The recent debacle of Alberto Gonzales testifying before Congress just illustrates the lengths to which the Bush Administration will go to protect it’s newly gained fascist powers. Daniel Schorr had it right in his NPR Commentary yesterday (7-30-07), Selective 'Leaks' from the Bush Administration, when he said:
In an investigation of a major leak the first question asked is, "who benefited?"
Who benefitted, indeed...
Daniel Schorr continues (transcribed by Illyia from the original):
In the case of a security breach that enabled a New York Times yesterday to report in some detail on the so-called Data Mining Program the leading beneficiary is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. In retrospect, Gonzales’ evasions and dissimulations before the Senate Judiciary Committee can be explained, at least in part, as an effort to keep attention focused on the Publically Known, NSA eavesdropping program while protecting the secret Data Mining Program. In a typical evasion, Gonzales testified, in February of last year, that "there has not been any serious disagreement about the Program That The President Has Confirmed." – That is, the eavesdropping program: Monitoring telephone traffic between foreign countries, in a search for terrorists.
Not publicly confirmed, is a controversial high-tech program, scooping up millions of phone calls and e-mail messages of Americans as well as foreigners, to be mined, as desired. Intelligence agencies have spent millions since 9-11 on computer programs that could search financial and other data. One such program, called Total Information Awareness, started in the year 2002, and was managed in the Pentagon by retired Admiral John Poindexter, who had been President Reagan’s National Security Advisor during the Iran-Contra Affair.
It now appears that the struggle in the Justice Department, that lead to several threatened resignations, was not about surveillance which the administration agreed to have monitored by secret intelligence courts, but about the Data Mining Program, whose existence the Administration to this day refuses to confirm.
The disclosure of the Program casts a new light on the now famous hospital room encounter, in which the then Attorney General John Ashcroft refused to sign a clearance for a program which it now appears was not the eavesdropping program, but the Data Mining Program.
Let’s find out more about this secret Data Mining Program, shall we?
In his article, Beware of Total Information Awareness, The CATO Institute’s Gene Healy, then a senior editor, had this to say on January 20th of 2003:
John Poindexter, head of the Pentagon's Office of Information Awareness, is developing a vast surveillance database to track terror suspects. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) system will, according to Poindexter, "break down the stovepipes" that separate commercial and government databases, allowing OIA access to citizens' credit card purchases, travel itineraries, telephone calling records, email, medical histories and financial information. It would give government the power to generate a comprehensive data profile on any U.S. citizen.
Adm. Poindexter assures us that TIA will be designed to respect constitutional guarantees of privacy and shield law-abiding citizens from the Pentagon's all-seeing eye. But if the history of military surveillance of civilians is any indication, accepting that assurance amounts to the triumph of hope over experience.
Opponents of new government surveillance measures such as TIA or Operation TIPS, the Justice Department's aborted plan to utilize citizen informants, often invoke the specter of the East German secret police and communist Cuba's block watch system. But we don't have to look to totalitarian states for cautionary tales. There's a long and troubling history of military surveillance in this country. That history suggests that we should loathe allowing the Pentagon access to our personal information.
Snip
During World War I, concerns about German saboteurs led to unrestrained domestic spying by U.S. Army intelligence operatives. Army spies were given free reign to gather information on potential subversives, and were often empowered to make arrests as special police officers. Occasionally, they carried false identification as employees of public utilities to allow them, as the chief intelligence officer for the Western Department put it, "to enter offices or residences of suspects gracefully, and thereby obtain data." In her book "Army Surveillance in America," historian Joan M. Jensen notes, "What began as a system to protect the government from enemy agents became a vast surveillance system to watch civilians who violated no law but who objected to wartime policies or to the war itself."
Snip
The Army's domestic surveillance activities were substantially curtailed after the end of World War I. But throughout the 20th Century, in periods of domestic unrest and foreign conflict, army surveillance ratcheted up again, most notably in the 1960s. During that tumultuous decade, President Johnson repeatedly called on federal troops to quell riots and restore order. To better perform that task, Army intelligence operatives began compiling thousands of dossiers on citizens, many of whom had committed no offense beyond protesting government policy. Reviewing the files, the Senate Judiciary Committee noted that "comments about the financial affairs, sex lives and psychiatric histories of persons unaffiliated with the armed forces appear throughout the various records systems." Justice William O. Douglas called army surveillance "a cancer in our body politic."
So this is the big secret behind Gonzales mincing, parsing and side-stepping when repeatedly questioned over the reasons for his midnight ride to Ashcroft’s bedside. This is what is most important for Gonzales to protect, even at the risk of his being charged with perjury – or personally worse – making a complete ass of himself!
Knowledge is power:
Over We the People. Over any opposition.
Through the electronic systems recording (financial, medical, legal) we depend on for our everyday transactions, can our government search for behaviors, place us on lists and target us for action. Through the accumulation of data, our simple lives become a treasure-trove of intelligence, useful for manipulation (through marketing), blackmail (we don’t hire people like you) or outright imprisonment (you didn’t pay your taxes – even if you did, there’s no record!).
Oh, knowledge is power.
Maybe the biggest, most dangerous, power in the world.
Yes. It is.
And, like every other power-grab made by the Bush Administration, there is no limit to lengths they will go to obtain and maintain it: Lies, distortions, sooth-saying, blaming, war - gulags ????
Well. Yeah. From Truthout,
Bush Submits New Terror Detainee Bill
According to the draft, the military would be allowed to detain all "enemy combatants" until hostilities cease. The bill defines enemy combatants as anyone "engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners who has committed an act that violates the law of war and this statute."
Legal experts said Friday that such language is dangerously broad and could authorize the military to detain indefinitely U.S. citizens who had only tenuous ties to terror networks like al Qaeda.
"That's the big question ... the definition of who can be detained," said Martin Lederman, a law professor at Georgetown University who posted a copy of the bill to a Web blog.
So, are the prisons ready yet? Did we stop the Bush Administration dead in their tracks? Like we did with Total Information Awareness?
What do you think?