TALON

The Pentagon admitted its error and promises it won’t happen again. Yeah right.

40 years ago, it happened to a group that included me, standing on the University chapel steps with a candle in a silent vigil for peace led by a much admired professor of comparative religion, a Quaker. How they even knew about this little thing; a group of maybe 20 people standing quietly, I do not know, but the men in black had made their way to this sleepy country town to take pictures and take names of the “subversives.”

Last year when The Broward Anti-War Coalition attended the annual Fort Lauderdale Air and Sea Show, their group of about 30 passed out pamphlets about pacifism; how to be a conscientious objector. In a day of an all volunteer military, it’s hard to se how the most convoluted reasoning process could define this as subversive, but a report in the Defense Department's Threat and Local Observation Notice database, or TALON as it’s called, contains a report that “BAWC plans to counter military recruitment and the `pro-war' message with 'guerrilla theater and other forms of subversive propaganda”

Of course this Quaker group is far from being the only one listed by our dear government in all it’s Stalinesque paranoia. Of course the problem has been corrected, according to Maj. Patrick Ryder, spokesman for the office of the assistant secretary of defense, but it was accomplished because of media exposure and the ACLU, not because anyone in Rumsfeld’s private militia was bothered by constitutional or moral scruples.

Peace is a subversive notion in America and has been such for the half century that I’ve been aware of such things. Freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press; these things have been seen as subversive too and whether they are ‘faith based’ or not. Anything that smells of the freedom not to agree is subversive and of course subversion, while anything the President can define as war is going on, can be seen as collusion with anyone the President decides is an enemy. Now under the redefined Bush constitution, collusion with anyone the President or the military selects as anathema can now quite legally result in search and seizure without warrant, without Habeas Corpus and without benefit of counsel or due process and with the help of Pontius Gonzalez, torture – and all for as long as they feel like it.

Maybe it’s time we all got a little subversive for real.