U.S. Civil Liberties on PBS

Regarding the upcoming March 5, 2004 "Now with Bill Moyers" show and an interview with Brian Terrell of Iowa's Catholic Peace Ministry:

Here are some details and background worth mentioning --

I consider it high time the public broadcast media provide coverage of what happened last November 2003 when local peace activists demonstrated at Camp Dodge and especially analysis of what ensued. The four grand jury summonses issued three months later were clearly designed to chill peace activism in Des Moines and to scare Drake administrators. But despite a handful of articles in the leading East Coast print media and the Des Moines Register, the story has not received the type of international coverage it deserves.

You might argue that this low profile is because the whole legal matter was dropped. But I sense that, in the event a grand jury actually handed down indictments, the inevitable long wait before matters came to court for a trial would cause the media to "chill out" and unplug the spotlights. I am not reading tea leaves here, but taking a sounding on just how shallow the waters of progressivism in America are currently running on the broad scale of things. In the late 60s five of us were indicted in Iowa City for conspiracy by a grand jury. But within a month, despite the fact that convictions could lead to 3-year jail terms, attention by the media evaporated. Nobody wanted to be reminded. All of us were in jail a few days (without being charged) and some of us sat in jail an additional two weeks when a judge refused to accept bail for earlier convictions from previous demonstrations. By that short time-span the matter had completely fizzled although it hung over our heads like a sword for three or more years and we had all simply gone on about our normal-for-the-sixties lives.

Here are some specific details about the "Now with Bill Moyers" show, now that the interview has been rescheduled: Moyers will run at 9 pm Central Standard Time (CST) on Channel 11 locally, but that does not mean it runs at the same time or same date in all the cities where the Iowa Peace Network's emails will be landing in someone's in-box.

In Montreal it can be seen on Mountain Lake PBS, Channel 57, Burlington, VT at 10:00 pm Eastern Time. KCTS Seattle, WA will run the show March 5 at 9 pm, but in Miami, FLA the show runs on WPBT Channel 2 March 7 at 10:30 am Eastern Time.

The best way to get a sneak preview of what is coming up with Moyers is to sign up for the program's newsletter by email at http://www.pbs.org/now/newsletter.html . You might want to keep up with your individual PBS station's programming announcements on their own website as well.

Mar 5, 2004, 10:00 pm, by the way, is also the time 'Now with Bill Moyers' will air at KQED in San Francisco. KQED, by the way, has one of the most interesting public broadcasting website's (http://www.kqed.org/ is worth browsing, much meatier than Iowa Public Television's effort at http://www.iptv.org/ where you find no local coverage of the grand jury intimidation). KQED at least covers civil liberties issues regularly. But none of the PBS sites I have seen recently are adequately covering these February 2004 attacks on peace activism in Iowa.

I end this message with a postscript pasted below showing that the show Moyers hosts has been exemplary in covering the civil liberties side to the assaults currently being carried out globally by the U.S. against people who were better off before they were 'liberated.'

-- RJP

Postscript

One public broadcasting bright spot for clarity recently was when interviewer JuJu Chang met with guest John Cole (a professor of law at Georgetown University who has been called one of America’s greatest voices for civil liberties) on Moyers' show. Professor Cole stated the following:

"There have actually been 5,000… over 5,000 people detained since September 11th in anti-terrorism initiatives undertaken by the Justice Department. And of those 5,000, only three were charged with any crime related to terrorism.

"And of those three, only one was convicted, and not actually of engaging in terrorist activity or even planning terrorist activity, but of conspiring to support some unidentified terrorist acts in the unidentified future. So you got 5,000 people locked up on pretexts who had nothing to do with terrorism.

What it does do is alienate the very community that has been targeted."

-- See the transcript at http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/civilliberties.html)

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