Kyle Cheney, the author of the recent (stealthily edited) Politico article on Ben Carson’s recollections about West Point, was once an editor of Boston University’s The Daily Free Press.
During his sophomore year in 2004, Cheney covered, and apparently protested, the Republican National Convention in New York City.
In an op-ed chock full of denunciation of all things GOP and George W. Bush, Cheney refers to the twelve-hour detention he dealt with as “Guantánamo on the Hudson,” and begs our forefathers to “forgive us.”
From the eleven-year-old piece:
In this era when doomsday scenarios constantly emanate from the lips of the Bushies, when Jefferson, Washington and Adams have taken a back seat to fearing the Axis of Evil, we can ill-afford to forget for even a moment the vision of liberty and freedom of expression that our forefathers mapped out for us in the Constitution.
After sitting on the curb for more than an hour watching police casually photograph and videotape the detainees, a cop pulled me aside. He asked me why I was there and how I got involved. Without listening to a word I said, he told me to stop wasting my time and the police’s time by protesting.
“You’re government doesn’t give a [expletive deleted] about you,” he told me, adding that if I wanted my voice heard, to go vote in November.
And I wondered to myself, is this what it has come down to in this post-9/11 world? Are constitutional rights to express oneself and assemble – rights for which thousands of Americans have died to preserve – less important than spoiling the pristine view of the Bush Administration and keeping New York’s mayor in good favor with the GOP?
That day, they were. And I spent my first 12 hours in police custody in Pier 57, or what it later became known as: “Guantanamo on the Hudson.”
This unequivocal and undeniable violation of civil and constitutional rights may actually inspire more protests than it deters, but either way, George Orwell’s grim prophesies grow truer. And although Big Brother is only watching me for the next six months (part of a deal most protesters struck with the judge to dismiss the current charges if we stay out of trouble for half a year), I am genuinely scared.
Scared that my government can conscientiously deny peaceful protesters the right to march. Scared that strong-arming cops under orders from Republican demagogues dictate policy more than the Constitution.
Cheney chides the “dirty Republican invective” at the convention, which was only surpassed by “the slick and grimy prison floor” on which he had to rest that night.
He also invokes the popular thesaurus author: “Roget doesn’t have enough words to describe the assault on First Amendment rights that I, and thousands of others, suffered …”
h/t to Big Government.
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