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The National Security State
| Thought of the day:
For more than a decade, from the late 1950s until 1968,
agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation monitored Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr., sent him threatening letters and worked to undermine his reputation.
"Continuing to follow closely King's activities," noted an
FBI memo at the time, "…so that in the end he might be discredited
and thus be removed from his position of great stature in the Negro
community." Civil-rights leaders weren't the only targets in those
days. The FBI and CIA kept files on hundreds of thousands of law-abiding
Americans (and an ex-Beatle, too) involved in anti-war demonstrations.
When theses abuses were exposed in the Seventies, Congress and the Justice
Department imposed reforms that limited the CIA's independence and restricted
the FBI and police from monitoring groups only for their politics. That
was then. Now, after September 11th it turns out that our enemies were
living among us, using our laws and freedoms to plan and execute terrorist
acts against the U.S. Within a month, Attorney General John Ashcroft
pushed a bill through Congress giving the CIA an important new role
in domestic spying, making it easier to conduct wiretaps - including
reading email - and encouraging the FBI and local police to snoop on
citizens. In "Spying on ourselves," Robert Dreyfuss describes
this new domestic-surveillance bureaucracy and questions its costs to
our civil liberties. "Over and over again these agencies have asked
to more powers," says Dreyfuss. "It's their nature, whether
FBI, CIA or the military, to seek more power, more money and weaker
restrictions over what they do." It's important to remember that
you can still be a patriot and have a healthy distrust of those who
would protect us. Author: Robert Love Cited from Rolling Stone Magazine, March 28th 2002 |
