[CTRL] Dismantle Covert Agencies

[William Shannon]

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=11861 Geov Parrish WorkingForChange 09.05.01 Get rid of the 'spooks' Time to do away with covert federal programs like the CIA and NSA As I wrote last week, today the Senate Intelligence (sic) Committee will hold hearings on a piece of very frightening, anti-democratic legislation, with wide bipartisan Congressional appeal for precisely that reason. The Official Secrets Act expands the secrecy that now shrouds anything labeled as essential to national security (a widely abused label) to apply to any information at all that someone in our government wants kept from the public. It's very likely to become law unless there's a public outcry. Agitation for a more open government, however, shouldn't stop with stopping the Open Secrets Act. The national security state itself is an abusive relic of the Cold War that still wields enormous, and increasing, influence around the globe. The entire apparatus of the post-WWII National Security Act -- the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and numerous other shadowy "black budget" outfits -- serves a very different purpose today than it did during the days of Stalin. But now, as then, anyone interested in greater democracy at home and around the world should be working for these agencies' abolition. The CIA, when it was exposed by the famous Church Committee hearings in the mid-1970s, was an agency that for a quarter-century had been undermining democracy and encouraging (or installing in power) totalitarians and fascists around the world, using methods in direct violation of numerous U.S. as well as international laws. For obvious reasons, we don't know as much about the United States' more recent covert operations. But there's plenty of evidence that covert agencies, funded by taxpayers, are still as lawless and anti-democratic as ever -- spying on citizens at home, plotting assassinations and coups abroad (sometimes quite overtly, as with Saddam Hussein), supporting drug kingpins and paramilitary thugs (the Drug War has been a financial windfall for the CIA -- on and off the books), and generally operating as a menace in the world's affairs. Even if it's not always an omnipotent force for evil -- and what government agency is that competent? -- the perception that it is, as with Gary Webb's crack cocaine/CIA allegations in 1996, is tremendously damaging to citizens' faith in our democracy. Meanwhile, over at the NSA, new technology and programs like Echelon are enabling American spooks to routinely monitor billions, maybe trillions of phone calls, faxes, e-mail, and other communications between ordinary citizens -- not suspected of any crime -- anywhere in the world. And our satellites, planned to be a weapons staging ground in the future, are already deploying mind-boggling technologies to identify, for example, what plant it is that you've got growing on your windowsill. (Crime tip #106: when committing a serious crime anywhere in the world -- e.g., advocating democratic control over corporations -- don't look up.) Why? Why is this necessary? With the Soviet Union gone, there's plenty of evidence that the CIA et al. haven't given up on old, murderous habits (c.f. Colombia or Central Africa). But if the primary national security threat to the U.S. today is, in fact, terrorism, then the "intelligence" that's needed is a police function, and therefore one that should be subject to the usual limits that should be placed on police powers in a democracy. Extralegal tactics like those engaged in by the National Security Act agencies are the hallmarks of a police state; the tactics, and the agencies, should be abolished. The most troubling trend, of course, is that absent a Communist Menace, much of American spying in recent years has been given over to ensuring competitive economic advantages for the U.S. -- in other words, working closely with and for the benefit of U.S.-based corporations or transnationals doing business in the U.S.. In Colombia, there's oil; in Africa, diamonds. Industrial espionage isn't just the mental image many of us have, of a spy sneaking out of factory with, say, a new Greek recipe for baby food. It's far more frightening: open license for spying not just on governments, but any private citizen who might be involved in the world's economy -- that is, all six plus billion of us. That, or the more traditional mercenary army approach, is then done at the explicit direction of powerful, self-interested, privately held corporate interests for whom human life, or the eradication of it, may be merely another cost of doing business while providing value to shareholders. National security has nothing to do with this; it's all about money and power. If the abuses have been horrific in the past, they may be that much worse today, and as technology advances, more terrifying and deadly still tomorrow. Who's going to stop them? It's got to be us. Every covert agency in our government must be abolished. Period. Demand it. Dismantle them. Now.