The question is irresistibly upon us.

• In every state, the police or the National Guard and, at times, active-duty army troops, are conducting relentless helicopter drug-surveillance over people’s homes and property, setting up roadblocks, interrogating, detaining, harassing and terrifying residents with displays of excessive power.

• In hundreds of American cities, young people are being subjected to a nighttime’s curfew law; many have a daytime curfew as well.

• The CIA, FBI and other federal agencies are refusing to respond to subpoenas for documents issued by attorney who need them for the defence of their clients in national security cases in state courts.

• US residents are undergoing assorted harassments and penalties from the federal government for having travelled to, spent money in and/or shipped various goods to Cuba, Libya, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Yugoslavia or other nations of that ilk. Those who visit the United Nations Mission in New York or the Interests Section in Washington of some of these countries being photographed and receiving visits or phone calls from the FBI.

• The CIA is opening and reading mail to and from selected countries. The FBI is peeking at Americans’ correspondence, domestic and international, for a host of its own priorities.

• In Western states, police and federal Border Patrol agents are stopping pedestrians and motorist purely because they look Hispanic, and asking them to prove that they’re lawful residents of the United States.

• Motorists are being stopped on highways for drug checks, blacks and Hispanics being the most likely to be stopped because of the race-based drug-courier profile being employed. Blacks are being strip-searched on streets by police, who then shine a flashlight at their genital and anal areas.

• The INS is holding children (under age 18), mainly from Latin America and China, for months at a time in prison-like conditions, not informing them of their rights, interfering with their attempts to obtain lawyers and failing to facilitate contact with relatives, detaining them perhaps to force their illegal alien parents to come for them, so they can be taken into custody.

• Private corporations are recording employees’ phone calls and voice mail, reading their computer files and email, getting logs of what websites they’ve looked at, videotaping them as they work, observing them in bathrooms and locker rooms with two-way mirrors or hidden cameras, tracking their whereabouts by having them use electronic pass keys, bugging their offices, subjecting them to airport-style electronic searches, testing their urine for drugs, doing extensive security checks on their backgrounds – all this whether or not they have ever behaved poorly on the job, or whether their work involves any danger to anyone.

• At the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a random group of about 300 students is having to undergo urinalysis each week. At other schools, students are obliged to take a urine test in order to join the track team, join the chess club, go to the prom, go on a field trip or drive to and from school; some of these school policies have been approved by courts.

• New Jersey state troopers are enlisting hotel worker along the New Jersey Turnpike to tip them off about suspicious guests who, among other things, pay for their rooms in cash or receive a flurry of phone calls; hotel managers are allowing troopers, without a warrant, to leaf through the credit card receipts and registration forms of guests; the troopers are giving surveillance seminars to train employees to scrutinize guests who fit the profile of drug traffickers, the profile including race and speaking Spanish.

• The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is keeping up to date its list of aliens, radicals and other undesirables who will be rounded up and detained in times of “national emergency”.

• Juveniles imprisoned at one of the nation’s more than 50 so-called “boot camps” are forced to go on endurance runs until blood has soaked their shoes; one has already died from it; at other times, the youngsters are subjected to shackles or handcuffs.

• Women are being arrested for using crack cocaine while pregnant, even if their baby is perfectly normal at birth. Indeed the idea of the “crack baby” may well be a myth.

• Government agencies and private corporations are not giving gay couples or unmarried heterosexual couples the same benefits they offer married heterosexual couples. Homosexuals are being discharged from the military because of their sexual orientation, even if not charged with any misbehaviour.

• Task forces of international, federal, military, state and local law enforcement and intelligence agencies, as well as private entities, are employing increased interaction, abundant funds, new laws, new technologies and new octopus-like databases to spy on and harass activists of many stripes: Irish and Middle-East support groups, human rights, immigrants’ rights, civil liberties, prison reform, minorities, labour, environmental, animal rights, nuclear power and anti-imperialism activists, even if there is no evidence of violence or illegal activities.

The FBI and police are noting license plate numbers of people attending meetings and demonstrations, photographing people, paying informers to infiltrate groups, breaking into offices to steal mailing and contributor lists, rifling through files and carrying out “harassment arrests” (i.e., arrests where charges are later dropped). Individual members of these groups are receiving FBI visits at their homes and workplaces, or the Bureau is sending anonymous letters to the person’s colleagues implying that s/he is actually an informer, as well as sending assorted poison-pen letters to employers, landlords and spouses designed to produce maximum stress.

• Airport passengers are being detained for hours, even days, and are missing flights because they fir a “terrorist profile” based on their nationality, ethnicity, appearance, airport behaviour, travel itinerary or other criteria. They are being strip-searched, including body cavity searches, X-rayed, forced to take laxatives, their bowel movements monitored.

• The FBI is urging librarians to report on the books taken out by patrons with foreign-sounding names, particularly scientific and technical books. (When this program was first revealed and criticised, the FBI proceeded to do checks on the critics.)

• The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is demanding that a publisher provide it with the names of people who bought a marijuana cultivation book.

• The police are confiscating the cars of customers of prostitutes, sometimes after a female police officer has lured the man into offering her money for sex. It matters not if the car does belong to the man.

• Women desiring an abortion are finding various daunting obstacles placed in their path by state and federal authorities.

• The FBI or the police are carrying out a sting operation in order to arrest a black elected official regarded as too charismatic or “uppity”. (The repeated case of former Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry is highly instructive.)

• People are being rejected for housing and employment because of their race.

• Numerous foreign academics and activists are being refused entry to the US to attend a conference due to their ideology and/or the ideology of the conference not being to the liking of the US State Department.

• Language minorities are facing discrimination and hostility from the “English Only” movement.

• US government agents provocateurs are encouraging some people, as in the World Trade Centre bombing or within militia groups, to carry out a bombing or other terrorist act.

• The judge sentences you to prison. Then the prison officials sentence you to hell…Prisoners are being handcuffed or hogtied and forced to lap their food like dogs from plates shoved under their faces…non-violent drug offenders are thrown in with dangerous murderers, rapist and robbers, despite court orders to segregate them…guards are kicking inmates in the groin, siccing dogs on them…female prisoners are being beaten and raped by guards, sold for sex to male prisoners, taken off the grounds to work as prostitutes, forced to perform stripteases for corrections officers (14 states do not outlaw sexual contact between correctional staff and prisoners), women’s sex acts are photographed by guards, prisoners of both gender are kept naked or in their underwear, and monitored by the opposite sex…male prisoners are slain, with impunity…guards are using tear gas, Mace and pepper spray against prisoners in handcuffs or locked in their cells…prisoners are not protected from assaults, physical and sexual, by other prisoners…guards instigate fights between prisoners…inmates are kept in shackles, belly chains and handcuffs at all times when outside their cells, even in the shower…chain gangs are resurrected…guards who report abuses risk reprisals from prison officials…the California Correction Officers union makes large political contributions to public officials and prosecutors so that the guards can continue to act with impunity.

• Increasingly, those incarcerated in the US, now approaching two million in number, are seeing their rights and privileges taken away or seriously curtailed in regard to academic classes, vocational training, reading materials, sports, exercise, prison law libraries, access to free legal advice, ease of appealing their cases, access to media. They are being charged for room and board, for doctor visits, forbidden to receive packages, forced to shave off beards and long hair and remove earrings; their phone use is limited to a few minutes a week, visits to one hour a month, visiting family members are treated rudely and subjected to humiliating searches and disrobings, prisoners are transferred to other prisons very far from their families; HIV-positive and terminally ill prisoners are denied special care, asthmatics are not monitored, those on anti-psychotic medications miss their doses, hypertensives cannot get proper diets; prisoners are confined to cells for all but a few hours a week; lights are on in cells 24 hours a day.

• In a new prison being built 3,000 feet up in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, windows in each cell command spectacular views of the valley below. Prison officials are planning to smoke the windows so inmates can’t see out.

• Various levels of government agencies are seizing bank accounts of men who supposedly are deadbeat dads, but it’s later determined that they aren’t.

• Educational institutions are being forced to allow military recruiters on campus to avoid losing government grants for student aid and other purposes.

• The US military is carrying out one of its many urban exercises, such as this one described in Massachusetts: “Last week Navy Seals landed from helicopters on top of some buildings, rappelled down the buildings and had fun and games shooting and throwing dummy explosives around. They woke half the city of Lowell. Early that evening our house shook and the windows rattled violently as several helicopters flew over at no more than 200 feet.”

• A driver, stopped by the police, tapes the encounter. When he goes to the local police station to complain about his treatments, he is asked to hand the tape over. He’s then charged with illegal wiretapping.

• Intercity buses and trains are being boarded by DEA agents to conduct searches of passengers’ belongings. Passengers are assured that it’s all “voluntary”.

• Law enforcement authorities of various stripes are routinely confiscating a computer from the home of someone charged with drug something or other…or whatever…They take the computer back to the office where the good ol’ boys can have a thigh-slappin’ time reading the personal mail. There’s no telling when they’ll get around to returning the computer.

• In the Miami area and sections of New Jersey, those who don’t toe the anti-Castro party line are being subjected to a wide range of abuses. Suggesting a rapprochement with Cuba, calling for an end to the US embargo, arranging for travel to the island, shipping medicines there, etc., has on hundreds of occasions led to bombings, shootings, death threats, murder, beatings, being driven out of business, fired from a job, forced off the air. Perpetrators of these acts have enjoyed a virtual immunity from prosecution.

• In contrast to Washington’s hands-off treatment for anti-Castro terrorists, under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, there are 30 foreign “terrorist” organisations which are held in official disdain. The law prohibits persons from “knowingly providing material support or resources to a designated foreign terrorist organisation”. Thus it is that donating toys to an orphanage operated by Hamas in Jordan, or books to a school run by a Jurdish independence organisation, or collecting money for the families of Irish prisoners can be regarded as “association with a known terrorist organisation”, and be subject to federal prosecution.

• The INS is bursting into the homes of Palestinians, legally resident in the US, and dragging them out for distributing the magazine of a Palestinian organisation or raising funds for various Palestinian causes which are not involved with violence. They will be incarcerated for an indefinite term, with an indefinite fate, without criminal charges being filed against them. (Aliens, the Justice Department has long believed, and the Supreme Court has now confirmed, do not have the full protection of the Bill of Rights.)

• Various kinds of government agents or private investigators are covertly checking through your garbage, either behind your house or at the dump.

• A Federal judge is sentencing an American citizen to six months in a “halfway house” and 300 hours of community service because he drove a Libyan official, who had been denied a visa, from Mexico to Texas, or, in some equally innocuous way, treated a citizen from an Officially-Designated Enemy (ODE) country with simple human dignity.

• The police are beating up and arresting strikers and escorting scab workers into plants, thus taking the side of the employer, as the police have done virtually without exception during 150 years of industrial conflict in the United States.

• Law enforcement officers in northern California, taking the side of logging interests once again, are pressing cotton swabs saturated with pepper spray (600 times hotter than cayenne pepper) into the eyes of non-violent people chained to each other, who are protesting the felling of ancient redwoods; protestors are shrieking and writhing in pain as the solution takes effect.

• Banks, telephone companies, utility companies, credit card companies, airlines, bus companies, rental car outlets, storage facilities, hotels and motels and all manner of other private institutions are providing various local, state and federal authorities with all the information about their customers they desire under the ever-expanding legal authorities being granted to law enforcement bodies with scarcely any public hearings or debate.

• States are selling confidential wage, driving and other information about their residents to private information companies and other enterprises.

• Scenarios along the lines of the following from Savannah, Ga. are probably taking place elsewhere: Without warning, a team of armed county and school system officers periodically entered the schools, ordered everyone into the hallways, used dogs to sniff the students’ belongings, and scanned the students’ bodies with metal detectors. One of the high-school teachers was very upset by this – “Because I teach the Constitution,” she explained – and made her feelings known to the authorities. A police officer told her principal that because of her “attitude” problem, she might have to be detained or restrained during future surprise raids. During a subsequent raid, the teacher’s son was the only student out of 1,500 to be individually searched. Later, cars in the parking lot were searched, and the police claimed to have found a marijuana cigarette in the teacher’s car. The Board of Education suspended her and she was later fired.

• In various schools students are being suspended for bringing a bottle of the non-prescription painkiller Advil to school; dying their hair an “unacceptable” colour; giving a classmate a Midol tablet for relief of menstrual cramps; bringing “drugs” to school – lemon drops; bringing a gift-wrapped bottle of wine as a Christmas present for a teacher; another is punished for carrying a small paring knife to cut her lunch fruit; yet another, a 9-year-old boy, is punished for waving his drawing of a gun in class; a six-year-old boy is sent home for planning a kiss on a girl’s cheek; eight-year-old girls are strip-searched in school, in a search for stolen money (not found); pre-schoolers to 6^th grade students are given genital exams as part of their physicals; high schools employ random Breathalyser testing to ferret out students who have imbibed alcohol; a 14-year-old girl is strip-searched and suspended for two weeks because she tells her classmates she understands how the Columbine shooters felt; and high school students are questioned by police who want to know if a chemistry textbook was for bomb-making.

• A high-school teacher is being suspended without pay for teaching mathematics using real-life problems, such as: “Jerome wants to cut his half-pound of heroin to make 20 percent more profit. How many ounces of cut will be needed?”

• Juveniles in reform schools are being hogtied and thrown into isolation cells for weeks at a time; placed in straightjackets; standing with noses pressed against a wall for as long as 16 hours a day; handcuffed naked to beds. Juveniles are being jailed with adult criminals even for just being runaways.

• Prisoners in a state correctional facility who staged a peaceful demonstration against the transfer of other inmates to out-of-state gulags against their will, are being punished with up to a year of solitary, and their time in solitary will not count toward their sentences, according to the Department of Corrections.

• A federal court, created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, is receiving applications for authorisation of electronic surveillance within the United States and is rubber-stamping them. In its first 20 years, the court received some 10,000 applications from the Justice Department on behalf of the FBI and the National Security Agency. By all accounts, only on was rejected, on a technicality.

• Drunk driving, generally defined in the 1980s as a blood alcohol concentration of .15 was later defined as .10 and then, in some states, as .08. If .08 doesn’t do, will Congress and the states go for .06, and then .04? In any event, the scientific validity of these cut-off points has been questioned by the federal government itself.

• People are being harassed, arrested and/or having their property confiscated for engaging in certain forms of gambling, even in their own homes. Other forms of gambling, which are legitimised by the local or state government, proceed happily unmolested.

• Hundreds of political prisoners are rotting away in American prisons. As US-based human rights groups have testified before the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations in Geneva, these people are being held “as a direct result of actions undertaken in furtherance of a political or social vision”. They go back to the black liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly members of the Black Panthers; others are native American activists, anti-nuclear activists, opponents of US interventionist policies in Puerto Rico, Central America and elsewhere. A number of these prisoners were set up by FBI dirty tricks under the notorious COINTELPRO (counter-intelligence program), aimed at “neutralising” Black Panthers and white radicals.

• Aliens who have come to the US from oppressive countries, seeking political asylum, are winding up in Kafkaesque nightmares, wasting away in prison under intolerable conditions, without criminal charges being filed against them, some dying because of unattended health problems, forgotten about until perhaps Amnesty International or some other human rights organisation takes up their case. The FBI and the INS are using secret evidence – which neither the accused nor their attorneys have a right to examine – to detain these people and ultimately deport them, even if they are married to American citizens. The aliens are often those who decried human rights abuses in their home country and fled torture and other retribution from their government, which may be putting pressure on Washington to silence and return them by providing the evidence in question.

• The Boy Scouts are rejecting some young man as a member because he is an atheist, or rejected an adult as a troop leader because the person is homosexual.

• Some of the more than 10,000 FBI agents are spending their time enticing people on the internet to purchase child porno, or the G-men are pretending online to be a 13-year-old girl in order to lure a man to a meeting. When the man shows up, he’s arrested.

• Many foreigners, in the US legally, are sitting in prisons, charged with a crime, without their country’s consulate having been informed, without the prisoner being told that he has the right to contact his consulate. Some of them are sitting on death row.

• The IRS, acting as judge, jury and executioner, is subjecting taxpayers to nightmarish collecting processes, ordering them to pay taxes they don’t owe, failing to credit them for payments made, seizing their cars and bank accounts, boosting tax penalties to meet office quotas and generally wrecking havoc in people’s lives; an audit is being carried out upon an individual because he or she has upset someone in a very high position in the government.

• Monetary rewards are being paid out to students who report other students for smoking, drinking alcohol, using drugs or violating other school rules.

• First-time drug offenders, carrying no weapons, including many who were simply couriers or played peripheral roles in drug trafficking, and others with no record of violence or involvement in sophisticated criminal activity, are being sentenced to very long prison terms, with no chance of parole.

• Under “three-strikes” laws, people are being sentenced to 25-to-life terms for petty theft, despite the fact that the three-strikes laws were designed for violent crimes.

• The grand jury system is running amok. Virtually all federal cases use it to obtain indictments. Neither the accused nor his or her lawyer is there so they can’t confront accusers. The system is used as an instrument of terror – relatives testifying against one another with no confidentiality privilege with respect to family members other than husbands and wives: parents called to testify against their children, children against their parents, brother against sister. It lacks due process. It’s another secret tool of an expanding executive branch.

• Those wishing to experiment with their mind in the privacy of their home, those seeking transcendence and nirvana, are being punished by the state for their sin. Young men are being sentenced to up to 20 years in prison for possession of less than a gram of LSD, with no evidence presented of them having done any harm to any other person.

• Human Rights Watch is charging state governments, as it did in New York, of violating international laws by sentencing drug dealers to prison terms similar to those given to violent offenders. A person convicted in New York of selling two ounces of cocaine receives a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life, the same penalty meted out to a murderer.

• More states are joining the frenzy to make publicity available the names, addresses, biographies (often with detrimental erroneous information) and photos of convicted sex offenders for the rest of their lives, driving these people from their neighbourhoods and jobs; this is being done regardless of whether the popular a priori view of sex offenders being untreatable is true or not, or whether they’re undergoing therapy or not.

• Many hundreds of school books are being dropped from curriculum’s because of complaints by parents, religious groups and others. Books in public libraries are under attack as well, books which no one is obliged to read – Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, Oliver Twist, The Grapes of Wrath, The Diary of Anne Frank, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and numerous other lesser-known novels, as well as countless books of history, social studies, geography, even home economics. School newspapers, other curriculum materials, music and art, are also being targeted.

• Individuals who wish to end their lives with dignity and with a minimum of suffering are being denied the assistance of a doctor by state legislatures, the Catholic Church and citizen’s groups. In Oregon, after passage by 60 percent of a referendum allowing doctor-assisted suicide, the DEA warned that physicians who help someone commit suicide will risk their licenses to write prescriptions; whether this is ever enforced or not, the threat will have its effect.

• Numerous people who could get exceedingly welcome relief from dreadful symptoms by the use of marijuana are denied the legal right to do so. In states where voters have passed initiatives legalising the medical use of marijuana, the authorities are throwing up obstacles to make its practice as difficult as they can make it. In Washington, DC, Congress has in effect nullified the passage of such a referendum.

• Many people are being placed on death row. Some of them, if they’re lucky, will join the 75 men and women released from death row between 1976 and 1998, their cases reversed because they had been found innocent after all

• Hundreds of cities are employing highly armed and trained Special Weapons and Tactics Teams (SWAT), based on military special operations models, and told they’re part of a “war” on crime. Ready to terrorise the enemy (the citizens) with automatic assault rifles, tanks and grenade launchers, they are called out even in non-crisis situations, choosing a neighbourhood and swooping onto street corners, forcing pedestrians to the ground, searching them, running warrant checks, taking photos and entering all the new “intelligence” into a state database from computer terminals in each patrol car. As they carry out this exercise, they do not trip over many members of the Fortune 500.

• A known militant, but non-violent, opponent of the president is being removed by the Secret Service from a site where the president is going to speak, then released after the speech.

• Defendants and prisoners appearing in court, who don’t know their place, are being given 50,000 volt shocks with a torture device known as an electronic security belt.

• Young men are registering with Selective Service, making themselves subject to be drafted for a future war of “national security” – as defined solely by the government, no opposing arguments accepted. Failure to register is punishable by a large fine, imprisonment and/or permanent loss of all federal financial aid and employment.

• Aliens are being denied citizenship for refusing to agree to bear arms in defence of the United States because of their pacifist beliefs, a reason not acceptable to the INS, which insists on a religious basis.

• DEA, ATF, INS, FBI DIA, Secret Service, US Forest Service, National Park Service, Sheriff’s Departments, National Guard and/or other official cowboys, wearing black suits, ski masks and the like, forming massively armed mobs of screaming, swearing agents, while helicopters chop above, are battering down doors, raiding people’s homes, smashing up furniture, beating up residents, handcuffing them, manhandling pregnant women, terrifying children, separating them from their parents, shooting people dead, looking for drugs or individuals which are often not there – this jihad being the outcome of no more than a tip from an informant.

• Forced labour is thriving: people compelled to work off their welfare grants, with no prospect of real employment, sometimes at sub-minimum wages, or no wages at all; convicted defendants sentenced to “community service”; conscientious objectors obliged to do alternative service, for a period longer than military service, thus being punished for exercising their conscience, inmates denied vital privileges if they refuse to work in prison, many producing for private companies, who get away with paltry wages, no benefits, no unions. (Some prison-made products are being exported, exactly what the US has condemned China for.)

• US embassies abroad are surveilling selected American travellers, fingered by a joint effort of the FBI and the State Department Passport Office.

• The INS and the US Border Patrol at the Mexican border are killing or physically mistreating large numbers of would-be immigrants. In INS centres around the country, thousands of immigrants are being held under inhumane conditions, including heads pushed into toilets, forced drugging and being made to kneel naked and chant “America is Number One”.

• The INS is illegally seizing files of social agency employees working with undocumented immigrants. Lawyers and others working on behalf of victims of abuse are finding it almost impossible to file a complaint and receive a response from the INS or the Border Patrol. Media and human rights groups are virtually excluded.

• Demonstrations against detention centres and other INS practices are being brutally quashed in Los Angeles by a phalanx of local and federal armed forces – riot squads, mounted units, ATF agents, INS commando units, water cannons, tear gas…many protestors are being injured and arrested; some of those not carrying proper documents are being deported directly from a police station.

• Indigent defendants are waiting in jail for many months before the court appoints a lawyer, and then experience a further wait before they have a chance to speak with the lawyer.

• The notion of bail is rapidly eroding. We’re raised to believe that for other than a capital offence, reasonable bail must be offered. We have a long history of not holding people in custody until their guilt has been determined. That’s not true anymore. We call the new concept “preventive detention”.

• Citizens are being sentenced to inordinately long prison terms, often for life, for providing information, or merely attempting to do so, to a country not named the United States of America. The disclosure of the information – in some cases already publicly available, or declassified before the arrest – would typically cause no actual harm at all to the United States, nor to anyone else on earth, except that the act of passing it to an alien nation grates on the sensibilities of those who professionally play the secrets game and the enemies game. These professional players are fond of announcing that the “betrayal” has caused “irreparable harm” or “incalculable damage” to US national security. In some cases, the information has been passed only to the FBI, in a sting operation, yet the duped person is put away for decades.

• The federal government is busily creating new documents, at the rate of some five million a year, which are unavailable to the ordinary citizens of the republic because they are stamped with words like “Secret”, “Top Secret”, or “Eyes Only”.

• Workers in the Defence Departments “Area 51”, in the Nevada desert, are suffering and dying from inhaling toxic chemicals that spew from the burning of hazardous wastes in huge open pits. They suffer severe, persistent respiratory distress, cancers, aching guts, ugly crusty scales, cracked and bleeding skin, “tissues filled with industrial toxins rarely seen in humans”…But because of the ultra secrecy surrounding Area 51, they can’t obtain information about what chemicals they’ve been exposed to in order to get appropriate medical treatment, and they can’t claim worker’s compensation because Area 51 can’t be investigated. The place in subject to no law of the land save national security.

• Black-uniformed officers in laced-up black boots, wearing black berets, with name tags missing, are descending without warning on a prison, hauling prisoners, some without clothes, from their beds, shackling them and beating them, jumping on their backs, an inmate’s head is driven into a wall, a sickening cracking sound, the prisoner’s screams, blood splatters the wall and the ground. All to demonstrate that the Correction Commissioner doesn’t “coddle” prisoners.

• Human Rights Watch and the ACLU are finding once again that the United States is violating Article 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, ratified by the US in 1992, which requires that all prisoners and detainees “be treated with humanity and with respect to the inherent dignity of the human person”. (In fiscal year 1999, there were 2,324 brutality claims against the NYPD, which kills someone every ten days on average, often unarmed, at times in handcuffs, or in jail; police officers guilty of such actions are not being disciplined; some are later promoted.)

• You’re exercising your precious freedom to vote and the only candidates presented to you with more than a snowball-in-hell’s chance of winning are those whose ideologies enable them to raise about a half million dollars to contest a seat in the House, about five million for the Senate, and about a hundred million for the White House. Or, increasingly, the candidates themselves are multi-millionaires.

• In California, teenagers are being stopped, harassed, photographed and questioned by police purely because their clothing is thought to be gang attire, or of gang colours.

• As in Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Indianapolis in recent years, police in large cities are exhibiting a remarkable level of disdain for the laws of the land: giving false information to courts to secure search warrants, or acting without warrants, committing perjury on the stand, allowing the results of botched tests of drugs to be used in criminal cases, staging drug raids in order to steal drugs, money, guns and other valuables, taking money and drugs from dealers in exchange for immunity, robbing and beating people on the streets of their precinct.

• New cases are being added to the more than 60,000 people using the city of New York for being illegally strip-searched after being arrested for minor offences.

• Public relations firms, hired by large corporations and business associations, are utilizing hefty fees, lawyers, detectives, spies and public opinion against food, environmental and other activists and authors who pose a threat to one of their special-interest clients, trying to make the activists look foolish, if not criminal, as they exercise their political rights.

• NBC is cancelling an appearance by a nuclear activist because she has criticised General Electric, which owns the network. Another nuclear activist or author, or opponent of military spending, is unwelcome at CBS because it belongs to Westinghouse; while yet another finds doors closed at ABC because of having treated the Disney conglomerate with less than reverence; ditto at CNN, owned by the AOL-Time-Warner octopus; while the advertisers are increasingly influencing the content of the news stories.

• During a new US invasion abroad, the media is being severely restricted as to what it can report to the American people about the war; reporters are required to submit their copy to the Pentagon censor, and are told where they can go, what they can film, who they can interview; those who don’t toe the line are transferred by their employer under heavy Pentagon pressure.

• The FBI is placing ads in Vietnamese-language and Russian-language newspapers in the US asking immigrants to report on suspected spies amongst their numbers.

• A prison inmate’s sacramental confession to a Catholic priest is surreptitiously being taped by prison officials. The personal mail of inmates, including those awaiting trial, is being read.

• The FBI is staging photos used in a trail, and its crime laboratory is producing scientifically flawed, misleading or altered evidence benefiting the prosecutor’s case against a defendant, even allowing a judge to be impeached on false charges. A Bureau official is destroying an internal report critical of an FBI action in a particular case and not disclosing its existence to prosecutors or defence attorneys, or the Bureau is allowing inaccurate and/or incomplete “expert” testimony during court proceedings, tilting it in such a way as to incriminate the accused. A veteran FBI agent who blows the whistle on such goings-on is being harassed and suspended.

• Medical records containing people’s most intimate personal information are being gathered and stored in commercial data banks maintained by hospital networks, HMOs, drug companies and insurance companies. These organisations are exerting increasing pressure on doctors and therapists to reveal information about their patients. Corporations are requiring employment applicants to give them full rights to their medical records. Law enforcement and national security agencies are increasingly gaining access to this information. Personal prescription drug information is being marketed.

• Police are setting up more and more cameras to observe the citizenry on public streets.

• Police sting operations are ensnaring gay men and charging them with “soliciting lewdness”, under a state anti-sodomy law which prohibits homosexual couples, but not heterosexual couples, fro having consensual oral sex in private. Married men leaving gay sex clubs are being photographed by police, who then extort money from them by threatening to inform their wives or bosses.

• Students are being suspended by their schools for refusing to stand up for the American flag or recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or for something they wrote in the school newspaper or on their own personal home webpage.

• The INS is sending letters to immigrants who have been applying to legalise their status. The letters tell the immigrants to come to the federal building, bring some ID, and the INS will give them a work permit good for a year. When the immigrants eagerly arrive at the INS office, they are promptly arrested and deported.

• Police are stopping cars on the road, stealing money and other goods from the passengers, or taking bribes to refrain from making (false) arrests.

• Undercover vice squads in Arizona, wearing black ski masks, are seizing hundreds of copies of an adult newspaper from vending machines.

• Copies of the Cuban newspaper Gramma are being seized by customs officials in one American city or another. Videos taken in Iraq are being seized by Customs from returning American citizens.

• Mentally ill people are languishing in prisons all over the country, receiving no treatment and often suffering physical and sexual abuse from other inmates and guards.

• Some persons judged to be mentally ill or retarded or in other ways regarded as “misfits” are being sterilised without their knowledge in secluded corners of various state institutions.

• The DEA, other federal and state agents and police are seizing houses, boats, cars, airplanes, real estate, furnishings, bank accounts and other assets belonging to people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking, or belonging to their spouses, often without a conviction, and whether or not the assets seized were tied to the alleged crime. In one state, a man is losing his home and his business for selling two grams of cocaine. In another, numerous cars are being confiscated from new car dealerships for failing to report all cash transactions involving more than $10,000. Elsewhere, a 75-year-old grandmother is being dispossessed of her home for the sins of her fugitive, drug-dealing son.

• The concept of equal access to legal remedy and justice is being invalidated every day after a decade of deep government cutbacks to the legal aid program, thus robbing the poor of what is often their sole defence against unscrupulous landlords, scam artists, battering spouses, home foreclosure, consumer fraud and many other legal predicaments.

• People going to police stations to lodge complaints against officers are being unceremoniously ushered out.

• Police in Los Angeles are carrying out a pre-dawn commando raid of more than 100 homes in a fishing expedition for individuals and contraband, yielding very little but many frightened and upset residents.

• In many cities, the homeless are being rounded up in parks and other sites supposedly open to the public and taken to places where respectable citizens, particularly tourist, will not be forced to cast eyes upon them.

• People who bring food to the homeless in public parks are being arrested, charged with giving out food without a permit, trespassing or whatever else the authorities can think of; cooking equipment and vehicles are being confiscated.

• An FBI sting operation is entrapping police officers in Washington, DC and elsewhere by offering them bribes to escort supposed drug couriers, resulting in the officers being sentenced to as much as 55 years in prison without the possibility of parole – a veritable life sentence.

• In many states, thousands of people are having their driver’s licenses suspended for six months for any drug conviction, whether or not their offences were related to operation of a motor vehicle.

• Numerous individuals are being harassed and/or arrested because of a “positive alert” from a drug-sniffing dog even though law enforcement and scientific circles have known for many years that most US currency has some amount of cocaine or other drug stuck to it – in Los Angeles it was found that more than 75 percent of all the paper money in circulation was so tainted.

• Several other extreme police brutality cases like Rodney King in Los Angeles and Abner Louima in Brooklyn are taking place, but there are no video cameras or witnesses observing, or the victim dies and his death is ruled accidental or a heart attack.

• A public official who questions the War On Drugs is paying an awful price, like former surgeon General Jocelyn Elders whose son was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling one-eight of an ounce of cocaine to an undercover police officer. His arrest took place five months after the sale,  on a warrant issued a week after his mother suggested that the government study the legalisation of  drugs.

• Then there’s the thing called Waco.