Human Rights

Veteran peace activist William "Bud" Combs recently spent 90 days in jail for protesting against Fort Benning's Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (aka the School of the Americas). "What the veteran peace activist didn't know was that he would spend eight days of his sentence in solitary confinement," writes Bill Berlow. "His apparent offense: receiving and sharing with other inmates what federal authorities consider disruptive, if not subversive, political literature.

Several high school teachers in New Mexico have been suspended or fired after refusing to enforce pro-war views in their classrooms. Geoff Barrett, a teacher at Albuquerque's Highland High School, was suspended after refusing to remove student-made artwork expressing views on the recent U.S. war against Iraq.

Round-the-clock coverage of the war in Iraq has eclipsed a host of bad-news stories from the rest of the world, including a massacre in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Israeli killings and detentions in the West Bank, and a crackdown on dissidents in Cuba. According to Curt Goering of Amnesty International USA, the virtual exclusion of most other international news has provide an opportunity for repressive authorities to settle old scores. "That's been a fear that we had even before the war started," Goering said.

"The travel industry and civil liberties groups are sharply
objecting to government plans for a new airline passenger
screening program .... . The proposed program ... would involve
electronic checking of the credit
records and criminal histories, along with checking whether
the passenger is on watch lists of suspected terrorists.
The screening would be done by the federal Transportation
Security Administration. ... Based on the results, each traveler would be
assigned a