Cars of those arrested for drunken driving are being seized by the police, sometimes immediately. At times the police try to keep the car even if the person is acquitted.

People are being harassed, arrested and/or having their property confiscated for engaging in certain forms of gambling, even in their own homes. Other forms of gambling, which are legitimized by the local or state government, proceed happily unmolested.

Hundreds of political prisoners are rotting away in American prisons. As US-based human rights groups have testified before the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in Geneva, these people are being held as a direct result of actions under-taken in furtherance of a political or social vision . They go back to the black liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly members of the Black Panthers; others are native American activists, anti-nuclear activists, opponents of US interventionist policies in Puerto Rico, Central America and elsewhere. A number of these prisoners were set up by FBI dirty tricks under the notorious COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), aimed at neutralizing Black Panthers and white radicals.

Many have used violence against property, and a few toward police, but persons who commit politically motivated offenses in furtherance of leftist causes receive substantially, often shock-ingly, harsher treatment than those who commit similar acts for monetary or right-wing reasons. Many were sentenced to more than 50 years for actions, such as possession of explosives, without there being any victims. If the usual sentence for such an act in a particular court or state is 10 years, at the beginning of year 11- certainly by year 15-these people are political prisoners. It is often not the worst prisoners who are thrown into solitary confinement, but rather these political prisoners, as well as the jailhouse lawyers and prisoner activists.

The Congressional Black Caucus, in October 1997, issued a declaration to remind the world of the existence of these political prisoners.

Aliens who have come to the US from oppressive countries, seeking political asylum, are winding up in Kafkaesque nightmares, wasting away in prison under intolerable conditions, without criminal charges being filed against them, some dying because of unattended health problems, forgotten about until perhaps Amnesty International or some other human rights organization takes up their case. The FBI and the INS are using secret evidence-which neither the accused nor their attorneys have a right to examine-to detain these people and ultimately deport them, even if they are married to American citizens. The aliens are often those who decried human rights abuses in their home country and fled torture and other retribution from their govern-ment, which may be putting pressure on Washington to silence and return them by providing the evidence in question. Many are refused entry to the US because they lack proper documents, when in fact many escape their homeland with false papers. As of 1999, the INS was holding more than 10,000 asylum seekers. In February of that year, the Washington representative of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees called upon the United-States to stop detaining such people. Many may be regarded as political prisoners.

The Boy Scouts are rejecting some young man as a member because he is an atheist, or rejecting an adult as a troop leader because the person is homosexual.

Some of the more than 10,000 FBI agents are spending their time enticing people on the internet to purchase child porno, or the G-men are pretending online to be a 13-year-old girl in order to lure a man to a meeting. When the man shows up, hes arrested.

Many foreigners, in the US legally, are sitting in prisons, charged with a crime, without their countrys consulate having been informed, without the prisoner being told that he has the right to contact his consulate. Some of them are sitting on death row.

The IRS, acting as judge, jury and executioner, is subjecting taxpayers to nightmarish collection processes, ordering them to pay taxes they dont owe, failing to credit them for payments made, seizing their cars and bank accounts, boosting tax penalties to meet office quotas and generally wreaking havoc in peoples lives; an audit is being carried out upon an individual because he or she has upset someone in a very high position in the government.

Monetary rewards are being paid out to students who report other students for smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs or violating other school rules.

DARE and other school-based drug programs are teaching chil-dren to turn in their parents for marijuana or other drug viola-tions.

The mayor of New York has urged citizens to take pictures of people going into sex-video stores and topless bars. Other informant schemes call for people to turn in others for not wearing seatbelts, for telling ethnic or racist jokes and for failing to recycle their garbage properly.

First-time drug offenders, carrying no weapons, including many who were simply couriers or played peripheral roles in drug trafficking, and others with no record of violence or involvement in sophisticated criminal activity, are being sentenced to very long prison terms, with no chance of parole.

Under three-strikes laws, people are being sentenced to 25-to-life terms for petty theft, despite that fact that the three-strikes laws were designed for violent crimes.

The grand jury system is running amok. Virtually all federal cases use it to obtain indictments. Neither the accused nor his or her lawyer is there, so they cant confront accusers. The system is used as an instrument of terror-relatives testifying against one another with no confidentiality privilege with respect to family members other than husbands and wives: parents called to testify against their children, children against their parents, brother against sister. It lacks due process. Its another secret tool of an expanding executive branch.

Those wishing to experiment with their mind in the privacy of their home, those seeking transcendence and nirvana, are being punished by the state for their sin. Young men are being sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for possession of less than a gram of LSD, with no evidence presented of them having done any harm to any other person.

Human Rights Watch is charging state governments, as it did in New York, of violating international law by sentencing drug dealers to prison terms similar to those given to violent offenders. A person convicted in New York of selling two ounces of cocaine receives a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life, the same penalty meted out to a murderer.

More states are joining the frenzy to make publicly available the names, addresses, biographies (often with detrimental erroneous information) and photos of convicted sex offenders for the rest of their lives, driving these people from their neighborhoods and jobs; this is being done regardless of whether the popular a priori view of sex offenders being unbeatable is true or not, or whether theyre undergoing therapy or not.

Many hundreds of school books are being dropped from curriculums because of complaints by parents, religious groups and others. Books in public libraries are under attack as well, books which no one is obliged to read-Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, The Grapes of Wrath, The Diary of Anne Frank, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and numerous other lesser-known novels, as well as countless books of history, social studies, geography, even home economics. School newspapers, other curriculum materials, music and art, are also being targeted.

Individuals who wish to end their lives with dignity and with a minimum of suffering are being denied the assistance of a doctor by state legislatures, the Catholic Church and citizens groups. In Oregon, after passage by 60 percent of a referendum allowing doctor-assisted suicide, the DEA warned that physicians who help someone commit suicide will risk their licenses to write prescriptions; whether this is ever enforced or not, the threat will have its effect.

Numerous people who could get exceedingly welcome relief from dreadful symptoms by the use of marijuana are denied the legal right to do so. In states where voters have passed initiatives legalizing the medical use of marijuana, the authorities are throwing up obstacles to make its practice as difficult as they can make it. In Washington, DC, Congress has in effect nullified the passage of such a referendum.

Cancer patients in great pain are being denied sufficient morphine to relieve their suffering because the War on Drugs has inhibited doctors from prescribing as much as is needed.

Many people are being placed on death row. Some of them, if theyre lucky, will join the 75 men and women released from death row between 1976 and 1998, their cases reversed because they had been found to be innocent after all.