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Oct. 18, 2003 |
Two students criticized the government in a classroom discussion; and government officials whisked them away for interrogation the next day.
This did not happen 60 years ago under the leadership of a ruthless dictator; rather, it occurred late last month at a high school in Oakland.
Ever since the events of Sept. 11, the government has been on high alert all in an important effort to prevent a devastating terrorist attack. But our government must also take the necessary steps to maintain habeas corpus and other rights of the accused.
On April 23, two Secret Service agents showed up at Oakland High School to "investigate a situation that came to their attention," according to Oakland High School principal Clement Mok.
Mok said that he was not at liberty to comment any further on the situation, but added that he was informed that the Secret Service is required "to protect the president and vice president, and that, they said, is what they were doing."
The two students were involved in a class discussion about the United States' foreign policy when they both expressed wishes that the president get "taken out," according to the LA Times. The teacher of the class, Sandy Whitney, construed this as a threat and took it upon herself to alert the Secret Service.
The next day, Secret Service agents took the two students out of class and questioned them without even allowing them to talk to their parents, let alone a lawyer. When the students asked if they could speak to their parents, the agents only told them, "You don't have any rights; we own you," according to Larry Felson, a teacher at Oakland High School, in an interview for the LA Times.
In today's climate of multi-colored terrorism warnings, saying that the president should be "taken out" may not be incredibly intelligent. But at the same time, few rational people would hear these words from a teenager 3,000 miles away from the president and interpret them as a real and credible threat to national security.
If anything, this incident shows that the police state that many feared would follow Sept. 11 is already here. From the surge in wiretapping to the unwarranted arrests of hundreds of men of Middle Eastern descent to the passage of civil-liberty-eroding legislation, we are slowly losing the freedoms that we are trying to protect in the first place.
If children cannot even express their feelings in the classroom without fearing our leadership, who is safe from government thought-police? What's next, children turning their parents in for suspicious conversation at the dinner table?
Something has to be done about the government's recent abuse of our constitutionally guaranteed rights before our state deteriorates into something out of a George Orwell novel. |
