Editor,
It is shameful enough that detainees in Iraq have had no rights and have been tortured without proof of complicity in terrorism. It is shameful enough that laws today allow people in this country, even legal immigrants and U.S. citizens, to be held without notification, habeas corpus or trial. It is shameful that we allow our rights and the rights of other people to be so abused, because it will come back to haunt us, not only in lack of respect for our country and democracy itself, but even more directly.
Case in point: Robert Anderson, who was tackled, handcuffed, dragged and led away by UNM Police. The incident occurred at a campus meeting sponsored by UNM at which a panel of speakers from Lockheed Martin and Sandia National Laboratories were promoting the building of a new
generation of nuclear weapons.
Anderson objected to the exclusion of anti-war views from the makeup of the panel. As someone next to him raised an anti-war placard, one member of the panel asked that it be lowered, saying signs were prohibited at the meeting. As campus police entered the room, the panel member pointed to Anderson asking them to remove him from the room. That is shameful, too, that UNM turned its police into goons for Sandia National Laboratories. Students and staff have always had a much better relationship with
UNM Police.
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It is even more shameful that decent people in this country would allow the proliferation of small-scale nuclear weapons. Sure, such weapons could be used against enemies, but there is no way these weapons are going to be kept out of the hands of terrorists. They are going to be too easy to transport, to steal and to make copies of. If we allow UNM to work with war profiteers and turn a neat profit while making accessible nukes, we will pay the price when these smaller nuclear weapons turn up on our streets, and we lose stadiums full of people, small towns, electrical power stations or dams. A small nuke could kill thousands of U.S. citizens at a time without
warning.
It is shameful that we have allowed a handful of really stupid people in our government to kill so many innocent civilians in order to bring them democracy, and it is shameful that we allow our government, our corporations and even our universities to proliferate such awful weapons. What will not be shameful is our destruction, if we allow such things to go on.
If we allow freedom and democracy to die in the name of nationalism, we will reap what we have sown, and the U.S. will fight a losing battle, standing for nothing, believing in nothing and having failed those who have fought and died for it.
Terry Mulcahy
UNM staff
