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| An iconic, oft-published image I increasingly regard as a lament for the United States. The woman, a student at Western Washington State College, was a participant in an anti-war demonstration. Nikon F, 105 f/2.5 Nikkor, Tri-X at 800 in D-76, exposure not recorded. Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 1971. (Click on picture to view it full size.) |
*
RACE HATRED SUSTAINED by unlimited
police power was one of the defining characteristics of Nazi Germany,
but is it now also a core principle in the new, post-Constitutional
paradigm of U.S. governance?
That's the underlying implication of
Reuters' bold revelation an elite
Drug Enforcement Administration unit routinely
receives
National
Security Agency intercepts and reports
from
other intelligence
agencies
it
then
relays
to
state
and local police
departments throughout
the nation. The
DEA unit, says Reuters, is called the Special Operations Division or
SOD and is partnered
with the Department of Homeland Security.
Researched
and written by
investigative
reporters John
Shiffman and Kristina Cooke, the Reuters exposé
says the cops
who receive
the information are under strict orders to keep its source secret –
“not only
from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.”
It adds that “federal agents are
trained to 'recreate' the investigative trail to effectively cover up
where the information originated, a practice that some experts say
violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If
defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to
ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information
that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.”
A
second Reuters report further details how
the government is using spy tactics to nullify
the Constitutional
rights of
suspects and defendants in a
broader spectrum of ordinary
criminal cases.
Because
the
prosecutions disclosed in the initial
Reuters
report are all apparently drug-related, they
are
of especially
grave
concern to minority advocates, who cite compelling
statistical evidence
the
so-called “war on drugs” is in fact a war against
African-Americans,
Hispanics, First Nations peoples and indeed all other non-whites in
the United States.
The
racial element in this story – which
the carefully self-censured U.S. corporate media monopoly has yet to
acknowledge – arises from the government's
hugely disproportionate
arrest and imprisonment of non-whites.
Whether in percentages or in raw numbers, the U.S. imprisons more of
its people than any other nation. But the selectivity of its penal
harshness is disclosed by the fact the vast majority of convicts are
from nonwhite minorities. Though only 27.6 percent of the USian
population is non-white (2010 census data), 67.6 percent of the
nation's male convicts, and 50.7 percent of its female convicts, are
nonwhite (see material linked immediately above).
While
minority advocates assert these statistics prove the racism the
U.S. officially denies, the
One Percent's fear of revolution is undoubtedly another
major element
in the targeting of minorities.
Hitherto top-secret files of
the KGB – Komitet
gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti or
Committee for State Security –
revealed
after the collapse of the Soviet Union its analysts had carefully
evaluated the USian rebellions of the 1960s and concluded only the
minority communities possessed any genuine revolutionary potential.
Though
the U.S. and Canadian news reports of these disclosures have
seemingly
vanished
from public access, they nevertheless might explain why
the intelligence agencies are using the rationale
of the drug war to focus on minorities, particularly after the
emergence of the Department of Homeland Security as the de
facto
USian secret police.
Lastly
of course is the profit motive – the unapologetic savagery of
for-profit
prisons
as capitalism
inevitably morphs into Ayn Rand fascism. “(T)he
increasing overincarceration of people of color,” says the American
Civil Liberties Union, “rakes in billions of dollars a year for
(Corrections Corporation of America) and other for-profit prison
companies.”
In
other words, the intelligence agencies are now aiding the increasingly
privatized criminal
justice system in its unacknowledged mission to ensure white
supremacy and simultaneously
add to the already obscene riches of the
One Percent.
But
the
dire implications
of
USian
surveillance
operations
go far beyond matters of race. They are
legitimately
frightening
to any
and all dissidents
everywhere
in the nation.
What
is portrayed
by
the newest revelations is
a power-mad government intent on
imposing
a
21st
Century
version of a Nazi or
Stalinist police state. Given
the Obama Administration's relentless
campaign
to
forcibly
disarm the
civilian population,
Second Amendment advocates are now
especially
wary
of being unconstitutionally
targeted. Under
the
new paradigm of USian governance – absolute power and unlimited
profit for the Ruling Class, total subjugation for all the rest of us
– all such fears are undeniably rational.
***
Another element in the tsunami of
tyranny that is sweeping away USian freedom is the
rat-out-your-colleague program by which the government is indoctrinating its employees in how to
achieve job security by spying on one another. While capitalism has
always encouraged workplace paranoia and the associated
back-stabbing, out-ratting and brown-nosing as a means of destroying
or preventing worker solidarity, one of the (former) attractions of
government employment was the relative absence of such pressures. But
this new effort by the Obama Administration will make government
employees as mutually distrustful as their private-sector
counterparts, thereby facilitating the union-busting the Republicans
openly demand and most Democrats secretly support – which may,
beneath its national security disguise, be the program's primary
purpose.
***
A comment by
which I responded to a piece about John Kiriakou, the former
Central Intelligence Agency officer who dared reveal the
unconstitutional USian torture program and is now imprisoned as a
result,
gets right to it:
Government IS the enemy. Who put Mr.
Kiriakou in jail? Who reads all our mail? Who monitors our lives
every minute of every day? Who provides the goon squads that enforce
the corporate will? Who falsely pledges to protect our
freedom then damns us all to inescapable slavery?
This, alas, is the one point upon
which the conservatives are now proven to have been truly prophetic
-- and if we could but grant them that, perhaps then we could begin
to build a Left/Right solidarity sufficient to salvage our liberty.
LB/11 August 2013
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