The Bushist Police State and Interlibrary Loan

"Those same FBI and DHS agents who are heroes when they take on al-Qaeda directly are in danger of becoming double agents for Bin Laden when they are tempted by all the new prerogatives offered them by King George III (isn't he our third George?) to sidestep the Bill of Rights, due process and the rule of law.

My colleague Andras Riedlmayer writes:




"It's not just the NSA engaging in wholesale monitoring of phonecalls. Now we find out that Bush's Department of Homeland Security also monitors interlibrary loan requests from college libraries, and checks them against a "watch list" of supposedly dangerous books. And if there's a match, they take action -- as in the case of a student at U. of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, taking a class on fascism and totalitarianism, who'd requested a book for a research paper.

The Homeland Security found the title sufficiently worrisome to send two agents to pay a visit to the student at his parents' home and question him. They did not let him have the book.

The two professors involved in this case are Brian Glyn Williams, associate professor of Islamic history at UMass Dartmouth, and his colleague Robert Pontbriand, who teaches modern European history.

It makes the 1950s look like halcyon days. Consider -- an American citizen who has committed no crime is flagged for (a.) having travelled abroad, and (b.) for having checked out a book on the Department of Homeland Security's "watch list" of forbidden or dangerous titles, as revealed by the government's secret monitoring of library circulation transactions. All this without probable cause, a search warrant or any semblance of due process."
Juan Cole

Like sheep to the slaughterhouse