Laura Berg’s Letter - Receiving the Pen Award after being charged with sedition

[UpInArms]

Laura Berg’s Letter - Receiving the Pen Award after being charged with sedition

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/opinion/27sun3.html

The PEN American Center, the literary organization committed to free expression, is honoring an American most people in this country have never read or even heard of: Laura Berg. She is a psychiatric nurse at a Veterans Affairs hospital who was threatened with a sedition investigation after she wrote a letter to the editor denouncing the Bush administration’s bungling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war.

That’s right, sedition: inciting rebellion against the government. We suppose nothing should surprise us in these days of government zealotry. But the horror and the shame of that witch hunt should shock everyone.

Ms. Berg identified herself as a V.A. nurse when, soon after Katrina’s horrors, she sent her impassioned letter to The Alibi, a paper in Albuquerque. “I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” she wrote. “We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.”

Her superiors at the hospital soon alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigation and impounded her office computer, where she keeps the case files of war-scarred veterans she treats. Then she received an official warning in which a Veterans Affairs investigator intoned that her letter “potentially represents sedition.”

It took civil rights litigators and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico to “act forcefully” in reminding the government of the Constitution and her right to free speech. The Department of Veterans Affairs retreated then finally apologized to the shaken Ms. Berg.

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[nuxvomica]

1. So she was accused of sedition and not Rush Limbaugh

Calling for the removal of a government is not sedition, it's politics. Calling for riots, as Limbaugh did, is closer to the mark.

[midnight]

2. This nurse who is on the front lines sees first hand the foreign

policy blunders. She was moved by yet another government blunder, but this time it was to close to home. It was here in the United States. The evacuation plans for NOLA had been removed from the state. All the government officials were turning away help. The levies were never reinforced and the tragedy just unraveled before our very own eyes. Although many news centers were only allowed to capture the staged photo ops. What we saw was unforgettable. The women is a hero.

[Demeter]

3. K&R For America

[indepat]

4. Auchtung, mein fuhrer