The Demise of our First Amendment Rights – And How that Enables Rampant Militarism

[Time for change]

While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors and powerful political supporters, he is morally timid – so much so that he seldom if ever says “no” to them on anything – no matter what the public interest might mandate. – Al Gore, explaining the many ways in which biased television news coverage has distorted Americans’ view of reality


Most people – and most Americans as well – are basically decent, but lack the courage, energy or opportunity to right the great many wrongs in our world. They have a basic sense of fairness and justice, yet when their country turns away from justice or commits atrocities in their name, rather than strenuously object to those atrocities they turn a blind eye and allow themselves to believe that nothing is wrong. Thus explains the acquiescence of the German people to the Nazi Holocaust committed in their name. And thus explains the acquiescence of too many Americans to the imperialist ambitions of the Bush/Cheney administration with respect to the abuse and torture of their prisoners, their invasion and occupation of Iraq, their plans for war with Iran and who knows what else. In both of those cases a small group of excessively ambitious and ruthless men convinced enough of their fellow countrymen of the necessity of their disastrous schemes to secure their help and acquiescence in carrying them out.

Many of our Founding Fathers, being well versed in world history, recognized the potential for a single or small group of powerful, ambitious and ruthless men to enlist the help of others in carrying out their imperial ambitions. To prevent that from happening they created a Constitution (albeit flawed in many ways) that contained numerous mechanisms meant to serve as a check on such ambitions. Paramount among those mechanisms were the concepts of “one-man-one-vote” and our First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of the press.

Those two concepts are inexorably intertwined. Our right to vote means little without our First Amendment rights because it is our First Amendment rights that enable us to gather the information that we need in order to make an enlightened choice in the voting booth.

Our First Amendment – and hence our democracy – is now under vigorous assault by our government, greatly facilitated by the fact that most of the news that Americans receive today is under the control of a very small number of powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations. Because that assault has been largely successful, those powerful and wealthy individuals have obscenely disproportionate influence on our nation’s priorities and policies today, including our military budget and actions.


Al Gore explains how the loss of our First Amendment rights has enabled Bush administration outrages

Al Gore, in his new book, “The Assault on Reason”, explains how the Bush administration has taken advantage of this lack of access to information (after playing a critical role in exacerbating the problem) to perpetrate a series of outrages on the people he was selected to serve:

The perpetrators have clearly assumed that they have little to fear from public outrage and that very few people will learn about their misdeeds.

All of them assume an ignorant public. Bush would not be able credibly to label a bill that increases air pollution “the clear skies initiative” – or call a bill that increases clear-cutting of national forests “the healthy forests initiative” – unless he was confident that the public was never going to know what these bills actually did.

Nor could he appoint Ken Lay from Enron to play such a prominent role in handpicking members to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) … unless the president felt totally comfortable that no one would pay attention … After members of the FERC were appointed with Mr. Lay’s personal review and approval, Enron went on to bilk the electric ratepayers of California and other states without the inconvenience of federal regulators trying to protect citizens from the company’s criminal behavior.

Likewise, this explains why many of the most important Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) positions have been carefully filled with lawyers and lobbyists representing the worst polluters in their respective industries, ensuring that those polluters are not inconvenienced by the actual enforcement of the laws against excessive pollution …

The private foxes have been placed in charge of the public henhouses. And shockingly, the same pattern has been followed in many other agencies and departments. But there is precious little outrage because there is so little two-way conversations left in our democracy… This behavior could never take place if there were the slightest chance that such institutionalized corruption would be exposed in a public forum that had relevance to the outcome of elections.

Now let’s consider some of the methods that the Bush administration has used to create or perpetuate this grave danger to our democracy, especially with respect to issues of war and peace.


Hiding the excesses of our war in Iraq – the April 2004 attack on Fallujah

The story of the two week April 2004 U.S. assault on the Iraq city of Fallujah, with a population of 350,000, demonstrates the extent to which the Bush administration will go to censor unfavorable reporting of its military actions.

Despite the uniformly positive coverage of the battle by “embedded” American journalists, and the U.S. claim that there were no civilian casualties, coverage by non-embedded journalists depicted a vastly different picture. Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansour and his team reported the following from that battle:

We found children, women, elderly, all lifting white flags and walking, or in their cars leaving the city… When we reached the heart of the city at the hospital, I almost lost my mind from the terror that I saw… I felt like we need a thousand cameras to grab those disastrous picture: fear, terror, planes bombing, ambulances taking the dead people… We were the only team that was able to enter the city…

The planes bombed this house, as they did the whole neighborhood, and they brought the corpses and bodies to the hospital… I could not see anything but a sea of corpses of children and women – mostly children… I was taking photographs and forcing myself to photograph. At the same time I was crying…

In response to the Al Jazeera reporting George Bush first proposed bombing Al Jazeera’s international headquarters, but was dissuaded from doing so. The Guardian reported on how the Bush administration chose to deal with the only non-embedded news organization that made an intense effort to report on the battle:

An Al Jazeera camera man, Salah Hassan, had been arrested In Iraq, held incommunicado in a chicken-coop sized cell and forced to stand hooded, bound and naked for up to 11 hours at a time. He was beaten by U.S. soldiers… Finally, after a month, he was dumped on a street just outside Baghdad, in the same vomit-stained red jumpsuit that he had been detained in. Twenty other Al Jazeera journalists have been arrested and jailed by U.S. forces in Iraq and one, Tariq Ayoub, was killed last April when a U.S. tank fired a shell at the Al Jazeera offices in Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel. It was an accident, the Pentagon said, even though Al Jazeera had given the Pentagon the coordinates of its Baghdad offices…

Amy Goodman and David Goodman further describe the difficulties that journalists face in reporting on the Iraq war, in their book, “Static – Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back”:

The Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Basra were bombed by American planes, and two of its correspondents have been imprisoned on unspecified terrorism charges… Al Jazeera’s journalists are not the only ones under siege. The Iraq War has been among the deadliest conflicts ever for journalists. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reported that by mid-2006, over 100 journalists and media assistants had been killed in Iraq while doing their jobs. By comparison, 66 journalists lost their lives over the course of the 20-year-long Vietnam conflict. More than half of those killed in Iraq were Iraqi and other Arab journalists. Fifteen journalists have been killed by U.S. fire…

Journalists also risk arrest while reporting on the war in Iraq: In 2005 alone, U.S. forces arrested seven Iraqi journalists “for prolonged periods without charge or the disclosure of any supporting evidence,” according to CPJ. All were eventually released, and no charges were ever filed. CPJ concluded that the Pentagon has “displayed a pattern of disregard when confronted with issues involving the security of Iraqi journalists and citizens.”…

In an extraordinary attack on the press, the U.S. military declared in April 2004 that there could be no peace for Fallujah unless Al Jazeera abandoned the city … In August 2004, the U.S.-backed Iraqi government ordered Al Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau closed.

The role of a free press in the war and peace decisions of nations

As I said at the beginning of this post, most people are basically decent. That is a major reason why a free press can potentially serve a vitally important role in a democracy in persuading a nation’s citizens to reject war, in opposition to the ambitions of that nation’s war-mongering leaders. And that is why the Bush administration has tried so vigorously to censure meaningful coverage of its Iraq war.

Dan Carlin explains the importance of accurate war reporting in general and visual images in particular, to help enable a nation’s citizens to make enlightened decisions regarding war and peace:

Images can end wars…. Like the photo taken after the My Lai massacre, showing dead babies piled half-naked in a dirt road atop their slain mothers and brothers and sisters, or the photo of the Saigon police chief pulling the trigger on a wincing Viet Cong officer, or the image of a little Vietnamese girl running naked, screaming, her clothes burnt off by the horrible, hot blast of a napalm attack.

If Larry Stimeling’s theory is correct – that these images fueled the anti-war movement and helped bring about the end of the Vietnam War…. average citizens, armed with the visual revelation of wasteful atrocities being perpetrated in their names on foreign peoples, and killing American soldiers, mobilized to stop it – and succeeded.

The consequences of censuring coverage of the Iraq War

In contrast, the lack of relevant information provided to the American people hinders the occurrence of a similar phenomenon with respect to the Iraq war. Carlin continues:

But if Vietnam entered the collective American imagination as those brutal snapshots of ravaging bombs, murdered civilians, and American soldiers in body bags – as real, gruesome images of war that demanded outrage and action – the latest American war against Iraq was most notable for its unreality, for its poverty of visual imagery. Where are the pictures? …

There were images collected in Iraq as startling as anything to come out of Vietnam, and as an American – and particularly as one who supported the war – I feel lucky to have seen them at all: most Americans will never even know they exist. Most people following the war in the U.S. through newspapers and on television weren’t shown images of war, but rather visual shorthand for war… Those images, which did exist, were excluded from American coverage for matters of “taste,” and because of government censorship.

There is an enormous blind spot in the American imagination today where the victims of the Iraq war – American, British, and Iraqi alike – should be present… to allow us to weigh the dead in our thoughts on the war and on all future wars…Americans today have no visual relationship with the lives that were lost in Iraq this year, and the collective amnesia… may be fast becoming the status quo.

The mainstream American media decided in the Iraq war (and in the Gulf War before it) that Americans would rather not be exposed to those difficult images of war, that they would prefer to ignore the ugly reality of the sacrifices being made in their names. We could not honor the soldiers who died, because images of their funerals were banned from TV and newspapers. We could not acknowledge the deaths we caused among Iraqis because the media decided that their deaths were beside the point, uninteresting, or too gruesome for us to stomach.

Of course, it is not only the lack of visual images, but the lack of a great deal of information that Americans should know about the Iraq War, including our reasons for being there, that hinders us from responding in a fully effective manner. The overall effect of U.S. government censorship of Iraq War news is to prevent us from being sufficiently informed to make the decisions required of a democracy. Carlin explains:

To stop reacting is to stop exercising the emotions, good or bad, that make us human, and without those emotions there can be no agency whether one of selfish nationalism or willful indifference, or one of universal respect for the dignity of the individual, one that spawns compassion, activism and change. By limiting what we see, news sources limit our ability to feel anger, or sorrow, or indignation – they limit our ability to act. And when the media decide that their audiences don’t need to see something, or don’t want to see it, they strip us of the ability to act ethically.

The many ways in which the Bush/Cheney regime has abridged our First Amendment rights

Thus far I have concentrated on how our First Amendment rights have deteriorated through the Bush/Cheney administration’s efforts to censure coverage of the Iraq War, as well as our corporate news media’s acquiescence or active participation in the censure. But there are many other means by which the Bush administration has abridged our First Amendment rights. Though the demise of our First Amendment rights did not start with George Bush and Dick Cheney, it certainly has accelerated under them:

First Amendment zones
With the onset of the Bush pResidency in 2001 we saw the creation of the concept of “First Amendment zones”, in which American citizens would have their Constitutional rights to free speech protected. The corollary to that is that their Constitutional rights are NOT protected outside of those zones. The American Constitution does not say anything about “zones” in which the Constitution applies. It is supposed to apply throughout the country. And in fact, the very purpose of George Bush’s “First Amendment zones” is to impede the ability of American citizens to have their protests of government heard by other citizens. As such, the first amendment zones should be seen as a clear violation of our Constitutional rights to free speech.

Access to the President
The Bush White House has also established a well publicized policy of denying access to the President for journalists who fall out of favor with the Bush administration. Since the jobs or careers of many journalists depend on having this access, this practice gives those journalists a strong incentive to write stories that cast the pResident in a favorable light, and a strong disincentive to write stories that are unfavorable to the pResident.

That practice also violates our First Amendment rights. The pResident works for us, the people. We have a right to know what he is doing, and that right is definitely abridged if only those journalists who have proven their loyalty to the pResident are allowed access to him – especially in the context of presidential press conferences.

Paid pResidential Pre$$titutes
Another unprecedented practice of the Bush administration is to insert its own reporters (paid by tax payer dollars, by the way, but that’s another issue) into its press conferences or other venues and have those reporters pretend to be real journalists, printing stories as if they constituted real news or independent editorials, when in fact they are nothing but government propaganda.

This again is a violation of our First Amendment rights, including free speech and freedom of the press. The purpose of the press, as previously noted, is to provide citizens with the information they need in order to form opinions. If the United States government arranges to put out government propaganda disguised as news, then citizens will not be able to distinguish between the two, and therefore “news” loses much of its value. And also, it ties up airtime or newspaper space that would otherwise be devoted to real news. Inaccurate reporting about the reasons for our invasion of Iraq was a major factor in creating reasonable acceptance of that invasion among the American electorate.

The criminalization of independent news reporting
The most egregious violation of our First Amendment rights by the Bush Administration has been its attempt to criminalize journalists who report stories that the administration considers unfavorable. As with all tyrannical power grabs, this is done under the guise of “national security”. But since the Bush administration itself allots to itself the power to determine when a journalistic action is criminal, it thereby has the power to send to prison any journalist who writes a story that displeases it. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has rationalized the right to imprison journalists for providing information to the public that the Bush administration deems to be criminal conduct.


Conclusion

The bottom line, as Bill Moyers points out, is that the protection offered us by our First Amendment is based on the assumption of a separation of our government and a free press, which is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers goes on:

What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.

Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.

How can we fight this? A very useful starting point is that we must recognize the extent to which our First Amendment rights have been grievously abrogated, as well as the fact that our corporate news media is on not on our side. Recognizing the problem and the enemy is always the first step towards finding a solution. And as soon as we elect a new President we must make it a priority to break the monopoly that our current corporate news media has on deciding what news we will receive.

George Bush and Dick Cheney have committed numerous impeachable offenses, including: lying to the American people and to Congress in order to justify a preemptive war of aggression; the abuse and torture of its prisoners, in violation of international law, our Constitution, and the laws of our land; warrantless spying on hundreds of thousands of Americans, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution and our Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the use of presidential “signing statements” to nullify over 800 laws duly passed by Congress; the firing of several federal prosecutors in order to promote a partisan political agenda that involved among other things the illegal disenfranchising of hundreds of thousands of American citizens; repeated and willful violations of the Whistleblower Protection Act in order to promote their corrupt political agenda; and many many more. But even without any of that, the numerous violations of our First Amendment rights depicted in this post would constitute impeachable offenses of the first magnitude; for a democracy cannot long exist without freedom of speech and a free press.

[Alexia Wheaton]

1. The Dixie Chicks fiasco proved that and proved...

just how vile Country has become.

[Time for change]

4. Impeachment

it seems to me is by far the best solution. We now have in office by far the most lawless government we have ever had. Getting rid of Gonzales will mean little if we don't get rid of Bush and Cheney too. They have both committed so many impeachable crimes that it is hard to even know where to start. If Congress allows them to stay in office it will set a terrible precedent:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3021745

[JDPriestly]

2. This post made me want to read Gore's book.

[Time for change]

3. Al Gore's book

It is very refreshing to see a politician who doesn't pull punches in his criticism of George Bush, despite the fact that he's a sitting president. Gore has been doing that for a long time, long before it became popular to do so.

His book is well worth reading for many other reasons as well.

[Time for change]

5. Summary of reasons why I feel that these issues are crucially important

1. Our corporate news media routinely withholds or misrepresents news that is of crucial importance for our nation's citizens to be aware of, in order to function as a democracy. The severe intensification of important information being withheld from the American people by the Bush/Cheney regime, and the failure of and acquiescence by our corporate media in that process means that we are losing our democracy.

2. This process is especially stark with respect to the Iraq War and with respect to plans that the Bush administration has to widen that war with an invasion or bombing of Iran, which could lead to WW III. With modern weaponry, an expansion of the current war could be cataclysmic to our country and our world.

3. The American people have insufficient understanding of the full effects even of the current war. In particular, they are clueless the intense hostility of the Iraqi people to our occopation of there country, as I detail in this post: "Just Go: Iraqis' View of the American Occupation of their Country:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1123435

4. The arrest and imprisonment and murder of reporters who dare to report accurately on the Iraq War is so outrageous that I can barely express in words how I feel about it. Yet, our corporate news media does not even cover this monumental scandal.

5. The Bush/Cheney administration are the most lawless and corrupt administration in the history of our country, by far. There is only one reasonable solution to that predicament, and that is to hold them responsible for their many crimes, as I discuss here: "When Once a Republic is Corrupted"
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x3021745
Yet, this is only likely to happen to the extent that the American people are made aware of the extent and magnitude of the Bush/Cheney crimes, and the contempt that they have shown for our Constitution and the laws of our country.

[Larry Ogg]

6. Time for change, here is some-thing I wish you would take a good look at

and do your epidemiological thing with, if you think there is anything to it. I think is very important that it be include in this subject. And I know there is a lot more to add than what I have yet so far.

Talking about the First Amendment, I didn’t see any mention of the other part “Freedom of Religion” in your OP. And I believe it plays a very important role in the demise of the First Amendment, and I don’t think a lot of people are getting it. But Thomas Jefferson got it. Religion is a crucial link that is being used to move people in the wrong direction.

This is a link too a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote too Dr. Benjamin Rush Monticello, September 23, 1800, http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/P/tj3/writings/brf/jefl134.htm

The following is in my own words of which I believe Thomas Jefferson was saying in the letter. Jefferson discussed the first amendment stating, “That certain clergy and religious factions had hoped to use the freedom of the press for the purpose of obtaining an establishment of a particular form of Christianity though the U.S.?” Jefferson continues to describe the fact that every sect i.e. every religion believes its own form to be the true one religion, (how true it is) and went so far as to emphasize that two of them in particular the Episcopalians & Congregationalists. One can only surmise that the Episcopalians & Congregationalists of that day were at the forefront of wanting to use the first amendment to establish a particular form of religion or even a religious state. Jefferson did not want to stand in the way of freedom of religion but he was strongly against a religious state and continued to say that, “The returning good sense of our country threatens abortion to their hopes, & they believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly…” Certainly Jefferson knew all to well, as history has shown, religion unchecked would stand in the way of ‘freedom of religion and freedom of speech’. And by the context of this one letter, I see that Jefferson is making it clear that there are those who would usurp the first amendment freedom of the press and freedom of religion to deny the same to others, i.e. certain religious leaders would seek to control the content of the free press i.e. what people read and think would push them in one direction or the other. The problems with the religious clerics was that they couldn’t decide which was going to be the official state religion, a typical problem that history has shown leads to religious warfare, hence the reason for freedom of religion, but it doesn’t preclude any religious faction from fantasizing that there theological point of view will be the dominating factor governing the lives of all humanity. It is in this context, in my opinion, that Jefferson penned these famous words that appear on the interior frieze below the dome in the Jefferson memorial. “FOR I HAVE SWORN UPON THE ALTAR OF GOD, ETERNAL HOSTILITY AGAINST EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY OVER THE MIND OF MAN”

It pleases me that Jefferson used the words, “EVERY FORM OF TYRANNY”, although he wrote this famous fraise while reflecting on how Christian leaders naively interpreted the first amendment as their divine right to monopolize the free press, as it was and still is their goal to influence how people think. But this is something religion left to its own contrivance could not accomplish without a whole lot of help from an unholy alliance. So ware did the help come from, hmm…?

Are the Christian fundamentalist leaders Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing with an ulterior motive, are they a part of the Economic Royalists system…, is their a conspiratorial alliance…, what is the connection? After all doesn’t theology and Royalty go hand in hand…? George Bush clams to be a Christian who talks to god, I have heard radical Christian fundamental extremist proclaim that Bush is the son of David here to rid us of the evil Muslim world. Obviously this works out wonderfully for the corporations as they don’t have to tell the truth, they can just use the Radical Muslim extremist excuse “They hate us for our freedom” while the dirty work of exterminating millions of innocent lives is being done at the expense of young American lives and taxpayer dollars, along with the radical Christian fundamental extremist leadership backing them up by proclaiming to their naïve parishioners, this is a holly war of God, a crusade against gods enemy the evil Muslim world… But anyone with good sense knows all to well that that is total bull shit. Our foreign policy is the pinnacle of tyranny, it is used to terrorize, destroy and overthrow any week and democratically elected, or not, government that stands in the way of the elite’s right to loot and plunder the resources of the world, much like the barbarians they are. And religion is one very important tool to divide and conquer it with. And it is also being used to divide and conquer “We the People”, through the First Amendment, “Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Religion…”

[Time for change]

7. A very interesting and important but difficult question to answer

Where do the Christian fundamentalists fit in to the current power structure of our country?

Many people consider the "economic royalists" and the Christian fundamentalists to be two totally different groups, who have combined to form a politically convenient alliance. You bring up a very interesting and important question when you ask if the Christian fundamentalists, meaning (I believe this is what you meant) that they are really more interested in wealth and power, but they use religion as a mask to gain the wealth and power that they're after.

I've often wondered about their motivation, but I've not gone very far towards figuring it out. I believe it was Al Gore who hinted that the leaders of this movement merely use religion as a mask to gain the wealth and power that they seek, whereas their followers are merely highly gullible people who believe what they want to believe when their leaders promise to protect them in return for their loyalty to them.

You're right that I left religion out of my OP. I've always considered the religion part of the First Amendment to be quite different from the free press and free speech part, but you make a good point that they may be more strongly related than I've previously thought.

I have to admit that I'm more interested in and concerned about the free speech and free press part of the First Amendment than the religion part -- probably because I don't feel that freedom of religion in our country is as threatened as freedom of the press and speech are. We all tend to view things from our own personal vantage point. I do not practice an organized religion, but I have never felt discriminated against because of that, nor have I felt compelled to practice a religion. On the other hand, I believe that lack of access to good quality news for large segments of our population is already destroying our country and will make our country into a dictatorship if the trend continues.

There is of course a great deal of prejudice against Muslims today in our country, but I don't see that as a religious issue. Rather I see it as a ploy by the Bush administration to use Muslims as scapegoats so as to enhance their own power. If there were no Muslims I believe they would use some other group.