Responding to terror perpetrated by 19 men with box-cutters a decade ago, the U.S. government has now put hundreds of millions of innocent Americans into countless military, intelligence and law enforcement databases without suspecting them of any crime. The National Security Agency eavesdrops on over 1.7 billion pieces of our email, phone and other communications each day. And the government has spent trillions of dollars on often worthless “homeland” security bureaucrats and technologies. In the name of enhancing security, the government has damaged the authentic security and future of the nation.
Propagandistically “selling” the new security institutions and technologies to Americans has served the interests of demagogic politicians, a conflict-loving mainstream media and wealthy contractors from the military-industrial-surveillance complex. But this has come at the expense of everyone else in the nation, now and in the future. Terrorists and criminals can easily evade most of these technologies; ordinary citizens won’t.
As documented by Dana Priest and William Arkin in their new book, Top Secret America, even the government has no real idea how much money’s being spent or who’s doing what in these new agencies; worse, they are so secretive, duplicative, and inefficient that they simply don’t work.
Mission creep and the rarity of actual terror events means that these new Keystone Cops are increasingly using the awesome new powers and technologies for petty crime (like ensuring that proceeds from neighborhood magazine subscription sales aren’t pocketed) or for repression of peaceful dissenters, environmental and anti-war activists, animal rights and pro- and anti-abortion rights activists, Tea Party members and libertarians. The FBI, CIA, the military’s new Northern Command and the top-secret Joint Special Operational Command, in partnership with local police, corporations and the 72 duplicative and ineffective “fusion centers,” use the powerful new technologies and surveillance authorities to secretly access our bank records, emails, airline and other travel information.
President Obama has compounded the errors of Bush and Cheney by continuing the same flawed approaches. He has escalated some of the most indefensible and counterproductive techniques, including the global drone attacks now condemned even by Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, and increased reliance upon extra-judicial killings or assassinations that sidestep fair trials and due process by targeting even U.S. citizens.
These may produce some short-term “successes,” but they yield long-term catastrophe as revenge kicks in, further offshoots of al Qaeda are created, nations like Yemen and the Philippines and Pakistan are destabilized, and the U.S. creates more terrorists.
As Abraham Lincoln noted: “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
Chip Pitts is a board member of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a grassroots organization helping to restore constitutional rights, and teaches international law and human rights at Stanford Law School.
