Police State USA: Spying as Law
of the Land
FISA "Compromise" Completes
Transformation of US into Full Police State
by Larry Chin
http://globalresearch.ca/, July
11, 2008
On July 9, 2008, the US Congress overwhelmingly
passed legislation permitting government spying, including immunity
to telecommunications companies involved in secret domestic surveillance
programs. With the stroke of George W. Bush's pen, the US is now
a police state by definition.
The extent of the spying program, and
its larger implications, have been revealed by Mark Klein, who
blew the whistle on secret domestic spying program of Bush/Cheney's
National Security Agency (NSA) and AT&T:
The update of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, called the "FISA compromise", or more
appropriately, the "spy bill", largely completes the
triumph of the Bush/Cheney administration and a bipartisan criminal
consensus. By convenient design, the FISA revision derails pending
law suits filed against the Bush administration's corporate spying
partners (AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and Verizon), silences (the
largely empty-to-begin-with) congressional investigations into
Bush administration's illegal domestic spying program. Presidential
nominee Barack Obama and the Democrats have now moved to silence
all discussion about the issue.
Fear itself, a.k.a. spying itself
Between the false flag mass murder of
9/11 and the creation of the "war on terrorism", the
USA Patriot Act and this new FISA revision, the Bush-Cheney administration
and its enthusiastically complicit congressional partners, have
achieved total victory--world war, open criminality, and the end
of law itself.
It gives the US government unprecedented
new spying powers and sweeping new legal cover for spying that
goes well beyond even the original FISA law---which itself was
an abomination that already permitted the US president broad surveillance
powers.
Given the fact that the US government
is a wholly corrupted criminal organization by definition, the
political spin over "oversight", warrants, the involvement
of the Inspector General, etc. is all the more transparently ridiculous:
the operatives of such apparatuses do not investigate or punish
their own. Nor do they voluntarily stop the lucrative and intoxicating
criminal activity that is their lifeblood.
In fact, the debate over the spy bill
is a red herring, clouding the larger central (purposely unaddressed)
issue: the "war on terrorism" lie itself.
The mass murder of 9/11 was a false flag
operation, orchestrated and executed by the Bush administration.
The "war on terrorism" is a perpetual covert operation,
an endless pretext for war and murder, supported by a bipartisan
consensus. (See "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda:the
database".) No 9/11, no "war on terrorism", no
war in the Middle East. No "war on terrorism" lie, no
dictatorial powers for the White House, and no beefed-up FISA.
Given that the "war on terrorism"
is a lie, the need for unprecedented spying is also a lie. Just
as 9/11 remains the endless pretext for endless war and terrorism,
it also remains, in its countless propaganda manifestations, the
justification for open totalitarian rule of force and intimidation
within US borders.
The totalitarian criminal agenda is fully
endorsed by neoliberal Democrats, including Barack Obama. According
to the Obama campaign, "Senator Obama has said before that
the compromise bill is not perfect. Given the choice between voting
for an improved yet imperfect bill, and losing important surveillance
tools, Senator Obama chose to support the FISA compromise."
The pro-surveillance Democrats, led by
Senator Jay Rockefeller and Obama (whose lame hemming-hawing justifications
can be read here) are repeating asinine lies, and groundless excuses.
In calling criminal spying and covert
operations "important surveillance tools", Obama is
showing his truest colors. Obama, whose politics and rhetoric
have been consistently in line with the Bush/Cheney agenda on
all of the most telling issues (war in Afghanistan, war on Iran,
"terrorism", "homeland security", globalization,
and most recently, other right-wing positions), is a smooth-talking
and appealing front for the Bush-Cheney status quo. Obama and
McCain, like Bush-Cheney, will continue to push the endless "war
on terrorism" lie, and embrace every single criminal act
conducted in the name of this propaganda construct.
All "homeland security"/Big
Brother measures such as FISA, in any form, provides political
cover for the US government to engage in criminal activity. Any
politician, be it Bush/Cheney or Obama, who approve of any sort
of "surveillance" is guilty of committing a criminal
act, and of raping the Constitution along the way.
Cynical posturing and election-year flatulence
from Obama's legion of defenders and fans cannot hide what has
happened, or who is responsible. The rape of the US Constitution
is so overt and so egregious that it has set off a wave of outrage
and backlash, spawning unusual new grassroots coalitions.
Clearly, however, the powers that be,
including the Obama camp, has casually dismissed this relatively
small portion of the US public out of its election-year calculations,
regardless of how stridently they organize, blog, blow whistles
or file law suits.
Senator Russ Feingold (whose own record
on opposing the Bush administration is less than stellar) warned
that the FISA revision "could mean millions upon millions
of communications between innocent Americans and their friends,
families or business associates overseas could now be legally
collected."
It means much more than Feingold states,
and it has for many years---perhaps decades.
Spying: the pre- and post-9/11 norm
Returning again to the expose by whistleblower
Mark Klein, his detailed and stomach-turning expose, which includes
materials from the key court cases, exposes the fact that the
NSA began breaking into local telephone circuits in 2001. As pointed
out by Robert Parry, the current program may have been in place
before 2001.
In other words, the spying program never
had anything to do with international "terrorists",
and everything to do with a larger police state agenda, including
the power to identify, designate and destroy individuals whose
opinions run counter to those of whichever Big Brother is "in
charge". This is a long-planned program that 9/11 allowed
to push to full fruition.
It is a well-documented fact that the
US government's spying capabilities are overwhelming, and that
continuous illegal surveillance has always trumped congressional
oversight, and the law itself. Obviously, the light reigning-in
of criminal covert operations in the post-Watergate 1970s has
been completely undone in the decades since.
Investigators such as former NSA operative
James Bamford (author of the expose of the NSA, Body of Secrets)
and Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American
Empire at the End of the Age of Oil have thoroughly detailed the
pervasiveness and effectiveness of a wide range of spying and
intelligence programs used by intelligence and law enforcement
agencies. These include Echelon and PROMIS, which are used by
operatives in criminal fashion, as ordered by high-level officials,
specifically to get around all oversight.
Completely unaddressed throughout the
years of noise over spying and FISA, the Total Information Awareness
Program (formerly known as DARPA, and spearheaded by Iran-Contra
participant John Poindexter) has found new life as the IARPA program.
Nobody is talking about IARPA. Nobody
will.
Welcome to hell, again
The George W. Bush administration seized
the White House in 2000 by way of an openly stolen election, then
cemented its criminal power into place with the unprecedented
9/11 mass murder, and its two resulting abominations: the fabricated
"war on terrorism" (the pretext for endless global war),
and the USA Patriot Act (the full-scale destruction of the Constitution,
and the militarization of the US homeland).
These continuing atrocities were the works
of a bipartisan "war on terrorism" consensus, a full
partnership at the top echelons, whose overriding agenda is the
survival of the criminal racket known as the Anglo-American empire.
The deepening of the war and security
state has continued unabated. Under a US congress with a Democratic
Party majority, nothing been done to stop, reverse or undo the
world war, boundless US government criminality, open corruption,
or the absolute and systematic rape of law itself. Now, particularly
with a looming US presidential election, leading members of both
political parties have shown their true colors: as flagrant proponents
of military-intelligence/"homeland security", and enthusiastic
destroyers of the Constitution.
In The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,
Victor Marchetti and John Marks wrote in 1974:
"The clandestine mentality is a mind-set
that thrives on secrecy and deception. It encourages professional
amorality---the belief that righteous goals can be achieved through
the use of unprincipled and normally unacceptable means.
Today, exemplified by actions of the bipartisan
US consensus, assisted by an acquiescent and dumbed-down populace,
the clandestine mentality is not clandestine. "Professional
amorality" is the norm---celebrated openly, and opposed by
few."
In other words, your life and all of your
communications---from your emails, your web searches, medical
records, and financial information, to your reading this article
and clicking this web site---has been "hoovered up"
by the US government's spying machine, to be used against you
at some future time, if the powers that be so choose.
If 9/11, the Patriot Act, and the relentless
destruction of law since 2000 have not already make abundantly
clear, a "Homeland Security" police state within US
borders, courtesy of the spy bill, is now complete. Not even the
trappings of a democracy remain.
Larry Chin is a frequent contributor to
Global Research.
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