Maybe this is not exactly a surprise, but Attorney General John Ashcroft is the leader of the pack among this year's Muzzle award winners, cited by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression as 2002's leading free expression deniers in the United States. And Ashcroft's allowing $8,000 in tax money to be spent draping a pair of nudes was probably the least of the reasons why he earned the dishonor.
Ashcroft was cited for, essentially, doing his level best to keep the Justice Department's activities as hidden from public examination as he could get away with, "while simultaneously expanding the DOJ's authority to find out as much as possible about the private lives of the American public," the Center said in its Muzzle announcement.
And the examples? Pressing for the passage of the Patriot Act and expanding the government's licence to investigate our private lives, "including what we read"; prohibiting the public and the press from access to immigration deportation hearings, "(a)lthough the U.S. Supreme Court specifically has held that the public and the press have a First Amendment right of access to criminal court proceedings"; shrinking Justice Department responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, including one last August (from the Electronic Privacy Information Center) which asked for "information on the government's use of sweeping new surveillance powers" under the Patriot Act; refusing to give Congress information about the DOJ's terrorist investigations, drawing fire from both parties; and, banning Jose Padilla and Yasir Hamdi - suspected of aiding terrorists - from speaking with their own attorneys.
The Jefferson Center also tweaked Ashcroft for his long-enough notorious habit of calling those who criticize actions like those with aiding terrorism, as he did in a memorable enough statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. If Edward R. Murrow could (and did) say, "We proclaim ourselves as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom - what's left of it in the world - but we cannot defend freedom abroad by abandoning it at home," Ashcroft could and did say to the Judiciary Committee, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists - for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve."
Ashcroft was the lead Muzzle honoree, but Congress seems to have placed a close enough second, by the Jefferson Center's listings. Passing the Patriot Act overwhelmingly, six weeks after 9/11, earned them that distinction, particularly since the Act allows authorities to seek warrants for "any tangible things" in libraries and bookstores without former standards of probable cause - "things" including books, circulation or purchase records, Internet usage records, computer disks, and computer hard drives.
"Because of this" provision, it is impossible to know exactly how often investigators have made use of Section 215 (of the Patriot Act)," the Jefferson Center said. "Regardless of the number of times it has been utilized, Section 215's very existence chills the exercise of First Amendment rights"(The) Patriot Act was passed by Congress with very little debate and, based on the public comments of a number of Congressman, it appears that Section 215 was unnoticed among the hundreds of pages that comprised the Act."
The good news: There has since come strong enough bipartisan support, the Jefferson Center said, for proposed legislation that would shrink the reach of that provision. "But the carelessness with which the 107th Congress passed (it)," the center continued, "serves to condemn rather than excuse."
Other Muzzle dishonorees include:
* Berkeley (California) Mayor Tom Bates: He was cited for discarding copies of the University of California - Berkeley student newspaper, the day before he defeated a Republican opponent in the election, that ran an article praising that opponent. At first denying his involvement, Bates - whose career was seen as building on a human rights advocacy and activism record - subsequently copped to it, saying, "There is no excuse for my behavior."
* Board of Education, Cedarville, Arkansas: After a critical parent objected to the Harry Potter novels, the school board rejected a library committee decision to keep the novels on school library shelves unrestricted. The board ordered the novels put on the restricted shelves, meaning students could not sign them out without permission slips. That provoked another pair of parents to sue the board for violating the First Amendment, including "their right to be free of government control over what they read," the Jefferson Center said. "If such is the fate of the Harry Potter novels, how many other reputable works will be censored based on the objections of a vocal few, or one?
* The Tennessee Arts Commission: Because one of artist Ernie Sandidge's oil pantings in an exhibition included a nude character - that hadn't been included in the slides he submitted for exhibition approval - the Commission revoked his exhibition in the art gallery across from the state Capitol. Arts Commission director Rich Boyd said in an e-mail to the National Coalition Against Censorship that the TAC had had a "no nudes" policy on file, but refused to send a copy of that policy, saying it could be seen by no one but a Tennessee resident, the Jefferson Center said. Boyd later told the Free Expression Policy Project of NCAC that Tennesee's "obscenity/harmful to minors" law madates the no-nudes policy. "The depiction of a nude human is a means of artistic expression that has transcended the ages," the Jefferson Center said. "To eliminate all nudity would rebuke history's most influential artists: Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Manet and Picasso, to name but a few."
Tell it to John Ashcroft. The pair of nude statues he ordered covered up at taxpayer expense? The semi-nudes that so often appear behind him during press conferences in the DOJ's Great Hall. You know - the ones representing "The Spirit of Justice" and "The Majesty of Law."
To see more on the other 2003 Muzzle winners for their exemplary work against free expression, visit the Jefferson Center on the Web.
