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Alexander Cockburn for the defence



Excerpted from full article from Counter Punch at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02012003.html

American Journal
US Judge Railroads Ed Rosenthal in Fed's War on
Medical Marijuana; Pee-Wee, Townshend and Ritter: the
Sex Police at Work
by ALEXANDER COCKBURN

...The state these days nails people for what they
have in their computers. Poor Pete Townshend draws a
well-publicized escort of no less than twelve police
officers to drag him off when he's arrested and
absurdly accused of "incitement to distribute" (also a
crime here) because the silly ass used a credit card
to download images from pedophile sites, which are
monitored by the FBI in a vast operation involving
multilayered schemes of entrapment. Small wonder the
G-men and G-women were too busy to spare any time for
urgent memos about Middle Easterners learning how to
fly 747s. 

In England it's now a criminal act to look at, receive
or send any pictures or electronic images of children
that the police or other authorities construe as sex
related. These photos can be computer-generated, with
no relation to any physical being. Scan a hot little
Cupid from Bouguereau, tweak it around in Photoshop,
and if the cops find it on your laptop you're dead
meat. 

We're in the twilit world of the "thought crime." Have
a photo of a kid in a bath on your hard drive, and the
prosecutor says you were looking at it with lust in
your heart, and that is tantamount to sexually
molesting an actual kid in an actual bath. The
possibilities for entrapment are rich indeed. The FBI
could send pedophilic images to a target, then rush
around, seize his laptop and announce that porn has
been found on the hard drive. 

Once you're defined as a dirty beast in a raincoat,
it's hard to fight back. Look at what's happening to
Scott Ritter, entrapped in another Internet sting
operation, with the Feds now shopping for a suitable
jurisdiction in which to nail him again, even though
his case was settled and sealed at the state level,
before some kind soul in favor of bombing kids in
Baghdad leaked the file to the press. 

In an admirable article in the London Daily Telegraph
apropos the Townshend case, Barbara Amiel recently
wrote thus:

"Behind our own attitudes lurks a recurring insistence
that violent images create violent social behaviour.
Since we can't outlaw urges, including urges of
paedophilia, we throw our resources into preventing
any way in which urges can be gratified. But, if
gratification involves nothing else than the viewing
of pictures or textual descriptions of the act, making
that a criminal offence strikes one as completely
insane. 

"Shouldn't we start by decriminalising every human act
that does not go beyond reading, viewing or listening
to representations of acts that if engaged in might be
unlawful? Then we could punish with various degrees of
severity any deviant acts that cause actual harm." 

Sure, there are predators out there, seeking to do
young people harm. But don't confuse dreams with
deeds, any more than we should confuse George Bush's
pledge to future generations that "we will not pass
along our problems" with the pain his budgets and his
war plans inflict on so many young lives. 


=====
-Brian in Atlanta
The Who This Month!
http://www.thewhothismonth.com
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