In response to Michael Miner’s useful article on [Steve] Chapman’s role in the Tribune series on the USA Patriot Act (“Trib: A Government’s Gotta Do What a Government’s Gotta Do,” December 5).
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Attorney General Ashcroft is prosecuting the environmentalist organization Greenpeace for “sailor mongering,” and might shut them down completely. “Sailor mongering” refers to an 1872 law which prohibits anybody from inducing a ship’s crew to desert their posts. It was passed because at that time there was a problem with wharf-side boardinghouse owners being bribed by captains to recruit sailors away from other ships. The law has only been used twice, the last time over a century ago. In April 2002 Greenpeace activists peacefully boarded a ship loaded with illegally logged mahogany and lectured the crew about damage to the rain forests. They received a small fine at the time, but now Ashcroft has dredged up the “sailor mongering” law to throw the book at them.
The Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineering has been warned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Office of Foreign Assets Control, that their journals may not legally edit articles submitted to them for publication by countries on the U.S. government’s “terrorist sponsors” list (e.g., Cuba, Iran, etc). If they receive an article from a specialist in such a country they can publish it but they may not edit it for publication (correct spelling, grammar, style, etc) because to do so is to provide material assistance to perpetrators of terrorism. Who knew that semicolons were weapons of mass destruction?
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