Here’s a link to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the War on Terror.
So you think there’s no chance that you’d be quizzed by FBI agents about what you read or who you pal around with?
Well, just ask Atlantan Marc Shultz, who works in an Atlanta bookstore. According to an account Shultz wrote in Creative Loafing, he was interrogated by two FBI agents because he’d been reported as reading something suspicious in a coffee shop.
That suspicious something was an article by Hal Crowther, “Weapons of Mass Stupidity,” in a Tampa alternative newsweekly. The Crowther piece is a scathing criticism of corporate media, such as Fox News, in the post-Sept. 11 environment.
Atlanta FBI spokesman Joe Paris wouldn’t comment on the Shultz story or even confirm it. He merely said, “We have an obligation to follow up on any information we get of a terrorist-type nature.”
A terrorist-type nature?
There’s an important principle involved here. Well, plenty of principles, but one in particular that strikes me. It’s the combination of individuals being allowed – and I’m guessing: encouraged – to inform the authorities of their suspicions, and the obligation – that’s the word FBI man Paris uses: obligation – to investigate the matter. This means that person X who has, for some reason of his own, taken a dislike to person Y can invent some plausible suspicions about Y and phone them in, and the powers that be have to be all over Y with their investigations.
Practised political stirrers aren’t going to be too bothered, and may even rather enjoy it. Either way they will exploit it all for the publicity and the fifteen minutes of fame, the way this Marc Shultz guy seems to be doing, and good for him. But for other less public souls, this could surely be very bad.
I mustn’t exaggerate, but this is the sort of thing that happened in Stalin’s Russia, in logical structure even if not remotely as bad in scale or intensity. In place of a decade in an arctic camp ending in premature death, substitute a week or two of anxieties at the hands of the government, and maybe a rather scary legal bill because you figured, best let my lawyer keep track of all this.
The point is the authorities not having any power to drop the matter, but being obligated to go through the motions demanded. To begin with, the policemen doing this are only doing it because they have to. But what we are liable to end up with is an altogether different kind of policeman, the kind of policeman who really likes these scenarios, who truly believes that scaring regular citizens half to death is the heart and soul of good government.
