Bowing To The Police State

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Wed, 17 May 2006 12:04:23 -0700 (PDT)

Bowing To The Police State

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.tompaine.com/print/bowing_to_the_police_state.php

 

 

 

Bowing To The Police State

 

Ray McGovern

May 16, 2006

 

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm

of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC.

He was a CIA analyst for 27 years and is now on the

Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Is Congress aiding and abetting the creation of a police state?

 

Recently, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,

Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give the CIA and NSA

unprecedented police powers. By inserting a provision in the FY07

Intelligence Authorization Act, Hoekstra has undermined the existing

statutory limits on involvement in domestic law enforcement.

 

This comes after revelations in January of direct NSA involvement

with the Baltimore police in order to " protect " the NSA Headquarters

from Quaker protesters.

 

Add to this, the disquieting news that the White House has been

barraging the CIA with totally improper questions

about the political affiliation of some of its senior intelligence

officers,

the ever widening use of polygraph examinations, and the FBI's admission

that it acquires phone records of broadcast and print media

to investigate leaks at the CIA.

 

I, for one, am reminded of my service in the police state of the

U.S.S.R.,

where there were no First or Fourth Amendments.Like the proverbial frog

in slowly boiling water, we have become inured to what goes on

in the name of national security. Recent disclosures about increased

government surveillance and illegal activities would be shocking, were it

not for the prevailing outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of

abuses.

 

But the heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions

that are supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police state,

the ones who stand to lose their own power as well as their rights

and the rights of all citizens, aren't interested in reigning in

the power of the intelligence establishment.

To the contrary, Rep. Hoekstra and his counterpart at the Senate,

Pat Roberts, R.-Kan., are running the risk of whiplash

as they pivot to look the other way.

James Bamford, one of the best observers of the inner workings

of U.S. intelligence, warned recently that Congress has lost control

of the intelligence community.

" You can't get any oversight or checks and balances, " he said.

" Congress is protecting the White House,

and the White House can do whatever it wants. "

 

Consider the following nuggets drawn from Sunday's Washington Post

article by R. Jeffrey Smith about the firing of senior CIA analyst

Mary McCarthy. Apparently McCarthy learned that at least one

" senior agency official " lied to Congress about agency policy

and practice with regard to torturing detainees during interrogations.

 

According to Smith's article, one internal CIA study completed in 2004

concluded that CIA interrogation policies and techniques violated

international law. This is said to have come as something of a shock

to agency interrogators who had been led by the Justice Department

to believe that international conventions against torture

did not apply to interrogations of foreigners outside of the United

States.

 

McCarthy reportedly was also chagrined to learn that the CIA's

general counsel had secured a secret Justice Department opinion

in 2004 authorizing the creation of a category of " ghost detainees, "

prisoners transported abroad, mostly from Iraq, for secret interrogation

- without notification of the Red Cross, as required by the Geneva

Convention.

 

No problem, said senior CIA officials.

We'll just lie to the committee leaders about the torture;

they will wink and be grateful we did. The lying came

during discussion of draft legislation aimed at preventing torture.

As deputy inspector general, McCarthy became aware

that CIA officials had misled the chairmen and ranking members

of the congressional " oversight " committees on multiple occasions.

 

Neither of the committees seemed interested in taking a serious look

at the torture issue. It will be highly interesting to see what the

intrepid

chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees do,

if anything, to followup on Smith's report that " a senior CIA

official " meeting

with Senate staff last June lied about the agency's interrogation

practices.

 

Or that a " senior agency official " failed to provide a full account of

CIA's

policy for treating detainees at a closed hearing of the House

intelligence

committee in Feb. 2005 under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman,

the ranking Democrat. Will Roberts and Hoekstra hold those agency

officials accountable, or will they let the matter die - like some of

the detainees subjected to " enhanced " interrogation techniques

to which the chairmen have so far turned a blind eye?

 

Hoekstra is a master at Catch-22. On the one hand Hoekstra insists

that those in intelligence who have information on illegal

or improper behavior report it to his intelligence committee;

then he refuses to let them in the door. Russell Tice,

a former NSA employee, has been trying since last December

to give Hoekstra a first-hand account of illegal activities at the NSA.

 

He has rebuffed Tice, with the lame explanation that the NSA

will not clear Hoekstra or any of his committee members

for the highly classified programs about which Tice wants to report.

 

With the door locked to the intelligence committees, Tice has turned

to the Senate Armed Services Committee and said that

he will meet soon with committee staff in closed session

to tell of - " probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts " -

at the NSA while Gen. Michael Hayden was in charge.

 

Amid the recent revelations of secret CIA-run prisons abroad,

torture and illegal eavesdropping, Hoekstra has chosen

to express outrage- but not at the prisons, torture or eavesdropping.

Rather, the House Intelligence Committee chairman is outraged

that information on these abuses has found its way onto the public square.

 

Hoekstra has turned his full attention

- to pursuing those who leak such information

- never mind that is the activities disclosed,

- not the leaks, that are the real outrage.

 

The executive branch is " walking all over the Congress at the moment, "

complained Sen. Arlen Specter, R.-Pa., last week to the

Senate Judiciary Committee which he chairs. Unlike Roberts and Hoekstra,

Specter seems genuinely troubled at the president's disdain

for the separation of powers and particularly his end-run

around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which

prohibits eavesdropping on American citizens without a court warrant.

 

But when Specter meets a stonewall, he caves.

He may ask telephone company CEOs why they surrendered

records to the government, but - illegal eavesdropping or no -

Specter will likely remain a spectator,

as Pat Roberts greases the skids for Big Brother Gen. Michael Hayden,

architect and implementer of eavesdropping on Americans

in violation of FISA, to become the next director of the CIA.

 

Hayden's disingenuousness in his testimony before the intelligence

committees has been clear, but the committee chairmen

are as much to blame for winking at it.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has told Rep. Maurice Hinchey,

D.-N.Y.,that it is stopping its months-long investigation into

who approved the NSA's eavesdropping-on-American-citizens initiative

(now euphemistically dubbed " the terrorist surveillance program " ).

 

Justice explained to Hinchey that the NSA would not grant Justice

department investigators the appropriate security clearances

to investigate the NSA program.

Kafka would smirk.

 

Rep. Hoekstra's speaks of " vigorous oversight " of the NSA,

but the evidence of that is lacking. Late last year

the current head of the NSA, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander,

deliberately misled House intelligence committee member

Rush Holt, D-N.J., on the eavesdropping program.

 

On Dec. 6, Holt, a former State Department intelligence specialist,

called on Alexander and NSA lawyers

to discuss protecting Americans' privacy.

 

They all assured Holt that the agency singled out Americans for

eavesdropping only after warrants had been obtained from the FISA court.

Later that month, when disclosures in The New York Times made it clear

that Alexander had lied to a member of his committee, Hoekstra

merely suggested that Holt write a letter to Alexander to complain.

 

The inescapable message to Alexander?

Fear not: Hoekstra the fox is watching the hen house.

When the writers of the Constitution envisioned a separation of powers

to ensure checks and balances in our government,

they were relying on the leaders of those branches

to fight to maintain their own power within the system.

 

Fresh from the struggle against King George,

they could not have predicted that some of our leaders

would voluntarily sign away their own rights

to another George who would be king.