March 18, 2003

Bretton Barber is a junior at Dearborn High School in Michigan. On February 17, he was wearing a T-shirt that had a picture of Bush on it and the words "International Terrorist." "At lunch, the vice principal came and said I had to turn it inside out or go home," Barber told The New York Times on Feb. 26. Barber went home--and called the ACLU.read more

March 18, 2003

Toni Smith, a senior guard on Manhattanville College women's basketball team, repeatedly turned her back on the American flag during the playing of the "Star Spangled Banner" this season to protest Bush's Iraq war maneuvers.read more

March 18, 2003

They might not have black helicopters, but the government spy agencies are using other aircraft to keep track of people in the United States. "The FBI has a fleet of aircraft, some equipped with night surveillance and eavesdropping equipment, flying America's skies to track and collect intelligence on suspected terrorists and other criminals," Curt Anderson of the Associated Press reported on March 15.read more

February 13, 2003

Emily Jane Heynen is a tenant in Minneapolis. She had a problem with her previous landlord, Eulalia Rohleder, who lived downstairs. Seems the landlord wanted to put up a plastic American flag on Heynen's porch, and when Heynen objected, the landlord and her daughter, Penny, were none too happy.read more

January 30, 2003

A peace group that wants to take its message onto the mainstream air waves found the going got rough on the night of Bush's State of the Union address. The AntiWar Video Fund had purchased time on CNN in Washington, D.C., that evening, but just hours before the ad was to air, the cable company Comcast yanked it.read more

January 20, 2003

It was mid-day on November 22, and Ayesha Ahmad was on assignment in Easton, Maryland. A reporter for Capital News Service out of the University of Maryland, she was covering the closing of the Black & Decker plant there, the largest employer in the area. Ahmad, a North Carolina native, was wearing her hijab, a traditional Muslim scarf, as she approached the gate of the plant.read more

December 18, 2002

Yaju Dharmarajah and his wife, Pilar Schiavo, were trying to sign up for a training session put on by the federal government in how to do emergency relief. This innocuous request prompted a visit.read more

December 6, 2002

I and two other peace activists were supposed to address an anti-Iraq War teach-in at Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, on December 3. About twenty students and a faculty adviser had planned the teach-in over the course of a month. They'd made up posters and leaflets and were all set to go with the teach-in. But the day before it was supposed to happen, a student involved with the Young Republicans went on a local rightwing radio program and complained that the teach-in was unbalanced. He and the host, Chris Kroc, drummed up enough negative calls and e-mails to the school administration-some referring to the school district as "subversive and anti-American," according to the Capital Times-that within a matter of hours, the school superintendent, Art Rainwater, postponed the teach-in.read more

December 17, 2002

Professor M. J. Alhabeeb teaches economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is writing a book entitled "Microeconomic Theory of the Family," and one of his recent papers is entitled "Youth Employment in the United States: Trends and Implications." But when two campus police officers, one working for the FBI, came to pay him a visit on the afternoon of October 24, they weren't interested in discussing his microeconomic theory or signing up for one of his courses.read more

November 15, 2002

Richard Abdoo is the CEO of Wisconsin Energy Corp., based in Milwaukee. Earlier this fall, Abdoo sent a $250 check to the peace group Not in Our Name (notinourname.net). As a result, his name was listed as one of the 30,000 endorsers of the group's "Statement of Conscience Against War and Repression." And he was identified as "Chairman of the Board, president and CEO, Wisconsin Energy Corp." Abdoo said the donation was strictly a personal one.read more

October 23, 2002

New Jersey State Senator James Cafiero upped the political rhetoric to a whole new level when, on October 17, he introduced a resolution urging Attorney General John Ashcroft to indict two Congresspeople who went to Iraq on charges of treason. The traitors, according to Cafiero, are Representative Jim McDermott, Democrat of Washington, and Representative David Bonior, Democrat of Michigan.read more

October 16, 2002

The No Fly list is still up and running. The FBI and the Transportation Security Administration have a list of suspicious people they distribute to the airlines, and the airlines check the names of their passengers against this list. The existence of the list was reported here on this web site and then in the June issue of The Progressive, after a group of peace activists were detained in Milwaukee on April 19.read more

October 10, 2002

During the IMF-World Bank protests in Washington at the end of September, uniformed military personnel were using enormous zoom lens to photograph the protesters. This is a potential violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is supposed to prevent the military from doing domestic law enforcement.read more

August 6, 2002

Attorney General John Aschroft's ill-fated TIPS program (first reported by Bill Berkowitz in the May issue of The Progressive) gets weirder by the day. Dave Lindorff, writing for salon.com on August 6, reports that the Justice Department is forwarding citizen tips--or at least his--to "America's Most Wanted," of all places.read more