FREE SPEECH — The men behind newly re-elected President Ahmadinejad of Iran would agree with the Pentagon on one point at least: protest is just another word for low-level terrorism.
According to current Department of Defense anti-terrorism training
course material, what many would call the exercise of First Amendment rights constitutes terrorist activity, reports Dennis Loo, Professor of Sociology at Cal Ply Pomona, on OpenSalon.com.
The Department of Defense is training all of its personnel in its
current Antiterrorism and Force Protection Annual Refresher
Training Course that political protest is "low-level terrorism."
The Training introduction reads as follows:
"Anti-terrorism
(AT) and Force Protection (FP) are two facets of the Department of
Defense (DoD) Mission Assurance Program. It is DoD policy, as found in DoDI 2000.16, that the DoD Components and the DoD elements and personnel shall be protected from terrorist acts through a high pirority, comprehensive, AT program. The DoD's AT program shall be all encompassing using an integrated systems approach."
The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, "Knowledge Check1" section reads as follows:
Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?
Select the correct answer and then click Check Your ANswer.
O Attacking the Pentagon
O IEDs
O Hate crimes against racial groups
O Protests
The "correct" answer is Protests.
A copy of this can be found on the last two pages of this pdf. The ACLU is, well, protesting this item in a recent letter.
