This is John Whitehead’s latest email column from The Rutherford Institute. I find his columns consistently interesting.
Neutralizing a Beatle: The U.S. vs. John Lennon
By John W. Whitehead
September 25, 2006
In December 1971 at a concert in Ann Arbor, Mich., John Lennon took to the stage and in his usual confrontational style belted out “John Sinclair,†a song he had written about a man sentenced to 10 years in prison for possessing two marijuana cigarettes. Within days of Lennon’s call for action, the Michigan Supreme Court ordered Sinclair released.
However, as Adam Cohen observes in the New York Times (Sept. 21, 2006), “What Lennon did not know at the time was that there were F.B.I. informants in the audience taking notes on everything from the attendance (15,000) to the artistic merits of his new song…The government spied on Lennon for the next 12 months, and tried to have him deported to England.â€
The government’s surveillance campaign against Lennon is the subject of a new documentary, The U.S. vs. John Lennon. It could not have debuted at a better time—especially in light of recent revelations about the government’s efforts to spy on American citizens through phone calls and e-mails. Indeed, Lennon’s battle with the U.S. government is not only a chilling tale of paranoia and abuse of power—it is a lesson for our times. As Cohen recognizes: “It is the story not only of one man being harassed, but of a democracy being undermined.â€
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