Outlaw Nation,
Watching You,
News Fakers
excerpted from the book
Static
Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders
and the People Who Fight Back
by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
Hyperion, 2006, hardcover
Introduction
p1
President George W. Bush, September 20, 2001
Either you are with us or you are with
the terrorists.
p6
President George W. Bush
See, in my line of work you got to keep
repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to
sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
Outlaw Nation
p17
The United States is an outlaw nation.
The laws that used to govern the behavior
of American leaders evolved from basic codes of conduct for civilized
nations. In 1215, the Magna Carta asserted that no one, not even
a king, was above the rule of law, and it established the concept
of habeas corpus-a prisoner's right to challenge his or her detention
in a public court of law. Kidnapping, murder, and rape, all nations
agree, are crimes. The four Geneva Conventions, the first of which
was adopted in 1864, established that even in wars, civilians
and combatants have rights. The conventions prohibit murder, torture,
hostage-taking, and extrajudicial sentencing and executions.
These have long been the publicly proclaimed
ideals of Western nations. In private, they have been routinely
violated. From the Native American conquest, to slavery, to Vietnam,
where torture and extrajudicial killing were staples of the CIA's
Phoenix program, to Latin America, where US.-backed death squads
rained terror on civilians throughout the 1970s and '80s, to the
U.S. Army School of the Americas, which counts among its graduates
a who's who of Latin American dictators and human rights abusers,
the United States has been secretly involved in the torture business
for years.
p18
Bush reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas
"God told me to strike at al Queda
and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam.
p19
In the Outlaw Nation that has risen up where the United States
once stood, holding humans in offshore cages and denying them
fair trials is fine. Kidnapping has become an essential tool of
foreign policy. The vice president personally lobbies the Senate
to legalize torture, while the secretary of defense decides which
medieval torments are acceptable (drowning and freezing are in;
disemboweling is out). The secretary of state trots around the
globe to forcefully and unequivocally reassure squeamish allies
on whose soil the kidnappings and torture occur-that what they
know is happening (and secretly assisted) is not really happening.
The US. media speaks politely about possible "abuse"
and refers delicately to things like "stress positions."
Torturing its enemies in secret is not
new for the United States. But the open - even proud - embrace
of it is unprecedented.
p24
... what the US. government calls "extraordinary rendition"-sending
suspects to foreign countries to be harshly interrogated. The
program began in 1995, under the Clinton administration, when
the CIA undertook a series of kidnappings of suspected terrorists
in Europe. Suspects were shipped to Egypt, where some were tortured
and others were killed.
p26
Human rights groups estimate that over one hundred people have
been rendered to countries well known for torturing prisoners.
In the case of Syria, the Bush administration could be confident
that Arar and the other prisoners it sent there would be savaged.
According to the US. State Department 2001 Human Rights Report,
published seven months before Arar was sent to Syria:
Former prisoners and detainees [in Syria]
report that torture methods include administering electrical shocks;
puffing out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beating,
sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyperextending
the spine; and using a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate
the victim or fracture the victim's spine.
p28
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, kidnapped at New York's
JFK airport in 2002. The U.S. said he had links to al Queda. In
what the U.S. government calls "extraordinary rendition",
he was secretly flown to Syria where he was tortured. He was finally
released one year later without being charged as a terrorist.
Arar was found innocent of all crimes by a Canadian court in 2005.
Arar told the Toronto Star, "If the
courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this
administration? Where do we go? The United Nations? We-me and
others who have been subjected to this-are normal citizens who
have done no wrong. They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed
other lives. But the court system does not listen to us. When
a court will not act because of 'national security;' there is
no longer any difference between the West and the Third World."
p30
The US. State Department 2002 Human Rights Report ... said this
about Egypt:
There were numerous, credible reports
that security forces tortured and mistreated citizens .... Principal
methods of torture reportedly employed by the police included:
Being stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe
with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal
rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused
with cold water. Victims frequently reported being subjected to
threats and forced to sign blank papers to be used against the
victim or the victim's family in the future should the victim
complain of abuse. Some victims, including male and female detainees,
reported that they were sexually assaulted or threatened with
the rape of themselves or family members."
Notwithstanding President Bush's absurd
claim in 2005 that "we do not render to countries that torture,"
he and his administration have found Egypt's abysmal human rights
record to be irresistible. Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif
told the Chicago Tribune that the CIA had handed over to Egypt
between sixty and seventy terrorism suspects captured from around
the world. Indeed, Egypt has become a destination of choice for
governments wishing to outsource torture: Human Rights Watch estimated
that between 2001 and 2005, Egypt worked with other countries
to arrest more than sixty Islamic militants living abroad and
return them to Egypt .
Former CIA agent Robert Baer explained
the cold logic behind where the United States chooses to outsource
torture: "If you want a serious interrogation, you send a
prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send
them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear-never to see them
again-you send them to Egypt.
p38
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared in Europe in December
2005
"The United States does not transport and has not transported
detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogations
using torture .
But just four months later, investigators
for the European Parliament revealed that the CIA had flown one
thousand secret flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes ferrying
terrorism suspects to countries that torture.
p44
New York Times, May 1961 in an editorial titled "The Right
Not to Be Lied To":
"A democracy-our democracy-cannot
be lied to .... The basic principle involved is that of confidence.
A dictatorship can get along without an informed public opinion.
A democracy cannot. "
Watching You
p46
White House spokesman An Fleischer, September 26, 2001
"Americans ... need to watch what they say, watch what they
do.
p46
The year was 1971. The president: Richard Nixon. Concerned citizens
in a suburb of Philadelphia decided something had to be done.
They were about to change the course of history.
On March 8, 1971, anonymous activists
used a crowbar to force their way into the two-man office of the
FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, in the middle of the night. FBI agents
arriving at work in the morning found only empty file cabinets;
more than a thousand documents had been taken. The Citizens' Commission
to Investigate the FBI, as the activists dubbed themselves, had
pulled off its first and only action. The impact of that break-in
is still being felt today.
p47
Buried in the stolen documents was a new term: COINTELPRO. It
stood for the FBI's "counterintelligence program." The
documents revealed that the super-secret program began in 1956,
"in part because of frustration with Supreme Court rulings
limiting the Government's power to proceed overtly against dissident
groups," according to the Church Committee reports issued
later. As one stolen memo put it, the FBI used COINTELPRO to "enhance
the paranoia endemic in these circles to get the point across
there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox."'
The stolen documents and subsequent revelations
shined a light on one of America's darkest chapters. The FBI was
not simply gathering intelligence. COINTELPRO was a program aimed
at aggressively destabilizing, provoking, smearing, and destroying
organizations and individuals, many of whom were doing nothing
more than exercising their free speech rights. Often, the only
transgression of these groups and individuals was that FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover disagreed with them. The groups that were targeted
included the Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Students
for a Democratic Society; and many antiwar, civil rights, and
religious groups. Students, celebrities, professors, and concerned
citizens were all targeted in the FBI's covert program. One stolen
memo captured the vicious mentality of COINTELPRO: "Neutralize
them in the same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize
the US."'
COINTELPRO operations often took a devastating
toll. As Allan Jalon recounted in the Los Angeles Times, agents
tried to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr. into killing himself.
Actress Jean Seberg was targeted for having made a donation to
the Black Panther Party; she ended up committing suicide after
spurious gossip about her, based on an FBI wiretap, was leaked
and published in the Los Angeles Times.
No one has ever claimed responsibility
for the 1971 break-in in Pennsylvania. The FBI concluded a six-year,
33,000-page investigation, but couldn't solve the "crime."
The explosive contents of the COINTELPRO
memos shocked the nation. Congress members were outraged at having
been in the dark about the FBI's rogue operations. The exposés
led to hearings by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho on abuses by the
intelligence agencies. The torrent of government abuse was slowly
stemmed but only temporarily.
They're back. Three decades after the
FBI COINTELPRO program was exposed and supposedly dismantled,
the federal government is once again spying on Americans. The
targets of this illegal spying usually share one thing in common:
They are innocent Americans who are exercising their right to
speak freely.
Sarah Bardwell, an intern at the American
Friends Service Committee in Denver, discovered that the Bush
administration has another name for free speech: terrorism. She
learned this when heavily armed police dressed in SWAT gear showed
up at her door in July 2004.
... Bardwell ... was one of numerous activists
being targeted by the FBI in a nationwide campaign of spying and
political intimidation. See, in the aftermath of being attacked
by Saudi-born terrorists, the Bush administration vowed to make
us safer... by illegally spying on critics at home.
p50
Mark Silverstein, legal director of the ACLU of Colorado, to Democracy
Now
"The FBI is unjustifiably regarding
demonstrations and public dissent as potential terrorism... if
you participate in actions critical of the government or government
policies, you might wind up with an FBI file. The danger, of course,
is that these kinds of actions on the part of the FBI could deter
people from joining a protest, from signing a petition, from writing
a letter to the editor if they feel that that's going to prompt
FBI scrutiny and maybe an FBI file."
p52
The Joint Terrorism Task Forces are on the front lines of domestic
spying. The JTTFs are teams of state, local, and federal agents
that are led by the FBI. There are currently sixty-six JTTFs around
the country, according to the ACLU." Among the institutions
that work closely with the JTTFs are "just about every university
in the country," says the FBI. Many of the JTTFs have campus
police officers assigned full-time to the FBI, funneling information
about students and campus organizations to the Bureau. When reporter
John Friedman of The Nation cold-called a number of universities
to inquire whether they had officers assigned to the FBI, about
one-third confirmed that they did, including the University of
Illinois, Champaign /Urbana; the University of Texas, Austin;
the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the University of Florida,
Gainesville; Michigan State; and Yale.
With campus police now serving as the
eyes and ears of the federal government, it's little wonder that
students feel an icy wind blowing through their dorms. At North
Carolina State University, the FBI went door-knocking and interrogating
students following a protest at a nearby Republican headquarters
shortly after the 2004 election. Campus police also increased
their presence at campus antiwar protests.
p54
In 1972, the Thomas Merton Center was founded in Pittsburgh to
"find common ground in the nonviolent struggle to bring about
a more peaceful and just society."
In 2002, a year after George W. Bush became
president, the Center's activities made it a target of an international
terrorism investigation.
According to secret FBI files obtained
by the ACLU in March 2006, the Pittsburgh JTTF conducted a secret
investigation into the activities of the Thomas Merton Center
beginning as early as November 2002 because of its opposition
to the war in Iraq. The ACLU said that these documents were the
first to show conclusively that the rationale for FBI targeting
was a group's opposition to the war.
p56
... in December 2005 ... NBC News and journalist William Arkin
exposed the existence of a secret Pentagon database to track intelligence
gathered inside the United States. The database included information
on dozens of antiwar protests and rallies, particularly actions
targeting military recruiting.
The Department of Defense has strict guidelines,
established in 1982, that restrict the information it is allowed
to collect and retain on US. citizens. These guidelines may now
be being either bent or violated. The Pentagon database obtained
by NBC included 1,519 "threats" that were reported between
July 2004 and May 2005, including:
* Countermilitary recruiting meetings
held at the Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Florida
* Antinuclear protests staged in Nebraska
on the anniversary of the US. atomic bombing of Nagasaki
* An antiwar protest organized by military
families outside Fort Bragg in North Carolina
* A rally in San Diego to support war
resister Pablo Paredes
In all, the Pentagon "threat"
list included four dozen antiwar meetings, including some that
took place far from any military facility or recruitment office."
All were entirely legal gatherings.
p57
The Pentagon's domestic intelligence gathering has been done through
a secretive program that allows military bases and other defense
installations to file Threat and Local Observation Notices (TALON)
of suspicious activity into a consolidated database. The program,
established in 2003 by then deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz,
is so secret that even the number of reports in the database is
classified. Also classified is the size and budget of the new
agency overseeing the database, Counter-Intelligence Field Activity
(CIFA).
p57
Bill Dobbs, a spokesperson for United for Peace and Justice, a
coalition of some fifteen hundred groups that has sponsored national
antiwar demonstrations, observed on Democracy Now!, "The
crackdowns on dissent come in many different forms. What's alarming
about the surveillance, of course, is that we don't know what
sort of infiltration is going on, what sort of covert action may
be taking place, and we may never know"
p58
The most breathtaking and far-reaching of all the Bush administration
spy programs that have been revealed so far has been the warrantless
eavesdropping by the National Security Agency. The program was
first exposed in an article in the New York Times in December
2005-after the story was withheld by Times editors for over a
year at the request of the White House (see Introduction
The Times revealed that President Bush
had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop-without warrants-on calls
and e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists.
Then, in May 2006, USA Today exposed how the National Security
Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of
millions of Americans with the help of AT&T, Verizon, and
BellSouth (the latter two companies have denied the charge). One
source told the paper that the NSA is attempting to create the
world's largest database-big enough to include "every call
ever made" within the United States. An AT&T whistle-blower,
Mark Klein, has revealed that the telecom company has built secret
eavesdropping rooms in their main switching centers where calls
are monitored. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed suit against
AT&T in January 2006, demanding that the company stop illegally
spying on its customers.
Soon after the Times exposed the existence
of the program, an NSA whistle-blower, Russell Tice, spoke about
it on Democracy Now! "I believe I have seen some things that
are illegal," he began. "This is probably the number
one commandment of the Ten Commandments as a SIGINT [signals intelligence]
officer: You will not spy on Americans .... Apparently the leaders
of NSA have decided ( that they were just going to go against
the tenets of something that's a gospel."
p60
Russell Tice, a lifelong Republican who voted for George W. Bush,
said in a letter to Congress
"The freedom of the American people
cannot be protected when our constitutional liberties are ignored
and our nation has decayed into a police state."
p60
retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor in March 2006\
"It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into
dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these
beginnings.
News Fakers
p62
Since coming to power, the Bush administration has engaged in
a systematic campaign of covert propaganda aimed at subverting
both domestic and foreign media. The Government Accountability
Office estimates that between 2003 and 2005, the administration
spent $1.6 billion on advertising and public relations to promote
its policies.
... good news started to appear in Iraqi
newspapers in mid-2005. MORE MONEY GOES TO IRAQ'S DEVELOPMENT,
blared one headline. THE SANDS ARE BLOWING TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC
IRAQ, gushed another. One article reported cheerily, "As
the people and the [Iraqi security forces] work together, Iraq
will finally drive terrorism out of Iraq for good."'
The stories, made to appear as if they
were written by independent Iraqi journalists, were in fact written
by American "information operations" troops as part
of a multimillion-dollar covert Pentagon operation to plant propaganda
in the Iraqi media. Cash-strapped Iraqi newspapers were paid from
$50 to $2,000 to run a story. In addition, Iraqi journalists were
paid stipends of up to $500 per month, depending on how many pro-American
pieces they published.'
This secret program is run by a relatively
unknown defense contractor called the Lincoln Group, which in
2005 landed a multiyear $100 million contract to produce pro-American,
anti-insurgent TV, radio, and print messages.
... December 2005, the Lincoln Group had
placed over one thousand articles in fifteen to seventeen Iraqi
and Arab newspapers. It also paid Islamic clerics for advice on
how to persuade Sunnis to participate in elections and oppose
the Iraqi insurgency. The Lincoln Group also proposed an Arab
sitcom based on the Three Stooges, featuring bumbling terrorists
as the main characters; the Pentagon rejected the idea.
p65
The Pentagon propaganda campaign is being waged as the State Department
is offering programs in basic journalism skills and media ethics
to Iraqi journalists. One workshop was titled "The Role of
Press in a Democratic Society.""
"Here we are trying to create the
principles of democracy in Iraq," said a senior Pentagon
official who opposes planting stories in the Iraqi media. 'Every
speech we give in that country is about democracy. And we're breaking
all the first principles of democracy when we're doing it."
Static
Home Page