I couldn't tell you about it and couldn't tell you why: ‘Gagged’ by the Government: a Police State Story

By Alfredo Lopez

For the past three months, I and other leaders of the organization May First/People Link have been under a federal subpoena to provide information we don't have. During that time, we have also been forbidden by a federal court "gag order" to tell anyone about that subpoena, although we had already announced it and commented on it before the order was sent. Finally, we were forbidden from telling anyone about the gag order itself.

It all sounds comical but any laughter would end if we violated that "gag order," because that would be a felony and we could face prison sentences and huge fines.

We were silenced by our own government in a case we had nothing to do with and over information we didn't have...and we couldn't tell anyone about any of it.

The court order has now expired as of December 18 and I am now free to talk about it.

It's actually not easy to write about. Not because it was very painful -- it really wasn't. But it was so bizarre, illogical and foreign to my normal experience that it cut into the normal expectation of discourse and communications I, and people in this country, take for granted as a right. Not being able to talk about something and not being able to explain why was among the most surreal experiences I've had in nearly 50 years as an activist and, because of its implication, it was one of the most disturbing.

It's also difficult because I have no complete political context for this. I know there are many activists who are under such gag orders but I don't who they are. They are gagged and, while the order that restrained us came from a judge and had a three-month time limit, many of these orders are issued instead as a federal National Security Letter and they are open-ended. I know people who have been gagged for years and had to press hard to have the order lifted long after the relevant investigation was over.

I also know that about 300,000 such letters have been issued over the last ten years -- over 140,000 between 2003 and 2005.

The numbers alone attest to the seriousness of this situation. So let me explain what happened to us...

For the rest of this article by ALFREDO LOPEZ in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent, uncompromised, five-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/gagged