Chapter
1
THE THIRD REICH
This work deals chiefly with the contribution of information technology
to developing weapons of mass repression and the apparatus for applying these
weapons. To appreciate the significance of this technology, we must relate how
it helped the German fascists identify, imprison and slaughter millions of
Jews, Gypsies, communists, social democrats, anarchists, labor leaders, homosexuals,
Jehovah Witnesses and other pacifists, and physically and mentally handicapped
individuals,
During the
1930s and 1940s, the technology was dependent on primitive but powerful
automatic data processing equipment – raw data key-punched on Hollerith cards,
then sorted and collated with machines originally developed in the U.S. by
International Business Machines (IBM) for census tabulations and corporate purposes.
In 1927 IBM used its Hollerithprocedures to assist a racist American (Eugenic)
research project that espoused sterilization of ‘inferior races’ and
‘eugenically impaired’ individuals. To confirm its theories ‘scientifically,”
the project wanted to estimate what were considered racially determined characteristics
(e.g., cranial size and IQ scores) and ‘eugenic’ attributes (e.g., alcoholism
and epilepsy) of thousands of individuals.[10]
Then, during the 1930s
and 1940s, the German IBM subsidiary, Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft
(Dehomag) used this technology to serve the Nazi regime’s
census bureau, armed forces, factories, railroads, concentration camps, etc.[11]
According to Edwin Black, the author of IBM and the Holocaust, IBM
U.S.A. maintained Dehomag during the 1930s.[12]
Throughout the war, it provided covert support for Dehomag through subsidiaries
in neutral countries.
Following the trail of
IBM memos and FBI, State Department, American military and German government
files, Black discovered that IBM data processing equipment made a dramatic
difference in the numbers of Jews whose property the Gestapo seized and who
were either killed outright or sent to their deaths – starved, gassed and
worked to death as slave labor in factories and concentration camps. In
Holland, for example, IBM equipment helped the Germans create a diabolically efficient
killing machine. Jewish quotas were established with the aid of the data
processing equipment and the overwhelming majority of Jews in that country were
rapidly identified, rounded up and sent to death camps.[13]
In France, however, this
technology was sabotaged. The Germans had appointed Rene Carmille administrator
of the French statistical service. Carmille – unbeknownst to the German
authorities – was a leader in the underground resistance movement. He sabotaged
the German attempt to develop a database comparable to Holland’s and instead
used its files for the resistance, generating databases identifying men whose
occupational skills and military backgrounds enhanced the struggle against the
German forces. His work, for instance, enabled the Free French to mobilize the
resistance against the Germans in Algeria virtually overnight.
At the cost of his own
life, Carmille saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in France. When the
Gestapo finally discovered that his department had defied their directives –
its employees, while updating the French census records, had not punched the
‘racial’ identities of individuals on Hollerith cards nor collated, tabulated
and printed this information – he was arrested, tortured by Klaus Barbie, the
infamous Butcher of Lyon, and sent to Dachau where he perished.
Information technology in
Holland enabled the Nazis to exceed their Jewish quotas; however, they did not
fulfill the quotas in France because sabotage of this technology forced them to
conduct haphazard and random roundups.
Black reports:
Of an estimated
140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported [to concentration camps],
and of those 102,000 were murdered – a death ratio of approximately 73 percent
[of the Dutch Jews].
Of an estimated
300,000 to 350,000 Jews living in France, both zones, about 85,000 were
deported – of these barely 3,000 survived. The death ratio [of the French Jews]
was approximately 25 percent.[14]
It is important to note
that the U.S. government and the people who settled our country can match the
deadliest weapon employed by the German fascists. In the 19th
century, the American army launched genocidal attacks against Native Americans
Such attacks were also repeatedly conducted by civilian organizations, in hunts
organized and financed by groups of white settlers who killed and scalped
Native Americans regardless of their age or gender.[15]
But there were historical
differences. These genocidal attacks involved the extermination of native
people who, with some exceptions, could not be enslaved and, in the minds of
settlers, stood in the way of the private exploitation of natural resources.
They were not aimed at ridding the world of an ‘evil race’ that spawned
world-wide communist conspiracies, and gave rise to Marxism, ‘The Red Forces’ and
democracy. In Nazi dogma, killing Jews meant ending the fountainhead of Bolshevism,
democratic egalitarianism and the corruption of the Aryan race.[16]
Furthermore, the
genocidal slaughter of Native Americans primarily took place in the 1800s; consequently,
it did not employ the informational technology provided by IBM in
the 1930s. In regard to the employment of this technology for mass repression,
the Nazi regime represents the sole historical precursor.
THE UNITED STATES
Hitler’s crimes occurred
more than a half-century ago. Nevertheless; the files held by the FBI, believe
it or not, contain Nazi allegations about German immigrants. Take, for
instance, the FBI file on the most famous scientist of our time, Albert
Einstein. The FBI hounded Einstein because he was a socialist and anti-fascist
who, among other things, publicly urged individuals subpoenaed by the House
Un-American Activities Committee to engage in civil disobedience – to invoke
their First Amendment rights and refuse to testify before the Committee.
Angered by Einstein’s anti-fascism, J. Edgar Hoover and his agents followed
every lead in search of dirt.[17]
They tapped Einstein’s phone and read his mail. They shadowed him at public
events. They filled his file with stories that were supplied by raving
Anti-Semites, con men and lunatics about his connections with communist conspirators.
They even stuffed his file with false allegations taken from the Gestapo’s infamous
‘Jewish Desk’ and the 1930s pro-Nazi
German press.
The FBI hounded Paul
Robeson and Martin Luther King, Jr. – their files were also filled with rumors,
gossip and lies. So, too, were the files of 10 million other Americans from all
stations in life who were targeted by the FBI.
Of course, the government
did not use the FBI files to round up millions of people and gas them. But the
files were still employed as weapons of mass repression. During the so-called
“McCarthy period,” initiated by Truman’s administration, these files influenced
job loss, blacklisting, family hardship, forced isolation, humiliation and
suicide.
The files also added fuel
to the degradation of democracy. They provided a database for another weapon of
mass repression – the undercover war against the American people – officially
designated as the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). Frank
Donner’s classic, The Age of Surveillance, which was based upon
his long experience as a Director of the ACLU’s Project on Political
Surveillance, describes the endless number of ‘dirty tricks’ and ‘black bag’
operations conducted throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s by government agencies.
Apparently, affiliation with the FBI, CIA, Internal Revenue Service and
military intelligence agencies enabled agents to get away with slandering
political dissenters, forging their signatures, breaking-up and harassing their
families, burglarizing their homes and offices, tapping their phones
unlawfully, instigating loss of employment, disrupting political
demonstrations, encouraging unlawful arrests and unwarranted IRS audits. In the
cases of Fred Hampton, Mark Clark and other African-Americans, 28 people were
killed in an eighteen-month period during the assault against the Black Panther
Party.[18] In addition to socialists, communists, civil rights
workers, Native American organizations and the Black Panther Party, COINTELPRO
aimed at repressing anyone who was actively opposed to an unjust war in Vietnam
in which more than 58,000 American troops were killed, 153,000 wounded and over
three million Vietnamese slaughtered.
Granted, despite their enormity,
even these particular harms do not place the U.S.’ use of weapons of mass repression
in the same league as Nazi Germany’s. But they do justify a comparison that
makes these weapons a paradoxical facet of American political reality.
To explain, the U.S.
government is not the entity idealized by public school civic lessons. Like
Janus, the Roman God of gateways and exits, the Statue of Liberty, the gateway
to the U.S. signals a vista of democratic spirits and American dreams. But this
seascape enters upon shores flooded by tides of political repression. The U.S.
government is a Janus-faced institution, concurrently incorporating the
renowned ‘Democratic’ and imperialist ‘National Security’ States.
LEGALIZING REPRESSION
The American political
terrain can seem confusing, filled with roads that suddenly fork – one road
leading toward the sun and the other into the shadows. But how do the packs of
jack-booted predators from the darker side acquire a legal persona? How do they
become ‘upright citizens’ despite our Constitution?
The answer recognizes
that political factors determine whether information technology is used for
mass repression. Germany, for instance, turned its Hollerith technology –
originally utilized by industry and commerce – into weapons after the Reichstag
fire. Although a Nazi squad had actually torched the Parliament building,
Hitler blamed communist terrorists and proclaimed a state of emergency that
suspended all individual liberties guaranteed under the Weimar Constitution.
His crackdown acquired an aura of legality because it was backed by additional
decrees and ratified by the German Parliament.
Taking a lead, perhaps,
from the Nazi game plan, similar steps for turning information technology into
weapons have become customary in the United States. President Lyndon B. Johnson
used a fictional attack by Vietnamese patrol boats against an American warship
in the Bay of Tonkin to justify his emergency powers. Congress swiftly ratified
these powers and the slaughter of more than three million people followed in
its wake. At home, every U.S. intelligence agency ratcheted up its information
technology to target American dissidents.
In 2001 G.W. Bush also
invoked a state of emergency. In this instance, the terrorist attack was
genuine; he did not fabricate it. But were Bush’s ‘state of emergency’ and the
legislative nullification of civil liberties necessary to prevent terrorism?
Now, almost two years that followed 9/11, the answers are beginning to appear
in a different arena.
The Congressional
investigation of over a dozen federal intelligence agencies suggested they had
more information that might have helped to prevent the terror attacks than the
Bush administration had admitted. It discovered that the terrorists had
seriously considered ususing
airplanes to carry out attacks as early as 1994. In 1998, furthermore,
officials had received reports concerning a "bin Laden plot involving
aircraft in the New York and Washington, areas." They knew that al Qaeda
was trying to establish a cell in the U.S. and that bin Laden was recruiting
five to seven young men from the U.S. to travel to the Middle East for training
in conjunction with his plans to strike U.S. domestic targets. One intelligence
report specifically mentioned the World Trade Center.
Then, almost three years
before 9/11, the U.S. had added information that a bin Laden team had evaded
security checkpoints at a New York airport during a dry run for a hijacking
plot. Intelligence agents missed another chance to stop the unfolding 9/11 plot
when they dismissed information about the identities of two hijackers, Khalid
Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi, who lived in San Diego.
In July 2001, a briefing
prepared for senior government officials warned of a significant terrorist attack
against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. This surprise attack
was designed to be spectacular and inflict mass casualties.
No less than eleven
countries provided advance warning to the US of the 9/11 attacks. Mossad experts
came to Washington in August 2001 to alert the CIA and FBI to a terrorist cell
said to be preparing a big operation These experts provided a list of
terrorists that included the names of four of the 9/11 hijackers, none of whom
was arrested.
In addition, just a month
before the attacks, the CIA sent a message to the FAA warning of a possible
hijacking "or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner." As
we now know this warning was not taken seriously. Again, U.S. authorities did
little or nothing to prevent the events of 9/11.
In November 2003 Al Gore
topped-off the indictment of the U.S. intelligence agencies. In a surprising
speech broadcast by CNN, he reported that U.S. intelligence agencies could have
discovered links that would have prevented 9/11. These agencies knew two suspected
terrorists, Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi, had purchased tickets in late
August 2001 for American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.[19] The terrorists used their real names when they
bought the tickets and, although their names were on a govgovernment watch list (called TIPOFF)
federal agents did not check readily available common addresses showing that
Salem Al-Hazmi (who also bought a seat on American 77) used the same address as
Nawaq Alhamzi. An additional search also would have discovered that two other
key terrorists, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, used the same address as
Khalid Al-Midhar. (Atta helped hijack American 11, which crashed into the North
Tower of the World Trade Center, and Al-Shehhi was on United 175, which crashed
into the South Tower). Had the agencies also searched frequent flier numbers,
they would have found that Majed Moqed
(on American 77) used the same number as Al-Midhar. The reader may find
these names and linkages confusing but, after all, aren’t we dealing with intelligence
agencies?
All the remaining
hijackers – including those who boarded United 93 which crashed in Pennsylvania
– could have been identified before 9/11 by merely searching for identical
phone numbers, names on the INS watch list for expired visas or the address of
an apartment in San Diego, rented by two of them.
Gore
said the collecting of all sorts of personal data on hundreds of millions of
people actually makes it more difficult to protect the nation against
terrorists. He indicated that the intelligence agencies need better and
timelier analyses and that creating massive databases composed of almost
entirely irrelevant information can be counterproductive. He revealed that one
FBI agent said in private: “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack here and
he (Ashcroft) is just piling on more hay.”
Against this background
of all of these disclosures, the sluggish military reactions on 9/11 seem
unbelievable. Once aircraft deviate significantly from their flight plans,
fighter planes are sent up to investigate. The US military launched fighter
aircraft from Sept. 2000 to June 2001 on 67 occasions to chase suspicious
aircraft. However, the deviation associated with the first hijacking was discovered
around 8:20AM and no fighter plane was scrambled from an air force base until
the third plane had almost hit the Pentagon at 9:38AM.
The investigations of
events leading to 9/11 have repeatedly exposed systemic problems that mandated
restructuring federal intelligence agencies and military responses. However,
they did not reveal any condition requiring the massive reorganization of 22
federal agencies into an overarching Office of Homeland Security. And even the
need to adopt policies upgrading airport security, immigration guidelines,
automobile licensing standards, pilot training schools, border patrols, and so
on, should have been taken before 9/11 when the earlier warnings were sounded.
However, they did not require the massive expansion of executive power.
Bush’s supporters insist that
the threats to national security – posed by terrorists armed with weapons of
mass destruction – cannot be prevented without compromising individual
liberties and the rule of law. But this justification for gutting our
Constitutional liberties is another lie that is being used to strip the rule of
law of its authority and insinuate a budding fascist conspiracy in its place.
And we will now see that
it is also being used to turn information technology into weapons of mass repression.
CHAPTER
2
OPTIONS & DECISIONS
Immediately, after the
Sept. 11 slaughter, Bush had a number of options. He could have resorted to
police actions typically employed against terrorism throughout the Western
world. In addition, he could have asked the Security Council for a multilateral
enforcement strategy. Instead, he invaded Afghanistan. Concurrently, Congress
passed The Patriot Act while Attorney General John Ashcroft rounded up and
imprisoned thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants. Ashcroft announced that
suspected terrorists would be tried secretly before military tribunals; and he
charged civil libertarians who objected to his kangaroo courts with disloyalty.
During the year following
Sept. 11, Bush, Ashcroft and Congress began to build the legal infrastructure
for employing weapons of mass repression. Justified by an alleged need to set
aside judicial precedents in order to assist terror investigations, the
government can now monitor religious and political institutions without
suspecting criminal activity. It has prevented the courts from reviewing immigration
hearings and, to extort information, it has secretly detained thousands of
people without charges. It has encouraged bureaucrats to resist public records
requests. It can prosecute librarians and other record keepers if they tell
anyone that the FBI, when conducting a terror investigation, subpoenaed their
records. Sidestepping current legal protections, the government may even
monitor conversations between attorneys and federal prisoners, and deny legal
aid for people accused of certain crimes.[20] To
assist what it defines as terror investigations, it may search and seize papers
and effects of citizens without probable cause. Citizens can be jailed indefinitely
without a trial or without being charged or being able to confront witnesses
against them. Emulating ruthless dictatorships throughout the world, the
government is betraying the Constitution by restricting information, freedom of
assembly, legal representation, unreasonable searches and the right to a speedy
and public trial.
By now, the reader must
be weary hearing how our civil liberties are being attacked. But these attacks
are listed to underscore the extraordinary breadth of an insidious legal
infrastructure being set up in the name of a war against terrorism.
Furthermore, this setup includes unlikely federal bureaus, devoted to the collection
and dissemination of information. For example, our power hungry Attorney
General is exerting political control over fairly independent agencies such as
the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the National Institute of Justice.
Until passage of the
Patriot Act, these agencies collected crime statistics and granted research
awards reporting whether crime was increasing or decreasing, suggesting what
causes it and what to do about it. According to the National Resource Council,
a branch of the National Academy of Sciences, crime data must be released
promptly in order to maintain credibility and freedom from political
maneuvering. But authority is now being taken from directors of these agencies
and given directly to the Department of Justice (DoJ). Statistical reports and
decisions regarding research grants now go to Attorney General Ashcroft’s
office for political vetting before release.[21] In addition, Bureau employees are forbidden to speak
directly to journalists. All media calls are rerouted to a public affairs officer.
According to Professor Alfred Blumstein at Carnegie Mellon University, a
founder of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, these are “the most intrusive
efforts by the political appointees in the Justice Department to control the
shaping and dissemination of statistics since I have been involved.”[22]
Whenever Big Brother
farts, we smell the stench of fascism. Surely, combating terrorism by introducing
fascism at home will affect the political climate in America for years to come.
To underscore this point, comparisons have been made with periods when the
abuse of executive power was rampant. Krugman observed that the attack on civil
liberties bears an eerie resemblance to the period just after World War I.
“John Ashcroft is re-enacting the Palmer raids, which swept up thousands of
immigrants suspected of radicalism; the vast majority turned out to be innocent
of any wrongdoing, and some turned out to be U.S. citizens.” Another
outstanding journalist, Alexander Cockburn, in a similar vein mentioned the
McCarthy blacklists of the 1950s and the spying on anti-war protesters in the
1960s. Russ Feingold, the sole Congressman to vote against the infamous Patriot
Act, in a speech reviewing political repression in the U.S., from the Alien
& Sedition Acts of 1798 to the FBI Counter Intelligence Program of the
1960s, called it “a breathtaking expansion of police power”.
CONTINUITIES
The Alien & Sedition
Acts were cited because they discriminated against immigrants and discarded Constitutional
safeguards for citizens. They tripled the time an immigrant had to live in the U.S.
before acquiring citizenship and gave the president power to summarily arrest
and deport so-called ‘dangerous’ aliens. The Acts made it illegal to publish
statements against the government and against Congressional legislation,
including the Acts themselves.
But, the Acts
boomeranged. They were largely directed at Irish working-class immigrants and
French refugees who were protesting President John Adam’s administration. They
also targeted newspaper editors who supported Thomas Jefferson. Widespread
indignation, however, helped Jefferson to win the presidential election in
1800. The Acts were repealed.
How did the Palmer raids
compare to the situation today? Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and his
assistant, J. Edgar Hoover (who directed the General Intelligence Division of
the DoJ), conducted the raids in 1920 – climaxing a decades-old attempt by the
government to crush working-class movements and left-wing political parties
opposing the government and powerful industrial magnates. Prior to World War I,
four leaders of the struggle for an 8-hour day were hung for a terrorist act
they never committed.[23]
Strikes conducted at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steel works and at John D.
Rockefeller’s Colorado mine, mill and smelter works, were smashed by company
thugs, state militia and federal troops. By 1920, thousands of anarchists,
socialists and communists, including Victor Berger,[24]
Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti[25]
and Eugene V. Debs, were being imprisoned, murdered or indicted on false
charges for their political beliefs. (Debs, as presidential candidate for the
American Social Democratic Party, got one million votes while he was
incarcerated for opposing the war.) Palmer responded to the post-war surge in
union organizing and left-wing activities by exploiting the “Red Scare,” which
had been instigated by newspapers and corporations. The Red Scare was alarming
because it alleged that anarchists and Bolsheviks were about to overthrow the
family, church and government.
Palmer insisted that the
government had to imprison or deport thousands of anarchists and communists in
order to prevent a violent revolution.[26]
Congress, he insisted, was ignoring the menace of “vast organizations” conspiring
to abolish the established order. It was not helping him to legally stamp out
these seditious societies, even though the fires of revolution “were licking
the altars of the churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell,
crawling into the sacred corners of American homes, seeking to replace marriage
vows with libertine laws, burning up the foundations of society.” Fanatic
anarchists and Bolsheviks, who had formed The Communist Labor Party, were not
genuine idealists, he declared. They were aliens possessed with criminal minds.
Even though the Bolsheviks lived in the U.S. rather than Moscow, they were
taking orders from Lenin and Trotsky, he claimed.
Palmer further reported
that the DoJ had identified 60,000 Bolshevism agents. He reported, “The whole
purpose of communism appears to be a mass formation of the criminals of the
world to overthrow the decencies of private life, to usurp property that they
have not earned, to disrupt the present order of life regardless of health, sex
or religious rights.” Insisting, “first that the ‘Reds’ were criminal aliens
and secondly that the American government must prevent crime,” he conducted a
‘preemptive strike’ by rounding them up. People were beaten and arrested
without warrants. His men smashed union offices and the headquarters of the
socialist and communist parties. Over 5,000 people were arrested; some were deported. Shortly
afterwards, another 6,000 were arrested, mostly members of the Industrial Workers
of the World.
Palmer had announced the
raids were necessary because a Communist revolution was to take place on May
Day. When that day passed without a revolution, critics used the lack of
evidence to accuse him of abusing civil rights and exploiting the Red Scare to
secure the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
Subsequently, Palmer was
called before Congressional Committees and accused of using Government funds
unlawfully. He was charged with violating Constitutional Amendments regarding
free speech, searches and seizures, due process and cruel and unusual
punishment. He had arrested people simply because they were members of
political organizations listed by Hoover. He had planted covert FBI agents in
communist organizations and violated the Constitution by taking away
citizenship from naturalized citizens.[27]
What can the historical
attacks on civil liberties tell us about the recent attacks? Government officials
have succeeded in doing what they will when political activities of noncitizens
(or citizens who are labeled noncitizens) have been repressed. At this writing,
enforcement agencies, with critical exceptions, have targeted noncitizens
identified by racial profiling. Under this new racist McCarthyism, FBI dragnets
have produced thousands of false arrests and unjustified detentions.
Furthermore, the rationales (‘investigators have their hands tied’) for chucking
civil liberties are indefensible. Virtually all the persons arrested and
charged with being terrorists, hyped by Ashcroft and the media, were drawn in
by investigations initiated before Sept. 11 or based upon information known
before that date. In fact, as indicated, Congressional investigation into the
FBI’s and CIA’s failure to prevent the atrocities on Sept. 11 suggests that law
enforcement reforms, competent police procedures and adequate airport screening
would have made the Patriot Act superfluous.
Furthermore, European
nations have experienced thousands of bombings, hostage-takings, kidnappings,
bank robberies and hijacked or bombed passenger jets at the hands of
terrorists. The terrorists have been drawn from Basque, Corsican, Action
Directe, Bader Meinhof, Japanese Red Army, Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Irish
Republican Army cells.[28]
But, unlike the U.S. and the Al-Qaeda, Great Britain did not invade the U.S.
because Irish-Americans harbored and funded IRA terrorists.
Chapter 3
The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being
whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step
may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to
emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen --- a society in which government may
intrude into the secret regions of a [person's] life.
–
William O. Douglas
HOMELAND SECURITY
The Bush administration
has incorporated at least 22 long-established agencies – including the Coast
Guard, Customs Service, Secret Service, Immigration and Naturalization’s enforcement
arm and Federal Emergency Management Agency into the Office of Homeland Security
(OHS).[29]
Also, to enable the government to shadow everyone, the OHS will contain an
intelligence division that will receive information from the CIA and the FBI
presumably to investigate potential threats.
The passage of the
Homeland Security Act, according to the ACLU, will endanger access to (1) the
Freedom of Information Act, (2) limit the OHS agencies’ accountability to the
public, (3) deprive the Inspector General from auditing and investigating
agencies it controls, (4) strip OHS employees of the protections in the federal
Whistleblower Protection Act, (5) allow employees to be fired easily by forbidding
them to form labor unions and (6) let files on individual Americans be shared
without regard to privacy rights.
These conditions will
make the abuse of power a certainty.
Among these Kafkaesque
attempts to cage American freedoms, the Act had also planned to ask a million
people to help uncover terrorists by spying on their neighbors. The OHS
intended to accomplish this goal by launching an experimental program entitled
Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) in ten cities during the
winter of 2002. While waiting for legislative approval, TIPS had originally
asked over a million American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship
captains, utility employees, and other ‘well positioned’ private citizens to
participate in "a formal way to report suspicious terrorist
activity," according to its government Web site. It was designated ‘a
Citizen’s Corps program’ providing workers with the opportunity to report
‘unusual activities’ they might observe to law enforcement agencies
Civil libertarians
immediately denounced TIPS as a device for spying on people’s mail, homes and
conduct without a warrant. Also, on July 24, 2002 in preparation for Ashcroft's
appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy's press
secretary, David Carle, sent out a "News Backgrounder" that explained
"the historical precedent for Operation TIPS." In World War I, the
DoJ had established the American Protective League (APL), which enrolled
250,000 'informants' with wide access in their communities to report suspicious
conduct and investigate fellow citizens. The APL spied on workers and unions .
. . and organized raids on German-language newspapers. With the power to make
arrests, "members of the League used such methods as tar and feathers,
beatings, and forcing those who were suspected of disloyalty to kiss the flag,”
according to Leahy’s information. After the war, The New York Bar Association
damned the APL. It declared: "No other one cause contributed so much to
the oppression of innocent men as the systematic and indiscriminate agitation
against what was claimed to be an all-pervasive system of German espionage."
Before the 2002
elections, a number of influential legislators had opposed the TIPS program,
which had been besieged by criticism.[30]
Conservatives like Senator Joe Lieberman, who had originally supported TIPS,
turned in the face of this criticism and backed off. Others agreed with the
Texas lawyer Paul Coggins who said the House of Representatives had choked on
TIPS because it would have transformed 2002 into the ‘Year of the Rat’ by
getting Americans to spy on each other. Leahy led the fight to exclude TIPS in
the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee and Rep. Dick Armey led the same
fight in the House.
Critics insisted that
most of the information sent to the agencies that managed TIPS would be motivated
by political prejudice, racial profiling, religious bigotry and perhaps even a
fellow citizen’s taste in hair styles, clothing or loud music. Leahy, as
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, justifiably asked Ashcroft whether
people applying for a government loan or a job might be told that a suspicious
activity had been logged in the OHS databank because somebody "didn't like
their dog barking in the middle of the night" or the “political shirt”
they were wearing. In reply to his critics, Ashcroft pledged that citizen spies wouldn’t actually
go inside homes to snoop and that the DOJ would not maintain a central database
for TIPS. In fact, he assured Leahy, even though millions of Americans would be
asked to report suspicious activity, TIPS would not create a database that
could be used against innocent citizens.
But Leahy didn’t buy
Ashcroft’s spin on TIPS. Neither did other legislators who recoiled from
Ashcroft’s ‘friendly’ neighborhood spy program. As a result, the government
during the summer of 2002 modified its sales pitch without abandoning the
program. It softened the DOJ website text calling for volunteers among the citizenry
at large as well as postal workers and teamsters; but, it continued to ask for
volunteers.
By September, Coggins
noted that some people asked to volunteer had refused to become TIPSters. He
sarcastically observed,
Postal workers
led a parade of occupations to opt out of the not-so-secret service. Congress
is still skeptical of the attorney general's watered-down proposal, which has
more holes than Swiss cheese – and it smells rotten to the public as well. That
means you and I probably won't get our secret decoder rings in the mail anytime
soon. No secret handshake. No license to snoop. For now, a plumber is just a
plumber, and an exterminator is there to get rid of bugs – not plant them. For
now, it's still safe to chitchat with neighbors and officemates, read racy
novels, watch steamy movies, cook foreign dishes and even speak a foreign
language. We still live in "America, the Beautiful," not "America,
the Bugged."[31]
Fortunately, opposition
from liberals and conservatives alike forced the administration to delete the
TIPS program from the Homeland Security Act before it was passed. TIPS, for
now, appears to be a dead letter.
Why then are we writing
more about the TIPS program? Although it has been quietly put aside, the
administration has, in the past, sent up trial balloons and dropped them if
they generated enough opposition – only to revive them when the political
climate allowed. Since knowledge is power, we will say a few more words about
what almost happened and what may still be in store.
First, it is not
generally known that Ashcroft – without waiting for Congressional approval –
actually went ahead and began to put TIPS into operation. Although the U.S. Postal Service had
refused to cooperate with TIPS, we know that postal workers in at least one
region were required to attend a meeting about the TIPS program and undergo
training for snooping. The same holds for utility workers in a nearby county.
This covert practice, for all we know, may still be in effect regardless of the
fact that the TIPS program was deleted from the Homeland Security Act.
But there are more
important issues to be considered. Civil libertarians had asked, “Why is the
mobilization of millions of citizens necessary?” Besides overwhelming police
with innumerable reports, what would be accomplished by TIPS? Would the OHS use
TIPS to build urgently needed resources to identify and corral thousands of
political dissidents? Are we dealing here with an effective response to
terrorism or with stifling political dissent?
These
questions were implied whenever a critic asked how the Feds would deal with the
tips. Where would they be stored?
Who would analyze them? Granted, even though identifying genuine terrorists
among millions of tips would be as difficult as finding a needle in a haystack,
ready cash appeared to solve the storage problem: The administration was requesting
772 million dollars in its 2003 budget for the OHS’ information technology.[32]
Nonetheless, on the face
of it, Ashcroft’s program still lacked credibility. Supposedly, TIPS was to
help uncover terrorists – but it intended to accomplish this goal in just 10
cities by recruiting a million volunteers. A million volunteers! How many more
millions would Ashcroft have requested if TIPS had ever become a nation-wide
program? Unless he had a hidden agenda, the numbers of volunteers simply did
not make sense. But, they could make sense if TIPS were stood on its head and
critics focused on the volunteers rather than their ‘suspects’. Was TIPS
originally an excuse to build a million-person database overnight composed
chiefly of chauvinistic, fearful and self-righteous patriots? Given the present
political climate, who else would actually spy on their neighbors except
people whose paranoiac reactions to panics, generated by repeated OHS alerts,
could be readily exploited by demagogues?[33]
What could Ashcroft have
accomplished with these eager volunteers? He could have used them to expand an
aggressive right-wing mass movement. And a database identifying these people
would have served as a valuable asset for collaborative efforts, between the
government and right-wing citizen groups targeting political dissidents.
Consequently, TIPS – on a
much grander scale – might have been designed to serve the aims adopted by The
American Protective League when it repressed labor unions and anti-war movements
in the First World War. This possibility would explain why Dubya Caesar and
General Ashcroft stubbornly tried to keep the TIPS proposal alive – until they
were forced to trade it for a sizeable vote on the rest of the Homeland
Security Act. Indeed, the information technology required by TIPS might have
provided another weapon of mass repression regardless of officially
acknowledged aims.
Finally, since TIPS was
only recruiting citizens, a separate program planned to recruit noncitizens
among Muslims. Toward this end, the Feds have encouraged police departments to
interview thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants.[34]
The interviews, the Feds claimed, would be legal, voluntary and necessary for
uncovering terrorist ‘sleepers’:
"This is the least intrusive type of investigative technique that
one can imagine," Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff told Congress.
"This is not rousting people, this is not detaining people, this is not arresting
people. This is approaching people and asking them if they will respond to
questions." (FBI Deputy Assistant Director Steve McCraw as well made everything
sound totally benign and user friendly. He said, the questioning is aimed at
recruiting "individuals who may have information. They may not have information
now, but they may come in contact with the information later.")
Ostensibly, the Feds were
merely interested in possible witnesses, suspects and covert informants in
Muslim communities. But, in setting up the ‘voluntary’ spy network, police officers,
for instance, have been asked to obtain a detailed profile on every subject,
including his movements, past residences, travel, education and family members.
Subjects were asked to reveal their views of terrorism and the Sept. 11 attack,
and to give names of people who might support terrorism. Now this sounds simple
and straightforward. Yet, aside from questions about how reliable or voluntary
responses from immigrants would be under these conditions, using the interviews
to prevent terrorism would inevitably converge on political or religious
beliefs. An authority on the FBI’s history, Athan G. Theoharis, asks, "How
do you identify someone who might engage in terrorist activities? You look at
their political views. You examine how they feel about American foreign
policy."
REINSTALLING RED SQUADS
While he was defending
the TIPS program before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ashcroft depicted TIPS
as merely a “referral agency that sends information that is phoned in to
appropriate federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies." When
questioned, he vaguely indicated that they already have well-established
policies on how information can be used.
But, as we already know,
these agencies have repressive policies and practices initiated decades ago by
law enforcement officials like J. Edgar Hoover. In addition to helping Hoover
generate files on ten million individuals, the police departments, especially
in large cities used the infamous ‘Red Squads’ to maintain their own files on
political dissenters and union activists.[35]
Moreover, although many police departments stopped updating these files after
the Vietnam War, in March 2002, the ACLU again demonstrated the need for
vigilance. It sued the city of Denver to preserve its police files on political
dissenters until questions were answered about why they were kept.[36]
In this instance, the
mayor of Denver, Wellington E. Webb, acknowledged on March 13 that the police
have "3,200 files on individuals and about 208 records on
organizations." These files "have largely been collected in the last
three years," he said.
The files include
political groups the police believe had caused problems in other cities. In addition,
the police often classified political groups and activists as “criminal
extremists”. This label was applied to the American Friends Service Committee,
a Quaker group that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947. An Amnesty International
organizer’s file listed his name, birth date, height, weight, eye color, hair
color, driver's license number, and vehicle manufacturer and model. He was also
branded a “criminal extremist”. Still others were identified in the same manner
because they belonged to groups opposed to police brutality. Finally, the
members of The Chiapas Coalition were labeled “criminal extremists” as well because
they opposed the “low-intensity war against the indigenous peoples in Chiapas
and other states in Mexico” and the deleterious effects of the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
A founder of the Chiapas
Coalition, Kerry Appel, expressed anger and outrage. “I was incredulous at
first," he said. "We're an open, public group. I think there's a
political agenda here within the police department to impose their own labels
on human-rights and peace and justice organizations to criminalize them and
erode public confidence in the integrity of their work." Sister Antonia Anthony,
a Franciscan nun, who spent 25 years living among Indian groups of U.S. and
Mexico and in Chiapas from 1991-1995, also objected: “I really don’t like being on a police file, nor do I like the
threat to our democracy of silencing protesters and stopping nonviolent
actions.” The Chiapas Coalition, she said, is devoted to consciousness-raising
and nonviolent protest. “We are not violent; we are not terrorists," she
said.
A panel of three former
judges found that of the 3,200 files none met legal criteria of reasonable
standards of criminal activities. Mark Silverstein, ACLU executive director,
expressed astonishment at the extent of the spying the mayor disclosed. He
said, "Perhaps I'm too naive. But I thought that after the revelations of
COINTELPRO and the Red Squads, I guess I would have thought that police departments
would have found far less need to do this kind of thing." Since the files
documented police misconduct, he exclaimed, ``We need to know why police
regarded peaceful political protests as crime scenes.''
Similar questions were
being asked in March 2002 – a month later – when the New York Police Department
(NYPD) petitioned a Federal District judge to lift restrictions that curtail
police monitoring of political activity. These restrictions, called the
‘Handschu guidelines,’ stem from a 1971 suit filed by 16 plaintiffs, including
one Barbara Handschu, who contended the department had violated their civil
rights by unlawful surveillance. In 1985, the guidelines were approved because
the court recognized decades-old law enforcement abuses committed by the NYPD’s
notorious Red Squad. Still, even though the guidelines prohibited investigations
of lawful political activity, the department wanted them lifted in order to
fight terrorism. Newsday reporter Leonard Levitt even so found this
justification absurd. He reported that the New York police commissioner “could
not cite one instance, real or hypothetical, in which the Handschu guidelines
hindered police in fighting terrorism, the only thing to be said with certainty
is that his attempt to abolish them is the Police Department's first power grab
since the World Trade Center attack.” Rather than the Handschu guidelines, the
NYPD and FBI’s failure to detect terrorists in the past was due to their
stupidity and laziness, according to Levitt.[37]
Unfortunately, in
February 2003, a federal U.S. District Judge, Charles S. Haight, announced that
he might expand New York’s police powers in March by ‘modifying’ the
guidelines. Although civil libertarians said his modifications would make the
guidelines virtually unenforceable, Haight’s announcement suggested that he had
swallowed the claim that the guidelines were weakening NYPD’s ability to fight
terrorism.
Haight believed the NYPD
officials’ promise to respect civil liberties but the NYPD a few months later
showed what that promise was worth. During the protests against the war in
Iraq, NY police interrogated demonstrators about their views on the war,
whether they hated President Bush, if they had traveled to Africa or the Middle
East, and what might be different if Al Gore was president. When the New York
Civil Liberties Union informed Judge Haight about complaints from the protesters,
he decided that the interrogations reflected “operational ignorance” on the
part of NYPD’s highest officials. While he admitted that civil liberties lawyers
could hold the city in contempt of court in the future if the police violate
people’s rights, he did not impose new restrictions on the police in the wake
of the investigations.
Chicago is another major
city with a history of Red Squads. During the Congressional debate over
anti-terrorism provisions, some Representatives mistrusted agents who claimed
their hands were tied before the Patriotic Act. For instance, Rep. Janice D.
Schakowsky (D-Ill.) recalled, "In the 1970s, I was part of a housewife
community organization that it turns out was spied upon secretly by a unit of
the Chicago Police Department." This unit was Chicago’s Red Squad and it
spied on, infiltrated and harassed a wide variety of political groups.
Students at the
University o
