A serious attack on the civil rights of every person in Chicago is under way and should disgust every thinking Chicagoan for its brazenness.

The run-up to the May 20-21 NATO summit has seen an effort by some to spread unnecessary fear of violence. The intention of this fear-mongering is to scare people from exercising the right to protest, a fundamental right enshrined in the First Amendment.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart's proposal to reopen the long-shuttered Joliet prison for protest arrestees is simply a boneheaded idea. (Joliet, a hellhole when it was closed two decades after the making of "The Blues Brothers" movie, is undoubtedly much worse now for having been closed for a decade.)

Last week's announcement of a "red zone" of troops in battle gear, to be deployed by the federal government in the South Loop, falls into the same category. So does the Red Cross sending out a mass email about putting Milwaukee on alert for the possible evacuation of Chicago, as reported by CBS News.

Some, like former Chicago Police Superintendent Terry Hillard's firm, Hillard Heintze — armed with a juicy security contract from the city — have a financial interest in spreading this fear. Useless and often counterproductive "security" has become one of the few growth industries in a stagnant economy.

We've seen this script play out before. Under the notorious government COINTELPRO program of the 1960s and '70s, police and FBI operatives would infiltrate civil rights and anti-war organizations and, finding nothing that could justify surveillance let alone repression, would invent or actively encourage violence and other illegal actions.

Closer to today, any serious look at the "poster child" for alleged protester violence, the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, shows that the police were the main cause of the violence.

Don't take my word for it. Seattle's former chief of police, Norm Stamper, has said so, repeatedly. He blamed not just the actions of rank-and-file officers but his own decision-making.

And juries of our peers have agreed with Stamper's assessment, repeatedly. Seattle paid out $1.8 million to WTO protesters due to the violence and other misconduct of its police officers. Washington, D.C., paid out $22 million to protesters and bystanders due to police violence and other misconduct during two protests in 2000 and 2002. Los Angeles paid close to $12.85 million for a police attack on a 2007 May Day rally. And in February, Chicago agreed to pay $6.2 million to Iraq War demonstrators, on top of millions in attorneys' fees.

As an organizer of what looks to be the largest protest during Chicago's NATO summit, I've been asked dozens upon dozens of times by reporters whether there will be protester violence. The questions have taken on a tone of "When will you stop beating your spouse?"

I'm astounded at the one-sided absurdity of these questions coming in a town with such an international reputation for police violence, and I'm not just talking about the Kerner Commission's derision of what it called the "police riot" during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Have any of these reporters asked Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy similar questions about violence from the police?

Beyond the demonizing of protesters, there is a far more sinister agenda at work here — the wars abroad are having a hugely corrosive effect on what remains of democracy at home.

Indeed Barack Obama, the "peace president," has greatly escalated George W. Bush's wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, earning him the approving epithet "warrior president" from a New York Times columnist who remarked that he is "one of the most militarily aggressive American leaders in decades."

With these wars abroad has come a full-scale war on civil liberties here, with only a few comparable precedents in American history.

What's really going on here?

Hype and fear-mongering. It is an attempt to intimidate people from asking questions of their government, let alone demonstrating against it.

Tom Paine famously remarked that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Put more crudely, the First Amendment is a "use it or lose it" proposition.

If you are angry at America's longest ever war that is killing and maiming Afghans and Americans alike, if you are angry at the insane military spending that is robbing us of a host of social services, then you need to protest against NATO, which represents some 70 percent of world military spending.

Exercise one of your fundamental rights as an American — the right to protest government wrongs.

Andy Thayer is a lead organizer of the May 20 march against NATO.