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Free speech in America? Oh yeah?

We constantly hear about the First Amendment to the US Consitition guaranteeing freedom of speech. But is it the reality?

This piece by Robert Fisk, first in The Indpendent, and reproduced on ZNet, would suggest that all is not well with the so-called freedom of speech. This is an appalling "story" of how things have gone wrong - very wrong! In fact the "story" revealed is rather scary on many levels.

"Laila al-Arian was wearing her headscarf at her desk at Nation Books, one of my New York publishers. No, she told me, it would be difficult to telephone her father. At the medical facility of his North Carolina prison, he can only make a few calls - monitored, of course - and he was growing steadily weaker.

Sami al-Arian is 49 but he stayed on hunger strike for 60 days to protest the government outrage committed against him, a burlesque of justice which has, of course, largely failed to rouse the sleeping dogs of American journalism in New York, Washington and Los Angeles.

All praise, then, to the journalist John Sugg from Tampa, Florida, who has been cataloging al-Arian’s little Golgotha for months, along with Alexander Cockburn of Counter Punch".

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