| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"Black Elk" |
| Date: |
02 Jan 2006 08:39:48 AM |
| Object: |
Frank Church was an American hero. |
For all the caterwauling and deceptive propaganda pushed by neo-fascists it
is more evident now than ever that Senator Church was correct in securing
oversight over intelligence agencies who when unfettered run amuck.
---
The Bush Family Coup
By James Ridgeway
The Village Voice
Friday 30 December 2005
Son revisits the sins of the father on America.
Washington - The 9-11 attacks provided the rationale for what amounts to
a Bush family coup against the Constitution.
From the outset, President George Bush used 9-11 to reorganize and
increase the federal government's reach far beyond any existing law to delve
into the lives of innocent, ordinary people. The new powers allowed the
government to arrest them at will and to subject them to endless
incarceration without judicial review. Some people were sent abroad to be
tortured for crimes they had nothing to do with. Who knows how many people
have been tortured in American jails? When government employees within the
intelligence community sought to protest, the government fired them and made
sure they could never get another job in their areas of expertise. This
extraordinary program of spying on Americans, much of which was carried out
in fishing expeditions under the Patriot Act, has the makings of a
consistent and long-range policy to wreck constitutional government.
It is little wonder both left and right have come together to fight Bush
and may yet jettison the Patriot Act. Revelations of the domestic spy
operation, with its secret wiretaps, ought to supply sufficient evidence to
impeach Bush and Vice President ***** Cheney and launch criminal prosecutions
of the top federal officials involved in carrying out the program. After
all, these people are directly engaged in overthrowing constitutional
government. How did this all come about?
Get the Commies
In opening a conference on counterintelligence in March 2005, former
president George H.W. Bush, who headed the CIA from 1975 to 1977, said, "It
burns me up to see the agency under fire." Recent criticism, Bush said,
reminded him of the 1970s, when Congress "unleashed a bunch of untutored
little jerks out there" to investigate the CIA's involvement in domestic
spying, assassinations, and other illegal activities, and subsequently
passed laws to prevent abuses.
Bush was referring to the activities of the U.S. Senate's Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence
Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee after its chair, Idaho
Democratic senator Frank Church. Among other things, the committee's 1976
report detailed the workings of the infamous COINTELPRO, an FBI domestic
spying program on Civil Rights leaders, anti-war groups, and anyone else who
rubbed J. Edgar Hoover the wrong way. The report also detailed illegal
domestic activities by the CIA and military intelligence. A simultaneous-and
even more contentious-investigation was carried out in the House by the
Select Committee on Intelligence, which also came to bear the name of it
chair, New York Democratic congressman Otis Pike. The Pike Report focused on
the CIA covert actions, as well as on the CIA's overall effectiveness and
its budget.
Within days of the 9-11 attacks, officials of Bush the younger's
administration and former intelligence chiefs were on the talk shows
denouncing the "chilling effect" of the congressional investigations of the
1970s, and of subsequent halfhearted efforts to regulate the work of the
intelligence agencies. Paul Bremer, the future head of the Iraq occupation,
who had chaired the National Commission on Terrorism from 1998 to 2000, said
on CNN that the Church Committee did "a lot of damage to our intelligence
services. . . . And the more recent problem was that the previous
administration put into effect guidelines which restricted the ability of
CIA agents to go after . . . terrorist spies."
Congress lost no time in repealing these rather toothless earlier
guidelines, along with a host of other restrictions, especially those
safeguarding the privacy of electronic communications. The Senate passed the
Combating Terrorism Act of 2001 on September 13, one of its first actions in
response to the attacks.
Between 1960 and 1974, the FBI conducted half a million investigations
of so-called subversives, without a single conviction, and maintained files
on well over a million Americans. The FBI tapped phones, opened mail,
planted bugs, and burglarized homes and offices. At least 26,000 individuals
were at one point catalogued on an FBI list of persons to be rounded up in
the event of a "national emergency." Hoover was particularly obsessed with
Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which he thought was
influenced by communists. The FBI proceeded to undermine the civil rights
movement, planting agents among the Freedom Riders (and also the Ku Klux
Klan). Hoover put spies into the ranks of labor activists and of Democratic
Party insurgents during the 1964 presidential campaign.
Meanwhile, the CIA began spying domestically. The Agency planted
informants of its own within the United States, especially on college
campuses. Between 1953 and 1973, they opened and photographed nearly a
quarter of a million first-class letters, producing an index of nearly 1.5
million names. Under something called Operation CHAOS, separate files were
created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups. In
1964, the CIA even created a secret arm called the Domestic Operations
Division, the very name of which flew in the face of its legal charter. Back
then, there were no "communications problems" between the two agencies.
Raise the Wall
In documenting all this, the Church Committee concluded the intelligence
community had engaged in actions "which had no conceivable rational
relationship to either national security or violent activity." The report of
the House's Pike Committee documented a history of CIA covert actions, as
well as notable intelligence failures. As a result the CIA got out of
domestic spying and the FBI supposedly pulled back from its orgy of homeland
snooping. Some rather modest oversight was applied, the most important of
which led to the creation of the "the wall." This refers to application of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA was enacted in 1978,
in the wake of the congressional investigations, as a compromise that would
allow the FBI and other domestic law enforcement to carry out
counterintelligence operations while putting some sort of restraints on
COINTELPRO-type abuses. Under FISA, the FBI could continue to do things like
conduct searches and tap phones without traditional search warrants and
without probable cause, as long as agents were targeting terrorists, spies,
or other purported enemies of the United States, and as long as they got
permission from a secret FISA court.
There was concern from the start that FISA would be used to circumvent
the Fourth Amendment in routine criminal cases. So FISA dictated that these
warrantless searches and surveillance could be conducted only for
counterintelligence purposes, and not for regular criminal investigations.
However, if a FISA search happened to turn up evidence of a crime, this
information could be handed over to law enforcement. According to a joint
inquiry conducted in 2002 by the Senate and House Select Committees on
Intelligence, "the Intelligence Community agencies, perhaps overly
'risk-averse' in dealing with FISA-related matters, restricted the use of
information far beyond what was required. The majority of FBI personnel
interviewed . . . incorrectly believed that the FBI could not share
FISA-derived information with criminal investigators at all or that an
impossibly high standard had to be met before the information could be
shared. Most did not know [it] could be shared with criminal investigators
if it was simply relevant to the criminal investigation."
And anyway, the FBI never stopped its domestic spying. During the '80s
and '90s the FBI spied on and/or infiltrated peace and solidarity groups
engaged in protesting U.S. involvement in the wars of Central America, put
agents into Earth First, and went after the far right, again trying to plant
agents and turn participants into informants. The shooting at Ruby Ridge and
the raid in Waco galvanized not just the right but the heartland against the
Bureau. At Ruby Ridge, it was an FBI sniper killing a mother with a baby in
her arms. At Waco it was a monstrous assault on a religious enclave. And the
Bureau's handling of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995-with botched lab work
and lost documents-to this day fuels the controversy over the government's
role in that catastrophe. Recent evidence suggests a federal agent may have
penetrated the gang that conducted the bombing. The informant told her
superior, who sat on the information until long after the bombing.
Install Big Brother
The failures of the FBI and CIA in 9-11 were not because of any wall.
These agencies failed because they weren't doing their jobs right. The
congressional investigation found the CIA couldn't penetrate al Qaeda-an
especially odd claim since we had helped to create and finance al Qaeda as
an instrument to win the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the
1980s. John Walker Lindh and other Americans walked right into al Qaeda and
were greeted by its high officials. How come the CIA couldn't do the same?
No wall kept the CIA from getting Osama bin Laden. They just couldn't find
him. As for how the hijackers got into the U.S., it's hardly a mystery. An
FBI informant among the Muslim community in San Diego socialized with two
hijackers and rented a room to one of them. When Congress tried to figure
out how this happened, the Bureau covered it up, refusing to allow the
informant to testify. Again, there was no wall here-just plain incompetence
made worse by a deliberate cover-up. The FBI reportedly was informed in
April 2001 by a longtime reliable asset of an impending attack using
airliners as missiles. It did nothing. An operation known as Able Danger
reportedly turned up information on and tracked hijacker Mohammad Atta as
far back as 1998, but the Pentagon wouldn't tell the FBI what it knew. Even
now, the Bush administration is fighting to prevent the Able Danger
officials from testifying before Congress about what they knew and when they
knew it. When it comes to intelligence, the only thing worse than the FBI's
record is the CIA's.
Given all that's happened, the only explanation for the Bush domestic
spying is that it's political. There are no crimes involved here. But there
is an over weaning desire by this so-called conservative government to
establish and institutionalize a Big Brother regime that tolerates no
dissent and wrecks constitutional government.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_123105A.shtml
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0601,mondo1,71442,6.html
--
Doomed to defeat by the superior Allied forces, it was thought that the
forces of fascism had been routed and that the world was safe for democracy.
The irony is that the intelligence apparatus of the U.S. government saved
many of the most hardened Nazi war criminals from a certain execution in
order to recruit them as scientists, spies and guerrilla warriors in the
anticipated war with the Soviet Union. And this had dire effects on our
country's democracy.
Many Americans may not be aware of this wide spread recruitment of SS and
Gestapo alumni into our intelligence agencies but it has had a profound
effect on the shaping of our domestic and foreign policy, often with ruinous
consequences. The legacy of this incorporation of Nazis into the CIA and
U.S. military has been a half a century of support for fascist regimes,
juntas, death squads, torture and the overthrow of democratically elected
governments around the world.
http://archive.democrats.com/view2.cfm?id=9099
--
The fair use of a copyrighted work:
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is
distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in
receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml.
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