When Free Speech Is Made Criminal

摘要

In July, retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, who sought the Democratic nomination for the 2004 Presidential election, made the startling statement in an MSNBC interview that Americans who are "disloyal to the United States" should be subjected to internment "for the duration of the conflict." The conflict to which he referred is the amorphously defined, and apparently interminable, "War on Terror," so this internment is likely to last a long while. Actually, as Clark rather churlishly pointed out on Twitter in response to his critics, he never said the word "internment." But he did say that we should "segregate them from the normal community." If that's not "internment," what is it? Are they to be herded into ghettos? And if so, and if relocation to those ghettos is mandatory, is that not basically "internment"?