Police State

US attorney general's Patriot tour: the specter of a police state
By Bill Vann
13 September 2003

The Bush administration has seized upon the second anniversary of the
September 11 attacks as an opportunity to push for a further expansion
of the police-state powers it has assumed in the name of fighting a
"war on terrorism."

On the eve of the anniversary, Bush traveled to Quantico, Virginia, to
speak before FBI academy cadets and Marine Corps personnel. The trip
was in keeping with a well-established pattern in which the US
president's public appearances are largely restricted to audiences
packed with police and military personnel.

Bush’s message in Quantico was to demand that the US Congress untie
the hands of our law enforcement officials in the war against
terror Specifically, he called for the introduction of
administrative subpoenas- in cases where suspects are alleged to be
terrorists, allowing police to seize sensitive documents without
seeking court approval. He likewise demanded greater powers to hold
suspects without bail€”including those who are not charged with any
violent activity—as well as a further expansion of the death
penalty.

These measures constitute elements of the so-called Patriot II act,
also known as the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, a draft
legislative package that was prepared in secret and then leaked to the
press in February. Other measures in this act include increased powers
of the government to carry out secret arrests and indefinite
detentions and would allow the US attorney general to strip Americans
of their US citizenship if they are deemed to have provided support to
a group labeled by the government as terrorist.

Reaction to these repressive proposals was so hostile that the
administration has yet to present it to Congress. Bush's speech seemed
to suggest that it will now seek to push them through piecemeal.

The president's speech in Quantico followed on the heels of an 18-city
tour by US Attorney General John Ashcroft that was billed as a defense
of the Patriot Act, the most sweeping expansion of the government’s
powers of search, seizure and detention to be enacted in US history.
It was pushed through Congress with near unanimous support of
Democrats and Republicans alike and almost no debate in the weeks
following the September 11 attacks.

Ashcroft appeared before invitation-only audiences consisting of
uniformed police officers, prosecutors, military officials and
right-wing Republican politicians. In city after city, the number of
protesters outside these meetings either equaled or exceeded the
attorney general’s law enforcement audiences. In one of his last
appearances, in Boston, over 1,200 demonstrated as Ashcroft spoke to a
largely empty Faneuil Hall.

The Justice Department billed Ashcroft's tour as an attempt to clear
up alleged public misconceptions about the Patriot Act a recent CBS
News poll indicated that more than half of the population is concerned
about losing your civil liberties as a result of recent measures
enacted by the Bush administration to fight terror. Even the Justice
Department's Inspector General's office found itself compelled to
release a report in June detailing the abuse of 762 immigrants who
were rounded up in the aftermath of September 11 and never charged
with any crime.

Yet there was little indication, given the tightly controlled
audiences and restrictions upon the media, that the attorney general's
aim was to convince the public. Rather, the tour had much more the
character of rallying the forces of state repression nationwide.

He spoke in messianic terms about their work, describing it as a
a tribute to the dead of September 11� Appearing in New York City just
two days before the September 11 anniversary, Ashcroft declared:
"Providence, which has bestowed upon America the responsibility to
lead the world in liberty, has also handed America a great trust: to
provide the security that ensures liberty. We accept this trust not
with anger or arrogance but with belief."

This right-wing Christian fundamentalist and rabid opponent of civil
liberties is carrying out a mission for an administration that is
confronting an unprecedented political crisis. Even its right-wing
supporters like columnist Robert Novak have begun to speak of the
White House confronting a "perfect storm" combining a debacle for the
US occupation in Iraq with a continuing unemployment crisis at home.
Polls now indicate that Bush's approval ratings have fallen to the
level that preceded the September 11, 2001 attack.

This is a government of gangsters installed through the theft of an
election. Men like Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft and Rumsfeld accept no
principles of legality and are influenced not in the slightest by
democratic sensibilities. Their commitment lies to the thin layer at
the top of society that has amassed enormous personal wealth and has
used it to manipulate the US political system to its own ends.

In a column published in the New York Times Friday, Paul Krugman makes
the following point about those who presently control the government:
Nor can the members of this administration simply lose like
gentlemen. For one thing, that's not how they operate. Furthermore,
everything suggests that there are major scandals- involving energy
policy, environmental policy, Iraq contracts and cooked
intelligence that would burst into the light of day if the current
management lost its grip on power. So these people must win, at any
cost.�

Krugman warns of an election campaign that will be "probably the
nastiest of modern American history" predicting that anyone who
opposes the incumbent administration will be portrayed as a terrorist
accomplice.

While this is no doubt true, any serious reflection on the present
crisis of the Bush administration and its record in office poses far
more troubling questions.

Bush and his cabinet have embraced murder as an instrument of foreign
policy, with the US president publicly bragging about the kind of
operations that intelligence agencies formerly denied they had ever
conducted. They have repudiated international law, carrying out two
wars of aggression in the space of a year and a half and holding
prisoners of war in cages in Guantanamo Bay naval base under
conditions that grossly violate the Geneva Conventions.

Is there any reason to believe that this administration will not
resort to similar methods at home if it feels it is threatened with
being thrown out of office? As Krugman suggests, these are men who
face the real prospect of imprisonment for criminal activities if they
lose power.

There are the intimate connections of the administration with such
massive corporate scandals as Enron, the awarding of the no-bid
contracts to Vice President Cheney's former company and the fomenting
of an illegal and predatory war against Iraq on false pretexts. There
is also the issue of September 11 itself, and the still unanswered
questions concerning why the administration failed to act on advance
warnings of an impending terrorist attack that then provided it with
the justification for military and economic policies that it had
planned well in advance.

As Ashcrof's tour demonstrates, the administration is turning to the
forces of state repression and the most backward elements in American
society. It is attempting to mobilize these layers as a bulwark
against growing opposition to the continuing war and occupation in
Iraq and to a social and economic policy that has led to the greatest
polarization between the wealthy and the broad mass of working people
in the country's history.

This is a government that has demanded-and in the case of immigrant
detainees has already exercised - the right to carry out the kind of
police-state measures that created thousands of "disappeared" under
the military dictatorships that held power in Argentina and elsewhere
in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.

Ashcroft is now preaching the divine right of repression. How far is
it from what the administration is now proposing to actively
encouraging his police audiences to moonlight as state-sanctioned
death squads against its political opponents?

American working people cannot afford to reassure themselves with the
conception that "it can't happen here"� There is a logic to the
predatory and militarist policy that those who rule America pursue
abroad. Faced with mass opposition, they will move toward similar
methods at home as well.