Rise of the Police State Although the amount of money the U.S. government spends on intelligence activities is a secret, it is clear that the monitoring of American citizens is taken seriously by their government. This is especially clear after revelations in 2013 about the scope of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA). Equally clear is that the U.S. justice system aggressively polices and prosecutes its citizens: the U.S. has one of the very highest per capita incarceration rates in the world. A common – and accurate – critique of the modern U.S. government is that it has become unbalanced by the massive expansion of power and secrecy in the executive branch. A related problem is that the now-vast network of federal agencies (whose officials of course are unelected) operate with minimal accountability. In many cases they effectively create their own laws. This is true to some extent in all agencies since they issue and enforce regulations, but the potential to be corrupted by power is infinitely greater in law enforcement and intelligence agencies such as the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA – which operate mostly in secrecy. The Frequency of Crimes Perpetrated by Government Agencies You don’t have to visit an obscure blog these days to find complaints that America is becoming something of a police state. But America’s government doesn’t just engage in secret invasive surveillance and aggressive policing – it also engages in crimes. That’s not my opinion – that’s what the federal government itself says. For example, the CIA constantly commits crimes according to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, IC 21 (April 9, 1996) – as explained in chapter 6 of Into the Buzzsaw. The Congressional report cited therein by John Kelly (whose book Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the FBI Crime Lab was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) states that “several hundred times every day” officers of the Clandestine Service (CS) of the CIA “engage in highly illegal activities.” In an August 2013 article, Reuters revealed that – as a matter of official policy – a secretive unit within the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) instructs law enforcement officers in various agencies to lie about the origins of their investigations. Some cops don’t need to be told to lie. The subject of crimes by police officers is generally under-reported in the mainstream corporate news media – especially on national TV news, but to evaluate the plausibility of widespread acquiescence in gang stalking by local police officers it is helpful to consider criminality by police generally. This review of crimes by Chicago police officers published by the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Political Science is illuminating. Browse through the list of convictions of police officers on pages 24 to 47 of this report. The list is in alphabetical order by the officers’ names, and covers the past half-century. Keep in mind: these were just the crimes that were discovered and prosecuted. The crimes range from bribery and extortion to torture and murder. Gang stalking would be like jay-walking for the cops on this list. Law enforcement agencies in America make extensive use of criminal informants in their investigations, and in many cases authorize criminals to commit crimes when an agency believes it furthers its goals, as reported for example in this August 2013 article in USA Today. “The FBI gave its informants permission to break the law at least 5,658 times in a single year, according to newly-disclosed documents that show just how often the nation’s top law enforcement agency enlists criminals to help it battle crime.” The FBI report from 2011 which USA Today obtained via the Freedom of Information Act does not reveal the nature of the crimes: “The report does not spell out what types of crimes its agents authorized, or how serious they were. It also did not include any information about crimes the bureau’s sources were known to have committed without the government’s permission.” FBI Whistle-Blowers Mike German Mike German was a decorated FBI agent who specialized in counter-terrorism. He left the agency after 16 years, when he became a whistle-blower. He had discovered that fellow officers were violating wiretapping regulations. When he reported that to his supervisors, his accusations were ignored, and his career was effectively frozen. Mr. German is now associated with the ACLU, as a senior policy counsel. Apparently, his experience was not unique in an agency which values secrecy more than ethics. Mike German is one of the guests on this Democracy Now! interview together with an individual who was targeted by the FBI for being a political dissident. The individual was subjected to intense investigation for years – despite having no criminal record, apart from trespassing incidents related to political protests. At 2:06 in the video of this interview journalist Amy Goodman asks Mike German to explain the FBI’s legal authority to perform the “assessments” which, as I mentioned in the introduction above, are essentially investigations that can now be launched against an individual without any evidence that the individual has committed a crime. Ted Gunderson As previously mentioned, USA Today found that the FBI frequently authorizes criminals to commit crimes when its officials believe it furthers their objectives. According to the late Ted Gunderson, a former high-level FBI official who became a whistle-blower (see his affidavit) the crimes which are partly delegated to criminals include organized stalking. Gunderson claimed that the FBI’s infamous Cointelpro operations (which lasted from 1956 to 1971) re-emerged in a more sophisticated form a decade or so later. Because of its enormous prison population – largely associated with the “drug war” – America has a vast number of ex-convicts who can be easily coerced or paid to participate in organized stalking. My personal observations suggest that this is exactly what is being done in many of the instances of street-level harassment of targeted individuals. How Far Will U.S. Officials Go in their Criminality? An instructive example of the extremes to which federal agencies sometimes go is the CIA’s secret MK Ultra program. I describe MK Ultra in some detail in section 5 below, so I will just note here that it involved performing experiments (including psychological and physical torture) on American citizens. No one was punished for their participation in that program – which lasted two decades, and the head of the CIA destroyed most of the records about it when it was discovered. In September 1970 the leftists in Chile won a plurality of that country’s democratic election, as a result of which, their representative would have soon been confirmed as the next president. Right-wing political leaders in Chile, some major U.S. corporations which did business in the country (including Pepsi Cola and Chase Manhattan Bank), and the CIA were not pleased with this development and communicated that to then-president Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and they plotted to arrange for a military coup instead. An obstacle they faced was that the chief of the Chilean General Staff, General René Schnieder did not believe in interfering with the democratic process. So Nixon and Kissinger had him murdered. The incident – and other very serious transgressions – did not prevent Kissinger from generally being treated with great respect and adulation by the American news media over the rest of his career. That kind of sycophancy and complacency by mainstream journalists obviously makes it difficult to expose and punish the bad behavior done in secret by the U.S. government. U.S. officials are also quite willing to engage in very serious crimes against their own citizens when they believe it could further their agendas. A good example of this was “Operation Northwoods.” A proposal was drafted in 1962 by the highest-level officials in the U.S. military establishment to stage “false flag” incidents – covert operations designed to deceive the public into thinking that acts of terrorism against Americans were being perpetrated by another country – in that case, Cuba. The following is excerpted from a Wikipedia entry on the subject: Operation Northwoods was a series of false flag proposals that originated within the United States government in 1962, but were rejected by the Kennedy administration.[2] The proposals called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit perceived acts of terrorism in U.S. cities and elsewhere. These acts of terrorism were to be blamed on Cubain order to create public support for a war against that nation, which had recently become communist under Fidel Castro.[3] One part of Operation Northwoods was to “develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington”. Operation Northwoods proposals included hijackings and bombings followed by the introduction of phony evidence that would implicate the Cuban government. It stated: “The desired result from the execution of this plan would be to place the United States in the apparent position of suffering defensible grievances from a rash and irresponsible government of Cuba and to develop an international image of a Cuban threat to peace in the Western Hemisphere.” Several other proposals were included within Operation Northwoods, including real or simulated actions against various U.S. military and civilian targets. The plan was drafted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed by Chairman Lyman Lemnitzer and sent to the Secretary of Defense. Although part of the U.S. government’s Cuban Project anti-communist initiative, Operation Northwoods was never officially accepted; it was authorized by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but then rejected by President John F. Kennedy. 2 – Ruppe, David (May 1, 2001). ”U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba”. ABC News. Retrieved January 21, 2012. 3 – Zaitchik, Alexander (3 March 2011) Meet Alex Jones, Rolling Stone Lying About Killing A thorough review of disturbing crimes and conspiracies by the U.S. government is beyond the scope of this website. My goal here is simply to cite a few examples to make the general case that acts and programs involving serious deception and criminality are not abberations. Here is a final example from a few years ago. When a U.S. cruise missle struck a village in Yemen in 2009 killing 41 people – including 14 women and 21 children – the U.S. government and the Yemeni government conspired to lie about the incident, saying that the Yemeni government had launched the attack rather than the U.S., and that the victims were members of an al-Qaeda training camp. The truth about who launched the attack and the identity of the victims was later revealed by two sources: cables released by Wikileaks and evidence gathered and reported by a young Yemini journalist named Abdulelah Haider Shaye. After exposing what really happened in the missle strike, Shaye was arrested on apparently trumped-up charges and given a sham trial that was criticized by major human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and sentenced to five years in prison. In 2011 the president of Yemen announced that he was going to pardon Shaye, but apparently decided against it “because of a phone call from Obama.” To review: In an incident which barely registered on the radar of the news media and the American public, the U.S. government killed a bunch of women and children. Then they lied about it to cover it up. Then, when they got caught lying about it, they arranged to have the journalist who exposed all the killing and lying kept in prison for reporting it. If you think that a government which routinely does that kind of stuff (without any negative career consequences or political consequences or legal consequences for those involved) – and which was previously caught waging an illegal counterintelligence program against its own citizens – could not possibly be acquiescing in an illegal program of organized surveillance and harassment of targeted citizens, then you’re not skeptical – you’re just naïve. ________________________________________________________ 3. Current Oversight of Law Enforcement and Intelligence Agencies
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 23:01:31 +0000
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