To the editor:

George Bush says we are fighting to “defend our freedom” and “to bring freedom to others.” This requires civil liberties including freedom of speech and due process.

But three and a half bloody years into “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” journalists in Iraq are now, according to a New York Times article, being charged and jailed because of “a broad new set of laws criminalizing speech that ridicules the government or its officials, some resurrected verbatim from Saddam Hussein’s penal code.” Criminalizing speech. Are we advising the new Iraqi government? And if so, are we in collusion or impotent in this matter?

While championing democracy at home and abroad, Bush administration officials have paid PR firms and “journalists” in the United States and Iraq to print articles and report news showing U.S. policies in a favorable light, and have assailed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Conventions and even the Magna Carta, tossing habeas corpus out the window. A bill passed last week grants Bush the power to order indefinite, unreviewable detentions, even of U.S. citizens.

The Bush strain of logic is palatable for some because of “the war on terror.” But his tactics are fueling rather than quelling violence and are creating a tragically backward chapter in world history.

Propaganda, torture, secret detentions and black prisons, illegal wiretapping, and the removal of checks and balances are not what the Founding Fathers had in mind. They’d call it what it is: tyranny.

And those who follow or remain silent share the blame.

Christy Kennedy,

Lawrence