Right On Coleen! Thanks for having the guts to publish this article. It means a lot coming from you.
There are a lot of good people working for the government right now that are working for change, but it’s really hard because their hands are tied. Most of them are in Damage Control mode and just trying to make it through their day-to-day activities without having to participate in anything too horrible until this administration can be replaced.

Coleen Rowley: The wrong side of ‘us vs. them’
By Coleen Rowley for the Star Tribune.

I didn’t attend Attorney General John Ashcroft’s speech last month in Minneapolis, but newspapers have quoted him as saying that Americans are “freer today than at any time in the history of human freedom.”
Well, this American disagrees! And I would venture to say that many others feel the same way — those who have been put on the “them” side of the “us vs. them” equation in the context of the administration’s “you’re either with us or against us” mentality.
It didn’t matter whether you were a career FBI agent, a decorated war veteran, a duly elected congressman or senator, a military general or even a former president, you were labeled a traitor for voicing any criticism of administration policies. You were accused of giving aid and comfort to the enemy, called a friend of Osama bin Laden and thrown to the wolves (or more accurately, the FOXes).
The intimidation in this country that’s been whipped up by this official fear and warmongering has been far more effective than any Patriot Act in whittling away our civil liberties…
It’s also no secret that this administration has used its considerable power to fight giving any real legal protection to government whistle-blowers and even attempted to water down the Sarbanes-Oxley Act’s protections recently enacted for corporate whistle-blowers.
Of course, no “whistle-blower protection” exists for public disclosures or articles such as this one. But even without it, the First Amendment should suffice and is what I rely on. However, the official warnings along these lines that I’ve repeatedly received in the course of my attempts to speak on issues of public importance seem little more than veiled threats; or are they perhaps a warning that the First Amendment is not as robust as it used to be?
There’s another large segment of our citizenry who have found themselves cast as “thems” by this “war” mentality. Complaints of discrimination against Muslim workers and reports of hate crimes against people believed to be of Middle Eastern descent have at least doubled…
Although it must be recognized that the origin of this problem was in the horror of the violent attacks themselves and that certain government leaders, such as FBI Director Robert Mueller, have undertaken efforts to reach out to affected Arab groups, the social scientists point to other government actions following 9/11 (including the government’s roundup and detention of illegal immigrants, the special registration requirements that single out students and visitors from Muslim nations, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) as sending “social signals” that are worsening these biases.
A specialist in the issues of prejudice and stereotyping has noted that people who perceive themselves under threat naturally tend to think of “who’s with me” and “who’s against me.” In any event, I doubt that many in the Arab-American segment of the populace feel “freer today,” as Ashcroft’s generality suggests.

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