Strangling Dissent, Muzzling Whistleblowers

In May 2006 USA Today revealed that since 2001 the NSA has been illegally and covertly collecting a massive database of calls placed by tens of millions of Americans. In May 2006, shortly after this startling revelation, Bush nominated Gen. Michael Hayden to be the new CIA Director. As NSA chief from 1999 to 2005, Hayden oversaw that agency’s massive, illegal surveillance. During his confirmation hearings, Hayden refused to publicly answer any probing questions about this surveillance, continuing to claim against all evidence that he and the NSA were abiding by the law.

            As each new revelation of more massive and more intrusive illegal surveillance comes out, the administration concocts a new cover story, only to subsequently have another whistleblower reveal the falsity of the administration’s last rationale. Small wonder the administration is so intent on criminalizing media coverage of their illegal acts and thus strangling the public’s right to know.

            On May 16, 2006 ABC News reported that the administration was tracking phone numbers dialed by major news organizations in order to intimidate reporters and those in government who provide leaks to the press. Furthermore, this tracking can be done without court order, using a “national security letter,” issued by an agent in the field. This letter can require a phone company or Internet provider to turn over the information, and not reveal the act has been done. According to Brian Ross, ABC News’ Chief Investigative Correspondent, the Justice Department’s figures show the F.B.I. issued 9,254 of these national security letters in 2005, aimed at surveilling 3,500 US citizens and legal immigrants. This administration is clearly operating surveillance at a magnitude far greater than it has ever represented. (Pp. 168-169)

If Colin Powell had broken ranks - he claims now that his February 2003 perjured speech before the UN Security Council advocating a war on Iraq is “painful” to remember – this might have single-handedly stopped the Bush White House’s deceitful plans for war from being carried out.

Our government has been carrying out monstrous and patently illegal policies – invasions that, according to the UN Charter, constitute the gravest war crime of all (attacking a country that has not attacked you first, WMD or no WMD); torture; indefinite, “preventive detentions” without recourse to habeas corpus (preventive detentions were a practice that constituted one of the explicit reasons for the American Revolution) - along with unparalleled cynicism and unequalled skill in the manipulation of public opinion, extraordinary violations of fundamental civil liberties such as due process, being informed of the charges against you, being able to confront your accusers in court, protections against invasions of our privacy by government snooping into all of our phone calls, Internet activity, movements, associations, and financial transactions, agents provocateurs dispatched without apology into dissenting groups by government agencies in order to frame such groups, “preventive” arrests of people planning to exercise their freedom of speech and assembly before they get to exercise such rights and charging them as “domestic terrorists,” the classification of massive amounts of information that should be and in most cases was previously public information as government secrets, outing a covert CIA agent in order to punish her spouse for calling out the White House on their pre-war lies, the list goes on and on.

In times such as these we have more need than ever for people of conscience to step up and blow the whistle, hell, set off the factory whistle, blow the damn ship’s horn, bang the drums, yank the rope on the church steeple bells till your ears are buzzing and the whole town’s awake and in the streets.

The fact that a liberal like Miller is calling for muzzling might appear on the surface to be peculiar. But Miller shares some common ground with the people who are celebrating the institutionalization of students’ lodging official complaints against professors delving into areas that some students, expert as these students are about what belongs and doesn’t belong in the courses which they are taking precisely because they don’t already know all that there is to know about a subject, are loathe to tread.

The commentary on this that I want to highlight is by Carolyn Foster Segal and it’s published in the Irascible Professor. Segal writes:

“The online daily Chronicle of Higher Ed contained a news story earlier this year about several public universities, including Penn State and Temple, ‘that have adopted special procedures allowing students to complain. The process lets students file complaints if they think professors are one-sided in presenting course material or if they think professors have introduced subject matter that is not germane to the course.’ Moreover, the vice provost for academic affairs at Penn State ‘said he is proud of Penn State’s complaint policy, which is “far more than most universities have . . . We encourage students to submit complaints” (Robin Wilson, "Using New Policy, Students Complain About Classroom Bias on 2 Pa. Campuses," 23 July 2008.)

“Students need encouragement to complain?  With or without such a questionable 1984-like policy and a coach like David Horowitz, who ‘worked with the Penn State students in shaping their complaints,’ students need no invitation to complain.

“They complain about grades of F and D and B+ and A-. They argue about the unfairness of attendance policies, rules on plagiarism, and being called upon in class (‘the teacher picked on me’). They find fault with their mattresses; the food in the café; the color of the walls of their classrooms; guest speakers; and their instructor's creed, nationality, suspected sexual persuasion, and tone of voice, the last because most of them don't understand irony. They object to assignments: ‘novels are too long,’ ‘have confusing plots,’ or ‘use too many words.’ They file grievances about grading systems and course content.

“The campus atmosphere is already a culture of criticism….

“At my own college, an English/Education co-major wrote a letter to the then-chair of the English department explaining that she would neither read nor submit to testing on Beowulf because its Paganism was in opposition to her Christian faith; she also requested substitute readings.  My department didn't give in to her demands; several people did try to suggest that she might find it helpful and educational to consider a work outside what she already knew, but she wasn't buying it, and she ultimately left the school.”

The problem with the culture of criticism that Segal cites isn’t that there is too much criticism. The problem is that there isn’t enough criticism - of the right kind. Criticism originating from an overblown sense of entitlement and/or from a sense of certainty about what is true and right (the kind of smug, ignorant, uncurious certitude that Sarah Palin so exemplifies) based on faith or unquestioned authority and/or a sense of close mindedness that refuses to entertain ideas contrary to one’s own, is the source of criticism that there is far too much of.

Criticism, however, that is based on a passion to find out what’s true, on systematic doubt, on insisting on evidence and rigor of argument and logic, criticism that calls out injustice, deceit, and unfairness, that discomforts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted, this is the kind of criticism that we need much, much, more of. For that is what education and especially higher education should be about: the pursuit not of credentials per se, and not turning university education into the academic equivalent of Staple’s big red EASY button, but knowledge and a heightened capacity to learn and to analyze.

That this kind of criticism and this sort of education is under fire from an unholy alliance between David Horowitz - who has made his career a la good ole Joe McCarthy going after people he doesn’t agree with and trying to get them fired rather than engaging in open and principled debate with competing ideas – and “liberal” (or even in some instances “radical” academics), indicates the perils of the landscape we see before us today.

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