DRScoundrels

“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty … your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and … give ammunition to America’s enemies.”

-Attorney General John Ashcroft, addressing the Senate Judiciary Committee on December 6, 2001

If a state is to build myths and narratives on which to justify its existence and its actions, it must by necessity exclude or marginalize all competing viewpoints or narratives. There are many ways of accomplishing this end, but chief among the state’s methods of controlling narrative and myth are two specific means: banning or outlawing citizen surveillance, and quarantining dissent. The state must not only tell its stories, it must limit the exposure of all other stories. Furthermore, the state must link adherence to the official version to patriotism while simultaneously implying or stating outright that any deviation from the official state narrative of an event is heresy and sedition.

The facts are not relevant to the state’s narrative. In point of fact, the facts and the evidence are very often the two items which must be quarantined and even destroyed. In a patriotic society as defined by the state, dissent is the lowest form of sedition. In a patriotic society as defined by the people, dissent is the necessary and even holy means of checking the power of a state in order to affirm the power of the people and the constitutional limitations placed upon a government.

To dare to speak the objective truth as defined by the evidence in a statist construct where the official line deviates from the evidence is to engage in treachery. It is a direct challenge to the false unity which defines statism, the unity which is built around a gigantic shared delusion about what the state is, what the state does, and what the state’s power implies for the power and self-determination of its people. It is to stand in stark opposition to the totalitarian impulse which lies at the core of every pro-statist, for the statist is incapable of conceiving that rights are natural to man, that men have intrinsic value and dignity apart from what the state acknowledges or imparts to men, for the state is the source and wellspring of authority.

To say that men have worth apart from the quantification of the state, to insist that individuals have power beyond what the state acknowledges are things that the statist cannot abide. An individual who has such things apart from the state does not appeal to the state for the legitimization of his self-determination or for authorization to act on his own behalf or in his own interest. The statist would have us all pretend that constitutions are foundation upon which rights rest, that before whatever document birthed forth by founders and framers, there were no rights or powers vested to individuals.

The fundamental bifurcation between those who ardently defend freedom as existing before the state and those who insist on freedom’s origins within the state is this: we who believe that the state exists only to acknowledge what already exists within man make to pretense of appealing to the state to legitimize what we believe is ours by birth: freedom and self-determination, the state be damned if it insists otherwise. We are creatures of value in and of ourselves, and we wear the crown by virtue of our own birth. We recognize mutual interests and make our associations based on those interests, but we do not necessarily believe that this associations have to give rise to the state. So long as the state serves our interest, we will tolerate it. The minute it does not, we will utterly abolish the state and tear down its ministries, and, if its ministers and bureaucrats demonstrate the temerity to object to free men acting with self-determination, we have no problem in making of the ministers and bureaucrats martyrs for obsolete states which have outlived their usefulness to us. To be perfectly clear, we believe that the precedent of past dead tyrants will discourage would be tyrants in the future. The more brutally we dispose of such individuals, the more efficiently we may discourage those who might try to emulate their behavior patterns in the future.

The state makes no grant to us; we grant everything to the state. The problem with our fundamental assumption about the state is this: we assumed that we could define its role, enact its bodies, and leave it to the limited tasks which we originally established for it. We have been wrong at every turn. The state only metastasizes over time, to where it claims and arrogates greater and greater amounts of power for itself in the name of evolving needs and changing practical demands. By its very nature, it comes to compete with its fundamental reason for existence: the defense and expansion of an individual’s liberty and self-determination is mutually exclusive to the power of the state and its ministers. Whatever freedoms are retained by the individual serve as a limitation upon state power. It is only natural that the two should clash absolutely within time. Individuals and states both covet the same end for themselves: greater power and self-determination. Only one of the two can possess the full measure of that which it covets. For one to succeed, the other must be denied.

For the state and its ministers, and the interests they inevitably come to represent as the corruptible state lurches towards its degraded destiny, the denial of individuals is contingent upon the manipulation of their consent. In the perverse methodology of the state, individuals are seduced into consenting to the surrender of their own freedoms, under the guise of making small and reasonable sacrifices to prevent the ultimate loss of their lives from some external threat. We know of this primary justification by its odious nomenclature, which is all to ubiquitous these days in our government’s appeal to individuals and courts as it seeks to voraciously consume liberty in order to expand its own authority: national security. National security from the perspective of genuine patriots exists solely to defend and expand liberty and self-determination, and not as an excuse for the surrender of either of those two precious commodities.

For the state to overcome our dissent, it must drown us out. It must marginalize us, it must control the language and the classification which flows from language. We are not patriots; we are seditionists and traitors, we are even potential terrorists. We are aiding and abetting the enemy, whomever he may be, by daring to show the temerity to question the state’s nostrums. When we exercise our rights, the state must find a way of restricting the exercise of our rights in order to limit our effectiveness. The state finds ways of doing so by establishing “free speech zones” where individuals who dare to exercise their constitutional rights to free speech, which includes the right to protest and to publicly and peaceably assemble, are corralled like cattle away from the media and the representatives of the state so as to limit their exposure. In this manner, the state may maintain the appearance of unbroken national unity: ““When Bush travels around the United States, the Secret Service visits the location ahead of time and orders local police to set up “free speech zones” or “protest zones” where people opposed to Bush policies (and sometimes sign-carrying supporters) are quarantined. These zones routinely succeed in keeping protesters out of presidential sight and outside the view of media covering the event (http://www.amconmag.com/article/2003/dec/15/00012/).”

People who support the line of the state, whose fawning and unchallenging adulation of the state ensures a photo-op where the President can be re-affirmed at every turn as a leader beloved by the people, make it to the parade route, where the cameras dutifully record their signs of support, their smiles, and their regurgitation of various “patriotic” slogans. You see, free speech in the view of the statist is that which conforms to a norm which flatters the state. The free speech which might embarrass or challenge the statist’s narrative or myth construction has to be hidden away from view. Those citizens with enough courage to resist being corralled to an area where their dissent is freely permitted away from public view are arrested and charged with crimes:

“When Bush came to the Pittsburgh area on Labor Day 2002, 65-year-old retired steel worker Bill Neel was there to greet him with a sign proclaiming, “The Bush family must surely love the poor, they made so many of us.” The local police, at the Secret Service’s behest, set up a “designated free-speech zone” on a baseball field surrounded by a chain-link fence a third of a mile from the location of Bush’s speech. The police cleared the path of the motorcade of all critical signs, though folks with pro-Bush signs were permitted to line the president’s path. Neel refused to go to the designated area and was arrested for disorderly conduct; the police also confiscated his sign. Neel later commented, “As far as I’m concerned, the whole country is a free speech zone. If the Bush administration has its way, anyone who criticizes them will be out of sight and out of mind.”

At Neel’s trial, police detective John Ianachione testified that the Secret Service told local police to confine “people that were there making a statement pretty much against the president and his views” in a so-called free speech area. Paul Wolf, one of the top officials in the Allegheny County Police Department, told Salon that the Secret Service “come in and do a site survey, and say, ‘Here’s a place where the people can be, and we’d like to have any protesters put in a place that is able to be secured.’” Pennsylvania district judge Shirley Rowe Trkula threw out the disorderly conduct charge against Neel, declaring, “I believe this is America. Whatever happened to ‘I don’t agree with you, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it’?”Similar suppressions have occurred during Bush visits to Florida. A recent St. Petersburg Times editorial noted, “At a Bush rally at Legends Field in 2001, three demonstrators—two of whom were grandmothers—were arrested for holding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone. And last year, seven protesters were arrested when Bush came to a rally at the USF Sun Dome. They had refused to be cordoned off into a protest zone hundreds of yards from the entrance to the Dome.” One of the arrested protesters was a 62-year-old man holding up a sign, “War is good business. Invest your sons.” The seven were charged with trespassing, ‘obstructing without violence and disorderly conduct (ibid, emphasis added).’”

The narrative which makes it to the news is one which is poorer due to the controlled and intentional omission of any coverage of dissenting viewpoints. The person watching at home or reading the newspaper, simply has no reason to believe that his state and his fellow citizens are not largely in accord with one another. The sense of unity upon which statism depends in order to continue its abuses against individuals is maintained, and the encroaching statist continues his invasion and conquest of personal freedom and self-determination under the cover of and insipid and asinine version of patriotism.

The state arrogates for itself the right to surveil and compile vast amounts of information on its citizens, often at great taxpayer expense. The New York Police Department placed 56 activists under 24 hour surveillance in the lead up to the 2004 Republican National Convention. The NYPD assigned six officers and one supervisor to track each of the 56 activists(http://www.democracynow.org/2004/8/19/the_return_of_cointelpro_fbi_launches).

That’s 392 individuals to track and surveil 56 activists around the country, and the individuals in question are officers of a local police department which arguably lacks the jurisdiction to monitor anyone outside of New York City itself. The law is of little consequence to its enforcement agencies, if and when it functions as an impediment to what they perceive to as necessary to carry out whatever mission they are attempting at a given time. At the same time the NYPD was engaged in its surveillance of the 56 activists, the FBI was also interrogating activists in Colorado, Kansas, and other states about their plans to protest at the convention. Since when is protesting at a political gathering grounds for interrogation by the FBI or any other law enforcement agency?

When some of the individuals in question were arrested at the 2004 Republican National Convention, they sued to compel the NYPD to release 1,800 pages of records detailing their surveillance in order to refute the claims by the police department that its surveillance provided reasonable cause to arrest and detain the activists in question. The NYPD predictably did not wish to have to reveal its records, and so it fought the request in court and won. The courts held that a “‘law enforcement privilege’ outweighed the need to open the documents to public scrutiny
(http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/police-surveillance-records-may-stay-secret-judges-say/).”

The classic statist response to any request for transparency is “trust us,” and if that doesn’t suffice to deter the inquiries, the state claims some amorphous privilege which renders its internal workings impenetrable to the very citizens who pay for its functions. The last thing a state wishes for is transparency that is enforceable and automatic. The state requires secrecy not as a valid means of defending individual liberties or maintaining the security of the individuals it exists to protect and serve, but rather as a means of shielding itself from embarrassing revelations which would serve to evoke ridicule of the state’s claims and ultimately reveal just how corrupt, incompetent, and unjustified the state is in its actions.

The reality is that the state is neither particularly efficient nor particularly competent on matters of security, and the state very often seeks to invoke security concerns to conceal information which would directly serve to indict the officers of the state of corruption, incompetence, and gross negligence. Nowhere is this more true than on the issue of terrorism.

The dominant narrative of the state is that intelligence was not communicated or shared among its various agencies due to interagency turf struggles over jurisdiction, but nothing could be further from the truth. The intelligence was widely available, widely disseminated, and well known within both the INS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Central Intelligence Agency. At one point, the FBI even had an inmate working in the adjoining cell with Ramzi Yousef, the Al-Qaeda bombing mastermind who designed the first bomb which detonated under the World Trade Center in 1994, and that inmate’s cooperation generated leads which for all intents and purposes should have interrupted Al Qaeda’s operations. The FBI had a phone tap directly on Ramzi Yousef’s phone calls to a Dallas burger joint, and had recordings of each and every phone call. The FBI also had an informant directly inside of the mosque where much of Al-Qaeda’s activity was taking place, but its officials failed to act on the intelligence and prevent the various plots it had intelligence on from going forward.

Time and time again, the FBI had opportunities, reasonable suspicion, and grounds for legitimate search warrants and even actionable intelligence which would have provided the Department of Justice with ample evidence to gain an indictment against various operatives of Al-Qaeda in this country.

In the case of the African embassy bombings, Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed walked into the U.S. embassy at Nairobi in November 1997 and informed the CIA officers at the embassy that a truck bombing plot was imminent and underway. Prior to his walk in to the Kenyan embassy, Ahmed had interviewed with the Kenyan police and confessed to taking surveillance photos. The CIA shared Ahmed’s warnings with two other government agencies, only to have senior officers dismiss Ahmed as a “fabricator” and have him was deported from Kenya. He would turn up later in Tanzania, arrested for his involvement in the truck bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam (282 Lance, Peter Triple Cross ).

That is not all: in 1996, an informant warned the CIA that the Nairobi office of the Saudi Al-Haramain Foundation contained operatives engaged in a plot to plant a bomb in front of the U.S. embassy. The CIA dispatched a counterterror team to Nairobi, where the Kenyan police arrested the 9 suspects and detained them, but the CIA’s Nairobi station chief refused to petition the Kenyan authorities for permission which would have enabled the counterterrorist unit to question the 9 suspects. The CIA’s higher ups did not bother to challenge the Nairobi station chief’s intransigence on the matter.

What is more, Ambassador Prudence Bushnell relayed concerns that the embassy’s location in Nairobi was “extremely vulnerable to a terrorist attack.” Her concerns were put directly through to the State Department on December 15, 1997, and a follow up message conveyed her concern that “the embassy’s security profile…is cause for concern (http://nyti.ms/8YQhuB).” By January 1998, the CIA’s deputy station chief had been mugged outside of the embassy, and the authorities were cognizant of a conspiracy to kill Ambassador Bushnell. General John Zinni concurred with Bushnell’s concerns and notified the State Department that the embassy was susceptible to attack, but his offer to assist the embassy by sending in specialists to alter its security profile and make it more difficult to attack was refused by the State Department (282, Lance).

The two warning communiques which went out after Ahmed’s walk in would have come through the FBI’s Alec Station and Special Agent Dan Coleman, who had searched the computer files of Al-Qaeda member and operative Wadih El-Hage, whose files revealed the presence of a terrorist cell connected to the “Haj,” who the FBI knew was none other than Osama Bin Laden. When Ihab Ali, an Egyptian cab driver who had personally flown a private jet for Bin Laden, came across information which indicated that the FBI had spoken to Wadih El-Hage, he notified Ali Mohammed by letter, and Mohammed called El-Hage, who was running a tire shop in Arlington, Texas. What is more, the FBI was aware of El-Hage’s affiliation with Osama Bin Laden, because when Special Agent Dan Coleman confiscated El-Hage’s laptop during a search, he also seized various address books containing both Bin Laden’s phone number and that of Ali Mohammed.

In August of 1996, U.S. intelligence agencies had already tapped El-Hage’s phones and gleaned information alerting them to the Kenyan cell and its affiliation with Bin Laden. One of the phones was used by Wadih El-Hage for the purpose of calling Bin Laden. The information was shared with the U.S. attorney’s office, who then convened a grand jury to ascertain Bin Laden’s involvement with al Qaeda (269 ibid). The federal authorities were also aware of the fact that El-Hage and his associate Harun Fazhul were guilty of providing fake passports to members of Al-Qaeda in Azerbaijan and Sudan, as well as passing communications between members in Afghanistan, Egypt, Yemen, Italy, Germany, England, and the United States. In February 1997, El-Hage had been recorded calling Mohammed Atef, and his associate Fazhul was recorded stating that El-Hage was visiting Bin Laden in Afghanistan. Moreover, the authorities would learn that Bin Laden had instructed El-Hage to “‘militarize’ the East African cells (272, Lance).”

Let’s review: we have the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice and the SDNY U.S. Attorney’s office all aware of Wadih El-Hage’s direct links to Osama Bin Laden, his providing of fake passports to members of Bin Laden’s terrorist network, and even his visits to Bin Laden in Afghanistan. These agencies were also aware of the existence of a group in Kenya affiliated with Bin Laden through El-Hage’s laptop, which was in the possession of the CIA’s Alec Station, whose sole purpose was to investigate Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and the CIA had shared their knowledge of the walk in of Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed, who point blank warned the CIA officers at the Nairobi embassy that an attack was imminent and planned. What is more, according to the intelligence sources in the article “Unheeded Warnings: A special report Before Bombings, Omens and Fears,” the State Department “was briefed about the presence of Mr. bin Laden’s operatives in Kenya, ”before, during, and after” the August 1997 raid on Mr. Hage’s house,” and “some of those reports referred to Osama bin Laden in the first paragraph (http://nyti.ms/8YQhuB ).”

What a shock it must have been on August 7th, 1998, when a suicide truck bomb exploded in Nairobi, Kenya; and a second exploded minutes afterward in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. There was no way that the CIA, FBI, State Department, the Department of Justice, or anyone else could have known that such attacks would have come. It was entirely unforeseeable with all of the wiretaps, address books, laptops, and recorded conversations, not to mention the walk-in off of the street by Mustafa Mahmud Said Ahmed, who, incidentally, had told his interrogators that the attack would begin with the bombers detonating a stun grenade in order to attract embassy workers to the windows right at the point when they would shatter under the blast wave’s advance (292, ibid). 224 individuals lost their lives, and four thousand were injured that day because the officials of a state failed miserably at the task they were entrusted to complete. They had the resources of the world’s most powerful nation, ample evidence, months of advance warning, and plenty of opportunities to interdict the conspiracy before it killed their countrymen. But they didn’t.

The official narrative, the one that the state would have us believe, is that interagency cooperation wasn’t what it should have been. There were conflicting reports about Mustafa Ahmed’s veracity. Not all of the accumulated intelligence was shared in an expeditious manner. Intelligence funding had been cut under the Clinton Administration. But the real narrative, the one that no state could afford to acknowledge, is this: the institutional incompetence, arrogance, and insular corruption which is the hallmark and inevitable end of every statist bureaucracy prevented the state from fulfilling its essential mission: to protect the lives of its citizens from attack.

While Wadih El Hage’s connection to Osama Bin Laden was well-documented, and his telephone conversations recorded, and his laptop containing evidence of his knowledge and support of an East African terrorist cell was in the custody of law enforcement and intelligence agencies, the federal government saw fit to allow El Hage to go about his existence as a free man selling tires in Arlington, Texas. (You can pick out Peter Lance’s excellent book Triple Cross, which documents in great detail the government’s failings on the African embassy bombings and the 9/11 attacks, here: http://bit.ly/9UgY9P). They also failed to interdict the plot and stop the bombings from occurring despite multiple warnings in the lead up to the bombings, with ample evidence of both El Hage’s and Ali Mohammed’s involvement in the plot. At any time, either of these two men and their associates could have been surveilled and arrested, and it is likely that the bombings would never have occurred.

The official narrative of the state in such instances is one which minimizes the state’s culpability, and which serves only to exculpate its bureaucracies from accountability for their failure to preserve the lives of citizens and civilians. The state does not arrest individuals like Wadih El Hage, or Ali Mohammed, or any of their numerous co-conspirators in a timely fashion which would prevent their setting events into motion that claim actual lives; but when 65 year-old Bill Neel carries a protest sign denigrating the president outside of a so-called “free speech zone,” he is immediately arrested and charged with criminal activity. The absurdity is evident to all but the most pro-statist individual, and the reality is also evident: the state does not exist to protect the lives or the liberties of those citizens who delegate power to the state for those very purposes; it exists solely to preserve itself at their expense and often at the expense of their safety and their very lives.

The state’s idea of national security is the preservation and enhancement of its own power; moreover, it is the preservation of its own reputation from ridicule and accountability for its myriad failings. In short, you may not criticize the state even if the criticism is wholly deserved. You may not access information which would bolster your contention of the state’s incompetence or corruption, for that information is often sequestered behind the claim of national security or some ambiguous law enforcement purpose. To pretend as pro-statists do that the state has our good in mind when it engages in such machinations to deny us the information we seek, and the information that our press seeks, is to engage in willful self-delusion. It is beneath anyone who would claim for themselves the mantle of a thinking individual with a mere rudimentary capacity for logic and reason. It is to indulge a sclerotic, inefficient, and pathetic state in its attempts to evade accountability to the very people it supposedly exists to serve. It is wrong.

There is no patriotism to be found in such an obstreperous embrace of the state which mindlessly screams that those who dare to question the state and its various apparatuses are unpatriotic abetters of our supposed enemies. We who question the state perform the highest service imaginable to the real national interest: that of our own interest in staying alive and in securing our lives, liberty, and property from the threat of statist incompetence. Sunshine, as Louis Brandeis once noted, is indeed the best disinfectant. Only a state totally corroded from within by the disease and infection of corruption, ineptitude, and utter incompetence would resist such a remedy as transparency could provide. Only a state which works in service of such corruption and incompetence and against the interests of its own people would dare to reply against those people when they rise up in defense of that interest to insist that the state give a full accounting of its actions. Our security lies in openness and honesty from those who govern and hold the power of the state granted to them by the people. That grant of power may just as easily be withdrawn or taken back. As Cicero defined it in his famous treatise on the subject, “…law, whose function is to enjoin right action and to forbid wrongdoing (The Law, Book I, 17)…”

The law is not to be an agent of obstruction to justice or the identification of wrongdoing by the state in the name of some pernicious concept of security. We are all, including the agents and bureaucracies of the state, accountable before the law to enjoin ourselves to right action in order to avoid wrongdoing. Should this basic standard of law fail to guide the state, its individuals will not too long be behind it in their own lapse into utter degradation. If the state perverts the law it is entrusted to enforce against its purpose; so that it enjoins wrongdoing and prohibits right action, as in the case of an individual, who, unlike Bill Neel, goes willfully and quietly to the free speech zone rather than insisting upon the acknowledgement of his rights up to the point of forcing overreach by the state, we have lost all reason to exist as a society and all basis to call ourselves a society of law and order. We are but savages pretending to exist in order, mired in chaos and regressing each day we accept such an existence. We exist according to the standard of Isaiah 59:15: “Yea, truth faileth; and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey: and the LORD saw it, and it displeased Him that there was no judgement.”

He that departs from evil in our society, or who stands on what he knows to be right and true, like Bill Neel, does indeed make of himself a prey. He is surveilled by six New York City Police Department officers and their supervisor across state lines, or led away like Bill Neel in handcuffs, off to jail for the offense of having dared to exercise his constitutional rights and God-given conscience to express a sentiment against what he feels in his heart and mind to be wrong. And so it is that I conclude this section by noting the following: To those who scare peace-loving people with the false idea that their liberty must be curbed in order to secure freedom … your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and … give ammunition to America’s enemies both within and without.