90 years is too long to wait

The front page of today's Chicago Tribune carried a story about an attempt to gain clemency for 74 people convicted and imprisoned under Montana's World War I sedition law:

On April 23, 1918, with the U.S. in the depths of World War I, Fred Rodewald, a German immigrant homesteader who had settled with his family on 320 acres in eastern Montana, uttered a sentence that forever changed his life.

He suggested that Americans "would have hard times" if Germany's kaiser "didn't get over here and rule this country."

That remark earned him 2 years in prison for violating Montana's Sedition Act. When he went off to the penitentiary in Deer Lodge, the 42-year-old Rodewald left behind a pregnant wife and eight children. An armistice ended the war less than a month later.

Now, nearly 90 years later, law students at the University of Montana have begun a quest and are prowling dusty archives and musty courthouse storage rooms across the state to clear Rodewald and 73 other Montanans convicted of sedition.

Ninety years late is better than never, I suppose, but it's a crying shame that those 74 people ever had to go through the embarrassment of a public trial for exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech. Nor was I terribly reassured by the next paragraph of the Tribune story, which contrasted the situation in 1918 when "a farmer could be jailed for suggesting that it was 'a rich man's war,' and today, when citizens can criticize the war in Iraq without fear of prosecution, if not without fear of government surveillance."

Because let's face it, it's not for lack of trying that critics of the Iraq war (or the Bush administration generally) have yet to lose their liberty. The wingnut brigade has routinely castigated liberals, Democrats, and opponents of the war (all of whom appear to be interchangeable in their minds) as traitors, malcontents, unpatriotic carpers not fit to enjoy the benefits of a free society. The president of the United States recently went on the air in a live address and admitted having broken the laws prohibiting spying on U.S. citizens--and promised to go right on breaking them, no matter what anybody, including the courts, thought. The White House and its apologists have been trying, thankfully without success, to argue that the president is not subject to the laws of the land, nor to the Constitution he took a sacred oath to "preserve, protect, and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic," in furtherance of its senseless war in Iraq.

We already know that peace activists and anti-war protesters were among the U.S. citizens illegally spied upon on Bush's orders. It's not hard to believe that worse could well have been in store had the surveillance not been reported. There is, after all, a long tradition of that sort of thing in our history--of which the Montana example documented today in the Tribune is just one shameful instance.

All I can hope for is that when we come to write the history of the turbulent years of the Bush presidency, it won't take some crusading legal students until 90 years after the fact to rehabilitate the victims of the Shrubbery and its pet PATRIOT Act. And that we'll continue to be lucky enough that nobody has to go to jail (such as your 'umble blogger) for having the guts to tell Emperor Chimpicus that he's stark bollocks naked.

Comments

[Charlie]

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

[Anya]

Charlie, people are idiots.

A) They don't believe that they won't/haven't forefit their own civil liberties, and

B) They don't realize that the illegal wiretaps, regardless of "good" intentions, jeopardize the past and future convictions of actual terrorists.

If some terrorist is released on a technicality (such as illegally obtained evidence), I won't feel more safe.

Will you?

[Charlie]

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

[Anya]

They will if the law works the way it should. Of course, maybe GWB will suspend all laws and rule by divine right. (After all, it's God's will that he became President.) Then, you can kiss all your rights good-bye -- including the one that allows you to say what you want in blog comments.

[Michael]

See ya, Charlie. I'm not nearly as patient with trolls as NTodd or Mustang Bobby is.

[Michael]

Sorry about that, Anya. That's what I get for being a good boy and reading for comps today: A troll infestation that should have been stopped with his first comment.

[Charlie]

Oh, that's not the Christmas spirit.

[Michael]

Cry me a fucking river. You're banned. Now leave.

[Anya]

S'okay, Michael. After the first reply, I'd already wasted as much time as I should have on a troll.

On the other hand, even trolls have First Amendment rights -- as long as they don't consume excessive amounts of bandwidth. :o)

[Michael]

I pay for this blog with my own money. The First Amendment doesn't apply here, except by my suffrage. And I don't have any for Charlie. I watched him stink up NTodd's blog, and then he tried the same schtick at Mustang Bobby's when NTodd finally banned him. Mine being the third LC blog he's showed up at, I'm not waiting around for him to show his true colors. I'm just getting rid of him.