The Daily Background

It hasn’t been entirely struck down yet- but it’s getting closer and closer. Not the PATRIOT, but the First Amendment. The right to write and read whatever you like is heading closer and closer to extinction it seems, as evidenced by the latest case of sheer unreasonable governmental abuse of the PATRIOT ACT (which as readers undoubtedly already know suffered a huge blow recently).

Read on for the story…

It appears that any college student who checks out a certain BOOK and happens to go through the nearly nationwide college and university interlibrary loan system inside the United States automatically gets flagged as a potential terror threat. That’s right, folks. A book can do it.

So what is exactly this horrible terror threat of a book? A suicide bombers manual? The anarchist cookbook perhaps? Hardly.

The book which was placed on this Double-Super-Secret Homeland Security “watch list” is, in fact, a book written in way back in the 50s, a collection of quotations by communist leader Mao Tse-Tung called “The Little Red Book.”

For those of you that thought the hunt for dirty pinkos was over by the end of the seventies, this should raise a serious doubt.

Apparently, reading a book about an alternative governmental structure is now a potential terror threat. The story itself goes thusly. It appears that a college student (a senior who has out of fear requested to remain anonymous) at the univesrity filled out a routine request book loan request form. He was writing a research paper, and his professor suggested that he go “direct to the [original] source,” which meant that he would need the original

Apparently the Ministry of Truth…. er, Homeland Security Agency got wiff of the “suspicious” activity which was merely research for a paper on communism- in a class on fascism and totalitarianism, and pounced. Apparently visited and investigated by federal agents, one of his professors, who were willing to speak to the press had the following to say:

“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.
Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

You can read more reporting about this incident here, with discussion here.

Filed under: Patriot Act, Z-TDB Blog