Posted on 12/14/2001 4:23:06 AM PST by al-andalus
Big Brother was watching
How Bill Clinton laid the groundwork for the new police state.
By A.C. Thompson
LIBERALS ARE AGHAST : the war on terrorism is turning out to be a war on civil liberties. Like a pair of steroid-crazed pro wrestlers, the Bush-Ashcroft tag team is running amok. They're shredding the Constitution and handing scary new powers to cops and FBI agents and just about anyone else in law enforcement or intelligence. "We are all suspects, if Ashcroft has his way," syndicated columnist Molly Ivins howled Dec. 6.
Facing the Senate that same day, the attorney general hunkered down and put on his best John Wayne face, skewering his critics ("they give ammunition to America's enemies") and hinting that some civil liberties may have to be thrown out the window. "Preventing terrorism is a very difficult job," Ashcroft said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We witnessed this week the carnage in Israel. It's a society that has far fewer freedoms than we do and has a far greater investment in terrorism prevention. [And] yet 25 innocent people were slaughtered ... in terrorist activity."
But the Bush-Ashcroft Big Brotherism is nothing startling or new. The USA PATRIOT Act, the military tribunals, and Ashcroft's plan to expand domestic spying are only a public augmentation of the well-oiled police state machinery that was already in place.
As we snoozed through the Clinton era, our lovable, sax-playing president was busy deep-sixing legal protections – often in the name of combating terrorism. He presided over a massive expansion of federal phone-tapping powers. Signing the 1996 Counter-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, our buddy Bill laid the groundwork for Ashcroft's schemes, eviscerating habeas corpus, one of the cornerstones of our judicial system, curtailing due process for immigrants, and creating special courts to try terrorists with secret evidence. Sound familiar? And under Clinton, reinvigorated Red Squads apparently spied on the anticorporate protesters who rocked the Seattle WTO conference.
Clinton "set the stage" for the current rollback of rights, says Harvey Silverglate, an attorney, author, and nationally known expert on individual freedoms. "Clinton caved in to the notion that at a time of perceived crisis or danger it is OK to infringe on civil liberties even if the particular infringement does not produce any added security. So now we have a situation where Ashcroft can make some of the most dangerous incursions into civil liberties that we've ever seen, and nobody even notices."
Nobody paid any attention, for example, when the Federal Bureau of Investigations in 1995 published a notice in the Federal Register stating the bureau's intention to monitor up to 1 percent of all phone calls in certain regions. Aside from a few lonely civil libertarians, the only people who raised a stink at the time were telecom executives, annoyed that they were being told to tailor their systems to the FBI's specifications. And as the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff has noted, a 1998 law greatly eased federal wiretap constraints, giving the bureau carte blanche to tap any phone a suspected criminal might use within a limited geographic area. Only Georgia representative Bob Barr, a Republican privacy freak, opposed the measure.
Even before the PATRIOT Act eased phone-tapping rules, the FBI was doing plenty of eavesdropping, says Jennifer Stisa Granick, an instructor at Stanford law school's Center for Internet and Society.
Granick says the old, pre-PATRIOT Act wiretapping law was "a single-party consent law," which meant FBI agents couldn't listen in on calls without the knowledge of one of the people on the line or a warrant. Circumventing that dilemma was simple: agents would seek out informants who would let the bureau eavesdrop on their phone calls with alleged criminals. Problem solved.
In fact, federal court records obtained by the Bay Guardian suggest that S.F.-based FBI agents used the technique in July 1998 to overhear the conversations of computer hackers. "This kind of stuff happens all the time," Granick told us.
For defense lawyers like Scott F. Kauffman, Clinton's 1996 counterterrorism act, which was a response to the Oklahoma City bombing, "changed the entire legal landscape" – especially in capital cases. "Given the really limited resources we have, it's created an impossible burden," Kauffman, a San Francisco death penalty specialist, told us. "It's sped everything up."
The law also marked a proto-PATRIOT assault on immigrants, allowing the Immigration and Naturalization Service to hastily deport green-card holders convicted of crimes of "moral turpitude" – an amorphous term that could cover just about any offense. Another provision established secret court proceedings for alleged terrorists, barring suspects from seeing more than a summary of the evidence arrayed against them.
Ashcroft's publicly stated lust for domestic spying has sent liberals into hysterics. In truth, though, under Clinton the bureau engaged in COINTELPRO-type political snooping. According to the Seattle Weekly and numerous other credible alt-press sources, the feds have been keeping tabs on leaders of the new anticorporate protest movement since at least 1999.
David Solnit can tell you all about it. A seasoned Oakland activist type – he was in the streets during the '84 Democratic Convention – Solnit is apparently on the shit list of the FBI. In June 2000 he journeyed to a Windsor, Canada, college campus to conduct a workshop on making signs and giant puppets for demonstrations. The trip took a detour when Solnit was stopped by local cops who had apparently been staking him out. "They said, 'Are you David Solnit?' " he recounts. "They had an FBI printout of what the FBI thought my legal history was, which was incredibly inaccurate." Solnit, an avowed pacifist with no history of violence, spent four days in the local lockup on bunk charges that were later dropped.
From every indication, it looks like the feds had been spying on Solnit and sharing their information with Canadian authorities.
(For the record, FBI special agent Andrew Black told us, "The FBI absolutely does not keep tabs on protesters.")
This apparent exercise in espionage doesn't surprise Jim Redden, author of Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State. "The restrictions [on domestic spying] that were supposedly placed on the FBI as a result of Watergate were never very effective," Redden told us. "The FBI quickly figured out ways around them, and there were agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that never were under those restrictions. Government surveillance never really ended."
So why all this backtracking, you ask? Why choose this moment to take gratuitous potshots at Clinton?
Well, to point out this: the current clampdown – which may profoundly change the way we live – isn't about George W. Bush. It's not about John Ashcroft or the FBI's Bob Mueller.
The power grab is being driven by the two dictates both political parties hew to. One is appeasement of the public. Unnerved, we are clamoring for a sense of security – and this could be the ultimate campaign issue. From Bush on down, if the pols don't deliver, they're likely to be tossed from office – just like Jimmy Carter, whose inability to liberate the American hostages in Iran was his undoing.
The other dictate is appeasement of the permanent government: the generals, the high-level law enforcers and agency chieftains – in other words, the people who really run this country. They are seizing this moment to expand their spheres of influence and fulfill long-standing policy dreams, Constitution be damned. "These proposals have been in the pipeline for years; that's why they can whip them out so quickly right now," Stanford's Granick says.
And it would've been just the same with Al Gore at the wheel.
E-mail A.C. Thompson at ac_thompson@sfbg.com.
It figures that this work would come from the S.F. Guardian. Only an idiotic publication would quote Molly Ivins!
Yes, but this A-Hole writes in San Fran.....Gee, glad he could stop Buttf******G long enough to join the Chorus at the Party we've been having since '94 or so....Sheesh.
"Police state" indeed. Puh-leeeze.
People who throw terms like this and "fascist" around in reference to the post-9/11 America only cheapen the term and cheapen the debate. Go do your homework; there are always security-related modifications to liberties that occur during time of war. Abraham Lincoln, who did more to secure liberty for more Americans than any post-Colonial American leader, suspended the writ of habeas corpus and instituted the draft. Over a hundred years later, we're still the freest people in the world.
So what good is tightening the old national securtiy noose if it doesn't do any good? Just a question. Won't be able to respond right away anyhow.
And in my opinion we are approaching a totalitarian state. Virturally any time I leave home I see 2 or 3 people pulled over by the locals in their $90,000 squad cars. Gotta pay for them somehow. Us tax payers can't pay it all, FWIW.
I felt the article gave America a bad rap by calling it a "police state". I could care less whether he thinks Clinton started it.
My basic point is, if America is a police state, then what is North Korea, or Iraq, or China? "Really bad police states"?
People who suggest America is a fascistic police state have no frigging clue what a police state is.
Pulling it all together, what we have right here in our own country are all of the ingredients necessary for a totalitarian police state. We have a federal government that nobody in his right mind would trust, which lies to us incessantly, uses illegal force against its citizens with impunity, and collaborates with totalitarian dictators under cover of a massive propaganda campaign conducted by our supposedly free press. Our major information media are dominated by closet totalitarians who pay lip service to democracy while covertly promoting the interests of communist despots. The political opposition is made up largely of cowards who are so intimidated by our totalitarian propaganda media they are unable to offer effective resistance to even the most egregious violations of civil liberties by the corrupt Clinton regime. They have become, in the fullest sense of the term, Weimar Republicans. And finally, we have that which makes it all possible, a listless, docile, dumbed-down public who gape mindlessly at all of the above phenomena without the slightest glimmer of comprehension, and prattle the latest propaganda cliches dumped into their empty heads by the mainstream media.
The Elian affair has truly given us a glimpse into the abyss of tyranny. The message that comes through loud and clear is that the system isn't working. The question that remains to be answered is whether we still possess the intelligence and fortitude necessary to fix it.
Edward Zehr can be reached at ezehr@capaccess.org
Published in the May. 22, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly
Copyright 2000 The Washington Weekly
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.