Coleen Rowley: Criminalizing of Dissent: What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?

[marmar]

from HuffPost:




Coleen Rowley
Posted November 14, 2008 | 11:00 PM (EST)
Criminalizing of Dissent: What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?



When I got this letter enclosing 20 some business cards from a St. Paul bail bond company about three weeks before the Republican National Convention, to give to members of my peace group, I couldn't believe it: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/criminalizing-of-dissent_b_144022.html


As a retired FBI agent and former FBI legal counsel who also knew the non-violent composition of the protest and peace groups that were organizing the various marches, rallies, concerts, picnics and "unconventional" artistic events during the RNC, I wasn't very worried about police brutality or jail. I was more worried about the increasing intimidation that was deterring more and more people from participating. So we held an impromptu press conference that last week to try and alleviate the fears and get more people to participate. I also wrote a letter spotlighted in the St. Paul newspaper entitled "Patriots can't stay home".

Unfortunately it turned out the bail bond company had the correct scoop. Although my husband and I luckily managed to escape, hundreds of others would find themselves arrested for things like "unlawful assembly" over the course of the RNC week in St. Paul and hundreds more would be subjected to chemical sprays and police brutality.

No patriot should have to face what we did merely to exercise his or her first amendment rights. St. Paul authorities were apparently duped into letting their city be used and abused, probably because of the lure of the (Republican) money. But even the promise of making money did not turn out to be true for most St. Paul businesses. There's little appetite now, with the elections over, to dredge up and rehash the nightmare, but without better exposure and more critical examination of what happened, the kind of "war on dissent" that occurred the first week of September in St. Paul risks repeating itself at all future "national security events". .......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/criminalizing-of-dissent_b_144022.html

[AndrewP]

1. I was there as a peaceful protester

I saw first hand how the right to free speech was discarded.

Fortunately I wasn't attacked or tear gassed. Just told I wasn't a patriot by a bunch of mouth breathers.

[ben_meyers]

2. What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?

Order his overseer to take them out to be beaten, at least that's what was done to his slaves that dissented.

I hardly think that Coleen Rowley has any idea what Jefferson would do.

[Libertyfirst]

3. Citation. know the subject very well and know of no such record.

[ben_meyers]

9. In fact Jefferson owned approximately 200 slaves

and the information is in his own hand written records. There is no reason to believe that they were treated any better or worse than any other slaves at the time. It's possible he changed his thinking later in life, but to deny it is revisionist.

[melody]

4. What a load of nonsense

Jefferson was a very different person than the one you're depicting. He had many friends who were
abolitionists.

[BrklynLiberal]

7. Jefferson and Slavery

http://wiki.monticello.org/mediawiki/index.php/Thomas_Jefferson_and_Slavery

Thomas Jefferson was a consistent opponent of slavery throughout his life.<1> He considered it contrary to the laws of nature that decreed that everyone had a right to personal liberty. He called the institution an "abominable crime," a "moral depravity," a "hideous blot," and a "fatal stain" that deformed "what nature had bestowed on us of her fairest gifts."

Early in his political career Jefferson took actions that he hoped would end in slavery's abolition. He drafted the Virginia law of 1778 prohibiting the importation of enslaved Africans. In 1784 he proposed an ordinance banning slavery in the new territories of the Northwest. From the mid-1770s he advocated a plan of gradual emancipation, by which all born into slavery after a certain date would be declared free.

[1776Forever]

8. Jeffersons' own words on slavery.....

http://www.africanamericans.com/ThomasJeffersononSlavery.htm

The almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. - But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.

Thomas Jefferson, 1785

[Fumesucker]

5. Umm.. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time

With the blood of patriots and tyrants.

It is its natural manure.

[Octafish]

6. Great essay. Coleen Rowley is a great American, a true Patriot.

People ARE afraid to protest. With good reason, as history has shown us.
People who asked about the mysteries surrounding the assassination of President Kennedy ended up dead.
People who protested the war in Vietnam ended up surveilled and blacklisted.
The FBI leadership tried to destroy Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today, Uncle Sam has turned the CIA and NSA on the We the People -- in violation of their charter.
People who gather in private homes to protest the Iraq war are infiltrated by undercover police.
That's NAZI.

From the OP:

As an aside, I did not know any of the RNC 8 personally before this unprecedented attempt to use the expansive Minnesota Patriot Act to essentially "terrorize dissent" but you can hear them tell their own stories of what happened on this video along with comments of Naomi Wolf. If you're like me, you can sign their petition on the basis of principle alone: upholding the First Amendment and need for authorities to not blur what was, at most, planned acts of "civil disobedience" as opposed to acts of real terrorism.

If her bosses in Washington had listened to her and her fellow FBI agents, who knows? Real terrorism that gave us the "Minnesota Patriot Act" -- the attacks of September 11 -- may never have happened.

Know your BFEE: The Stench of Moussaoui Permeates the Octopus

Know your BFEE: Moussaoui Must Die for Bush and 'His' Government

Minnesota Patriot Act. Wow.