PULSE: How do you think September 11 affected political activism in this country?

KLEIN: I think the opposition to neo-liberalism is much, much stronger than it was in 1999. But I think activism in general, and in the United States in particular since September 11, has been very timid.

I think that there’s a climate of fear in the United States around being perceived as anti-government. There’s a fear of being in the streets. I saw this very clearly when I was in New York during the Republican convention. Certainly the opposition to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq and the sort of corporate takeover of politics was very, very clear; but in terms of the opposition, the way it was expressed was very timid and controlled. I think that’s a broader social issue that people in the U.S. really need to grapple with: what is the role of dissent in a democracy?

Weinglass contrasted the prosecution of the Cuban Five with the case of Orlando Bosch. Bosch was implicated in the deaths of 73 men, women and children when a bomb destroyed a Cubana Airlines passenger plane in 1976. Once described as “the most notorious terrorist in the hemisphere,” Bosch has friends close to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. Despite a Justice Department recommendation that Bosch be denied residency, the Bush administration intervened on his behalf and today he walks the streets of Miami a free man.

Touching on the Bush administration’s general foreign policy and its “bizarre acceptance of the use of torture” in Afghanistan and Iraq, Weinglass said, “We are undergoing a crisis of illegality and lawlessness at the highest levels of government.”