The Steve Kurtz case finally dismissed (Another political trial, another pathetic witch hunt: Just business as usual in Bushland)
America is no stranger to political trials. From the Cold War Joe McCarthy era to the military tribunals of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, the USA has been trying to do to justice what the Soviets did somewhat better and on a larger scale during the Communist decades in their show trials.
The Soviet Union could always count on the KGB to provide the courts with false evidence and torture derived confessions. In the USA the FBI have always proven to be more than willing to do the government’s dirty business.
Hoover was America’s answer to Stalin’s foul henchman Beria - and if J. edgar would have been granted the same powers he would probably have done things in the same manner as the butcher of Lubyanka square.
The FBI is still at it, by the way. The more realistic threat of world communism has been exchanged for George Bush’s Quixotic fight against the phantom mills of world terrorism - as old Joe McCarty’s obscene House Committee on Un-American Activities (the infamous HUAC) has been born again as the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act - the famous PATRIOT Act, indeed.
The same tyranny of fear, the same ruthless paranoia and the same Witch Finder General spirit rule again - and now, like then, the same principle applies:
Who’s not for us is against us and should - and will - be fucked over with extreme prejudice. As the artist Steve Kurtz found out at great cost.
This is what Tim Dowling wrote about the case in the online Guardian:
In May 2004 the American artist Steve Kurtz woke up to find that his wife Hope was not breathing. Paramedics summoned to his Buffalo home noticed laboratory equipment and petri dishes containing bacterial cultures, which Kurtz used in his art work. His wife died and the paramedics immediately notified the police. The Joint Terrorism Task Force swooped in, detaining Kurtz on suspicion of bio-terrorism. Agents in bio-hazard suits - from the FBI, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, among others - sealed off the street and seized equipment that Kurtz had already told them was harmless (indeed, much if it had already been exhibited in public) and carried off books, papers, computers and his cat.
Within a week the Commissioner of Public Health announced that the seized cultures were harmless and that Kurtz’s wife had died of natural causes. His lawyer called the FBI’s response “a colossal overreaction”, but only now, four years later, has the case finally been dismissed. While it may have been immediately obvious to some that the bio-terrorism investigation was an embarrassing mistake, the FBI, with its curious knack for groundless tenacity, went ahead and indicted Kurtz for mail and wire fraud, the maximum sentence for which had recently been upped from five to 20 years by the USA PATRIOT Act. It claimed that he had obtained the $256 worth of harmless bacteria illegally.
This week a federal judge ruled that the government’s case was “insufficient on its face”, offering support to the assertion by Kurtz’s lawyer that no crime had been committed. Why the FBI chose to pursue this case is unclear, but Kurtz’s supporters are convinced that it was an intentional attempt to punish an artist who is critical of the government’s authoritarian tendency. As Nature magazine put it: “It seems that government lawyers are singling Kurtz out as a warning to the broader
artistic community”.
As I said, not for the first time - and most certainly not for the last either. For this is the house that Jack built - or rather, this is the USA that Bush, Cheney and the other maniacs have been steadily building, these last seven years.
And as the people in Berlin learned the hard way during the Cold War: It’s much easier to build those prison walls than to tear them down.
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