If The Counts Are Tight, You Must Indict

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The American Police State Watch – May 2006 to April 2007

The Year In Tyranny

BACKGROUND: March 2, 2006 – Reauthorization of the Patriot Act passes in Congress, clearing the way for President Bush to sign legislation making permanent most major provisions of the 2001 law. Revisions include an amendment granting the president authority to appoint interim federal prosecutors indefinitely without senate confirmation. It also includes broader powers for the FBI to commit domestic espionage in the name of fighting terrorism, without prior approval by the Justice Department.

June 15, 2006 – Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both Bush appointees, carry a majority decision to overturn the “knock and announce” requirement for police officers intent on searching a private residence. A central tenet of the Fourth Amendment, in place in America since 1914, and with roots in 13^th century English law, the “knock and announce” rule was basic to the view that one’s home is one’s castle. SWAT teams, acting without being restricted by it, may precipitate extreme violence when met by homeowners who are, for now, in many states allowed to open fire on unknown persons bursting through their doors.

June 23, 2006 – AT&T issues an updated privacy policy that says that AT&T – not its customers – owns the customers confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

June 2006 – In a story that makes headlines nationwide, FBI agents proclaim that they have broken up a plot to take down Chicago’s Sears Tower. It is subsequently revealed that not only had the so-called conspirators not yet obtained explosives, but that they had not made any material advances whatsoever, had done no surveillance on their target, had never even been to Chicago, and were so ill funded that undercover agents had to provide them with boots. The suspects, a hapless group from Liberty City, Florida, live in an impoverished black neighborhood of mostly single-story dwellings surrounded by new condominium towers in Miami’s red-hot redevelopment area.

July 7, 2006 – A plot to “bomb the Holland Tunnel and flood lower Manhattan” is reported first in the New York Daily News and then headlined nationwide. Proclaimed portentously as “the real deal” by Mark Mershon, chief of the FBI’s New York field office, it is simultaneously clucked over by White House homeland security adviser Fran Townsend on Fox News as the type of “leak” of an ongoing investigation that “helps the terrorists figure out our methods.” It is subsequently revealed that the conspirators, all foreigners, had not yet obtained explosives nor made any material advances whatsoever, had done no surveillance nor been to New York or even the United States, had not in fact even met each other, and had only been communicating in an Internet chat room set up by one Assem Hammoud, a 31 year old Lebanese man living with his mother in Beirut. Ms. Townsend’s so-called secret investigation, “our methods,” were first, the electronic version of using a cup to eavesdrop through a wall, and then, the brilliant tracking down of the suspect through his Internet address. It drops off the news when it is realized that the terror plot defies the laws of physics. The sidewalk entrance to the Jersey-bound tunnel is, according to federal maps, exactly ten feet above sea level.In fact, there is no place in lower Manhattan that is below sea level; the flooding of which would thus require setting up a large and sophisticated pumping operation simultaneous with the bombing of the tunnel.

August 17, 2006 - A federal judge rules in Detroit that the Bush administration's wiretapping program is illegal and unconstitutional, violating the First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy. The White House and Justice Department voice disappointment over the ruling and vow they will fight to overturn it.

September 28, 2006 – House and Senate pass a Terror Bill that will go on record as the most tyrannical law in the 217-year history of the United States, far worse than the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, or the nightmare that was the McCarthey era. Railroaded by the Bush administration and cynical republican legislators, this law broadens the definition of illegal enemy combatants to include legal residents of the United States, empowers the president to apply that label to anyone he chooses and thus subjecting them to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal, strips suspects of the right to Habeas corpus, repudiates the Geneva Conventions by allowing Mr. Bush to determine in secret which abusive interrogation techniques he considers permissible, narrows the definition of torture so as to, for example, effectively eliminate rape as an offense, allows coerced evidence to be permissible, weakens protections against secret evidence, and eliminates judicial review except by military tribunal.

Oct 2006 – US State Department will begin issuing passports with RFID chips consisting of a microchip and a tiny antenna that transmit data whenever the antenna comes within range of a reader. The chip, according to statements, will contain only the details printed in the passport and a digital photograph. Passport covers will contain anti-skimming material to block casual access and only recognized readers will be able to access the data. Generic programmable readers are available online for less than $100.

December 7, 2006 – Seven State Prosecutors are dismissed, including Paul Charlton (Phoenix) who had pushed to tape-record FBI interviews, John McKay (Seattle) who had advocated a computerized law enforcement information-sharing system, and Carol Lam (San Diego) who had prosecuted Randy Cunningham, the disgraced Republican congressman.

December 20, 2006 – The Supreme Court is considering weighing in on TSA requirements that domestic travelers must show photo ID as a violation on the right to privacy. At present such requirements are demonstratively unenforceable: passengers who refuse to show photo ID are bumped to the front of the line for thorough security inspections but otherwise permitted entrance to a concourse. Exact details of the rules are secret; contained as SSI (Secret Security Information). That the rules are undiscoverable violates a long-standing American legal tradition that citizens have the right to know the laws that apply to them. Secret law is a basic, long-standing instrument of tyranny.

December 21, 2006 – Department of Homeland Security is sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to disclose details of its “Risk Assessment” program that assigns travelers crossing US borders computerized scores rating their risks as possible terrorists or criminals. These ratings are to be held on file for 40 years and individuals will not be permitted access to them. These ratings have affected every traveler including US citizens who have crossed borders in the last 4 years.

Feb 20, 2007 - A federal judge in San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, denies requests from media groups to unseal evidence in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) class-action lawsuit against AT&T. EFF's suit accuses the telecom giant of collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in illegally spying on millions of Americans. The sealed evidence includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, as well as several internal AT&T documents and portions of a declaration from EFF's expert witness. Some of the evidence was previously released in redacted form, while other evidence is still completely unavailable to the media and the public.

"We're disappointed that the court did not choose to unseal all of the documents that include or refer to the evidence presented by Mark Klein and our expert, J. Scott Marcus. The government has already agreed that the evidence is neither classified nor a state secret, and is only being held under seal because of AT&T's weak trade secrecy claims," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Given that the privacy of millions of Americans is at stake, we strongly believe that the public would benefit from seeing this evidence for themselves."

March 2007 - Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee are shocked (!) to discover that the FBI has been grossly overstepping the bounds of even its recently broadened powers, powers that those same republicans enabled. These powers granted the FBI much greater latitude to commit domestic espionage in the name of fighting terrorism. A report to the H.J.C. by the Justice Department’s inspector general Glen A. Fine, found the FBI, using the investigative tool known as national security letters, has in all 56 of its field offices engaged in illegal activities to gather vast amounts of information on private citizens. They have been collecting telephone, Internet, financial, credit, and other personal records about Americans without judicial approval. The report found repeated violations of the rules governing use of NSLs, including frequent invocations of emergency proceedings when there was no emergency, and large gaps in record keeping.

March 14, 2007 – In a statement intended to deflect blame amidst a rising clamor over the unwarranted dismissal of state prosecutors, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales will only conclude, “mistakes were made,” the classic Reaganesque cop out with the missing subject and the passive verb. The White House lays blame on failed Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers who was dismissed herself as White House counsel in January 2007, and is then forced to reveal a stream of e-mail correspondence between Miers and Kyle Sampson, top aide to Gonzales, detailing a scheme to replace every one of the 93 state prosecutors in the nation.

March 15, 2007 – The Pentagon earnestly declares that a Guantanamo Bay prisoner named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been held without bail or trial or representation and who has been continuously tortured mentally and physically for four years, has suddenly confessed to the US military in a secret hearing, that he planned and financed every major terrorist attack worldwide prior to 2003. The “we got him!” style announcement by the Pentagon, accompanied by a heavily redacted transcript, temporarily knocks besieged Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez off the front pages of the madding mainstream press.

April 6, 2007 – For only the 51st time in its 99 year history, and the first time in 10 years, an FBI agent is killed in the line of duty. It happens during a massive stakeout of a small time gang of bank robbers in suburban New Jersey. When the hapless bank robbers show up outside the bank, two dozen FBI agents carrying significant firepower, along with U.S. Marshals, a task force from the NJ State Police, and several heavily-armed SWAT teams from surrounding communities descend upon them. Three lightly-armed robbers give up immediately and one runs away and hides, but in the confusion an agent is shot in the back at close range by a cop with an assault rifle. It is a tragedy resulting from the perfect triangulation of three modern realities: 1. a saturation of military surplus hardware among police departments nationwide, 2. a culture of fear that leads to an inclination towards excessive force, and 3. the impossibility of containing militaristic tactical maneuvers in real urban settings.

April 26, 2007 - Two Atlanta police officers plead guilty to manslaughter after killing an elderly woman who opened fire on them during a "no-knock" drug raid on her house on Nov. 21, 2006 (see June 15, 2006 above.) The officers also plead guilty to lying about information from an informer that there was surveillance equipment in her house in order to obtain the no-knock warrant that same day. Kathryn Johnston, 92, who lived alone in a modest green-trimmed house at 933 Neal Street, fired one shot from a .38-caliber revolver through her front door as the plains clothed police, who had already pried off her burglar bars, began to ram the door open. Ms. Johnston was then struck five times in a hail of gunfire and died instantly from taking a bullet to the chest. The police fired 39 shots in all, and after handcuffing her dead body, searched the house without finding any drugs.

Muslim Girl, 20, Puts 5,000 Drunken White Men To Shame

CRONULLA JOURNAL; Australian Muslims Go for Surf, Lifesaving and Burqinis

By RAYMOND BONNER

Published: March 9, 2007 in The New York Times

As a teenager growing up in a Sydney suburb, Mecca Laalaa never felt anything but Australian, even though she was for the most part unable to engage in the most quintessential of Australian pastimes: swimming at the beach. ''Restricted by my clothing,'' Ms. Laalaa explained.

Ms. Laalaa is a Muslim and has voluntarily worn the burqa, the traditional head-to-toe covering for Muslim women, since she was 14. It is hard to swim, she said, if your body is swathed in cotton, which is very heavy when wet.

Now, her clothing quandary solved by a novel fashion, the burqini, Ms. Laalaa, a vivacious 20-year-old, has become a Surf Life Saver, as volunteer lifeguards here are known, lured to the beach by a new outreach program for Australia's Muslims.

The program, On the Same Wave, was started a year ago by the nonprofit group that organizes the volunteers, Surf Life Saving Australia, along with the federal Immigration Ministry and the local council.

The outreach was the response to an ugly episode on Cronulla Beach, about 20 miles south of downtown Sydney, in December 2005, when skinheads and neo-Nazis, many drunk and with racial epithets painted on their bodies and T-shirts, marauded through the area beating up Lebanese men. (see 5,000 Drunken White Men - Ed.)

Many here and abroad wondered if Australia was headed for a period of rising racial tension. The riots set off a round of soul-searching and left many Australians asking if the violence reflected an underlying racism in their society.

Among Australia's population of roughly 20.2 million, fewer than half a million are Muslims, most of them in Sydney and Melbourne.

On the Same Wave was intended to promote cultural understanding, introduce people from minority groups -- Chinese, Somalis, Sudanese -- to beach culture and safety, and above all to increase and diversify the membership of Surf Life Saving, said Vanessa Brown, its membership director.

It has also challenged the public perception of a virtually sacred Australian icon, the Surf Life Saver, as someone who is always blond, blue-eyed and sun-bronzed. ''It's a stereotype, that's accurate,'' said Suzie Stollznow, diversity manager for Surf Life Saving New South Wales.

Under the program, 22 men and women, from 14 to 40 years old and including a woman with three small children, signed up to become Surf Life Savers. Most were ethnic Lebanese, but there was a Palestinian, a Syrian and a Libyan.

''But all proudly Australian,'' said one, Suheil Damouny. ''It's important to mention that.''

Like most Muslim immigrants here, Mr. Damouny, 20, a sportswriter at The Torch, a weekly newspaper, does not like to be referred to by ethnicity. His grandparents fled Palestine in 1948 and moved to Lebanon, then to the United Arab Emirates, where he lived until moving to Australia seven years ago. He considers himself Australian.

Mr. Damouny said his friends could not understand why he wanted to be a Life Saver, especially in Cronulla. And they did not think he could pass the rigorous eight-week course. ''But I did,'' he said proudly. Seventeen finished; one woman dropped out after making the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, and coming back in a full burqa.

Nodding to where a yellow surfboard with the red letters ''Surf Rescue'' rested waiting to be paddled out in an emergency, Mr. Damouny, who is about 5 feet 7 and weighs 140 pounds, said: ''The hardest was getting used to that big, ugly thing. It is quite heavy.''

One requirement was to be able to pull an unconscious swimmer on board, and then get him to shore, ''through massive waves,'' Mr. Damouny said.

Ms. Laalaa broke her nose when she was trying to paddle out through the crashing surf and the board reared up and kicked back into her. She also twisted both ankles, she said. ''I have black-and-blue bruises all over my body,'' she said. ''But I'd do it all over again.''

She admits that she was an unlikely candidate. ''I'm a girly-girl,'' she said. ''I like to walk on the street in high heels.''

But Ms. Laalaa said one reason she had joined the lifesaving program was to educate Australians about Muslims. ''They don't think Muslim women swim,'' she said. ''Or do anything,'' she quickly added with an irrepressible laugh.

When people see women wearing the burqa, they think they are oppressed. ''I am not oppressed,'' she said. ''I do have my own mouth. I am educated. I do make my own decisions.''

For her and other women, the biggest obstacle, she explained, was what they would wear. That was solved by a local fashion entrepreneur, Aheda Zanetti, who designs ''dynamic swimwear and sportswear for today's Muslim female.''

For Surf Life Savers, Ms. Zanetti, whose label is Ahiida, came up with a two-piece outfit made of spandex, form-fitting but fully covering, even the hair. Ms. Laalaa pulls her hair back into a bun and hides it under a bright red hood that is an extension of the long-sleeved yellow top.

Ms. Laalaa said her father, a welder, was completely supportive, as was her mother, a homemaker, and her three brothers and sister. She said her family was not that different from other Muslims in Australia. Most are moderate, she said. Experts here agree. It is the radicals who grab the headlines, they say.

Ms. Laalaa said Muslims had felt fully integrated into Australian life until the attacks of Sept. 11. That is when the tensions mounted, when many Australians began looking at Muslims with suspicion.

''Before 9/11 they didn't know us,'' said Shayma Almoty, a friend of Ms. Laalaa's. ''Now they've become afraid and fearful of us.''

''Which is ridiculous,'' chimed in Ronya Chami, 21, an accountant and another longtime friend. The message to other young Muslims, Ms. Chami said, is, ''Get out there and be part of Australia.''

Will The Real Fascists Please Stand Down

“Islamo-Fascism” as a talking point by first President Bush and now Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is a disingenuous use of a loaded denunciation.

Fascism as exemplified by Mussolini Italy and Franco Spain was a form of centralized totalitarian power exhibiting aggressive nationalism, strict state control of the population, extremist right-wing ideology, rabid anti-communism, and the strangle-hold of a military, corporate and religious confederacy.

The terrorists who threaten Americans are diffuse adherents to a stateless ideology whose most vexing feature is its ability to recreate itself in dislocated and independent cells operating on shoestring budgets. Fascism as a term can only refer to the centralized totalitarian power of nations. If neoconservatives want to label “men who despise freedom” as a “new type of fascism” then they must by definition be accusing those terrorists of being agents of a fascist state. Inasmuch as all real threats to American civilians since 9/11 have come from British citizens, maybe we should now consider invading England.

The neoconservatives who make up the Bush administration have succeeded in establishing a doctrine emphasizing national rather than international goals, the consolidation of executive power rather than the checks and balances of democracy, secrecy and domestic surveillance rather than the transparency of freedom, an alliance with an extreme religious right rather than the separation of church and state, and the complete ascendancy of the military-industrial complex in an aggressive war upon another country rich in resources.

Misdirecting censure by preemptively inveighing against others the very charge one seeks to evade …that’s an old trick.

The American Police State Watch - November 2000 to April 2006

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

April 13, 2006 – The NYTimes publishes an article containing testimony by an AT&T employee revealing the existence of secret rooms where NSA IT specialists tap into internet hubs and “vacuum clean” phone and data transmissions, including domestic e-mail, on a vast scale. This is the exact method first disclosed in Congressional hearings in 2000 when a classified and unregulated FBI program with the code name Carnivore was investigated and released without sanction.

March 17,2006 – Internal NYPD reports are released that detail tactics used with protesters at the World Economic Forum, a private organization that met at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002. In one report a police inspector praised the “staging of massive amounts” of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight “would cause them to be alarmed.” Other reports revealed proactive tactics including undercover infiltration and the deliberate spreading of misinformation. Lawyers representing some of those arrested argue that such tactics “punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities.”

Feb.25,2006 – The NYTimes reports that an AT&T data center in Kansas maintains databases which contain electronic records of 1.92 trillion telephone calls, going back decades. The Electronic Frontier, a digital-rights advocacy group, asserts in a lawsuit that the AT&T Daytona system is the foundation of the NSA’s effort to mine telephone records without a warrant.

Jan 31, 2006 – “EFF filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T on January 31, 2006, accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in its massive and illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications. The lawsuit alleges that AT&T not only helped the NSA listen in on millions of ordinary Americans' Internet and telephone communications, but also provided access to its databases containing records of most or all communications.” - EFF

Dec. 24, 2005 – The NYTimes breaks a story about the NSA tracing and analyzing large volumes of telephone and Internet communications into and out of the US without court-approved warrants. Reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau write that nearly a dozen current and former officials served as their sources, and described a large data-mining operation. According to those officials, the NSA’s “back-door” access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency’s operational capability.

Dec. 16, 2005 – In an exclusive, the NYTimes breaks the story about President Bush’s secret decision in the months after 9/11 to authorize the warrantless eavesdropping of Americans in the United States. Two days later Mr. Bush delivers a radio address defending his actions as “fully consistent with my constitutional responsibilities and authorities,” and vows to continue the highly classified program because it is “a vital tool in our war against the terrorists.”

Dec.8, 2005 – In a decision with global implications, Britain’s highest court has ruled that evidence that may have been obtained with torture cannot be used in court. The decision came in the retrial of 8 men who had been held since 2001 on antiterrorism charges.

Dec.7, 2005 – U.S. terror suspect Sami al-Arian, a former professor at the University of South Florida, is found not guilty on any of 51 criminal counts of operating a North American front for Palestinian terrorists. Prosecutors had relied on some 20,000 hours of taped conversations culled from wiretaps.

Dec.1, 2005 – Human Rights Watch releases a list of 26 “ghost detainees” being held without due process outside the U.S. in secret prisons. The kidnapping, transport and torture of terror suspects on European soil raises alarms overseas about whether local governments are complying with American actions in violation of international law.

Nov. 18, 2005 – The Washington Post reports the Pentagon has expanded its ability to spy on citizens within the United States. According to the Post, the Bush administration is considering allowing a little known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity to investigate certain crimes domestically. The Pentagon is also pushing legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exemption to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies. Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies says, "such an exemption would remove one of the few existing privacy protections against the creation of secret dossiers on Americans by government intelligence agencies." Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon says, "We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing."

Nov. 10, 2005- U.S. Senate votes 49 to 42 to approve an amendment cutting off Habeas Corpus provisions by detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. Habeas Corpus is a basic civil right afforded citizens of western nations since the Magna Carta in 1215 AD, wherein it states in Article 39: "No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned or disseised (sic) or exiled or in any way destroyed, nor will we go upon him nor will we send upon him except upon the lawful judgment of his peers or the law of the land." Habeas Corpus, protection for the individual against arbitrary detention by the state, is perhaps the most central tenet of western civilization, and the bedrock of democracy. Historically, in the West it has been suspended only rarely, when one-party governments make war on their own people.

Nov.2005 – The House approves extension of all 16 provisions of the USA Patriot Act. Fourteen are extended permanently, the other 2 - dealing with the government's demands for business and library records and its use of roving wiretaps - are extended for 7 years. Tens of thousands of the so-called national security letters, which the FBI uses to demand records without warrants, have been issued since 2001.

Nov.2, 2005 - The Washington Post reports that the CIA is running secret detention camps in Europe. Prisoners are flown from the US and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to former KGB prisons in Romania and Poland and perhaps as many as six other countries in a covert network set up after 9/11. A subsequent analysis by The New York Times of twenty-six CIA planes shows records of 307 CIA flights into Europe since September 2001.

Sept. 2005 - Mercenaries from private contractor Blackwater are employed in New Orleans to sweep flooded neighborhoods in a "rescue effort" and are filmed breaking down front doors while armed with assault rifles.

July 2005 - A SWAT team competition held outside San Jose, California draws heavily armed, tactical specialists from police departments around the nation.

2004/2005 – The proliferation of surveillance cameras in major cities like New York, Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans increases in an aggressive stepping up of surveillance systems nationwide. In California banks, video cameras begin to be installed at every teller window. In New York, after the Republican National Convention, the NYPD requests an additional 400 surveillance cameras in Manhattan, even though all empirical studies in the USA and Britain have shown there is no deterrent effect on crime from prominently displayed CCTV. As for preventing terrorism, the July 7 bombings in London demonstrate that the world’s largest linked CCTV system for intelligence gathering by a centralized authority (over 6,000 cameras) serves only to document the event, not prevent it.

Nov.9, 2004 - Two tanks roll by an Iraq War protest demonstration in Los Angeles, circle the block, and then return and park in front of the federal building in Westwood.

2004 - Harsh treatment of political prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and in Afghanistan create the impression that these are the gulags of our time.

Nov. 22, 2003 - In Miami, Florida, 10,000 protestors marching against a meeting of the Free Trade Association of the Americas are harassed and intimidated by a massive police presence backed up with US Army tanks.

Aug. 2003 – Protesters at the Democratic Presidential Convention in Boston Are denied their First Amendment Right to Assemble and are herded into isolated and chain-link fenced “Free Speech Zones.” A similar attempt to contain demonstrators at the Republican Presidential Convention in New York is widely ignored and results in mass arrests and detainments on a polluted and dangerous Westside pier.

Feb.17, 2003 – American operatives kidnap an Islamic militant, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, in Milan and deliver him to authorities in Egypt for interrogation. Claiming he was tortured, he exposes a CIA practice that becomes known as “extraordinary rendition.”

2003 – Police helicopters in New York City are outfitted with night-vision cameras. During an operation shadowing bicyclists in Brooklyn, a 4-minute tape is made of a couple in flagrante dilecto on the deck of a Manhattan penthouse, then copied and circulated, resulting in a lawsuit.

2002 - Suburban police cars throughout California begin carrying assault rifles on routine patrols; a conspicuous display of disproportionate force in even the safest, crime-free neighborhoods which is less a necessity against imagined terrorists than it is an implied threat to ordinary citizens.

Sept.2001 - A law called the USA Patriot Act is rushed through Congress granting sweeping powers to the federal government to investigate, monitor and track terrorism suspects. Under this law, warrants will no longer be necessary for the FBI to demand records or perform wiretaps on law-abiding U.S. citizens - a massive unregulated breach in the wall between international intelligence gathering and domestic law enforcement, previously protected by Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1970’s reform that struck a proper balance between national security and bedrock civil liberties in the wake of the abuses of presidential power accompanying and following the Vietnam War.

Nov. 2000 – Congress holds hearings to investigate an unregulated FBI program called Carnivore, wherein the FBI is engaged in the constant filtering of e-mail servers in search of key words in private domestic correspondence. The newly empowered conservative-majority legislature fails to act to stem a serious infringement on First Amendment Right To Privacy.

Carnivore III

Documents Show Link Between AT&T and Agency in Eavesdropping Case

By The New York Times

By John Markoff and Scott Shane

Published: April 13, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO, April 12 — Mark Klein was a veteran AT&T technician in 2002 when he began to see what he thought were suspicious connections between that telecommunications giant and the National Security Agency.

But he kept quiet about it until news broke late last year that President Bush had approved an N.S.A. program to eavesdrop without court warrants on Americans suspected of ties to Al Qaeda.

Now Mr. Klein and a few company documents he saved have emerged as key elements in a class-action lawsuit filed against AT&T on Jan. 31 by a civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The suit accuses the company of helping the security agency invade its customers' privacy.

Mr. Klein's account and the documents provide new details about how the agency works with the private sector in intercepting communications for intelligence purposes.

The documents, some of which Mr. Klein had earlier provided to reporters, describe a mysterious room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco where he worked.

The documents, which were examined by four independent telecommunications and computer security experts at the request of The New York Times, describe equipment capable of monitoring a large quantity of e-mail messages, Internet phone calls, and other Internet traffic.

The equipment, which Mr. Klein said was installed by AT&T in 2003, was able to select messages that could be identified by keywords, Internet or e-mail addresses or country of origin and divert copies to another location for further analysis.

The security agency began eavesdropping without warrants on international phone calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States suspected of terrorist links soon after the Sept. 11 attacks.

After disclosing the program last December, The New York Times also reported that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

The technical experts all said that the documents showed that AT&T had an agreement with the federal government to systematically gather information flowing on the Internet through the company's network.

The gathering of such information, known as data mining, involves the use of sophisticated computer programs to detect patterns or glean useful intelligence from masses of information.

"This took expert planning and hundreds of millions of dollars to build," said Brian Reid, director of engineering at the Internet Systems Consortium in Redwood City, Calif. "This is the correct way to do high volume Internet snooping."

Another expert, who had designed large federal and commercial data networks, said that the documents were consistent with administration assertions that the N.S.A. monitored only foreign communications and communications between foreign and United States locations, partly because of the location of the monitoring sites. The network designer was granted anonymity because he believed that commenting on the operation could affect his ability to work as a consultant.

The documents referred to a second location, in Atlanta, and suggested similar rooms might exist at other AT&T switching sites.

Mr. Klein said other AT&T technicians had told him of such installations in San Jose, Calif.; Los Angeles; San Diego; and Seattle.

The Internet hubs there carry a significant amount of international traffic. The network designer and other experts said it would be a simple technical matter to reprogram the equipment to intercept purely domestic Internet traffic.

The Department of Justice initially asked the Electronic Frontier Foundation not to file Mr. Klein's documents in court, but a review determined that they were not classified and the government dropped its objection. The foundation filed the documents under seal because of concern about releasing proprietary information.

On Monday, AT&T filed a motion with a federal judge in San Francisco asking the court to order the foundation to return the documents because they were proprietary.

The documents showed that the room in San Francisco, which Mr. Klein says was off-limits to most employees but serviced by a company technician working with the security agency, contained computerized equipment that could sift through immense volumes of traffic as it passed through the cables of AT&T's WorldNet Internet service.

According to the documents, e-mail messages and other data carried by 16 other commercial Internet providers reached AT&T customers through the San Francisco hub.

One piece of filtering equipment described in the documents was manufactured by Narus, based in Mountain View, Calif.

The equipment could be programmed to identify and intercept voice or data conversations between e-mail, telephone or Internet addresses, said Steve Bannerman, the company's vice president for marketing.

Buyers included companies trying to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which requires that communications systems have a wiretapping capability built in.

Typically, law enforcement interceptions are done on a case by case basis and require warrants.

Mr. Bannerman said he could not comment further because Narus had not announced any sales to the federal government. William P. Crowell, a former deputy director of the N.S.A, is on the Narus board.

In an interview, Mr. Klein said he did not have a security clearance but had witnessed interactions between colleagues who did have clearances and the highly secretive N.S.A. "It was strange and sort of suspicious," he said.

Mr. Klein said he learned of an agency connection to the mysterious room in 2002 when a company manager told him to expect a visit from an N.S.A. official who wanted to speak with another senior company technician about "a special job." That technician later installed the equipment in the room, he said.

Based on his observations and technical knowledge, Mr. Klein concluded that the equipment permitted "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of Internet traffic. Mr. Klein, 60, who retired in 2004 after 23 years with AT&T and lives near Oakland, Calif., said he decided to make his observations known because he believed the government's monitoring was violating Americans' civil liberties.

An AT&T spokesman at the company's corporate headquarters in San Antonio declined to comment on Mr. Klein's statements.

"AT&T does follow all laws with respect to assistance offered to government agencies," said Walt Sharp, the AT&T spokesman. "However, we are not in a position to comment on matters of national security."

Asked to comment, Don Weber, a spokesman for the N.S.A., said, "It would be irresponsible of us to discuss actual or alleged operational issues as it would give those wishing to do harm to the United States the ability to adjust and potentially inflict harm."

John Markoff reported from San Francisco for this article, and Scott Shane from Washington.

Carnivore II

Court Filings Tell of Internet Spying

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: April 7, 2006

WASHINGTON, April 6 — A former AT&T technician said on Thursday that the company cooperated with the National Security Agency in 2003 to install equipment capable of "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of e-mail messages and other Internet traffic.

A statement by the technician, Mark Klein, and several company documents he saved after retiring in 2004, were filed on Wednesday in a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The suit, filed in January in federal court in San Francisco by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, says the company helped the security agency invade its customers' privacy. The documents provided by Mr. Klein were filed under seal because of concerns about disclosing proprietary information.

Mr. Klein's documents, some of which he had provided to The New York Times, describe a room at the AT&T Internet and telephone hub in San Francisco that contained a piece of equipment that could sift through large volumes of Internet traffic.

Carnivore

Proponents of warrantless wiretapping would have us believe that we must accept infringement of Fourth Amendment liberties in a dangerous post 9/11 world. Their argument is false anyway you look at it. In the first place, the Bush administration began pushing its unconstitutional activities as soon as it took office in 2000, and secondly, its utter failure to protect Manhattan in 2001 demonstrates the futility of a broad-based surveillance network run by an incompetent bureaucracy.

The recent history and techniques of electronic surveillance, should outrage anyone who values their privacy and freedom. The old ways, steaming open letters and tapping land lines , were not the sole province of cold war secret police like the Stasi in East Germany, but their use without judicial oversight was pointed to by the West as hallmarks of totalitarianism. Today,there are new methods, no less clandestine or egregious, and in use on a vast scale to spy on millions of Americans.

In the mid 1990’s, as the Internet build-out accelerated and e-mail became common, the FBI, true to its longstanding tradition, developed a system for tapping into it. First they hired software engineers to write programs for a surveillance operation dubbed “Carnivore”, and then they put together the hardware they needed to utilize it. The purpose was to maximize surveillance of all communications over the Internet while it was novel and unregulated and to thereby subvert Fourth Amendment requirements of probable cause, minimization. and most importantly, warrants.

"Carnivore software is a component of a software suite called DragonWare written by the FBI. The other components of DragonWare are Packeteer and CoolMiner, two additional programs that reconstruct e-mail and other Internet traffic from the collected packets."1 The software is set to filter, store and analyze e-mail correspondence directly from an ISP hub. The filters are key words that touch on a bewildering array of socio-political concerns of such paranoid breadth that J. Edgar must be wearing his craven death’s head smile like never before. For a sample from 2005 you can visit here if you dare.

Carnivore is employed after the FBI has convinced a court that an ISP is unable to sufficiently narrow information requested by the government on a particular case, or because the investigation is of such a sensitive nature that informing the ISP would compromise national security. Once judicial permission is given, a technically trained agent is deployed with a carnivore computer. He takes that computer from an FBI lab to the ISP and secures a work area where he installs a one-way tap into the Ethernet stream, and a telephone link to a remote computer that collects and examines the data. After that, his work is done. A case agent can then retrieve information remotely as the carnivore filters select it.

The Fourth Amendment requires that the court order for search and seizure describe the particulars of the search, and Title III requires that the electronic surveillance be minimized to include only those communications which are described in the warrant. Clearly, tapping every communication through an ISP hub in search of any one of thousands of key words, and then storing and reading those communications that, however innocuously, may contain one of those words, is a gross violation of privacy and a particularly slimy infringement of the search and seizure laws that make the Fourth Amendment so precious. It’s analogous to tapping every phone in America and then trusting the government to record only what they deem suspicious.

And as if that wasn’t bad enough, the sad fact is that for all this snooping, for this unprecedented invasion of privacy, there have been no real benefits to the national security whatsoever. For all the hundreds of thousands of us who have had our e-mail read over the last ten years, there have been few to none arrests or convictions of real terrorists because of it. Why is that? Is it because real terrorists have proven to be nothing if not diabolically clever and are not lining up to advertise their plans over the Internet in plain English? For that matter, all a terrorist cell has to do to undermine this FBI surveillance is to open an e-mail account, share the password among themselves, and save their communications as drafts. Then they can access those drafts from anywhere, anytime, without ever even sending e-mail. But then, if the FBI had thought of that, which is nothing more than an electronic update of the classic cold-war letter drop, they’d have been out of a job.

All of this unconstitutional surveillance was put in place long before the intelligence community failed to protect us from 9/11. If they were engaged in these activities then, ostensibly to fight the so-called War On Drugs and trading with Cuba, one can only begin to imagine what they are doing now behind the smoke screen of national security. In a telling precursor from the days of prohibition, the warrantless telephone wiretap case of Olmstead v US in 1928 was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court before being ruled in favor of the government by a 5-4 margin. Justice Taft, supporting the conviction stated, “The reasonable view is that one who installs in his house a telephone instrument with connecting wires intends to project his voice to those quite outside, and that the wires beyond his house and messages while passing over them are not within the protection of the Fourth Amendment.” We now perceive the unreasonableness of this view. Dissenting Justice Brandeis said it best, one would hope, for all time, “The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home….Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded and all conversations between them upon any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. Moreover, the tapping of one man’s telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call, or who may call him. As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wiretapping…. The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and of his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain; pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred, as against the Government, the right to be let alone -- the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men. To protect that right, every unjustifiable intrusion by the Government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed, must be deemed a violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

---

1 Smith, Steven P, et al. Independent Technical Review of the Carnivore System, http://www.usdoj.gov/jmd/publications/carniv_final.pdf, 12/8/2000

5,000 Drunken White Men

Attacks on two towers by people of Mid Eastern descent start rumors flying. Retaliation is demanded and organized with sophisticated communication devices. An overwhelming force gathers and moves with lightening speed and ferocity, but against the wrong target: the convenient and innocent neighbors of those responsible for the initial attacks. The twin towers of the World Trade Center, Iraq and the US Army? No…two lifeguard stands on Cronulla Beach in Sydney, the Lebanese suburb of Carringbah, and 5,000 drunken, text-messaging white men.

It does remind of the Bush foreign policy in a reductionist nutshell. We are saddled with a foreign policy that has all the forthought, subtlety and nuance of 5,000 drunken white men. One might argue that there is after all diversity in the Bush administration, but for the purpose of this analogy, let’s just consider, based on their performances, that Colin Powell, Condi Rice and Alberto Gonzalez are serving as honorary drunken white men.

More to the point, however, this shocking race riot in Australia exposes the corrosive effect on those at home from a foreign policy built on fear and hate. Prime Minister John Howard, recently re-elected for a second term, is a staunch supporter of the War On Iraq, and has instituted, in response to terrorist attacks on his citizens and their interests in Indonesia, draconian negations of civil rights within his own land. Unwilling or unable to deal with the real sources of terrorism , he has instead exacerbated the climate of fear, and a race riot is the direct result.

Tony Blair has taken Britain down the same path and it led to the disaffected "lads from Leeds" and their subway bombs. Was that the end of it? Not likely. What about America? Without a sizeable Islamic population to lash back, perhaps the mendacity, repression and incompetence of the Bush administration will draw its own fire. Whenever I think of what’s been done to Iraq, or of the Patriot Act, or of the federal neglect of New Orleans, I feel like 5,000 drunken white men.

The Republican Devolution

In the mid 1990's, conservative republicans led by House Whip Newt Gingrich, created the Contract With America, a campaign tract that delineated their plan to take control of the House and Senate. The first sentence of this manifesto pledged Republicans "to restore the bonds of trust between the people and their representatives." Success in the elections of 1995 gave Republicans majority legislative control, and led by Tom Delay and his spokesman Michael Scanlon, they made good on that promise by hectoring President Clinton with a series of frivolous charges culminating in 1999 with his impeachment for perjury relating to his private sex life, a grandstanding waste of time that astounded the world with its false piety.

Congressional ethics committees fell silent once Bush took office. In their eyes, the bonds of trust had been restored by the monolithic conservative control of all branches of federal government, and that's too bad because Republicans and their operatives have been busy beltway beavers ever since, building and blowing dams on the rivers of money that flow through Capitol Hill.

Thankfully, the Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the I.R.S. and the S.E.C. are not looking the other way:

Under Investigation - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist for insider trading.
Under Investigation – Senior Presidential Advisor Karl Rove in the leak of a CIA agent’s identity.
Indicted - Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby on obstruction and perjury charges.
Indicted - House Majority Leader Tom Delay on campaign fraud charges and money laundering.
Indicted - Delay aide James Ellis on campaign fraud charges, conspiracy and money laundering.
Indicted - Delay aide Warren Robold on campaign fraud charges, conspiracy and money laundering.
Indicted - Delay aide John Colyandro on campaign fraud charges, conspiracy and money laundering.
Convicted - Republican Representative Randy Cunningham for taking bribes from military contractors.
Convicted - Republican Operative Michael Scanlon for conspiracy to bribe congressmen.
Indicted - Lobbyist Jack Abramoff for wire fraud and conspiracy to bribe congressmen.
Indicted - Lobbyist and Abramoff partner Adam Kidan on wire fraud and conspiracy charges.
Indicted - Chief procurement official David Safavian on obstruction and perjury charges.
Under Investigation - Republican House Chairman Bob Ney for taking bribes.

Scanlon's guilty plea and a $7 million fine got him off the hot seat, and swung the spotlight onto Abramoff and Safavian. If either one or both cut a deal with the Justice Department, an enormous conservative scandal may unfold, exposing these hypocritical moralists for the venal animals they really are.

Death Squads...Right On Schedule

A body-dumping ground on the Iranian border, a long row of corpses bound and shot execution-style on the road outside Mosul, 169 emaciated and tortured detainees concealed in an Interior Ministry bunker in central Baghdad, and Donald Rumsfeld, at a press conference this week has the temerity to say that he has no evidence of counterinsurgency death squads operating in Iraq, and then he turns to one of his generals and says, "Do you?” and the general shakes his head and parrots, “I do not, sir.”

Despite the disingenuous denial by the Secretary of Defense that counterinsurgency death squads are now operating with his blessings, their appearance at this time was inevitable. A guerrilla war entering its third year with no end in sight, a surrogate army that can't stand on its own, and an upcoming election...now is the exquisitely vicious, perfect time to bring in paramilitaries to crack down on “rejectionists” (sic-Bush) and eviscerate their civilian support. We need look no further than the Reagan administration's war-mongering in Central America to find the model for this tactic and the footprints of the players who are still operating today. Men like Dick Cheney who as a senator was a passionate supporter of the discredited communist domino theory that Reagan used to defeat Carter in 1980 and then to restore military support to Latin American dictators. And John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and previous Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1987; responsible then for funneling covert funds and arms to the Contras after congress had banned further military aid, and under whose watch human rights violations in Honduras became systematic. Men like Steve Casteel, ex-DEA official in Latin America and in charge of the Iraq Interior Ministry until handover of sovereignty on June 20, 2004, and Jim Steele, in charge of Special Forces in El Salvador in the early 80's, also now operating in the Interior Ministry of Iraq.

In El Salvador, paramilitary death squads were funded, trained and armed by the U.S. They were extremist nationalists, pathological killers, ex-Salvador intelligence operatives like Roberto D’Aubuisson; they were the brainchild of the CIA. They were known as El Mano Blanco, The White Hand, and they were responsible for the murders of first Archbishop Romero and then forty mourners at his funeral on the steps of the San Salvador Cathedral, for the rape and murder of four Maryknoll nuns on the road from the airport, for the dumping of corpses with warnings stuffed in their mouths at the journalists’ hotel in San Salvador, for the massacre of over 800 campesinos at El Mozote, for the apocalyptic body-dump of El Playon, and for the "disappearance" of tens of thousands more.

In Iraq now, the rebellion is made up of a bewildering array of over 100 insurgent groups (ref. SITE Institute) with more joining in every day in an incomprehensible maelstrom of ideologues, gangsters, assassins, die-hard Baathists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Jihadi pop-ups, Sunni and Shiite vendettas, and the ever-present Ali Baba intrigues. From the onset, Iraq was a war of ideas that we came into losing before the battle on the ground even began, when Bush let slip that he was launching a “crusade.” In the arena of ideas, it’s been one debacle after another for the U.S.A. as the Bush administration has consistently outraged the world with new lows of mendacity, creeping fascism, propaganda at home and propaganda abroad, torture gulags and secret prisons, chemical weapons and war crimes in Fallujah. Rather than rising above the fray and projecting the image of a democratic ideal, an honorable force under civilian control, the Bush administration has utterly failed in the court of world opinion. And in America, even some of their most deluded supporters are losing their will to fight to the last drop of somebody else’s blood.

The Iraqi death squads were initially Sunni militias, ex-Republican Guards with a taste for brutality and commando fighting, trained by U.S. Special Forces, supplied with arms, uniforms and sophisticated communication equipment, ushered past curfews in convoys of masked gangs (ref Peter Maas NYTimes May 1, 2005.) They are increasingly recruited from Shiite Militias and are known as the Wolf Brigade, the Scorpion Brigade, the Lion Brigade, and the Fearless Warriors. Their purpose is a counterinsurgency timed for maximum effect when political campaigns are taking place and when the U.S. is contemplating withdrawal before regular Iraqi troops can operate on their own. Death squads are a last resort, perhaps the last resort of a bankrupt strategy before the final catastrophe, that most reprehensible and cowardly tactic of all…a full-on American air war.

The following is exerpted from a 1999 interview with Amb.Robert E. White, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador 1979-1981; appointed by President Carter, fired by President Reagan:

“The Reagan administration came in and they simply didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand is more like it. Now it’s my belief that they looked upon El Salvador as something they could put their stamp on and demonstrate the difference between the sort of do-goody (sic), indecisive Carter administration and the tough, no-nonsense Reagan administration that would know how to deal with communist revolutionaries. Unfortunately, they simply didn’t understand: the Salvadoran military do not kill armed people; they kill unarmed people. They have no experience what-so-ever in fighting and no stomach for fighting either.”

“A former CIA station chief who had left the agency came to El Salvador and spoke with a lot of military officers and the people who owned the country, and the message as reported to me later was: ‘Look, we’re in. Human rights is no longer an issue. We’re going to roll these revolutionaries up and just trust us to do the right thing.’”

“We spent probably six billion, seven billion dollars. We killed seventy-five thousand people, many of whom died horribly, through torture. We drove a million refugees to the United States and all of this to try in vain to defeat a revolutionary force that was ready to negotiate peace in 1981. Now if anyone can make sense of that from the point of view of the United States national interest, I would like to hear it.”

BLOWBACK!

Since he initiated the second war on Iraq, Bush has been proclaiming that we are fighting terrorists there so that we don't have to fight them at home. Unfortunately for Spain, Britain and Australia, the Aznar, Blair and Howard governments believed him. Now that they've fully thrown open up the gates of hell we see the results: worldwide recruitment of jihadists has swelled, they rush to Iraq for peerless training in urban terror, then bring it back home.

In the 1980's we armed and trained Osama bin Laden and the mujahadeen to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Then they turned on us. The CIA has a word for that...blowback.

That’s the unexpected repercussion from ill-advised foreign policy; the unintended consequence of propping up unsavory dictators and arming insurgents to topple regimes that we don’t find sympathetic.

In the 1980's we also armed Saddam Hussein's dictatorship with conventional and biological weapons to fight the fundamentalist Shiite Ayatollahs in Iran. Hundreds of thousands died during a seven-year fight to a draw. Then Saddam turned on Kuwait...blowback!

In 2003 we invaded Iraq ostensibly to fight terrorism and instead enabled the transformation of a Jordanian bit-player named Abu Musab al-Zarqawi into the mastermind of a deadly new branch, Al Quaeda In Mesopotamia, that is fast eclipsing Osama bin Laden’s Afghanistan Al Qaeda with its mayhem...major blowback!

In 2005 we propped up in Iraq a Shiite majority "democracy" and will soon have to deal with the fact that Iran, an anti-American Shiite theocracy with real weapons of mass destruction, has thousands of covert agents who now pass freely into Iraq to cement alliances and ensure that Sunni participation is nullified; a strategy they were never able to achieve in the 80’s while Saddam Hussein’s pan-Arab secular Ba’athist party was in power....impending blowback.

Counter Spin

Last week brought the best news progressives and activists have seen in five years. Off-term elections resulted in the defeat of conservative Republican gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia by Democrats who based their campaigns on opposition to discredited Bush Administration policy. The Dover, Pennsylvania school board of fundamentalist Christians who had insinuated intelligent design into their high school science curriculum were drummed out of a job. In California, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $250 million attempt to end run the Democratically dominated state legislature by putting conservative proposals to the ballot went down in flames; all four measures soundly defeated. And finally, the Republican dominated House was forced to pull the proposal for drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge from its budget package after all but five Democrats voted against it.

On Tuesday the non-partisan Pew Research Group released a poll showing that 43% of Americans believe they were lied to about Iraq’s WMD to justify the invasion, and an ABC/Washington Post poll showed that 60% think George W. Bush is dishonest and untrustworthy. Democratic legislators, smelling blood and recovering some spine, leveled a new round of accusations at the Bush Administration regarding the use of questionable intelligence as false pretenses for starting the war. Bush countered on Friday, at a tightly wrapped Veterans Day speech at an army depot in Pennsylvania, with typical spin and revisionism, much more of which we are sure to see shoveled through the media in coming weeks.

These are the main charges neoconservatives level at their critics:

Democratic Legislators voted for the war based on the same intelligence. 21 of 50 Democratic Senators and one Republican voted against the Iraqi War Resolution on October 11, 2002. To their shame, 29 Democrats voted to approve it, and with 49 Republicans, that was enough for President Bush to circumvent the War Powers Act and start a war based on an imminent national threat (the false intelligence.) However, persuading dubious, inside-the-beltway politicians post 9/11 with a threatening dichotomy of “you’re either with us or against us,” and bombarding their constituents with fearful propaganda was malfeasance. Anybody who sat through the televised presentation by Colin Powell before the United Nations Security Council and came away saying they were convinced by that shaky power-point display was too traumatized or too deep into the establishment to stay objective. Ultimately, arguments regarding the validity of intelligence are moot since at that time UN inspectors had full access within Iraq, were doing work of such thoroughness that it garnered the Noble Peace Prize, were finding no WMD, and thus had Saddam Hussein completely contained.

Critics of the war are demoralizing the troops. The American soldiers aren’t paying attention to this debate or even given the opportunity to have, or voice an opinion. Neither are they fighting day after day, tour after tour to advance an aggressive foreign policy. They’re fighting to survive, and to protect the soldiers next to them. We owe it to those who have died, those who have been wounded, and those who are still fighting to resolve this mess as quickly and truthfully as possible. If anyone at home has endangered American soldiers, it’s those who have lied in order to send them to war.

Critics and dissenters are excuse makers who find terrorism understandable. This is the rhetorical trickery often used by reactionary conservatives seeking to avoid real debate: falsely portraying as repellent caricatures those whose ideas they would attack, just so they can easily knock them down. It’s standard procedure in the Rovian White House to launch personal attacks to avoid the issues. Thus those who recognize that the War On Iraq has revived the Jihadist logic of total conflict against the west are accused of claiming that there is some kind of justification for terrorist attacks. Likewise, those who call for a cessation of US offensive tactics and a timetable for withdrawal are accused of giving comfort to the enemy.

The War On Iraq has made us safer. Neoconservatives and terrorists are co-dependents; extremists whose ideological madness feeds each on the other, leaving the civilized world to pick up the pieces. Since March 2003, when the hunt for Bin Laden was deprioritized for the sake of invading Iraq, we've been picking up the pieces from Al Qaeda network attacks in Jakarta (Aug.03), Casablanca (May 03), Istanbul (Nov.03, Dec.03) Riyadh (May 03, Dec. 04), Khobar (May 04), Jeddah (Dec.04, Jan.05), Madrid (Mar.04), Taba (Oct.04), Sharm-el-Sheik (July 05), Jakarta (Sept.04), London (July 05), Bali (Oct.05) and Amman (Nov.06). The sad fact is, the War On Iraq has legitimized Al Qaeda in the radical Muslim world and made a greater target of America and every nation whose misguided leaders enabled this pre-emptive war against a non-existent enemy in an oil-rich country.

Al Qaeda network terrorism is not in response to actual Mideast events. This charge has several components. First they point out that terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and the first Bali bombing in ’02 preceded the Iraq war. Oh really…which one? This is the second, and after the first, Desert Storm, there was a decade of draconian sanctions that cost the lives of an estimated 100,000 Iraqi children. Another long standing argument attributes Islamic attacks as being the result of poverty or unemployment, and psychologically profiles terrorists as alienated, frustrated and conflicted by the temptations and successes of modern western life. But take for example the London suicide bombers of 7/7/05…ordinary midland Brits; cricket-playing sons of upwardly mobile immigrants. What radicalized them to the extant where they could be exploited was that even on the quiet streets of Leeds they must have felt under attack from the actions of British and American Forces in this second War On Iraq, where tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed and torture has become routine. That level of injustice brings tribal, racial and religious affinities to the fore, just as 9/11 did with Americans; massacre upon massacre in a cycle of violence. Extremism breeds extremism, ideology is reaction to policy, and as long as the neoconservative offensive continues in the Mideast we will never see the end of it.

The Tangled Web

It started off as misinformation to initiate an ill-founded war; misinformation fed through a mainstream press. Then it became lies to further a larger agenda. Then more lies to cover the earlier lies; still with the compliance of the press, and uncontested by a partisan and cowed legislature until there was a tangled web of deception so thick and vast that it could be easily fed and maintained with obfuscating propaganda. And so, rather than having to defend themselves from charges of malfeasance, they were able through arrogance, fear and a contempt for nuance to defend the web itself. And, as in the old Soviet Union, inconvenient truth was subject to revision.

Thus was born the Forever War out of the War On Terror. Specific questions about the ultimate purpose of the war were unanswerable because it was a war that was never meant to be won. It wasn’t a war against a people or a place, but rather the defense of a morally bankrupt foreign policy and the insurance of power through the constant destabilization of society. Those who initiated it had no intention of ending it, those who supported it learned to live with the knowledge that they had worshiped false values and had sent American soldiers to die in vain in Iraq, Syria and Iran.

GW Bush, like Vladimir Lenin, was an opportunist who had ushered vicious and incompetent cronies to power and sought to institute a totalitarian police state at home while exporting and inciting terror abroad. He presided over a cabal of ideologues who were the enemies of truth and clarity, who preyed upon the ignorant and fearful, who catered to military-industrialists and religious zealots, and who so maniacally grasped at their illegitimate authority that they became wholly corrupt.

In early 2006, anti-American sentiments were found to have risen to alarming levels around the world. Even for those still listening to the party line this was attributed almost entirely to hostility derived from American policies, especially on Iraq after the release of previously suppressed images from Abu Gharib prison, and the adjournment in The Hague of a High Commission of the International Criminal Court to investigate war crimes committed by the United States Army upon the city of Fallujah, including the targeting of medical facilities and the failure to protect civilians. The Bush Administration, with the backing of Congress, declared the opinions of Old Europe regarding American prosecution of the Forever War to be counterproductive if they hampered the war effort and of the “gravest concern if they condoned, justified or encouraged the Evildoers.”

Late in 2006, due to continued troop requirements in Iraq and the new offensive on the Western Front against Syria, a military draft was instituted requiring all civilians between the ages of 18 and 35 to register for service. Despite relentless media showcasing of ready compliance in a few areas like San Antonio and Cincinnati, protests began along the west coast and New England.

In the summer of 2007, anti-war demonstrations turned violent in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Seattle, Chicago, Ann Arbor and Salt Lake City. Simultaneously, a series of Force 4 and 5 Hurricanes devastated the Southern Atlantic and Gulf Coasts from Georgia to Texas, and millions of people were displaced and then stranded by gas shortages resulting in further outbreaks of violence across the south. President Bush declared martial law in those cities where demonstrations and civil disobedience were occurring, and sent available National Guard troops to control evacuee traffic on southern highways.

At the same time, H5N1 avian flu was diagnosed in poultry stock in several states across the country: in Rhode Island, Iowa, Texas, and California. In South East Asia a new viral strain, H5N2, had been spreading between people and several ill airline passengers were isolated upon arrival in Los Angeles and San Francisco. In August of 2007, all across the United States, small focal outbreaks of H5N2 began to be reported, and infected communities were immediately quarantined by federal troops. In the absence of a widely available vaccine to control this new viral strain, the military took control of the entire national highway system, requiring special permits for interstate travel. Overseas troop requirements on the new Eastern Front against Iran, and the plan to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act meant increasing reliance on private militarized contractors to enforce domestic policy.

In October of 2007, the Forever War was raging across the Mid East while the pandemic raged at home, and the country was put on a heightened state of alert due to “The Evil Within.” President Bush called for a nationwide prayer vigil. The subsequent declaration of a national state of emergency led to an indefinite suspension of presidential elections. Draft evaders, protesters, inciters and counter-crusaders were identified from surveillance videos, purchase histories and e-mail transcripts, rounded up by neoPatriot2 contractors, and sent to be held for extra-constitutional processing in the first of the permanent Free Speech Camps.

And so it began…the ending of the great experiment that was America. The beginning of the end was the unfolding of a flower of evil from the seed of its own troubled past. America had begun with the greatest contagion on indigenous peoples the world had ever seen while hypocritically denying the survivors their religious freedom, created a marvel of savage capitalism as the world’s largest slaveholder in thrall to the mass production of sugar, tobacco and cotton, then shook off its past for a brief shining moment and coalesced into the idea that liberated and inspired mankind, before bloating into an empire that sought to control the world by shock and awe, and finally reaching an apotheosis of malevolence and incompetence that couldn’t protect the most technologically advanced civilization in history from itself. Like all great empires, America collapsed from within. It collapsed from fear and zealotry and greed and the maniacs who exploited it in their insatiable lust for power. The great, steady beacon of freedom had become the constantly sweeping searchlight of fascism.

Dispatch 10/18/2010
Desert Canyon Outpost
Red Letter 23

CostaSwitza RicaLand

Guanacaste, Costa Rica

Costa Rica is full of Europeans this winter enjoying the excellent weather and the strong Euro in a dollar-dominated country. The dollar has been stable here for years, and you can use U.S. currency anywhere in casual exchanges for colones that adhere closely to what you would get in a bank. Those who come in with Euros are thus enjoying a 50% discount on what was already a bargain of a country. I met people from Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, and The Netherlands. Besides their fiscal good fortune and sunny holiday dispositions, they share another trait: the ability to turn on a dime and flash anger at the foreign policy of the current American administration and revulsion at American people for having re-elected it. That’s something new I’ve noticed since this election…Europeans are no longer making a distinction between American policy and American people. They’re angry, and they’re angry with us as citizens of a rogue empire for not resisting it.

When, in the late sixties, it became apparent that the Vietnam War was a failed policy based on lies and that America was engaged in war crimes, many cities and most universities were engulfed in protest. Fifteen years later, Reagan’s covert war on the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the collectivos in Guatamala, and the rebeldes in El Salvador, while lacking the personal component of the threat of a draft to American youth, finally became so egregiously unconstitutional that Congress could no longer not react. Now, we’ve re-elected a cabal of extremists whose global machinations go so far beyond our past shameful actions in South East Asia and Central America that the whole world is involved, and they’re appalled at our complicity and complacency. Subtleties like red state/blue state electoral college, Democratic Party ineptitude, and moral value machinations mean about as much to them as the choice of nozzles in a firestorm.

Costa Rica walked a thin line in the 80’s between the Somoza family, the Sandinistas, the Contras, Cuban Exiles, the CIA, U.S. Military advisors, and National Security Council stooges like Oliver North. In 1984, President Luis Alberto Monge Alvarez flew to Washington to endorse Reagan’s pro-Contra plans, and Costa Rica was on the brink of a full-on military build up courtesy of Uncle Sam. Resistance from the people was swift and effective. They threw their support behind peace advocate Oscar Arias Sanchez who in 1986 restored Costa Rican neutrality and in 1987 won the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering a formal peace plan signed by all five Central American presidents which ended the conflict, despite Reagan’s callow efforts to sabotage it. In a speech before the U.S. Congress later that year Arias said the Costa Rican people “are convinced that the risks we run in the struggle for peace will always be less than the irreparable costs of war.” Today, this small, stable country is known as the Switzerland of Central America and, as I would soon learn, that’s as much because of its dramatic landscape as for its neutrality.

I landed in San Jose, the capital, with a bag full of motorcycle gear, a straw hat, some meds and not much else. A dirt bike was waiting for me at Wild Rider Rentals and I went there directly. It was a Yamaha TTR 250; a light, tough bike with high ground clearance, good suspension and brand new knobbies just as I had requested. The owner of the company, Thorsten, a German expat, assured me that the battery was charged and the engine tuned, and watched with slight concern as I surveyed the bike’s condition. Its chain, hoses and cables were good, but it was heavily scratched everywhere, the gas tank was dented, a side panel was bashed, a heat deflection plate was missing, a foot peg was bent, the rack was gone, and it was outfitted with cheap rear view mirrors. “It’s perfect,” I said with a grin, and his face lit up with surprise, both of us now knowing what I intended to do with this machine and relieved that neither of us were going to be fussy about its appearance now or when I brought it back.

In the morning I filled my backpack with essentials for a week, pulled on my armor, threw my gear bag on a rack in Thorsten’s shop, and got out my maps for a quick consultation. He took a look at my intended route directly west to the coast and shook his head, “I advise you against going over the Cerro de la Muerte. It’s a cloud forest up there, the pass is 11,500’, it’s always wet and foggy, sometimes you can’t see 50’, and it’s cold… real cold.” This was unwelcome news; I’d been planning my route for a week but without, obviously, paying enough attention to the topographical features on my maps. “An 11,500’ pass? Between here and the Pacific? It’s only 80 kilometers as the crow flies; that’s unbelievable.” “Yes but it’s true,” Thorsten replied with that Teutonic gravitas that makes you pay attention, “And believe me, that’s no way to start your trip. Let me show you a better route to the sea. I’m going to highlight the road in orange and the key towns in yellow because there are no road signs.”

And then I was away on a slowly descending northwest route from 3,800’ San Jose to sea level at Puntarenas where I caught the afternoon ferry to Guanacaste Province. As soon as I rode off the pier in Naranjo I was onto a dirt road and feeling the heat even though I had stripped down to nothing but mesh and ballistic plates. It was exciting; I was heading south down the Nicoyo Peninsula on a spider web of dirt roads through cattle ranches towards Cabo Blanco, the oldest and one of the least visited of Costa Rica’s wildlife preserves. It’s small in comparison to some of the mega parks that have been created to protect rich ecosystems and migratory patterns that don’t respect political boundaries, but in all of Costa Rica it’s the sole “Absolute Preserve,” one that can only be entered on foot, along a narrow and sometimes difficult to discern trail that winds for 5 kilometers from the ranger station through the dry tropical forest to the beach at the point.

Welcomed by the fearsome screams of howler monkeys who roar like tigers but are really harmless little guys with oversized throat sacs, I spent a couple of days there, recording the sounds of wildlife, and occasionally chatting with the volunteers. They were all female, all in their mid twenties, all pretty, and all from northern Europe. They had paid their own transportation to get to Costa Rica, to stay in a remote bunkhouse, eat rice and beans for two weeks, and groom the trail. At first I had to laugh at the existential absurdity of bringing fair young woman thousands of miles, handing them a rake, and sending them into the jungle. And, it is, in a sense, a Sisyphean task with the constant rain of debris from the dense canopy above, where competition is intense with ferns and vines and strangler trees all pushing up to the light, where birds and lizards and monkeys shred fruits and pods and leaves, and rip bark to get at termites and ants and bees. Still, it makes a difference. Certainly the trail is very neat in places, and without their work would disappear altogether within days, but I felt their presence in a more spiritual than practical sense…more acts of devotion in the cathedrals of nature than "Waiting For Godot" grounds crew... more perception than reality. Like vestal virgins in a roman temple charged with keeping the altar fire burning, their efforts set the tone. Most visitors walk the path as quietly as they can and speak in whispers. These bright young women infuse what so many come here to find, a lively experience of wildlife, with a larger sense of respect for the world outside us, and a true commitment to conservation.

When I left the Nicoyo Peninsula I headed south along the coast as far as Dominical. From Quepos to Dominical there’s a 40 kilometer dirt road that goes beyond washboard in roughness and has loose rocks the size of baseballs. I found that a steady speed of 70 km/hr kept me skipping over the tops of the bumps and I rode standing up to take the vibrations and jumps in my legs and so that I could see the obstacles coming on. I passed the few cars and trucks and buses like they were standing still. Every 10 kilometers or so there was a village and a school and since it was mid afternoon the kids were out and waiting for the bus. I’d slow down to 15 km/hr for the school zone and pass by a knot of blue uniformed kids who would jump and shout at the armored rider on the dirt bike to “hit it!” I'd stay within the speed limit through the zones, and then at the end, still within sight, I’d peg the throttle, bring the front end up and disappear in a cloud of dust and rocks. Later that night in Dominical, I drank beer in a bar with a German who spent 3 1/2 hours in a hot and dusty bus getting his kidneys pounded on that road and absolutely hated it. I did it in 40 minutes and absolutely loved it. That’s why I travel this way.

It was an open-air café on the beach and I had my maps spread out on a side table in the soft and salty night air, planning my return to San Jose for tomorrow. While the locals watched a televised soccer game at the bar, Cristof was packing a cigarette on the map with some herb he’d bought in the tourist town of Montezuma and planning on getting toasted. “Let’s get some more beer, man, and go have a smoke,” he said. “That's tempting,” I told him, “but tomorrow I’ve got to cross the Mountain of Death.” We both laughed at the ridiculous cliché, and then I showed him on the map where we were, where the Cerro de la Muerte was, what the elevation change was, how short the direct line was, and that there was no other route from here to San Jose without going all the way back up the coast. “Whoa, dude,” he said, like a real Californian, “the Mountain Of Death, man!”