arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

A very consensus Congress is prepared to give the Bush administration absolute power. Bush is calling for what may be the end of very dear civil liberties. "We're a nation of law, a nation of civil rights. We're also a nation under attack", stated Bush. Apparently, this unseen enemy called "Terrorism" is a domestic enemy, as Bush has been calling for the expansion of CIA powers and the expansion of law enforcement. Bush said, "We need to go back to work tomorrow, but we need to be alert to the fact that these evildoers still exist." Bush rhetoric has repeatedly called for workers to depoliticize themselves from the process, go back to work, and let government take care of the situation. Attorney General John Ashcroft said that Congress would be asked to tighten federal laws on wiretaps. Ashcroft pushed for the specific singling out of "terrorists" through phone-tapped monitoring. He said, "Technology has raced us past the point where a specific telephone is that valuable, because people change telephones. You and I know that you can go into convenience stores or into large merchandising outlets and but telephones that are disposable. So we need to be able to develop our capacity to surveil individuals, rather than the hardware people use." Senator Bob Graham of Florida is proposing legislation to install a new J. Edgar Hoover. His bill would create a "terrorism czar" to oversee CIA infringements on personal privacy.

The most frightening of all this is the call of private database firms to lift the ability of the CIA to assassinate! Since the exposure of COINTELPRO, an illegal CIA program designed to dismantle leftist organisations, the Freedom Of Information Act has allowed people to view their federal files. However, craftfully, much of that information is now kept by private databases that keep track of purchases, Internet transmissions, and any other traceable step. Kenneth Adelman, President Reagan's former arms control director, stated, "Intelligence agents should not be constrained by Boy Scout ethics." One need not look far to see what Adelman is advocating. The assassinations of Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King, Wounded Knee etc. are all lessons of what Adelman wants to return to. An absolutely unaccountable CIA. George Friedman, chairman of a global intelligence gathering company in Texas, said, "I believe it is a certainty that the ban on assassination will be lifted." The need to expose this to as many people as possible is dire. We must not let the mistakes of the past be repeated by allowing government to wage a domestic intelligence war on its own concerned citizens. As proven historically, the future of any progressive organising could be at stake.