Part 1
By Dr. Steve Best - [email protected]
�They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.� Ben
Franklin (inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty)
Welcome to post-Constitutional America. While lip
service is paid to freedom, basic liberties such as the First Amendment
right to freedom of speech and association, the Fourth Amendment right
prohibiting illegal search and seizures, and the Sixth Amendment right
to a speedy and public trial are increasingly jeopardized. George Bush,
John Ashcroft, the Justice Department, and the FBI have tossed the
Constitution into the shredder as they perversely redefine concepts such
as democracy, patriotism, terrorism, and security. While Americans
continue to be entertained by the weapons of mass distraction, the
country moves ever more quickly toward tyranny. With the dystopias of
both Orwell�s 1984 (overt state domination) and Huxley�s Brave New World
(insidious thought control and intense normalization) on the horizon,
the gravest threats to freedom today stem not from the Al Quaeda, but
rather from our own government.
The State of the Nation
�The State � is the most flagrant negation, the most
cynical and complete negation of humanity.� Michael Bakunin
As defined within anarchist political theory, the state
is inherently a system of domination. Historically, the state evolved as
a bureaucratic apparatus and power system in its own right, and its goal
was to thwart all self-organization among members of society. The state
is the usurpation, alienation, and concentration of the power of the
community. Surveillance has always been a key function of the state,
beginning with the invention of writing. In modern times, Marxists
argued that the state is nothing but the ruling political arm of the
hegemony of the dominant economic class, the bourgeoisie. Critics point
out that the state has a relative autonomy and that the state and
capitalist class sometimes are at odds with one another.
That said, it nevertheless is true that the modern
democratic state largely is a vehicle to sanctify the profits and
property rights of capitalists, and that laws often are but legal
expressions of economic power, protecting particular not universal
interests. The flip side of state protection of corporate hegemony is
the suppression of peoples� interests and their civil liberties. Thus,
the realm of law and the domain of justice rarely overlap, and the state
uses both legal and paralegal (e.g., force and repression) means of
suppression.
Just as the CIA has been nothing but a tool to destroy
democracies outside our borders, the mission of the FBI has been to
squelch dissent from within. The worse excesses of the FBI�s COINTELPRO
(Counter Intelligence Program) -- whereby from 1956 to 1971 it
monitored, infiltrated, and disrupted sundry religious and political
organizations -- are resurfacing as the intelligence agencies are
collecting and sharing data on American citizens. Despite the Church
Committee reports of the mid-1970s that documented abuse of power by
U.S. intelligence agencies, nothing has changed except that we are
losing more liberties.
On few occasions was state power and anti-democratic
agendas so evident than during the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when Sen.
Joseph McCarthy led a Cold War crusade against First Amendment rights.
It is no exaggeration to say that we are entering a neo-McCarthyist
period. The terms and players have changed, but the situation is much
the same, with the Communist threat being replaced by the Terrorist
threat, and John Ashcroft taking the place of Joseph McCarthy. Both then
and now, the country demonized a foreign �Other� who threatened the
American way of life. Government and media employed simplistic scripts
of good and evil, with the U.S. defined as being unambiguously good and
the foreign enemy being unqualifiedly evil. Like before, the government
identified dangerous enemies everywhere, not only outside our country
but also, more menacingly they want us to believe, ensconced within our
borders. The attack on the foreign Other allows targeting the Other
within, and the domestic Other is any and every citizen expressing
dissent.
Origins of the Patriot Act
�I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel
and to revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact
that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading
army.� Henry David Thoreau
According to the U.S. government, the main domestic
enemies are not sleeper Al Quaeda cells, but rather animal and earth
liberation groups, namely the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Earth
Liberation Front (ELF), and Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC).
Because of their many arson attacks, including the spectacular hit on a
Vail ski lodge in 1998 (which the government called �the largest act of
eco-terrorism in US history�), the FBI has identified the ELF as �the
largest and most active U.S.-based terrorist group.� According to FBI
testimony to Congress in February 2002, the ALF and ELF together
committed over 600 �criminal acts� that inflicted over $43 million in
damage to animal industries.
But all three animal and earth liberation organizations
are major targets of state suppression as they are officially identified
as �domestic terrorist groups.� Indeed, not only the state has
stigmatized these groups as domestic terrorists, but in the creeping
rightward political direction, so too have otherwise progressive groups
like the Southern Poverty Law Center, some mainstream animal and
environmental groups, and much of the mass media. Indeed, even the
Humane Society of the United States has come under fire by animal
exploitation industries as a �terrorist organization.�
After the 9-11 attack, the Bush administration declared
a permanent state of emergency against terrorism. With America in a
panic, members of the Bush administration quickly went to work to draft
new anti-terrorist legislations and on October 26th, less than one month
after the attacks, President Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act.
One of the most important pieces of legislation in
American history, this 342-page tome was pushed through Congress before
few could even read it, and only a handful of politicians dared to
challenge it. Certainly the cleverest of all government acronyms, the
USA Patriot Act is short for �Uniting and Strengthening America by
Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism
Act.� The designator �Patriot� is painfully ironic, of course, for in
the Orwellian doublespeak of the Bush administration patriotism means
tyranny and the act aims to dismantle the very freedoms for which true
patriots profess to die. Framed as legislation to combat terrorists, the
Patriot Act proposes bold new measures to undermine the Constitution. It
is a mishmash of provisions to augment state power, with some changes
eliminating existing legal loopholes that mitigate government authority,
some updating laws for the age of the Internet, and some granting the
Justice Department powers previously proscribed by Congress but passed
because of the urgency of 9�11. The Patriot Act dissolves the system of
checks and balances that support the Constitution, as the Executive
Branch of government seizes control of legislation and the courts. Power
is becoming increasingly centralized in the Leviathan of the
contemporary state as other branches of the state become rubber stamp
mechanisms and alibis for totalitarianism.
The Patriot Act radicalized powers available to the
government already on the books from Title 18 of the United States Code,
which defines criminal policy including actions against property,
people, and the state. In addition, the first institutional threats to
animal liberation can be found in the Animal Enterprise Protection Act
of 1992. This involved a joint study between the attorney general and
the secretary of agriculture on �the extent and effects of domestic and
international terrorism on enterprises using animals for food or fiber
production, agriculture, research, or testing.� This is perhaps the
first time the word �terrorist� was applied to the U.S. animal
liberation movement, which began in the late 1970s.
Perhaps most importantly, the Patriot Act builds on laws
created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a secret
court created in 1978. The purpose of FISA was to review requests for
surveillance on suspected spies, terrorists, and other foreign enemies
of the U.S. in order to collect intelligence information. Unlike other
courts, the FISA court did not require probable cause that a crime is
being committed to obtain a warrant. Ashcroft tried to argue that the
Patriot Act grants the authority to use FISA to conduct a criminal
investigation and expand the powers of the executive branch accordingly.
This would in effect override the Fourth Amendment that �no warrant
shall issue, but upon probable cause.� The seven members of the FISA
court -- which denied only one out of 12,000 surveillance requests over
two decades of its existence -- unanimously rejected the Patriot Act aas
an abuse of government authority and denied Ashcroft its approval in
August 2002, as it chastised the FBI for misleading them on over 75
occasions. But Ashcroft argued the FISA court exceeded its authority,
and an appeals court overturned its decision.
Thus, the Patriot Act shifts the focus of FISA from
foreign to domestic intelligence; it thereby targets not only spies and
terrorists but also American citizens. By weakening the already
permissive nature of FISA and by applying these diminished standards to
domestic criminal investigations, the Patriot Act reendows the
government with COINTELPRO-like powers to spy, invade, disrupt, and
violate constitutionally protected rights. To use FISA secret courts and
procedures for domestic investigations, the FBI need only claim that
foreign intelligence gathering is a �significant� but not necessarily
the �primary� purpose of investigation, that any request it makes is
related somehow to its investigation.
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Part 2 of this article, explores some of the repressive implications of the Patriot Act, and I
will discuss its implications for animal rights and direct action in the
current era.
Go on to SpayDay USA
- Feb. 25th
Return to 2 February 2003 Issue
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