consortiumnews.com/2002/112902a.html
Editorials Richard Milhous W Bush By Nat Parry December 1, 2002 George W Bush is fast building a political system of secrecy and snooping that Richard Milhous Nixon would have died for.
Click for Printable Version Bushs executive powers are already so sweeping they may be unprecedented in US history. While some of Bushs supporters cite prior suspensions of constitutional rights during the Civil War and World War II, those eras lacked todays technology to pry into the most personal details of the lives of Americans. Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon and his allies were forced to adopt relatively crude means for invading the privacy of Americans. and burglars were sent into homes and offices searching for embarrassing or incriminating information. By contrast, todays modern technology can let Bushs team collect and analyze trillions of bytes of data on transactions and communications, the electronic footprints left in the course of everyday life: books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and hundreds of other examples. Bushs aides argue that their unrestricted access to this electronic data may help detect terrorists, but the data could prove even more useful in building dossiers on anti-war activists or blackmailing political opponents. Despite assurances that such abuses wont happen again, the capability will be a huge temptation for Bush, who has made clear his view that anyone not supporting his war on terror is siding with the terrorists. The technological blueprint for an Orwellian-style thought police is already on the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagons top research and development arm. DARPA has commissioned a comprehensive plan for electronic spying that would track everyone in the world who is part of the modern economy.
The program will then cross-reference this data with the biometric signatures of humans, data collected on individuals faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. The project seeks what it calls total information awareness. Masonic Eye The Information Awareness Office even boasts a logo that looks like some kind of clip art from George Orwells 1984. The logo shows the Masonic symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the slogan, scientia est potentia, Latin for knowledge is power. Though apparently unintentional, DARPA's choice of a giant white pyramid eerily recalls Orwell's Ministry of Truth, "an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air." The all-seeing Masonic eye could be read as "Big Brother Is Watching." Former Vice President Al Gore and others have noted these strange similarities both in style and substance with Orwell's totalitarian world. "We have always held out the shibboleth of Big Brother as a nightmare vision of the future that we're going to avoid at all costs," Gore said. "They have now taken the most fateful step in the direction of that Big Brother nightmare that any president has ever allowed to occur."
Besides the parallels to 1984, the assurances about respecting constitutional boundaries have been undercut by the administration's provocative choice of director for the Information Awareness Office. The project is headed by President Reagan's former national security adviser John Poindexter, who was caught flouting other constitutional safeguards in the Iran-contra scandal of the mid-1980s. Poindexter approved the sale of missiles to the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran and the transfer of profits to Nicaraguan contra rebels for the purchase of weapons, thus circumventing the Constitution's grant of war-making power to Congress. Under US law at the time, military aid was banned to both Iran and the contras. Noteworthy, too, the Iranian government - then as now - was listed by the US government as a sponsor of international terrorism, and the contras were widely regarded by human rights monitors as a terrorist organization responsible for the deaths of thousands of Nicaraguan civilians. One former contra director, Edgar Chamorro, described the practice of seizing towns and staging public executions of Nicaraguan government officials.
In 1990, in federal court in Washington, Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in connection with the Iran-contra scheme and the cover-up. But his case was overturned by a conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel, which voted 2-1 that the conviction was tainted by congressional immunity given to Poindexter to compel his testimony to Congress in 1987. Though Poindexter's Iran-contra excesses in the 1980s might be viewed by some as disqualifying for a sensitive job overseeing the collection of information about everyone on earth, DARPA says it seeks out such committed characters to run its projects. "The best DARPA program managers have always been freewheeling zealots in pursuit of their goals," the agency's Web site says. Fewer Safeguards While the Bush administration has promised that this time there won't be violations of constitutional protections, a marked difference between the Nixon era and now is that there are actually fewer institutional safeguards protecting the American people today. When Nixon was president, opposition Democrats held the congressional levers that permitted investigations into Nixon's domestic spying. The national news media also approached its duties with far more professionalism. The federal courts, too, were less partisan and less likely to rubber-stamp White House assertions of national security. Now, with all those institutional checks and balances either gone or substantially weakened, there is little to interfere with Bush's return to Nixon-style abuses or worse. "Under authority it already has or is asserting in court cases, the administration, with approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, could order a clandestine search of a US citizen's home and, based on the information gathered, secretly declare the citizen an enemy combatant, to be held indefinitely at a US military base," Washington Post legal affairs reporter Charles Lane wrote. "Courts would have very limited authority to second-guess the detention, to the extent that they were aware of it."
Even in the face of the political constraints that existed three decades ago, Nixon mounted a systematic campaign to spy on and neutralize people he considered threats to his Vietnam War policies. Some of the domestic espionage against anti-war and black militant groups started in previous administrations, though Nixon intensified many of the operations out of a personal fury over challenges to his authority. The Plumbers When the FBI and the CIA drew lines on how far they were willing to go, Nixon turned to a private organization of ex-spooks dubbed the Plumbers, whose name came from their job of clamping down on leaks of information. One of their assignments was to destroy the reputation of former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the secret Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War, which chronicled the lies and deceptions that led the American people into the conflict. Nixons Plumbers broke into Ellsbergs psychiatrists office searching for derogatory information about him. For a just-published account of the Pentagon Papers affair, see Daniel Ellsberg's Secrets. The Plumbers most notorious and ill-fated caper was breaking into the Watergate complex in Washington to put bugs on phones at the Democratic National Committee. On June 17, 1972, the operatives returned to fix bugs that werent working and were caught. Nixon denied a connection to the burglars, but aggressive investigative reporting at the Washington Post and other news organizations exposed the secret White House links and the cover-up. In retrospect, it is clear that Nixon was driven to order widespread domestic espionage by his rage over the Vietnam War p...
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