Obama grabs repressive tools.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment - Column

Whistleblowers and solidarity activists beware: The Obama Administration may be coming after you. It is using the repressive powers of the state to try to send a chill down the backs of many people who might dream of opposing U.S. policy.

The WikiLeaks revelations fell like a hammer on the repressive reflex of those in power. God forbid that in a democracy the citizenry actually knows what its government is up to, but pundits and politicians alike viewed the publication of Pentagon documents and State Department cables as the gravest possible assault.

The Pentagon tossed Private Bradley Manning, who is suspected of spilling documents to WikiLeaks, into solitary confinement for the last half year "for no discernable reason other than punishment," said Psychologists for Social Responsibility. The group added that "solitary confinement is, at the very least, a form of cruel, unusual, and inhumane treatment in violation of U.S. law."

That was just the beginning. Attorney General Eric Holder opened a criminal investigation of Julian Assange and threatened to charge him under the Espionage Act of 1917. And both houses of Congress introduced bills to amend that oppressive act to make it even more oppressive. Anyone would be guilty of violating the Espionage Act if that person knowingly and willfully disseminated any classified information about U.S. human intelligence activities "in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States."

Note the immense sweep of "in any manner." And who would define "the safety," much less the "interest," of the United States?

Under this elastic language, The New York Times and The Washington Post would have committed a crime when they published the Pentagon Papers.

The dusting off and polishing of the Espionage Act should fill you with great alarm. As Naomi Wolf has argued so well, members of Congress and the White House "are manipulatively counting on Americans to have no knowledge or memory of the dark history of the Espionage Act, a history that should alert us all at once to the fact that this Act has only ever been used--was designed deliberately to be used--specifically and viciously to silence people like you and me." She reminds us that Eugene Victor Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison "for daring to read the First Amendment in public," and that "E. E. Cummings spent three and a half months in a military detention camp under the Espionage Act for the 'crime' of saying that he did...