Welcome to the spring Green issue of the Columbus Free Press, an actually remaining free press. Most of the American mainstream press have determined that Bushism is 21st century Americanism. In the words of ACLU of Ohio Legal Director Raymond Vasvari, we should attempt to resist “an Orwellian slide into a surveillance society.”

If you’re not afraid of the National Security Agency’s Echelon project eavesdropping on your electronic communications, or the FBI’s Carnivore software snooping on your email communications, or the national security bureaucracies Face Recognition Technology, then you should enjoy this issue of the Free Press.

By now it should be clear to Freep readers and supporters that the so-called “shadow government,” the undemocratic forces of the military industrial complex and their spooky friends, see the 9/11 terrorist attack on the U.S. as a golden opportunity to promote happy-face, nanny-state fascism. Investigative reporter Marty Yant points out how a Bush administration official was in Afghanistan the month before the terrorist attack threatening U.S. military action against the Taliban.

There’s a shocker. The Bush bunch’s old “freedom-fighting Al Quaida friends” from the 80’s didn’t wake up crazy mad one day, hate the U.S. and attack us because they’re insane. The Bush administration was over there threatening them with bombs on behalf of Enron and Unocal to make the world safe for another pipeline and fossil fuel pollution.

We’ve included writings from Michael Moore, whose best-selling book Stupid White Men does a superb job of condensing and explaining the facts of the Bush coup in the 2000 Presidential election. Had we not allowed the son of the former CIA director to steal the Florida election through the massive disenfranchising of black voters, it’s likely 3000 people would still be alive and the Twin Towers would still be standing.

Whatever Al Gore’s foibles, he lacks the requisite aristocratic arrogance to send his lackeys into a fanatically fundamentalist Middle Eastern regime and threaten them with death if they don’t allow us to lay pipe in their country.

With the spring comes rebirth, and with U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich’s “Prayer for America” burning up the Internet faster than the FBI can track it, there’s hope for a renewed progressive movement. Under the absurdly named U.S.A. Patriot Act, one particularly pernicious provision allows the CIA director to gather information from the FBI about terrorism in general – even if the information concerns a law-abiding U.S. citizen. My favorite part of Kucinich’s prayer is the following:

“We did not authorize assassination squads.
We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.
We did not authorize the repeal of the Bill of Rights.
We did not authorize the revocation of the Constitution.
We did not authorize national identity cards.
We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.
We did not authorize an eye for an eye.
Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.
We did not authorize the administration to wage war anytime, anywhere, anyhow it pleases.
We did not authorize war without end.
We did not authorize a permanent war economy.”

Sign me up for the Kucinich for President campaign in 2004.