I do not normally blog on American politics, but this deserves attention. A former professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, who has also been a US Marine colonel and who has been injured in action and decorated, is on a terrorist watch list. This is apparently that he has publicly criticised George Bush. This is not an isolated incident.

What has happened to professor Murphy speaks for itself. What makes it worse are the reaction of the people he spoke to, which made it plain that they regarded it as routine for dissidents to be treated this way.

It is not an isolated incident. Other examples include the FBI’s surveillance of the Thomas Merton Center for Peace & Justice. Membership of a pacifist organisation named after a Trappist monk is regarded as suspicious!

Others who have been treated as potential terrorists include a Jesuit priest and members of the Green party.

So far things appear to be better in Britain, but we cannot be complacent. Actors have been detained for acting in films the government does not like. We can still hope that these abuses are acts of over-zealousness rather than an attempt to squash dissent, but the powers the government has now given itself to designate people terrorist suspects certainly leave room for the same abuses as we have seen in the US.

Edit: 23rd April 2007: It appears that anonymous hate postings on websites that accuse someone of being a terrorist are enough to get them detained. In other words, with a little bit of effort you can get anyone you want (presumably apart from “important” people) on the list.