-Caveat Lector-
An excerpt from:
Secret Police
Anrea darvi and Thomas Plate�1981
Abacus(1983)
London
448 Pages -
-----
EIGHT
When the Bizarre
Becomes Commonplace
1
The future of the secret police is made secure by their successes in the
past. Secret police forces around the world have proven to be astonishingly
effective instruments of control. And in an era in which many states are
increasingly insecure, desperate governments are forced to ask the inevitable
question: What better method for gluing a society together is there? It is no
coincidence, after all, that regimes of both the extreme left and the extreme
right, despite all their differences of ideology and political style, select
the secret police inStrument of societal control time and again. The moral
justifications for adopting stringent security measures among regimes of the
left and of the right may differ, but the end results are nearly identical:
the knocks on the door in the middle of the night; the prolonged and
unexplained detentions; the telling marks left on the wrists, the back, or
the feet; and the wholesale disappearances of hundreds, and sometimes even
thousands, of citizens. These are the telltale signs of a society's reliance
on the secret police solution. With the obvious exception of the spread of
nuclear weapons, the spread of the secret police solution is as important and
troubling a fact of world politics as there is.
The contemporary acceptance of the concept of the secret police solution is
obviously related to the brutal simplicity of that option. What could be
simpler than eliminating opposition to the government, rather than creating a
complex system in which opposition is tolerated if not welcomed? For to
achieve a broad and genuine political consensus in a society, so that the
governed consent to be governed, is an extraordinarily difficult process that
may take years, decades, or even centuries to achieve, and which stands in
the way of that instant economic progress that seems so essential in the
modern world.
Given these factors, consider anew the secret police solutionimmediate,
relatively uncomplicated, time-tested, a very accessible Nuick fix."
And it often works.
But it does not always work-or it does not work forever. It worked for
twenty-one years in Iran, but in the end it failed. Historians can now
speculate why. Perhaps it was that SAVAK was more club than brain. Its powers
exceeded its talents. And it was betrayed by the carelessness of its
sovereign, who permitted SAVAK to become a rallying cry in every household
where contempt for the corrupt regime and the heavy-handedness of the secret
police prevailed. Compare the Shah's moves to those of Chile's President
Pinochet, who put DINA through the blind of the name change; or those of the
late Marshall Tito, whose secret police force was (and still is) so secret
that few even know its contemporary name and even fewer know how it is
organized or how it works. SAVAK was encumbered with one liability that it
could not, ultimately, overcome: the miscalculations of the Shah in his
struggle with the mullahs, in his moral slackness in the face of growing
corruption around his court, and in his relations with his patron, the United
States, which in the end pulled the rug out from under the Peacock Throne. A
secret police organization cannot succeed in the face of such colossal
incompetence.
But, in more competent hands, the secret police can be a terribly effective
instrument of control. Their use is a technique that can endure over time.
The longevity and consistency of the powers of the KGB are testimony to the
grand potential endemic to the secret police solution.
But the secret police solution itself is not an adequate basis for governing
a society. In the U.S.S.R., the KGB exists alongside a massive and powerful
central party structure that has proved its governing abilities and
resilience over decades. The KGB also exists alongside a system of massive
ideological indoctrination running at fever pitch from cradle to grave. But
when the Shah of Iran became the focus of all political hostility, SAVAK was
left to stand on its own; there was nothing in the society that the Shah had
created to backstop the secret police. The secret police solution, then,
cannot be the whole solution; even in its most powerful and intimidating
forms, there must be other aspects to the organizational plan of a society.
The secret police of Communist countries tend to be highly effective not
because they are necessarily better, more efficient organizations but because
they exist in the context of a much more thoroughly thought-out approach to
the problems of governing large masses of people. Call it a totalitarian
system or whatever, but in the absence of support from other sectors of
government, especially in the area of ideological propaganda, no secret
police can go it alone over the very long run.
Even in the short run, the secret police solution creates problems of its own
making. It is an engine of social control that has proved in various parts of
the world to be difficult to turn off once it is turned on. It develops a
momentum of its own so powerful that even the sovereign ruler may live in
fear of being destroyed by the machine he himself created; hence the need to
have the head of the secret police organization beholden and accountable
directly to the sovereign, and the need for a smaller, even more elite group
of individuals, closest of all to the sovereign, who are entrusted to keep
watch over the main engine.
Any secret police force may develop into a monstrous machine that needs to
create political problems in order to fuel its own momentum�or to expand its
domain. As Joseph Fouche understood, rulers must constantly be reminded of
how vulnerable they would be without their secret police. The mad logic of
the secret police solution may dictate that the secret police perpetrate the
bombing in the public square or other act of terrorism in order to remind
everyone of how unstable political life would be without them.
The secret police solution also brings into being in society a massive new
political force: the secret police bureaucracy itself. It lobbies for
legislation, has the ear of the sovereign, works to control the press, and
manipulates public opinion. By making its presence felt in all the
decision-making councils of society, the secret police force becomes a
coequal in government, not just an errand boy.
Not surprisingly, the secret police organization that is permitted maximum
room in which to maneuver can make life every bit as miserable as the
antigovernment terrorist. In the presence of a powerful, type-A secret police
force, a society changes. A widespread informant system alone tends to foster
a paranoid society, in which trust is too risky a virtue. Who is working for
the secret police and who is not? No one ever really knows for sure. And
everyone is afraid to ask.
This paranoia is compounded by the nagging uncertainty of not knowing when
the individual might be designated an enemy of the state�or why. And
precisely because this designated power is often left to the secret police
force itself, the system permits the secret police to define whole categories
of "enemies of the state." Acting as both judge and jury, the secret police
force can so expand the definition of what constitutes a spy or a security
risk or a communist or a fascist that as its net gets ever wider, its powers
expand to the point where even the sovereign ruler may have difficulty
controlling it.
This is why the key feature of a type-A secret police force is not its degree
of operational sophistication, but the extent of its raw power. A secret
police force is sometimes clumsy, sometimes untalented, sometimes
slow-footed, and sometimes dim-witted. But it is so powerful that it can
usually cover up these failures. And it is only when the secret police have
such wide powers that a whole subclass of professional informers and
torturers will be created; when the traditional professions of law and
medicine and science will be co-opted or eliminated by the secret police;
when torture will become a prevalent practice of the state; and when a whole
class of "enemies of the state" will be created.
The regime that would avail itself of the type-A secret police solution ought
to consider its decision carefully. Even the great Fouche had doubts about
the mechanism he perfected, for, in the end, he repudiated his monster: "It
is necessary to abandon the errors of a police d'attaque, which menaces
without guaranteeing and torments without protecting. We must restrict
ourselves to the limits of a liberal and positive police." Good advice.
2
To emphasize that which secret police organizations around the world have in
common is a way of drawing a general portrait of a universal phenomenon. But
in developing that picture of the secret police-whether of the left or of the
right, clumsy or sophisticated, small or large-the conclusion is inevitable
that there is a specific point at which a type-A secret police force is born:
precisely when the state grants it the power to become a state within a state.
This transformation is achieved by the granting of a single power. That power
is the power to remove the citizen from his home or place of work or off the
street or out of the theater or from his university club or union hall
whenever secret police agents wish�and to hold him as long as they wish.
Legal scholars call this power the power of indefinite detention. This is the
essential power of the type-A secret police force.
This is the essential element that precipitates all the other elements into
the unique chemistry of a secret police force. After granting the secret
police the power of indefinite detention, the torture, the unexplained
incarcerations, the disappearances follow in step.
These are the monsters. It is these monstrous institutions that require
attention and study, because they offer one very clear way to achieve
internal security and stability. At what point does a police institution snap
into a secret police force? Note these words written by Robert Goldman,
professor of law at American University, and Daniel Jacoby, the well-known
attorney, in a report, to the Court of Appeals of Paris, describing Mexican
police practices:
"Initially, we think it is important to note that similar investigations of
torture allegations in other countries by regional and international human
rights commissions . . . have established an almost causal link [our italics]
between, particularly, illegal incommunicado detention and the infliction of
cruel treatment on those so detained." But what comes first? The power of
indefinite detention? Or the practice of torture? The answer is the power of
indefinite detention. As Goldman and Jacoby point out, "Thus, such detention,
unlawful in itself, creates a situation which readily invites the use of
internationally and domestically proscribed practices against detainees who
are effectively stripped of all legal recourse to protest their detention."
This is the chemistry that jolts the monster to life. All else follow
logically from this power.
Torture becomes an administrative practice of the secret police precisely
because it is a handy technique-an administrative means to a crucial
political end. The morality of means will inevitably become sublimated to the
overarching morality of ends. To think otherwise is vastly to overestimate
the ability of human beings to observe the canons of moral law in the midst
of acute political crisis. No more compelling evidence for this proposition
can be offered than the behavior of the French in Algeria. Having endured the
Gestapo in their own territory while the country was occupied by the Germans,
the French just a decade later proceeded to inflict the Gestapo solution on
Algiers.
The Algerian experience confirms how a type-A secret police force is born.
Torture in Algeria followed logically from the dictates of the Special Powers
Law of March 16, 1956, which permitted the Prefect of Algiers to delegate to
the military exceptional authority beyond ordinary police powers. As the
historian John Talbott has put it: "These powers, as exercised in the
circumstances prevailing in Algiers in early 1957, opened the door to the
practice of torture. It is not hard to see how this happened. The laws of the
Fourth Republic required a suspect to be brought before an examining
magistrate. . . . within twenty-four hours of his arrest. Such a procedure
was one of the safeguards against frivolous arrests and illegal detentions.
But in Algiers, the paratroopers arrested and detained for questioning
hundreds of men and women suspected of nothing more than possessing useful
information. The key provision of the Special Powers Act, and in some
respects, the key to much of the controversy over the Battle of Algiers, was
the authority to intern suspects, the. right of assignation 6 residence."
This was the chemistry that converted the practices of the 10th Paratroopers
Division into secret police practices. "The government had decided to keep
Algeria French," noted Professor Talbott. "The soldiers who resorted to
torture believed themselves to be meeting the requirements of the
government's policy. . . . This is not to say that the military command ever
received from the government explicit orders to resort to such methods." It
did not have to; the resort to torture as a routine method of interrogation
was the inevitable consequence of (a) the deteriorating political situation
and (b) the powers of indefinite detention. "I cannot defend SAVAK's every
action," wrote the Shah of Iran in his memoirs, "and will not attempt to do
so here. There were people arrested and abused. Unfortunately, this is not a
perfect world."
it was the Guy Mollet government in Paris, one must recall, that passed the
magic wand to the military; the secret police system did not arise overnight
on its own. Like the Shah incorporating SAVAK, or the Pinochet junta
enfranchising DINA, "It was the . . . government," according to Talbott,
"that sent the Tenth Division into Algiers with orders to put an end to
terrorism by whatever means necessary." And like the Shah and Pinochet and
Marcos and any number of rulers around the world in recent times, "the
civilians did not take back the sweeping powers they had handed to the
soldiers, once the crisis passed. They did not think to close the lid on
Pandora's box."
Once Pandora's box is opened, can a society ever return to relatively
conventional policing?
The government surely won't help return society to normality: having created
a monster that is (at least over the short run) exceedingly effective, it is
not about to rein in that which is keeping it in power. In any society in
which there is violent opposition to the government, the secret police
solution can be effective. "The terrorists' campaign," wrote Talbott, "worked
[only] as long as the terrorists faced an undermanned and poorly informed
police force and benefited from the restraints that civil and criminal law
put on the use of state power. The removal of these restraints robbed the
terrorists of their anonymity, turned them into hunted men and women, made
them informers against each other, stripped them of the protection of their
silence." Or, as the Shah put it, "Similar organizations [to SAVAK] exist
worldwide, since every country is obliged to protect its populace from
subversion."
The general population won't be able to set the clock back. It is naive
to expect the general populace to rise up against the terrorism of the secret
police. For one thing, the people will be too terrified- as well they should
be-to protest. For another, they may also be privately afraid of what life
would be like in the absence of the se-cret police. In 1980, the government
of President Augusto Pinochet, which created the DINA monster, held a
plebiscite, albeit under less than entirely ideal conditions. Nevertheless,
the Pinochet govern- ment obviously was proud of the returns: two-to-one
voter approval for an eight-and-one-half-year term. "While the regime . . .
remains an international pariah seven years after over-throwing President
Salvador Allende Gossens," wrote a New York Times correspondent from
Santiago, "it has won a wide popular following inside Chile for the
tranquility, as well as the economic growth, it has provided." The
correspondent quoted one resident of Santiago as saying: "Among the bad, one
has to choose the less bad."
To most citizens, freedom that involves instability and chaos will seem too
pricey. In response to an article that appeared in a U.S. newspaper beneath
the headline "Under Argentina's Sheen, the Terror Goes On," a United States
reader wrote in: "The Argentine political system has the same root problems
as most of the countries of the world-lack of respect for the law. . . . It
would take a hypocrite to say that today seems like anything but a paradise
[in comparison to the chaos in Argentina in the early seventies). The streets
of the major cities were battlegrounds and no one was safe. I'm certainly not
in favor of unnecessarily heavy-handed tactics from any government-from the
right or the left. But I can understand how situations like that one can and
do arise in countries where a few citizens' take advantage of the general
freedom to foment terror for their own idealistic causes. Political stability
is the most important ingredient for day to day normalcy."
We must face the fact that the general populace will usually side with
the police; and under special circumstances, when the police solution evolves
into the secret police solution, it may even side with the secret police-at
least at the start. In Britain last year, Scotland Yard recommended to
Parliament that new restrictions be placed on the right of assembly. The
right of assembly, of course, is one of the cardinal freedoms in a democratic
country, and England was history's first. Nevertheless, England may be ready
to limit the right of assem-bly. "Many people side with Scotland Yard,"
reports one journalist who has lived for some time in London. "After a decade
of often vi-olent social conflict, of division and anxiety, many people in
Britain
think of tranquility as the surest sign that the quality of life as they used
to know it will once again be secure . . . . . The essence of well- being is
the absence of change."
The intellectuals will not succeed in returning a society to normal policing:
they can and will do only so much to protest the inevitable consequences of
special powers. Indignation, after all, is not an easy emotion to sustain
over a long period of time, and the critics will become isolated from the
general population as they are increasingly perceived as the enemies of law
and order. Before long, the climate of opinion and general indifference will
wear out the critics. History, at least in the short run, will not run their
way. Writing in her journal in the last full year of the Algerian war, Simone
de Beauvoir remarked, "In this sinister month of December 1961, like many of
my fellow men, I suppose, I suffer from a kind- of tetanus of the
imagination. . . . One gets used to it. But in 1957, the burns in the face,
on the sexual organs, the nails torn out, the empalements, the shrieks, the
convulsions, outraged me."
But the outrage soon passes, and most people find that they can live with the
secret police less uncomfortably than they can live with disorder and
terrorism. The secret police solution is a terrible price to pay: once a ty
pe-A organization comes to life, it is difficult to phase it out of existence.
In the end, of course, citizens will get far more than they bargained for.
The tragedy of the secret police solution is that it is such a blunt and
crude instrumentality that in the name of preserving paradise it winds up
creating hell. It eliminates the (a) communists or (b) fascists, but takes
with it all other shades and nuances of political life. And when even the
moderate critics of the regime are eliminated, incarcerated, exiled, or
intimidated, the secret police machine rolls on�a status-quo machine whose
roar is deafening and whose appetite is insatiable. Enemies of the regime
will be created even if real enemies have long since ceased to exist.
Liberals will be apprehended as communists, traditionalists as fascists. New
tasks are essential. Like any other organ of government, the secret police
force is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy. It will not fade into the
background without a fight.
The secret police solution is not something that can be tried for a short
time-like an incomes policy or tax reform-and abandoned overnight. The scars
of a Gestapo will remain fresh in people's minds long after the traces of its
existence have become practically invisible. In Egypt, the memory of Nasser's
concentration camps was surely fresh in Anwar Sadat's mind when, in 1972, he
moved to streamline and professionalize the Egyptian security and
intelligence services. No one wanted the horrors of Nasser's "Gestapo" to be
duplicated. "Sadat remembers that Nasser put many, many people in
concentration camps," explains a well-informed U. S. State Department
official. "Even those who ran Nasser's camps were sometimes against them.
Sadat remembers Nasser's system, and he knows that other people remember that
system, too." It is as if the best insurance against choosing a secret police
solution may be having had to endure one. But those who have endured such an
experience would probably agree that the Gestapo experience is a very high
price to pay for attaining the wisdom of not wanting to go through it all
over again.
In Iran, the existence of SAVANIA is a painful reality, It is all too
reminiscent of SAVAK. One wonders whether the mullahs. are repeating the
mistake of the Shah. In a famous letter written to an ayatollah on the eve of
his execution, a now-deceased SAVAK official explained one of the errors of
SAVAK. Tehrani, the SAVAK torturer, urged the mullahs not to repeat the
mistakes of the Shah by making SAVAMA into a highly visible Gestapo:
"Availability of news and information in various areas, particularly
knowledge of the objectives of the opposition and future plans," Tehrani
began, "have always assisted the decision-making of government officials. It
is for this reason that the existence of an intelligence unit whose sole
function is to gather information of the views of various strata and
opposition groups, including Communists, seems to be necessary."
But Tehrani warned the mullahs that there was a wrong way to go about this
information-gathering. "However, doing this openly-or announcing the
reorganization of the previous SAVAK or anything of this sort-will provide
the opposition and the followers of the various ideologies, particularly the
Communists, with a suitable propaganda tool."
"For this reason," Tehrani suggested, "the 'intelligence unit' should be
organized in a really secret manner and should start its activities under the
supervision of a person trusted by the government."
The heavy-handed approach of SAVAK will not, in the long run, defeat
communism, asserted Tehrani. "One cannot destroy the Communist groups and the
followers of Communist ideology by restricting their freedom, street rights,
interruption of their meetings and even pressure," he wrote in his
confession. "Because with the continuation of pressure these groups will go
underground and then it will be more difficult to fight them."
3
Despite the fact that the FBI and other U.S. internal-security organizations
have, at times, extended their franchise unnecessarily and illegally, the
United States has never endorsed the concept of an all-powerful executive
branch of government.* The courts have always retained enormous powers to
review the activities of law-enforcement officers and to levy punishments
accordingly. Just last year, two former FBI officials were convicted and
sentenced for perpetrating "black bag jobs"�illegal break-ins at the homes of
friends and relatives of members of the radical Weathermen during the late
sixties. In this climate of judicial authority, what future would an FBI
torturer have?
But if the past is any guide to the future, it is clear that the seeds of a
heavy-handed secret police system lie planted in American culture. The
history of this country is marked by extremist tendencies in the pursuit of
the maintenance of the status quo, as well as in the pursuit of change. There
is a broad historical tendency to rely on law enforcement, rather than other
institutions of government, to tackle the problems of social change. The
concept of law and order in America is more than a political slogan used
frequently by politicians during election campaigns. It is a philosophical
outlook that is deeply embedded in the American character.
In terms of the worldwide phenomenon that we have been discussing, there has
never been a SAVAK, DINA, or KGB in the United States. Americans may have
helped other nations set up their secret police institutions, but they have
not allowed a comparable
* Perhaps the only major exception to this rule is former President Nixon's
"Huston Plan": In July of 1970, an ad hoc Inter-American Committee on
Intelligence was set up to make recommendations for increased and improved
intelligence-gathering techniques and operations to President Nixon. The
Committee, composed of FBI Dinctor Hoover; CIA Director Richard Helms;
Lieutenant General Donald Bennet, Director, Defense Intelligence Agency; and
Admiral Noel Gaylor, Director, National Security Agency, submitted to the
President for approval the "Huston Plan," named after the coordinator of the
committee and liaison to the President, Tom Charles Huston. The Plan proposed
the use of electronic surveillance, burglary, wiretaps, and mail coverage
against violence-prone campus and student-related groups, and any individual
or group in the United States that allegedly posed a threat to internal
security. system to be established in the United States-no organization or
associated groups that practice, as a general administrative procedure,
indefinite detention and interrogation by torture. These are the central
defining elements of a type-A secret police system.
However, certain intemal-security practices common to a SAVAK or a DINA have
been adopted in the United States. Those aspects include extensive
surveillance of political activity-in particular, although not exclusively,
of the Left; and considerable counterintelligence penetration of left-wing
groups, including the employment of agent- provocateur techniques.
In order to achieve a high degree of political surveillance, the United
States system of surveillance has operated in a. highly decentralized, and to
an important degree, unorganized fashion. This disorganization and
decentralization derives from the complex political organization of the
republic itself, as it operates on at least five levels: federal, state,
county, city, and private corporate.
Tile federal component of this system has included Army Intelli-gence;
the CIA (which is prohibited in theory, but not in reality, from domestic
spying); the FBI (practicing the classic variety of surveillance techniques,
including surreptitious entry, penetration by informants, and electronic
eavesdropping, as well as the usual agent- provocateur and disinformation
measures); and the NSA (National Security Agency), with the technological
ability to tap telephone conversations and other electronic communications.
For a time, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency was a potentially active
member of this system, but the Watergate revelations, which resulted in the
resignation of President Nixon, curbed that development. At times, other
agencies in the mammoth federal government have plugged into this informally
organized intelligence system. For instance, in 1967, the Community Relations
Service, in theory set up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act to mediate and
conciliate racial disputes, was
authorized to spy on militant black, antiwar, and radical protest groups.
At state and local levels, a myriad of law-enforcement agencies, with their
own intelligence squads, have conducted an astonishing variety of covert
infiltration and surveillance operations. In Los Angeles, for example, police
officers, operating as undercover agents, have infiltrated and spied on
groups ranging from the Soviet Jewry relief organizations to the Los Angeles
City Council. In Chicago, the police department's so-called Red Squad
investigated and spied on individuals guilty of everything ranging from,
suspected terrorist activity to speaking out against then-Mayor Richard
Daley, fighting pollution, and supporting 1968 presidential candidate. Eugene
McCarthy. "All the earmarks of a police state"�these were the words used by a
Cook County grand jury in 1975, on concluding a six-month investigation into
the Chicago Police Department Red Squad's spying operations.
Local police forces in the United States have been quite involved in attempts
to curb anti-nuclear-power demonstrations. The Buffalo Police Department has
had a standard policy of photographing demonstrators-and routinely placing
the results in the Department's antisubversive files. The Los Angeles Police
Department assigned a videotaping team to record a 1978 city council hearing
on nuclear power. Power companies have even maintained their own security
departments (equipping some of them with sophisticated surveillance
equipment, including night- time telescopes and wiretapping tools), which
have cooperated with government agencies in the identification of anti-
nuclear activists because the utility companies partially recruit their
security personnel from Army Intelligence, the FBI, the U. S. Treasury
Department, and state and local law-enforcement agencies.
This sort of unofficial cooperation among private as well as government
law-enforcement agencies has been enhanced by the Law Enforcement
Intelligence Unit, a private organization that describes itself as an organ
ization dedicated to promoting "the gathering, recording, investigating and
exchange of confidential information not available through regular police
channels, concerning organized crime." The LEIU, whose subscribers come from
more than 250 state and local law-enforcement agencies, maintains
computerized filing systems, while its administrative work is performed by
the California Department of Justice's Organized Crime and Criminal
Intelligence Branch. But despite its commitment to combatting "organized
crime," there is no doubt that LEIU files contain information on political
dissidents as well. And that information is sometimes forwarded to LEIU` by
police department officials attempting to subvert civilian oversight of their
intelligence activities. But LEIU is more a tribute to the limitations placed
on the U.S. internal-security system than evidence of a SAVAK in the making.
The principle of accountability of police intelligence to civilian oversight
remains a fearsome reality to law-enforcement officials. The very existence
of LEIU suggests that the existing government political-surveillance system
is so inadequate that internal security officers felt it necessary to create
an entirely private, nongovernmental organization. LEIU was in fact
established, in 1956, by the head of the Los Angeles Police Department's
Criminal Intelligence Division as a result of the department's exasperating
experience in trying to work with the FBI. (The FBI traditionally insisted on
access to local police department files without offering the reciprocity of
its files. There was very little real cooperation.) And so, when LEIU was set
up, the Bureau immediately targeted it as a threat to its dominance. As a
consequence, LEIU, which became a worrisome entity to both rival law
enforcement agencies and civilian sectors of society, because it is insulated
from civilian oversight, has never produced a very effective instrument of
political surveillance.
The theme of noncooperation among United States law-enforcement agencies is
common throughout United States history. Had there existed an adequate
political-surveillance system within the United States, obviously LEIU would
never have had to be created. The fact that there is no such adequate system
of surveillance may not, however, be a reason for us to feel complacent about
the dangers of the surveillance system ever threatening our civil liberties.
Rather, it should help us put into perspective the hysterical claims coming
from the more radical sectors of American society with regard to the alleged
pervasiveness and supereffectiveness of political surveillance in the United
States, or arguments about the existence of a drastically overzealous secret
police system in the country.
As long as overlapping federal, state, and local jurisdictions (and
rivalries) among police intelligence forces continue to exist, and as long as
the processes of judicial and legislative review of police procedures remain
a potent force in American politics, nothing approaching a DINA, a SAVAK, or
a sophisticated Eastern European secret police system is likely to come into
existence in America.
Indeed, one could argue that under the sort of leadership provided by the new
director of the FBI, former federal judge William Webster, the likelihood of
a full-fledged secret police surveillance system developing in the 1980s in
America is diminished. For under Director Webster, programs that have become
negatively notorious, such as COINTELPRO, have-if the FBI is to be
believed-been disbanded. COINTELPRO was a top-secret FBI program designed
along the lines of a department of misinformation, to create confusion among
various left-wing groups in the sixties, especially the Black Panthers. And
Director Webster's leadership has had a ripple effect throughout the U.S.
law-enforcement community. A 1980 survey of police intelligence units in New
York, Chicago, Washington, Houston, Atlanta, and Detroit by the Los Angeles
Times suggest that the heyday of the so- called "Red squads" may be over.
"The survey," wrote reporters John J. Goldman and Larry Green, "found that,
in general, police departments have sharply cut back on intelligence
gathering and have narrowed their activities to combatting terrorism and
organized crime. Units have shrunk in size and budgets have been
significantly reduced. Often under pressure from courts, city councils and
civil liberties groups, police administrators have imposed stringent
guidelines on gathering information in some cities."
Despite all this, Americans should not be complacent. We must be aware that,
once dismantled, a political police force is easily reassembled, practically
overnight. It would be dangerously smug to view the egregious secret police
institutions that we have studied as if they represent a look back into a
ridiculously primitive past; it may be a look forward into a vision of the
future. The fact that it has not happened here does not mean that it won't.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.
Police authorities, by and large, will insist that they require more power,
which is understandable. There are more law- enforcement problems today than
ever before. As a high official of the Los Angeles Police Department put it
in a moment of exasperation with city-council critics of the department's
surveillance operations, "I'll tell you one thing. It's time for the council
people to stand up and support the need for intelligence and confidentiality
about the intelligence-gatherers, or to announce that they don't 'want
intelligence. If they do that . . . we will be here to pick up the pieces
left by the terrorists."
The Los Angeles official, speaking in 1980, did not sound all that different
from General Van den Bergh, who in 1969 gave an interview to the Rand Daily
Mail on the issue of whether the government needed the expansive BOSS Act "to
control the situation." Said the head of BOSS: "If you're being attacked by a
man armed with an axe, you can hardly be expected to defend yourself with a
feather, . . . The police were faced with . . . legal requirements introduced
to South Africa via England-long before the world had to begin coping with
communism and communist-inspired revolution. They had to caution a suspect
that it was not necessary for him to answer any questions or provide any
explanations, and if he did so this could be used as evidence in trial. In
addition, in accordance with court rulings, no one under arrest could even be
questioned by the police'. How, under such circumstances, with your hands
tied, does one go about fighting a communist-inspired revolution?"
Then the head of BOSS was asked: "Do you think that the wide powers given to
the police can be reconciled with the civil freedoms which any individual in
a democratic country would like to enjoy?"
Van den Bergh: "Yes, and most definitely. After all, it is just these powers
which enable you and me to enjoy freedom in a free and democratic country.
Take these powers away from the police, and our freedom-for which we paid
dearly-will soon become something of the past. . . .
Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau once put the matter only slightly
differently: "Even with hindsight, any government has to tread a very narrow
line between what would rightfully be denounced as political interference on
the one hand, and what would rightfully be denounced as political negligence
on the other. We try to meet this general dilemma by exercising general
control of the Security Service but keeping out of its day-to-day
operations." Defending the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service in
the face of allegations of its use of "disruptive tactics" against suspected
terrorists, Trudeau snapped: "I'm not a police officer. But when you catch a
terrorist because you've opened an envelope, I don't think the bulk of the
Canadian people would think that this, even if it is technically a crime,
would be something that should bring the RCMP to be put in jail."
There is no question that new areas of the world may be moving toward secret
police solutions. If you have any doubt about this, examine the ruminations
of a special parliamentary committee in England with regard to the
appropriateness of "in-depth" interrogation of suspects in Northern Ireland.
In its "Report of the Committee of Inquiry into Police Interrogation
Procedures in Northern Ireland," presented to Parliament by the Secretary of
State for Northern Ireland in March of 1979, the question was addressed in
this way: "The problem is how to supervise and control interrogations so as
to minimize the chances of improper behavior and the opportunity of making
false allegations, without impairing the efficiency of interrogation in
obtaining evidence leading to the conviction of criminals, which the public
generally wants and expects."
Another commission of inquiry in Britain,** several years earlier, was not
profoundly troubled by the notion that in-depth interrogation of the wrong
suspects can and will inevitably occur: "We have also considered the argument
that, however careful the selection of detainees for interrogation in depth,
it may on occasion involve the interrogation of a man wrongly suspected. It
can accordingly be argued that to subject such a man to these techniques is
something which should not be tolerated. There is some force to this
argument, but it must be remembered that even under normal conditions it is
accepted that a person suspected of ordinary crime, who may thereafter be
found not guilty, can be subjected to some measure of discomfort, hardship,
and mental anxiety. Moreover, interrogation in depth may itself reveal the
innocence of the detainee and allow of his release from detention." In
consequence, the Parker Committee endorsed the use of interrogation by
methods which, by United States standards, would be considered scandalous-the
famous "five techniques": wall-standing; hooding; subjecting the victim to
irritating high-frequency noises; restricting the victim to a bread-and-water
diet; and depriving the victim of sleep. "The true view, it seems to us, must
depend on the degree to which the techniques are applied . . . " concluded
the Parker Committee, ". . . on the length of time during which he is
deprived of sleep or given a restrictive diet. . . . And all these matters
depend upon the medical condition of the detainee." Or, as the Bennett
Committee ultimately concluded, "Confessions which are 'voluntary' . . .
will, however, only be made in an interrogation procedure with the right
atmosphere. They will not be made in the atmosphere of a casual conversation
or cosy fireside chat. . . ."
We believe the hard-nosed conclusions of the Bennett and Parker committees
would find a sympathetic hearing in practically every country in the world.
The tolerance for political disorder and violent terrorism is ever
diminishing. Police all over the world will request more power-and probably
will get it. Every government needs to adopt methods and powers necessary to
achieve internal security. Every government needs a security service.
Our point is simply this: Some security police are worse than others. Much
worse.
** Chairman of the committee was Lord Parker of Waddington.
pps. 283-292
-----
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Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
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Amen.
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