The Silencers Among Us

...In March 1984, the Libel Defense Resource Center reported that damages awarded by juries against the media in libel cases now exceed jury awards in medical malpractice and product liability suits...

...Others in the crowd threw flowers at the womenflowers that had been sprayed with mace...

...The police arrested them...

...Meanwhile, worker-writers in other parts of the country must be wondering whether they ought to criticize their managers in print...

...The case at hand concerned Jori Elkis, a seventh grader, who had been suspended for receiving a note in the school lunchroom...

...After ABSCAM came Operation Greylord, a Chicago sting which, for the first time, i n v o l v e d the long-term bugging of judges' chambers...

...The Reagan Administration is engaged in a shrewd attempt to undermine the First Amendment, trying to alter how the citizenry defines its expectations of freedom...

...Where there is a diversity of people and views, our rights seem to be more valued...

...The South African visitor never had a chance to say a word to the class...

...Of course, should Reagan be reelected, his lifetime censorship edict could be reactivated...

...I don't think we are going to be able to have both an ongoing intelligence capability and a totality of civil [liberties] protection...

...Mail ran heavily in favor of the President's action, and a Pentagon spokesman cheerily told a Washington Post reporter, "I guess most of the people think I don't have to tell you a damn thing...

...Like the Wobblies decades ago, Woo characterizes her fierce resistance as a "free-speech fight...

...State and local police enthusiastically emulating the FBI's methods add to the impression that privacy is an anachronism...

...A hearing panel decided that a rule forbidding public school students from passing notes violates the youngsters' free-speech rights...

...Consider this true epiphany from the State University of New York at New Paltz...

...Large, revealing sections of our history would have been shrouded by Government censors...

...Irish foes Ian Paisley and Bernadette Devlin...

...Having gone through one draining court casefinancially and psychologically—the workers don't want to provoke another...

...Without missing a beat, Hart answered, "I would remove him...

...First, they fear it will look to the folks at home as if they have something to hide from the bureau...

...Okay, I said, but what would you do with Webster if you became President...

...Around the same time, the Iowa State Department of Public Instruction chalked up a win for the First Amendment...

...And there is more: On March 7, 1983, Attorney General William French Smith issued a new set of domestic security guidelines for the FBI...

...But we and the rest of the press were wrong...

...Liberty," Hand said, "lies in the hearts of men and women...

...Such unevenness of protection was sanctioned for much of our history...

...The women wanted to draw attention to the accelerating dangers of the nuclear arms race, so they exercised their First Amendment rights of speech and assembly...

...Many Americans, as throughout our history, are decidedly not in favor of free speech for everybody...

...To avoid any misunderstanding as to the purpose and nature of their demonstration, they gave advance notice to the police chiefs of every town on their route...

...Reporters do not feel they are affected by it...

...In 1984, as always, the signs are mixed...

...During waves of witchhunting paranoia, or when the nation is put on a war footing, or if "national security" otherwise becomes the first principle of government, the Bill of Rights comes in for a beating...

...several hundred foreign delegates who wanted to attend a United Nations session on disarmament, and Hortensia de Allende, the widow of Salvador Allende...

...In supporting the Act, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana spoke for many of his colleagues when he said, "I am willing to take risks with regard to all of the [constitutional] protections we have set up...

...Last February, for example, Merle Woo won a First Amendment battle in Northern California's Bay Area...

...Libel suits are, after all, aimed at small enterprises as well as the Post and the National Enquirer...

...This was the case with President Reagan's censorship directive of March 11, 1983, which would have required more than 128,000 Government officials to agree to "prepublication review" of their writings—for life—whether the writings were speeches, novels, or articles...

...In fact, Murphy went on to say, O'Coin had missed 26 per cent of the school board meetings in 1983...

...Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, puts it this way: Our procedural rights are intact even where there are attempts to censor or suppress speech...

...If, for instance, you were to speak out in favor of draft resistance at a church meeting or in a bar, you could be the proud subject of a new FBI dossier...

...To what extent does liberty lie in the hearts of the people...

...The President's palace guard promised not to pursue implementation of the directive until the next session of Congress—that is, not until 1985...

...And liberty has died in the hearts of some Americans...

...Operation Greylord also used fake lawyers, fake cases, and fake defendants to hunt its prey...

...The order would also have greatly expanded the use of liedetector tests for Federal employees...

...For instance, its "scab of the month" column, which figured prominently in the libel suit, has been discontinued...

...Murphy is co-editor of the school paper—and the defendant in a $200,000 libel suit brought by William J. O'Coin, a member of the Cumberland School Committee...

...The average jury award in eighty libel cases from 1980 to 1983 was $2,174,633...

...The standards of the First Amendment were applied only to laws enacted by Congress and to the actions of the Federal executive branch...

...Blocked by the mob, the women sat down...

...Second, a legislator who offends the FBI might, just might, have his office infiltrated or his telephone tapped...

...However, official willingness to shunt the First Amendment aside in the name of national security can be effectively resisted if the threat is sufficiently publicized to enable friends of the Bill of Rights to muster a defense...

...Countless unsuspecting clients told their secrets to Federal agents...

...Even if he wins in court, he will have to pay for taking seriously the free-press clause of the Constitution...

...Another kind of lesson has been learned by Colin Murphy, a sixteen-year-old high school student in Cumberland, Rhode Island...

...Under the rules, a person who speaks—merely speaks—about the possibility of breaking the law can be subject to electronic surveillance and the intimate attentions of undercover agents...

...For instance, under the McCarran-Walter Im-migration Act, visas have been denied to such foreign political and cultural figures as all six Salvadoran presidential candidates...

...Aggrieved Americans can go to court and, after the usual delays, usually win...

...The speechmakers will presumably point out that citizens are ensured such liberties nowhere else in the world...

...The women, charged with disorderly conduct, spent five days in jail...

...The spirit of the times always affects how firmly and consistently the First Amendment functions...

...The Presidential directive would have denied Americans the kinds of critical assessments of past governmental policies that are now found in memoirs, op-ed pieces, and other works of former officials...

...playwright Dario Fo...

...There, in the summer of 1982, a group of fifty-four women from all parts of the United States had started on a walk for peace in the Gandhi-Martin Luther King tradition of nonviolent witness...

...That's why the rest of us are lucky the First Amendment isn't coming up for a vote...

...Those employees successfully defended themselves against a $4.2 million damage suit, but the three defendants will be paying off the costs of the court action for a long, long time...

...Woo claimed she had been fired for criticizing certain practices of the university and also for being an outspoken trade unionist, a lesbian, and a socialist feminist...

...Brandishing American flags, they thrust two-foot flagpoles at the nonviolent demonstrators...

...Jack Landau, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, noted that the American press had been given access to every military engagement since Lexington and Concord (if sometimes under agreement not to report immediately...

...O'Coin had publicly excoriated the town's teachers for what he claimed was their appalling absentee rate...

...when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it...

...Rags will fly, bands will play, and orators will make sonorous reference to the first of those amendments—the one that guarantees Americans freedom of press, speech, religion, and assembly, the one without which no other freedoms can be secured...

...Most members of Congress have no desire to voice public differences with the FBI...

...The suspension was reversed...

...When the women arrived at Waterloo, several hundred townspeople would not let them pass...

...The main reason, he told me, was that ABSCAM had frightened them...

...Press coverage of constitutional violations is usually limited primarily to the three words in the First Amendment aimed at protecting the press itself...

...Some of the citizens threatened the marchers with physical harm...

...A small thing, you might say...

...The ones who learn this are more likely, when they grow up, to understand the importance of the Amendment to others, including those whose ideas they hate...

...In homogeneous Waterloo, heretics are few...

...One target was Fighting Times, a dissident, muckraking union newsletter published by workers at an American Motors Corporation plant in Wisconsin...

...A Louis Harris poll last December disclosed that by a wide margin—65 to 32 per cent—the public thought reporters should have been in on the assault from the first...

...Accordingly, there was a cry of outrage from the media when the Reagan Administration excluded the press from the first two days of this nation's invasion of Grenada...

...If people feel that their privacy is becoming more and more vulnerable to bugs, wiretaps, undercover agents, and video cameras, they are far less likely to participate in First Amendment activities that might prove unpopular...

...See "Libel and Labor" in the November 1983 issue of The Progressive...

...Today, we are in a period that suffers from all of these political infections...

...no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it...

...Veteran correspondent Daniel Schorr remarked at the time, "A startling lesson of the Grenada invasion episode is that the news media, arguing the public's right to know, found themselves without general public support...

...Cumulatively, these scams give the impression that the FBI may be anywhere and everywhere...

...True enough—but as the women who walked into Waterloo discovered, those charged with enforcing the First Amendment sometimes wink, or even cheer, when it is being violated...

...If you don't use "the constitutional right to speak your mind," she says, "you'll lose it...

...Particularly when the people in a community believe free speech applies only to themselves...

...And the FBI, through such operations as ABSCAM, has shown how resourceful it can be when it comes to undermining Fourth Amendment protections...

...Only one Presidential candidate has been unequivocally opposed to what the FBI has been doing to the Fourth and First Amendments: In March, Gary Hart told me he was appalled by ABSCAM, Operation Greylord, and the relaxed FBI guidelines...

...Tomas Borge, Interior Minister of Nicaragua...

...Another successful move by the Administration to limit what we can know—and simultaneously reduce our expectations of the range of the First Amendment—was the enactment three years ago of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act...

...The Constitution, said the panel, does not stop at the schoolhouse gate...

...In the lecture room, although two-thirds of those present clearly wanted to hear him, the others made so much sustained noise that he finally had to leave...

...Representative Don Edwards, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on civil and constitutional rights, tried hard to sidetrack the guidelines, but he found little support among his colleagues...

...He was concerned about the tendency to revere the Bill of Rights as a sanctified parchment under glass while letting its spirit wither in the life of the nation...

...Some fifty students, white and black, roared and screamed at the representative as he entered the Humanities Building...

...It doesn't matter whether the employers win or not...

...I said about the same thing back then...

...The story that did go out, however, had an additional dimension: It said that some students, like the government of South Africa, do not permit conflicting views...

...The media's fears about libel law and its threat to the First Amendment are more solidly grounded...

...As the visitor left the campus, a black student shouted, "Let the story go out that students would not allow a racist to speak on this campus...

...University of Chicago law school professor Philip Kurland called it "the clearest violation of the First Amendment attempted by Congress in this era...

...The Administration has been more successful in empowering the Federal Bureau of Investigation to weaken the First Amendment...

...There had been no lecture, no chance to ask this South African some pointed questions about his brutal government...

...It is true that verdicts have been reversed by higher courts in some 71 per cent of the appeals from jury libel awards...

...The measure, which won overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, makes it a crime to publish material—even if the material is in the public domain—that could lead to the identification of covert American intelligence agents and foreign officials on the CIA payroll...

...I would be surprised, though, if any address includes the warning softly given years ago by Federal Judge Learned Hand...

...As the union activists' lawyer, Alvin Ugent, says, "Libel suits are a useful tool for management...

...Admittedly, this news has not yet reached places like Waterloo...

...Instead of dealing with paper stereotypes of the apartheid regime, the professor thought, let the students see a three-dimensional member of the racist ruling class...

...Despite the Bureau's record, FBI Director William Webster has garnered praise from many quarters for ostensibly putting an end to the abuses publicized in the Congressional probes of COINTELPRO and other J. Edgar Hoover triumphs...

...The election campaign aside, Mondale's position shows that liberals, however compassionate, are not always reliable when the problem is assuring a safety net for the Bill of Rights...

...After almost two years of fighting, she got her teaching job back at the University of California in Berkeley, along with a cash settlement of $48,584 and $25,000 in lawyers' fees...

...On the other hand, Walter Mondale, in answering an ACLU questionnaire, said he was against such past FBI assaults on the Constitution as the COINTELPRO Surveillance program, but added, "Under Director Webster, the FBI has demonstrated its commitment to balancing the need for effective law enforcement against a concern for the privacy and freedom of American citizens...

...As a result, all governmental violations of free speech, press, religion, and assembly are now judged according to the constitutional standard...

...Young Murphy dug up statistics like a good reporter and wrote an editorial asserting that O'Coin had his facts wrong...

...But that is an expensive source of deliverance that can break a paper even if it is vindicated...

...Murphy and his family have hired a lawyer...

...It was not until 1925 that the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment applied to the states as well...

...But, Glasser continues, "what we are permitted to speak about, publish, hear, and read is increasingly limited to what the Government wants us to know...

...Last year, a political science professor had invited to his class one of South Africa's representatives to the United Nations...

...BY NAT HENTOFF Seven years from now, on December 15, 1991, there will be celebrations across the land to mark the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights...

...In Waterloo, New York, for instance...

...Yet it greatly matters whether kids learn that the Constitution is not just a civics lesson but something that belongs to them...

...A November poll taken by ABC News and The Washington Post revealed that the citizenry— by 48 to 38 per cent—believed that the Government tried too hard to control news from Grenada...

...none of their tormentors was arrested...

...So long as these people and others are barred from the United States, Americans are denied their First Amendment rights to hear them...

...Persistent undermining of the First Amendment by the FBI has not received much attention from the mass media...

...While the First Amendment protects our rights, the Fourth Amendment protects the First by safeguarding us against unlawful search and seizure...

...I'm a constitutional fundamentalist...

...But a barrage of articles, Congressional appearances, television debates, and broadsides by book and newspaper publishers, First Amendment lawyers (with Floyd Abrams in the lead), former Government officials, the American Civil Liberties Union, and indignant members of Congress forced the Administration to retreat last spring...

...Nat Hentojf writes regularly about the First Amendment for The Progressive and other publications...

...More significant, Fighting Times has been permanently chilled...

...What was most dismaying to the press, however, was the apparent absence of public support for the First Amendment rights of the public's surrogates, the front-line reporters...