Coming
in September
From AK Press
Featuring Essays by:
Edward Said, Robert Fisk, Michael Neumann, Shahid Alam, Alexander
Cockburn, Uri Avnery, Bill and Kathy Christison and More
Today's
Stories
August
11, 2003
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Recent
Stories
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
Pimps for the White House
August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
Prison Rape
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
of the Day
Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
The Devil's Music (Industry)
Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
Rampton
and John Stauber
True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
Wars
Hammond
Guthrie
Speculation Blues
Website
of the Day
Army of One?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
July
30, 2003
David
Lindorff
Poindexter the Terror Bookie
Marjorie
Cohn
Why Iraq and Afghanistan? It's About
the Oil
Elaine
Cassel
How Ashcroft Coerces Guilty Pleas
in Terror Cases
Zvi
Bar'el
The Hidden Costs of the Iraq War
Lisa Walsh
Thomas
Killing Mustafa Hussein: Death of a Child, Birth of a Legend?
Sean
Carter
Pat Robertson's Prayer Jihad: God, Sodomy and the Supremes
ND Jayaprakash
India and Ariel Sharon
Steve
Perry
Bush's Top 40 Lies
Standard
Schaefer
Correction about Bloomberg and Outscourcing
Website
of the Day
Bring Them Home Now!
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
August
11, 2003
Homeland Security
for Whom?
Are
Bush, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz Protecting America or Their Own
Regime?
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
Adapted from the July 2003
issue of Penthouse Magazine
"The implication or latent threat
of terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply."
William Colby, creator of the CIA's Phoenix
Program, which targeted Vietnamese leaders for assassination
during the Vietnam War
For those of you believe the war on terror and
the violent occupation of Iraq will ensure world peace, you've
got another thing coming; and that thing is the illegitimate
Bush Regime's homeland security infrastructure.
Let me state the point of this article
up front: The war on terror, and its "homeland security"
counterpart, are flip sides of the same coin. They are the same
ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like CIA
agent Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, their evil intention
is wrapped in a complex matrix of transparent lies. Pointedly,
that evil intention is to provide the Bush Regime with political
internal security at home, thus enabling it to plunder the world
with impunity.
The foreign policy aspect of this synthesis
was promulgated on September 20, 2002 in the "The National
Security Strategy of the United States" (a.k.a. the Bush
Manifesto) in which the Bush Regime confers upon itself the divine
right to devastate any nation it dislikes, or has vast oil fields
or other natural resources that it covets. This first-degree-murder
strategy makes about 70 percent of Americans feel good about
Bush. But Bush has an insidious ulterior motive, and if these
feel-good Americans were to read the fine print of his Manifesto,
they would realize that by generating more human misery around
the world, the eternal war on terror will create  more dissenters at home, and
thus provide Bush with the mandate he needs to impose a de facto
military dictatorship, as prescribed in his domestic policy statements:
the Homeland Security, Patriot, and Domestic Security Enhancement
Acts.
Just as waging war around the world is
popular, so too will be suppressing domestic dissent. For example,
Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly recently had to defend himself
when he said war protesters were "un-American." His
producers made him do some fast backpedaling, but the Big Mouth
was expressing the true feelings of most of his listeners. The
airwaves and editorial columns bombard the public with the Bill
Riley message, and that is how peace activists go from being
bad Americans to being enemies of the state. And that is how
the war on terror translates into a homeland security infrastructure
that suppresses dissent.
The Shell Game
Homeland Security is a euphemism for
internal security, but that phrase has the nasty ring of McCarthyism
to it, and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, led by
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and racist Senator James Eastland's
Internal Security Subcommittee. Before the neo-cons got hooked
on terror, America's hawks were obsessed with Godless Communism.
Hoover devoted his life to destroying every Communist in America,
while the Dulles brothers (CIA Director Allen and Secretary of
State John) harnessed the mania and used it as a convenient pretext
for Cold War foreign intervention, and laid the foundation stones
for the American empire after World War II. In the same way,
Bush's anal obsession with terror is the new contrived pretext
for solidifying world domination. But as Hoover, Eastland, and
the Dulles' knew, without political internal security, Bush cannot
wage war abroad, with all the economic benefits that entails.
So Bush, with the help of Joe Lieberman,
the Senator from Israel, created the Department Homeland Security
to pacify (a euphemism for terrorize) the American people into
submission through a number of ploys. This homeland security
boondoggle is the biggest reorganization of the U.S. government
in 50 years. It might even bankrupt the country and, perhaps
intentionally, throw it into a Depression. That remains to be
seen. What is certain is that at a cost of $50 billion in taxpayer's
money, the homeland security infrastructure will provide Bush
with 170,000 political cadres, and the internal security he needs
to assure the continuity of his political power indefinitely.
Except for providing Bush with political internal security, there
is no need for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a Trojan
Horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers
and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve permanent political
dominance.
And he is creating this police state
through terror. As the Homeland Security web site assures us,
the threat of terrorism "is a permanent condition"
that "requires our country to design a new homeland security
structure."
Terror as an Organizing
Principle of Society
The underlying principle of homeland
security (and the war on terror) is that terror is an organizing
principle of society. This includes every type of terror, from
the shock and awe bombs that liberated Baghdad, to the collective
punishments Israel used to crush the Palestinian soul. It's armed
propaganda in the form of National Guardsmen eye-balling us at
airports, and it's the greatest psywar campaign ever waged, in
the form of red white and blue color-coded warnings of terror
attacks that never occur, and unsubstantiated reports brought
to you by government stenographers at network news.
Terror is the underlying concept. In
"Metaphoric Entrapment In Time," researcher Anthony
Judge tells how the new homeland security infrastructure is actually
an act of "structural violence."
"Personal violence is for the amateur
in dominance," Judge notes, quoting two-time Nobel Prize
winner Johan Galtung, but "structural violence is the tool
of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns;
the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality
of the social system and its institutions, of government, and
of individuals at the interpersonal level is tacit violence.
Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social
injustice."
Now that the Department of Homeland Security
has been voted into law, Bush has laid the groundwork for America's
new legally criminal social structure, which exploits on both
personal and professional levels. This confluence blesses Bush
with omnipotence. He is all-powerful. As he said before sacrificing
the Iraqis on the altar of his apotheosis: "We have concluded
that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world."
Delusions of grandeur? A messiah syndrome?
Penis envy? What gives?
Justice as Terror
Administrative detention is the extralegal
nail upon which the forthcoming legally criminal homeland security
structure hangs. It is a neat way of avoiding the Bill of Rights
and the Geneva Conventions by creating "crimes of status."
Administrative detention was first used by the CIA in the Vietnam
War through the notorious Phoenix "assassination" Program,
and was applied against Communists, Nationalists, and anyone
else opposing the puppet US puppet regime, just as CIA death
squads are operating now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sympathizing
with the Communists was a crime of status, as was advocating
peace.
Administrative detention is structural
violence for the professionals. At the personal level, the terror
as an organizing principle of society relies on selective terror,
which means destroying one's political opposition through acts
of terror directed at individuals. It derives from the Eye of
God technique, which plays on primitive fears of an all-seeing
cosmic Eye of God that sees into your mind. It was used in World
War One by morale officers who sent pilots in small aircraft
to fly over enemy camps to call out the names of individual soldiers.
CIA psywar expert Ed Lansdale, Graham Greene's model for Alden
Pyle in The Quiet American, used this technique in the Philippines
in the early 1950s. At night a psywar team would creep into town
and paint an eye (like the one that appears atop the pyramid
in the Great Seal of the United States) on the wall of a house
facing a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.
In South Vietnam the Eye of God trick
took a ghastly twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour
Hersh that "some psychological warfare [psywar] guy in Washington
thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers. When we
killed the VC there, they wanted us to spread eagle the guy,
put out his eye, cut a hole in the back [of his head] and put
his eye in there. The idea was that fear was a good weapon."
Likewise, ears were cut off corpses and nail to houses to let
the people know that big brother was listening as well. When
Viet Cong leaders were found, Phoenix teams murdered and mutilated
them along with their families and neighbors as a means of terrorizing
the neighboring population into a state of submission. Such horrendous
acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if
they had been committed by the enemy. To spread the word that
everyone was a potential victim, CIA psywar posters pictured
a Phoenix with a blacklist trailing from its beak and a snake
(i.e. a Communist) grasped in one of its talons. The message
was that the omnipotent CIA selectively snatches its prey, in
the most hideous way.
The Bush Regime is locked into this method
of selective terror. They want you to think they know everything
about you: if you've been bad or good, so to speak. Just remember
what happened to Uday Hussein and his brother Qusay, and all
the other Iraqis featured on the CIA's popular death cards, which
are advertised on the Internet.
The modern manifestation of selective
terror is the computerized blacklist - the greatest blackmail
scheme ever invented: if you don't do what Bush and his clique
want, your name pops up and you're suppressed. Be forewarned,
the Bush Regime's blacklists include the INS/State Department's
TIPOFF; CAPPS II, which uses credit information and secret databases
to assess a person's security risk level each time he or she
flies; the "No-Fly" blacklist of peace activists, distributed
to airlines by the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration;
and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department.
You know about these lists. You just don't know about the secret
ones, the Bush Regime's enemies list of its most powerful domestic
political opponents.
Administrative detention and selective
terror work in tandem and depend on informant and surveillance
programs that identify, in homeland jargon, "terrorist surrogates"
at the grass roots level of society. (Attorney General John Ashcroft's
Terrorism Information and Prevention System, a.k.a TIPS, was
the short-lived prototype.) This is how it happens: on the basis
of a false accusation made by an anonymous homeland informant,
counter terror teams will arrest a terrorist surrogate, detain
the person indefinitely under administrative detention laws in
an interrogation center until he or she dies or defects, or is
sent to a military tribunal for disposition. Disposition means
permanent detention in some perverse torture chambers like the
ones in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ultimately, the Domestic Security
Enhancement Act will allow Ashcroft to secretly incarcerate and
deport U.S. citizens without any thought of ensuring them due
process of law. Check out what happened to Jose Padilla.
To summarize so far: Blanket surveillance,
blacklists, arrests on the word of anonymous informants, the
absence of due process through extralegal administrative detention
procedures, military tribunals, incarceration, and deportation
are the instruments of the homeland security infrastructure,
which will coordinate all existing U.S. intelligence, police,
and military units in the attack on terrorists and their surrogates.
Ensuring Political
Security
Bush is about to devour his domestic
enemies at both the tactical (personal) and strategic (professional)
levels. Upper echelon enemies will be dealt with by the Homeland
Security Council, which Bush chairs, and which does not appear
on any organizational chart. It sets policy for a secret political
warfare program. It is the greatest danger facing America today.
Like the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic senators, it takes
only a few "black propaganda" operations to suppress
the leaders of the political opposition. Private contactors may
carry out executive actions (what the Israelis fondly refer to
as "targeted kills") issued by this all-powerful Board
of Directors, as they are not accountable to Congress. Or Bush
will employ political action squads from the Terrorist Threat
Integration Center, which consists of the FBI and CIA's terror
experts, and reports only to Bush.
Tactically Bush will neutralize opponents
through the Department of Homeland Security, which consists of
four directorates: Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection,
Science and Technology, Border and Transportation Security, and
Emergency Preparedness and Response. The all-important Office
of Intelligence, consisting of about 1000 analysts from dozens
of agencies, is cloistered within the Directorate of Information
Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. This Office, insofar
as it will coordinate the other directorates in terror operations,
is the nerve center of the DHS political internal security infrastructure.
The Office of Intelligence will manage
the CIA's domestic action squads, interrogation, and informant
programs, and will wag the homeland security dog by coordinating
all in-coming intelligence, and then sending out warnings to
state, local and private sector officials. Employees from the
CIA's Counter-Terror Center will fill the most important positions
within the Office of Intelligence, and will plan daily operations
in conjunction with fellow CT Center officers posted within 93
Justice Department terrorism task forces run around the country.
With the latest electronic surveillance gadgets available to
them, they will reach into every corner of society, including
our homes, workplaces, public facilities and computers, to sniff
out terrorist surrogates and launch preemptive attacks to neutralize
them before they activate.
If you don't believe that the blossoming
homeland security infrastructure is already providing political
internal security, consider that hundreds of businesses and institutions
across the country have already been placed on the CIA's Watch
List. According to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, one Bush
official said that merely being on the list "could destroy
the livelihood of all those organizations...without a bomb being
thrown or a spore of anthrax being released."
Elizabeth Becker of the New York Times
reported several months ago that "the leaders of many federal
departments and agencies have been scrambling to figure out...
how they can influence the outcome [of the impending Department
of Homeland Security] without appearing disloyal."
And James Bamford noted that "pressure
has been building on the intelligence agencies to deliberately
slant estimates to fit a political agenda," and "a
growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals
and diplomats ...charge that the administration squelches dissenting
views."
This is the maximum danger of homeland
security, and what it boils down to mandatory self-censorship.
Already we passively permit hooded paramilitary policemen with
automatic rifles to search our cars, without probable cause,
for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. These policemen are helping
us, right? They would never turn their guns on us, right?
As stated in a CIA terrorist training
manual that came to light almost 20 years ago, "Implicit
terror always accompanies weapons, since the people are internally
"aware" that they can be used against them."
This is what William Colby was talking
about when he was quoted in the prologue to this article as saying,
"The implication or latent threat of terror was sufficient
to insure that the people would comply."
Creating the Political
Cadres
Neo-con Michael Ledeen, a certified homelander,
rationalized the use of terror as an organizing principle of
society when he said, "New times require new people with
new standards." According to Ledeen, these new people have
the will power to "stamp out" the "corrupt habits
of mind" manifest in the thoughts or actions of anyone who
opposes Bush Regime aggression. Says Ledeen, "The entire
political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will
give [Homeland Security] a chance to succeed, and us to prevail."
On the international scene, these "new
people" illegally invaded Iraq, formed a puppet regime of
supplitiefs, stole the nation's oil and are putting the profits
in their own pockets, and are now assassinating and otherwise
terrorizing, through an updated Phoenix Program, any political
opposition, in what amounts to mass murder.
Information management is key in creating
the "new people" who will organize the new criminal
homeland social structure, and make it appear legal, moral and
most importantly, popular. The first step in manufacturing these
robots is through motivational indoctrination, which is based
on the principle that people will do a anything you ask of them
if you make them feel special. In return for adopting the right
attitude, a successful career is offered. Several alumni from
the CIA's Phoenix Program already enjoy important top homeland
security posts, like Major General Bruce Lawlor, Chief of Staff
of the Department of Homeland Security, and Roger Mackin, the
CIA officer in charge of the Department's counter-narcotics center.
From mid-1967 until mid-1968, Mackin ran the Phoenix Program
in Da Nang City, and managed its Intelligence and Operations
Coordination Center - the organizational model for the Department
of Homeland Security. Mackin is also touted as the CIA officer
who nailed Colombian drug smuggler Pablo Escobar in a typical
Phoenix assassination operation in December 1993.
CIA psywar experts like Lawlor and Mackin
will motivationally indoctrinate the 170,000 some odd homeland
security personnel to wage political warfare. A training manual
on the subject was reprinted in the early 1980s by a former Phoenix
officer who got caught up in the Reagan Regime's illegal Contra
War. Titled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, it
states that "the human being should be considered the priority
objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target
of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point
in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the 'political animal'
has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets."
Having been politically and motivationally
indoctrinated, Critical Infrastructure and other homeland personnel
will spy on colleagues who may inadvertently or maliciously serve
as terrorist surrogates by publicly or privately revealing information
about homeland infrastructure vulnerabilities, such as power
grids or computer systems. These cadre will covertly identify
and watch terrorist surrogates until it becomes necessary to
expose the surrogates in the media. No one will want to be identified,
even falsely, as an inadvertent or malicious terrorist surrogate,
knowing that they are subject to being "stamped out,"
as Michael Ledeen suggests. In this way the Bush Regime is organizing
its political cadre - Ledeen's "new people" who have
been psychologically defeated by the implicit terror around them
and, having reverted to the same infantile state of mind occupied
by President George W. Bush, have embraced the Fascist principles
they've been subliminally indoctrinated with for years through
the corporate propaganda machine.
These "new people" are fast
joining front organizations like the Freedom Corps, the Citizen
Corps, Community Emergency Response Teams (which will train kids
at school to prepare for the disasters the Bush Regime will surely
visit upon America); the Neighborhood Watch Program that will
allow the Bush Regime to detain its drunk and disorderly political
opponents as terrorist surrogates; and the Medical Reserve Corps
(MRC), through which enfranchised doctors will monitor patients
within the faltering health care system.
Within these front groups are cadres
trained "in techniques of persuasion over control of target
groups" to support the Bush Regime. In the forthcoming national
emergency, these cadres will be mobilized, will attend mass meetings,
carry placards, shout slogans as part of a Popular Information
Program, appeal to our cultural beliefs through Michael Savage-style
radio shows, teach classes on correct thinking, organize subtle
but massive screening operations designed to generate defectors,
who will in turn to denounce former comrades who spoke ill of
the Bush Regime. They will intervene with "problem individuals,"
and everywhere encourage their neighbors to report the activities
of terrorist surrogates by dropping a note addressed to the police
in local mailboxes. It's not hard to imagine a few of the most
highly motivated cadres getting carried away, grabbing ropes,
and forming lynch mobs.
Only five percent of the people need
to be organized in this fashion for Bush to wield control over
the indifferent ninety percent, and defeat the five percent that
form the political resistance. This is why psychological operations
are the Bush Regime's No. 1 priority. Case in point: when Bush
publicly announced the Department of Homeland Security on 6 June
2002, he stated that the organization's primary mission was to
"mobilize and focus... the American people "to accomplish
the mission of attacking the enemy where he hides and plans."
By which he means his political opponents.
Psywar experts prize "compromise
and discreditation" operations like the one the FBI used
against Martin Luther King before he was assassinated. Information
about his extramarital affairs was leaked, and he was sent a
message with the suggestion that he should commit suicide. "There
is only one way out for you," the forged document read.
"You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent
self is bared to the nation." Forged documents like the
one used against King are an important facet of political blackmail,
and are also used to justify false arrests or conceal illegal
operations. We have already seen Network News broadcast "edited"
videotapes of Osama bin Laden and, in the Afghanistan war, captured
(perhaps forged) documents were routinely used as a form of black
propaganda to justify military actions that resulted in "collateral"
damage.
The greatest example, of course, is Bush's
criminal an impeachable use of forged documents to justify the
illegal invasion of Iraq. This was an act of treason by the President
of the United States, and yet within the new legally criminal
homeland security structure, it is business as usual.
We can expect a slew of false rumors
from low-level homeland cadre, designed to ruin the reputations
of politically incorrect families in their villages and towns,
especially environmentalists who pose a threat to Critical Infrastructure
corporations. The paranoia that currently infects the Arab-American
community will spread until no one is sure who is a spy for the
Thought Police. When the national emergency arrives, most likely
the forthcoming depression, and the homeland security infrastructure
goes on Red Alert, midnight arrests and disappearances into administrative
detention centers will become commonplace. Amid the confusion,
the CIA will form special units within the 93 terrorism task
forces around the country, and other unilateral Phoenix Program-style
hit teams will operate under cover of the security forces at
their disposal.
The clincher is when the definition of
a terrorist surrogate is expanded to include people deemed dangerous
to the Public Order, at which point any person can be arrested
on criminal charges for political offenses. No specific charge
is required; a homelander like Ledeen or Bill O'Rilley will simply
accuse someone of disturbing the peace or being un-American The
definitions of sedition and treason will grow to include disseminating
information about government corruption, or undermining the will
of the State by challenging its authority. Calling for civil
disobedience will be a really scary threat to the homeland. Cadre
in the Office of Cyberspace Security will expose you as a terrorist
surrogate for sending sarcastic or satirical emails. How can
you prove you were only joking when you blamed Bush for the terror
attacks on the World Trade Center, and said Cheney's refusal
to investigate proves that Bush did it?
Ultimately, every town will form a Homeland
Committee, chaired by a Bush Regime operative who will process
confidential reports from concerned citizens about the activities
of peaceniks, or people they don't like for personal reasons,
such as business competitors. These reports will pass through
an ideological filter as they work their way up to the Office
of Intelligence and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center,
where motivated CIA officers will gleefully pull the plug on
environmentalists, people espousing national health care, and
anyone challenging to the Bush Regime and the internal security
forces that are firmly in its grip.
Beware. Ashcroft has vowed to "employ
new tools that ease administrative burdens." However benign
he might think he means this, these new tools can allow the government
to wage political warfare through implicit and explicit terror.
And the government can do it! The Geneva Conventions guarantee
protection to civilians in time of war, but do not prohibit a
state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency
detention when such measures are necessary for the security or
safety of the state. In this way indefinite detention, torture
and summary execution, all carried out without previous judgment
pronounced by a regularly constituted court, are perfectly legal,
because they are the result of "administrative procedures"
and do not involve a "criminal sentence."
This is what Israel is done to the Palestinians,
and this is what the Bush Regime has in store for America through
its eternal war on terror: that sad obsession with dominance,
itself a sad projection of Bush's feelings of inadequacy, most
likely brought upon by his domineering mother Barbara.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The
Hotel Tacloban, The
Phoenix Program, and TDY.
His new book The Strength of the Wolf: the Federal Bureau of
Narcotics, 1930-1968 will be published by Verso. Valentine was
an investigator for Pepper on the King case in 1998-1999. For
information about Valentine and his books and articles, please
visit his website at www.douglasvalentine.com.
He can be reached at: redspruce@attbi.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
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