has flooded the media and the hearts and minds of the earths multitude with this mystique, playing it for all its worth, for generations.

Historian Christopher Simpson, in his study, Science of Coercion, observed:

Military, intelligence and propaganda agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency helped bankroll substantially all of the post-World War II generations research into techniques of persuasion, opinion measurement, interrogation, political and military mobilization, propagation of ideology and related questions. 8

Little is left to chance in The Selling of America. The Clinton administration announced in 1999 that it was forming a new International Public Information group to influence foreign audi-ences in support of US foreign policy and to counteract propaganda by enemies of the United States. IPIs charter says that control over international military information is intended to influence the emotions, motives, objective reasoning and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups and individuals. 9

Its a free country.

The thought comes with mothers milk.

Its a free country.

How many times does someone growing up in the United States have to hear those words before it settles comfortably, deep in the received truth lobe of the brain?

Its a free country.

How many in the world have made this adage a basic element of their love affair with America?

Its a free country.

In the minds of many Americans and foreigners, whether consciously or not, this gives the United States the moral right to do what it does in and to the rest of the world.

Its a free country.

The following is offered as a corrective.

Overtly and covertly, legally and illegally, the military-industrial complex has joined forces with the prison-industrial complex, linked further to the omnipresent national security-police complex, all clasping hands tightly with the War on Drugs, in a declaration of War on the American People and the Bill of Rights. This Authority Juggernaut-enamored with its own perpetuation, glorification and enrichment-has

convinced the American public that without its stormtroopers all hell would break loose and the safety and security of the citizenry would be on a life-support machine. In this undertaking, it has had the indispensable assistance of intimidated legislatures, an uniconoclastic judiciary, compliant media, and a president, Bill Clinton, who-in the words of civiMiberties columnist Nat Hentoff- in this century.. .has inflicted the most harm on our constitutional rights and liberties .10

On any given day, a day like today in fact, or one during last month, or last year, much of the following-all of it derived directly from actual happenings or disclosures of the past few years-is taking place somewhere in the United States. Time and again we have been assured that certain practices have been terminated, only to discover that-perhaps with slight modifications-they are still being carried out.

It should be noted that what is presented herein deals essentially with violations of civil liberties and human rights, and does not include the numerous forms of corporate abuse which are economic in nature or which adversely affect peoples health.

Many of the violations reflect foreign policy considerations given a domestic twist to bring the threat home to US citizens and win support for those policies.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In every state, the police or the National Guard and, at times, active-duty army troops, are conducting relentless helicopter drug-surveillance over peoples homes and property, setting up roadblocks, interrogating, detaining, harassing and terrifying residents with displays of excessive power.

In hundreds of American cities, young people are being subjected to a nighttime curfew law; many have a daytime curfew as well

The CIA, FBI and other federal agencies are refusing to respond to subpoenas for documents issued by attorneys who need them for the defense of their clients in national security cases in state courts.

US residents are undergoing assorted harassments and penalties from the federal government for having traveled to, spent money in and/or shipped various goods to Cuba, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Yugoslavia or other nations of that ilk. Those who visit the United Nations Mission in New York or the Interests Section in Washington of some of these countries risk being photographed and receiving visits or phone calls from the

FBI.

The CIA is opening and reading mail to and from selected countries. The FBI is peeking at Americans correspondence, domestic and international, for a host of its own priorities.

In Western states, police and federal Border Patrol agents are stopping pedestrians and motorists purely because they look Hispanic, and asking them to prove that theyre lawful residents of the United States.

Motorists are being stopped on highways for drug checks, blacks and Hispanics being the most likely to be stopped because of the race-based drug-courier profile being employed. Blacks are being strip-searched on streets by police, who then shine a flashlight at their genital and anal areas.

The INS is holding children (under age 18), mainly from Latin America and China, for months at a time in prison-like conditions, not informing them of their rights, interfering with their attempts to obtain lawyers and failing to facilitate contact with relatives, detaining them perhaps to force their illegal alien parents to come for them, so they can be taken into custody.

Private corporations are recording employees phone calls and voice mail, reading their computer files and email, getting logs of what websites theyve looked at, videotaping them as they work, observing them in bathrooms and locker rooms with two-way mirrors or hidden cameras, tracking their whereabouts by having them use electronic pass keys, bugging their offices, subjecting them to airportStyle electronic searches, testing their urine for drugs, doing extensive security checks on their backgrounds-all this whether or not they have ever behaved poorly on the job, or whether their work involves any danger to anyone.

At the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a random group of about 300 students is having to undergo urinalysis each week. At other schools, students are obliged to take a urine test in order to join the track team, join the chess club, go to the prom, go on a field trip or drive to and from school; some of these school policies have been approved by courts.

New Jersey state troopers are enlisting hotel workers along the New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about suspicious guests who, among other things, pay for their rooms in cash or receive a flurry of phone calls; hotel managers are allowing troopers, without a warrant, to leaf through the credit card receipts and registration forms of guests; the troopers are giving surveillance seminars to train employees to scrutinize guests who fit the profile of drug traffickers, the profile including race and speaking Spanish.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is keeping up to date its list of aliens, radicals and other undesirables who will be rounded up and detained in times of national emergency .

Juveniles imprisoned at one of the nations more than 50 so-called boot camps are forced to go on endurance runs until blood has soaked their shoes; one has already died from it; at other times, the youngsters are subjected to shackles or handcuffs.