Calling America the land of the free is increasingly as misleading as Fox News claiming to be Fair and Balanced. The Patriot Act has given the state unfettered access into citizens’ lives. The Department of Homeland Security keeps the nation wound up with terror alerts. Record numbers of foreign journalists are barred access to the country, while the US military continues to kill journalists oversees, such as this week’s strafing in Iraq.

Now, though, things in this climate of fear and repression have got ridiculous — people are being arrested for their t-shirts!

Backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Nicole and Jeff Rank — arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts to the president’s July 4 appearance at the West Virginia Capitol — filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday alleging their First Amendment rights were violated.

The couple were booted out in handcuffs after revealing T-shirts with President Bush’s name crossed out on the front. Nicole Rank’s shirt had the words “Love America, Hate Bush” on the back and Jeff Rank’s had “Regime change starts at home” on the back.

“What is at stake here transcends politics,” Jeff Rank said at a news conference at the Capitol. “What is at stake is the right of all Americans — Democrats, Republicans and Independents, all Americans — to peacefully voice their dissent to their government.”

He continued: “Unless common citizens like ourselves are willing to stand and fight for their civil liberties, those very liberties our great nation was founded upon, ideals of freedom that keep us strong today, will wither and erode until they are gone forever.”

It emerges that there are other instances of t-shirt intimidation by the state. Lawyer Stephen Downs was arrested, handcuffed and charged with trespassing at a New York mall after refusing to remove his t-shirt, which read, “Give peace a chance”. Elsewhere, 16-year-old Bretton Barber was sent home from high school for wearing an anti-Bush T-shirt bought on the Internet.

Censorship is everywhere, and the corporate muck in too helping muzzle any dissent.

As Linda Heard in the Arab News notes the anti-war comic strip Doonesbury was dropped from 38 US publications because its characters criticized the American president. In the same month Whoopee Goldberg got the heave ho from both Slim fast and Celebrity Squares for making an anti-Bush joke. Also in July, Clear Channel Communications — which last year was accused of banning the Dixie Chicks from the air over anti-war remarks made by the group’s lead singer — attempted to block a billboard from being hoisted above New York’s Times Square. The board read: “Democracy is Best Taught by Example, Not by War”.

Last November, CBS banned a documentary, which was less than flattering about the life and times of Ronald Reagan — one of two former presidents George W. Bush most admires.

In the run up to this month’s Republican convention there was a reprehensible security clampdown that resulted in hundreds of protestors being held without charge for more than 40 hours, which a criminal court judge pronounced illegal, before ordering their immediate release. Censorship by illegal incarceration.

Cartoonist Michael Ramirez was visited by a Secret Service agent after publication in the Los Angeles Times of a cartoon depicting a gun being pointed at the president’s head — a spoof of a 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. The agent asked: “Do you think Bush’s security detail should have felt threatened by your cartoon?”

Freedom under Mr Bush is clearly not what it used to be.

Hamid Karzai actually took a trip outside the confines of the “green zone” in Kabul this week. Sadly it was short-lived affair, as his American bodyguards decided to abort the trip after a rocket attack hit near where his helicopter landed. According to US Major Mark McCann, the rockets fell 300 metres from the landing site and Karzai was not in any imminent danger. Rather optimistic spin, even for the Army so replete with doublethink and euphemism that civilian deaths are stylised as “collateral damage”.

The incident underlines some questions about Afghanistan : does Karzai’s government actually control anything outside Kabul? With this sort of security, are free and fair elections possible on October 9? Would any elected Afghan President actually control anything outside Kabul? And if not, what is the use of holding elections if they are ultimately to elect a President with absolutely no control over Afghanistan?

Tough questions indeed. NATO’s peace-keeping force is scheduled to be “8,500 troops in theatre over the period of the elections” according to the International Security Assistance Force spokesman Squadron Leader Peter Maskell. There is a big “but” proviso to this figure though: currently the NATO force’s election security arrangements call for one company (approx 200 men) of Italians to be based outside Kabul, in Mazar-e-Sharif. They will be stationed in their barracks. This seems to the little red email to be rather sparse coverage for guaranteeing the safety and fairness of the 25,000 polling stations, 5,000 counting centres, 130,000 polling officials and reported 10.5 million voters across the country. Especially given that the current president can’t seem to stray outside Kabul without being attacked with rockets.

Perhaps the US forces’ announcement of an extra battalion of 700 paratroopers to join the 20,000 or so US Troops already in Afghanistan can help take up the slack. Most of the US forces however are involved in Operation Mountain Storm, the latest in a seemingly endless series of operations all named Mountain [insert macho-sounding thing here] aimed at rounding up the elusive Taliban. Or Taliban remnants or illegal combatants or whatever the current doublethink term is. Operation Enduring Budget Freedom at its finest.

Of course one has to bear in mind that the sort of logistics involved in supplying the modern US Army means that more than a few of these troops are “support” rather than “combat” troops (their primary role is shipping rather than fighting).

Based on numbers alone then, the election seems set to be a farce — being generous and assuming all the troops are available for election duty it works out as a ratio of 1.18 troops per polling station, or 5.9 per counting centre, or 0.23 per election official. But as stated before, NATO are to be confined to barracks, and US combat troops will be mostly tied up in the mountains. If we take the polling stations and counting centres together as separate entities to be defended and overseen, there are only enough troops in country, theoretically to post one guy outside each. Given that this is unlikely to happen, these elections are open to intimidation, blackmail, bribery or whatever any budding warlord with a modest militia armed with guns wants to do.

As Sunday’s events in Herat show, there’s no guarantees that even as innocuous a move as a “promotion” of a government official can go smoothly, which does not bode well for a free and fair election. Herat’s rioting also highlights the fact that any elected president’s control over the country as a whole is far from assured, which may well render even a 100% fair and free election ultimately meaningless, if the government formed is powerless to enforce any of its policies.

How much power does the current government have? Putting aside the helicopter incident, take for example Bush administration’s latest annual report on drugs to congress listing Afghanistan as once again being the world’s major producer of opium (a UN report places it as being the producer of 75% of the world’s opium). Bush’s report also noted that the Afghan government “lacked the capacity” to tackle the problem in Afghanistan ’s provinces.

Hamid Karzai feels the opium trade helps terrorism — presumably by extension that means the Taliban. Which might be true, but seems somewhat at odds with the Taliban’s past record and their notable success in stamping out the opium trade. The governor of Central Bank said recently that opium currently makes up to a third of the country’s economy. A far cry from the evil terrorist-supporting Taliban days. So the little red email dares conclude that the provincial warlords in and out of the Northern Alliance are more likely behind the recent rise in poppy pushing than the Mullahs of the Taliban. Should we be wrong, of course, it would seem to us to put the lie to the US claims of having broken the Taliban and Al Qaeda if the few “remnants” of these own a third of the GDP. Certainly the Karzai government can claim nowhere near those sorts of revenues. Opium production is of course illegal, so if a third of your country’s economy is going on against your government’s wishes, what sort of control does that government have? Not much at all.

The US government is no doubt hoping that the election will be free enough and fair enough to endorse their invasion and occupation, and their favoured candidate, Hamid Karzai. With a worst-case scenario (which is what seems to be shaping up) the election will also be close enough to the US elections to give Bush the publicity boost of holding Afghan elections, without time for any critics to voice the obvious conclusion as the realisation kicks in — that the elections were devoid of meaning and divorced from reality.

I have indicated it was not in conformity with the UN charter from our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal — Kofi Annan 16/9/04

United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan finally had the balls to say what we all knew anyway. Speaking to the BBC, he said: “I hope we do not see another Iraq-type operation for a long time - without UN approval and much broader support from the international community.”

The attack dogs of the right wing across the world wasted no tine to lambaste the UN leader, with one Republican labelling his comments “outrageous” and Aussie PM John Howard saying the UN was “paralysed”.

Obviously, Annan has much to do to regain the world’s confidence for not being able to constrain Bush; his organisation has never looked more flimsy Indeed, it looks like its forerunner the imperilled League of Nations, though 70 years Bush is its nemesis not Hitler.

A legal question does arise from the BBC interview though: now that Kofi Annan has called the US’ invasion of Iraq illegal, does that make the 140,000 US soldiers in the ‘sovereign’ country ‘illegal combatants’.

Iraq, meanwhile, has descended into greater chaos with both the Independent and the Guardian (LINK) in Britain leading with reports on how the civil war is unfolding in the country. The latest high level Pentagon briefing on the outlook for the concession (err liberated country) in 2005 is pessimistic, also suggesting civil war is inevitable.

On the likelihood of elections, Annan was sceptical. “You can not have credible elections if the security conditions continue as they are now,” he said.

Bush is due to address the UN General Assembly next week. The US’ unpaid debts to the UN dwarf everyone else’s put together.

You know Putin must have done something wrong when even an past-master of the coverup like Colin “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” Powell attacks him, saying the man “is pulling back on some of the democratic reforms.”

The burials were not even over before Vladimir Putin used the horror of the school attack in Belsan to totally cement his power, effectively ending regional politics.

There was uproar in some quarters. The Financial Times said Putin “took a chainsaw to the fragile roots of Russian democracy,” while the Polish daily Rzeczpospolita warned, “Farewell, democracy.” Some of the Russian press dubbed the goings on ‘Black September’ — a reference to the Bolsheviks sudden seizure of power in September, 1917. Has the country suffered a coup d’état by its own leader, the Moscow Times mused.

Prior to this week, the former KGB man, who took over from the decrepit Boris Yeltsin, was considered the most powerful Russian leader since Brezhnev. Since his announcement Monday that he would appoint all 89 regional governors, instead of popular elections which were established in the 1993 Russian constitution, he has assumed Stalinesque power. Putin was one of the quickest to realise the potential for state control and coercion in the wake of the airplane attacks on New York and Washington, playing the War on Terror™ card straight away and repeatedly across his vast country and particularly in his personal bête noir Chechnya. Stalin hated Chechnya too, consigning the entire population at huge hardship to the Urals.

In Putin’s announcement, the largest political shake up since the fall of the Soviet Union included scrapping district elections which fill half the 450 seats of the Duma, the country’s lower house of parliament. Putin insisted this Kremlin power grab was part of  the “complex of counter-terrorist measures”.

Bush, followed his secretary of state on Wednesday questioning the legitimacy of democracy in Russia. He said he was “concerned about the decisions that are being made in Russia that could undermine democracy.”

No one thought to explain the Patriot Act properly to Dubya maybe.

Even vodka pickled former president Yeltsin voiced his concerns. “The stifling of freedoms and the rolling back of democratic rights will mean, among other things, that the terrorists will have won,” he said.

In neighbouring Georgia meanwhile the population is fretting that Putin might use his new found power to invade the country under the guise of rooting out Chechens in the Panskiya Gorge. Next door fighting is likely to flare between the Christian Ossetians and the Muslim Ingushetians, as tension rises from the school attack. The pair last fought back in 1992 over territorial disputes.

A significant figure, given Moscow’s tilt towards totalitarianism, re-emerged this week. Former spook Putin, who back in 1989 when the Wall came down was in Berlin shredding documents quicker than you can say “das vadanya”, has personally seen to it that the statue of the founder of the Cheka, Lenin’s forerunner to what would become the KGB in the 1950s, was resurrected.

Felix Dzerzhinsky presided over the Red Terror and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. In August 1991, his statue was torn down to much jubilation from its plinth in Lubyanka Square. Made of bronze it was so heavy it allegedly took a crane from the US embassy to help haul it down, a la Saddam statue TV moment in this year’s Iraq war.

Now this man is back on his plinth, someone Putin admires, though the nation despises. He was responsible for the deaths of as many as half a million people in six years and founded the horrific Gulag system, that makes Guantanamo look like Waikiki.

Even Dzerzhinsky would be impressed with the way his latter day protégé Putin has managed to muzzle the entire population, its media, its politicians and its businessmen.

It might have been five years since landmines were banned but 15,000 people still die every year from these machines of random evil. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines estimates that 40 percent of those victims are children.

More than 80 nations are plagued by mines.

This week the Austrian ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Wolfgang Petritsch, called for the destruction of the estimated 200 million landmine stockpiles. Since 1997, 37 million have been destroyed.

“The greatest harm to the civilian population and children is from landmines,” Petritsch said on Wednesday.

Speaking in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, he said: “We must eliminate this weapon. A lot has been achieved but much more needs to be done. The human devastation of this weapon is immense, as is the extent to which it poses a significant obstacle to social and economic development.”

Addis Ababa has played to host to an African Union meeting this week discussing how to rid the continent of landmines. Sub-Saharan Africa is the worst hit place on earth for mines, which leaves huge tracts of land fallow.

148 countries have so far signed up to the Ottawa Convention banning the use of anti-personnel landmines, including 48 African states.

Egypt, Ethiopia, Libya, Morocco and Somalia are the only countries in Africa that have not ratified the 1997 convention.

In the seven years since the treaty was enforced casualties caused by mines around the world has halved.

According to the Swiss-based Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian Demining, the three largest perpetrators of producing these nasty death-traps are China, Russia and Singapore.

Up next in the drive to cut out landmines is a global convention in November, the Nairobi Summit on a Mine-Free World.

Latest reports are that 10,000 are dying each month in Darfur, and the situation is clearly not improving. More than 200 refugees are dying every day in North and West Darfur, according to a shock assessment by the World Health Organisation. Once again when it comes to Africa, it’s a case of too little, too late. The umming and aahing over whether or not the travesty in this western area of Sudan constituted genocide was a death sentence in itself. By not decreeing it a genocide — gen·o·cide n. — systematic killing of a racial or cultural group, according to Dictionary.com — the world’s governments were not compelled to react. Now, the suffering has been going on for more than 18 months, becoming acute six months ago. The acknowledgement from the US and others won’t bring back to life the 75,000 who have already perished.

Darfur is nothing new regrettably. In Congo three million people have died over the past six years, the previous civil war in Sudan took about 2 million lives, and carried on for nearly 20 years. And then there is the carnage of Rwanda where 800,000 died, including 500,000 in 100 days. Each time the West remained quiet.

And now there are murmurings of a similar plight erupting in Angola , a couple of thousand kilometres to the southwest. The United Nations reported Wednesday “four people have died and nine more have been injured in ethnic unrest sparked by a shortage of water in Angola’s southern Huila province”.

No rainfall in Huila, Cunene and Namibe provinces in the southwest, home to thousands of nomadic cattle farmers and their 1.5 million head of cattle, has ignited tension in the area. The nomads have seen there livelihoods crumbled in the last five years as the government has granted huge land concessions to farming giants, edging them out to an area now devoid of water.

The World Food Programme estimates more than 25,000 are in need of immediate food assistance. Quick action would save this latest sub-Saharan tragedy from becoming another genocide.

An otherwise tepid election in Hong Kong on Sunday, that by and large did little to advance the democracy movement, saw the 48-year-old famous dissident and little red email contributor Leung Kwok-hung, AKA Long Hair, he of the Marxist ideals and Che Guevara t-shirts, elected with more than 60,000 votes in the New Territories West district. For once Long Hair will have access to the other side of the barricades, that is if he is allowed into the Legislative Election who have already warned the April Fifth Movement party member t-shirts are not allowed inside the chamber. Mr Leung rebutted the comment asking what difference it would make. All the old school politicians are frightened by this maverick who admits after being used to being thrown out by the security guards it will be surprise to be helped in by the guards fending off the media. Leung will only take HK$16,000 of his monthly salary, giving the rest of the HK$58,000 a month pay package to charity.

Albert Cheng was also elected. This is the man who was controversially booted off the airwaves for his political views and cited in a recent Human Rights Watch report as an example of the PRC’s attempts election-fixing through intimidation. He was forced to leave for his critical stance on the HK government and he said he was also intimidated by Beijing cronies.

Though the democrat aligned parties managed to increase their seats to 25 out of 60, the result was a disappointment with a 55% turnout.

Everything’s a bit young here, this city being handed back to China just seven years ago. So there is no distillation of party politics with their being too many democrat parties, all to similar, and none of them able to envision how they would run Hong Kong ­ all too wishy-washy. Of course these people were only running for the legislative council, a vetoing body, not part of the government which is chosen by the Communist Party in Beijing for the foreseeable future. Hopefully the independent Long Hair will shake these people out of their stupor.