Title: FW: [globalnews] The Docile American
In case anyone needs to be reminded, it is more important now than ever before, in the face of the Bush administration’s frontal assault on civil liberties and freedom of speech, that each and every one of us stand up and speak our truth, in our homes, in our neighborhoods, on our streets, and on the Internet.
We have nothing to fear but fear itself. And the Bushes want you to be fearful. Fearful to speak out because Big Brother is watching, fearful to post on your favorite mailing list because the spooks have black boxes that troll the Internet for thoughtcriminals, fearful to appear in public at antiwar rallies and rock concerts because video surveillance cameras may capture your image and be placed in a giant databank.
They want you to be too frightened to stand up to corporate power and lobby as an academic, a citizen activist, or a community leader for safe, clean food, a clean environment, civil liberties and peace in the world. Remember that the spooks have proven unable to sift through the terabytes of data they get from Echelon, or wiretaps or email monitoring devices over the years. They don’t have that capability. I speak here as a journalist who has covered spooks and national security for many years for The Village Voice and other publications. Remember these are the same folks who think airport security consists of shaking down grandmothers and small children, but they do virtually nothing to control the users of corporate airplanes. They are far from omnipotent. They are the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.
The Bushes would like to be able to target outspoken folks in large numbers with the new technologies and new bureaucracies they are creating, but their ability to do that is still years away. They can put enhanced surveillance on folks they already have on a list, but the probability that you will not get a job or will be blacklisted in your profession because you speak out on the Internet or attend a peace rally is small. If you are effective enough in your opposition to draw their attention personally, the best defense is a high profile.
Curtis Lang
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Be the change you want to see in the world.
--Gandhi
NOTEBOOK
Regime Change
By Lewis H. Lapham
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
· Benjamin Franklin)
Unrelenting in its search for Osama bin Laden and the roots of all the world’s evil, the Defense Department some months ago established an Information Awareness Office that took for its letterhead emblem the all-seeing eye of God. Although still in the early stages of development and for the moment funded with an annual budget of only $200 million, the new medium of mass investigation seeks to “detect and classify” every prospective terrorist (foreign, hybrid, mutant, or native born) setting foot on American soil. No door or envelope unopened, no secret unexposed, no suspicious suitcase or Guatemalan allowed to descend un-noticed from a cruise ship or a bicycle.
To give weight and form to a paranoid dream of reason not unlike the one that sustained the sixteenth century Spanish Inquisition, the government apparently means to recruit a synod of high-speed computers capable of sifting through “ultra-large” data warehouses stocked with every electronic proof of human movement in the wilderness of cyberspace-bank, medical, and divorce records, credit-card transactions, emails (interoffice and extraterritorial), college transcripts, surveillance photographs (from cameras in hospitals and shopping malls as well as from those in airports and hotel bars), driver’s licenses and passport applications, bookstore purchases, website visits, and traffic violations. Connect all the names and places to all the dates and times, and once the systems become fully operational, in four years or maybe ten, the protectors of the public health and safety hope to reach beyond “truth maintenance” and “biologically inspired algorithms for agent control” to the construction of “FutureMap”-i.e., a set of indices programmed into the fiberoptic equivalent of a crystal ball that modifies “market-based techniques for avoiding surprise” in such a way that next week’s nuclear explosion can be seen as clearly as last week’s pornographic movie. In the meantime, while waiting for the technical up-grades with which to perform “entity extraction from natural language text,” the clerks seated at the computer screens can look for inspiration to the mandala on their office stationery-an obverse of the Great Seal of the United States similar to the ornament on the back of the $1 bill, an Egyptian pyramid and mystic, Rosicrucian light buttressed by the rendering in Latin of the motto “Knowledge is power.”
When reports of the lAO’s existence belatedly appeared in the main-stream press in November of last year, nine months after the headquarters’ staff began moving the first electronic robots into an air-conditioned basement in Virginia, the news didn’t capture the attention of the Congress or excite the interest of the television networks. No politician uttered a discouraging word; no prominent historian entertained the risk of a possibly unpatriotic question. The talk-show gossip of the moment dwelled on the prospect of war in Iraq and the setting up of the Department of Homeland Security (soon to be equipped with its own domestic espionage service), and, except for an occasional lawyer associated with the American Civil Liberties Union, most of the people in New York to whom I mentioned the Pentagon’s gift for totalitarian fantasy were inclined to think that intelligence gathering was somehow akin to weather forecasting-a routine and necessary precaution, annoying and possibly unconstitutional but entirely appropriate in a time of trouble.
William Safire entered an objection on the opinion page of the New York Times (“Orwellian scenario ... sweeping theft of privacy rights ... exploitation of fear”), but elsewhere in the large-circulation media protests were hard to find. The general opinion so clearly favored the Bush Administration’s policies of forward deterrence and preemptive strike that I wasn’t surprised by the absence of commentary, much less complaint, when it was announced in early December that the FBI had been jettisoning the baggage of due process while pursuing the rumor of an underwater terrorist attack against an unknown target somewhere along the 95,000 miles of the American coastline. From hundreds of dive-shop operators everywhere in the country the FBI demanded the names of the several million swimmers who had taken diving lessons over the course of the last three years. Only two citizens refused the request, the co-owners of Reef Seekers Dive Company in Beverly Hills, California. When word of their non-cooperation showed up in a news-paper story, they were besieged by vindictive telephone calls expressing the hope that their shop prove to be the next locus of a terrorist bombing.
The incident speaks to the nervous temper of the times-hundreds of dive shops, only one refusing to give up its client list; the voice of the people tuned to the pitch of an angry mob-and illustrates the lesson in obedience well and truly learned by a once free people during the second half of a century defined in the history books as America’s own. I’m old enough to re-member public speeches unfettered by the dogma of political correctness, a time when it was possible to apply for a job without submitting to a blood or urine test, when people construed their freedoms as a constitutional birthright, not as favors grudgingly bestowed by a sometimes benevolent government. I also can remember the days when people weren’t afraid of tobacco smoke, sexual intercourse, and saturated fats; when irony was understood and money wasn’t sacred; when even men in uniform could be trusted to recognize a joke.
The spacious and once familiar atmospheres of liberty (wisecracking and open-ended, tolerant, unkempt, experimental,
and democratic) didn’t survive the poisoning of Hiroshima or serve the purposes of the Cold War with the Russians. The easygoing, provincial republic of fifty years ago gradually assumed the character of a world-encircling nation-state, its plow-shares beaten into swords, borrowing from its enemies (first the nonexistent Communist empire, now the unseen terrorist jihad) the practice of restricting the freedom of its own citizens in the interest of what the increasingly oligarchic governments in Washing-ton proclaim to be “the national security.” Begin the narrative almost any-where in the late 1940s or early 1950s-with the National Security Act of 1947, the hearings before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951, President Harry Truman’s decision to build the hydrogen bomb, the composition of the Hollywood Black-list, or Senator Joe McCarthy’s search for Marxists marching in the Rose Bowl Parade-and the plot development moves briskly forward in the direction of more fear and less courage, toward the substitution of White House intrigue for congressional debate and the professions of smiling loyalty preferred to the clumsy and impolitic fumbling for the truth.
Bear in mind the conclusion of the Church committee hearings as long ago as 1976-“too many people have been spied upon by too many Government agencies and too much in-formation has been collected”-and space permits only a brief acknowledgment of the various police powers seized by the government under the rubric of the war on drugs (the use of anonymous informants, the taking of property without conviction or arrest), of the illegal surveillance of American citizens by their own intelligence agencies (the CIA between 1953 and 1973 producing an index of 1.5 million suspicious American names, the FBI compiling a list of 26,000 individuals to be summarily rounded up in the event of “a national emergency”), of the justice Department’s long campaign against the civil rights granted by the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth amendments to the Constitution, and of a system of public education that offers its best-attended courses of instruction to the student populations in the army and the prisons. Add to the constant threat of nuclear extinction the sum of the wiretaps infiltrated into the American consciousness across the span of three gen-erations, and it’s no wonder that by the late 1990s, even in the midst of the reassuring prosperity allied with a buoyant stock market, and well before the destruction of the World Trade Center, the public-opinion polls found the bulk of the respondents willing to give up a generous percentage of their essential liberty in return for safer streets, secure suburbs, well-lighted parking garages, and risk-free cocktail waitresses.
Since the shock of September 11, 2001, the American public has quickened the pace of its retreat into the shelters of harmless speech and heavy law enforcement. If I were to measure the general level of submissiveness by my own encounters with the habit of self-censorship and the general concern with social hygiene-acquaintances reluctant to remark on the brutality of the Israeli army for fear of being thought anti-Semitic, public scolds who damn me as a terrorist for smoking a cigarette in Central Park, college students so worried about the grooming of their résumés that they avoid rock concerts on the off-chance that their faces might show up on a police-department videotape-I might be tempted to argue that America’s winning of the Cold War resulted in the loss of its soul. In place of the reckless and independent-minded individual once thought to embody the national stereotype (child of nature, descendant of Daniel Boone, hard-drinking and unorthodox) we now have a quorum of nervous careerists, psalm-singing and well-behaved, happy to oblige, eager to please, trained to hold up their hands and empty their pockets when passing through airport security or entering City Hall.
John Quincy Adams understood the terms of the bargain as long ago as 1821, speaking as the secretary of state against sending the U.S. Navy to re-arrange Spain’s colonial empire in Colombia and Chile. America, he said, “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the country to embark on such a foolish adventure, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force .... She might be-come the dictatress of the world. She would no longer be the ruler of her own spirit.
The Bush Administration equates the American spirit with power, not with liberty. During the months since the fall of the twin towers it has assumed the colors and usurped the standard of freedom to jury-rig the framework of an autocratic state; bowing to the constituencies of fear and patriotic sentiment, a servile Congress approves the requested legislation as eagerly as if it had been called upon to save a sinking ship with the rapid slamming of steel doors. First the USA Patriot Act (authorizing the government to arbitrarily decide who is and who is not an un-American), then the president seeking the prerogative to declare any citizen an “enemy combat-ant” (subject to being imprisoned, indefinitely, without charge or bail and forbidden access to a lawyer or a court review), then the formation of the lAO and the several reconfigurations of both the Justice Department and the FBI (always with the purpose of multiplying their pretexts for an arrest), and then, most recently, on November 25 of last year, the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security.
The supporting legislation runs to 484 pages, which Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia flung down on his desk with a gesture that reminded a New York Times reporter of “the fury of Moses smashing the tablets.” One of only nine senators who voted against the bill, Byrd denounced it as a foolish and unlawful seizure of power unlikely to do much harm to America’s enemies but certain to do a great deal of harm to the American people. “With a battle plan like the Bush Administration is proposing,” Byrd said, “in-stead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the riv-er arid built a bureaucracy.”
Not having read the small print in the Homeland Security Act, I can’t guess at the extent to which it will further subtract from the country’s store of civil liberty, but if I understand correctly its operative bias (170,000 functionaries undefended by a labor union and serving at the pleasure and sole discretion of the president of the Unit-ed States) I all too easily can imagine a new department of bureaucratic control that incorporates the paranoid systems of thought engendered by the Cold War with the dogmas of political correctness meant to cure the habit of free speech, and deploys the surveillance techniques made possible by the miracles of modem telecommunications technology.
I don’t count myself a believer in the dystopian futures imagined in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or George Orwell’s 1984, but I think it would be a mistake to regard the trend of events as somehow favorable to the cause of liberty. President Bush likes to present himself as the embodiment of the spirit of 1776, but to the directorship of the Pentagon’s new Information Awareness Office he appoint-ed Vice Admiral John Poindexter, a royalist ideologue, a convicted felon, and a proven enemy of both the American Congress and the articles of the Constitution. As national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan in 1985, the admiral supervised what came to be known as the Iran-Contra swindle-the selling of missiles to the despotic ayatollahs in Iran in return for money with which to fund, secretly and illegally, a thuggish junta in Nicaragua. After the scheme collapsed under the weight of its criminal stupidity, the admiral repeatedly lied to the congressional committee investigating the farce (thus his convictions on five felony counts), and when called upon to account for his false testimony he said that he considered it his “duty” to conceal information too sensitive to be entrusted to loud-mouthed politicians.
Not an honest or liberal-minded man, the admiral, but unfortunately representative of the arrogant corporatists currently in charge of the government in Washington. Glimpsed in the persons of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, the senior managers of the Bush Administration make no secret of their contempt for the rules of democratic procedure (inefficient, wrong-headed, and slow), their distrust of the American people (indolent and in-moral, corrupted by a debased popular culture, undeserving of the truth), and their disdain for the United Nations and the principle of international law (sophomoric idealisms popular with weak nations too poor to pay for a serious Air Force). I don’t for a moment doubt the eager commitment to the great and noble project of “regime change,” but on the evidence of the last eighteen months they’ve been doing their most effective work in the United States, not in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. Better under-stood as radical nationalists than as principled conservatives, they deploy the logic endorsed by the American military commanders in Vietnam (who found it necessary to destroy a village in order to save it), and they offer the American people a choice similar to the one presented by the officers of the Spanish Inquisition to independent-minded heretics-give up your liberty, and we will set you free. .
