Bad year for free speech

[Ivo Skoric]

What a world. Australian journalists get deported from the US for 
failure to have the specific, journalist "I" visa. FBI monitors and 
investigates peaceful protests. Saudis, finally, throw out a 
paragraph from their schoolbooks teaching their kids to feel deep 
hatred for people of other faiths. And at least two people -one in 
New Zealand, another in Slovenia are facing terrorist charges for 
merely sending a threatening e-mail to the global imperial 
authorities of the U.S. of A. This was not a good year for free 
speech, was it?
ivo  

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Protests Greet Sentence for Bush Hate Mail
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Fri Nov 21,11:31 AM ET

LJUBLJANA (Reuters) - Slovenian human rights activists on Friday
condemned a court's decision to sentence a man for "terrorist" crimes
for sending hate e-mail to President Bush.

Tomi Sluga, 29, told the local court in the northeastern town of
Murska Sobota he was drunk and only joking when he sent an e-mail to
the White House web before a June 2001 Bush visit to the small Alpine
state.

"President, save the Earth, you ass, you will be killed in Ljubljana.
Welcome!" the email read.

The court found Sluga guilty of "endangering a protected person" and
gave him a two-year suspended sentence on Monday, the first 
conviction
under Slovenia's new anti-terrorism laws.

Protesters from several rights group demonstrated outside the supreme
court in Ljuljana, demanding Sluga's case be reconsidered.

"It is an exaggeration that has nothing to do with security," Gorazd
Kovacic of the local Mirovni Institut (Peace Institute) told Reuters.

"We wanted to protest against the court's senseless decision to
sentence a person for terrorism just for sending an e-mail," said
Marta Gregorcic, a prominent rights activist who was among the three
dozen demonstrators.

Slovenia broke away from Yugoslavia in 1991 and is due to join the
European Union in May.



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There are no unconquerable fortresses. There are only bad conquerors.


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