The land of the free… [the detention and interrogation of Laura Poitras]

Via Avedon, we learn from Glenn Greenwald the astonishing depths to which our government will go to suppress any consideration of the damage the so-called War on Terror is inflicting to our own freedoms.

Laura Poitras is an award winning film maker. At present, she is making a film about

…the way in which The War on Terror has been imported onto U.S. soil, with a focus on the U.S. Government’s increasing powers of domestic surveillance, its expanding covert domestic NSA activities (including construction of a massive new NSA facility in Bluffdale, Utah), its attacks on whistleblowers, and the movement to foster government transparency and to safeguard Internet anonymity.

She has been the target of an organized campaign of harassment:

Since the 2006 release of “My Country, My Country,” Poitras has left and re-entered the U.S. roughly 40 times. Virtually every time during that six-year-period that she has returned to the U.S., her plane has been met by DHS agents who stand at the airplane door or tarmac and inspect the passports of every de-planing passenger until they find her (on the handful of occasions where they did not meet her at the plane, agents were called when she arrived at immigration). Each time, they detain her, and then interrogate her at length
…
She has had her laptop, camera and cellphone seized, and not returned for weeks, with the contents presumably copied. On several occasions, her reporter’s notebooks were seized and their contents copied, even as she objected that doing so would invade her journalist-source relationship. Her credit cards and receipts have been copied on numerous occasions. In many instances, DHS agents also detain and interrogate her in the foreign airport before her return, on one trip telling her that she would be barred from boarding her flight back home, only to let her board at the last minute.

Recently, the attack has been escalated:

This time, however, she was told by multiple CBP agents that she was prohibited from taking notes on the ground that her pen could be used as a weapon. After she advised them that she was a journalist and that her lawyer had advised her to keep notes of her interrogations, one of them, CBP agent Wassum, threatened to handcuff her if she did not immediately stop taking notes. A CBP Deputy Chief (Lopez) also told her she was barred from taking notes, and then accused her of “refusing to cooperate with an investigation” if she continued to refuse to answer their questions (he later clarified that there was no “investigation” per se, but only a “questioning”).

Think about it. Agents seriously imply they will arrest a journalist for assault for writing and that they will arrest her for obstruction of justice for declining to answer questions. They spit on the Fourth Amendment by searching laptops, cell phones, and so on. They potentially expose a journalist to identity theft by photocopying credit cards.

It seems to me that Poitras almost doesn’t need to make a film about how the so-called War on Terror is destroying liberty. Just telling us what she has gone through is lesson enough…if Americans will listen.