The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
Some bedtime reading
Posted by Killing the Despots One Week at a Time at 4:20 PM
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
After we were hit on September 11 2001, we were in a state of
national shock. Less than six weeks later, on October 26 2001, the
USA Patriot Act was passed by a Congress that had little chance to
debate it; many said that they scarcely had time to read it. We were
told we were now on a "war footing"; we were in a "global war"
against a "global caliphate" intending to "wipe out civilisation".
There have been other times of crisis in which the US accepted
limits on civil liberties, such as during the civil war, when
Lincoln declared martial law, and the second world war, when
thousands of Japanese-American citizens were interned. But this
situation, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda notes, is
unprecedented: all our other wars had an endpoint, so the pendulum
was able to swing back toward freedom; this war is defined as
open-ended in time and without national boundaries in space - the
globe itself is the battlefield. "This time," Fein says, "there will
be no defined end."
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an
old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to
the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin
academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among
other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire
of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of
the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an
open-ended state of emergency). Or the terrifying threat can be
based, like the National Socialist evocation of the "global
conspiracy of world Jewry", on myth.
It is not that global Islamist terrorism is not a severe danger; of
course it is. I am arguing rather that the language used to convey
the nature of the threat is different in a country such as Spain -
which has also suffered violent terrorist attacks - than it is in
America. Spanish citizens know that they face a grave security
threat; what we as American citizens believe is that we are
potentially threatened with the end of civilisation as we know it.
Of course, this makes us more willing to accept restrictions on our
freedoms.
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a
prison system outside the rule of law (as Bush put it, he wanted the
American detention centre at Guantánamo Bay to be situated in legal
"outer space") - where torture takes place.
At first, the people who are sent there are seen by citizens as
outsiders: troublemakers, spies, "enemies of the people" or
"criminals". Initially, citizens tend to support the secret prison
system; it makes them feel safer and they do not identify with the
prisoners. But soon enough, civil society leaders - opposition
members, labour activists, clergy and journalists - are arrested and
sent there as well.
This process took place in fascist shifts or anti-democracy
crackdowns ranging from Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s to
the Latin American coups of the 1970s and beyond. It is standard
practice for closing down an open society or crushing a
pro-democracy uprising.
With its jails in Iraq and Afghanistan, and, of course, Guantánamo
in Cuba, where detainees are abused, and kept indefinitely without
trial and without access to the due process of the law, America
certainly has its gulag now. Bush and his allies in Congress
recently announced they would issue no information about the secret
CIA "black site" prisons throughout the world, which are used to
incarcerate people who have been seized off the street.
Gulags in history tend to metastasise, becoming ever larger and more
secretive, ever more deadly and formalised. We know from first-hand
accounts, photographs, videos and government documents that people,
innocent and guilty, have been tortured in the US-run prisons we are
aware of and those we can't investigate adequately.
But Americans still assume this system and detainee abuses involve
only scary brown people with whom they don't generally identify. It
was brave of the conservative pundit William Safire to quote the
anti-Nazi pastor Martin Niemöller, who had been seized as a
political prisoner: "First they came for the Jews." Most Americans
don't understand yet that the destruction of the rule of law at
Guantánamo set a dangerous precedent for them, too.
By the way, the establishment of military tribunals that deny
prisoners due process tends to come early on in a fascist shift.
Mussolini and Stalin set up such tribunals. On April 24 1934, the
Nazis, too, set up the People's Court, which also bypassed the
judicial system: prisoners were held indefinitely, often in
isolation, and tortured, without being charged with offences, and
were subjected to show trials. Eventually, the Special Courts became
a parallel system that put pressure on the regular courts to abandon
the rule of law in favour of Nazi ideology when making decisions.
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek what I call a "fascist shift" want to close
down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young
men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian
countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent
rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially
important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence
and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution.
The years following 9/11 have proved a bonanza for America's
security contractors, with the Bush administration outsourcing areas
of work that traditionally fell to the US military. In the process,
contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been issued for
security work by mercenaries at home and abroad. In Iraq, some of
these contract operatives have been accused of involvement in
torturing prisoners, harassing journalists and firing on Iraqi
civilians. Under Order 17, issued to regulate contractors in Iraq by
the one-time US administrator in Baghdad, Paul Bremer, these
contractors are immune from prosecution
Yes, but that is in Iraq, you could argue; however, after Hurricane
Katrina, the Department of Homeland Security hired and deployed
hundreds of armed private security guards in New Orleans. The
investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill interviewed one unnamed
guard who reported having fired on unarmed civilians in the city. It
was a natural disaster that underlay that episode - but the
administration's endless war on terror means ongoing scope for what
are in effect privately contracted armies to take on crisis and
emergency management at home in US cities.
Thugs in America? Groups of angry young Republican men, dressed in
identical shirts and trousers, menaced poll workers counting the
votes in Florida in 2000. If you are reading history, you can
imagine that there can be a need for "public order" on the next
election day. Say there are protests, or a threat, on the day of an
election; history would not rule out the presence of a private
security firm at a polling station "to restore public order".
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in
communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on
ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The
Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under
surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being
watched.
In 2005 and 2006, when James Risen and Eric Lichtblau wrote in the
New York Times about a secret state programme to wiretap citizens'
phones, read their emails and follow international financial
transactions, it became clear to ordinary Americans that they, too,
could be under state scrutiny.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about
"national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile
and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and
harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena,
whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found
itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service, while
churches that got Republicans out to vote, which is equally illegal
under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American Civil Liberties Union
reports that thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental
and other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a secret Pentagon
database includes more than four dozen peaceful anti-war meetings,
rallies or marches by American citizens in its category of 1,500
"suspicious incidents". The equally secret Counterintelligence Field
Activity (Cifa) agency of the Department of Defense has been
gathering information about domestic organisations engaged in
peaceful political activities: Cifa is supposed to track "potential
terrorist threats" as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A
little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights
protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly
expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D
Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who wrote
China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power, describe
pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being
arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society
there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are
targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get
off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed
that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security
searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found
themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San
Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's
government - after Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and
thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of Princeton University; he is
one of the foremost constitutional scholars in the nation and author
of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy is also a decorated
former marine, and he is not even especially politically liberal.
But on March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass at Newark,
"because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from
flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in
September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on
the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of
the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support the constitution?
Potential terrorist. History shows that the categories of "enemy of
the people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo who
was accused of mishandling classified documents. He was harassed by
the US military before the charges against him were dropped. Yee has
been detained and released several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in Oregon, was mistakenly
identified as a possible terrorist. His house was secretly broken
into and his computer seized. Though he is innocent of the
accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies that once you are on
the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they
don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state
universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph
Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's
Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in
punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those seeking a fascist shift
punish academics and students with professional loss if they do not
"coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically. Since civil servants
are the sector of society most vulnerable to being fired by a given
regime, they are also a group that fascists typically "coordinate"
early on: the Reich Law for the Re-establishment of a Professional
Civil Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several states put pressure
on regents at state universities to penalise or fire academics who
have been critical of the administration. As for civil servants, the
Bush administration has derailed the career of one military lawyer
who spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an administration
official publicly intimidated the law firms that represent detainees
pro bono by threatening to call for their major corporate clients to
boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a closed blog that "waterboarding
is torture" was stripped of the security clearance she needed in
order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight US attorneys for what
looks like insufficient political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the
civil service in April 1933, attorneys were "coordinated" too, a
step that eased the way of the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s,
Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the
70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be
dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and
harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close,
and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed
already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says arrests of US journalists
are at an all-time high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San
Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for refusing to turn over
video of an anti-war demonstration; Homeland Security brought a
criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast, claiming he
threatened "critical infrastructure" when he and a TV producer were
filming victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had
written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished in other ways. Joseph
C Wilson accused Bush, in a New York Times op-ed, of leading the
country to war on the basis of a false charge that Saddam Hussein
had acquired yellowcake uranium in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame,
was outed as a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her
career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though, compared with how the
US is treating journalists seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in
an unbiased way. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented
multiple accounts of the US military in Iraq firing upon or
threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning independent) reporters
and camera operators from organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to
the BBC. While westerners may question the accounts by al-Jazeera,
they should pay attention to the accounts of reporters such as the
BBC's Kate Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded or
killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003. Both CBS and the
Associated Press in Iraq had staff members seized by the US military
and taken to violent prisons; the news organisations were unable to
see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news
and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified
documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to
attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged
papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not
possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have
pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What
you already have is a White House directing a stream of false
information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to
sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies
that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from
fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every
closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that
increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the
definition of "spy" and "traitor". When Bill Keller, the publisher
of the New York Times, ran the Lichtblau/Risen stories, Bush called
the Times' leaking of classified information "disgraceful", while
Republicans in Congress called for Keller to be charged with
treason, and rightwing commentators and news outlets kept up the
"treason" drumbeat. Some commentators, as Conason noted, reminded
readers smugly that one penalty for violating the Espionage Act is
execution.
Conason is right to note how serious a threat that attack
represented. It is also important to recall that the 1938 Moscow
show trial accused the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin, of
treason; Bukharin was, in fact, executed. And it is important to
remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely
invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists
were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail
for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured
and threatened with death", according to the historian Myra
MacPherson. After that, dissent was muted in America for a decade.
In Stalin's Soviet Union, dissidents were "enemies of the people".
National Socialists called those who supported Weimar democracy
"November traitors".
And here is where the circle closes: most Americans do not realise
that since September of last year - when Congress wrongly,
foolishly, passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 - the
president has the power to call any US citizen an "enemy combatant".
He has the power to define what "enemy combatant" means. The
president can also delegate to anyone he chooses in the executive
branch the right to define "enemy combatant" any way he or she wants
and then seize Americans accordingly.
Even if you or I are American citizens, even if we turn out to be
completely innocent of what he has accused us of doing, he has the
power to have us seized as we are changing planes at Newark
tomorrow, or have us taken with a knock on the door; ship you or me
to a navy brig; and keep you or me in isolation, possibly for
months, while awaiting trial. (Prolonged isolation, as psychiatrists
know, triggers psychosis in otherwise mentally healthy prisoners.
That is why Stalin's gulag had an isolation cell, like Guantánamo's,
in every satellite prison. Camp 6, the newest, most brutal facility
at Guantánamo, is all isolation cells.)
We US citizens will get a trial eventually - for now. But legal
rights activists at the Center for Constitutional Rights say that
the Bush administration is trying increasingly aggressively to find
ways to get around giving even US citizens fair trials. "Enemy
combatant" is a status offence - it is not even something you have
to have done. "We have absolutely moved over into a preventive
detention model - you look like you could do something bad, you
might do something bad, so we're going to hold you," says a
spokeswoman of the CCR.
Most Americans surely do not get this yet. No wonder: it is hard to
believe, even though it is true. In every closing society, at a
certain point there are some high-profile arrests - usually of
opposition leaders, clergy and journalists. Then everything goes
quiet. After those arrests, there are still newspapers, courts, TV
and radio, and the facades of a civil society. There just isn't real
dissent. There just isn't freedom. If you look at history, just
before those arrests is where we are now.
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president
new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national
emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare -
he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that
he has declared in Oregon, over the objections of the state's
governor and its citizens.
Even as Americans were focused on Britney Spears's meltdown and the
question of who fathered Anna Nicole's baby, the New York Times
editorialised about this shift: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in
Washington is that laws that strike to the heart of American
democracy have been passed in the dead of night ... Beyond actual
insurrection, the president may now use military troops as a
domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease
outbreak, terrorist attack or any 'other condition'."
Critics see this as a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act -
which was meant to restrain the federal government from using the
military for domestic law enforcement. The Democratic senator
Patrick Leahy says the bill encourages a president to declare
federal martial law. It also violates the very reason the founders
set up our system of government as they did: having seen citizens
bullied by a monarch's soldiers, the founders were terrified of
exactly this kind of concentration of militias' power over American
people in the hands of an oppressive executive or faction.
from Naomi Wolf's "The End of Americ: A Letter to a Young Patriot"
