Re: Still, I would take Americans over the French any ole day. The French are nasty plus they have mauvais caractère. <g>
Oh, I understand you! After all, everyday life in the American surveillance state has turned so comfy, so cozy... hasn't it? Here's the latest from your Disneyesque police-state:
Antiterror tactics chill U.S. campuses
By Mark Sidel YaleGlobal Online
TUESDAY, JUNE 28, 2005
IOWA CITY Washington's war on terror may be quietly taking a toll on unsuspecting quarters - America's universities. To understand the effects of antiterror policies on the U.S. academic sector, it helps to spend time on university campuses in Australia, Singapore, Britain or other countries. From Melbourne to Edinburgh, those institutions are now filled with foreign students, many of whom would have come to the United States had they not been deterred by restrictive visa policies.
The inconsistent and ham-fisted implementation of a valid goal - preventing terrorists from entering the United States - has hindered or severely delayed many innocents from realizing their dreams of education, research, or teaching in the United States. Thousands who are not terrorists have been denied visas, and many more have been forced to wait - often for months or years - preventing them from continuing their legitimate academic work.
Even as policies have eased in the last year or two, the perception remains that U.S. universities are an unfriendly destination for the best foreign students and scholars. In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, doors to U.S. education and research clearly closed - at a time when Australia, Britain, France, Singapore, Japan and others were aggressively campaigning to attract the best and the brightest from abroad. And so the United States is increasingly losing a global competition for the finest thinkers and innovators, regardless of their countries of origin.
Antiterror policy has also led to direct interventions on campuses and the occasional silencing of debate. At Drake University in Iowa, federal authorities issued - and were later forced to rescind - a broad subpoena seeking information on student protesters against the war in Iraq. At the University of Texas in Austin, military intelligence agents walked the corridors of the law school, seeking information on "suspicious" attendees at a conference on Islam, law and gender. Most serious of all, some academics have been caught up in the web of antiterror policy.
Post-Sept. 11 policies have also affected university funding and grant distribution - a fact virtually unknown outside the quiet offices of university presidents and academic vice presidents. As the U.S. government has sought to prevent charities from being used as conduits for terrorist financing - an important goal - it has pressured foundations and other American nonprofit groups to guarantee, under penalty of law, that no philanthropic money go to ill-defined lists of terrorists and organizations. In November 2002, the Treasury Department took steps to limit overseas funding by public charities, asking nonprofit groups to comply with a substantially widened and detailed set of new provisions.
Forced onto the defensive, their grants scrutinized by the government, several important U.S. philanthropic institutions have quietly responded. Some major foundations, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, have shifted part of this risk to their grantees, requiring them to sign tough new letters taking full responsibility for broad definitions of violence or terrorism conducted with grant dollars.
Several academic institutions have protested against this move. In April 2004, the provosts of Chicago, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and three other universities wrote to the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, calling the new grant language vague and warning that it might impinge on political speech. "Whatever university administrators may think of the merits of the political views expressed," they wrote, "these fall under the protection of freedom of academic speech."
The key issues here are twofold. First, restrictive U.S. visa and security policies continue to discourage and prevent many exceptionally talented students and scholars from even attempting to pursue their studies and careers in the United States.
Second, the silencing effects of post-Sept. 11 antiterror policies continue to resonate on U.S. university campuses. Campuses are not in a new McCarthy era, but views outside the mainstream are less welcome than before - a development contributing little to the war on terrorism.
Only with continued pressure by the academic and scientific community, federal legislators, civil liberties organizations and others can these problems gradually be overcome. The damage will take years to repair.
(Mark Sidel is a professor of law at the University of Iowa. This article, adapted from his book, ''More Secure, Less Free? Antiterrorism Policy and Civil Liberties After September 11,'' is reprinted from YaleGlobal Online (yaleglobal.yale.edu).)
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