RK ARCHIVE - The March of Big Brother

First, while questioning Attorney General Gonzales during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the Administration?s no-warrant wire-tapping, Senator Lindsey Graham (R, South Carolina) said, ?The administration has not only the right but the duty, in my opinion, to pursue fifth column movements... and I don?t think you need a warrant to do that.? Graham volunteered to help draft guidelines for attacking this alleged threat.

To which Gonzales responded with a smile, ?The President has already said we?d be happy to listen to your ideas.?

New programs? Exactly what would those be? And why is it that the major media have, as usual, ignored the real story, concentrating instead on Halliburton?s historical record of cheating American taxpayers? In January 2005, the Army revised a 1977 document providing for agreements between the Army and ?correctional facilities? for the use of civilian inmate labor by the Army... i.e., military-run labor camps for prisoners. This would apply not just to ordinary prison inmates but, apparently, to inhabitants of these new detention camps KBR is going to build.

Third, put this together with the unprecedented expansion of Department of Defense into domestic surveillance via the DoD?s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which Bush has already authorized to investigate ?treason, terrorist sabotage, or economic espionage,? thereby ignoring the FBI. This enhanced authority seems to be contrary to the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids U.S. military personnel from taking part in domestic law enforcement. Nevertheless, the Pentagon has claimed that it needs no new law or executive order allowing the FBI and the National Security Agency to ?share? information about US citizens, including that from the extensive no-warrant data mining in which NSA has been engaged. Russell Tice, former NSA employee has described this program (no details for security reasons) to a Congressional committee this month, adding that such a special access program or sharing of information may be violating the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. (UPI, Feb. 14, 2006)

How many suspects are on the Administration?s ever-expanding list? The Washington Post on February 15, 2006 reported that the National Counterterrorism Center?s central repository has 325,000 names, four times as many as it had 18 months ago. If you have attended an anti-Iraq war demonstration, however tiny, chances are your name is there. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D - California) has said that Congressional committees ?have not been able to explore what is the link or an affiliate to al-Qaeda or what.... procedures (there are) for purging the names of innocent people.?

Fourth, keep in mind that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld back in 2003 approved a secret paper ?Information Operations Roadmap.? This put the Pentagon into domestic propaganda by blurring the distinction between foreign PSYOP (psychological warfare operations) and domestic news. The same document includes plans to take over the Internet and control the flow of information. Rumsfeld?s document even calls it ?fighting the net,? as if the web were an enemy weapons system. In other words, every communication is fair game.

Fifth, shortly after 9/11 Bush issued Military Order No. 1, empowering himself to detain any non-citizen as an international terrorist or enemy combatant. Remember Bush's declaration that he was ?now a wartime President?? Bush clearly intends to run the country like a general; witness the constant refrain that he needs no warrants for spying, that the authority is inherent in his position as Commander in Chief. This authority has been expanded to cover citizens as well as non-citizens, as demonstrated by his designation of Jose Padilla, an American citizen, as an ?enemy combatant,? imprisoning him indefinitely without benefit of due process. Three years later, facing a showdown with the Supreme Court, the White House finally brought charges against Padilla... but still asserts Bush has the authority to detain an American citizen without charges in that wonderfully expansive condition called ?enemy combatant.?

Sixth, the Bush Administration?s penchant for secrecy has caused thousands of documents in the National Archives to be withdrawn and re-classified as ?secret.? This, despite the fact that the documents have already been published in many cases as a matter of historical record. The Clinton Administration, which was accused of reckless de-classification of documents by the CIA and FBI, actually began the re-classification process in 1999. However, the program accelerated wildly under Bush, so that 8,000 of the 9,500 affected documents were withdrawn. Historians familiar with the cache of documents find most of the re-classifications to be ludicrous, with the result of depriving citizens important knowledge to help understand what is going on in the world. Just as bad, this sets a precedent for ever tighter control of information, no matter how remotely connected to the war on terror.

So, there you have it: a rapidly developing police state complete with concentration camps, an ugly paranoia which sees any independent thought as a threat, spying, etc. This was exactly the way the Soviets, fearing invasion by the capitalist powers bent on regime change, turned themselves into a police state, including a vast system of internal detention centers known as The Gulag. I had a conversation recently with a businessman returned from a trip abroad, and he said one of his fellow-businessmen in Europe said to him, ?We see that America is afraid.?

We are, under Bush, operating not from strength but from fear, and have lost the respect of the world because of what this fear makes us do. Is this what America is all about?

Comments

Thank you, J.C. The (Teddy - 4/4/2006 11:32:54 PM)

Thank you, J.C. The post may not have the glamour of election gossip, but is one of the most important I've written (IMHO). The thing is, each little item is stealthy... not seemingly significant on its own, but put together the evidence is frightening.

Insofar as the Pentagon plans go, of course we want them to run gameplans for a lot of scenarios, most of which probably would never occur (I'm sure we have a plan for invading Canada, for example). But now we have evidence of implementing one of them, the KGB contract to build physical detention camps, not virtual camps. The cover story is the camps are for floods of immigrants pouring across our borders???? What sort of paranoia is this? Their list of suspects grows daily, and most names appear to be those of native-born American citizens. Remember that the vast majority of inmates at Guantanamo are admittedly not terrorists... at least they were not when first incarcerated (but probably have been turned into terrorist-sympathizers by now).

It was exactly this sort of unreasoning fear that gave Hitler the opportunity to begin exterminating Gypsies, Jews, any opponent. Same thing for Stalin and the Gulag, most of which appeared after the infamous Kirov murder.

So far as can be det (Teddy - 4/4/2006 11:32:54 PM)

So far as can be determined, this is all true (see the references). The mass media simply do not put it all together.

And the American people, scared out of their minds by Cheney and Bush ("be afraid, be very afraid") consistently say they "trust the President" and it's okay to give up civil liberties in order to be safe. Karl Rove has already announced that "homeland security" and the ever-useful War on Terror will be the focal point of the upcoming campaigns.

I feel like an unsuccessful Paul Revere.