I heard about the story of Faith Fippinger on NPR about four months ago. In a nutshell, Ms. Fippinger is a 62-year-old retired schoolteacher living in Florida. To protest the war in Iraq, she became one of the "human shields" who were stationed near various installations around that country in an effort to prevent said installations from being destroyed by bombing.

In performing this function, she violated several travel and association bans imposed by the Treasury and State departments. Because of this, she is being prosecuted and stands to recieve very stiff fines and perhaps a long jail sentence.

At the time NPR played up the "little old lady" angle and played down the "knowingly broke the law because it doesn't apply to me" angle. Meanwhile I was shouting, "she broke the damned law" so loud someone in the car next to me shot me a look like I was from Mars.

Well, the BBC seems to have taken up the same story, and Steven Beste deconstructs it:

That Fippinger broke the law is beyond dispute. But the point the article tries to make is that she was doing so because of noble motivations, and thus should not be punished because she meant well.
...
She could have written about [her opposition]. She could have written about her political opinions online, as so many of us have. She could have had handbills printed and distributed them. She could have written letters-to-the-editor. She could have organized with others who opposed the war, tried to publicly express her point of view, tried to influence the majority of her fellow citizens to agree with her. A lot of people in the US did all of those things, and none of them have received letters from the Treasury Department threatening them with legal prosecution.

Read the whole thing, then accuse me of cheerleading.

I knew exactly what was going to happen to these people, because I'd read things like this happening to people trying to visit Cuba for years. The Treasury Department and the State Department take their travel and association bans extremely seriously, and they can, will, and do catch people violating them. The penalties, as this lady is finding out, are most definitely non-trivial.

When it comes to this sort of thing I'm very conservative, and I make no apologies for it. Laws apply to everyone, no matter how well intentioned or inoffensive you may be. Ask anyone with black or brown skin what "filtering" for supposed "good intentions" gets you. To be blunt, I doubt any of these articles or discussions would exist if the human shields were made up exclusively of 18 to 25-year-old single black males. Racism can sometimes be very subtle indeed.

The outcome of civil disobedience is always arrest and conviction. In fact, that tends to be a desired outcome. It's quite simply not my problem if you didn't check ahead of time to find out just what, exactly, you'd be subject to by breaking a law to make a point.

And yes, I do have a problem with Ashcroft and the patriot act and the way citizen "enemy combatants" are being treated, for precisely the same reasons. The difference is I'm going to make scrupulously sure I stay within the bounds of the law while I work to change things. While I still can.