnamese government tried to justify these measures by referring to national security and defence, they were clearly designed to stifle dissent. This directive will also force cyber-cafe owners to take a six-month long course in how to "monitor" their customers better. They will also have to check the identity of customers and ban them from accessing "pornographic and subversive" sites.

By the counties of Key West and Monroe, Florida. Following Hillsborough county's vote to ban gay pride recognition by county government, commissioners in these counties passed proclamations declaring 12 to 14 Aug Hillsborough County Pride in Exile Days. Greg Needham, who is co-chairman of a group calling itself Key West Cares About Pride, commented, "The point of all this is to show support for everyone in Hillsborough County, but especially for gays and lesbians. It will also give them a chance to experience a weekend in a place where gays and lesbians are fully supported by the city and county governments."

By Norman Solomon. He had this piece, which is one part media criticism and one part punditry, posted to Alternet.org. In it, he warns about a new propaganda movement by the Bush administration that will exploit claims of withdrawal from Iraq, and illustrates how it is likely to come out by showing how a similar effort worked out during the Viet Nam war. He sets the start date from this new propaganda movement as 27 Jul, and believes that its purpose is to bolster Republican standing for the 2006 mid-terms.

By Big Brother government. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By Steven Vincent. This American journalist was murdered on this day for reporting on the corruption of the American puppet-government, including about the existence of the death squad that apparently killed him. In three articles for The Christian Science Monitor over the month of July, Steven Vincent captured the criminal-induced confusion of post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, the jockeying for power between rival militias within government departments, and the growing use of political assassination. The specific piece that seemed to precipitate his murder is an opinion piece published in The New York Times on 01 Aug. He wrote about Shiite political parties that maintain their own militias in the city and he reported allegations that off-duty police are used to assassinate former members of Saddam Hussein's regime and other political opponents:

An Iraqi police lieutenant confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations -- mostly of former Baath Party members -- that take place in Basra each month. He told me that there is even a sort of 'death car': a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment.

He and his Iraqi translator Nouraya Itais Wadi (also known as Nour al-Khal) had left a money-changer's shop when four gunmen jumped out of a white car (Lt. Col. Karim al-Zaidi told the Associated Press that it was a police car, which was confirmed by witnesses). According to witnesses interviewed by an Iraqi journalist, the pair was hustled into the car while the attackers shouting to bystanders, "Don't interfere, we're the police." Mr. Vincent and Ms. Wadi were taken to a house somewhere on the city's outskirts and held and questioned for roughly five hours, according to a Basra police officer who requested anonymity. Then, blindfolded and with their hands bound behind them, they were taken to Al Rebaat neighborhood in Basra and shot repeatedly. Ms. Wadi, who was shot twice, survived the attack. See the source article for factual information about conditions caused by the breakdown of civil authority in Iraq. The country seems very clearly to have gone from the political oppression of Saddam Hussein to sectarian oppression by religious fanatics. Another factor in this military misadventurism that is not reported by the American corporate press.

On 03 Aug, Reporters Without Borders reported on his death, writing that Mr. Vincent was an avowed supporter of the US intervention in Iraq, although he was very critical of the growing influence of religious extremists. The group also wrote a commentary about his killing and the threat to journalists in Iraq in general, on 04 Aug.

By Big Brother government. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By Robert Parry. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Hispanics, for Hispanics. A cousin to comic books (graphic novels), fotonovelas consist of framed photographs with speech balloons, instead of hand drawn panels. The Denver library system was attacked by talk-radio host Peter Boyles of KHOW-AM; the station web site had the headline: "Shocking Content Found on Denver Public Library Shelves". The books, 6,569 volumes between 50 and 100 pages each, were in the adult sections of twelve branch libraries, but were available for anyone to check out. They were removed from the stacks on this day and sent to downtown headquarters for inspection. The fotonovelas are described as "sexually explicit", which could be the case if they are anything like narcocorridos.

[There is some indication, albeit nothing solid, that this might be part of a bigoted anti-immigration movement. At the moment, however, it looks simply as if the "We Hate Sexuality" reactionaries are whining. --MN]

[Addendum (29 Aug 2005:) It was reported on 24 Aug that the Denver Public Library had canceled four of its fourteen subscriptions to Spanish-language adult comic books. The canceled series are

• El Libro Vaquero (Cowboy Book),
• Frontera Violenta (Violent Frontier),
• La Novela Policiaca (Police Novel),
• El Libro Policiaco (Police Book).

Fotonovelas have been part of the library's collection for 15 years. This was the first time any complaints were made about them. The library was criticized by Representative Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., for spending tax money to serve a Spanish-speaking population which includes illegal immigrants. Similar English-language books have been found, but no complaints have been made against those publications. --MN]

By anybody. In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. authorities seized and suppressed film shot by U.S. military crews and Japanese newsreel teams. This was to prevent Americans from seeing the full extent of the devastation. It also established a pattern of censorship that continues to this day. The U.S. military footage was classified as secret; it was declassified in the early 1980s, yet it has never been fully aired. The Japanese film shot in black and white was declassified and returned to Japan in the late 1960s. Some of the footage was slated to air in the U.S. in a documentary for this sixtieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. A commentary about this censorship by Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher magazine, and entitled Hiroshima Cover-up Exposed, was published at AlterNet.org on 04 Aug. He wrote in part:

In the mid-1990s, researching "Hiroshima in America," a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the U.S. Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

The 50th anniversary of the bombing drew extensive print and television coverage -- and wide use of excerpts from the McGovern/Sussan footage--but no strong shift in American attitudes on the use of the bomb. Then, in 2003, as adviser to a documentary film, "Original Child Bomb," I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. She not only did so but also obtained from McGovern's son copies of home movies he had shot in Japan while shooting the official film.

"Original Child Bomb" went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win a major documentary award, and this week, on Aug. 6 and 7, it will debut on the Sundance cable channel. After 60 years at least a small portion of that footage will finally reach part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Only then will the Americans who see it be able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race -- and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today.

By British, Islamic extremists. It was reported that prosecutors were to meet with senior police within days of this date to decide whether charges of treason can be brought against Islamist extremists who have voiced support for terror in the wake of the London bombings. Attorney General Lord Goldsmith and Director of Public Prosecutions Ken Macdonald have discussed possible action that could be taken against three prominent clerics who have appeared on television since the bombings, and the Attorney General's Office confirmed the Crown Prosecution Service's head of anti-terrorism will meet senior officers at Scotland Yard early next week to discuss possible charges against Omar Bakri Mohammed, Abu Izzadeen and Abu Uzair. Charges to be considered include the common law offences of treason, incitement to treason, solicitation of murder and incitement to withhold information known to be of use to police.

[Hate speech charges aren't good enough? You have to take it one more step down the slippery slope? --MN]

By the Court of Appeals, Maryland. The state high court ruled that downloading child pornography from the Internet does not violate the Maryland state law that makes it a crime to "use a computer to depict or describe a minor" engaging in sexual activity. Jonathan George Moore was arrested for having child pornography on his computer, and subsequently tried in circuit court, before which he argued: the words "depict" and "describe" meant to create the image, and that he had not created the pornography, merely downloaded it. he was convicted and appealed, and the state high court took the case directly, bypassing the lower Court of Special Appeals. The court ruled: "A person who downloads a picture of a rose does not depict the rose - the photographer depicts the rose when taking the picture. The plain meaning of 'use a computer to depict or describe' is to use a computer to create, not to use a computer to download." Mr. Moore's conviction for possession of child pornography, a misdeamenor, stands; but, then, he never contested that one.

By Sunsets with Shakespeare. On this day the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and the Lansing branch of the ACLU sent a letter to city officials asking them to reconsider a decision to censor a Shakespeare in the Park production of Titus Andronicus. Todd Heywood, a Lansing resident, and his theater company, had requested permission to perform a modern adaptation of "Titus Andronicus" at a Lansing city park, but their request was denied by the Department of Parks and Recreation on the grounds that the stage blood might be offensive to the audience. According to Mr. Heywood, the city has previously approved performances of I Hate Hamlet, Picnic, Lysistrata 2411 A.D., and the movie The Longest Yard; all of which include scenes of violence and sexuality. Michael J. Steinberg, ACLU of Michigan Legal Director, commented about the incident, "Parks are public forums where the constitutional protection of expression is strongest - even when the expression is controversial or offensive. We are alarmed that a city would consider censoring a play by one of the greatest playwrights of all time."

[I am more pissed off by their use of a vague and ill-defined fear. And when they say "the audience", do they mean every member of the audience? --MN]

By FAIR. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By librarians from around the world. See the Cuban Independent Librarians Affair.

By Norman Solomon. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Mike Allen of Washington Post, and Anne Kornbluth of New York Times, both together on Face The Nation. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Utah television station KTVX. The station, a local ABC affiliate, rejected an ad featuring Cindy Sheehan two days before George Bush was to address the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The ads were bought by Gold Star Families for Peace. In an e-mail to media buyers, KTVX wrote that it was an "inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City." The e-mail read: "The viewpoints reflected in the spot are incompatible with our marketplace and will not be well received by our viewers." It added that the spot didn't qualify as an issue advertisement, but for the ad to have been considered an "issue" advertisement a ballot measure would have had to be at stake. What makes this political advertisement inappropiate for Utah is that Utah voted seventy percent for George Bush in the 2004 election. Salt Lake City affiliates of NBC, CBS, and Fox are airing the spot, however. See the source article for more background.

[A piece of core political speech can be considered an inappropriate commercial advertisement? How? Sheehan wasn't selling anything. And to ban it because of its viewpoint certainly smacks of censorship. Kudos to the Salt Lake City Fox affiliate, by the way, for acting with integrity. --MN ]

By Amanda Marcotte. In a piece entitled Camp Casey, PTA, posted to AlterNet.org on this day, Ms. Marcotte reports on her on-site experience at Camp Casey II, Crawford, Texas. Her reporting puts the lie to the Bush administration supporters who will say anything to smear Ms. Sheehan, and reveals the insidious lack of proper coverage of this movement by the corporate press.

By Matthew Rothschild. In a piece entitled Distortions of The Times, he blows the whistle on how the New York Times is burying information in articles. He wrote in part:

Seymour Hersh reportedly once said that you'll never know where you'll find a front-page story in The New York Times.

I'd like to amend that: You'll never know where you'll find the "lede"--the opening paragraph with the most important information.

Here are a couple of recent examples, all from Iraq, and they show how the Times is distorting what's going on there by burying crucial facts, a trend I reported on earlier.

His earlier article, from 26 Jul, is entitled The Times Buries Detainee Death; in this day's piece, he examines the trend in three seperate articles from three different days and by three different authors.

By Stephen Pearcy, lawyer and anti-war activist. His painting was removed from the cafeteria of the state Department of Justice and sequestered in the private office of Attorney General Bill Lockyer. Mr. Lockyer denied that it was due to complaints from July; his spokesman, Nathan Barankin, said the painting was removed from the cafeteria, along with two others, because of "concerns about the current situation in the Middle East." Those others are a poster reading "Palestine -- Stop U.S. Financed Genocide in the Middle East", and a painting depicting a caricature of President Bush riding a tank shaped like a church.

[Removing them due to a vague and ill defined fear, or due to some chilling effect, is still censorship. --MN]

By the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. A three-judge panel of the court unanimously reversed a lower court decision and ruled that Christopher Lamparello of New York City can continue to operate his "gripe site" at http://www.fallwell.com. The decision means that Mr. Lamparello did not violate trademark laws by using a misspelling of the Mr. Falwell's name as the domain name for his site. Jerry Falwell Ministries can be found online at http://www.falwell.com. U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton had ruled in Aug 2004 that Lamparello's domain name was identical enough to the trademark bearing Falwell's name that it could confuse Web surfers, despite a disclaimer. The appeals court disagreed, citing the adversarial nature of Lamparello's site. John H. Midlen Jr., representing Mr. Falwell, said he would ask the full appeals court to reconsider the decision.

[Addendum (26 Apr 2006:) On 17 Apr 2006 the U.S. Supreme Court turned away Falwell's appeal against the 4th Circuit decision. So unless this issue comes up in a subsequent appeal in an obliquely related case, he loses. --MN]

By Lawrence Greenfeld; head of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Reporters Without Borders. The watchdog organization wrote to to Gen. John Abizaid, the commander of the US troops in Iraq, asking for the immediate release of Abrahem Al-Mashadani, a Reuters cameraman in Ramadi, Iraq, who has been detained arbitrarily since 10 August. The group accused occupation forces of "frequently arresting journalists without deigning to provide any justification," adding that this "does not reflect well on the United States, which nonetheless does not hesitate to give the rest of the world lessons on freedom of expression and democracy." The letter also reads in part:

We call on the US army to put a stop to these summary arrests. Furthermore, some of the procedures used in Iraq are unacceptable, including beatings as in the case of the Reuters employees and the ABC cameraman in May 2004, and arbitrary arrests of journalists as in the case of the Canal Plus reporters in May 2004 and the CBS cameraman in January 2005.

We point out that the decision to arrest a journalist should only be taken on an absolutely exceptional basis. Journalists, especially Iraqi journalists, are already running very great risks to go into the field. More than 60 have already lost their lives in this country in two years. It is shocking that they are also being mistreated by the US army.

By Paul K. McMasters, First Amendment Center ombudsman. In a surprising twist, Mr. McMaster reported that the implementation of this new domain was encountering stiff opposition from both ultra-conservatives who don't want to allow any porn anywhere, and some producers of pornography. The concerns of the ultra-conservatives are the usual reactionary denial of the actual legality of pornography in the U.S. as free speech. The concerns raised by the producers of porn is that this domain would marginalize their product and leave them open to easier suppression and prosecution. See the source article for more background.

[Addendum (12 May 2006:) On 09 May 2006 ICANN voted to reject the proposal. It was rejected to due to opposition by religious hysterics and web porn purveyors both, although the pornographer had the only valid concern about how the domain could create a climate of discrimination. ICANN Chief Executive Paul Twomey, however, said the decision largely came down to whether the creation of the domain might put ICANN in the position of having to enforce all of the world's pornography laws. See the source article for more background. --MN]

By Big Brother government. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By US District Judge Alvin Hellerstein. The ACLU filed an FOIA request with the Pentagon in Oct 2003 to make public eighty-seven photographs and four videos previously undiclosed, and which depict prisoner abuse in Iraq. This series of images is said to be even more disturbing than the originally disclosed photographs. The Pentagon originally argued that releasing the images would violate the Geneva Convention rights of the detainees; a monstrous hypocrisy given that the US originally denied these very prisoners Geneva Convention protections and in light of a statement by then Department of Justice official Alberto Gonzales that the Geneva Convention was "quaint". Mr. Gonzales wrote the memo that condoned and justified the torture of prisoners in the care of American Forces personnel. The ACLU had agreed that the Pentagon could black out "identifying characteristics," but Judge Hellerstein ruled during the week of 11-17 Aug that the Department of Defence must explain publicly why it is concealing the images, commenting, "By and large, I ruled for public disclosure."

In May, members of Congress viewed these images; their responses to them demanding further elaboration. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Texas, was quoted as saying, "It was disgusting. There were new ones that we hadn't seen before, and they're bad. I mean there's no doubt about that." The Pentagon's decision to withhold the images was based on the idea that they would foment rioting in Islamic religious states and further hostility toward American servicemen abroad. Judge Hellerstein was expected to make his final ruling on this day.

By Iran. Spanning the 1870s to the late 1980s and containing works by artists such as:

Salvador Dali Vincent Van Gogh Claude Monet

Rene Magrite Joan Miro Pablo Picasso

Jackson Pollock Auguste Renoir Andy Warhol

. . . this exhibition contains some paintings that have not been shown since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. Experts say the exhibit is the most important collection of modern Western art outside Europe and the United States. The collection of some 150 paintings was largely amassed during the 1970s by Farah Pahlavi, wife of the late Shah of Iran, and was briefly put on display when the museum opened in 1978. The Shah's fall in 1979 saw most of the paintings locked away in a vault by the new Islamic leaders who were opposed to Western cultural influence and "immoral" art.

For more than 20 years most of the collection remained sequestered, although under the stewardship of Alireza Samiazar, director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, and with the backing of former President Mohammad Khatami -- a reformist cleric who favored greater cultural and artistic tolerance -- many of them were brought out for display. But not since 1978 has so much of the collection been shown at once. Even so, three of the works, including a Renoir of a semi-nude girl which is considered by some experts to be among the finest in the collection, were not included to avoid offending religious hardliners.

By Maia Szalavitz, STATS. The Media's Meth Baby Mania is a look at how the late 80's/early 90's media blew out of proportion the myth about crack babies, and warns that this decade's media is about to repeat history. Ms. Szalavitz writes in part:

When crack was the scariest drug of all, "crack babies" were the culmination of the terror. Columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote of them in 1989, "A cohort of babies is now being born whose future is closed to them from day one. Theirs will be a life of certain suffering, of probable deviance, of permanent inferiority."

As it turns out, none of that was true. In fact, being labeled a "crack baby" appears to have done more harm to these children than the cocaine itself did. And with news stories popping up about "meth babies" in our latest drug panic, we seem to be about to repeat this shameful pattern.

For some information about how the corporate press often fails to portray an accurate reflection of reality when propagating inflated fears and encouraging rumour panics, see these quotations from The Cult of Fear, by Barry Glassner, and these from Satanic Panic, by Jeffrey S. Victor.

By the American Library Association. According to a new survey by the ALA, The number of challenges during the 2003-2004 schoolyear was five hundred forty-seven, as compared to four hundred fifty-eight for the previous year; this is a twenty percent increase. This study was to be released on this day in anticipation of Banned Books Week, 24 Sep to 01 Oct. These numbers are the highest since 2000, but still well below a peak from a decade ago when more than seven hundred books were challenged.

By Charles C. Haynes, First Amendment Center senior scholar. In a piece entitled Pat Robertson, free speech and the court of public opinion, Mr. Haynes examines how Mr. Robertson's statement is in actuality protected speech. This editor does not generally agree, being currently of the opinion that Mr. Robertson's statement advocates the commission of a crime, in as much as it identifies a specific target and a specific action (under the reasonable person standard) to take against that target. Mr. Haynes, however, points out that there was no true threat in the statement.

Pat Robertson may be guilty of rhetorical excess, but he didn't direct or encourage someone to whack Chavez -- he expressed his views about how the U.S. government should deal with the Venezuelan president. Though Robertson's statement was tough talk, it was speech protected by the First Amendment. Exhorting a group of young men to join the Taliban to kill Americans shows criminal intent; suggesting that the U.S. government consider assassinating a foreign leader does not.

Moreover, Robertson's statement wasn't what the courts call a "true threat," another form of speech without First Amendment protection. There was no real likelihood of violence against Chavez as a result of Robertson's statement.

By Reporters Without Borders. The group accused Yahoo! of becoming a "police informant" in supplying information to China which led to the jailing of a journalist for "divulging state secrets". Shi Tao, 37, worked for the Contemporary Business News in Hunan province; he was arrested in Apr this year and sentenced to ten years in prison. According to a translation of his conviction, Shi Tao was found guilty of sending foreign-based websites the text of an internal Communist Party message which the government of China says was "top secret". The message warned journalists of the dangers associated with dissidents returning to mark the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Shi admitted to sending the e-mail but disputed whether it was a secret document.

Transnational corporations such as Yahoo! and Microsoft argue that they are obliged to operate within each country's laws, but also point out that since China is set to be the world's biggest internet market, they cannot ignore it. Thereby indicating that human rights are to be subverted to the cause of profit. For more background on Chinese government suppression of the Tiananmen Square incident, see the letter by Dr. Jiang Yanyong.

[Laws vs Ethics; always a sticky point on the surface, but consider that Adolf Hitler did nothing illegal by the laws of Germany. When he wanted to oppress a group, he simply he got the Nazi party to pass a law making it legal to do so. As for China, having served in the armed forces and at a paramilitary research institute as a security agent, and having held a SECRET security clearance on both occasions, I'd like to know what the hell they were thinking when they released a "top secret" document to the public, and are they going to or did they also punish the official who commited such an egregious breach of security? --MN]

By Fox 5. Brian Ellner, one of nine Democrats running for Manhattan borough president, reported on this day that Fox affiliate television station had agreed to air his ad leading up to the 13 Sep primary, pulled out of the deal after it saw the 30-second ad, which was critical of the George Bush. Mr. Ellner said Fox refused the ad because it was "disrespectful to the office of the president." WNYW Fox 5 spokeswoman Brandii Toby had no comment on why the decision was made or who was responsible for it. It was the only area station to not run the spot.

By FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has rejected requests from journalists to accompany rescue boats as they went out to search for storm victims. The reason given by a spokeswoman in reply to a request by Reuters is: "the recovery of the victims is being treated with dignity and the utmost respect. [...] We have requested that no photographs of the deceased be made by the media." A plausible rationale, along with the point that the space on the rescue boats will be needed for the rescued. Moreover, the corporate press can make arrangements of their own to access the affected area. The media has been making helicopter overflights of the affected area since the skies cleared up after Katrina's passage. Albeit there are no indications that any of them ever tried to pick up survivors.

On the other side of the issue, the Bush administration has prevented the press from photographing flag-draped caskets of US soldiers killed in Iraq, which sparked criticism that the government is trying to block material that puts the war in a bad light. This seems pertinent, prima facie, due to the concerted and ongoing criticisms of the Bush administration's response to the disaster. This editor, however, tends to discount any connection between the two actions.

[In my not humble so opinion this is just petulant whining by a pack of drooling, subliterate morons who want to suck at the government teat while getting a free ride to collect senationalized "news". If these reporters had such high ethical standards they'd understand from the start that to criticize FEMA for not bringing out survivors fast enough, and to then complain they were not being allowed to obstruct the rescue efforts underway, smacks of a conflict of interest. FEMA gets it either way it responds. Fuck you, Reuters; you low life contemptible slug and abomination to all; shell out your own money to hire boats and armed guards; you're only going to pass along the cost to the consumer, anyway, and still make a profit in the end. --MN]

By Project Censored. In an article released on this day and reprinted at CommonDreams.org and TruthOut.org, Project Censored reported on the top ten most important yet underreported stories over the past year.

Every year, project researchers scour the media looking for news that never really made the news, publishing the results in a book, this year titled Censored 2006. Of course, as Project Censored staffers painstakingly explain every year, their "censored" stories aren't literally censored, per se. [...] The stories highlighted by Project Censored simply haven't received the kind of attention they warrant, and therefore haven't made it into the greater public consciousness.

[...]

This list should not be taken as gospel; not every article or source Project Censored has cited over the years is completely credible; at least one this year is pretty shaky [...].

But most of the stories that made the project's Top 10 were published by more reliable sources and included only verifiable information. And Project Censored's overall findings provide valuable insights into the kinds of issues the mainstream media should be paying closer attention to.

By the government of Australia. See The Scott Parkin Affair page.

By the government of Australia. See The Scott Parkin Affair page.

By the government of Australia. See The Scott Parkin Affair page.

By an exercise in Free Speech. the new federally mandated Constitution Day requires that "each educational institution that receives Federal funds for a fiscal year shall hold an educational program on the United States Constitution on September 17." On 21 Sep, Vanderbilt University held a forum questioning the legality of what some see as government mandated speech. The debate, hosted at the university's law school, included Dean Ed Rubin, professors Rebecca Brown, Tom McCoy, and Suzanna Sherry. Some of the arguments, pro and con, were:

• Ed Rubin: "I believe personally that the federal statute does not comply with the Constitution, which is to say that Congress and the president have chosen to honor the Constitution by violating it.

  "The problem with this is that it requires us to have a particular kind of speech, to say something at a particular time under threat of federal fund reduction or cutoff."

• Tom McCoy: "The government is offering Vanderbilt University many millions of dollars in research funds on the condition that we forgo our freedom to say nothing about Constitution Day. This constitutes a fine of many millions of dollars if we exercise our right to say nothing.

  [...]

  "The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that forcing you to speak when you do not wish to speak raises the same First Amendment free-speech problem as raised when the government prohibits you from speaking."

  [...]

  "It is at most a minimal interference, nonetheless minimal interferences are worth worrying about. What worries me is that when you start ignoring very small constitutional violations, it is just a very short trip to banning speech you disagree with."

• Rebecca Brown: "There is no implication that we have to celebrate the Constitution, and we are not asked to adopt any point of view."

  "Yes, there is a topic (the Constitution), but what we have to think about is whether we think it is appropriate for the government to select a topic."

By James Caldwell High School students. The Caldwell-West Caldwell School Board in Newark, N.J. agreed to allow the publication of a previously censored article, Let’s Talk About Sex and its sidebar. in The Caldron, the student newspaper, but board members are now considering stricter policies that could allow for greater censorship in the future. The article, which discussed national sexual trends and studies and compared them to Caldwell High, and in which many of discussed the issues are the same as those addressed in the school’s sex education curriculum, was pulled from the paper’s April issue after Caldwell principal Kevin Barnes deemed it inappropriate. Mr. Barnes also then forbade any mention of the article and surrounding events in any future issue of The Caldron. In short, not only censoring the article, but censoring any revelation or discussion of his censorship.

After The Caldron's efforts to appeal to the superintendent and school board were rejected, the students contacted the Student Press Law Center, who, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, referred them to Bennet Zurofsky. It subsequently came out that the school board did not even have a vaguely defined policy. In the face of a threatened legal action, the board backed down, and is now considering how to lawfully implement review standards in accordance with Tinker v. Des Moines.

By Beerte Verstraete and Vernon Provencal. These two Acadia University professors had compiled and edited the volume of essays titled Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West. On this day, two days after a story on the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com alleged that one essay in the compilation "promotes sex with children", Haworth Press Inc., a publisher of scholarly tomes, announced that it would not proceed with publishing the book. The web site story, which was picked up by other conservative websites, cited an essay by Bruce Rind, a psychology instructor at Temple University in Philadelphia. An abstract of that essay states, in part, that "empirical data (collected for the article) show that pederasty is not only not predestined to injure, but can benefit the adolescent when practised according to the ancient Greek form." The summary also says many ancient societies, including the Greeks, considered pederasty a "noble" and "functional" practice. Haworth Press's statement announcing the cancellation made it clear that it had caved into this ultra-conservative nonsense. Mr. Verstraete said they received a letter from Haworth Press late Friday, 28 Sep, that "basically exonerates Bruce Rind from advocating pedophilia." The letter says Mr. Rind's article was "sound, but in view of the cultural and political climate in the States, they would withhold the article" to avoid negative press and "economic repercussions."

By ABC's World News Tonight. In an Action Alert issued on this day Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting detailed how this news show has done softball reporting on Wal-Mart's business practices in China. The organization had issued a previous Action Alert on 10 Aug 2005 about this very issue, which charge went unanswered by ABC. FAIR is alleging that ABC's reporting on Wal-Mart is improperly influenced by the corporate giant's status as a major advertiser on the network's news programming.

By the American Library Association, et al. The theme for this year is:

Read Banned Books
It's Your Freedom We're Talking About!

For a list of prospective titles, see my Personal Banned Books List.

By The People's Republic. Reporters Without Borders reported that on this day the government of China released "new" regulations for material that cannot be posted to the internet by the chinese people. RSF commented about the regulations:

The Chinese authorities never seem to let up on their desire to regulate the Web and their determination to control information available on it ever more tightly.

These new rules, announced with a fanfare by the official media, are certainly more intended to frighten Internet-users than to codify the use of the Net. In fact there is nothing really new in these 11 commandments, which simply repeat that the party has the monopoly of the dissemination of information and that the media’s task is not to be objective but to relay state propaganda.

These moves to filter the Internet are nevertheless a sign that the Internet frightens those in power, in particular during a period of ever greater social unrest. It’s noticeable that the only new elements in the text relate to banning the calling of strikes or gatherings though the Net.

Styled by the RSF as The 11 commandments of the Internet in China, these regulations forbid putting out news that:

• violates the basic principles of the Chinese constitution;
• endangers national security, leaks national secrets, seeks to overthrow the government, endangers the unification of the country;
• destroys the country’s reputation and benefits;
• arouses national feelings of hatred, racism, and endangers racial unification;
• violates national policies on religion, promotes the propaganda of sects and superstition;
• diffuses rumours, endangers public order and creates social uncertainty;
• diffuses information that is pornographic, violent, terrorist or linked to gambling;
• libels or harms people’s reputation, violates people’s legal rights;
• includes illegal information bounded by law and administrative rules;
• it is forbidden to encourage illegal gatherings, strikes, etc to create public disorder;
• it is forbidden to organise activities under illegal social associations or organisations.

The last two are completely new bans that have been added to the pre-existing nine rules above. Websites that break these rules will be shut down and the owners will have to pay a fine that could reach 30,000 yuans (3,000 euros).

By Dahr Jamail. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By the East Guernsey Board of Education. Superintendent Bob Greenwood banned the plays Bang, Bang, You're Dead and Godspell. The first runs counter to the district's zero tolerance for school violence, and the second, which sets the Gospel of St. Matthew to modern music, was banned as violating the spirit of church-state separation. Drama club adviser Heather Pasquinelli and technical adviser Jeremy Mull resigned on 26 Sep because of the decision.

By Marilyn Reynolds. The presence of the book in the Acton Middle School library is being challenged by Caroline Sanders whose thirteen-year-old granddaughter had brought it home to read. The book recounts the choices that the sexually active, underaged character must make after unprotected sex with her boyfriend leads to pregnancy. Acton Middle School librarian Linda Goodgion commented, "I understand why she is upset, and I think she did an excellent job of filtering what her granddaughter is reading. I have to have faith in their (students) ability to choose what meets their family’s standards. [...] I can’t go out there and say ‘you can’t take this book.’" Ms. Sanders, whose position is that the book does not belong in a middle school library -- period -- is concerned with what else might be in the library that could be deemed inappropriate for young teenagers.

By Cindy Kuzma. In this excellent examination of a sociological phenomenon, posted to AlterNet.org, Ms. Kuzma shows how much of the anti-sexuality movement due to American ultra-conservativism is a long-term effect. She begins by revealing an inicipent "moral panic" being generated in part by Dr. Joe S. McIlhaney Jr., founder and chairman of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health in Austin, TX, and in part by Loyola College in Maryland theology professor Vigen Guroian. She writes of their warnings against student sex on campus:

Their exaggerated rhetoric and fear-mongering strategy seem designed to inspire a moral panic. Sociologists define a moral panic as mass hysteria generated by exploiting people's worst fears, often for the sake of an underlying political agenda.

For example, remember the furor in the 1980s over the supposedly widespread satanic ritual abuse of children by daycare workers and parents? It turned out to be a series of hysterical events that have since been entirely discredited -- although some of the accused remain in prison.

Moral panics have taken place throughout history. From 1730 to 1731, for example, scores of homosexuals were burned alive in a sex panic that rose out of the fear that God would punish "sodomy" by allowing the North Sea to break through the dikes that defend Holland. Two hundred and fifty trials were held, and 75 men and boys were executed -- frequently burned alive.

Every moral panic has a few essential elements, most of which were first outlined and named in British sociologist Stanley Cohen's 1972 book Folk Devils and Moral Panics. One or more groups -- researchers call them "moral entrepreneurs" -- start the panic when they fear a threat to prevailing cultural values. For example, the civil rights and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, which dramatically altered society's rules about sex, race, and gender, inspired a fearful moral panic among many conservatives who believed the outcome of these movements would be the total dissolution of western civilization.

By U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Judith Miller. Ms. Miller testified before a grand jury today, ending her silence after 85 days in jail. Ms. Miller said in a statement that her source, I. Lewis Libby, had released her from her promise of confidentiality, but his lawyer said today that he and his client had released Miller long ago to testify, and were surprised when Miller's lawyers again asked for a release in the last few weeks. See:

• Miller testifies in CIA leak probe, a basic article about the event;
• Miller's decision to testify surprises supporters, journalists, an analysis by AP;
• Miller Walks: The Plot Thickens by Arianna Huffington on 30 Sep;
• Who is Judy Miller Kidding? by Arianna Huffington on 01 Oct;
• Lou Dobbs, PR bunny a media criticism of uncritical support for Miller by Lakshmi Chaudhry, 05 Oct;
• Judy's Liaison Dangereuse, a media criticism of uncritical support for Miller by Arianna Huffington, 05 Oct.

[See my commentary on this issue. --MN]

By the Government Accountability Office. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Face the Nation. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Southwest Airlines. Lorrie Heasley of Woodland, Wash., was booted off a Southwest Airlines flight in Reno for wearing a T-shirt that bore the f-word and images of President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ms. Heasley said she wore the T-shirt as a gag, and wanted her parents, both Democrats, to see it when they picked her up at the Portland, Ore., airport. Southwest Airlines spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said the shirt became an issue after several passengers complained as they boarded. After several conversations with flight attendants, Heasley agreed to cover the words with a sweatshirt. When the sweatshirt slipped while she was trying to sleep, she was ordered to wear her T-shirt inside-out or leave. She and husband Ron chose to leave. McInnis said Southwest rules allow the airline to deny boarding to any passenger whose clothing is "lewd, obscene or patently offensive." Heasley of Woodland, Wash., said she planned to press a civil rights complaint against the airline. Allen Lichtenstein, lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union in Las Vegas, said the T-shirt is "protected" political speech under the Constitution, and that the real issue is that the airline allowed her to wear the shirt onboard and then objected only when passengers complained. He is quoted, "That they changed rules in the middle of a flight simply because someone didn't like it ... might be problematic."

By Heritage and Arapahoe High School students. At these Littleton Public Schools District schools, students held after-class sit-ins at which they read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison; which book that was recently banned from their libraries and curriculum. Prompted by a complaint by the parents of a Heritage High ninth-grader, the school board decided in August to ban it. District spokesperson Diane Leiker commented about the incident, "It wasn't an issue of the literary merit of the book itself. It was mainly the themes and strong sexual content of the book. The board felt that students in the K-12 setting may not have the maturity necessary to really read that book." Some of the students themselves put the lie to this rationale:

• Heritage High School senior Shannon Flanagan: "This book is powerful. The writing is excellent, and it really just showed me a new perspective on something I hadn't considered before,"

• Heritage High School senior Heather Sevcik: "We can take what we learn from literature on these difficult subjects of these realities of life and we can use them to better our world."

• Heritage High School senior Camille Okoren: "Without that environment, where are we going to rely? On MTV? I just don't think that's a very good place to go once we've banned a book."

On 07 Oct, the school board heard arguments from proponents of the book, but board President Mary McGlone said the panel does not intend to reconsider the August decision now. She said that any member of the community can initiate the process of adding a book to the list of approved volumes. That process could bring the issue back before the school board before the end of the school year.

["It wasn't an issue of the literary merit of the book itself". But under the selection process, literary and artistic merit, or lack thereof, actually, are valid reasons to reject a book. Removing it because someone doesn't like the content is a clear and present case of censorship. I also noticed that the board president demanded due process to have the book put back on the curriculum, but I wonder how closely due process was followed in removing it. A study group that included parents, teachers, and administrators had recommended restricting the book to juniors and seniors, but the board rejected that recommendation on a 3-2 vote and opted instead to remove the book from the reading lists. --MN]

By anonymous citizens. The Delaware Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision requiring an ISP to disclose the identity of an anonymous poster who targeted a local elected official. the justices said in a 34-page opinion that a Superior Court judge should have required Patrick Cahill, a Smyrna town councilman, to make a stronger case that he and his wife had been defamed before ordering Comcast Cable Communications to disclose the identities of four anonymous posters to a web log operated by Independent Newspapers Inc. These citizens had posted a series of obscenity-laced tirades, and in June 2004 a lower court judge ruled that the Cahills had established a "good faith basis" for contending that they were victims of defamation and affirmed a previous order for Comcast to disclose their identities, but one of the bloggers, referred to in court papers as John Doe No. 1 and his blog name, "Public Citizen," challenged that ruling, arguing that the Cahills should have been required to establish a prima facie case of defamation before seeking disclosure of the defendants' identities. Chief Justice Myron Steele wrote in the opinion, "Because the trial judge applied a standard insufficiently protective of Doe's First Amendment right to speak anonymously, we reverse that judgment." Justice Myron also described the Internet as a "unique democratizing medium unlike anything that has come before" and said anonymous speech in web logs and chat rooms in some instances can become the modern equivalent of political pamphleteering.

By the Internet Services Unit (ISU). The agency in charge of censoring the Internet in Saudi Arabia blocked access to this web log service on 03 Oct, and over the Fourth and Fifth. On this day, after pressure from Reporters Without Borders, it allowed access to the service once again. ISU made no explanation for either of its decisions. During the course of investigating the blockage, RSF commented, "Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that censors the Internet the most, but blog services had not until now been affected by the ISU’s filters. The complete blocking of blogger.com, which is one of the biggest blog tools on the market, is extremely worrying. Only China had so far used such an extreme measure to censor the Internet." The blockage apparently did not prevent web surfers from accessing the logs, it did, however, prevent the journalers from updating their sites. The blockage affected some 400,000 journalers.

By Scott Parkin. See The Scott Parkin Affair page.

By the People's Republic of China. Xue-Jun Wang, one of the Sydney Dance Company's longest-serving dancers, was winding up rehearsals in a Shanghai studio on Wednesday when six immigration officials and city police officers in plain clothes arrived to take him away. He was then placed on a China Eastern flight, arriving in Sydney on the morning of 06 Oct. He was expelled for allegedly carrying banned books into the communist state. While Wang admitted he had been a Falun Gong practitioner for 10 years, he denied he had been carrying books by Falun Gong, a religion banned in China, and said he had been expelled for "chatting to the wrong person". He recounted that, "I was carrying a Chinese translation of Nine Commentaries, which is by the newspaper The Epoch Times. Last week, I had a chat with a Shanghainese man about the Communist Party and showed him a copy of the book. I think I showed it to the wrong person."

By American Veterans in Domestic Defense. This veterans group had planned to hold protests against libraries on this day in an effort to remove about 70 children's books that allegedly contain explicit material. Jim Cabaniss, president of the group, said the books contain pornographic pictures or promote homosexuality. Montgomery County library director Jerilynn Williams said she is aware of the protests but added that the veterans group has not contacted her. Mr. Cabaniss reportedly said that some residents had approached the commissioners court and the library board about removing the books but that no action was taken, and that his group's goal is to replace members of the two boards with people who will vote to remove the books. Three of the works cited were: It's Perfectly Normal, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Plastic Man.

By Larry Beinhart. In a piece entitled Reporters: Lost in the 'Fog'?, reposted to CommonDreams.org, Mr. Beinhart shows how reporters did some excellent work in covering the capsizing of a tour boat on Lake George, New York, and compares it to the generally abysmal coverage of the Bush administration. He referred to material that does not make the news as "Fog Facts":

Fog facts are things that have been reported, somewhere, sometime, but have disappeared into the mist-like the pre-9/11 hints that there were hijackers in our midst. The fog facts can still be found by enterprising reporters, but with time and news space increasingly crunched-and media priorities shifting to the trivial-they usually remain obscure, at least to the general public.

[...]

One story, Lake George, has a certain neutrality about it. It’s real news (it’s not political scandal). So reporters and editors fearlessly get it all for us. They do not just report the events, they pull all the relevant facts (laws, history, similar events, speculations, social impact) out of the thousands of bits of information floating around-- out of the fog.

The other story is also news. In terms of what will or will not happen to us in the future, it is significantly more important. All the bits and pieces that I’ve tossed in here can be found, without too much effort. Yet, they're not there. They're still lost in the fog.

By Parade Magazine. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Walter Skold. See the Cuban Independent Librarians Affair.

By the U.S. Supreme Court. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Manufacturing & Technology News. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By George Mason University. In an article posted at CommonDreams.org, Matthew Rothschild details the assault against a lone, peaceful protester who was speaking out during a recruitment effort on campus. Tariq Khan is an Air Force veteran at 27 and a junior at George Mason University in Virginia and is opposed to recruiting at schools. On September 29, when he saw the Marine recruiters had set up a table in the Johnson Center on campus, Khan decided to stand nearby. He taped a piece of paper to his chest with the words, "Recruiters Lie. Don't Be Deceived", and stood four feet away from the table. Subsequently:

• he was accosted by someone from the Johnson Center staff who told him he couldn't be there with a permit to table, even though Mr. Khan did not have a table, and who threatened to call the police to have him arrested;

• he was vilified by another student who then left and brought back an active Marine;

• the Marine then ripped the sign off of Mr. Khan's chest, an action which could well constitute assault;

• campus police officer Theodore Reynolds showed up and told Mr. Khan that he was forbidden to be there without a permit;

• when Mr. Khan replied that he didn't need a permit to merely stand there, Officer Reynolds threw him down and handcuffed him;

• Mr. Khan says that some of the students nearby were egging the police officer on, yelling, "Kick his ass! Kick his ass!";

• Reynolds and another police officer took him to the George Mason University police station where they found out Mr. Khan is a Pakistani-American, albeit born in the United States;

• he was then reportedly subjected to clearly bigoted harrassment when the officers linked him to the World Trade Center attacks because of his ethnicity;

• the officers then took him to the Fairfax Adult Detention Center where he was threatened with reprisals and physical assault; according to Mr. Khan, Mr. Reynolds said to him: "If you run your mouth off again or even look at an officer the wrong way, they'll hang you up by your feet.";

• Mr. Khan was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct, and released after about an hour;

• he was given a court date of 14 Nov and could face up to two years in jail and a $5,000 fine;

• on 03 Oct there was a protest to support Mr. Khan and campus police videotaped the demonstrators;

• on 05 Oct there was a teach-in;

• one hundred twenty-nine faculty members signed a letter calling for a review of the police conduct, as well as the school' policy on free speech;

• four hundred forty-three students, faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the community signed a petition which urges the university to "drop all charges" and calls upon campus police to account for and destroy the surveillance videotape from the 03 Oct protest.

The ACLU of Virginia has taken Mr. Khan's case, and Daniel Walsch, director of media relations at George Mason University, says, the university is conducting two internal investigations and is quoted, "It's possible that the charges could be dropped." A campus police official commented that protest activities are taped to provide visual evidence in the event something goes wrong, but not for COINTELPRO purposes.

[That Marine and Reynolds, at least, have violated their oaths to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, and have gone forsworn by so doing. They have become the very enemy which they imagine themselves opposing. Remember the words of Nietzsche: In hunting monsters one must take care not to become the monster, and when one stares long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you. --MN]
(see 14 Nov 2005)

By Everett High School Prinicpal Catherine Matthews. This Washington State high school puts out a paper called The Kodak, which has an anti-prior restraint statement as part of its masthead. Principal Matthews has demanded that the statement be removed and will not allow the paper to be printed until it is. Removing the statement, however, would give her carte blanche to vet and disapprove any article that might be inserted that offends her sensitivities. Recognizing this as a clear and present promotion of censorship, the staff of the paper has refused to remove the statement. The statement reads:

The Kodak is a student forum for the student body of Everett High School. We are not subject to prior review by administrators, faculty or community members. Editorial decisions are made by the student editors-in-chief and the editorial board. Our right to free speech is guaranteed under the First Amendment of the Constitution and under the Revised Code of Washington (RCW) Article 1, Section 5. Student free speech is also protected by Everett High School District Policy 3220.

[Addendum (05 Dec 2005:) On 30 Nov there was a report at Student Press Law Center site that school officials had printed and distributed an altered version of The Kodak without the permission or knowledge of the student editors. Editor Claire Lueneberg commented about the issue: "It looks like crap - the paper is a disgrace to the Kodak." She further said of it that the paper is more than a month late, all the dates are wrong, and the photos that were edited to be in color were printed in black and white. School district spokeswoman Gay Campbell said the district’s move was not about the battle to publish without prior review, but about getting the issue out to students who have been without a newspaper this year. I interpret this to mean that quality is irrelevant so long as the district controls the content. The students were reported to be planning on publishing an underground paper that will be called The Kodak. --MN]

By Norman Solomon. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Rev. Kieran McHugh, Principal of Pope John XXIII Regional High School in Sparta, N.J. He uniltaterally banned students from accessing social networking sites, such as MySpace.com, in September, citing student safety as his primary concern. This ban does not cover accessing the sites through school computers or on school time, but is blanket coverage for any place and time. His rationales are as follow:

• "I don't see this as censorship. I believe we are teaching common civility, courtesy and respect."

• "If this protects one child from being near-abducted or harassed or preyed upon, I make no apologies for this stance."

Kevin Bankston, staff attorney for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, commented, "It's an incredible overreaction based on an unproven problem. If they're concerned about safety, they could train students in what they should or shouldn't put online. Kids shouldn't be robbed of the primary communication tool of their generation."

[What a fucking asshole. How in the name of all that is rational can you possiblity teach "civility, courtesy and respect" by doing something so uncivil, discourteous, and fundamentally disrespectful as unilaterally co-opting authority over someone's cyberspace activities that are entirely outside your purlieu? And all for a completely vague and ill-defined fear that someone might come close to being kidnapped, harrassed, or molested without actually being so? What a total, fucking asshole! --MN]

By the "Conservative" press. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Florida state Senator Alex Diaz de la Portilla. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By Stacey Palevsky, Tri-City Herald. Ms. Palevsky's piece, Choosing what Johnny can read, was reprinted at the First Amendment Center web site. It is an indepth look at a properly implemented selection process and the interplay between issues of artistic merit, blandness in literature, and material that contains some shock value.

By the U.S. National Security Agency. Researcher Matthew Aid has accused the NSA of blocking the release of an article by NSA historian Robert Hanyok about the agency's cover-up of errors in interpreting intelligence from the Gulf of Tonkin incident. According to the 2001 article in the NSA's classified Cryptologic Quarterly, it appeared that NSA officers made honest mistakes in translating intercepted messages about what was reported as a North Vietnamese attack on the U.S.S. Maddox off the coast of what was then North Vietnam, but rather than correct the mistakes, midlevel officials decided to falsify documents to cover up the errors. Mr. Aid said he had been told that the article analyzes problems found in interceptions about the events. He said the nature and extent of the mistakes remained unclear, and that some senior officials at NSA who were not involved with the errors had taken issue with the journal article. He had requested the article in 2004 under the Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Aid believes that the intelligence failure then is pertinent to the more recent intelligence failures upon which was based allegations of NBC weapons in Iraq. On this day the controversy over the article's release was reported in The New York Times by Scott Shane; which report is reprinted at Truthout.org.

[In a written statement, NSA spokesman Don Weber said the agency had delayed releasing the article "in an effort to be consistent with our preferred practice of providing the public a more contextual perspective. [...] Instead of simply releasing the author's historical account, the agency worked to declassify the associated signals intelligence ... and other classified documents used to draw his conclusions." In short, they agency won't release the information until they have a chance to put their spin on it. --MN]

By Reporters Sans Frontieres. This international watchdog group published this index at its web site. Five of the top six slots were filled by Scandanavian countries. Canada came in in 21st place, down several rankings, due to government interference, and the United States proper fell twenty places to 44th; due in part to the jailing of Judith Miller, and also due to legal moves to undermine the privacy of journalistic sources. The American Occupied Territory of Iraq came in at 137th out of 167 ranked countries. North Korea came dead last.

[I do not have the specific date on which this report was released. --MN]

By Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Tom Engelhardt. In a piece entitled 'Hotel Journalism' Not the Essence of What's Happening in Iraq, published at TomDispatch.com and reprinted at CommonDreams.org, Mr. Engelhart took a look at the state of reporting in Baghdad and how it does a disservice to those who rely on it for the truth. The synopis is: reporting in Baghdad is so thoroughly circumscribed that it cannot be considered in any wise reliable. Conditions are so hazardous that long time war correspondent Robert Fisk will no longer remain in any location for longer than ten minutes, figuring that it would take twelve minutes for someone with a cell phone to summon a car load of hostiles and for that car to arrive.

By Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew. An indymedia web site, CMAQ, posted an article about the Canadian government cover up of the imperialist-caused Haitian crisis. The article reports, in part:

What is happening right now in Haiti is probably Canada's worst foreign policy crime in the last 50 years. The Canadian government helped plan and carry out the destabilization of Haiti's elected government, culminating in the February 2004 coup d'etat/kidnapping of President Jean Bertrand Aristide by U.S. Marines and Canada's Joint Task Force 2. Since then, the coup-installed government and its death squad allies have waged an all-out war against Aristide's Lavalas movement and its supporters with the full and enthusiastic backing of Paul Martin's Liberal government.

Canadian police lead the UN police mission (UNPOL) responsible for training, vetting and overseeing the new Haitian National Police (HNP). Under their watch, hundreds of former Haitian Army (FAd'H) officers, death squad members and individuals who "have been involved in drug rackets, kidnappings, extra judicial killings or other illegal activities," have been integrated into the HNP, according to the Catholic Institute for International Relations. The result has been massacres, violent and indiscriminate raids on poor neighborhoods, summary executions, attacks on journalists and peaceful demonstrators and arbitrary mass arrests. Thousands have been killed and thousands more have gone into hiding or taken exile in another country. When asked about reports of these abuses by human rights groups and mainstream news agencies, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew has scornfully dismissed all evidence as "propaganda which is absolutely not interesting."

The corporate press of North America and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation continues to ignore the Haiti situation completely.

By FAIR. The watchdog group issued an Action Alert about Washington Post withholding crucial information from a story at the request of the government. On 02 Nov the Washington Post carried a front-page story about secret Eastern European prisons set up by the CIA for the interrogation of terrorism suspects, but: "The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation." A previous court ruling on the matter of photographs from Abu Ghraib has already established this rationale is a vague and ill-defined fear and an insufficient reason to withhold information that would prove embarrassing but does not compromise national security.

By East Bakersfield High School students. Student journalists who fought to publish a series of articles on sexual orientation in the paper were finally able to distribute them on this day. Principal John Gibson had banned the articles during the 2004-2005 school year, fearing the students profiled in the stories would be harassed or hurt. In a suit against the district a judge backed the principal's decision until there was a full review of the school's concerns. In October, school officials relented and gave the student newspaper permission to run the stories. In the articles, students talked about coming out and their relationships and religious opposition to homosexuality. Bakersfield is a conservative community in California's agricultural Central Valley. Students at the school say they haven't known of any threats against students who are already open about their orientation, and whose names and photos subsequently appeared in news articles around the country.

By Paul K. McMasters, First Amendment Center ombudsman. This insightful commentary was posted to the First Amendment Center web site on this day. In it, Mr. McMasters examines the use and consistent abuse of criminal-libel law. He wrote in part:

Since 1964, when the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a criminal-libel conviction in Louisiana (Garrison v. Louisiana) there have been 77 threatened criminal-libel prosecutions in the United States, according to a 2003 study by the Media Law Resource Center. More than 65% of these cases targeted speech about public officials or issues of public concern, the report stated. In most cases, prosecutions were based on complaints from law enforcement officers and elected officials.

[...]

. . . criminal-libel laws are a pernicious assault on our First Amendment principles.

They invite comparison to insult laws drawn to protect despots in other parts of the world.

They allow local authorities to search homes and seize property and to arrest and jail those accused -- before they appear in court to defend their words. They silence or intimidate other citizens, journalists and commentators who may have facts or opinions to share about those accused of criminal libel.

They put defendants at a distinct disadvantage in court, where they face, not the individual allegedly defamed, but the government as prosecutor and the taxpayer as underwriter.

When it comes to public discourse, the threat of criminal prosecution for speaking our minds is as chilling as the prosecution itself, especially when there are other, more democratic, remedies for defamatory comments.

The piece strongly suggests that the sole purpose of criminal-libel laws is to protect the guilty from due criticism of their ineptitude or, as in the case of corporate "persons", from criticisms of avarice. At the very least, they fly in the face of the principles of U.S. civil libel laws which recognize four categories of victims of slander: private citizens, enjoying the greatest protection, public persons, such as celebrities and the newsworthy, public officials, who suffer the least protection as criticism in this category is often found to be core political speech, and groups of more than twelve, which cannot be effectively slandered.

By Associated Press. In a piece entitled Journalists face further threats in protecting sources, posted at the First Amendment Center web site, AP published a plaint about the current state of protections for source confidentiality due to the Judith Miller Affair and the Wen Ho Lee law suit. It is this editor's not so humble opinion that these concerns are misplaced as the sources in these cases acted in bad faith and quite likely with criminal intent. This editor continues to be of the opinion that journalistic rights no more provide a shield to reporters than client confidentiality protects the lawyers of organized criminals from being accomplices.

By U.S. District Judge George Steeh. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By the Los Angeles Times. Albeit this move appears to be more a matter of dumbing down to play it safe than an effort to stifle differing opinions. Robert Scheer had been a Times reporter for 17 years before he began writing a column on the Op-Ed pages in 1993. Michael Ramirez, The Times' editorial cartoonist since 1997, will leave the paper at the end of the year and will not be replaced. Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez, recently appointed to his position, said the Op-Ed page will rely more on commissioned artwork and illustrations, as well as stand-alone graphics. He is quoted from a statement: "The opinion pages are the newspaper's town square. Our readers expect us to publish all points of view and the broadest range of opinion - from those of our editorial board and columnists to those of our readers and Op-Ed contributors. And we intend to do exactly that." Times Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson framed the changes as: "You've got a new editorial page editor and a new publisher. We sat down and talked about the pages and decided to make the changes."

Mssrs Scheer and Ramirez said that they believed their strong political stances played a role in their dismissals. Scheer said he thought The Times had grown tired of his liberal politics, and is quoted, "I've been a punching bag for Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh for years and I think the paper finally collapsed." He also opined that he and Ramirez, "both had strong opinions and [I think] the owners think they can improve circulation by making the paper bland and safer."

Mr. Ramirez, 1994 Pulitzer Prize winner, said: "I can't help but think it's also a philosophical parting of ways." He said he also believed his removal was partly due to budgetary concerns, as well as a desire to change the look of the editorial pages. His departure will leave The Times without a permanent staff editorial cartoonist, which is part of trend. J.P. Trostle (editor of the book Attack of the Political Cartoonists), wrote in Harvard University's Nieman Reports during 2004 that editorial cartoon jobs at newspapers are: "increasingly left unfilled or are eliminated entirely after a cartoonist leaves a paper." The number of full-time cartoonists at newspapers has shrunk to fewer than 90, down from nearly 200 in the early 1980s. Times Op-Ed Editor Nicholas Goldberg is of the opinion that the paper will not move to either the left or the right as a result of the dismissals.

[For why this move is probably "A Bad Thing", read: When MBAs rule the newsroom: how the marketers and managers are reshaping today's media, Doug Underwood, 0-231-08048-4, (070.4/U56). --MN]

By Associated Press. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Oceanport school administrators. Pursuant to the ruling by U.S. District Judge Stanley R. Chesler in Apr of this year, the school district will pay $117,500 settlement to Ryan Dwyer for having violated his free speech rights. The settlement was announced on 06 Nov by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.

[Boy, there's a lot of books, programs, and repairs and renovations that are going to go wanting for that piece of stupidity. --MN]
(see 04 Apr 2005)

By the Children's Book Council. This week is to introduce young people to new authors and ideas in schools, libraries, homes, and bookstores. Through it, the Council encourages young people and their caregivers to discover the complexity of the world beyond their own experience through books. This year marks the 86th annual observance of the event.

By Virginia state prosecutors. Charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct against this George Mason University student were dropped on this day. Mr. Khan had been arrested by campus police for protesting military recruiters. University spokesman Daniel Walsch was reported to have said that officials concluded the police did not do anything wrong, after conducting two internal investigations of the incident. Mr. Khan is now forming a student group to advocate political justice and is considering legal action against the university.
(see 10 Oct 2005)

By NBC president Bob Wright. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Kenneth Y. Tomlinson. A report by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting inspector general Kenneth A. Konz was released on this day stating that Mr. Tomlinson had broken federal law by interfering with PBS programming and appearing to use political tests in recruiting the corporation's new president, aside from having trying to withhold funding unless the network, taxpayer-supported, brought in more conservative voices to "balance" the programming. Mr. Tomlinson was chairman of the corporation until September and resigned as a board member this Nov after Mr. Konz shared his findings with the board privately. The Center for Digital Democracy has called for the resignations of the entire board, including selected president Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee.

[I certainly think that anyone Tomlinson hired should be dismissed due to their presence on the board deriving directly from these unethical activities. --MN]

By the blogosphere. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By the University of California at San Diego. Student government officials, worried the station was planning to air material on 03 Nov that was live or unscreened, in violation of a recent amendment to the station's charter, asked the university to pull the station off the air for the night. When student government officials asked School administrators to turn the station back on a day later, the administration refused. Student government president Christopher Sweeten commented: "This wasn't a situation that the administration needed to step in on. This was a student issue." Mr. Sweeten said he met with administrators to discuss returning the station to air, but he was told the station would remain off the air until "no harm will come" from the situation. School spokeswoman Stacie Spector commented to The Union-Tribune: "This is about ensuring student safety, security and the effective enforcement of rules and regulations." This stems from an incident on 03 Nov between student government representatives and station managers that involved students knocking on the door of the television station and station officials refusing to open it. School adminstrators are saying that it was an altercation, but Mr. Sweetena and the station manager, Tiffany Rapp, both reject the claim there was any altercation. Ms. Rapp said of the incident that the studio has an access code, and the delegates from the student government did not have the proper code to enter the studio. The station is entirely funded by student activity fees and falls under the jurisdiction of the student government. As of this date a timeline had not yet been set for the station's return to air.

By a regime better known for oppression and the banning of free speech. According to Mohammad-Hossein Saffar Harandi, Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, where the policy of the ministry focused on book publishing in the past, this year it focuses on book reading as the main element; which is expected to lead to more publications in the future.

• The Public Relations Office of the Education Ministry was reported to be holding: the Fifth Roshd Educational Book Festival, the 2nd Student Book of the Year, book fairs in cities across the country, and book celebrations at schools.

• The publishing house of the Iranian Academic Center for Education, Culture, and Research (ACECR) is holding: several book fairs, book review sessions in the departments of ACECR, ceremonies to honor publishers, writers, and translators.

• The Majlis Library, as one of the sponsors, will be holding a ceremony to pay tribute to: the supporters of manuscripts, the authors of the best articles on manuscripts, IRIB text proofreaders.

• A seminar on non-Persian religious publications and a review of Iran's status at the most recent Frankfurt International Book Fair are also among the programs of the week.

• The Public Relations Office of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (IIDCYA) announced that the provincial departments of IIDCYA are also holding children and village festivals and book reading celebrations.

[And yet I have to ask myself: Just what will the content of these books constitute? Free speech? Or the party line? It is rather paradoxical that a regime that would ban and burn books also engages in a frenzy of publication at the same time. The thing to remember is that the new books are government approved. --MN]

By Bush supporters allegedly acting on behalf of the administration. See the anti-Bush sentiment suppression timeline.

By McLennan County. See the anti-Bush sentiment suppression timeline.

By the U.S. 2nd District Court of Appeal. The judges wrote in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune v. State ruling that four media outlets that had challenged a lower court ruling can view the evidence: "merely to confirm the accuracy of the verbal descriptions provided by witnesses under oath in the courtroom. Secret evidence is the hallmark of an oppressive regime. It is not a policy generally acceptable in a free society." The state has until 28 Nov to ask the Florida Supreme Court to review the ruling. If the state does not appeal or the high court refuses to review it, the evidence will be unsealed. Gregg Thomas, a lawyer who represented the media, commented, "We don't want to exploit this. "We don't want to show it, broadcast it or put it on the Internet. We want to make sure that evidence introduced at a trial is not secret."

[Florida, you might recall, enacted a law forbidding the perusal of autopsy photos in March of 2002. I haven't heard anything about that case since Dec 2002, but if this ruling stands, it should seriously derogate from the foundation upon which that law rests. --MN]

By President George Bush. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Brent Hartinger. On 21 Oct 2005, a University Place couple with children in both Curtis Junior High and Curtis Senior High schools complained about the presence of this book in the school libraries. University Place school officials removed the book, a story about gay teens, from the district's library shelves. Superintendent Patti Banks said she was alarmed by the "romanticized" portrayal of a teen meeting a stranger at night in a park after encountering the person in an Internet chatroom. She said her decision was not due to the homosexual theme of the novel; on 02 Nov she wrote to the complainants: "We want to send a strong consistent message to all our students that meeting individuals via the Internet is extremely high-risk behavior. To the extent that this book might contradict that message, I have determined it should not be in our libraries, in spite of other positive aspects (e.g., a strong anti-harassment theme)." The parents had written that reading the book could result in a "casual and loose approach to sex," encourage use of Internet porn, and the physical meeting of people through chatrooms.

In the book, published in 2003, a teenager thinks he's the only gay student in his high school until he learns that his online, gay chatroom buddy is a popular athlete at the same school. The teen meets others, and they form the school Geography Club, thinking the name will be so boring no one else will join. Parent Connie Claussen, who disagrees with Superintendent Banks's decision and plans to appeal to the district school board, said of the book: "It is about gay students. However, the most important part of the book is that it's about bullying, outcasts, about tolerance. "This is a really good book for any student to read."

By Arizona State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne. He wants public and charter schools to ban The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky. He had not read the book, and after receiving a complaint from an Apache Junction grandmother the only page he read was the one containing the scene where a girl is forced to perform oral sex at a party. His complaint is that: "The page is not just oral sex. It's nonconsensual oral sex that's described in detail. There's nothing in 'Catcher in the Rye' that's remotely comparable to this." Because of this he is asking all schools to remove the book from their shelves. He is quoted, "I'm hoping that if they have this book on the shelves they make sure that this is no longer available to minors or any other students for that matter and they will check to see if there are any other books like that on their shelves. I wouldn't dream of trying to stop adults from reading it, but schools should not make this book available to students in their charge." As is usual in such cases, he professed opposition to censorship.

By Junior Foreign Minister Dan McTeague. In a blazing display of ignorance of sociological phenomena and youth culture, and of a lack of respect for the intelligence of youth, this Canadian Member of Parliament called for Immigration Minister Joe Volpe to deny permission to the artist 50 cent to enter Canada. Mr. Jackson must get permission to enter the country due to his criminal record, but such permits are granted as a matter of routine, with some 12,000 being granted yearly. MP McTeague represents the riding of Greater Toronto, in which there have been a record forty-nine shooting deaths in 2005, as of this date. A staggering number for a generally peacable country, even for its largest city. MP. McTeague blames the violence in part on youth culture. His action is clearly and presently censorship -- his denials to the contrary -- given that he is acting out of content and viewpoint discrimination and specifically asking the government to sanction this discrimination.

[His ignorance is clearly illustrated by his statements to the effect that he is acting to protect the youth of Canada from their own youth culture. Something that is done by every generation of self-righteous "grown ups", and which has never worked. --MN]

By Norman Solomon. In a piece entitled Thanksgiving and More Taking, posted to Commondreams.org, Mr. Solomon looks at media reporting centering around the American Thanksgiving, and how much flies in the face of what is supposed to be a spiritual celebration. He wrote, in part:

In its unadorned state, the idea of being thankful is on a collision course with "Thanksgiving" the commercialized media phenomenon. To explore the genuine realms of giving thanks is to pause and mull over good fortune -- dwelling on it while hopefully mustering at least a bit of humility and gratitude for life along the way. But the prevalent emphasis on goodies for dinner-table consumption and the big-hype kickoff of the holiday buying season are media cues with widespread effects.

[To be fair to the press, Mr. Solomon seems to have invoked an equivocation in this piece. It appears that he is using the term "media" to refer to the press at one point, and then using the term to refer to the entertainment and advertising media. I'll be happy to lambaste the corporate press as money-grubbing parasitic trash, but the press is not responsible for the content of advertisements they have a contractual obligation to carry. I think this piece would be more to the point if Norman had stuck to the apparent double-standard morality of the corporate press itself playing up the psuedo-spiritual elements while being part of the corporatist structure, rather than sequeing from one to the other. --MN]

By the Roman Catholic Church. On this day a commentary by Fr. Gerard Thomas of Beliefnet was reposted at AlterNet.org. Titled The Vatican's Gay Purge, it is an exposé of an attempt by the Vatican to openly discriminate against admitted homosexuals. Father Thomas (a pseudonym; he is openly homosexual), wrote in part:

The recently leaked Vatican Instruction concerning the entrance of gay men into Catholic seminaries and religious orders was far worse than what I had expected. Contrary to some media reports that focused on the Vatican's banning of "sexually active" gay men from the seminaries (anyone--straight or gay--who enters the seminary must be celibate) and stories that zeroed in on "transitory" gays (another way of speaking about basically straight men), the document has a far simpler and more wide-ranging goal: the banning of any man who understands himself as gay. The document explicitly bars those who have "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies."

This is about as broad a ban as you could imagine.

The instruction will have a lasting effect on three groups of men. First, no matter how it is applied or interpreted or read by superiors and seminary rectors, this document will have the immediate effect of turning away any gay man who understands that he is gay. Any healthy, emotionally mature gay man will more than likely identify himself as someone with "deeply rooted homosexual tendencies," in the words of the Instruction. For some reason, the rest of the media seem to think the big news is that Vatican bans "sexually active" gays or "transitory gays."

This is utterly beside the point. An honest reading of the document shows that the Vatican is simply banning gays. The "application" of the document, even the portion of the document that says that rectors are ultimately responsible for their men, will be largely meaningless, for this simple reason: Few emotionally mature gay applicants these days will want to enter.

The only gay men who will enter will be either clueless, closeted, or lying.

[This Instruction, if implemented, will serve primarily to ensure the placement of repressed and confused men who will be more likely to sexually molest children. In fifteen to twenty years, this effect will create a backlash against the church just like that of the recent molestation scandals in the U.S.A. --MN]

By State of Maine. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Hampton University. See the anti-Bush sentiment suppression timeline.

By U.S. military "information operations" troops. The report, published on this day by the L.A. Times and reposted to CommonDreams.org, revealed that the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq. The articles are written by the "information operations" troops, translated into Arabic, and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor. This according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times. Many of the articles are presented in the Iraqi press as unbiased news accounts written and reported by independent journalists. While the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments according to officials. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles. The report also revealed that aside from the propaganda aspects, some of those who place the stories are scimming money. The papers are paid cash, and in one case at least, a receipt was pointedly refused for a payment of $900, for which the agent then claimed $1,200. This effort to disseminate propaganda is taking place even as the U.S. is pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency, and freedom of speech, in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption.

[Like I said before the invasion of Iraq to some keypals to whom I no longer correspond: Bush, Hussein; what's the difference? --MN]

[Addendum (07 Dec 2005:) On 05 Dec, a fairly indepth analysis of this issue titled The Unintended Consequences of Fake News, by William Fisher, was published by CommonDreams.org. Mr. Fisher places this latest incident within the context of ongoing media manipulation by the Bush regime, and shows how that regime pays no more than lip service to the concept of Free Press. --MN]

[Addendum (21 Jan 2006:) On 02 Jan 2006 a follow up report in the New York Times revealed that The Lincoln Group had also been paying Sunni religious scholars in return for assistance with its propaganda work. The sources for this information were identified as current and former employees. The Pentagon told the company early in 2005 to identify religious leaders who could help produce messages that would persuade Sunnis in Anbar Province, noted for violence against the occupation, to reject the resistance and to participate in national elections. Documents and Lincoln Group executives say the ties to religious leaders and dozens of other prominent citizens is aimed also at enabling it to exercise influence in Iraqi communities on behalf of clients, including the military. --MN]

By Governor Arnold Schwarzenneger. Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Lloyd Connelly has ruled the California government must remove from the state web site a state-produced video that was intended to look like an objective news report, and also that state agencies should not use public money to make similar videos in the future. A lawsuit filed in Mar 2004 by the California Nurses Association and two other unions, alleges that the production of two video news releases using state equipment and staff violated state law, and that because the videos were sent to television stations for broadcast, they amounted to little more than propaganda masquerading as news. Judge Connelly wrote in the ruling that the videos, "create the misleading impression that the regulations are unopposed by any segments of the public and are not subject to criticism, thereby discouraging any further questioning or investigation of the matter by the public." The judge did, however, dismiss the claim that the state violated a law against using state equipment to broadcast propaganda, and also denied a motion to hold personally responsible the department officials who authorized the videos.

By Committee to Protect Journalists. The United States tied with Myanmar, formerly Burma, for sixth place among countries holding the most journalists behind bars according to a survey conducted on this day. The United States is holding four Iraqi journalists in detention centers in Iraq and one Sudanese, an Al Jazeera cameraman, at the Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay; none of whom have been charged with a specific crime. A total of one hundred twenty-five writers, editors, and photojournalists were held in jails around the world on 01 Dec 2005, the report said, three more than were being held one year earlier. The top place offenders are:

• China: 32
• Cuba: 24
• Eritrea: 15
• Ethiopia: 12
• Uzbekistan: 5
• Myanmar/Burma and the U.S.: 5 (ea)
• (All other countries: 31)

No American journalists were being held in jails anywhere in the world as of the survey, which is taken on a single day each year and does not count those who might have been held and released during the year; Judith Miller was not included because she was not incarcerated on 01 Dec. The United States has made the list before, but this is the first year in which the United States had been on the list for cases in which journalists had been held without specific charges being filed against them.

By U.S. District Judge Beverly Martin. Judge Martin ruled that the original dress-code rules by Gwinnett County Public Schools and Brookwood High School of Georgia, were too vague to "apprise a person of ordinary intelligence of its requirements." The dress code also gave school officials "unfettered discretion" to determine what was or was not "gang related" clothing. The ruling stems from a case in which Marlyn Tillman of Snellville sued the school district in Apr 2004 after her son, an honor student, was disciplined multiple times after coming to school wearing clothes officials said were gang-related. The court said the district's policy was too vague because it failed to define what constituted gang-related activity or even what a gang was, and also failed to identify what a gang, gang words or gang symbols were. Ms. Tillman's son was punished for wearing a University of North Carolina jersey and a red Ralph Lauren polo shirt. This ruling means that this law suit can now go to trial to resolve issues that include the actual reasons for the various suspensions, monetary damages sought in the case, and whether the teenager's school record should be expunged. Ms. Tillman is supported in her suit by the ACLU.
(see 25 Jun 2006)

By The Committee to Protect Journalists. The Committee publicly condemned Cuba on this day for the detention of two foreign journalists who were reportedly interviewing opposition activists in the central Sancti Spíritus province. According to international news reports, the police detained Polish journalist Anna Bikont, of thePolish daily Gazeta Wyborcza, and Swiss journalist Nelly Norton, on 01 Dec. Authorities confiscated photographs taken by Bikont, according to Agence France-Presse, quoting sources at Gazeta Wyborcza. The two journalists were taken to Havana, from where they were to be expelled on this day. According to Polskie Radio, part of Poland's public radio network, Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Pawel Dobrowolski said Cuban authorities intended to deport the journalists because they had done journalistic work while traveling on tourist visas; he also said the journalists were arrested while meeting with the activists.

CPJ research shows that under Cuban immigration regulations, foreign reporters who visit the island to work must apply for journalist visas, which are processed through Cuban embassies abroad, and Cuban officials grant those visas to foreign journalists selectively, routinely excluding those from media outlets deemed unfriendly. Cuban law specifies that foreign journalists who travel to the country on a tourist visa "should abstain from practicing journalism." This is the second time this year that Cuba has expelled journalists under this excuse; in May, at least five journalists were expelled under similar circumstances.

By U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By Antonio Ansaldi Clothing. After meeting with Mayor Thomas Menino, clothing store owner Antonio Ennis has agreed to stop selling his tee-shirts that read: Stop Snitching. The store has stocked the shirts since 1999 and sells 300 to 400 a month. Mayor Menino said the message on the T-shirts is designed to intimidate crime witnesses from cooperating with police, so he intimidated Mr. Ennis by threatening to have city employees seize the shirts or "strongly discourage" their sales. This announcement came after a 01 Dec meeting between the Mayor and Police Commissioner Kathleen O'Toole and Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley to discuss a recent rise in violent crimes and murders. The city of Dorchester has had sixty-six homicides so far this year, matching a 10-year high, and police haven't identified a suspect in seventy percent of them. They say many witnesses are reluctant to help because of a fear of retaliation, and Mayor Menino says the "Stop Snitching" shirts are part of the problem.

[People are more afraid of tee-shirts than they are of being murdered for revenge? I would think that if you knew of a gang-member cum killer living on your block, and you saw him on the street at the same time your kids were waiting for the bus, or they had to walk past him on their way to the corner store, you wouldn't snitch on him no matter what it said on some tee-shirt. --MN]

By Paul K. McMasters. The First Amendment Center ombudsman had a piece titled Racy downloads become more daring -- and portable posted. In it, he looks at the likely ramifications of the increasing proliferation of internet accessible, portable devices such as cell phones and iPods, and the porn that is being produced for consumpition by such devices. At the same time, the industry in the U.S. is already acting gun shy and looking at how to regulate itself, while the Powers That Be are according to themselves authority to regulate how the industry may provide such services.

By Norman Solomon. See the entry on The Lackey Journalists Affair page.

By Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. Although she still opposes a constitutional ban on flag attacks, the Senator is supporting new legislation to criminalize desecration of the United States flag. Senator Clinton, D-N.Y., has agreed to co-sponsor the measure of Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah), which has been written in hopes of surviving any constitutional challenge following the 2003 Supreme Court ruling which recognized flag burning as core political speech.

[The Bennett-sponsored measure would outlaw: intimidating any person by burning the flag, lighting someone else's flag, or desecrating the flag on federal property. The problem with it is: the law would be used to intimidate any person who wished to protest government action by burning a flag, it is already illegal to destroy someone else's private property, and government property should certainly be a place where one can engage in unfettered political speech. And keep in mind that political protest is not about intimidating other private citizens. See Gary May's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee 20 April 2001, or the ACLU Campaign to Oppose the Flag Desecration Amendment. --MN]

By the U.S. State Department. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By the Bush administration. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By state Representative Sally Kern, R-Oklahoma City. Ms. Kern is driving a movement to restrict access to "homosexually themed" books in Oklahoma libraries. This movement began when two of her constituents complained about King and King, by Linda de Haan and Stern Nijland. As a result, a resolution, HR1039, was passed by a vote of 81 to 3 during the last session; it called for libraries to "confine homosexually themed books and other age-inappropriate material to areas exclusively for adult access and distribution." This because of the fact that King and King is specifically a children's book in which the characters are gay. Ms. Kern is now planning to write and propose legislation requiring libraries to restrict access to books featuring homosexuals, and which would penalize those libraries that don't by cutting their funding. Ms. Kern's rationale for this movement is that reading about homosexuals is the equivalent of having sex and engaging in high-risk behaviors physically. Ms. Kern insists that such state control of access to books will not be censorship.

By Superintendent Charles Ecker, Carroll County, Pennsylvania. He unilaterally deemed the book inappropriate for school libraries because of language and sexual content after having skimmed through it. On this day a school official announced that he would read the entire book before making a final decision. The school system's reconsideration committee had debated the issue, and recommending the book stay on library shelves, but Ecker indicated he would go against the committee. The book explores body image, teen romance, self-mutilation, date rape, and eating disorders; issues that adolescents commonly have to deal with.

By the Bush administration. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By G. Pascal Zachary. An article of his, titled Capitalizing On Government Repression, was reprinted at AlterNet.org. In it, he illustrates how people and busisness function in the repressive state of China. He wrote in part:

Everyone I meet is afraid. The chief executive of one of China's largest hotel groups is afraid to complain to the police about the hustlers who sell fake watches outside the lobbies of his hotels. A Buddhist who runs a network of factories is afraid to speak openly about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. A sports marketing official, one of the agents for China's basketball stars, is afraid to speak out against misguided policies of the national sports system. What is unusual about these people is not that they are afraid; many people in China are. What is unusual about these people is that they are Americans doing business in China -- some even doing business successfully. What they fear, of course, is the same thing that China's people fear: the arbitrary power of government.

For Americans doing business in China, it is a short step between fear and collaboration, [...].

He also reports on how some corporations -- specifically citing MicroSoft and Yahoo! -- are actively supporting the repression by cooperating with the government of China.

By Denver Federal Center security agents. Deborah Davis, a 50-year-old mother of four, used to ride a public bus that follows a route through the Denver Federal Center. Every morning officers from the Federal Protective Services (Department of Homeland Security) would board the bus and demand to see the ID's of the people riding the bus. They did nothing more than look at the ID's offered; there was no checklist or blacklist of who might not enter the grounds. One morning in September of this year, Ms. Davis simply refused to show her ID. She was arrested, removed from the bus in handcuffs, and was issued with two tickets. It took the agents two hours to look up the regulations under which they finally issued the tickets. The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado took up her case, along with an organization called the Identity Project, which fights for citizens to maintain the right to travel freely in the U.S. On 07 Dec the U.S. Attorney's office decided to drop the charges just two days before Ms. Davis's scheduled arraignment. Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado, says the ACLU was interested in the case because it exemplified the type of measures that infringe on citizens' privacy and freedom; measures justified by a post-9/11 government in the name of fighting terrorism.

[This amounts to private citizens needing internal passports to ride a bus through federal property. Not to get off there, but just to ride through it. And the agents doing the checks weren't even doing anything more than glancing at the ID's before allowing the bus to continue. You call that security? In a pig's eye! --MN]

By the current most egregious violator of human rights worldwide: the United States. A page dedicated to playing up recognition of the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was posted to the U.S State Department web site. In a countervailing viewpoint, Medea Benjamin and Andrea Buffa had a piece titled Iraqis' Human Rights Are Still In Peril published at CommonDreams.org. It is a brief examination of a few of the violations perpetrated by the U.S., or which stem from conditions created by its actions.

By cable companies. The two largest cable companies in the U.S., and several smaller ones, announced today a plan to offer packages of family friendly channels to give parents another option to shield children from sex, rough language and violence. Unfortunately, they did so in the face of pressure from the U.S. government. Kyle McSlarrow, head of the main cable trade group, told lawmakers that he hoped the industry's announcement would stave off government intervention. Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin had urged cable executives at an indecency forum earlier this month to give parents additional tools to help navigate the hundreds of channels available to consumers, albeit without endorsing a specific solution. One of those solutions, however, would have been the very worst thing to do from the point of view of the cable companies. "A la carte" pricing, paying only for channels you want to watch, would drive up costs and lead to the demise of channels that couldn't attract enough advertising dollars.

[The cost to the industry is that it would be driven toward non-competitiveness, and more consumers would opt for satellite viewing. That would not bode well for their profit margin. --MN]

By foaming-at-the-mouth, ultra-righteous lunatics in Afghanistan. Mr. Nasab, the editor of an Afghan women's rights magazine, was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to two years in prison after publishing articles questioning harsh punishments doled out under some interpretations of a-sharia, as well as articles arguing for women's equality. He was arrested in Oct of this year. In explaining his concern over the articles published in the magazine, Muhammed Aref Rahmani, a member of the national Shiite Council of Ulema (Islamic scholars), commented, "Sometimes the whole religion and the rules of the religion were attacked ... For instance, he says one woman should be equal to one man, as a witness in a case, which is completely against our religion." Mr. Nasab is now facing increasing calls for harsher punishments, including a recent fatwa demanding that he repent or be executed.

By Douglas Lee. See the entry on the Child Porn/Harmful to Minors page.

By the Pentagon. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By Sara Michelle Eccleston and Claire Marie Lueneburg, co-editors of the Everett High School newspaper The Kodak. They are claiming that officials are violating their free-speech rights by demanding to review editions of the paper before distribution. They argue in the lawsuit that since 1989 the newspaper has served as a public forum for students, with no content oversight by school administrators, and that as such, the district's ability to demand editorial control is severely limited. District spokeswoman Gay Campbell says there has been consistent school oversight of the newspaper, and that the district has an explicit policy allowing prepublication review. Ms. Lueneburg commented on this: "No principal had asked to review it before, even though it is provided for in the policy."

Mitch Cogdill, representing the students, says the root of the controversy is that the Kodak reported on the hiring of the high school's new principal, Catherine Matthews, who was the third choice of the students on the hiring committee, and the Kodak ran articles suggesting their voice was ignored. Ms. Eccleston and Lueneburg refused to submit to prepublication review and appealed the action to the superintendent and the school board, to no avail. The district's policy allowing editorial oversight by administrators was adopted in the mid-1990s but never exercised, meaning that as a practical matter, the newspaper remained a public forum for students, the plaintiffs said. The U.S. Supreme Court has held that school districts have very limited authority to exercise censorship in public forums, but school newspapers put together in a class, overseen by a faculty adviser, and published using school resources -- such as the Kodak -- are not considered a "public forum" unless the school district, by policy or practice, has set them up to be such a forum.

By Cuba. Ladies in White is a group of Cuban women who are relatives of jailed dissidents who stage weekly protest marches. They had been invited to Strasbourg to receive this year's Sakharov prize for freedom of thought, which was to be awarded on this day. Although they had applied for permission to travel weeks ago, the government did not grant that permission. They hadn't been denied permission outright, however, the government simply said that it would hold off determining whether to grant it or not until after the award ceremony.

By President George Bush. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By the American Civil Liberties Union. In an e-mail released on this day the ACLU reported on a draft report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, in which that office concluded the FBI had retaliated against a former undercover agent for reporting flaws in a terrorism investigation. In Sep 2002, Agent Mike German informed his supervisors that a terrorism investigation in Orlando was being so seriously mishandled that the agency was losing an opportunity to launch an active undercover operation that Mr. German believed could uncover a terrorism financing plot. Mr. German said the FBI failed to respond to his allegations, and instead, he was disparaged by supervisors, excluded from the Orlando investigation, and removed as a trainer from elite FBI undercover schools. He resigned from the FBI in June 2004. Mr. German was quoted: "What happened to me is not an isolated incident. FBI agents should be encouraged to report mismanagement and should be protected from retaliation. The Inspector General report is further evidence that the FBI's own internal oversight systems are broken and corrupt." See the ACLU web page for more background.

By the U.S. Senate. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By George Bush and the National Security Agency. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By the State of Turkey. Orhan Pamuk, the country's most prominent author, is being tried for insulting the Turkish Republic and "Turkishness" after telling a Swiss newspaper in February this year that "30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it." During this week a judge kicked the case against Mr. Pamuk back to the Justice Ministry, demanding that the government first approve it. European Union legislators criticized the government, questioning its commitment to freedom of expression, while ultra-nationalists pelted Mr. Pamuk's car with eggs and shouted "Traitor!" and "Love it or leave it!"; referring to Turkey. The administration's nationalist grass roots are angered by the possibility of having the case dropped. The controversy comes at a particularly sensitive time in the overwhelmingly Turkey's push to join the European Union. The government made EU accession a cornerstone of its rule and passed sweeping reforms of the legal code, and on 03 Oct the EU agreed to open talks with the Muslim state. Since then, EU officials have accused Turkey of losing its momentum and allowing reforms to slow down in that the government appears to be appealing more to its conservative constituents by implementing policies founded on religious prejudices.

By Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. In the December issue of Extra!, FAIR published a study of the guestlist on C-SPAN's Washington Journal. Alhough the show prides itself on its reputation for fairness, FAIR's study found that reputation does not reflect reality. On this day FAIR issued an Action Alert stating that the network's response has been silence. Extra! studied Washington Journal's guestlist in the six-month period from 01 Nov 2004 to 30 Apr 2005, tabulating all 663 guests who appeared on the show. The guests were classified by gender, ethnicity, party affiliation (if any), and occupation, and the study also looked at the think tanks most prominently represented on the show. FAIR reports that the most striking findings are:

• Of the partisan guests, Republicans outnumbered Democrats nearly one hundred thirty-four to seventy (1.9 to 1), and not a single representative of a third party appeared during the study period.

• People of color made up only 15 percent of the guestlist (100 out of 663). People of African and Asian heritage accounted for 4 percent each, while those of Middle Eastern and Latin American descent represented 3 percent each. No Native Americans were identifiable during the six months.

• Male guests outnumbered women by four to one, at 80 percent to 20 percent. Moreover, 69 percent of guests were white males, while just 3 percent were women of color.

• Journalists accounted for 32 percent of all guests, the largest single occupational group on the guestlist. Of opinion journalists, 32 were right-of-center while only 19 were left-of-center.

• Citizen-based organizations and public interest groups accounted for just 9 percent of total guests.

Peter Slen, Washington Journal's executive producer and part-time host, once commented: "Balance is our No. 1 goal. We keep official stats on the Washington Journal, OK? Republicans, Democrats, conservative, liberal, moderates-we try to stay within the week nearly perfect as far as the balance goes." FAIR says, however, that since publication of the study C-SPAN has declined to comment on the results, and has also turned down an offer by FAIR to appear on the show to discuss the issue.

By the American Civil Liberties Union. See the entry on the COINTELPRO page.

By U.S. District Judge John E. Jones. He ruled that intelligent design is not science but religion, and therefore cannot be taught in American schools. The religious right-wing of the U.S. has been pushing intelligent design as an alternative to evolution for the past few years. This ruling is the latest in several cases addressing the misapplication of ID as "science" in high school curricula. Citizens of Dover, Pennsylvania were so outraged by the effort to entangle church and state in their high schools that in an election just a few weeks before this decision, they replaced eight of the nine school board members for having voted a pro-ID action into policy; they did not demand that the school board rescind the policy, however, preferring to wait for the court's decision on the matter. ID proponents have been insisting from the start that ID was scientific and not religious in nature, but Judge Jones wrote in his 139 page decision: "In making this determination, we have addressed the seminal question of whether ID is science. We have concluded that it is not, and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents." An analysis of the social context surrounding the ruling, titled Intelligent Design Flunks in Pennsylvania and written by Stan Cox, was posted to AlterNet.org on 21 Dec.

By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen. Mr. Solomon wrote of this year's awards:

. . . I joined with Jeff Cohen (founder of the media watch group FAIR) to establish the P.U.-litzer Prizes. Ever since then, the annual awards have given recognition to the stinkiest media performances of the year. It is regrettable that only a few journalists can win a P.U.-litzer. In 2005, a large volume of strong competitors made the selection process very difficult.

The 2005 "winners", in brief, are:

• "FIRST DO SOME HARM" AWARD: Radio reporter Michael Linder
• SELF-PRAISE STEALTH PRIZE: William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer
• PUT THEM IN CHAINS AWARD: Bill O'Reilly
• MICKEY MOUSE JOURNALISM PRIZE: Correspondent Mike Barz and ABC
• OUTSOURCED TO THE PENTAGON AWARD: New York Times reporter Judith Miller
• ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MAN PRIZE: Bob Woodward
• PRIME SLIME NEWS AWARD: Nancy Grace and CNN Headline News

By Catherine Atkins. Ms. Atkins posted an entry on her web journal about a challenge to her book. In the opening pages of the book, the 16-year-old protagonist is freed after 2-1/2 years of being sexually abused by a man who kidnapped him from a rest stop, and the remaining story is about his recovery from the abuse. The challenge after a parent of a middle school student in Irving School District complained about sexual content. A committee of librarians and administrators decided to keep the book on library shelves, so the parent appealed, and Superintendent Jack Singley apparently ruled unilaterally that middle school students must have parental permission in writing. To his credit, he did read the whole book, and his concerns are: "that this book is a pretty rough read for this age student. ... I think it is best read with the supervision of an adult, primarily a parent." To his detriment, he did assert that this action is not censorship. School librarians have appealed his decision; school board members are reading the book and have scheduled a public hearing for 23 Jan 2006. When Jeff Comes Home is based on the case of Steven Stayner of Merced, Calif., who was kidnapped by Ken Parnell at age 7 in 1972 and escaped at age 14. Ms. Atkins submitted a statement at the request of Irving librarians for January's public hearing, saying she was moved by the Stayner case -- and how the district attorney had chosen not to prosecute Mr. Parnell for sex offenses because Steven initially denied the abuse. She wrote in her statement: "I thought it was terribly unfair that the boy felt too embarrassed to talk about what had happened to him. It was out of these feelings -- wanting fairness and justice for the boy -- that I wrote When Jeff Comes Home. Boys are at risk for sexual abuse just as girls are. ... It certainly wasn't discussed in literature for children and teens."
(see 11 Jan 2006)

By an unnamed student at UMass Dartmouth. Two history professors, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, at UMass Dartmouth, Massachusetts, told the Standard-Times newspaper on 17 Dec about how a senior at the school was visited by federal agents after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "The Little Red Book" via interlibrary loan. There were at least a couple of severe discrepancies in the initial report, however, and subsequent claims by the student only widened the credibility gap. Too many of the student's allegations didn't hold up to superficial examination. On this day, Aaron Nicodemus, the Standard-Times reporter covering the story, reported the whole thing was a hoax. His coverage of the story exhibited a high degree of quality.

By Howard Kurtz. See the entry on the Bush censorship page.

By Geov Parrish. This media criticism was posted to AlterNet.org on this day. In it, Mr. Parrish offers his choices for the most overhyped and the most underreported stories for 2005. These stories, in brief, are:

OVERHYPED:
• The fate of Terri Schiavo
• Intelligent Design
• The "War on Christmas"
• Everything's Going Splendidly in Iraq
• Michael Jackson's Trial
• Martha Stewart's Comeback
• Julia Roberts' Baby; or any of the glitterati
• Howard Dean; who is no longer a public official
• Pat Robertson
• The Minutemen vigilantes on the Arizona/Mexican border

  UNDERREPORTED:

• George Bush is already a lame-duck president
• The United States is becoming a torture regime
• Iraq is spinning out of control
• Say, where is Osama bin Laden, anyway?
• The Downing Street Memos
• The economy is balanced on a knife-edge
• The Bush administration's continued attacks on the environment
• Republican corruption scandals
• Failures of Homeland Security: Hurricane Katrina, racism, and the gutting of FEMA
• Our government's global covert propaganda campaign
• The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and its fallout on Israeli and Palestinian politics
• The biggest labor news in decades, the AFL-CIO split and the formation of the new Change To Win Coalition
• POCLAD passing legislation in Pennsylvania to stop the construction of megachain stores in local communities

By Tennessee state Senator Jeff Miller, (R-Cleveland). On 13 Dec he sent letters to various business owners warning them not to advertise in the Bradley News Weekly. The reason for this (economic) assault is that the paper had reported how Sen. Miller is dating a woman while waiting for his divorce to come through. Some of the business owners said they resented the threatening tone; Miller replied he was trying to call attention to what he considered unfair treatment from the free weekly. In an interview, Miller did not dispute the newspaper's report about his girlfriend, but said he and his wife were working toward a divorce settlement and his "personal life should be left just that." The newspaper said Sen. Miller's personal life is fair game because of his "family values" platform. Editor Barry Graham wrote in an open letter on the 21 Dec: "Your platform is that of a guy who believes in the sanctity of marriage, and that marriage should be between one man and one woman. And your behavior doesn't support your platform. So, we report it." This is not the first incident of friction between the official and the paper, but this one is much more public than the earlier incidents. Senator Miller once supported a bill to ban the distribution of unsolicited publications to homes, which could have put the paper out of business.

[Oh, yeah -- now there's a censormoron! This letter of his sounds a lot like more snivelling-shit petulance. --MN]

By William Fisher, Inter Press Service. On this day Mr. Fisher reported that Condoleezza Rice, U.S. Secretary of State, had announced a new international exchange programme for journalists. It is a partnership of:

• the State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs,
• the non-partisan Aspen Institute,
• the University of Southern California
• the University of Kentucky,
• the University of Minnesota,
• the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
• the University of Oklahoma,
• the University of Texas at Austin.

The programme is named for famed broadcaster Edward R. Murrow and is to emphasize "the democratic principles that guided Mr. Murrow's practice of his craft -- integrity and ethics and courage and social responsibility". Ms. Rice is further quoted: "We all know that the bedrock pillar of a free society is a free press and that it is crucial for the foundation of any democracy."

As part of the programme, the Aspen Institute is planning a major symposium for Apr 2006, among the themes of which will be the importance of diversity of opinion, an informed public, and challenges facing journalists around the world.

[This is utterly, fucking laughable. Jeff Gannon, Armstrong Williams, Judy Miller; the suck-hole, American corporate press in general; buying print-space in Iraqi newspapers; the long-running failure to protect journalists in Iraq; the conspiracy (failed because Britain refused to participate) to bomb the Al Jazeera network headquarters within the confines of a neutral country; demands by U.S. government officials to Middle East government officials to suppress critical writings by journalists; obstructionism against Freedom of Information Act requests; more secrecy in and about government than at any other time in American history including the Nixon years; spying -- FUCKING SPYING -- on American citizens with the foreign intelligence apparatus; all part and parcel of a piece of military misadventurism founded on a tissue of lies constructed out of whole cloth -- and that asshole Condi Rice dares to speak of democratic principles, integrity, ethics, courage, social responsibility, and how "the bedrock pillar of a free society is a free press", and on what is crucial to a democracy? And those shithead, right-wing nut republicans will start screaming hysterically the instant any indy journalist correctly points out how Orwellian this all this.

And my friends wonder why I'm so cynical. Last word in this rant goes to Professor Beau Grosscup of the University of California who is quoted: "The same people who set up a programme to promote 'independent journalism' are the same folks who defend funding public relations firms, conservative think tank connected jingoist individuals and embedded journalists as 'independent' media. It's all about public relations and media control. Joseph Goebbels would be proud." --MN]

By the Buffalo Bills. Motivated by the failure of his team, season-ticket holder Mike Allenbaugh carried a sign of protest to the final home game on 17 Dec, but security forces quickly moved in and took it away shortly before kickoff. He also says the security staff threatened to have him ejected before taking the sign. Mr. Allenbaugh thought he was obeying the rules; he first checked the team's stadium policy, then came up with a sign that read: "firE coacheS dumP maNagement"; the capital letters were aligned to spell out ESPN in an effort to attract the camera. The team's stadium policy, posted to its Web site, reads in part: "Banners and signs are permitted generally, but any such item deemed by management to be dangerous, inappropriate, or which obstructs the view for other guests will be removed. Flags or banners that are commercial or offensive in nature or attached to poles are prohibited." This apparent content discrimination comes courtesy of team management. Eire County, New York, owns Ralph Wilson Stadium, but it is leased to the team, and under the lease agreement, the team has complete control over the stadium during a game and can set its own rules.

[Naturally the team management is going to consider even valid criticisms as inappropriate. --MN]

Appendix G1: Censorship by President GeeDubya and company
          1st Term:  2001-2004
          2nd Term: 2005-2008

Appendix G2: George Bush religious initiatives and cover-ups
          1st Term:  2001-2004
          2nd Term: 2005-2008

Appendix G3: Actions to shield George Bush from free speech
          1st Term:  2001-2004
          2nd Term: 2005-2008

Appendix G4: 21st Century COINTELPRO operations
          1st Term:  2001-2004
          2nd Term: 2005-2008

For information about the history of the flag       amendment and the veterans who oppose it       see the ACLU site: