Liberty Alone

I see that this has already been picked up in the LibDem blogs by Chris Black, although Chris doesn’t give the whole letter, which can be found (nicely formatted) here.

The whole thing originates here.

A quick summary: Ex US Marine and academic Prof. Walter F. Murphy found himself inconvenienced by his inclusion on the terrorist watch list.

Chris picks up on one point - a question asked by a TSA official:

“Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.”

This is worrying for a start - you may protest, but we will then treat you as a subversive.
Chris stops there, but the letter continues ,the professor had not been on a protest as he explains:

I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said.

This is even more worrying, criticism of the government leading to persecution. This is dangerously close to the sedition acts, except its done in an extra-legal manner. This is purely an executive decision, there’s no judicial oversight. This goes beyond the proper functioning of government as a servant of those under its jurisdiction and places the government above individuals as the master.

This is an underhanded attempt to restrict free speech. Rather than attempting to use the legal process as has been done in the past, this uses arbitrary authority to undermine those who criticise, it seeks to treat critics of the government as unofficial suspects and to scare people into submission.

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