HOMELAND SECURITY: A TROJAN HORSE
That's what Douglas Valentine, author of the book, The Phoenix Program, thinks; he writes:
"... HOMELAND SECURITY IS, SIMPLY STATED, A TROJAN HORSE
through which Bush will unleash his ideological stormtroopers on America and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve personal and political gain." [Please see our article on this matter, "$3 Trillion and the Bush, Kerry Campaigns for the Presidency: What It Portends for Us as Christians."]
And it's happening even now; indeed, the restrictions imposed on Americans through the oppressive instumentalities of "Homeland Security" have already had a telling effect: our right to travel where and when we please without being hampered has been circumscribed; we are increasingly being surveilled in all aspects of our lives; our police forces have been "militarized;" the government has arrogated unto itself the right to wiretap our phones, monitor our email and internet usage, search our homes and businesses, and seize documents all without a warrant; the government can now arrest people without charges and hold them indefinitely (i.e., "disappear" people); and the list goes on and on.
These acts, taken together, have established - as two-time Nobel Prize winner Johan Galtung has said - a "LEGALLY CRIMINAL SOCIAL STRUCTURE" in the United States. By "legally criminal" Galtung means that what Bush and his elite cronies have been doing is legalizing their otherwise criminal acts of oppression directed against the American population.
WHAT HOMELAND SECURITY IS REALLY ALL ABOUT
You don't believe it? Well, ask yourself, Why do the rights of ordinary citizens have to be constricted if the purpose of these restrictions is merely to contain the activities of Al Qaida and the rest of Osama bin Laden's minions? Why is it that the government finds it necessary to roll back the rights of individual American citizens if all the government is targeting is Muslim extremists? The answer, of course, is that Muslim extremists are not the elite's real targets. Valentine suggests the real reason:
"Homeland Security is [nothing more than] an euphemism for 'INTERNAL SECURITY' [i.e., the establishment of a 'National Security State']." [Again, please see our article, "$3 Trillion and the Bush, Kerry Campaigns for the Presidency: What It Portends for Us as Christians."]
This is PRECISELY what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) thinks as well. In a chilling report released recently (August, 2004) entitled, "The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Business and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society," the ACLU documents exactly how the elites are planning to keep tabs on dissidents in the United States, and - if necessary - terrorize them into compliance to their wishes much as they have been doing for years to the black community in the U.S., and to the populations of America's client-states. [Please see our article, "The Horror of John Dimitri Negroponte and Everything He Represents."]
The strategy that the elites have devised to protect themselves from the fury of the "mob" (i.e., those who oppose them) calls for the creation of a "Surveillance Society" not unlike Hitler's Third Reich where everyone is enlisted as WATCHERS, and everyone is WATCHED. Anthony D. Romero, the American Civil Liberties Union's Executive Director, writes:
"Acting under the broad mandate of the 'War on Terrorism', the U.S. security establishment is making a systematic effort to extend its surveillance capacity by PRESSING THE PRIVATE SECTOR INTO SERVICE TO REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF [OTHER] AMERICANS. These efforts ... run the gamut from old-fashioned efforts to recruit individuals as eyes and ears for the authorities, to the construction of vast computerized networks that systematically feed the government a steady stream of information about our activities."
A MASSIVE EFFORT
The ACLU labels this -
"... a MASSIVE effort ... to turn regular Americans into ... government MONITORS who, pressed by constant urgings for vigilance and suspicion ... are asked to report to the authorities anything they think is 'unusual or suspicious' ... The new warnings are enormously vague and broad, yet frightening and intense. Unlike 'wanted' posters and other traditional public appeals, they are based not on crimes that have already been committed, but on the prospect or suspicion that an individual might be planning something bad ... The government's constant exhortations to micro-vigilance ... will create an atmosphere of CONFORMISM and mistrust that encourages abuse and divides Americans from one another ..."
And just how massive this effort is can be surmised from the government's initial and rather clumsy attempt to create such a system: The January 2002 effort by John Ashcroft's Justice Department to impose on the American public the now "defunct" program called the "Terrorism Information and Prevention System," or TIPS. [Please see our articles, "John Ashcroft, Theodore Olson and the New National Security State" and "None Are More Hopelessly Enslaved Than Those Who Falsely Believe They Are Free."]
Billed as a "national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity," the program would have recruited "millions of truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees" and "others" as government informants. The recruitment of utility workers and "others" (e.g., plumbers, electricians, pest control operators, computer repair people, etc.) was particularly insidious - it would have left, in the words of the ACLU report -
"Homeowners to wonder if anything in their home might draw suspicion whenever a cable or utility worker comes in to do a repair."
One can only imagine the "scurrying about" this program would have necessitated whenever home, cable, or computer repairs were needed: left-wing magazines would have to be hidden, hard disks on computers would have to be removed, posters on walls might have to be taken down, the children would have to be coached on what not to say, ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
The proposed scope of this project was stunning - it would have recruited, in its pilot program alone, one million informants in just 10 cities - or 1 IN EVERY 24 AMERICANS LIVING IN THOSE CITIES.
THIS IS AN OLD GESTAPO TRICK
The ACLU report continues:
"The recruitment of informants [i.e., WATCHERS, both individuals and corporations] for particular investigations has long been a key tool of law enforcement, BUT ONLY UNDER THE MOST OPPRESSIVE GOVERNMENTS HAVE INFORMANTS EVER BECOME A WIDESPREAD, CENTRAL FEATURE OF LIFE [as they are now becoming in the United States]."
"The East German Stasi, for example, not only employed 91,000 full-time workers, but also recruited from among the citizenry more than 170,000 non-professional informants, or as many as one in every 50 citizens, to spy and report on their fellow citizens. Stasi agents even used blackmail and other pressure tactics to get people to spy on their own family members." [NOTE: it should be noted that the ratio of "WATCHERS" to "WATCHED" in the system that TIPS was aiming for was one in every 24 - more than double the Stasi ratio - and there is no indication that this ratio has been abandoned by any of the more sophisticated successor systems to TIPS that the government has now set up.]
The Stasi system was patterned after the Gestapo (Geheime Staats Polizei) of Hitler's Third Reich, an ever present system of surveillance designed to - as Edward Crankshaw describes it - "... create a LEGEND OF TERROR ..." calculated to paralyze people with fear and prevent them from speaking out against the government.
Heinrich Mueller, chief of Hitler's Gestapo, commenting on the efficacy of this kind of system, said that there is -
"... nothing quite as efficient as an internal spy system (i.e., citizens spying on other citizens) for isolating the individual by making it impossible for anybody to trust anybody else."
That's what Crankshaw thinks as well; he reiterates what Mueller says almost word for word:
"There is nothing like the voluntary informer for creating a general atmosphere of unease and apprehension ... his information is usually valueless in any specific sense; but since every human being at some time commits some indiscretion, he enables the secret-police to appear where it is least expected and give the desired impression of possessing an all-seeing eye."
THE CITIZEN CORPS: ORGANIZING
"AMERICAN WATCHERS" GESTAPO-STYLE
This is especially true when one takes this system of voluntary WATCHERS and organizes it hierarchically, as the Department of Homeland Security is now doing through a new government program called "CAT EYES" (the Community Anti-Terrorism Training Institute). The program is centered on doubling the size of the nation's old "Neighborhood Watch" programs (which were loosely organized, independent neighborhood groups on the "look-out" for burglars, robbers, and other "home-intruders") and transforming them into HIGHLY ORGANIZED, TIGHTLY-CONTROLLED instruments of government surveillance replete with "Block Watchers," "Block Captains," "Neighborhood Coordinators," "District Coordinators," etc. who will - according to the institute's literature - "act as the eyes and ears of law enforcement and report any suspicious activity [relating to terrorism]" to the government. The new transformed "Neighborhood Watch" program is called the "CITIZEN CORPS."
This is EXACTLY what the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s where, according to Crankshaw, the Gestapo organized a similar system of groups into -
"... a cell system which enrolled quantities of ordinary citizens as honorary part-time members of the Gestapo ... Thus there was the Blockwart, the concierge, who had to report on the activities of every tenant in his apartment building [and so on from apartment building to block warden, to neighborhood warden, to ward captain, to district warden, ad nauseum until the whole city was covered by a hierarchical system of Nazi 'WATCHERS'] ..."
According to the ACLU report, all tips received from the "CITIZEN CORPS" - however raw -
"... will be cross-referenced through federal, state, and local databases. There is no mention of whether the name of an innocent person who is the subject of a tip will ever be purged from the database. In fact, according to the report, it is far from clear what any of these programs do with information about 'suspicious' individuals that they receive - how reports are recorded, shared and stored in domestic intelligence or law enforcement databases or what is done to ensure that innocent individuals who are the subjects of raw suspicions and rumors will not have a permanent black mark associated with their names in some government database."
CHANGING ONE'S BEHAVIOR AND PSYCHOLOGY
The ultimate purpose behind all this WATCHING is to create, as Valentine suggests, "... ANXIETY ..." in the American population, and most especially among those who might otherwise oppose the elite's American New World Order System; a pervasive atmosphere of -
"... CONSTANT UNCERTAINTY whenever people are in a situation where an informant might be present, enormously amplifying the effect of government surveillance on individual behavior and psychology."
And no doubt about it, this kind of "UNCERTAINTY" has the capacity to change one's behavior and psychology, that's for sure - after all, who wants to be targeted as a "terrorist suspect" these days? [That's what the elites are calling those who in any way oppose them: "TERRORISTS."] The consequences are enormous insofar as one's job, one's family, one's "credit worthiness," etc. are concerned. One's credit worthiness? Yes! - even one's "credit worthiness," as one so-called FBI "suspect" found out recently when he received a letter from his bank after his name (i.e., "Algabri") "popped up" on a "government WATCH list," a letter which read in part:
"We regret to inform you that we have decided that it is not in our best interest to continue your banking relationship with us." [Letter from Fleet Bank to Algabri, an American citizen.]
PROLIFERATING FROM LIST TO LIST
Algabri was unable to ascertain how or even why his name appeared on the list. Moreover, as Algabri found out, once one's name "shows up" on a "government WATCH list" it appears impossible to remove it. Not only that, it seems that one's name will then begin proliferating on other "WATCH lists" - jumping from one list to the next like some kind of deadly virus jumping from one cell in the body to the next, spreading like a cancer until all the cells of the body are infected, and the "host" collapses and dies.
And it's not just Algabri. Take what happened to those whose names appeared on a "Project Lookout" list, a program that is extant today. The list was circulated by the FBI among a supposedly restricted number of corporations who shared and re-shared the list with other corporations. As a result, the list quickly took on a life of its own - with damaging consequences for those on it: The companies started checking their customers against the list and began discontinuing their relationship with those who appeared on it.
Unfortunately, the list was later discovered to be riddled with inaccuracies and contained the names of many people with whom the Bureau simply wanted to talk, but by the time the mistakes were found, there was no way to remove innocent people from the list because the distribution had spun beyond the FBI's control. The ACLU reports that -
"No one knows how many innocent people have been denied jobs or suffered other harm because of the list."
To make matters worse, the ACLU reports that most people who appear on a government WATCH list don't even know that they are on it - until, that is, they begin to suffer the kind of consequences described above. And even then, they can only surmise their presence on the list - the government will never admit to it. As a result, there is no recourse for those who have been placed on such lists: one is left with only vague suspicions and a sense of utter helplessness. And don't think - even for a minute - that the government wants to mitigate what's occurring here. It doesn't! The fact is, it's precisely this kind of ambiguity and insecurity that the government is aiming to instill in the population - THE KIND OF VAGUENESS THAT MAKES PEOPLE THINK THAT AT ANY MOMENT A SHADOW CAN STEP OUT OF THE NIGHT AND SNATCH THEIR LIVES AWAY |
