Colleen Rowley; The Rich will Regret the Surveillance State (Corrupticops in ski masks, kidnapping people)
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Colleen Rowley; The Rich will Regret the Surveillance State
(Corrupticops in ski masks, kidnapping people)
Date: Apr 19, 2010 7:03 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
=======================================
http://www.actionlyme.org/index.htm
The cops, as a result of all their
illegal surveillance, when the ship
goes down (when Israel attacks Syria
for allegedly giving scuds to Hizbollah),
will know who has all the goodies to
steal. They have already been known
to put on ski masks and kidnap people
in this state, to take them to secret
places (empty warehouses) to beat them.
See the 1996 Ritt Goldstein Tapes:
http://www.actionlyme.org/VIKING_INTERVIEWS.htm
The wealthy of Corrupticut will be their
first targets, obviously, when no one
can get any food or gas/energy.
Another example, the bank-robber SWAT Cop:
http://forums.officer.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2157985
"In all of the cases, the robber was described as a white male in his
20's, wearing a dark colored jacket and ski mask, armed with a
handgun."
They're armed, insane, well-used to brutalizing
people. And when no one can get anything,
whose houses will be raided?
The blue-collar neighborhoods of Pawcatuck
or Belle Haven?
KMDickson
=================================================
Editor’s Note: Total Information Awareness was a scheme devised in the
months after 9/11 that would have allowed the U.S. government to
collect and analyze the electronic footprints left behind by everyone
in their daily lives, supposedly to ascertain who might be a
terrorist.
After TIA’s ambitious plan was exposed, Democrats in Congress blocked
its funding. However, as former FBI agent Coleen Rowley notes in this
guest essay, TIA has simply morphed into different forms, continuing
to hover over the United States as a specter of potential high-tech
fascism:
Since we all tend to reflexively cringe whenever someone mentions the
ideological “F” topic, I’m going to try and minimize some of the
natural revulsion and denial by writing the full word that we usually
fear to name only once: fascism.
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The very easy answer to why and how "F" is presently developing was
actually answered in 1795 by “the Father of the U.S. Constitution” and
our fourth president, James Madison, who observed:
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.
War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and
armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing
the many under the domination of the few.
“In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended;
its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is
multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those
of subduing the force of the people.
“The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the
inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of
a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals
engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst
of continual warfare.”
In the ninth year of what’s become the seemingly unending “war on
terror” (comprising real wars on Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle
East countries), we American citizens have consequently given up
numerous liberties in the vain pursuit of absolute security,
validating the prediction of another founding father, Benjamin
Franklin, that those who attempt to trade their liberty for greater
security will have neither.
Hard-core repressive police state tactics involving domestic use of
the military have only occasionally emerged, however — for instance,
during certain National Security Special Events. F-grade repression is
not close to being a fact of daily life (yet).
How, then, has the government been able to keep the momentum going for
hugely expensive and unpopular wars that have pushed the country into
a permanent war economy — where much of our only remaining
manufacturing resides in military bombs/weaponry and a large segment
of the decent-paying jobs exists in the “all-volunteer” military?
How has the growing disparity between the masses of ordinary people
losing their jobs, pensions, health care and homes – and the clear
ties to corruption of government by moneyed special and corporate
interests – not yet led to serious social unrest?
To be sure, our large-scale system of prison warehousing always plays
a role in tamping down social unrest. And a little official
intimidation goes a long way. It’s slowly being ramped up.
For instance, the small fines customarily imposed for minor offenses
of improperly posting flyers about upcoming rallies have now become
draconian penalties amounting to thousands of dollars.
Peace activists who simply lie down on the sidewalk in front of the
White House are being thrown in the terrible “D. C. lockup” for a day
or more. “Minnesota Patriot Act” law, passed after 9/11, now defines
causing minor property damage as an act of “terrorism.”
We experienced a form of police state intimidation firsthand in the
Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul when vague threats of
“anarchism” were leaked to the press months before the 2008 Republican
National Convention.
A show of force by anonymous “robo-cops” ensued and, unsurprisingly,
their threatened use of tasers, chemical weapons and mass arrests
materialized.
Mass arrests of approximately 800 people at the RNC, including those
of over 40 journalists (most of which were later dismissed due to lack
of justification), took place, but the really bad result (which most
citizens do not know) was the serious intimidation that had
effectively reduced the number of participants marching that first day
in St. Paul streets.
The “Total Information Awareness (TIA)” collection of private data on
individuals was originally proposed after 9/11 by Admiral John
Poindexter (convicted in the Iran-Contra affair) and falsely sold as a
solution to prevent terrorism.
Despite the lack of any evidence that TIA type programs “work” and are
capable of effectively identifying actual terrorists through the
vacuuming up of more data, they have taken root in the 16 different
“intelligence” agencies.
Just as Blackwater attempted to shed its bad image through a name
change, so did TIA. Each newly minted acronym (which I do not have the
space here to list) makes a false promise similar to the NIMD (“Novel
Intelligence from Massive Data”) one that allows billions more records
to be collected, stored, and “data-mined.”
The NSA, for example, is reportedly building a new computer system the
size of the National Capitol Building which will require more
electricity than what Salt Lake City uses for everything just for the
NSA to store its records.
Much of the data probably emanate from the NSA’s warrantless
monitoring program that Congress recently legalized after the
monitoring was illegally commenced by Bush.
Previous Attorney General Guidelines, which were enacted in the early
1980s after the Church Committee exposed abuses (such as J. Edgar
Hoover’s COINTELPRO), have largely been unceremoniously discarded to
open the doors further.
Although it’s well known that the task of finding a needle in a
haystack or “connecting the dots” is not made easier, but instead much
harder, by adding more hay to the haystack, it has not stopped the
newly burgeoning “Security-Surveillance Industrial Complex,” which is
as privatized as the military-industrial complex.
In 2007, the FBI temporarily raised some eyebrows when it proposed
quadrupling its Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE)
database to ultimately collect 6 billion records, or 20 for each man,
woman, and child in the U.S.
While a National Academies of Science study had refuted Total
Information Awareness’s ability to achieve its stated objective to
“proactively” mine the data to find terrorists using “predictive”
analysis, nothing seems to stop such collections from proceeding.
Private security and surveillance corporations have huge profit
incentives to push to expand such programs, as they benefit from
contracts with the government.
The average citizen does not suspect, however, that the government
would waste such vast sums of his/her tax money on useless
surveillance and data collection-mining systems to profit private
companies.
So the U.S. government intelligence agencies’ massive “intelligence”
collection serves to fuel and reinforce people’s fears of “terrorism,”
as well as intimidate and scare the average citizen away from such
basic good citizenship activities as marching, writing letters to the
editor, blogging, joining activist or social networking groups (such
as Facebook), or otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.
Airport screening that increasingly includes equipment that
effectively removes passengers’ clothing has another pernicious
impact. Reducing someone to a naked state and removing all semblance
of personal privacy is actually one of the permissible “harsh
interrogation tactics” touted by Cheney and his ilk as effective in
“breaking” a suspect.
Similarly, it is perhaps one of the most effective ways of
demonstrating the absolute power of the state over an individual.
Forcing individuals to remove their shoes is one thing, but forcing
them to essentially become totally naked on a regular basis will not
only destroy self-esteem but immediately create feelings of
helplessness and powerlessness.
The current government intrusiveness in the name of the “war on
terror” threatens much more than mere loss of individual privacy.
Everyone should be able to learn from history — specifically, the five
decade-long, Cold War-induced period in America when the zealot F.B.I.
director, J. Edgar Hoover, conducted guilt-by-association spying and
disrupted First Amendment activities with COINTELPRO.
Hoover’s immense power over other government and nongovernment leaders
(especially those he didn’t like) was based on his collection of vast
amounts of private information about them and his consequent ability
to blackmail them by threatening to expose their information and
secrets.
Think about the daily exposés one reads involving sexual scandals, for
instance, of elected government politicians caught routinely in
bathrooms and brothels, and you might grasp the dangerous potential of
this intrusive spying to thwart our democratic processes.
Up to now, the five main buttons that propagandists push to control
and manipulate larger masses of people have worked quite well. Those
in power have not had to resort much to the harsher forms of official
repression.
Pushing fear, hate, greed, false pride and blind loyalty, actually in
that order and on an almost 24/7 basis, has worked very well thus far:
not only has it brought out the worst in some people, but it has also
tamped down displays of dissent and social unrest.
But yes, Virginia, I do believe our young corporatocracy boat is
sailing right into the perfect category F storm unless we, as a
country, can quickly change course.
Instead of allowing the propaganda tools to manipulate and bring out
the worst in our citizens, we need to immediately encourage and
strengthen the opposite traits: courage, love, generosity, humility
and critical thinking.
We will need all of these to cut through the mass apathy,
desensitization and political gaming that has currently put our
country on the F course.
Coleen Rowley is a former FBI Agent. She holds a law degree, and
served in Minneapolis as "Chief Division Counsel," a position which
included oversight of Freedom of Information, as well as providing
regular legal and ethics training to FBI Agents. In 2002, Coleen
brought some of the pre 9/11 lapses to light and testified to the
Senate Judiciary Committee about some of the endemic problems facing
the FBI and the intelligence community. Rowley's memo to FBI Director
Robert Mueller in connection with the Joint Intelligence Committee's
Inquiry led to a two-year-long Department of Justice Inspector General
investigation. Today, as a private citizen, she is active in civil
liberties, and peace and justice issues.
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