Introduction
 |
| James Petras |
The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the
National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of
millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide
denunciations. In the United States, despite widespread mass media coverage and
the opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been any mass
protest. Congressional leaders from both the Republican and Democratic
Parties, as well as top judges, approved of the unprecedented domestic spy
program.. Even worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top
Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of each and every
intrusion into all electronic and written communication involving American
citizens. President Obama and his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully
defended the NSA’s the universal spy operations.
The issues raised by this vast secret police
apparatus and its penetration into and control over civil society, infringing
on the citizens freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of
privacy’, as raised by many legal experts.
Most civil libertarians focus on the
violations of individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s
privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the critics are right in
raising them. However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far
enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they avoid basic
political questions.
Why has such a massive police-state apparatus
and universal spying become so central to the ruling regime? Why has the entire
executive, legislative and judicial leadership come out in public for such a
blatant repudiation of all constitutional guarantees? Why do elected leaders
defend universal political espionage against the citizenry? What kind of
politics requires a police state? What kind of long-term, large scale domestic
and foreign policies are illegal and unconstitutional as to require the
building of a vast network of domestic spies and a hundred billion dollar
corporate-state techno-espionage infrastructure in a time of budget ‘austerity’
with the slashing of social programs?
The second set of questions arises from the
use of the espionage data. So far most critics have questioned the existence of
massive state espionage but have avoided the vital issue of what measures are
taken by the spymasters once they target individuals, groups, movements? The
essential question is: What reprisals and sanctions follow from the
‘information’ that is collected, classified and made operational by these
massive domestic spy networks? Now that the ‘secret’ of all-encompassing, state
political spying has entered public discussion, the next step should be to
reveal the secret operations that follow against those targeted by the
spymasters as a ‘risk to national security’.
The
Politics behind the Police State
The fundamental reason for the conversion of
the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive
domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The
vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror
attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the
vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across
the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary
re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building; shredding
public health and social security to bailout Wall Street. These are policies
which greatly enhance profits for bankers and corporations while imposing
regressive taxes on wage and salaried workers
Prolonged and extended wars abroad have been
funded at the expense of citizens’ welfare at home. This policy had led to
declining living standards for many tens of millions of citizens and rising
dissatisfaction. The potential of social resistance as evidenced by the brief “Occupy
Wall Street” movement which was endorsed by over 80% of the population, .The
positive response alarmed the state and led to an escalation of police state
measures. Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both
imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare; labeling them as
‘security threats’ is a means of controlling them through the use of arbitrary
police powers. The expansion of the President’s war powers has been accompanied
by the growth and scope of the state spy apparatus: the more the President
orders overseas drone attacks, the greater the number of his military
interventions, the greater the need for the political elite surrounding the
President to increase its policing of citizens in anticipation of a popular
backlash. In this context, the policy of mass spying is taken as ‘pre-emptive
action’. The greater the police state operations, the greater the fear and
insecurity among dissident citizens and activists.
The assault on the living standards of working
and middle class Americans in order to fund the endless series of wars, and not
the so-called ‘war on terror’, is the reason the state has developed massive
cyber warfare against the US citizenry. The issue is not only a question of a
violation of individual privacy: it is fundamentally an issue of state
infringement of the collective rights of organized citizens to freely engage in
public opposition to regressive socio-economic policies and question the empire.
The proliferation of permanent bureaucratic institutions, with over a million
security ‘data collectors’, is accompanied by tens of thousands of ‘field
operators’, analysts and inquisitors acting arbitrarily to designate dissident
citizens as ‘security risks’ and imposing reprisals according to the political
needs of their ruling political bosses. The police state apparatus has its own
rules of self-protection and self-perpetuation; it has its own linkages and may
occasionally compete with the Pentagon. The police state links up with and
protects the masters of Wall Street and the propagandists of the mass
media – even as it (must) spy on them!
The police state is an instrument of the
Executive Branch acting as a vehicle for its arbitrary prerogative powers. However
on administrative matters, it possesses a degree of ‘autonomy’ to target
dissident behavior. What is clear is the high degree of cohesion, vertical
discipline and mutual defense, up and down the hierarchy. The fact that one
whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, emerged from the hundreds of thousands of
citizen spies is the exception, the lone whistle blower, which proves the rule:
There are fewer defectors to be found among the million-member US spy network
than in all the Mafia families in Europe and North America.
The domestic spy apparatus operates with
impunity because of its network of powerful domestic and overseas allies. The
entire bi-partisan Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its
operations. Related branches of government, like the Internal Revenue Service,
cooperate in providing information and pursuing targeted political groups and
individuals. Israel is a key overseas ally of the National Security Agency, as
has been documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz, June 8, 2013). Two Israeli
high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to the Israeli secret police
(MOSSAD), have provided the spy software for the NSA and this, of course, has
opened a window for Israeli spying in the US against Americans opposed to the
Zionist state. The writer and critic, Steve Lendman points out that Israeli
spymasters via their software “front companies” have long had the ability to
‘steal proprietary commercial and industrial data” with impunity . And because
of the power and influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish
organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens of Israeli
espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the US spy
apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into its operation and political
goals - at a very high price in terms of the security of US citizens. In recent
years two incidents stand out: Israeli security ‘experts’ were contracted to
advise the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security in their investigation
and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of government critics and environmental activists
(compared to ‘al Queda terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which
forced the resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003, New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy
appointed his lover, an Israeli government operative and former IDF officer, to
head that state’s ‘Homeland Security Department and later resigned, denouncing
the Israeli, Golan Cipel, for blackmail in late 2004. These examples are a
small sample illustrating the depth and scope of Israeli police state tactics
intersecting in US domestic repression.
The
Political and Economic Consequences of the Spy State
The denunciations of the mass spy operations
are a positive step, as far as they go. But equally important is the question
of what follows from the act of spying? We now know that hundreds of millions
of Americans are being spied on by the state. We know that mass spying is
official policy of the Executive and is approved by Congressional leaders. But
we have only fragmented information on the repressive measures resulting from
the investigations of “suspect individuals”. We can assume that there is a
division of labor among data collectors, data analysts and field operatives
following up “risky individuals and groups”, based on the internal criteria
known only to the secret police. The key spy operatives are those who devise
and apply the criteria for designating someone as a “security risk”. Individuals
and groups who express critical views of domestic and foreign policy are “a
risk”; those who act to protest are a “higher risk”; those who travel to
conflict regions are presumed to be in the “highest risk” category, even if
they have violated no law. The question of the lawfulness of a citizen’s views
and actions does not enter into the spymasters’ equation; nor do any questions
regarding the lawfulness of the acts committed by the spies against citizens. The
criteria defining a security risk supersede any constitutional considerations
and safeguards.
We know from a large number of published cases
that lawful critics, illegally spied upon , have subsequently been arrested, tried
and jailed – their lives and those of their friends and family members
shattered. We know that hundreds of homes, workplaces and offices of suspects
have been raided in ‘fishing expeditions’. We know that family members,
associates, neighbors, clients, and employers of “suspects” have been
interrogated, pressured and intimidated. Above all, we know that tens of
millions of law abiding citizens, critical of domestic economic and overseas
war policies, have been censored by the very real fear of the massive
operations carried out by the police state. In this atmosphere of intimidation,
any critical conversation or word spoken in any context or relayed via the
media can be interpreted by nameless, faceless spies as a “security threat” –
and one’s name can enter into the ever growing secret lists of “potential
terrorists”. The very presence and dimensions of the police state is
intimidating. While there are citizens who would claim that the police state is
necessary to protect them from terrorists – But how many others feel compelled
to embrace their state terrorists just to fend off any suspicion, hoping to
stay off the growing lists? How many critical-minded Americans now fear the
state and will never voice in public what they whisper at home?
The bigger the secret police, the greater its
operations. The more regressive domestic economic policy, the greater the fear
and loathing of the political elite.
Even as President Obama and his Democratic and
Republican partners boast and bluster about their police state and its
effective “security function”, the vast majority of Americans are becoming
aware that fear instilled at home serves the interest of waging imperial wars
abroad; that cowardice in the face of police state threats only encourages
further cuts in their living standards. When
will they learn that exposing spying is only the beginning of a solution? When
will they recognize that ending the police state is essential to dismantling
the costly empire and creating a safe, secure and prosperous America?
