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"if something vanishes from your house, you won't know if it was a thief or the
government" -- Richard Stallman
Thursday November 8 2:28 PM ET
Sedition Law Used to Hold Suspects
By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/ap/20011108/us/attacks_sedition_1.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - Prosecutors seeking to hold people they suspect were in
the early stages of terrorist plots may turn anew to a very old weapon -
the Civil War-era law on sedition.
Last week, prosecutors cited the rarely invoked law in the case of a
student being detained in New York, and hinted they might make fuller use
of it in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
With roots in laws that date back more than 200 years, the statute gives
the government great flexibility in assembling prosecutions against people
who plan but don't carry out criminal acts against the United States.
Federal prosecutors ``appear to be right on the money'' in using the
sedition law to address possible terrorist collaborators, George
Washington University law professor Stephen Saltzburg said.
``To the extent a jihad'' or holy war ``is invoked against the United
States, it's like an announcement that `I'm putting myself under this
statute,''' Saltzburg said.
The government suggested its approach in a perjury indictment last week.
The federal grand jury that brought the case against an associate of two
of the hijackers is investigating ``seditious conspiracy to levy war
against the United States,'' the indictment stated.
Law enforcement officials, speaking only on condition of anonymity, said
prosecutors are examining other cases in which they might use the sedition
law against people who did not carry out attacks but had been in various
stages of planning.
The law imposes up to 20-year prison terms when two or more people
``conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the government
of the United States, or to levy war against them.''
While the law is seldom invoked, prosecutors used it to win convictions in
two high-profile cases against four Puerto Rican nationalists and against
a Muslim cleric and co-defendants who plotted to blow up the United
Nations.
In neither case were the violent acts carried out.
The U.S. law on sedition dates back to the 1790s when the Alien and
Sedition acts of the John Adams administration targeted people who
criticized the government. The acts expired and were not renewed amid a
storm of criticism.
A new law passed during the Civil War served as the basis for the current
statute.
There were Confederate sympathizers in the North and the law was passed to
make it easier to punish people who conspired against the union, said
University of Michigan law professor Richard Friedman.
The government used the sedition law after World War I to convict
anarchists. In the 1950s, the Supreme Court upheld convictions of
communists on sedition charges for teaching doctrines that were held to be
subversive.
``These weren't people blowing things up; they were basically basement
seminars where people would read Marx,'' said constitutional law professor
Richard Primus of the University of Michigan.
``Teaching people that the government is bad in the abstract is a
constitutional right, but once you go beyond to an agreement to commit
crimes, that becomes clearly punishable,'' said UCLA law professor Eugene
Volokh.
Chicago attorney Jeremy Margolis successfully prosecuted four Puerto Rican
nationalists for seditious conspiracy in the 1980s for planning to bomb a
Marine training center and an Army Reserve facility.
The object of the conspiracy was to change the policies of the U.S.
government ``as opposed to doing a particular criminal act - blow that up,
take that down, shoot that person,'' Margolis recalled.
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