Exhuming McCarthy: Little did Veterans Administration nurse Laura Berg suspect that when she dashed off a letter to the editor of the Albuquerque weekly Alibi it would lead to her work computer being seized by her bosses, who also accused her of “sedition.” Let’s be clear here. Dr. Webster defines sedition as “the stirring up of discontent, resistance or rebellion against the government.” Judge for yourself if what Berg wrote, as reported in The Progressive, constitutes sedition:
“I am furious with the tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence of this government,” it began. “The Katrina tragedy in the U.S. shows that the emperor has no clothes!” She mentioned that she was “a VA nurse” working with returning vets. “The public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote, and she worried about the hundreds of thousands of additional cases that might result from Katrina and the Iraq War.
“Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence,” she wrote. “This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil. . . . We need to wake up and get real here, and act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.
Seditious? — “Bush, Cheney, Chertoff, Brown, and Rice should be tried for criminal negligence.”Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times.”
Thinking she wrote the letter on her work computer, her bosses at the VA seized her computer and, in a memo, accused her of sedition:
Mel Hooker, chief of the human resources management service at the Albuquerque VA, wrote Berg back on November 9 and acknowledged that “your personal computer files did not contain the editorial letter written to the editor of the weekly Alibi.”
But rather than apologize, he leveled the sedition charge: “The Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition,” he said. “In your letter . . . you declared yourself ‘as a VA nurse’ and publicly declared the Government which employs you to have ‘tragically misplaced priorities and criminal negligence’ and advocated, ‘act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.’ ”
Berg has worked as a VA nurse for 15 years and is concerned for her job. The New Mexico office of the American Civil Liberties Union is working with her to clear her name, but so far, the VA has not admitted wrongdoing nor has it apologized.
This outrage fatigue you speak of? I am weary with it once again.