Security vs. Freedom
by Tom Maertens
(Note: the following are the speaker's notes I used for a presentation to a regional forum on the topic of Security vs. Freedom, slightly expanded to included mostly full sentences. TM)
We all hope to be both secure and free. Security includes not only National Security, but security in our person and possessions… the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, for example.
To discuss security, we first need to consider the threat: (slide presentation on terrorism/Al Qaeda, slides 10-20)
Hizbollah is potentially a greater threat than al-Qaeda. It is a religious/political/terrorist group and a criminal enterprise, which gets support from Iran and Syria, but also from its various criminal undertakings (credit card fraud, ID theft, counterfeiting, etc) It has mostly focused its attacks on Israel, but was likely behind the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, Khobar Towers, a synagogue in Argentina, and other attacks.
The response to 9/11 was the Global War on Terror, which I helped plan. At that point, it included the attack on the Taliban, but not the invasion of Iraq. Most of the early success came from international cooperation with friendly states…Malaysia, Jordan, Italy, France, the Philippines all provided information that allowed us to disrupt terrorist plots against American interests abroad.
The U.S. also provided more money for security, combined a bunch of existing agencies into the Department of Homeland Security, and passed legislation: the USA Patriot Act.
USA Patriot Act -- allows secret arrests; allows FBI to obtain bank, credit, library and Internet search records without informing the subject; permits sneak and peek searches; applies FISA wartime powers to terrorism.
But terrorism does not pose the same threat to our survival as the Civil War, World War II or the Cold War. There has been one attack, so far: our continued existence as a nation is not in doubt.
By most accounts, the US spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined. Besides the DoD budget, this includes the Homeland Security Dept budget (Customs, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, law enforcement,) the intelligence community budget, and most of the DOE budget.
U.S. defense expenditure is much higher than known, including off-budget spending for supplementals (Iraq), so at least $765. billion in calendar year 2004—about $330 billion or 75 percent more than the Department of Defense outlays.
One of the principal components of the GWOT was the invasion of Iraq. (Does anyone think there are fewer terrorists in the world because of our invasion of Iraq?)
Other measures include the creation, in 2005, of the National Clandestine Service.
The executive order gives the CIA the power to carry out covert operations, spying, propaganda, and "dirty tricks" within the United States and on the American public.
In June, 2005, President Bush put "a broad swath of the FBI" under his direct control by creating the National Security Service. This is the first time we've had a domestic spy agency, a "secret police" in our 200-year history. It will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of congressional oversight. Among other things, the FBI has set up Joint Terrorism Task Forces in 100 cities, and surveilled groups like Greenpeace and “Food not Bombs.”
The FBI now sends out 30,000 National Security Letters per year, which give the gov’t a backdoor into any personal information they want, without benefit of a warrant. Recipients may not reveal the fact of having received an NSL.
Despite the Posse Comitatus of 1878 prohibiting the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Bush administration has instituted the CounterIntelligence Field Activity (CIFA) -- domestic spying by the military – without benefit of law or without having even informed Congress. It is CIFA, with roughly 1,000 staff members, that has maintained the Talon database on the domestic peace movement. There are reportedly 290 military intelligence analysts working at Northern Command in Colorado Springs working on “terrorist threats to the United States.”
The ACLU believes the Bush administration may have conducted surveillance on as many as 150 protest or social groups, including Greenpeace, Catholic Workers, and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Also under surveillance were a Vegan group in Georgia, a Quaker group in Florida, and environmental protest group in Colorado, and a small group protesting outside Halliburton offices in Houston.
My experience with military intelligence is that they are very unsophisticated. In Panama, where I worked with a military intel brigade, it was essentially a bunch of enlisted men collecting rumors in bars. You know the military mentality: “Men, we haven’t found a single terrorist this month. We know there are terrorists out there. Now get out there and find them.”
That’s the mentality that labels a group of 15-20 anti-war protesters in Broward Florida as “a credible threat.”
The Bush administration instituted illegal wiretaps and intercepts by the NSA even prior to 9/11, without seeking the warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Yet to come out is the real reason Bush refuses to use the FISA court, a body that has issued 19,000 warrants and refused only five. Is Bush wiretapping political opponents? Journalists? The ACLU?
Does Bush – or Dick Cheney -- have an ‘enemies list’ like Richard Nixon did?
The Bush administration has ordered American citizens held without access to the courts, without charging them, by labeling them “enemy combatants.” Yasir Hamdi and Jose Padilla. In essence, they were declared Enemies of the State.
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating
any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of
his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all
totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
Winston Churchill
The Bush administration has instituted a system of secret prisons in Europe for high-value detainees in the war on terror, and has hidden them from the ICRC, contrary to the Geneva Conventions. As a result of press revelations, those prisoners have been moved to North Africa.
This administration is the first in US history to approve torture as state policy. Even when Bush reached an agreement with Senator McCain on torture, his signing statement essentially negated the deal. In case you are wondering, they are using some of the same methods employed by the Gestapo on the French resistance. (Jean Moulin – Lyon)
How far can the Bush administration go? Steven Bradbury of the Justice Dept suggested before a congressional committee that the President might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects INSIDE the U.S.
One of the results of our policies in Guantanamo, Iraq (Abu Ghraib) and Afghanistan, is that every human rights organization in the world now lists the US as a human-rights violator.
Protesters at public events can also be arrested. Christine Nelson showed up at Bush’s Cedar Rapids rally with a Kerry-Edwards button pinned on her T-shirt; Alice McCabe clutched a small, paper sign stating "No More War." For their minor protest, they were handcuffed, led off to jail and stripsearched.
Another matter of concern is Bush’s use of “signing statements” to avoid carrying out the law. He has issued over 800 signing statements, which have no status under the Constitution, but which Bush uses to selectively enforce the law. He has issued instructions to the bureaucracy not to enforce laws he doesn’t agree with, and has asserted on at least 82 occasions that he alone can “supervise, direct and control the operations of the Executive Branch,” a doctrine know as the Unitary Executive. This doctrine is nowhere in the Constitution.
An ABA panel said that Bush’s practices constitute a “ threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law.”
When Congress directs the president to furnish information, Bush reserves the right to withhold it. When Congress tries to define foreign policy, Bush objects, saying the authority is his alone, the panel noted.
Nobody really knows the financial costs of the GWOT. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist, has estimated the cost of the Iraq invasion at $1-2 trillion, counting all costs, such as Veterans’ benefits, interest on the debt, fuel, equipment replacement, and so forth.
That war has now become a civil war – 3,000 civilian deaths per month -- which will redound to Iran’s benefit, and to that of the Kurds….certainly not to ours.
The political costs are also difficult to calculate. For example, a Harris Poll recently conducted for the Financial Times found that the populations of our European allies – Britain, France, Italy, and Spain – view the United States as the greatest threat to global stability. Only 12% of the Britons trusted the US to “act wisely” in foreign affairs.
In other polls, citizens around the world have labeled George Bush as the greatest threat to world peace, greater than Kim Jong-il or Iran, for example.
What I have described is an extreme program that not only circumscribes our rights, but establishes dangerous precedents for future administration.
The administration has used patriotism and fear to sell this extremist program. In fact their patriotism is actually a form of nationalism.
George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism): Patriotism is essentially about ideas and pride. Nationalism is about emotion and blood. The nationalist’s thoughts “always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”
One inevitable result, wrote Orwell, is vast and dangerous miscalculation based on the assumption that nationalism makes not only right but might--and invincibility: “Political and military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts,” said Orwell. “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral color when committed by ‘our’ side.… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
So we have the Neocons, who thought they could outdo ancient Rome in their conquests, and who hijacked our foreign policy to promote the invasion of Iraq, are now advocating attacks on Iran and Syria. Real men go to Teheran. Despite the fact that their campaign to promote peace and democracy is in complete shambles.
As to fear-mongering, the Bush administration’s principal tactic, we will get more of it at election time. Remember the last election – Mueller, Ridge, Ashcroft warned of new terrorist threats every month.
Only one terrorist warning since the ’04 election…for a computer virus.
Are we safer? The administration makes much of the fact that there has been no repeat of 9/11, where 3,000 people died, 1800 of them Americans.
But far more people have died in Iraq, both Iraqis and Americans than in 9/11, and the cost in lost prestige and money is even higher. Where world opinion was once on our side, it is now firmly against us. And this was all self-inflicted, not the result of a terrorist attack.
James Madison once warned: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” In the case of terrorism, we have a war without end against unknown foreign enemies, whose numbers are increasing because of the Bush administration’s policies intended to combat them.
Thomas Paine once said, “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” It has never been more true than right now.
(Note: the following are the speaker's notes I used for a presentation to a regional forum on the topic of Security vs. Freedom, slightly expanded to included mostly full sentences. TM)
We all hope to be both secure and free. Security includes not only National Security, but security in our person and possessions… the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, for example.
To discuss security, we first need to consider the threat: (slide presentation on terrorism/Al Qaeda, slides 10-20)
Hizbollah is potentially a greater threat than al-Qaeda. It is a religious/political/terrorist group and a criminal enterprise, which gets support from Iran and Syria, but also from its various criminal undertakings (credit card fraud, ID theft, counterfeiting, etc) It has mostly focused its attacks on Israel, but was likely behind the Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, Khobar Towers, a synagogue in Argentina, and other attacks.
The response to 9/11 was the Global War on Terror, which I helped plan. At that point, it included the attack on the Taliban, but not the invasion of Iraq. Most of the early success came from international cooperation with friendly states…Malaysia, Jordan, Italy, France, the Philippines all provided information that allowed us to disrupt terrorist plots against American interests abroad.
The U.S. also provided more money for security, combined a bunch of existing agencies into the Department of Homeland Security, and passed legislation: the USA Patriot Act.
USA Patriot Act -- allows secret arrests; allows FBI to obtain bank, credit, library and Internet search records without informing the subject; permits sneak and peek searches; applies FISA wartime powers to terrorism.
But terrorism does not pose the same threat to our survival as the Civil War, World War II or the Cold War. There has been one attack, so far: our continued existence as a nation is not in doubt.
By most accounts, the US spends more on national security than the rest of the world combined. Besides the DoD budget, this includes the Homeland Security Dept budget (Customs, Coast Guard, Border Patrol, law enforcement,) the intelligence community budget, and most of the DOE budget.
U.S. defense expenditure is much higher than known, including off-budget spending for supplementals (Iraq), so at least $765. billion in calendar year 2004—about $330 billion or 75 percent more than the Department of Defense outlays.
One of the principal components of the GWOT was the invasion of Iraq. (Does anyone think there are fewer terrorists in the world because of our invasion of Iraq?)
Other measures include the creation, in 2005, of the National Clandestine Service.
The executive order gives the CIA the power to carry out covert operations, spying, propaganda, and "dirty tricks" within the United States and on the American public.
In June, 2005, President Bush put "a broad swath of the FBI" under his direct control by creating the National Security Service. This is the first time we've had a domestic spy agency, a "secret police" in our 200-year history. It will be run exclusively by the president and beyond the range of congressional oversight. Among other things, the FBI has set up Joint Terrorism Task Forces in 100 cities, and surveilled groups like Greenpeace and “Food not Bombs.”
The FBI now sends out 30,000 National Security Letters per year, which give the gov’t a backdoor into any personal information they want, without benefit of a warrant. Recipients may not reveal the fact of having received an NSL.
Despite the Posse Comitatus of 1878 prohibiting the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, the Bush administration has instituted the CounterIntelligence Field Activity (CIFA) -- domestic spying by the military – without benefit of law or without having even informed Congress. It is CIFA, with roughly 1,000 staff members, that has maintained the Talon database on the domestic peace movement. There are reportedly 290 military intelligence analysts working at Northern Command in Colorado Springs working on “terrorist threats to the United States.”
The ACLU believes the Bush administration may have conducted surveillance on as many as 150 protest or social groups, including Greenpeace, Catholic Workers, and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). Also under surveillance were a Vegan group in Georgia, a Quaker group in Florida, and environmental protest group in Colorado, and a small group protesting outside Halliburton offices in Houston.
My experience with military intelligence is that they are very unsophisticated. In Panama, where I worked with a military intel brigade, it was essentially a bunch of enlisted men collecting rumors in bars. You know the military mentality: “Men, we haven’t found a single terrorist this month. We know there are terrorists out there. Now get out there and find them.”
That’s the mentality that labels a group of 15-20 anti-war protesters in Broward Florida as “a credible threat.”
The Bush administration instituted illegal wiretaps and intercepts by the NSA even prior to 9/11, without seeking the warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Yet to come out is the real reason Bush refuses to use the FISA court, a body that has issued 19,000 warrants and refused only five. Is Bush wiretapping political opponents? Journalists? The ACLU?
Does Bush – or Dick Cheney -- have an ‘enemies list’ like Richard Nixon did?
The Bush administration has ordered American citizens held without access to the courts, without charging them, by labeling them “enemy combatants.” Yasir Hamdi and Jose Padilla. In essence, they were declared Enemies of the State.
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating
any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of
his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all
totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
Winston Churchill
The Bush administration has instituted a system of secret prisons in Europe for high-value detainees in the war on terror, and has hidden them from the ICRC, contrary to the Geneva Conventions. As a result of press revelations, those prisoners have been moved to North Africa.
This administration is the first in US history to approve torture as state policy. Even when Bush reached an agreement with Senator McCain on torture, his signing statement essentially negated the deal. In case you are wondering, they are using some of the same methods employed by the Gestapo on the French resistance. (Jean Moulin – Lyon)
How far can the Bush administration go? Steven Bradbury of the Justice Dept suggested before a congressional committee that the President might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects INSIDE the U.S.
One of the results of our policies in Guantanamo, Iraq (Abu Ghraib) and Afghanistan, is that every human rights organization in the world now lists the US as a human-rights violator.
Protesters at public events can also be arrested. Christine Nelson showed up at Bush’s Cedar Rapids rally with a Kerry-Edwards button pinned on her T-shirt; Alice McCabe clutched a small, paper sign stating "No More War." For their minor protest, they were handcuffed, led off to jail and stripsearched.
Another matter of concern is Bush’s use of “signing statements” to avoid carrying out the law. He has issued over 800 signing statements, which have no status under the Constitution, but which Bush uses to selectively enforce the law. He has issued instructions to the bureaucracy not to enforce laws he doesn’t agree with, and has asserted on at least 82 occasions that he alone can “supervise, direct and control the operations of the Executive Branch,” a doctrine know as the Unitary Executive. This doctrine is nowhere in the Constitution.
An ABA panel said that Bush’s practices constitute a “ threat to the Constitution and to the rule of law.”
When Congress directs the president to furnish information, Bush reserves the right to withhold it. When Congress tries to define foreign policy, Bush objects, saying the authority is his alone, the panel noted.
Nobody really knows the financial costs of the GWOT. Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economist, has estimated the cost of the Iraq invasion at $1-2 trillion, counting all costs, such as Veterans’ benefits, interest on the debt, fuel, equipment replacement, and so forth.
That war has now become a civil war – 3,000 civilian deaths per month -- which will redound to Iran’s benefit, and to that of the Kurds….certainly not to ours.
The political costs are also difficult to calculate. For example, a Harris Poll recently conducted for the Financial Times found that the populations of our European allies – Britain, France, Italy, and Spain – view the United States as the greatest threat to global stability. Only 12% of the Britons trusted the US to “act wisely” in foreign affairs.
In other polls, citizens around the world have labeled George Bush as the greatest threat to world peace, greater than Kim Jong-il or Iran, for example.
What I have described is an extreme program that not only circumscribes our rights, but establishes dangerous precedents for future administration.
The administration has used patriotism and fear to sell this extremist program. In fact their patriotism is actually a form of nationalism.
George Orwell (Notes on Nationalism): Patriotism is essentially about ideas and pride. Nationalism is about emotion and blood. The nationalist’s thoughts “always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. … Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”
One inevitable result, wrote Orwell, is vast and dangerous miscalculation based on the assumption that nationalism makes not only right but might--and invincibility: “Political and military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”
“All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts,” said Orwell. “Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage -- torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians -- which does not change its moral color when committed by ‘our’ side.… The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
So we have the Neocons, who thought they could outdo ancient Rome in their conquests, and who hijacked our foreign policy to promote the invasion of Iraq, are now advocating attacks on Iran and Syria. Real men go to Teheran. Despite the fact that their campaign to promote peace and democracy is in complete shambles.
As to fear-mongering, the Bush administration’s principal tactic, we will get more of it at election time. Remember the last election – Mueller, Ridge, Ashcroft warned of new terrorist threats every month.
Only one terrorist warning since the ’04 election…for a computer virus.
Are we safer? The administration makes much of the fact that there has been no repeat of 9/11, where 3,000 people died, 1800 of them Americans.
But far more people have died in Iraq, both Iraqis and Americans than in 9/11, and the cost in lost prestige and money is even higher. Where world opinion was once on our side, it is now firmly against us. And this was all self-inflicted, not the result of a terrorist attack.
James Madison once warned: “If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.” In the case of terrorism, we have a war without end against unknown foreign enemies, whose numbers are increasing because of the Bush administration’s policies intended to combat them.
Thomas Paine once said, “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” It has never been more true than right now.
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