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NEWS & LETTERS, June -July 2007LeadSpying campaign provokes distrust in Bush's agendaBy Olga Domanski Three festering scandals in the Justice Department reveal an administration hell-bent on killing civil liberties, curbing dissent and, in short, laying the foundations of single-party rule. As early as November 2005, the WASHINGTON POST broke front page news that the FBI had brokered, without any review, orders to investigate tens of thousands of individuals. Then on March 13 news that eight U.S. Attorneys had been summarily fired stunned the nation. Evidence emerged, despite his claims, that the dismissals were planned by the Attorney General himself in November. And Senate hearings on May 15 about the terminations exposed divisions within Bush's own ultraconservative cabinet, driven by some who want to distance themselves from his outrageous illegalities. Much of the testimony from James Comey could have the tenor of a movie script. However more than mere high drama poured forth from the former Justice Department official. He recounted the night in March 2004 when Alberto Gonzales, then Bush's White House counsel, and Andrew Card, then Bush's chief of staff, rushed to Attorney General John Ashcroft's intensive care bedside to get his signature for a document. The document was a reauthorizaton of Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping program due to expire the next day. Ashcroft, himself no friend of civil liberties, refused to sign it. He and the Justice Department had already been chided by the courts for offering spurious reasons to spy on individuals, and was not ready to authorize an illegal and unconstitutional program. He threatened to resign instead, along with Comey and other top Justice Department officials, including even FBI director Robert Mueller. Rather than back down, Bush "defused" the crisis by illegally continuing the program without the authorization. The press quickly compared the drama Comey had exposed to the "Saturday Night Massacre" in the Nixon administration. On Oct. 20, 1973 Nixon dismissed independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned. The departures announced a separation by much of the establishment from Nixon's extra-constitutional cover-up of the domestic espionage against the Democrats, the party out of power, in what became known as the Watergate scandal. However there is a significant difference between that event and what the WASHINGTON POST called the "Wednesday Night Ambush" in 2004. Whereas Richardson and Ruckelshaus resigned rather than follow Nixon's order to fire Cox, the threats by Ashcroft and Comey to resign in 2004 were not consummated. The truth is that the "Saturday Night Massacre" was a large-scale firing by Nixon of administration members to save himself from impeachment. No such threat faces Bush today. And very few current administration officials are openly breaking ranks. But cracks even within ruling circles have emerged. NO HEROES HERE The real surprise in Comey's story was the role played by Ashcroft, who had long been the personification of the reactionary presence of the Christian Right in government and an undisputed hawk in the "war on terror." He considered Bush's illegal program too much to allow to go undisputed. There is no "hero" to this story. Much was learned from Comey's whistle-blowing, and much of his testimony was praised by Democrats who have long criticized the surveillance program. Comey, however, was not opposed to the eavesdropping. What he was demanding was a legal rationale for spying that would be valid in today's current reactionary atmosphere. Nor can the Democrats claim to be heroes. They have much to answer to for having given Bush a free hand in his "war against terrorism," which has really been a war on immigrants, activists, and voter registration drives. They have dirty hands for allowing all the illegal spying measures against American citizens as well as against supposed "terrorism" suspects. And they caved in to Bush when they had a chance to either defund the war or show a little backbone. One and a half years ago, when the extent of Bush's illegal wiretapping was revealed by the NEW YORK TIMES, on Dec. 16, 2005, so clear was Bush's abuse of power that it had opened wide questions about whether it constituted outright criminal activity. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Spector called for hearings to be held quickly, and Barbara Boxer called for investigating whether Bush's authorization of the clearly unconstitutional secret spying was an impeachable offense. We seemed to see the beginning of the kinds of "cracks" in the ruling class that occur as crises grow deeper and demand resolution. LEGACY OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION That resolution will surely not be coming from more and more "hearings" rather than from reversing the policies behind the actions. It is necessary to look at the roots of Bush's assault on civil liberties. The abuses of power extend further back than the most obvious path from Nixonism, to Reaganism, to Bushism. The ruling class's use of the apparatus of the national security state against its own citizens arose even earlier than McCarthyism in the early 1950s. The incidents of Black revolutionaries murdered at the hands of the FBI and the local enforcers in the 1950s and 1960s offer vivid testimony to a history of the U.S. targetting police powers on dissenters. So too does the surveillance on Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the 1960s, on orders by liberal presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. This pattern of repression extends back all the way to the 1920s, when the U.S. ruling class's reaction to the Russian Revolution took the form of the Palmer Raids in which revolutionaries were imprisoned or deported. What is important about Nixon's Watergate break-in in 1972 is that it alerted the press to his attempts to neutralize even his "loyal opposition" as he pursued his goal of establishing a single-party state. What brought him down, finally forcing his resignation, was a combination of public revulsion over the scandal and the massive anti-Vietnam War movement that finally ended that bloodletting. He was also forced from power by a section of his own ruling class which considered him expendable because of his excesses, against themselves included. Republicans as well as Democrats went after Nixon for the Watergate burglary, without dismantling the deadly national security apparatus used for decades against the freedom movements in the U.S. The end of Nixon did not mean the end of Nixonism. Since then, we have seen the continued consolidation of the national security state, not only under Reagan, but under Clinton and the two Bushes. It has been dusted off and used when needed. Remaining constant but intensified has been the U.S. drive for single world mastery. Each of those figures has fulfilled their historic role in that drive. PERSISTENCE OF REPRESSION The extent of intrusion of the state into all our activities can be seen from just three kinds of encroachment, only sometimes making headlines: * The Army is attempting to control blogging by soldiers. The changes made on the Army's regulation on operations security, AR-530-1, was revised March 20, directing Army personnel to "prevent disclosure of critical and sensitive information in any public domain to include but not limited to the World Wide Web, open source publications and the media" and to "consult with their immediate supervisor and their OPSEC officer for a review prior to publishing or posting information in a public forum." That public forum includes letters, articles for publication, email, blog postings and discussions in online message boards. Jason Hartley, a sergeant in the New York National Guard who turned his blog into a book, JUST ANOTHER SOLDIER, summed up the feeling of the entire blogging community about the new regulation as "chilling, very chilling." Meanwhile the blogging continues to grow. <a href=Milblogging.com> Milblogging.com</a>, a web site that tracks military blogs, reported on May 4 that it counted 1,709 military blogs from 30 countries and 3,240 registered members. * The breadth of the attacks can also be seen in the current attempt in U.S. District Court in Eugene, Ore. to impose terrorism sentences on ten environmental activists. They had earlier accepted plea deals for crimes of property destruction. The crimes, now charged under the government's "Operation Backfire," involved damage to property but the defendants showed that they had gone to great lengths to ensure that no humans or animals suffered harm. Most of the crimes were for arson for which the median sentence is normally five to eight years. If accepted by the court, the new terrorism enhancements could land the young defendants in maximum security prisons for over 30 years. * National Security Letters (NSLs) have been around since 1978 when the FBI was given the power to use them to investigate what it judged to be foreign threats. NSLs became something altogether different after the September 11, 2001 attacks and the passage of the USA Patriot Act. The new Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon, and the CIA were empowered to issue NSLs to investigate anybody the administration branded as a threat to national security. The FBI issued 140,000 demands for information about individuals from travel agencies and internet service providers to libraries and eBay, between 2003 and 2005. This aggressive program, consistently underreported before then, has acquired internet and phone logs as well as bank transactions. No one less than the Justice Department's inspector general exposed this part of Bush's ominous spying agenda in March. These investigative demands are issued without a showing of probable cause or prior judicial approval and come with a severe gag order attached. This shields the FBI from complaints and paves the way for the spread of surveillance. A broad swath of internet and phone users, especially young people, assumes that all communications are monitored and hate the government for that reason. UPROOTING NEEDED These struggles against the invasion of privacy are part of a much wider and deeper struggle today against all of Bush's policies. His intransigence against ending the war in Iraq, gutting government spending on needed social programs, and assault on abortion rights show the contours of an attack on all the gains of freedom movements of the last 50 years. These attacks escalated as capitalism underwent a major economic retrenchment and restructuring in the mid-1970s and became institutionalized with the rise of Reagonomics in the 1980s. In the same token, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 did not remove a rationale for the U.S.'s drive for world hegemony. It emboldened that drive and produced the imperialist agenda of George Bush. Even before then, that drive determined the Reagan agenda. And that drive for global domination positioned Bush for his post-9/11 role as invader and top cop. As we wrote immediately after that attack: "It is imperative that we completely and totally oppose Bush's effort to respond to anti-human terrorism with an equally inhuman policy of indiscriminate military intervention, just as we must oppose all efforts to restrict civil liberties at home or scapegoat Muslims, immigrants or people of color. But an effective opposition to this new militarism will not emerge unless we project a total view rooted not just in what we oppose, but what we are for." ("Terrorism, Bush's retaliation show inhumanity of class society," NEWS & LETTERS, October 2001). That is a far more difficult and fundamental task than simply holding a hearing--or winning an election. It demands nothing short of uprooting capitalism and envisioning a philosophically-grounded alternative to capitalism. |
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