by Dave Lindorff
www.opednews.com


President Barack Obama, referring to the violent attacks on protesters against the controversial election results in Iran’s just-completed presidential election, this week lectured Iran’s government, saying, “Peaceful dissent should never be subject to violence.”

Referring to the tens and hundreds of thousands of frustrated and angry Iranians who have taken to the streets accusing Iranian authorities of rigging the election in favor of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama said that “the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected."

But there is a certain hypocrisy going on here.

Just days ago, the ACLU of Northern California issued a press release announcing that it had filed a complaint over a Pentagon anti-terrorism training manual. That training manual, aimed at Pentagon personnel, describes domestic protests as “low-level terrorist activity.”

As Staff Attorney Ann Brick and ACLU Washington National Security Policy Council member Michael German write in their complaint letter to the Department of Defense, “For the DoD to instruct its employees that lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is deeply disturbing in and of itself. It is an even more egregious insult to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.”

The ACLU has documented that the government has been and continues a policy of spying on legitimate peaceful protest organizations—particularly those that have been opposing America’s wars and its military policies, and the new president has said nothing and done nothing about terminating this egregious assault on First Amendment freedom of speech and assembly. Given that President Obama has also done nothing since taking office to undo the USA PATRIOT Act, which codifies much activity that traditionally would have been called dissent as a crime, or to publicly reverse the policy of the last eight years during which non-violent protest organizations have been spied on and infiltrated by agents of the military and by the FBI, and during which actual protesters have been harassed, penned into fenced-off “free speech zones,” assaulted by armed police and arrested, his pontificating to Iran about the sanctity of dissent rings particularly hollow.

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