The Place of Dead Roads

From the New Bedford Standard-Times, Agents' visit chills UMass Dartmouth senior:

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called The Little Red Book...he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program...was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism.

He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

Kudzus to the article's author for seeing this as part of the larger problem.

The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.
The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.
Dr. Williams said "My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think."

The fallout of this visit seems to help quash acedemic freedom. It's not like we want the young minds of this country actually learning a thing or two about terrorism and those that support it. That might help us find a way to solve the War on Terror. And then what would so many politicans use to scare us into not thinking?

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk. "I shudder to think of all the students I've had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that," he said. "Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless."

Just two nights ago I was reading about the book Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden.

Despite the saturation of global media coverage, Osama bin Laden's own writings have been curiously absent from analysis of the “war on terror.” ...In bringing together the various statements issued under bin Laden’s name since 1994, this volume forms part of a growing discourse that seeks to demythologize the terrorist network.

My natural instinst was to find a local bookstore with it in stock so I could go and pay cash for a copy. Now I see my first impulse was right.