It can't happen here... no, wait, this *is* happening here

A nurse who works at the VA Medical Center in Albuquerque has been accused by the administrators there of "sedition": VA Nurse Investigated for "Sedition" for Criticizing Bush by Matthew Rothschild The Progressive 02/08/06

What, you say? She helped Karl Rove and Scooter Libby out Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent? (Well, I guess that might be more just plain treason than sedition, since sedition implies trying to overthrow the government.) But, no, it wasn't exactly that:

Shortly after Katrina, she wrote a letter to the editor of the weekly paper the Alibi criticizing the Bush Administration. ...

Here’s what her letter said.

"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.

Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times."

I guess it's a good thing for her she didn't quote from the Declaration of Independence or something. She would have been in Guantánamo by now.