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New Business Blooms in Iraq: Terror Insurance

The idea of insuring ordinary people in what may be the most violent place on earth came from Abbas Shaheed al-Taiee, an executive at the Iraq Insurance Company.

“It is a kind of gift to the Iraqi people,” said Mr. Shaheed, 53, a big, heavyset man with terribly serious eyes and a reputation as a master salesman. “We have expanded the principles of life insurance to cover everything that happens in Iraq.”

Amazingly, the company has yet to pay out on a single claim.

Now, such protesters are not only “obvious potential rioters,” but “terrorists.” The recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, passed with widespread bipartisan support, included a new “anti-terrorist” provision allowing police to establish anti-protester “exclusion zones” at any event of “national significance.” (In Seattle, where this idea was first used and then legitimized by the courts, it was more honestly called a “no-protest zone,” an egregious violation of the First Amendment.)

The idea of all these harsh tactics is both to scare potentially sympathetic members of the public, who don’t necessarily want to be caught in a riot (police or otherwise), away from attending; and at the same time to legitimize whatever forms of police and jail abuse are inflicted on the protesters who do attend, in hopes they’ll think better of it next time. It’s worked, and in six years, as the crackdown grows ever-harsher, activists have yet to devise effective counter-measures.

Government cracks down on dissent in name of ‘anti-terrorism’