Snoop and lie: The U.S. destroys democracy

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With the internal plans in the Department of Defense and the creation of the new Department of Homeland Security, the United States has embarked upon a program of spying on citizens and deceiving them at the same time, a program unprecedented even during times of total war (as in the Second World War).

William M. Arkin, a military affairs analyst, has written an article entitled "Lies enshrined: Pentagon making deception a major, stated goal." And these lies are not designed to simply fool an enemy, but also to fool the citizens of the United States.

Whether or not we have a right to accurate information for decision-making as the voter-rulers of the country, we have always assumed that we do have a right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and to be immune from the violation of our personal integrity and privacy until charged with a crime or until a search warrant has been issued based on "probable cause." But the Pentagon honchos have decided that they must be able to ferret out every bit of personal and private information about our lives in an operation called "Total Information Awareness."

This KGB-like intrusion into our lives will monitor passports, visas, work permits, airline tickets, rental cars, gun purchases, chemical purchases, and other activities involving electronic transactions such as, presumably, credit card purchases.

Significantly, perhaps, the TIA snoop program is being run by Admiral John Poindexter, who was convicted of lying to Congress in 1990 in connection with the Reagan-Bush terrorist war against Nicaragua and the illegal secret dealing with Iran (the Iran-Contra scandal).

These snoop and lie programs must be viewed within the context of the FBI's "Carnivore" device which can examine everyone's email, the USA Patriot Act's provisions extending authority for intrusions into one's communications and private life, the Department of Transportation's secret "no-fly lists," and the legislation which recently created the Department of Homeland Security.

The latter includes a provision calling for the creation of "the Directorate for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection." This agency will be responsible for creating a database on citizens and residents, which could be used to spy on domestic critics of government as well as any "terrorists" who might be foolish enough to talk about their plans (or persons unlucky enough to have had contact, however innocent, with some "suspicious" person).

It is not clear just how the DIA-IP and the TIA will interface with each other, but it is possible that two separate databases will exist on each of us. Will our medical records and our federal and state tax returns be part of the data collected? Since such records are now digitalized and often sent via email, it is very possible that they will be caught up in these huge filing systems (and, incidentally, matched with our telephone conversations captured by satellites overhead, especially our overseas conversations). It is hard to imagine Admiral Poindexter not wanting to pour over the lists of charitable donations reported by Arab-Americans, for example, or to match their files with telephone calls to Yemen et al.

The new Homeland Security legislation (which should really be called State Security since it protects the government bureaucracies more than it does the land), also broadens the ability of government spies to monitor our email messages, since it changes the criteria for searching from an "immediate danger" to simply one of a "reasonable belief" that a crime might occur.

It seems that the Founding Fathers and Sons of Liberty of U.S. Revolution days are being replaced by Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin. The Pentagon and the White House are creating a totalitarian system of internal spying and lying which far exceeds any so-called War on Terrorism, and which, in fact, becomes a form of terrorism against the people of the country.

For those dear souls who believe tht the FBI et al, will never try to trample upon the rights of patriotic citizens, just recall the Bureau's war against the civil rights movement, the FBI's harassment of the critics of U.S.-backed massacres in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and the Bureau's Cointelpro operation against the American Indian Movement and the Black Panther Party.

[Jack Forbes, Powhatan-Delaware, is an historian, social critic, and poet, who has covered issues of international and inter-ethnic relations for 45 years. His web site is ://cougar.ucdavis.edu/nas/faculty.html>