By Dave Lindorff

President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on
protesters against the controversial election results in Iran’s
just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran’s
government, saying, “Peaceful dissent should never be subject to
violence.”

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and
angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian
authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that “the Iranian people and their
voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.

Just days ago, the ACLU of Northern California issued a press release
announcing that it had filed a complaint over a Pentagon anti-terrorism
training manual. That training manual, aimed at Pentagon personnel,
describes domestic protests as “low-level terrorist activity.”

As Staff Attorney Ann Brick and ACLU Washington National Security
Policy Council member Michael German write in their complaint letter to
the Department of Defense, “For the DoD to instruct its employees that
lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is
deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult
to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a
long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted
to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.”

The ACLU has documented that the government has been and continues a
policy of spying on legitimate peaceful protest
organizations—particularly those that have been opposing America’s wars
and its military policies, and the new president has said nothing and
done nothing about terminating this egregious assault on First
Amendment freedom of speech and assembly. Given that President Obama
has also done nothing since taking office to undo the USA PATRIOT Act,
which codifies much activity that traditionally would have been called
dissent as a crime, or to publicly reverse the policy of the last eight
years during which non-violent protest organizations have been spied on
and infiltrated by agents of the military and by the FBI, and during
which actual protesters have been harassed, penned into fenced-off
“free speech zones,” assaulted by armed police and arrested, his
pontificating to Iran about the sanctity of dissent rings particularly
hollow.

Imagine, if you will, what this government’s response would be to
having hundreds of thousands of American protesters gather in the
center of Washington, DC without a permit, to protest the policies of
the national government. There would be riot police in the thousands,
some mounted on horseback. There would be federal troops. There would
be police charges against demonstrators. There would be tear gas and
arrests.

How do we know this? It happens every time there are major protests in Washington—even when protests are granted permits.

This writer spent three days in the Federal Detention Center at
Occoquan, VA, back in 1967 for participating in a peaceful anti-war
protest at the Pentagon that year. I was one of hundreds at that event
who found himself, as a peaceful demonstrator, confronting armed
federal troops with fixed bayonets at that event. Not much has changed
since ‘67, as others have met the same fate over the years in
Washington and around the country. Certainly there is every reason to
assume that, if the public finally loses patience over the current
administration’s continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, its
failure to really tackle the health care crisis, and its limp response
to the economic crisis, and if people descend on Washington or perhaps
New York City en masse to protest, those people will be met with the
same kind of draconian, police-state style response that protesters
have met in the past--or that protesters are being met with in Iran
today.

If the Pentagon is teaching its people to equate protest with
“low-level terrorism,” how different, really, is Washington from Tehran?
______________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest
book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now
available in signed collector’s edition through his website).
Lindorff’s work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net