In contrast to Washingtons hands-off treatment for anti-Castro terrorists, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, there are 30 foreign terrorist organizations which are held in official disdain. The law prohibits persons from knowingly providing material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organization . Thus it is that donating toys to an orphanage operated by Hamas in Jordan, or books to a school run by a Kurdish independence organization, or collecting money for the families of Irish prisoners can be regarded as association with a known terrorist organization , and be subject to federal prosecution.

Under this legislation, tens of thousands of legal US residents, many here for a decade or more, with families and children born in the US, are being deported or being refused reentry into the country because of such associations, or because they were once convicted of a crime, even though theyve served their sentence, and regardless of how long ago it was; many were convicted of misdemeanors for which no sentence was imposed other than probation of one year, but that is sufficient for expulsion. The INS formerly could look at individual cases and keep out only people judged potentially dangerous. Now, regardless of all other circumstances, the person must be deported. Sometimes they are apprehended and deported when they apply for citizenship.

The INS is bursting into the homes of Palestinians, legally resident in the US, and dragging them out for distributing the magazine of a Palestinian organization or raising funds for various Palestinian causes which are not involved with violence. They will be incarcerated for an indefinite term, with an indefinite fate, without criminal charges being filed against them. (Aliens, the Justice Department has long believed, and the Supreme Court has now confirmed, do not have the full protection of the Bill of Rights.)

Various kinds of government agents or private investigators are covertly checking through your garbage, either behind your house or at the dump.

A Federal judge is sentencing an American citizen to six months in a halfway house and 300 hours of community service because he drove a Libyan official, who had been denied a visa, from Mexico to Texas, or, in some equally innocuous way, treated a citizen from an Officially-Designated Enemy (ODE) country with simple human dignity.

The police are beating up and arresting strikers and escorting scab workers into plants, thus taking the side of the employer, as the police have done virtually without exception during 150 years of industrial conflict in the United States.

Corporations are using many of the more than 10,000 private security firms, which employ some 1.5 million guards, to suppress strike action and intimidate union organizers.

Law enforcement officers in northern California, taking the side of logging interests once again, are pressing cotton swabs saturated with pepper spray (600 times hotter than cayenne pepper) into the eyes of non-violent people chained to each other, who are

protesting the felling of ancient redwoods; protestors are shrieking and writhing in pain as the solution takes effect.

People are dying in police custody in cases where pepper spray is a contributing factor.

Banks, telephone companies, utility companies, credit card companies, airlines, bus companies, rental car outlets, storage facilities, hotels and motels and all manner of other private institutions are providing various local, state and federal authorities with all the information about their customers they desire under the ever-expanding legal authorities being granted to law enforcement bodies with scarcely any public hearings or debate.

The War on Drugs is requiring banks, brokers, casinos and other financial institutions to monitor their customers financial transactions and report any unusual or suspicious activity. The information is all fed into the Treasury Departments Financial Crimes Enforcement Network whose computers spend their days making linkages between individuals and bank accounts, busi-nesses, real estate and other assets.

States are selling confidential wage, driving and other information about their residents to private information companies and other enterprises.

Scenarios along the lines of the following from Savannah, Ga. are probably taking place elsewhere: Without warning, a team of armed county and school system officers periodically entered the schools, ordered everyone into the hallways, used dogs to sniff the students belongings, and scanned the students bodies with metal detectors. One of the high-school teachers was very upset by this- Because I teach the Constitution, she explained-and made her feelings known to the authorities. A police officer told her principal that because of her attitude problem, she might have to be detained or restrained during future surprise raids. During a subsequent raid, the teachers son was the only student out of 1,500 to be individually searched. Later, cars in the parking lot were searched, and the police claimed to have found a marijuana cigarette in the teachers car. The Board of Education suspended her and she was later fired.

In various schools students are being suspended for: bringing a bottle of the nonprescription painkiller Advil to school; dying their hair an unacceptable color; giving a classmate a Midol tablet for relief of menstrual cramps; bringing drugs to school-lemon drops; bringing a gift-wrapped bottle of wine as a Christmas gift for a teacher; another is punished for carrying a small paring knife to cut her lunch fruit; yet another, a 9-year-old boy, is punished for waving his drawing of a gun in class; a six-year-old boy is sent home for planting a kiss on a girls cheek; eight-year-old girls are strip-searched in school, in a search for stolen money (not found); pre-schoolers to 6th grade students are given genital exams as part of their physicals; high schools employ random Breathalyser testing to ferret out students who have imbibed alcohol; a 14-year-old girl is strip-searched and suspended for two weeks because she tells her classmates she understands how the Columbine shooters felt; and high school students are questioned by police who want to know if a chemistry textbook was for bomb-making.

This while an eleven-year-old boy is being arrested and accused of incest because a neighbor saw him touching his younger sister sexually in their yard. He was held six weeks in a juvenile detention center and shackled in court on at least one occasion. The boy and his parents said he had pulled down his five-year-old sisters underwear to help her urinate. And two 10-year-old boys who put some soap in their teachers water bottle are being charged with a felony.

A high-school teacher is being suspended without pay for teaching mathematics using real-life problems, such as: Jerome wants to cut his half-pound of heroin to make 20 percent more profit. How many ounces of cut will be needed?

Juveniles in reform schools are being hogtied and thrown into isolation cells for weeks at a time; placed in straight jackets; standing with noses pressed against a wall for as long as 16 hours a day; handcuffed naked to beds. Juveniles are being jailed with adult criminals even for just being runaways.

Prisoners in a state correctional facility who staged a peaceful demonstration against the transfer of other inmates to out-of-state gulags against their will, are being punished with up to a year of solitary, and their time in solitary will not count toward their sentences, according to the Department of Corrections.

A federal court, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, is receiving applications for authorization of electronic surveillance within the United States and is rubber-stamping them. In its first 20 years, the court received some 10,000 applications from the Justice Department on behalf of the FBI and the National Security Agency. By all accounts, only one was rejected, on a technicality.

There exists no public record of any kind about the individual cases, nor any oversight. The Clinton administration expanded the courts mandate to allow it to approve physical break-ins, enabling the Justice Department to bypass the usual warrant procedure in an open court, which would necessitate some accounting of the items to be seized, and an explanation of probable cause that a crime had been committed. The targets of these wiretaps and burglaries can be under surveil-lance merely because of belonging to or supporting an organiza-tion whose politics are looked upon with disfavor by the US government. Federal agents can now obtain the phone numbers of all incoming and outgoing calls on any lines used or called by suspected foreign agents.

(The FISA court is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg when it comes to the US government listening in on the citizenry. See the Eavesdropping chapter for further details.)

Drunk driving, generally defined in the 1980s as a blood alcohol concentration of .15, was later defined as .10, and then, in some states, as .08. If .08 doesnt do, will Congress and the states go for .06, and then .04? In any event, the scientific validity of these cutoff points has been questioned by the federal government itself. 1