"Bowing to the Police State" by Ray McGovern, AntiWar COM
Is Congress aiding and abetting the creation of a police state? Recently, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give the CIA and NSA unprecedented police powers. By inserting a provision in the FY07 Intelligence Authorization Act, Hoekstra has undermined the existing statutory limits on involvement in domestic law enforcement. This comes after revelations in January of direct NSA involvement with the Baltimore police in order to "protect" the NSA Headquarters from Quaker protesters.
Add to this the disquieting news that the White House has been barraging the CIA with totally improper questions about the political affiliation of some of its senior intelligence officers, the ever widening use of polygraph examinations, and the FBI's admission that it acquires phone records of broadcast and print media to investigate leaks at the CIA. I, for one, am reminded of my service in the police state of the USSR, where there were no First or Fourth Amendments.
Recent disclosures about increased government surveillance and illegal activities would be shocking, were it not for the prevailing outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of abuses. But the heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions that are supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police state, the ones who stand to lose their own power as well as their rights and the rights of all citizens, aren't interested in reining in the power of the intelligence establishment. To the contrary, Rep. Hoekstra and his counterpart in the Senate, Pat Roberts, R-Kan., are running the risk of whiplash as they pivot to look the other way.
James Bamford, one of the best observers of the inner workings of U.S. intelligence, warned recently that Congress has lost control of the intelligence community. "You can't get any oversight or checks and balances," he said. "Congress is protecting the White House, and the White House can do whatever it wants."
Consider the following nuggets drawn from Sunday's Washington Post article by R. Jeffrey Smith about the firing of senior CIA analyst Mary McCarthy. Apparently McCarthy learned that at least one "senior agency official" lied to Congress about agency policy and practice with regard to torturing detainees during interrogations.
According to Smith's article, one internal CIA study completed in 2004 concluded that CIA interrogation policies and techniques violated international law. This is said to have come as something of a shock to agency interrogators who had been led by the Justice Department to believe that international conventions against torture did not apply to interrogations of foreigners outside of the United States. McCarthy reportedly was also chagrined to learn that the CIA's general counsel had secured a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the creation of a category of "ghost detainees," prisoners transported abroad, mostly from Iraq, for secret interrogation – without notification of the Red Cross, as required by the Geneva Convention.
No problem, said senior CIA officials. We'll just lie to the committee leaders about the torture; they will wink and be grateful we did. The lying came during discussion of draft legislation aimed at preventing torture. As deputy inspector general, McCarthy became aware that CIA officials had misled the chairmen and ranking members of the congressional "oversight" committees on multiple occasions. Neither of the committees seemed interested in taking a serious look at the torture issue.
Hoekstra is a master at Catch-22. On the one hand Hoekstra insists that those in intelligence who have information on illegal or improper behavior report it to his intelligence committee; then he refuses to let them in the door. Russell Tice, a former NSA employee, has been trying since last December to give Hoekstra a firsthand account of illegal activities at the NSA. He has rebuffed Tice, with the lame explanation that the NSA will not clear Hoekstra or any of his committee members for the highly classified programs about which Tice wants to report.
Typical. Typical of a totalitarian government that is.
- The agency that is supposed to be under the "oversight" of Congress just classifies the information so it cannot be looked at. Ya right! The American people are suppose to just "trust" the that the agency is not trying to hide anything, not only from the people but hide information from those who are responsible by law to monitor them.
- NSA gets to collude with local law enforcement, against precedent, against a religious group with a long history of being anti-war. Exercising their Constitutional rights.
It is the modus operandi of all totalitarian governments in history to represent their governance as protecting the people by protecting the government. So don't worry about your neighbors disappearing, detention without warrant or court review, local newspapers being closed or taken over by the government, government planted reporters and stories, etc., they are "protecting" you from subversives. Trust us, ignore the fact the the government gets to define what and who subversives are. Ignore that "subversives" seem to be defined as anyone that opposes government policy.
So, reader, what is your answer to my title question?
No comments:
Post a Comment