By 1935, in the depths of Prohibition and the Great Depression, the bureau officially became the FBI, and the warnings of the naysayers were soon validated under the 45-year reign of J. Edgar Hoover — a czar unlike any other in American history. Hoover's dirt cabinet was legendary: His agents snooped on everybody in Washington and beyond, so he could blackmail even as he was being blackmailed — the Mob had photos of Hoover in drag and intimate with his partner and “wife” Clyde Tolson.
Later came illegal domestic spying with COINTELPRO; the full-scale cover-up, if not complicity, in the '60s assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK; a catalog of other political cover-ups and hijinks featuring Gordon Liddy; the Frederic Whitehurst lab perversion revelations; intimidation and harassment of witnesses in hundreds of “sensitive” criminal cases; and most notoriously now (for those few who know it), the stubborn sabotage by D.C. headquarters of three field agents' investigations that could have prevented 9/11.
Given that the FBI was already in charge of domestic counterterrorism, and had a long, conflicted history with its bureaucratic rivals, it wasn't really clear why the solution was yet another bureaucracy joining the alphabet soup of our vast National Security empire — the DHS (Dept. of Homeland Security) joining the CIA, NSA, NRO, NCC, NGIA, FEMA and DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), the latter caught spying on demonstrations on American soil.
Recently, Ron Paul warned that the country was “descending into Fascism” — his utterance was dismissed by our mind-control punditocracy as either a rhetorical exaggeration or the raving of a lunatic. But the ever-expanding mandate and technological capabilities of the DHS are indeed worrisome, considering the long history of crimes and abuses committed by our other secret agencies. The DHS recently announced a new $50 million spy system, modeled after counterinsurgency programs in Iraq and Afghanistan, to detect bad guys in “emergency and non-emergency incidents” within the U.S. In conjunction with the FAA, it will soon be gathering surveillance with up to 30,000 drones flying over our neighborhoods, using the most sophisticated and invasive systems, FLIR and ground-penetrating radar.
According to a blizzard of memos and advisories issued to other federal and state agencies and private companies by the DHS and FBI over the last several years, red flags for potential “terrorist” activity include being “anti-globalist, suspicious of federal authority, defending online privacy, paying cash at Internet cafes, stocking up on more than 7 days of food, holding reserves of gold, engaging in any kind of public demonstration, creating alternative currencies, identifying as Libertarian.” Maybe “vegetarian, preferring herbal remedies, banking at credit unions, and enjoying sitar music” will soon join the list.
With the NSA building two gigantic new data processing and storage facilities in the Southwest (they've tapped out the grid in D.C.), the wiretapping scandals becoming normalized, the U.S. Army North holding regular domestic policing exercises in violation of Posse Comitatus, and the DHS funding the acquisition of hi-tech armored vehicles, assault weapons, grenade launchers and other military exotica by police agencies nationwide, it's really no surprise what this is all about: Ostensibly to suppress the nonexistent plague of terrorism that threatens us, but actually for controlling, pacifying and suppressing any dissent on the home front as the military-industrial complex escalates the never-ending War on Terror that the vast majority of Americans are sick of. As Pat Buchanan once commented, “They're over here, because we're over there.”
In the national Urban Shield 2011 exercise, two foreign units participated alongside American police: the Yaman, an Israeli Border Police unit long known for extra-judicial assassinations and systematic abuses in the occupied West Bank and Gaza strip; and a military unit from Bahrain, infamous for blasting nonviolent demonstrations with live fire and then arresting the wounded as they fled to hospitals. With the increasing militarization of our police forces, we can expect more tragedies like Waco and the inevitable erosion of our civil liberties unless we heed the advice of James Madison:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”
This first appeared in the Grand Junction Free Press
No comments:
Post a Comment