Here's a different Wolf report: - continued
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four -
you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It
can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose
minister preached that Jesus was in favour of
peace, found itself being investigated by the
Internal Revenue Service, while churches that
got Republicans out to vote, which is equally
illegal under US tax law, have been left alone.
Other harassment is more serious: the American
Civil Liberties Union reports that thousands of
ordinary American anti-war, environmental and
other groups have been infiltrated by agents: a
secret Pentagon database includes more than four
dozen peaceful anti-war meetings, rallies or
marches by American citizens in its category of
1,500 "suspicious incidents". The equally secret
Counterintelligence Field Activity (Cifa) agency
of the Department of Defense has been gathering
information about domestic organisations engaged
in peaceful political activities: Cifa is
supposed to track "potential terrorist threats"
as it watches ordinary US citizen activists. A
little-noticed new law has redefined activism
such as animal rights protests as "terrorism".
So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of
cat-and-mouse game. Nicholas D Kristof and
Sheryl WuDunn, the investigative reporters who
wrote China Wakes: the Struggle for the Soul of
a Rising Power, describe pro-democracy activists
in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, being arrested
and released many times. In a closing or closed
society there is a "list" of dissidents and
opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way
once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security
Administration confirmed that it had a list of
passengers who were targeted for security
searches or worse if they tried to fly. People
who have found themselves on the list? Two
middle-aged women peace activists in San
Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a
member of Venezuela's government - after
Venezuela's president had criticised Bush; and
thousands of ordinary US citizens.
Professor Walter F Murphy is emeritus of
Princeton University; he is one of the foremost
constitutional scholars in the nation and author
of the classic Constitutional Democracy. Murphy
is also a decorated former marine, and he is not
even especially politically liberal. But on
March 1 this year, he was denied a boarding pass
at Newark, "because I was on the Terrorist Watch list".
"Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a
lot of people from flying because of that," asked the airline employee.
"I explained," said Murphy, "that I had not so
marched but had, in September 2006, given a
lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the
web, highly critical of George Bush for his many
violations of the constitution."
"That'll do it," the man said.
Anti-war marcher? Potential terrorist. Support
the constitution? Potential terrorist. History
shows that the categories of "enemy of the
people" tend to expand ever deeper into civil life.
James Yee, a US citizen, was the Muslim chaplain
at Guantánamo who was accused of mishandling
classified documents. He was harassed by the US
military before the charges against him were
dropped. Yee has been detained and released
several times. He is still of interest.
Brandon Mayfield, a US citizen and lawyer in
Oregon, was mistakenly identified as a possible
terrorist. His house was secretly broken into
and his computer seized. Though he is innocent
of the accusation against him, he is still on the list.
It is a standard practice of fascist societies
that once you are on the list, you can't get off.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics
with job loss if they don't toe the line.
Mussolini went after the rectors of state
universities who did not conform to the fascist
line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged
academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's
Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist
Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
Academe is a tinderbox of activism, so those
seeking a fascist shift punish academics and
students with professional loss if they do not
"coordinate", in Goebbels' term, ideologically.
Since civil servants are the sector of society
most vulnerable to being fired by a given
regime, they are also a group that fascists
typically "coordinate" early on: the Reich Law
for the Re-establishment of a Professional Civil
Service was passed on April 7 1933.
Bush supporters in state legislatures in several
states put pressure on regents at state
universities to penalise or fire academics who
have been critical of the administration. As for
civil servants, the Bush administration has
derailed the career of one military lawyer who
spoke up for fair trials for detainees, while an
administration official publicly intimidated the
law firms that represent detainees pro bono by
threatening to call for their major corporate clients to boycott them.
Elsewhere, a CIA contract worker who said in a
closed blog that "waterboarding is torture" was
stripped of the security clearance she needed in order to do her job.
Most recently, the administration purged eight
US attorneys for what looks like insufficient
political loyalty. When Goebbels purged the
civil service in April 1933, attorneys were
"coordinated" too, a step that eased the way of
the increasingly brutal laws to follow.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East
Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s,
the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s,
China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and
would-be dictators target newspapers and
journalists. They threaten and harass them in
more open societies that they are seeking to
close, and they arrest them and worse in
societies that have been closed already.
The Committee to Protect Journalists says
arrests of US journalists are at an all-time
high: Josh Wolf (no relation), a blogger in San
Francisco, has been put in jail for a year for
refusing to turn over video of an anti-war
demonstration; Homeland Security brought a
criminal complaint against reporter Greg Palast,
claiming he threatened "critical infrastructure"
when he and a TV producer were filming victims
of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. Palast had
written a bestseller critical of the Bush administration.
Other reporters and writers have been punished
in other ways. Joseph C Wilson accused Bush, in
a New York Times op-ed, of leading the country
to war on the basis of a false charge that
Saddam Hussein had acquired yellowcake uranium
in Niger. His wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as
a CIA spy - a form of retaliation that ended her career.
Prosecution and job loss are nothing, though,
compared with how the US is treating journalists
seeking to cover the conflict in Iraq in an
unbiased way. The Committee to Protect
Journalists has documented multiple accounts of
the US military in Iraq firing upon or
threatening to fire upon unembedded (meaning
independent) reporters and camera operators from
organisations ranging from al-Jazeera to the
BBC. While westerners may question the accounts
by al-Jazeera, they should pay attention to the
accounts of reporters such as the BBC's Kate
Adie. In some cases reporters have been wounded
or killed, including ITN's Terry Lloyd in 2003.
Both CBS and the Associated Press in Iraq had
staff members seized by the US military and
taken to violent prisons; the news organisations
were unable to see the evidence against their staffers.
Over time in closing societies, real news is
supplanted by fake news and false documents.
Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified
documents to back up his claim that terrorists
had been about to attack the nation. The
yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern
America - it is not possible. But you can have,
as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed
out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news
well. What you already have is a White House
directing a stream of false information that is
so relentless that it is increasingly hard to
sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist
system, it's not the lies that count but the
muddying. When citizens can't tell real news
from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
to be cont.
__________________________________________
Dr. John M. Bennett
Curator, Avant Writing Collection
Rare Books & Manuscripts Library
The Ohio State University Libraries
1858 Neil Av Mall
Columbus, OH 43210 USA
(614) 292-3029
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.johnmbennett.net
http://www.library.osu.edu/sites/rarebooks/avantwriting/
___________________________________________
