More Stalinist creep-up; details here:

“As I began writing this piece I looked on the Internet at the Washington Post of July 5 and glanced at the lead-in to a report. It was ‘The elderly physician who exposed the government’s coverup of the SARS epidemic has been detained since June 1 and faces interrogation by the government.’ OK, so it was a quick look; but my immediate thought was ‘What on earth has that psychotic savage Ashcroft done now?’ which is a pretty grim reaction to a newspaper headline that, given a momentarily longer examination, was obviously about Beijing’s persecution of yet another innocent citizen.

“When a foreigner can look at such words in a Washington newspaper and think, even fleetingly, for the tiniest moment, that they could possibly apply to the democracy that is the United States rather than the totalitarian state that is China, it is obvious there is something badly wrong with the way the Bush administration is conducting the affairs of the nation. Only four years ago, not one reader on earth would have imagined for an instant that such a sentence could possibly, in the furthest flights of fancy, apply to the United States of America.

“No longer….[N]ow the world’s democracies look at America and regard with horror the establishment’s ferocious protection of a president who not only tells lies but wages war on his own people by denying them freedoms supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution….

“In America there has been an explosion of unbelievably Alice-in-Wonderland, government-initiated, capricious prosecutions, relentlessly pursued by dedicated morons in the teeth of all evidence that their grounds for federal charges were deficient, imperfect and derisory. The victims, such as Professor Steven Kurtz of Buffalo, Captain James Yee of the Guantanamo Bay prison, and the lawyer Mr Brandon Mayfield (to name the high-profile cases), have gone through hell. Their lives have been destroyed by the Government of the United States. Rejoice, ye tyrants everywhere, because the Bush administration is providing you with precedent, aid and comfort in repression of your citizens.

“Professor Kurtz (admittedly an eccentric of some magnitude; but what’s the matter with that?) is suffering a campaign of desperation to find the tiniest thing legally wrong about his actions. There is no possibility that he can be found guilty of any offence of substance, but Ashcroft and the FBI are still trying. No doubt they will get him on something or other, because, these days, under the Patriot Act, you can be clapped in jail for almost anything, providing those who charge you can state, without evidence being produced, that you are in some way possibly associated with terrorism.

“The treason charges against Captain Yee collapsed ignominiously, but when it was realized that the court would throw them out he was unnecessarily and intentionally humiliated in front of his family by production of evidence of dalliance with a female colleague. His wife and small daughter were brought into the courtroom specifically to hear details of the affair. The people who did this are by any standards the scum of the earth. The sort of a person who arranges for a man to be discredited, degraded and shamed in front of his little daughter is fairly typical of the Bush administration zealots. If someone is even a minor threat to their credibility they must destroy him. And if they can’t destroy him, well, they make sure he suffers unto the next generation. Good Christian stuff, all this.

“The macabre little piece of malevolent titillation about adultery (which is not indulged in by any God-fearing judge, bureaucrat or politician, of course) had nothing, nothing whatever, to do with the charges against Captain Yee that fell apart because they could not be supported in any way.

“Production in court of the evidence of the woman with whom he had had an affair was designed specifically to crush and mortify Captain Yee and to destroy his family and make his daughter forever, throughout her whole life, ashamed of her father, courtesy of the Bush administration’s obsession with persecuting people who don’t conform to their ideology. This disgusting and deliberate act of vindictiveness on the part of individuals representing the US government had no bearing on the charges of treason against Captain Yee, which were, of course, laughed out of court….

“The farcical and fanatical persecution of innocent citizens in the name of a warped patriotism that is colored by ignorance and mixed with deep-seated distrust of unfamiliar peoples is only too reminiscent of past periods of intolerance and spite. And this persecution of non-conformists has shown America’s enemies, to their satisfaction, that the US is what they declare it to be : a land in which rich, powerful barons rule the peasants with the connivance of religious bigots, a compliant media, and a jurisprudence that has been warped by its practitioners’ political allegiance. America’s friends, who are becoming fewer and fewer, despair because they cannot defend the juridical contradictions that are detracting from the nation’s formerly reasonable claim to be leader of the world in fairness and legal equability.”