The end of america a letter of warning to a young patriot a citizen's call to action by naomi wolf

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The END of AMERICA A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot A Citizen's Call to Action by Naomi Wolf …


a stunning indictment of the Bush administration and Congress, best-selling author Naomi Wolf lays out her case for saving American democracy. In authoritative research and documentation Wolf explains how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in the early years of the 20th century‚'s worst dictatorships such as Germany, Russia, China, and Chile.


In this timely call to arms, Naomi Wolf compels us to face the way our free America is under assault. She warns us‚-with the straight-to-fellow-citizens urgency of one of Thomas Paine‚'s revolutionary pamphlets‚-that we have little time to lose if our children are to live in real freedom.



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  • 1. The END of AMERICA letter of warning to a young patriot A Citizen’s call to action Naomi Wolf
  • 2. For Arnold Hyman and Wende Jager Hymanand for Chris and Jennifer Gandin Le,who love this nation.Copyright © 2007 by Naomi Wolf. All rights reserved.No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any meanswithout permission in writing from the publisher.Developmental Editor: John Barstow Editorial Director: Shay Totten Project Manager: Emily Foote Copy Editor: Nancy Crompton Fact-checker: Mary Fratini Book Designer: Peter HolmPrinted in Canada on recycled paper. First printingjuly 200710 987654321Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataWolf, Naomi.The end of America : a letter of warning to a young patriot / Naomi Wolf. p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN 978-1-933392-79-01. Civil rights—United States. 2. Abuse of administrative power—United States. 3. National security—United States. 4. United States—Politics and government—2001- I. Tide.JC599.U5W63 2007 323.490973—dc222007024640Chelsea Green Publishing CompanyPost Office Box 428White River Junction, VT 05001(802) As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such a twilight that we all must be most aware of change in the air—however slight—lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. Justice William O. Douglas We began with freedom. Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • 4. PREFACEI wrote this book because I could no longer ignore the echoes between events in the past and forces at work today.When I discussed these issues informally with a good friend who is the daughter of Holocaust survivors—and whoteaches students about the American system of government as a kind of personal response to what happened to herfamily—she insisted that I present this argument.I also wrote it as I did because, in the midst of my research, I went to Christopher Le and Jennifer Gandins wedding.Jennifer is one of our graduates—a gifted young writer who is the daughter of a Texas minister. Her Americanheartland roots reach back generations.Chris—the "young patriot" of the subtitle—is a born activist, a natural grassroots leader and teacher. He helps run theNational Suicide Prevention Lifeline and is active on a range of issues. They are characteristic of the kinds of theidealistic young people—idealistic Americans—who need to lead our nation out of this crisis.I attended Chris and Jennifers wedding on a warm day in early autumn. It was a scene of perfect Americana: the bestof this nations freedom, bounty, and shelter.The celebration took place on a green slope along the Hudson River Valley. Jennifers family decorated the ceremonyand reception sites in billowing white chiffon; Chriss mother and his female relatives cooked for days to createwonderful Vietnamese dishes. Jennifer appeared for the vows themselves, glowing, in a white ao dai, the traditionalVietnamese wedding gown, then changed for the dancing—appearing equally radiant—into a purple American ballgown. There were children playing, trees soughing in the wind, the sun dappling the scene; there were toasts andgifts, a great DJ, and bad jokes. Friends of different races and backgrounds were dancing and chatting, and sharing inthe affection we all had for the young couple. It was a scene of everything this country should be.I was there having emerged from my reading and could not ignore the terrible storm clouds gathering in the nation atlarge, and I felt that the young couple needed one more gift: the tools to fully realize and defend their freedom; themeans to be sure that their own children would be born in liberty.This was not an academic thought. Chriss mother, Le Mai, who welcomed the guests with wit and style, is a heroine.She fled Vietnam as a young woman, a refugee—a "boat person"—with her less-than-two-months-old Vu (Chriss birthname) in her arms. She knew she had to risk her own life and her childs life for the chance to live in freedom.With our own until-recent surfeit of liberty, we scarcely understand the preciousness of liberty as she does. But wehave to reach this kind of understanding quickly, in order to contend with the crisis we face and to act with theurgency the time requires.Chris and I have talked about liberty and his faith in the pendulums ability to "swing back." He also believes many ofhis peers have little connection to democracy because previous generations have not brought it to life.It is not just the young who are disconnected from democracys tasks at just the moment that the nations freedoms arebeing dismantled; in my travels across the country, I have heard from citizens of all backgrounds who feel alienatedfrom the Founders idea that they are the ones who must lead; they are the ones who must decide and confront anddraw a line. They are the ones who matter. This book is written for them.Such citizens need the keys to, the understanding of, the Founders radical legacy. They need to understand howdespots have gone about their work. They need a primer so they and those around them can be well-equipped for thefight that lies ahead.So they can fight it well.So that our children may continue to live in freedom.So that we may all.Naomi WolfNew YorkJune 24, 2007
  • 5. — INTRODUCTION — TEN STEPS America was opened after the feudal mischief was spent. We began well. No inquisitions, here, no kings, no nobles... Ralph Waldo EmersonDear Chris:I am writing because we have an emergency. Here are U.S. news headlines from a two-week period in the late summerof 2006: July 22: "CIA WORKER SAYS MESSAGE ON TORTURE GOT HER FIRED." Christine Axsmith, a computersecurity expert working for the C.I.A., said she had been fired for posting a message on a blog site on a top-secretcomputer network. Axsmith criticized waterboarding: "Waterboarding is torture, and torture is wrong." Ms. Axsmithlost her job as well as her top-secret clearance, which she had held since 1993. She fears her career in intelligence isover. 1July 28: "DRAFT BILL WAIVES DUE PROCESS FOR ENEMY COMBATANTS." The Bush administration has beenworking in secret on a draft bill "detailing procedures [for] bringing to trial those it captures in the war on terrorism,including some stark diversions from regular trial procedures. . . . Speedy trials are not required----Hearsay informationis admissible ... the [military] lawyer can close the proceedings [and] can also order exclusion of the defendant and hiscivilian counsel." Those defined as "enemy combatants" and "persons who have engaged in unlawful belligerence"can be held in prison until "the cessation of hostilities," no matter when that may be or what jail sentence they mayget. 2July 29: "THE COURT UNDER SIEGE." In June 2006, the Supreme Court ruled that denying prisoners at Guantanamojudicial safeguards violated the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law. The Supreme Court also insisted that a prisoner beable to be present at his own trial. In response, the White House prepared a bill that "simply revokes that right." TheNew York Times editorial page warned, "It is especially frightening to see the administration use the debates over theprisoners at Guantanamo Bay and domestic spying to mount a new offensive against the courts." 3July 31: "A SLIP OF THE PEN." U.S. lawyers issued a statement expressing alarm at the way the president wasoverusing "signing statements." They argued that this was an exertion of executive power that undermined theConstitution. Said the head of the American Bar Association, "The threat to our Republic posed by presidentialsigning statements is both imminent and real unless immediate corrective action is taken." 4August 2: "BLOGGER JAILED AFTER DEFYING COURT ORDERS." A freelance blogger, Josh Wolf, 24, was jailedafter he refused to turn over to investigators a video he had taken of a protest in San Francisco. Jane Kirtley, aprofessor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, said that, although the jailing of Americanjournalists was becoming more frequent, Mr. Wolf was the first American blogger she knew of to be imprisoned byfederal authorities. 5August 2: "GOVERNMENT WINS ACCESS TO REPORTER PHONE RECORDS." "A federal prosecutor may inspectthe telephone records of two New York Times reporters in an effort to identify their confidential sources..." accordingto The New York Times. A dissenting judge speculated that in the future, reporters would have to meet their sourcesillicitly, like drug dealers meeting contacts "in darkened doorways." 6August 3: "STRONG-ARMING THE VOTE." In Alabama, a federal judge took away powers over the election processfrom a Democratic official, Secretary of State Worley, and handed them over to a Republican governor: "[P]artypolitics certainly appears to have been a driving force," argued the Times. "The Justice Departments request to shiftMs. Worleys powers to Governor Riley is extraordinary." When Worley sought redress in a court overseen by afederal judge aligned with the Bush administration, she wasnt allowed her chosen lawyer. It was "a one-sidedproceeding that felt a lot like a kangaroo court..." cautioned the newspaper. She lost. 7Why am I writing this warning to you right now, in 2007? After all, we have had a Congressional election givingcontrol of the I louse and the Senate to Democrats. The new leaders are at work. Surely, Americans who have beenworried about erosions of civil liberties, and the destruction of our system of checks and balances, can relax now: see,the system corrects itself. It is tempting to believe that the basic machinery of democracy still works fine and that anyemergency threatening it has passed—or, worst case, can be corrected in the upcoming presidential election.
  • 6. But the dangers are not gone; they are regrouping. In some ways they are rapidly gaining force. The big picturereveals that ten classic pressures—pressures that have been used in various times in id places in the past to closedown pluralistic societies—were set in motion by the Bush administration to close down our own open society. Thesepressures have never been put in place before in this way in this nation.A breather is unearned; we cant simply relax now. The laws (hat drive these pressures are still on the books. Thepeople who have a vested interest in a less open society may be in a moment of formal political regrouping; but theirfunds are just as massive as before, their strategic thinking unchanged, and their strategy now is to regroup so thatnext time their majority will be permanent. 8All of us—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, American citizens—have little time to repeal the laws and roll backthe forces that can bring about the end of the American system we have inherited from the Founders—a system thathas protected our freedom for over 200 years.I have written this warning because our country—the democracy our young patriots expect to inherit—is in theprocess of being altered forever. History has a great deal to teach us about what is happening right now—what hashappened since 2001 and what could well unfold after the 2008 election. But fewer and fewer of us have read muchabout the history of the mid-twentieth century—or about the ways the Founders set up our freedoms to save us fromthe kinds of tyranny they knew could emerge in the future. High school students, college students, recent graduates,activists from all walks of life, have a sense that something overwhelming has been going on. But they have lacked aprimer to brief them on these themes and put the pieces together, so it is hard for them to know how urgent thesituation is, let alone what they need to do.Americans expect to have freedom around us just as we expect to have air to breathe, so we have only limitedunderstanding of the furnaces of repression that the Founders knew intimately. Few of us spend much time thinkingabout how "the system" they put in place protects our liberties. We spend even less time, considering how dictatorsin the past have broken down democracies or quelled pro-democracy uprisings. We take our American liberty forgranted the way we take our natural resources for granted, seeing both, rather casually, as being magicallyself-replenishing. We have not noticed how vulnerable either resource is until very late in the game, when systemsstart to falter. We have been slow to learn that liberty, like nature, demands a relationship with us in order for it tocontinue to sustain us.Most of us have only a faint understanding of how societies open up or close down, become supportive of freedom orruled by fear, because this is not the kind of history that we feel, or that our educational system believes, is importantfor us to know. Another reason for our vagueness about how liberty lives or dies is that we have tended lately tosubcontract out the tasks of the patriot: to let the professionals—lawyers, scholars, activists, politicians—worry aboutunderstanding the Constitution and protecting our rights. We think that "they" should manage our rights, the way wehire a professional to do our taxes; "they" should run the government, create policy, worry about whether democracyis up and running. Were busy.But the Founders did not mean for powerful men and women far away from the citizens—for people with their ownagendas, or for a class of professionals—to perform the patriots tasks, or to protect freedom. They meant for us to doit: you, me, the American who delivers your mail, the one who teaches your kids.I am one of the citizens who needed to relearn these lessons. Though I studied civics, our system of government wastaught to me, as it was to you, as a fairly boring explication of a three-part civil bureaucracy, not as the mechanism of athrilling, radical, and totally unprecedented experiment in human self-determination. My teachers explained that ourthree-part system was set up with "checks and balances," so that no one branch of government could seize too muchpower. Not so exciting: this sounded like "checks and balances" in a bureaucratic turf war. Our teachers failed toexplain to us that the power that the Founders restrained in each branch of government is not abstract: it is the powerto strip you and me of personal liberty.So I needed to go back and read, more deeply than I had the first time around, histories of how patriots gave us ourAmerica out of the crucible of tyrants, as well as histories of how dictators came to power in the last century. I had toreread the stories of the making and the unmaking of freedom. The more I read these histories, the more disturbed Ibecame.I give you the lessons we can learn from them in this pamphlet form because of the crisis we face.Like every American, I watched the events of September 11,2001, with horror. Then, like many, I watched the reactionsof the administration in power at first with concern, then with anxiety, and then, occasionally, with shock. I startedfeeling that there was something familiar about how events, at times, were unfolding.Because of the déjà vu I was starting to feel when I read the newspaper every day, I began to take a second look athow leaders in the past had cracked down on societies over which they had gained control; I looked with specialattention at what had happened when a leader brought about a shift from a pluralistic, democratic society to adictatorship.
  • 7. Historical EchoesI began to think of these examples as "historical echoes"—not proof that someone influential in the administration hadstudied the details of mid-twentieth-century fascism and totalitarianism, but certainly suggestive.What was it about the image of a mob of young men dressed in identical shirts, shouting at poll workers outside of avoting center in Florida during the 2000 recount, that looked familiar? 9 What resonated about the reports that Bushsupporters in the South were holdings organized public events to burn CDs by the Dixie Chicks? 10 (CDs are actuallyquite hard to burn, and produce toxic fumes.) What seemed so familiar about an organized ideological group shamingan academic for saying something unpopular—and then pressuring the state government to get the universitypresident to fire that professor? 11 What was so recognizable about reports that FBI agents were stopping peaceactivists at airports? 12 Why did the notion of being "greeted as liberators" 13 feel so familiar, and phrases such as"hiding in spider-holes" 14 sound so familiar?These events may seem, to have historical echoes because they actually are mirrored in history.No one can deny the skill of fascists at forming public opinion. I cant prove that anyone in the Bush administrationstudied Joseph Goebbels. I am not trying to. All I am doing is noting echoes.As you read you may notice other parallels—usually in the details of events. The Bush administration created a policypost-9/1 1 about liquids and air travel. Increased security restrictions led to airport security guards forcing somepassengers to ingest liquids: A Long Island mother, for instance, was forced to drink from 1 liter bottles filled with herown breast milk prior to boarding a plane at JFK. 15 Other adult passengers have been forced to drink baby formula. InBenito Mussolinis era, one intimidation tactic was to force citizens to drink emetics and other liquids. 16 German SS menpicked this up: they forced Wilhelm Sollmann, a Social Democrat leader, for instance, to drink castor oil and urine. 17 Ofcourse baby formula is not an emetic. But a state agent—some agents are armed—forcing a citizen to ingest a liquid isa new scene in America.In 2002 the Bush administration created and named the "Department of Homeland Security." White Housespokespeople Darted to refer to the United States, unprecedentedly, as "the Homeland." 18 American Presidents havebefore now referred to the I lulled States as "the nation" or "the Republic," and to the nations internal policies as"domestic."By 1930 Nazi propagandists referred to Germany not as "the nation" or "the Republic"—which it was—but rather as"the Heimat"—"the Homeland." Homeland is a word that memoirist Ernestine Bradley, who grew up in Nazi Germany,describes as saturated with nationalist power: "Heimat is a German word which no satisfactory equivalent in otherlanguages. It denotes the region where one has been born and remains rooted.... Longing lo be in the Heimat causesthe incurable disease of Heimweh." 19 Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, introducing Hitler at a Nuremberg tally, said,"Thanks to your leadership, Germany will be attainable us the Homeland—Homeland for all Germans in the world." 20 Adepartment of Domestic Security is simply a bureaucracy, capable of mistakes; a department protecting our"Homeland" has a different authority.In 2001 the USA PATRIOT Act let the federal government compel doctors to give up confidential medical recordswithout a warrant demonstrating probable cause. Your previously private interaction with your doctor is now subjectto state scrutiny. 21 (Nazi law in the 1930s required German doctors to disclose citizens previously private medicalrecords to the State.)In 2005 Newsweek reported that Guantanamo prisoners had seen the Koran being flushed down toilets. Underpressure from the White House, the magazine ran a correction: It had not interviewed direct witnesses to the practice. 22But human rights organizations did confirm accounts of similar abuses of the Koran. 23 (In 1938, the Gestapo forcedJews to scrub out the toilets with their sacred phylacteries, the tfillin ) 24Amnesty International reports that U.S. interrogators torment prisoners in Iraq by playing heavy metal at top volumeinto their cells night and day. 25 (In 1938, the Gestapo tormented imprisoned Austrian premier Kurt von Schuschnigg bykeeping the radio on at top volume, night and day.) 26An Iraqi human rights group complained that, in 2004, U.S. forces seized the innocent wives of suspected insurgentsand held the women hostage in order to pressure their husbands to turn themselves in. 27 (In Joseph Stalins Russia,secret police took hostage the innocent wives of dissidents accused of "treason," to pressure their husbands to turnthemselves in.) 28When the United States invaded Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney promised that we would be "greeted as liberators."(When the German army occupied the Rhineland, Nazi propaganda asserted that the troops would be welcomed asliberators.)President Bush argued that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay could be treated harshly because they were not coveredby the Geneva Conventions. (Nazis asserted that the troops invading Russia should treat the enemy especially
  • 8. brutally, because they were not covered by the Hague Conventions.) 29After 9/11, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney coined a new phrase: Americawas now on a "war footing." 30 Superficially, it was a stirring word choice. But if you thought about it, it was also kindof an odd word choice, because America was not actually at war. What is a "war footing"? (Nazi leaders explained,after the Reichstag fire, that Germany, which was not actually at war, was from then on a permanent "kriegsfusz"—literally, a "war footing.")The Bush White House "embedded" reporters with U.S. military units in Iraq. Uncritical coverage of the war expandedconsiderably. (National Socialist propaganda officials embedded reporters and camera crews with their own armedforces: Filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl was embedded with Nazi troops in Poland; 31 U.S. correspondent William Shirerdrove with German units into occupied France.) 32The Bush administration unloads coffins of dead American soldiers from planes at night and has forbiddenphotographers to take pictures of the coffins. 33 (National Socialists unloaded the coffins of I he German war dead atnight.)The White House announced, beginning in 2002, that there were terrorist "sleeper cells" scattered throughout thenation. A "sleeper cell," press reports explained, was a group of terrorists that had merged into ordinary American life,waiting, perhaps for years, for the signal to rise up and cause mayhem.A wave of reporting asserted that the FBI had located a sleeper cell in Lodi, California. After an informant had beenpaid hundreds of thousands of dollars to spy on Muslims, the FBI detained a Muslim father and son, Umer Hayat, andhis son, Hamid Hayat. 34 The two men explained that they had confirmed an imaginary sleeper cell in order to end aterrifying series of interrogations. 35Another much-publicized sleeper cell identified four Muslim men in Detroit. Attorney General John Ashcroft claimedthat the men had had advance knowledge of 9/11 ; 36 federal authorities charged that they were part of a "sleeper cellplotting attacks against Americans overseas," as news reports put it. 37 The Justice Department heralded the arrests asone of its biggest hits in the War on Terror.The phrase "sleeper cell" entered deeply into the American unconscious, even becoming the plot of a 2005 TV movie.But in 2006, Richard Convertino, the prosecutor of the Detroit case, was indicted on charges of trying to present falseevidence at the trial, and concealing other evidence, in his attempt to back up the governments theory about the men.All charges were dropped against the men and the Justice Department quietly repudiated its own case. 38 But youprobably didnt hear about that, and the creepy sleeper-cell narrative stayed in the atmosphere to trouble your dreams.Sleeper cell was a term most Americans had never heard before. It is a phrase from Stalins Russia, wherepropagandists said that imaginary cells, consisting of agents of "international capitalism"— that is, us—had been sentby the U.S. government to infiltrate Soviet society. These secret agents would pose as good Soviet comrades, livingquietly among their neighbors, but just awaiting the day when, at a signal, they would all rise up to commit mayhem. 39When the 2006 terrorist plot against U.S.-bound planes was uncovered in London, an FBI official gave a much-quotedsound bite: "If this plot had actually occurred, the world would have stood still." 40 FBI guys dont usually speak incadences of dark poetry. (Of his plans in 1940, Hitler said, "The world will hold its breath.") 41These echoes are worth noticing—but are not ultimately that important. What is important are the structural echoesyou will see: the way dictators take over democracies or crush pro-democracy uprisings by invoking emergencydecrees to close down civil liberties; creating military tribunals; and criminalizing dissent.Those echoes are important.So I read about Mussolinis Italy in the 1920s; Stalins Russia and Hitlers Germany in the 1930s; I read about EastGermany in the 1950s and Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and Chile in 1973, as well as about other Latin Americandictatorships; I read about Communist China in the late 1980s and early 1990s.The countries I looked at were very different, of course, and the violent dictators had a broad range of ideologies.Stalin imposed totalitarianism over a communist state, itself built upon the ruins of a toppled monarchy. Mussolini andHitler both came to power legally in the context of fragile parliamentary democracies. East Germany andCzechoslovakia were communist systems and China still is; and General Augusto Pinochet closed down Chiles youngdemocracy in a classic Latin American military coup d’état.Violent dictators across the political spectrum all do the same key things. Control is control. In spite of this range ofideological differences, profound similarities in tactics leap off the pages. Each of these leaders used, and other violentdictators around the globe continue to borrow, the same moves to close down open societies or crush dissent.There are ten steps that are taken in order to close down a democracy or crush a prodemocratic movement, whether bycapitalists, communists, or right-wing fascists. These ten steps, together, are more than the sum of their parts. Once allten have been put in place, each magnifies the power of the others and of the whole.Impossible as it may seem, we are seeing each of these ten steps taking hold in the United States today.
  • 9. But America is different! I can hear you saying.There is no guarantee that America is different if Americans fail to take up the patriots task.At times in our own history our commitment to freedom has faltered. The Alien and Sedition Act of 1798 made it acrime for Americans to speak critically— to "bring into contempt or disrepute"—of then-President John Adams andother U.S. leaders. But Thomas Jefferson pardoned those convicted under these laws when he took office.During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, effectively declaring martial law in several states:Close to 38,000 Americans were imprisoned by military authorities during the war—many for simply expressing theirviews. But when the war ended in 1865, the Supreme Court ruled that it had been unconstitutional for military tribunalsto try civilians.In 1918, labor leader Eugene Debs was arrested for giving a speech about the First Amendment; he got a ten-year jailsentence. Raids swept up hundreds of other activists. 42 But after World War I ended, the hysteria subsided.During World War II, the Justice Department rounded up 110,000 innocent Japanese-Americans and imprisoned themin camps. When the war was over, these innocent Americans were released as well.Anti-communist anxiety led the nation to tolerate the McCarthy hearings; but the pendulum swung back and SenatorJoe McCarthy himself was condemned by his colleagues.I am describing the movement of "the pendulum"—as in the American cliche, "The pendulum always swings back."We are so familiar with, and so reliant upon, the pendulum. That is why you are so sure that "America is different." Butthe pendulums working depends on unrestricted motion. In America, up until now, the basic checks and balancesestablished by the Founders have functioned so well that the pendulum has always managed to swing back. Its verysuccess has made us lazy. We trust it too much, without looking at what a pendulum requires in order to function: thestable framework that allows movement; space in which to move; that is, liberty.The pendulum cannot work now as it has before. There are now two major differences between these past examples ofthe pendulums motion and the situation we face today.First, as Bruce Fein of the American Freedom Agenda and writer Joe Conason have both noted, previous wars andemergencies have had endpoints. But President Bush has denied the current conflict with global terrorism as beingopen-ended. This is a permanent alteration of the constitutional landscape.The other difference between these examples and today is that when prior dark times unfolded in America, we forbadetorture, and the rule of law was intact. Legal torture, as you will see, acting in concert with the erosion of the rule oflaw, changes what is possible.So, because I was looking at something unprecedented in our nations history, I had to read the histories of manyforms of state repression, including the most extreme.I had to include Nazi Germany in my scrutiny of repressive governments. Many people are understandably emotionallyoverwhelmed when the term "Nazism" or the name "Hitler" is introduced into debate. As someone who lost relativeson both .sides of my family in the Holocaust, I know this feeling. I also know that there is a kind of intellectualetiquette, an unwritten rule, that Nazism and Hitler should be treated as stand-alone categories.But I believe this etiquette is actually keeping us from learning what we have to learn right now. I believe we honor thememory of the victims of Nazism with our willingness to face the lessons that history—even the most nightmarishhistory—can offer us about how to defend freedom.In looking at other violent dictatorships, including Germanys, I am not comparing the United States in 2007 to NaziGermany, or Bush to Hitler. The two nations and leaders inhabit different worlds. There will not be a coup in Americalike Mussolinis March on Rome or a dramatic massacre like Hitlers Night of the Long Knives. But certain threads areemerging that have connections to the past. I am calling your attention to important lessons from history about howfragile civil liberties are, and how quickly freedom can be lost. I ask you to quiet your understandable aversion longenough to walk with me through the material I have to show you.The ten steps to dictatorship are basic.In September 2006, military leaders staged a coup in Thailand, which had been a noisy democracy. In a matter of days,the coup leaders ticked through many of the ten steps, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense they did.They deployed armed guards in residential neighborhoods, sent lawmakers home, shut down the free press, took overthe state-run television, threatened critics with arrest, put new limits on travel, restricted protest, and discontinued theParliamentary rule of law. Thailand was a police state within a matter of days. 43We are seeing each of the basic ten steps being put into place here in the United States today—more quietly, more
  • 10. gradually, and sometimes more elegantly; but each is underway.My sense of alarm comes from the clear lessons from history that, once certain checks and balances are destroyed,and once certain institutions have been intimidated, the pressures that can turn an open society into a closed one turninto direct assaults; at that point events tend to occur very rapidly, and a point comes at which there is no easyturning back to the way it used to be.The fascist shift does not progress like a diagonal line rising steadily across a chart. Rather, it progresses in a buildupof many acts assaulting democracy simultaneously, that then form a critical mass—what writer Malcolm Gladwellwould call a "tipping point." The pressure from this set of assaults suddenly pushes the nation into a new anddegraded reality. The turning points can be mapped as vertical lines—the point at which prisoners lost the right tohabeas corpus, for instance, is one—which then plateau into the nations new normal. The nation acclimates; then thisprocess begins again at that greater level of suppression.What got to be really scary in my reading was how predictable events become, once you are familiar with the blueprint.By the beginning of August, 2006, for instance, it seemed like a good bet that the Bush administration would soonmove on from the detainee bill that it had been secretly preparing to seek Congressional authorization for creating aprison beyond the rule of law where torture could take place. This was accomplished by October of 2006.In September of 2006,1 thought that it was likely that some of the first prisoners to be tried in Guantanamo by the newmilitary commission system would be white and English-speaking. Indeed, that happened by April of 2007. It alsoseemed probable that White I louse spokespeople would begin to use terms such as treason, espionage, subversion,and aiding the enemy to describe criticism, press scrutiny, dissent, and even simple departure from alignment withWhite House goals. From the blueprint, I thought it was unsurprising when the administration started to criminalizespeech in new ways. This began to happen in earnest by May of 2007.When the U.S. Attorney scandal came to light in March of 2007 and there was still little information, because I hadbeen reading a biography of Goebbels, I remarked to a friend, "I bet the attorneys were in swing states." By the nextweek, it had been confirmed that most of them were in fact in swing states. All this supposition was NOT rocketscience; it was simply that each of these is a classic move in the playbook of a fascist shift.Everything changed in America in September of 2006, when (congress passed the Military Commissions Act. 44 Thislaw created a new legal reality that heralds the end of America if we do not take action. Yet most Americans still do notunderstand what happened to them when that law passed.This law gives the president—any president—the authority to establish a separate justice system for trying alienunlawful enemy combatants. It defines both "torture" and "materially supporting] hostilities" broadly. The MCAjustice system lacks the basic protections afforded defendants in our domestic system of laws, in our military justicesystem, or in the system of laws used to try war criminals—Nazi leaders got better civil liberty protection than alienenemy combatants, as did perpetrators of genocide like Slobodan Milosevic. And persons accused by the president(or his designees) of being alien unlawful enemy combatants are for-hidden from invoking the Geneva Conventions, atreaty that represents the basic protections of justice common to all civilized nations.The United States has signed the Geneva Conventions and agreed to abide by them, and this repudiation is a radicaldeparture from our traditions. Under the MCA, the government can used "coerced" interrogation to obtain evidence.Finally, and perhaps most damagingly, the MCA denies unlawful alien enemy combatants the right to challenge thelegitimacy of their confinement or treatment. So, while the MCA provides all sorts of rules that the military is supposedto follow, it will be difficult, if not impossible to hold anyone accountable for breaking those rules.But this is not all. The president and his lawyers now claim the authority to designate any American citizen he choosesas being an "enemy combatant"; and to define both "torture" and "material support" broadly. They claim the authorityto give anyone in the executive branch the power to knock on your door, seize you on the street, or grab you as youare changing planes at Newark or Atlanta airports; blindfold you and put earphones on you; take you to a cell in anavy prison; keep you in complete isolation for months or even years; delay your trial again and again; and make ithard for you to communicate with your lawyer. The president claims the authority to direct agents to threaten you ininterrogations and allow into your trial things you confessed to while you were being mistreated.The president claims the authority to do any of those things to any American citizen now on his say-so alone. Let merepeat this: The president asserts that he can do this to you even if you have never committed a crime of any kind:"enemy combatant" is a status offense. Meaning that if the president says you are one, then you are.Human rights groups raised the alarm early on about what this law might mean to the many innocent foreign detaineeswho had been swept up in the machinery of Afghan prisons and sent to Guantanamo. Some Congressional leadershave warned us about what this law might do to our own soldiers, if they are taken as POWs. But most ordinarycitizens did not understand what congress had done—not to anonymous, possibly scary, brown people on a farawayisland, but to them. Most Americans still do not understand.
  • 11. Last September, concerned about the legal arguments being put forward by the Department of Justice, I called a friendwho is a professor of Constitutional law."Does the administration assert that the president can define anyone he wants to as an enemy combatant? IncludingU.S. citizens?" I asked."Yes," he replied."And does it argue that courts must defer to the governments insertions that someone should be held as an enemycombatant, even when it presents no direct evidence?""Yes," he replied."So doesnt that mean they are saying that now any of us for any reason he decides can be seized off the street andimprisoned in isolation for months and interrogated?""Yes," he said."So why isnt anyone saying that?""Some people are. But a lot of people probably think it would just sound crazy," he replied. 45
  • 12. — CHAPTER ONE — The FOUNDERS and the FRAGILITY of DEMOCRACY But a constitution of government, once changed from freedom, can never be restored,. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever. John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, July 7,1775U. S. citizens in the year 2007, the very title of this book should be absurd. It is unthinkable to most of us that therecould ever be an "end of America" in the metaphorical sense. But it is when memories are faint about coercive tacticsthat worked to control people in the past that people can be more easily controlled in the present.When I say that the Bush administration has used tactics that echo certain tactics from the past, I am making aconservative argument. You will have to look at the echoes I note and decide for yourself what to make of them. Weknow that Karl Rove seeks the goal of a permanent majority. A permanent majority is easier to solidify for the future ifdemocracys traditional challenges to power are weakened or silenced.I wont insult Republicans by calling this goal a "permanent Republican majority," although Rove calls it by that name.Most Americans—Republican, Independent, or Democrat—are patriots and believe in the Founders vision. I have toassume that one reason for this assault on democracy is to secure the "permanent majority" status of a far smallergroup, or rather of several smaller groups, driven by motives of power and money: the great power represented byaccess to an executive that is driving an agenda unthreatened by the peoples will, and the vast amount of money thathas begun to flow from a condition of uninterrupted domestic surveillance and open-ended foreign hostilities.Authoritarianism, Fascism, Totalitarianism: Some DefinitionsAre any of these terms legitimate for this discussion?I have made a deliberate choice in using the terms fascist tactics and fascist shift when I describe some events inAmerica now. I stand by my choice. I am not being heated or even rhetorical; I am being technical.Americans tend to see democracy and fascism as all-or-nothing categories. But it isnt the case that there is a pure,static "democracy" in the white squares of a chessboard and a pure, static "fascism" in the black squares. Rather,there is a range of authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, and varieties of Fascist state, just as there are stronger andweaker democracies—and waxing and waning democracies. There are many shades of gray on the spectrum from anopen to a closed society.Totalitarianism, of course, is the blackest state. Mussolini adopted the term totalitarian to describe his own regime. 1Political philosopher Hannah Arendt writes of the post-World War I era and the "undermining of parliamentarygovernment," succeeded by "all sorts of new tyrannies, Fascist and semi-Fascist, one-party and militarydictatorships," and culminating at last in "the seemingly firm establishment of totalitarian governments resting onmass support" in Russia and in Germany.Arendt sees Germany and Italy as variations on the same model of totalitarianism. She defines totalitarianism as amass movement with a leadership that requires "total domination of the individual." A totalitarian leader, in her view,faces no opposition—it has gone quiet—and he can unleash terror without himself being afraid. 2Fascism is a word whose definition political scientists (and even fascists themselves) do not entirely agree upon.Though Mussolini coined this term (from the dual rods, ox fasces, carried by officials in ancient Rome), some Nazis didnot see the Italians as being tough enough to qualify as true fascists. Umberto Eco wrote of latter-day "Ur-Fascists"and other critics have described "neo-Fascists" or "sub-fascists" when they refer to more recent violent dictatorshipsthat use state terror and other kinds of control to subordinate the population and crush democratic impulses—notablyin Latin America. 3 The Columbia Encyclopedia defines fascism as a "philosophy of government that glorifies thestate and nation and assigns to the state control over every aspect of national life.... Its essentially vague andemotional nature facilitates the development of unique national varieties, whose leaders often deny indignantly thatthey are fascists at all." 4
  • 13. Throughout this letter of warning, I will use the term "a fascist shift." It is a wording that describes a process. BothItalian and German fascisms came to power legally and incrementally in functioning democracies; both usedlegislation, cultural pressure, and baseless imprisonment and torture, progressively to consolidate power. Bothdirected state terror to subordinate and control the individual, whether the individual supported the regime inwardly ornot. Both were rabidly antidemocratic, not as a side sentiment but as the basis of their ideologies; and yet bothaggressively used the law to pervert and subvert the law.This process is what I mean when I refer to "fascist shift." Two aspects of most definitions of fascism are relevanthere: Fascist refers to a militaristic system that is opposed to democracy and seeks, ideologically and practically, tocrush it. And fascism uses state terror against the individual to do this. When I talk about a "fascist shift" in America,I am talking about an antidemocratic ideology that uses the threat of violence against the individual in order to subduethe institutions of civil society, so that they in turn can be subordinated to the power of the state.This fascist shift has proven compact, effective, and exportable, long after these two regimes met their end in WorldWar II. If it is too emotionally overwhelming to think of Italy and Germany, you can consider the more recent fates ofIndonesia, Nicaragua, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Guatemala, all of which suffered widespread state terror and theactivation of many of the ten steps that I describe, as leaders sought to subdue the people. A fascist shift bringsabout a violent dictatorship in a context where democracy could have taken the nation toward freedom.Some critics responding to an essay I wrote laying out the spine of this argument were more comfortable with the termauthoritarian than with fascist. A number of U.S. writers have used "authoritarian" to describe the Bushadministration. Authoritarian, in contrast—the term Joe Conason uses, for example, in his prescient book It CanHappen Here—means that one branch of government has seized power from the others. 5 (The Concise OxfordDictionary defines it as "favouring, encouraging, or enforcing strict obedience to authority, as opposed to individualfreedom. . . .") 6 Conasons argument is entirely right for where we are at this point: in July of 2007, America actuallyalready has an executive who is disregarding the restraints of the two other branches of government.But authoritarianism has many guises, and some are relatively livable for most people. For instance, you can have amilitary leadership in an authoritarian system, but you can have fairly independent courts and a fairly independentpress. Indeed, people can see authoritarianism as rather attractive in what they understand to be a time of nationalemergency. Authoritarianism can be downright cozy compared to some alternatives. The grave danger in America isthat events are not stopping here.When I refer to other societies, I use the terms totalitarianism, fascism, and authoritarianism where they areappropriate. State terror directed against the individual is the difference between a fairly stable Americanauthoritarianism and the fascist shift I am writing to you about.Theorists such as Arendt and Zbigniew Brzezinski saw top-down terror to be at the heart of both Nazi and Sovietregimes. They argue that it was the overwhelming power of the secret police agencies such as the Gestapo and theKGB that led to the fear that blanketed these societies. 7 More recent historians focus on how populations in fascist ortotalitarian systems adapt to fear through complicity: In this view, when a minority of citizens is terrorized andpersecuted, a majority live out fairly normal lives by stifling dissent within themselves and going along quietly with thestates acts of violent repression. The authors of an oral history of Nazi Germany point out that, though it may soundshocking, fascist regimes can be "quite popular" for the people who are not being terrorized. 8Both perspectives are relevant here: Top-down edicts generate fear, but when citizens turn a blind eye tostate-sanctioned atrocities committed against others, so long as they believe themselves to be safe, a fascist realityhas fertile ground in which to take root.American Fascism?When America gets fascism it will be called anti-fascism. Attributed to Huey LongAmerica has flirted with fascism before. In the 1920s, a number of newspaper editors in the United States wereimpressed with the way that fascism coordinated with capitalism. 9 In the 1930s, when Americans were suffering fromeconomic depression and labor unrest, some U.S. leaders looked at the apparent order that Mussolini and Hitler hadimposed on their own previously chaotic, desperate nations, and wondered if a "strong man" approach would servethe nation better than our own battered system. As historian Myra MacPherson puts it, "In the thirties there wasalarming support for Hitler [in America], with American-style brownshirts proliferating... ." 10 Nineteen-thirties Americanfascism boasted many followers, nationally known demagogues, and even its own celebrities, such as aviator CharlesLindbergh, one of the most famous Americans of the day.Some commentators of the era speculated that demagogues might spearhead an extreme patriotic movement such asthose in Italy and Germany. In 1935, crusading journalist I. F. Stone compared Huey Longs dismantling of democracyin Louisiana to Hitlers legislation dissolving local self-government.In 1939 author James Wechsler wrote, "There was genuine fear that a fascist movement had finally taken root in NewYork," where reactionary hooligans were staging anti-Semitic street fights modeled on the German youth actions. 11
  • 14. Other U.S. intellectuals thought the time was right to develop an American fascist mystique themselves, and began todo so.American interest in fascism was prevalent enough for popular writer Sinclair Lewis to satirize it in his 1935 classic, ItCant Happen Here. Lewis, as Conason eloquently notes, showed step by step the ways in which it—a fascistcoup—could theoretically "happen here." Though many mocked Sinclairs premise in 1935, many others read his fableof warning and thought more seriously about the dangers that American fascism really represented. It was healthy forAmericans at that time to imagine the worst that could unfold if the nation chose to follow the seductions of fascismany further.What Is Freedom?"Its a free country," any American child will say, a comfortable assurance that this same American carries as he or shegrows up. We scarcely consider that that sentence descends to that child from arguments for liberty that date backthrough generations of Enlightenment-era English and French philosophers, who were trying to work out what "a freecountry" could possibly look like-even as they themselves lived through or looked back on reigns of violently abusiveand capricious monarchs.We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding allassaults. But the Founders would have thought we were dangerously naive, not to mention lazy, in thinking ofdemocracy in this way. This view—which we see as patriotic—is the very opposite of the view that they held. Theywould not have considered our attitude patriotic—or even American: The Founders thought, in contrast, that it wastyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult,personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way: Theysaw America—that is, the process of liberty—as special.In fact, the men who risked hanging to found our nation, and the women who risked their own lives to support thisexperiment in freedom, and who did what they could to advance it, were terrified of exactly what we call dictatorship.They called it "tyranny" or "despotism." It was the specter at their backs—and they all knew it—as Americansdebated the Constitution and argued about the shape of the Bill of Rights.The framing of the documents upon which the new national government rested did not take place as we were taught itdid—in a sunny glow of confident assertiveness about freedom. That scenario is a Hallmark-card rewrite of the realmood of the era and the tenor that surrounded the discussions of the day. The mood as early Americans debated theproposed Constitution and the Bill of Rights was, rather, one of grave apprehension.For the Founders shared with the rest of the people awaiting the outcome of their labors a dread of what nearly all ofthem— Federalist or anti-Federalist—saw as the real prospect of a tyrannical force rising up in America. Thisrepressive force could take many forms: the form of a rapacious Congress oppressing the people; the form of anout-of-control executive; or even the form of the people themselves, cruelly oppressing a minority. 12 The (constitutionand the Bill of Rights were set forth not as a flag flying merrily but as a bulwark: a set of barriers against what theFounders and their fellow countrymen and women saw as peoples natural tendency to oppress others if their power isunchecked.What recurred regularly in various arguments as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights took shape was thewidespread fear of an unchecked executive. 13 Its not surprising that these patriots would so deeply fear a single maninvested with too much power. They had just freed themselves from being subjugated to George III, an abusive, not tomention mentally ill, monarch.The Founders had fled repressive societies themselves, or were children or grandchildren of those who had done so.The North American colonies were settled by people—Puritans, Quakers and others—who had fled countries in whichthey had been imprisoned and even tortured for such acts as assembling in groups to pray; or for attending certainchurches; or for publishing pamphlets critical of the Bang or of Parliament. The Founders knew from their ownexperience how the Crown treated those who talked about democracy (that is, "sedition"). They knew aboutcriminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, and even show trials. They had personally to reckon with the risk ofstate-sanctioned torture and murder: Each of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence could have beenhanged if the colonies had lost the Revolutionary War.When Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, the little book that helped start the big revolution, he risked being hangedby the British Crown for treason. Indeed, the Crown did charge Paine with sedition for having written another book,The Rights of Man. He was tried by a jury hand-chosen by the government that he had attacked—a jury sure tocondemn him. The proceedings were a mockery of the rule of law. In spite of his lawyers brilliant defense, as onewitness put it, "the venal jury . . . without waiting for any answer, or any summing up by the Judge, pronounced[Paine] guilty. Such an instance of infernal corruption is scarcely upon record." Paines publisher was dragged off toprison in chains. 14
  • 15. Arbitrary arrest, state intimidation, and torture were the tactics of the tyrannical monarchs of eighteenth centuryEurope—tactics that the Founders sought to banish from American soil forever. The Founders rebellion on thiscontinent intended systematically to open a nation up to freedom—meaning, fundamentally, freedom from these evils.In colleges with progressive curricula, the Founders are often portrayed as "dead white men," whose vision wasimperfect, who denied women and the poor civil rights, and who defined an African slave in America as beingthree-fifths of a person; old guys in wigs who wrote documents that are now dusty in language that seems to us to beeither arcane or to offer sentiments that are so obvious now they have become cliches (". . . life, liberty, and the pursuitof happiness...").Heres what were not taught: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. Ifyou understand them truly now, they still are. These men and the women who supported their work were walkingfurther out into the unknown—betting on ordinary peoples capacities—than anyone had ever walked in the history ofthe human race. You are not taught—and it is a disgrace that you arent—that these men and women were radicals forliberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to bethe unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into areality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.You werent taught that the way they brought the freest nation in the world into being was by reading passionatelyabout fledgling democracies of the past; by positioning their imaginations directly against the violent repressions theyhad fled; and by carefully, delicately crafting a mechanism of checks and balances, and a bill of rights, that wouldprotect these extreme manifestations of freedom. The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could beentrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torturethem.Living against the backdrop of violent repression, these men and women saw the democracy they were seeking toestablish, and the checks and balances that protected it, as being in need of continual rededication against potentialtyrants in America who would want to subjugate Americans.Thomas Jeffersons initial reaction to the proposed Constitution was negative, for, as he wrote to James Madison, hefeared the possibility of the rise of an American tyrant: ". . . Roman emperors, popes, German emperors, days of theOttoman dependencies, and Polish kings—all were elective in some sense." Indeed, historian Bernard Bailyn sees that"[T]he fear of power—the very heart of the original Revolutionary ideology—was an animating spirit behind all of[Jeffersons] thinking... ." 15Jefferson wasnt alone in the Revolutionary generation in fearing an American despot. After the publication of theproposed Constitution in 1787, critics shared his apprehension. They feared a presidents treaty-making power,because they were worried he might make deals in secret. They worried about his power to make certain decisionswithout a two-thirds majority, because they feared he might do anything he wanted with that power. They argued thatan American executive would not be immune to despotic temptations just as an unchecked Congress would not beimmune. 16The authors of The Federalist Papers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—wrote that series ofessays to help reassure their fellow Americans. They did so by explaining that the complex web of tensions they wereproposing—these "checks and balances"—would prevent a person or a group united in "a common interest orpassion" from depriving others of their rights. Hamilton, Madison, and Jay did not think that this web wasself-sustaining. They thought that the delicate mechanism of the interdependent executive, legislative, and judiciarybranches was only as reliable as the character of the people who were either protecting or abandoning it. They saw allpeople as corruptible and so set up the system to keep anyone from having unconfined power. 17It was a truism to the Revolutionary generation that if the fragile mechanism became unbalanced, American leaderstoo—of course— would revert to brutality. We are so removed from the tyranny that the nations first patriotsexperienced personally that we have not only forgotten this crucial insight, we have even forgotten to consider howobvious it was to the fathers and mothers of our country.The Founders never expected us to fall asleep or get lazy. They counted on us to keep the web of the precious systemintact so that an American despot could never arise. They trusted us to cherish liberty as they did.The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.The Strength and Ease of DictatorshipThere is also a reverse process that systematically closes down freedom.Many Americans have an impressionistic sense that Mussolini and Hitler came to power through violence alone. Buteach came to power legally in a working democracy; each made use of the Parliamentary system itself to subvert andreorder the rule of law; and each then, quickly, legally aggregated state power overwhelmingly in his own person.Both leaders were supported by sophisticated intellectuals and political theorists who made the case to the people thatdemocratic processes weakened the nation in a time of crisis.All dictators: invoke an external and threat; develop a paramilitary force; create a secret prison system; surveil ordinary
  • 16. citizens; arbitrarily detain and release them; harass citizens groups; target writers, entertainers, and other keyindividuals for dissenting; intimidate the press; recast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage"; andeventually subvert the rule of law. Unfortunately, while it is very difficult to sustain an open society, history showsthat it is fairly simple to close one down.The same ten steps have shut down democracies all over the world at many different times. And these steps are nosecret: After all, Mussolini studied Lenin; 18 Hitler studied Mussolini; 19 Stalin studied Hitler; 20 and Chinese communistleaders studied Stalin, and so on. Indeed the United States has helped develop a training center, the School of theAmericas (now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), to train various procapitalistLatin American leaders in the theory and practice of violent dictatorship. 21Is the United States in 2007 parallel to Italy in 1922 or Germany in 1933, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Chile in 1973, or Chinain 1989? No. But over the past six years we have been watching the United States move closer to becoming a moreclosed society.The Appearance of Normalcy in an Early Fascist ShiftIts easy to look around at America in 2007 and choose to believe that this warning is overheated: After all, we are forthe most part doing what we have routinely done. We are going online into a vibrant Internet world; clicking throughhundreds of TV channels; enjoying Hollywood films; reading bestsellers that present views across the politicalspectrum. The courts are ruling, newspapers are publishing exposes, protest marches are being planned about the war;a presidential race is underway.But there are plenty of examples of a shift into a dictatorial reality in which, for several years, while the basicinstitutions of freedom are targeted and rights are eroding, daily life still looks very normal—even, for many people,pleasant.Americans tend to think of the shift to fascism in scary set-pieces: the boots on the stairs, the knock in the middle ofthe night, the marching columns, the massive banners waving over city streets; a Leni Riefenstahl film all the time, oran unrelieved scene of citizen terror with crematoria smoking in the distance.We are so used to seeing depictions of the most sensational aspects of totalitarian societies—the gulag, the deathcamps—that we dont pay much attention to the fact that there is often an incremental process that led those societiesto become places where such things could happen.The view that fascism looks from the start like a nationwide prison camp rather than a fairly normal society can becomforting when facing an argument like mine. Its natural to wish that the two realities were so categorically differentthat, of course, "It couldnt happen here."But as would-be dictators consolidate power, if they are training their sights on a democracy, things proceed fairlyroutinely in many areas in the earliest years. In the beginning, the horror, as W. H. Auden put it, is usually elsewhere,taking place while other people are going about their normal daily round. Peasants in Italy celebrated their harvestfestivals in 1919 in Naples when Mussolinis arditi were beating bloody the local communists in Milan. 22 JournalistJoseph Roth, the star columnist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, filed glitzy reports on urban style and nightlife, onarchitecture and the avant-garde; he and his colleagues dwelt on the latest fashions and described the trendiestwatering holes. As Roth rebutted rising anti-Semitism in print, Hitler was consolidating power around himself. 23 VictorKlemperer, a Jewish professor of French literature who kept a diary throughout the rise and fall of the Third Reich,cared for his garden, did repairs on his car, chatted with his Nazi neighbors, went to the movies with his wife, even ashe became increasingly aware of persecution, arrests, theft of property, and new discriminatory laws; even as he wascertain of an inevitable catastrophe. 24 Thats what people do.The neon lights were flashing outside nightclubs in Vienna right through the Anschluss. British travelogues for Italyand Germany from the 1930s depict jolly fascists sharing a nice Marsala with the writers in an Osteria. More recently,the day after the 2006 military coup in Thailand, tourists were posing for snapshots next to armed guards; sunbatherswere still at the beach. 25Most of the tourists didnt bother to go home even after martial law was declared. Such scenes show thatcontemporaries often experience a brighter picture of what is going on than what the history to be written in the futurewill reveal. Its as if societies continue to party upstairs while the foundations of the house crumble beneath them.At first, Nazi Germany would not have looked, on the surface, so unrecognizable to us: Germans still, for a time, saw anindependent judiciary; lawyers—even human rights lawyers; working journalists—even political satirists; criticism ofNazis in cabarets and theatre; and professors still teaching critical thinking. There were hundreds of newspapers of allpolitical colors; there were feminist organizations, abortion rights activists, sex education institutes, even gay rightsorganizations. These kinds of civil society organizations would become "co-ordinated" with Nazi ideology, or simplydisemboweled-but as the shift was first taking place things looked in many ways, superficially, like an open modernsociety. 26
  • 17. Even later in the game, violent dictatorships keep many of the trappings of a civil society. It is a point of pride to do so.What they do not have—and everyone who works in the press, the judiciary, the universities, the theatre, the electoralsystem, and so on, understands the rules about this—is freedom.Americans dont get this at all, but other countries who have experienced dictatorships either near them or over themdo get it: Journalists in Brazil and Argentina know exactly what the difference is between publishing a newspaper infreedom and publishing the same newspaper while looking over ones shoulder. The fact that we are unaware that adictatorship can be incremental leaves us terribly vulnerable right now. Even educated American people think that ifthe press is publishing and Congress is legislating, all is well; but those things are often still happening right up to thepoint of no return in a closing democracy-and they keep happening, in neutered form, even after a violent dictatorshiphas been established.A shift toward violent dictatorship does not need to look like people being fed into ovens; historically, it looked likethat exactly once, and that was less than a decade after the Nazis gamed power. A violent dictatorship almost neverlooks like that. At first, it can simply look like people weighing their words. At its turning point, it can simply look like ahigh-profile arrest for "treason" or a handful of arrests for "espionage"-even as tourists still flock to monuments andcelebrities are still being photographed at clubs.We are not in danger of a military coup. But home-grown American versions of the same steps that all dictators haveadvanced may yet create an America in which all our institutions are intact-but functioning weakly; in which citizenshave m theory the right to dissent, and some may do so mutedly, but most are afraid to exercise that right robustly; inwhich the press is subdued, the opposition is pulling its punches, and people are worried about expressing their trueopinions, because it may cost them their jobs, or worse. This would not be Munich in 1938, but it would be an Americawith another kind of culture than the one we have taken as our birthright: a culture in which the pendulum still exists,but the peoples will cannot move it more than slightly.We still have time to turn back the tide. What we do not have is leisure. A movement of citizens on the left and righthave both begun to build what is essentially a democracy movement in America: the American Freedom Agenda andthe American Freedom Campaign are trying to awaken the nation to these dangers and turn citizens into those leadingthe charge to defend the nation The AFA created a legislative package to repeal or modify restrictive laws and restoreliberty. We must roll back the laws that are associated with the opening of the door into darkness.If we fail to act, we could face an America in which we still have Friday night football games and Fourth of Julyfireworks, Wal-Mart and The Food Network and the Statue of Liberty-but an America in which people who publishclassified documents might go to jail and people who go to jail might not come out the same; an America with the sameTV shows and video games, and even the same schedule of elections—but one in which you can lose your job if yousay to a colleague that you voted against the grain; an America that looks much the same on the surface—but inwhich we no longer have real freedom.It could easily become an America that is quieter and more frightened. And a quiet, frightened American citizenry doesmean the end of the America the Founders created.For a little while, we still have the power to stop that from happening.
  • 18. — CHAPTER TWO — INVOKE an EXTERNAL and INTERNAL THREAT Fear is the foundation of most governments; but it is so sordid and brutal a passion, and renders men, in whose breasts itpredominates, so stupid and miserable, that Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution which is founded on it. John AdamsAfter September 11, 2001, we Americans learned in dramatic new ways that we were facing a terrifying external threat.We saw it in the carnage in lower Manhattan, but the administration also used a new set of phrases that defined for usa new reality. "Evildoers" who envied us and hated our freedoms were determined to annihilate us. By October 2001,the USA PATRIOT Act—that in the end, when it became law, topped 400 pages-rushed through Congress. Lawmakerspassed it overwhelmingly - though many said that they had scarcely read it. Some remarked that it would have seemedunpatriotic to resist passing the law. 1White House rhetoric elaborated on the all-encompassing nature of the terrorist threat: it was an "axis of evil." ("Axis"is Mussolinis coinage; in 1936 he first offered the simile of an axis to describe the fascist states collaboration). 2 ByMarch 2003, with the invasion of Iraq, it was common for administration spokespeople to refer to Muslim terrorists as"evil." (Our allies, said the White House, were the countries of the "New Europe"-a phrase Hitler coined to describeAxis powers.)By 2006 Bush was comparing Osama bin Laden to Lenin and Hitler; bin Laden posed "a threat to civilization" itself. 3The White House deployed the term Islamofascism to convey the idea that this global, ever-growing, andever-shifting enemy wished to enslave us utterly. 4 Bush said that we were now committed to a global "war on terror."This war is eternal in time and space, with no endpoint at which you can say "We have won" or "We have lost." The"evildoers" want a "global caliphate," and the battlefield is the whole world. Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrotean essay in Newsweek that invoked the specter that terrorists representing "Islamic fascism" are seeking technologiesto make "radical Islam a global power, allowing new killing on an unimagined scale." 5All those who seek to close down an open society invoke a terrifying external threat. Why is it so important for suchleaders to whip up this kind of terror in a population?Free citizens will not give up freedom for very many reasons, but it is human nature to be willing to trade freedom forsecurity. People fear chaos and violence above all. Before 1922 in Italy and before 1933 in Germany, citizens of thosenations suffered from mayhem playing out on the streets, and labored in economies ravaged by inflation and war. 6 Inboth Italy and Germany, many citizens were eventually relieved when fascists came to power because they believedthat order would be restored.But we are not wracked by rioting in the streets or a major depression here in America today. That is why the successthat the Bush administration has had in invoking "Islamofascism" is so insidious: We have been willing to trade ourkey freedoms for a promised state of security in spite of our living in conditions of overwhelming stability, affluence,and social order. This is quite a feat in the annals of such victories: It is unprecedented to strip people of key freedomsin an atmosphere of bourgeois equilibrium. It takes potent mythologizing.All fascist leaders tell citizens a story of an encircling global threat that is evil incarnate: "Fascists need a demonizedenemy against which to mobilize followers," writes political theoristUnbent O. Paxton in The Anatomy of Fascism. Each culture, he writes, identifies its own national enemy. 7 Paxton pointsout that once an enemy has been identified, the elites create myths mitigating the fears that the population begins tosuffer from inhibitions to this "other." The "enemy" is functional: What matters in .1 fascist leader is not to get rid ofthe enemy but rather to maintain an enemy. 8 (Because this is what really counts, Arendt points to me that the"enemy" status can be shifted from group to group: when the Nazis had overcome the "enemy" represented by Jews,they moved on to demonize the Poles.) 9There is no reason the external enemy cant be real. International terrorism aimed at the West is all too real. Oftenfascist leaders invoke a threat that has elements of truth as its basis—but a truth that is distorted to their purposes.Fascist leaders, Paxton writes, do not elaborate a philosophy so much as a "mood" that whips up what he calls"mobilizing passions" of the population: "At bottom is a passionate nationalism," he points out. "Allied to it is a
  • 19. conspiratorial and Manichean view of history as a battle between good and evil .amps, between the pure and thecorrupt, in which ones own community or nation has been the victim." These attitudes, he argues, form the "emotionallava that set fascisms foundations." Among the themes that fascist elites develop when they are driving toward anauthoritarian system are: •A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;... •The belief that ones group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any actions, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;... •The superiority of the leaders instincts over abstract and universal reason. 10Fascist leaders invariably describe this external threat as being global; impure; secretive; able to assume "harmless"camouflage that lets its members infiltrate ordinary society.They always portray this enemy as being backed by powerful international financiers who operate in subterraneanways, and as being capable of and intent upon destroying everything that the citizens of that society hold most dear.The threat is described as hydra like: If you cut off one of its heads, two more grow in its place.Italian fascists used this tactic: In 1919 they warned that "Where there were external enemies, now there are internalfoes. On one side are real Italians, lovers of their country. On the other, their enemies, the cowards who seek to blow topieces our national grandeur." By 1922, a fascist newspaper urged Italian women to get used to Arditi bloodshed,because death squads were necessary in order to rescue Italy from the "Bolshevik beast." 11 Italian fascist mythmakingexaggerated real dangers that Italy truly faced.Weimar Germany, too, faced obvious dangers: not a Jewish conspiracy, of course, but multiple crises indeed. TheVersailles treaty had humiliated veterans and eviscerated the industrial base of the nation; inflation was rampant, aswas violent crime; many people felt that the moral base of their society was crumbling; their allegiances toParliamentary processes were weak; and many Germans romanticized the "good old days" of the stable rule ofChancellor Otto von Bismarck. Violent street brawls erupted continually between Communists and Social Democratson one side, and Brownshirts and Free Corps veterans on the other. Between 1924 and 1933, propagandists for therising National Socialist party took these real threats and embellished them. Dangers were everywhere, they wrote;good Germans had been "stabbed in the back" by "November traitors" who had sold out their nation and enslaved itscitizens to the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. 12 To real threats, these propagandists added fantasy ones: an urban,degenerate "Jewish influence" was undermining the values of pure-blooded Germans: they faced "the hydra of theblack and red International, of Jews...." 13(Our own Presidents in the past have sometimes stirred up this fear of a shadowy internal and external threat: Whenfaced the possibility of war with France in the 1790s, President John Adams suggested that the many French refugeesin the country at that time posed a threat to social order and a danger of subversion, and implied that they weredomestic traitors.)The Rise of HitlerMany of us have the impression that the Nazi seizure of power had a certain nightmare inevitability about it: We tendto see Nazism as too incomprehensible evil that subsumed Germany like a metaphysical whirlwind or a Biblical curse.But that frame doesnt help us learn the lessons that we need.Hitler could never have ascended to power as he did if the Reichstag had not first cravenly, but legally, weakenedGermanys system of checks and balances. Lawmakers who were not Nazis— who in fact were horrified byNazis—unwittingly opened the door for Nazis to overturn the rule of law, and did so before the Nazis even cameformally to power. 14The Nazis rose to power in a living, if battered, democracy, through a day-by-day accretion of decisions—a set oftactics: "Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945," writeshistorian Richard J. Evans. But Evans also writes that "[Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by nomeans so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily haveturned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points...." l5Hitlers predecessor, Reich Chancellor Heinrich Brining, was not a National Socialist; he was a centrist. But hetampered with the framework of German democracy, reduced the power of the Parliament, and restricted civil liberties ina way that Nazis seized upon.Increasingly, the Republic was governed by emergency decree. The erosion of the rule of law unbolted the door forHitler, and Hitler then used the law to burst it open and let the flood ensue. 16Hitlers Germany was no anarchic state: He used to law to legitimate virtually everything he did. Hitler often boastedthat "We will overthrow Parliament in a legal way through legal means. Democracy will be overthrown with the tools of
  • 20. democracy." 17 "I can say clearly," he announced at a Nuremberg rally in 1934, "that the basis of the National Socialiststate is the National Socialist law code." He called Nazi Germany "this state of order, freedom and law." 18Dictators can rise in a weakened democracy even with a minority of popular support. Hitler never won a majority: Inthe election in 1932, only 13.1 million Germans voted for the Nazi party. Although National Socialism was the largestsingle party, the Nazis had fewer seats in government than the combined opposition parties did. At that point theycould still have been defeated. 19 Their numbers declined further in the next election.At that critical time, Brownshirts waged a campaign of violence against Nazi Party opponents in the streets. A sense ofcrisis descended on the country. A coalition of conservatives united to provoke a constitutional crisis in Parliament aswell. Lawmakers then engaged in frenzied negotiations to head off civil war. The conservative majority still believed atthat point that if Hitler were appointed Reich Chancellor they would be able to control him. They made a deal: Hitlerwas sworn in as Reich Chancellor entirely legally on January 30,1933.But Nazis directed events to cascade rapidly after that: They staged torchlight marches while all marches by theCommunist opposition were forbidden. When thousands of citizens marched against the new governmentnonetheless, police arrested their leaders. Twenty opposition newspapers took issue with the new Nazileadership—but then the papers were banned; local authorities cracked down on free assembly across the country. 20Soon, Germans learned of a terrorist threat: The Reichstag was set on fire on February 27,1933. That would be likesomeone trying to set fire to the Capitol. A disturbed young Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was accusedof having set the fire. Some historians believe the Nazis engineered this attack themselves.First, Nazi leader Hermann Goering informed Germany that it was now on a "war footing." Goering warned the nationthat the Reichstag fire was just part of a larger plot: Communist terrorists, he said, had planned to poison the watersupply and kidnap the families of government ministers. He claimed also to have evidence that these shadowyterrorists were planning bombing attacks on railroads, electrical works, and other infrastructure sites. These threatswere never substantiated, but the nation was terrified nonetheless. 21The Nazi Reich Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick, introduced "clause 2": It suspended parts of the Germanconstitution. It shut down freedoms of expression and of the press and freedom of assembly. Clause 2 also gave policeforces the power to hold people in custody indefinitely and without a court order. The law, and cowed lawmakers, hadwell prepared the way. 22At last, Hitler told the Cabinet that an amendment to the Constitution was required, the Enabling Act, which wouldallow him permanently to circumvent some powers of the Parliament. It was now legal for the state to tap citizensphones and open their mail. 23Appalled at the terrorist threat, and not wanting to be seen as unpatriotic, there was little debate: lawmakers of allparties passed the Enabling Act by a wide majority: 441 to 94. The constitution remained, but from then on, Hitlercould govern by decree.Joseph Stalin too used the "internal and external threat" narrative. Party functionary Sergei Kirov was assassinated inMoscow in 1934, probably with Stalins blessing. Stalin blamed the murder on counterrevolutionary "terrorists." Hewarned Russians of a worldwide conspiracy of capitalist-imperialist villains determined to wage a war against thecountry, and working in concert with an internal network of other "counterrevolutionary terrorists," "assassins," and"wreckers." 24 The fear engendered by that story set the stage for the mass arrests of 1937 to 1938.The hydra narrative became boilerplate for would-be dictators: During the Cold War, Communist leaders urged EastGerman and Czech citizens to beware a bloodthirsty cabal of "capitalist imperialists" as well as domestic "enemies ofthe revolution." 25In September 1973, General Pinochets military junta displayed a cache of arms on television and told Chilean citizensthat the Unidad Popular (whom they called "terrorists") planned to assassinate many of Chiles military leaders in oneblow. 26Is the "Islamofascism" threat new, or is the way we are hearing about it new—for us? The Clinton administration wasprofoundly worried about Islamic terrorism: The bombing of the USS Cole and the first attack on the World TradeCenter took place on Clintons watch. But the language that President Clinton and his State Department used todescribe the same terrorists then was quite different from the language we hear today, and 9/11 itself does not explainthe difference: Clintons team used language about a serious geopolitical threat, but we did not hear mythologizingabout a hydra of "evil" and "evildoers."Extremist Islamic terrorists do seek to harm us. But Bush has universalized the fanatical claims of the most fanaticalelements of the threat. The United Kingdom and Spain have suffered grave terrorist assaults, but those nations have,in contrast, described the same people and the same threat in more prosaic language. British and Spanish citizens thinkthey are facing a serious security concern; Americans, however, fear that the same threat can bring about the end ofcivilization.The "Security-Industrial Complex"
  • 21. America is not driven by pure ideologies the way that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were. In America, profit drivesevents where ideology does not: Within days of the 9/11 attacks, security companies were lobbying airport andgovernment officials to invest in new technologies of surveillance. Six years later, the surveillance industry is hugebusiness: "[S]urveillance technologies are emerging as one of the ripest plums for companies to pluck in the newanti-terrorism." 27 In 2003, business writers estimated that this burgeoning industry was worth $ 115 billion a year. Iftrends continued, they estimated, the windfall from new surveillance and security demands would bring in $130 to $180billion a year by 2010.Lockheed Martin, Acxiom, ChoicePoint, and other companies have sharply increased their investment in lobbying for apiece of this profit: ChoicePoint alone quadrupled the money it put into lobbying after 9/11. A 2003 study found that569 companies had registered Homeland Security lobbyists after 9/11. 28 The New York Times reported that "the majordefense contractors want to move into the homeland security arena in a big way." 29 Dr. William Haseltine, who sits onthe boards of many of the organizations that analyze this industry, including the Trilateral Commission and TheBrookings Institution, and who is one of the founders of the American Freedom Campaign, says that the"security-industrial complex" rivals the "military-industrial complex" in influencing policy. 30Peace is bad for business. When the former Soviet Union fell apart, the U.S. defense industry was staring into the faceof a falling market share: To grow, it would have to find a new enemy. It would also help if it expanded its product linefrom building fighter jets to the newfangled demand for applications involving surveillance.Dr. Haseltine points out that the Department of Homeland Security has, like the Defense Department, an externalcorollary in private industry; so the relationships between the two departments are now institutionalized. 31 TheDepartment of Homeland Security will be almost impossible to dismantle whether or not it is successful in protectingAmericans: An $115-billion-a-year industry can exert major pressure on policy-making, and the Department ofHomeland Security is not going to go away, even if tomorrow all the Muslim terrorists in the world were to lay downtheir arms.But what if Islamic terrorism does subside? A foreign enemys actions will always be unpredictable. But you can alsoidentify a more reliable domestic enemy in need of surveillance: us. A powerful lobby is now served by policies inwhich government increasingly designates U.S. citizens as potential security threats, which in turn creates a demandfor more and more costly high-tech watching.The ACLU is measured in describing how this profit potential affects legislation: "It is not possible to determine theoverall extent to which private-sector lobbying has actually driven the governments push for increased surveillance,as opposed to simply helping companies fight for a pieces of a pre-determined government pie. . .but in at least somecases, major new impetus for surveillance-friendly policies has clearly come from the private sector. There is muchmore money to be made providing complex, cutting-edge technological solutions to security problems," they note,than there is in solutions that may be more truly effective but cheaper, such as strengthening cockpit doors. "It wouldbe a double tragedy," their report continues, "if the emerging surveillance-industrial complex were not only to lobbyfor increased surveillance of Americans, but also to divert resources from security measures that would be far morelikely to be effective in protecting Americans from attacks." 32So: the state has now identified, mythologized, and institutionalized an external and internal threat—indefinitely. Whois caught in the middle between the mythologies of the external and internal enemies? Ordinary Americans—us.
  • 22. — CHAPTER THREE — ESTABLISH SECRET PRISONS No person shall be . . . deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law . .. The Fifth Amendment to the ConstitutionIn all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury . . . and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; tohave compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense. The Sixth AmendmentThe Magna Carta was signed in 1215. Since then, our Western legal tradition has held that everyone deserves somekind of judicial process before being thrown into prison. This simple yet radical notion that you cannot beunaccountably imprisoned is the cornerstone of all democracy. We Americans expect that we cant be thrown into jailwithout hope of getting out. That faith is so essential a part of our liberty that we scarcely think about it.This guarantee that you cant be randomly jailed is strengthened by the concept of habeas corpus. This is the law,dating from 1079, that undergirds our freedom as Americans. The phrase comes from the Latin; it is a writ "to have thebody." Having the right to habeas corpus means that if they grab you and throw you in jail, you have the right to seethe evidence against you, face your accusers, and have a hearing before an impartial judge or jury to establish whetheryou actually committed the crime of which you are accused. In short, it means that if you are innocent, there is hopethat you can prove that you are, and hope that you can eventually get out. It means your innocence protects you.Your innocence does not protect you in a dictatorship.Just as habeas corpus, or some equivalent procedure, is the cornerstone of virtually every democracy, so a secretprison system without habeas corpus is the cornerstone of every dictatorship. You cannot push an open society intosubmission without a secret prison or, more effective still, a system of secret prisons. By "secret prison," I mean aprison system that is not accountable and that is beyond the rule of law. Building a secret prison system beyond therule of law permits everything else that follows. Without the real threat of such a secret prison system, citizens speakup, activists are forceful, and democracy is stubborn.The classic secret prison system starts out modestly and metastasizes. Initially the government targets people seen bythe rest of the population as being "evil": dangerous radicals or outright criminals. At this stage, the prisons—eventhe mistreatment and torture of prisoners—are publicized, to general acceptance or even approval: Cartoons in theGerman press from 1931 to 1933 made light of prisoner abuse. 1 Early on, the secret prisons and even this abuse makecitizens feel safer: They cant imagine that they themselves might ever be subjected to mistreatment.And then there is a "mission creep"—always. The thick black line that has separated "us" from "them" starts to blur.The secret prison system expands, slowly or quickly but inexorably, to seize civil-society leaders, journalists, clergy,and the political opposition. I challenge you to name a time and place when this did not happen.Early on, this mission creep is seldom evident. There is a strong, if unconscious, psychological denial among citizensat this stage. Because there is now a two-caste system, and because most people are in the protected caste, a kind ofmagical thinking makes many people feel more secure as they witness "others" being sent into brutal detention.This is the regressive seduction of fascism. A "Daddy wouldnt harm me" kind of thinking, a sense of privilege asDaddys state-sanctioned ire and even violence are directed at others outside the circle of safety. Then, if they areworking in a democracy, leaders seeking a fascist shift acclimate citizens to an ever-lowered bar for the acceptance ofstate torture. (The Fox TV show 24 depicts torture as entertainment. The producers recently noted that torture is nolonger shocking, let alone news. 2 )Secret Prisons MetastasizeWhy should Americans worry about Guantanamo? Because history shows us that building a secret prison opens aPandoras box in Hell. In the mission creep I mentioned, citizens start to see well-publicized reports of arrests of peoplewhose status begins to blurs the thick black line that had been established between "us" and "them." 3 This is asensitive time: if the authorities move too fast, and arrest people with whom ordinary citizens identify too early, therewill be a backlash. But if the leaders seeking a fascist shift get away with these arrests, a citizen backlash stalls. Believeit or not, that is where we are right now in America.In the endgame of a fascist shift, deportations to the secret prison claim citizens at the heart of civil life. It is always the
  • 23. same cast, in regime after regime: opposition leaders, outspoken clergy, union leaders, well-known performers,publishers, and journalists.At this stage, the regime starts to call critics "enemies of the state," "enemies of the people," "traitors," "criminals,"and "spies." At this point there are likely to be show trials where evidence is withheld from the prisoner, or secrettrials, for "security purposes." Citizens are gradually stripped of elements of due process. The independent judicialsystem is bypassed altogether because a "peoples court" or military tribunal system has been revived or newlyestablished alongside it. The message at this point is that no one is safe, and by then it is pretty much over. This stageof the shift tends to happen very fast.(The same lesson—you dont need Nazi-style death camps to subdue a nation, only a network of indefinite detentionand torture camps set up as a backdrop-has been learned well by many dictators. Alfredo Stroessner ofParaguay—who offered his nation as a haven for Nazis 4 —used this part of the ten steps, as did dictators in Argentina,Brazil, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Uruguay, and Guatemala. 5 Many of-these dictators established sadistic prison camps;used paramilitary death squads; "disappeared" critics; stripped prisoners of the right to trial; targeted oppositionleaders, academics, journalists, scientists, performers, and clergy; orchestrated mass arrests; and practiced torturedirected by the state. Even in "merely" authoritarian regimes such as Morocco and Egypt, which dont have torturecamps along the same lines, its well known among citizens that prisoners die "accidentally" in brutal interrogations.These deaths also intimidate civil society. 6 )We should worry about the men held at Guantanamo because history shows that stripping prisoners of their rights isintoxicating not only to leaders but to functionaries at every level of society. Professor Philip Zimbardo, in The LuciferEffect, shows once again how easy it is for even decent people to become desensitized and act as instruments of evil.Once a government crosses that line, its easier for would-be dictators to portray such demands as the right to alawyer, the chance to see the evidence against you, and the right to be heard by an impartial judge as trivialimpediments to a "national security" goal as they choose to define it, rather than as essential rights for all.The historical record shows without doubt that after that has happened, secret prisons start to operate with ever-moresevere penalties, ever-greater violence, and always less accountability. So many regimes have fostered thisdevelopment that it seems to prove a dark potential inherent in human nature. Even well-informed people arent alwayssure why habeas corpus and due process in general are not expendable in a time of crisis.We forget that these processes are intimately related to our own physical safety in America. "Due process" and "therule of law" are not, it turns out, dry formalities; if they remain robust, when leaders are seeking a dictatorship, theycan save our lives.In Mussolinis Italy, the prison system was never as brutal as that of Germany and Russia, but Mussolini sent tens ofthousands of political prisoners into internal exile (confino) nonetheless; thousands died in the prisons. 7One of the first things the Nazis did was to establish prisons in legal "outer space," often in basements, guarded by SSofficers who were not accountable to the state; they rounded up communists, criminals and anarchists, and torturedthem. By 1933, when Hitler was Chancellor, ordinary Germans were taken to these torture sites as well. On March 20 ofthat year, SS leader Heinrich Himmler announced that a concentration camp for political prisoners would beopened—Dachau, just outside of Munich. Within thirty days, SA and SS had rounded up, arrested, imprisoned,tortured, or often simply shot dead tens of thousands of Communists, Social Democrats, other opposition leaders,labor leaders, journalists, the clergy. That whole year, storm troopers continued to make these arrests. 8The first concentration camps, such as Oranienberg, received no political prisoners. In 1933, most of the 27,000detainees were there because they were political opponents of the regime. 9So Hitler came to power in a democracy that at first still possessed an independent judiciary, human rights lawyers, anaccountable military, and a legitimate prison system. But, in a matter of months, he had deployed a paramilitary forceanswerable only to him; set in motion an alternative system of tribunals in which his representatives served as judge,jury, and executioner; and established a network of illegitimate prisons where torture took place.Those steps were enough to create the conditions from which there was no turning back. To make sure that theremaining vestiges of democratic process would not deter him from attaining absolute power, Hitler passed a law"appointing” himself as Supreme Judge with the power to imprison or execute individuals without benefit of trial." 10The mass arrests of 1933 were so effective in quelling the population that within several years, the prisons held lessthan a quarter of the prisoners they had before. Many had been killed, but another reason for the drop in population isthat, by then, opposition had simply withered. The entire society—those who agreed with Nazis and those who didnot—was "co-ordinated" under the banner of Nazi ideology, and any dissent now carried a mortal risk. 11The Nazis did not need formal extermination camps to control the population. The formal extermination camps thatmurdered millions, with which most of us are more familiar, were not established until the very eve of the war. Theprisons of the mid-1930s, in contrast, terrorized people "only" through widely publicized violent interrogation,
  • 24. beatings, deliberate denial of medical care, and informal murder committed by guards who knew there was no chance oftheir being punished. That was enough to silencedissent. 12Stalins Terror also shows that secret prisons and torture metastasize. The prison camps of the gulag became ever morenumerous, more violent, and more lawless: "The first codes of Soviet law categorically forbade the use of penalmethods that could be considered torture.... In 1937 all these liberal systems were abolished.... The corrective-laborcamps were turned into hard-labor camps, calculated not so much to correct as to destroy the prisoners.... Camps forspecial punishment... became virtual death camps." 13It took only six years for Stalin, the NKVD police, the evermore brutal network of prisons, and arrests of tens ofthousands of citizens—the usual suspects—to terrorize the country. With the prison system intact, once charges of"sabotage" or "attempted rebellion" began to fly, any Soviet citizen could find him or herself accused on the basis of astray remark of being a "traitor," a "state and political criminal," or a "conciliator." Then he or she could be heldwithout seeing evidence, tried in a show trial, imprisoned, tortured, or even executed.GUANTANAMOExcessive bail shall not be required . . . nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.The Eighth AmendmentIt is well documented that the Bush administration set the stage for torture to take place at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq,after Major General Geoffrey Miller was sent to "Gitmo-ize" interrogations. Michael Ratner and Ellen Rays report,Guantanamo: What the World Should Know, documents the fact that the White House institutionalized torture atGuantanamo too, long before the administration asked Congress to make the abuse legal in 2006. "Guantanamo is atwenty-first century Pentagon experiment that was, in fact, outlawed by the Geneva Conventions of 1949," saysRatner, who has faced death threats because he helps to represent the detainees.Nazi Germany is hardly irrelevant to the Guantanamo debate: the Geneva Conventions were revised in 1949 because ofworld revulsion against Nazi practices. "[Guantanamo] is similar in purpose to the German World War II operationsthat led to the I Geneva Conventions] ban: it is an interrogation camp, and interrogation camps are completely andflatly illegal." 14In spite of the Supreme Courts 2006 ruling, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that the protections of the Geneva Conventionsapply to inmates at Guantanamo, violent abuse, ranging from waterboarding, beatings to sexual humiliation, has beencommonplace there. According to Newsweek, Guantanamo developed a "72-point matrix for stress and duress....These included the use of harsh heat or cold; withholding food; hooding for days at a time; naked isolation in cold,dark cells for more than 30 days, and threatening (but not biting) by dogs. It also permitted limited use of stresspositions designed to subject detainees to rising levels of pain." 15Torture creates the division between speech and silence when people are assessing what they will personally risk.Legal torture, as I mentioned, changes everything. The existence of a secret prison where torture takes place movesthe states threat closer to the body of every citizen and sets the bar of courage higher for everyone when it comes tospeaking out.People concerned about civil liberties try to alert others by reminding them of the last repressive era in the UnitedStates, the McCarthy witch hunts. We need to get past that frame to understand where we are now. The McCarthythreat is a cakewalk compared to the threats against dissent that are legally possible now. Citizens who challenged theMcCarthy blacklisters, men and women such as Arthur Miller and Lillian Hellman, were courageous; but—not todiminish their courage—no one speaking out at that time risked being driven mad by years of isolation in a narrow cell.They risked nothing more physically brutal than the end of a career.Playwright, democracy activist, and former Czech President Vaclav Havel knows about how violence resets the bar ofcourage: He was held as a political prisoner for four and a half years in a prison that was uncomfortable, but that didnot use torture. When asked about his courage, he notes rightly, "None of us know in advance how we will behave --I dont know, for example, what I would do if I were physically tortured." 16Havels courage helped to free Czechoslovakia; if he had been tortured, would he and his fellow Czechs still be livingin a closed society? Who are these "evildoers" being tortured today by the United States?According to a Seton Hall University study, most of the Guantanamo prisoners are innocent, and were swept up byNorthern Alliance warlords in Afghanistan simply because the United States had offered bounties of up to $5000 perprisoner, a major sum for that area. The warlords often simply gave the United States names of neighbors with whomthey had disputes, or even of random villagers, to get the money. 17 (These are the same warlords, by the way, whoraped and brutalized their own people before the advent of the equally brutal Taliban.)
  • 25. The prisoners were then, according to Ratner and Ray, "kept in metal shipping containers, so tightly packed that theyhad to ball themselves up, and the heat was unbearable. The people inside were suffocating, so the Northern Alliancesoldiers shot holes into the containers, killing some of the prisoners inside." 18 Some of the men who survived weretaken, blindfolded and shackled, onto transport planes, where they were chained belly-down on the floor fortwenty-four hours. Forbidden to go to the bathroom, the prisoners lay in their own urine and feces until they arrived atGuantanamo and were put in cells. 19 (Stalins prisoners, transported by train to the gulags, were also forced to liepublicly in their own urine and feces—a part of the journey that was as horrifying to them as the more overt forms ofviolence.)In the camp, squads of U.S. military personnel "beat people up, sometimes quite severely." Red Cross reports, whichare not public, have leaked: prisoners were stripped, short-shackled to a chain on the floor, and forced to kneel orstand for hours during interrogations. They were kept in extremes of heat and cold— sometimes at temperatures of 110degrees. At Camp X-Ray, the prisoners were kept in the "dog-run-like cages," exposed to the elements and to beatingsby the IRF (Immediate Reaction Forces). Meals and medical care could be withheld from prisoners who refused tocooperate.The psychological torture is, the prisoners report, the most painful of all: They are told that there is no way out unlessthey confess. "[T]hey [U.S. forces] also intimidated prisoners with family photos, threatening that things wouldhappen to the prisoners family unless the prisoner talked."Guantanamo is growing: the dog-run-like cells of 2002 have been built up into formal cells. Two new camps, Romeoand Tango, have been built to be total isolation camps. 20 . Prolonged isolation triggers psychosis even in mentallyhealthy prisoners: Every camp in the Soviet Gulag had an isolation block for prisoners who didnt cooperate, as inGuantanamo. 21Yet, as one otherwise compassionate friend of mine put it, "Thats not my issue." Most Americans have found itdifficult to worry much about the "tough" or "harsh" interrogations of people who, they think, are probably terrorists.The Founders would have been shocked at these attitudes. They did care about the just treatment of prisoners, evenof the most despised political prisoners: "There is one example of this violation in Virginia, of a most striking andshocking nature," said Virginia Attorney General Edmund Randolph, to the Constitutional Convention. "[A]n exampleso horrid that, if I conceived my country would passively permit a repetition of it, dear as it is to me, I would seekmeans of expatriating myself from it. A man [Josiah Phillips, a political prisoner], who was then a citizen, was deprivedof his life thus: from a mere reliance on general reports, he was accused of several crimes. He was attained veryspeedily and precipitately, without any proof better than vague reports. Without being confronted with his accusersand witnesses, without the privilege of calling for evidence in his behalf, he was sentenced to death, and wasafterwards actually executed-----I cannot contemplate it without horror." 22"ACLU focus groups do not care about Guantanamo," says spokeswoman Emily Whitfield. "But when you tell them . .. that citizens can be seized on the street and kidnapped and shipped away to be tortured—it makes even Republicanguys crazy." 23 What Whitfield is telling these Americans is true.Even after Congress passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006, most Americans continue to assume that the onlyway one can be subjected to "harsh interrogations" or other abuse is if one is actively engaged in terrorist crimesagainst the United States. Even now, many well-informed people believe that you cant possibly be mistreated if youare a U.S. citizen.But President Bush has claimed the "unilateral authority" to "arrest virtually anyone, anywhere, citizen or noncitizen,even in the United States, if he deemed them an enemy combatant," warns Ratner. 24 Any U.S. citizen can now bemistreated in various ways.Two U.S. citizens, Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, had already been taken as "enemy combatants," even before theMilitary Commissions Act was passed.Hamdi, a 31-year-old born in Louisiana, wasnt physically tortured, but he was imprisoned in a navy brig without a trialfor three years. He was unable to tell his family where he was; forbidden to speak to a lawyer; and could not see theevidence against him or receive a visit from the Red Cross. The Bush administration argued that they had to make thisU.S. citizen believe he was utterly in the power of his interrogators, that his situation was hopeless and that lie wouldnever get out, in order to question him usefully. 25 When the Supreme Court insisted that this American citizen had toreceive some kind of hearing, the administration simply let him go. 26 It is hard not to wonder if a hearing might haverevealed that the evidence against him would not hold up.Jose Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen, was called an "enemy combatant." You probably heard of him as the "dirtybomber" because thats how his arrest saturated the airwaves: The administration asserted when they took him in thathe had al-Qaeda connections, he planned to set off a dirty bomb, and he was also planning a series of natural gasexplosions in apartment buildings. 27 Very scary.(You probably didnt hear that none of those accusations appear in the indictment against him. In fact, no violent plot
  • 26. against the United States appears in the indictment. 28 )His lawyers say Padillas interrogations included "hooding, stress positions, assaults, threats of imminent executionand the administration of truth serums" (Guantanamo detainees also report receiving injections of some kind duringinterrogations). 29 Jose Padilla was entirely alone for these three years in a ten-cell wing of a South Carolina brig: Herarely had human contact except with his interrogator; his meals were slid to him through a slot; he was continuallyelectronically monitored; his windows were blacked out; he had no clock or calendar; his mattress was taken awayfrom him so that he had to sleep on a steel slab; and he became so passive that the brigs staff told his lawyer thatPadilla was like "a piece of furniture." 30It took twenty-one months for the U.S. government to let him see his attorney. Dr. Angela Hegarty, of CreedmorePsychiatric Center, examined him before his trial; she said in an affidavit that he was not in a condition to help himselfin his own defense because of his mental condition. Another psychiatrist who examined Padilla believes he may havesuffered a brain injury as a result of his treatment.In spite of his having become "like a piece of furniture," when Padilla finally emerged to see a dentist, he was chained;he had blackout goggles over his eyes and noise-blocking headphones covering his ears; and he was surroundeddramatically by guards wearing riot gear. By the way, his plea to the governments charges is "not guilty." 31 As of thiswriting, the president claims that he has the right to do this to you or me tomorrow—on the presidents say-so alone.Most people take it for granted that Bushs effort to establish a practice of torture or abuse is aimed at "real" terrorists.But lets look more closely.Throughout years of legal maneuvers, starting long before the September of 2006 victory in Congress, the Bush WhiteHouse aggressively tried to redefine the level of abuse legally considered to be torture, and to keep the definition of"enemy combatant" broad and loose.Throughout the litigation of these two cases involving U.S. citizens, Bush administration lawyers resisted defining"enemy combatant" with specificity.This effort goes back to just six months after 9/11, to the Taft-Haynes Memo of March 22, 2002. 32 Bush requested thismemo from his lawyers to support his claim that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to the conflict withal-Qaeda or the Taliban. The arguments are broad, the terms subjective, and the method is that of looking forloopholes to exempt people from protected status: Taft invokes arguments that "the [Civilians] Convention could notof course cover criminals or saboteurs? Still another argument notes that the rights and privileges of the Conventioncant apply to "unprivileged combatants engaged in unlawful belligerency? " 33In the wording of the 2002 "torture memo,"—Bybee-Gonzales August 1,2002 memo re: Standards of conduct forinterrogation-torture is laboriously underdefined. 34(When you are looking at suggestions of a fascist shift in a democracy, intention is important; drafts and memosreveal what the regime seeks, if it could be unconstrained.)The "torture memo" also shows how far back this White House has sought to legalize abuse and how hard it hasworked to do so. The memo is forty pages of densely worded legal argument in favor of allowing all kinds of horrifictreatment of human beings. It concludes that:[Torture] covers only extreme acts. Severe pain is generally of the kind difficult for the victim to endure. Where thepain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death ororgan failure. Severe mental pain requires suffering not just at the moment of infliction but it also requires lastingpsychological harm, such as seen in mental disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder. Additionally, such severemental pain can arise only from the predicate acts listed. Because the acts inflicting torture are extreme, there issignificant range of acts that though they might constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment failto rise to the level of torture. 35 [Italics mine]Why go to this level of grim acrobatics to legalize such savage activity?Americans do not live in a bubble of immunity that most of us are sure protects us from the broad range of thisadministrations assertions. After Hamdi, legal scholar Lloyd C. Anderson noted, "[T]he rationale of the Hamdidecision—that the AUMF provides authority to detain—strongly suggests that the president has the authority todetain a United States citizen in the United States as an enemy combatant." 36The governments position is that even U.S. citizens can be held indefinitely without charge, and the president hasreserved what he views as his right to mistreat those he detains. "Whatever is permitted under the presidents broadassertion of power can be done to you," said my law professor friend. He explained that, until the Supreme Court rulesotherwise, if it does—and please recall that several key decisions on civil liberties could have gone the other way bybut a single vote—President Bush alone will continue to decide whom to detain and whether to charge them, no matterwho they are. The president argues, most importantly, that the courts must uphold the detention of citizens even whenthere is no direct evidence against them. Mere declarations by government officials, the administration says, shouldsuffice.
  • 27. I asked my friend to explain this further. "The president in essence says he has the power to decide who should bedetained as an enemy combatant, and to hold them, without charge or trial, indefinitely," he said."Does this mean they can arrest a reporter? Or a critic?""They wont come for them this year," the professor remarked."But their arguments would permit them to take anyone, based essentially on their own say-so." 37Belligerents, saboteurs, criminals; these are Stalins words. 38 More importantly, they are broad, loose categories.Vague, loose definitions of what a criminal is are typical of fascist legislation: The Nuremberg Laws of 1938, forinstance, turned an ordinary German into a criminal if his girlfriend was Jewish, and turned a German Jew into a criminalif he or she displayed the German flag. 39 These laws dont proliferate simply to stamp out forbidden actions; rather,they act as a way to create a category of people and activities that are suddenly or unexpectedly criminalized as a wayto ensnare and intimidate citizens.Penalties in Germany escalated so that anyone who helped a Jew or who spoke up against the abuse of Jews andothers targeted by the state eventually faced official opprobrium or, later, charges. This kind of proliferating taboo withcriminal penalties is at work now against those Americans who speak up for the detainees. Lawyers representingdetainees, as we will see, have had career setbacks, have been faced with threats of boycotts, and even beenthreatened with criminal charges.We too, as U.S. citizens, face an increasingly elaborate tripwire. People who have "materially and purposely supportedhostilities"—who could this be? Could it be a peace activist who asks Congress to cut funding for the Iraq war?Journalists reporting on classified information? A whistle-blowing civil servant?"The Pentagon has made up a new term," says Ratner," enemy combatant. . . This is a totalitarian system in whichthere are no checks or balances on the executive. The president can do whatever he wants, acting as a dictator. In thissystem the courts have no independent function and cant protect anybodys rights___[WithMilitary Order No. 1, Bush] issued a military order giving himself the power to run the country as a general."But arent U.S. citizens safe, protected by habeas corpus and the Constitution? "The Bush administration claimed,"argues Ratner,... Under these claimed commander-in-chief powers [that] the president can . . . designate people enemy combatantsand detain them for whatever reason he wants ... there are no charges and prisoners have no lawyers, no family visits,no court reviews, no rights to anything, and no right to release until the mythical end to the "war on terror." 40"Fingerprints" from Other Prison SystemsAccounts of Stalins gulag show parallels between the methods that Stalin used on political prisoners and thepractices introduced by military interrogators in Guantanamo. The Communist Revolutionaries of 1917 were opposedto torture, having suffered it themselves at the hands of czarist forces. So in order for Stalin to promote the use oftorture, he had to create new laws and form new attitudes. Eventually, "physical torture" in Stalins secret prisons "wasused with the complete approval of the central offices. Of course the policy did not spring up in a single day butdeveloped gradually over several years," writes historian Roy Medvedev. Adhering even minimally to legal methodsof investigation would not let Stalin do what he needed to do. So Stalin advocated that the NKVD use what he called"physical methods of influence" on prisoners. 41The Abu Ghraib photos emerged in April 2004. Americans were appalled. But in less than three years Americans wentfrom being horrified by these photos to being accustomed enough to detainee abuse to let Congress pass the 2006law. In less than three years, the White House went from rhetorically disavowing the use of torture to being confidentenough openly to advance legislation to permit many cruel practices.In 1937 the Soviet February-March Plenum changed the law to expand the use of torture. After that, the "most refinedtortures" could be directed legally at "stubborn enemies of the people" 48 — which meant, remember, just aboutanyone. Whether one agreed or disagreed with Stalins party line, one could also be charged with being an "enemy ofthe people."Eugenia Ginzburg was a devoted communist, a teacher, and a mother of three. To her dismay, the NKVD accused herof being part of an "underground terrorist organization." She was sent to prison. She learned there from "Greta,"another prisoner, that detainees were tortured into confessing:"They have special apparatus to produce . . . confession," [Greta tells Ginzburg]."Torture!" I exclaimed.Greta nodded sadly. "Night come, you hear." 43Stalins torturers routinely led their prisoners to believe they would be killed in order to elicit their false confessions.(This tactic was used on Hamdi as well as on others by the United States.) The NKVD used dogs on prisoners. (So dowe.)
  • 28. HumiliationInterrogators at Guantanamo humiliate prisoners: Prisoners heads and beards are forcibly shaved as punishment 44—an act as affronting to Muslims sensibilities as was the forced shaving of the beards and peyos of Jews in Germanyin the 1930s. Detainees also report that guards have spit in their food. 45Stalins prisons used psychological humiliation: An NKVD interrogator would urinate in a glass and force the prisonerto drink it. 46 Prison memoirs recount other kinds of sexualized humiliations. (To the horror of womens rights activists,the Military Commissions Act of 2006 defines "rape narrowly—leaving it legal for an interrogator to force a female ormale prisoner to strip, as well as legalizing many other methods to coerce, violate and degrade people sexually." 47According to Newsweek, the Red Cross cites "acts of humiliation such as [detainees] being made to stand naked . . .with womens underwear over the head, while being laughed at by guards, including female guards." Notably, theBush administration gave a private screening for Congress to show 1800 slides and videos of atrocities that the publicwould not see, including sexual ones. 48 So while by now everyone is scared of what can happen to people in U.S.military custody, Congress has seen what is scariest.)At Guantanamo male prisoners have indeed been stripped naked, and both male and female guards looked in at themcontinually. Human rights organizations have multiple independent reports of male prisoners having been handledsexually by female guards. 49Standing PositionsWeve all heard by now about the use at Guantanamo of the "stress position"—rephrased by the White House as themore benign-sounding "long-standing position." (Rumsfeld dismissively noted, when reports of the practice causeddismay, that he stands for eight to ten hours a day.) 50 In Guantanamo and other U.S.-held prisons, the prisoner in a"stress position" must remain standing for hours or days, as in the famous photo of the hooded Abu Ghraib prisonerstanding, arms outstretched, on a steel box.Stress positions or long-standing positions are euphemisms for a technique developed in Stalins prisons and knownas the dreaded "conveyor." In the gulag, agents forced prisoners to remain in one position for hours, without beingallowed to sleep. P. A. Shabalkins prison diary describes this: "The so-called conveyor is set up: the interrogatorschange but the prisoner stands or sits. For days. They kept me, for example, on the conveyor for eight days.They dont let you sleep. But if you withstand the conveyor and dont crack, physical torture follows." 51Eugenia Ginzburg saw a prisoner being forced to stand for two days; when he still refused to sign a false confession,the NKVD look him to a "standing cell": "[I]t was a place so narrow that the prisoner could only stand upright with hishands at his sides.... We were so appalled that for two days we scarcely uttered a word." 52Does this forced standing yield good intelligence? Many memoirs of Stalins Gulag confirm that after just days ofexperiencing the conveyor, innocent Soviet prisoners would sign anything.Sleep DeprivationPresident Bush defended the practice of depriving detainees of sleep. It sounds almost harmless. You wake them up?Big deal. Its not a spa.Another survivor of Stalins secret prisons, M. M. Ishov, wrote that Stalins prisoners were also forbidden to sleep:"Everything was done to wear out the prisoners completely." 53 Again, after just a week of sleep deprivation, Stalinsprisoners would name any names—and make up names. The East German secret police used the same method, withsimilar results.According to the classic psychiatric study, Recovering Sanity: A Compassionate Approach to Understanding andTreating Psychosis, by Edward M. Podvoll, prolonged sleep deprivation and isolation drive sane people mad.Use of WaterInterrogators at Guantanamo use "waterboarding," a torture invented in the Spanish Inquisition. 54 The gulag usedwater against prisoners as well: Guards at Iaroslav Prison threw a female prisoner into an isolation cell and drenchedher with ice water with a hose. The NKVD poured icy water on uncooperative prisoners held on shipboard prisons. 55Extremes of Heat and ColdPrisoners at Guantanamo report suffering from extremes of temperature. 56 Manipulating temperature extremes wascommon in the gulag too: Ishov reported that the cells were deliberately kept at about 44 degrees. Stalins prisonerswere held in the basement near central heating pipes. 57Danger to Those Who HelpIn a fascist shift, security forces predictably begin to detain and try those who are "other," and gradually open thenoose to include those more and more like "us". David Hicks, a white, English-speaking Australian, was the thirddetainee to be tried by the U.S. military tribunals. You can also predict from the Fascist playbook that lawyers fordetainees will get into trouble.The Military Tribunals have begun, and they are increasingly dangerous to the military JAG lawyers for the detainees
  • 29. and others speaking up on their behalf. Penalties for such advocates began with career setbacks and are escalatinginto criminal charges or worse. In April 2007 the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to "remove some ofthe last shreds of legal representation" available to the prisoners. It wants to let military and intelligence officers readthe lawyers mail to the prisoners; limit their visits to only three; and "allow government officials—on their ownauthority—to deny lawyers access to the evidence used to decide whether an inmate is an illegal enemy combatant."The administration also accused the lawyers of improperly relaying messages to the news media—a chargefrighteningly close to one that had another attorney, Lynne Stewart, facing 30 years in prison. 58These lawyers are carrying on a noble tradition: At the height of anti-Tory hysteria, Alexander Hamilton chose toserve as attorney to represent one of the most hated categories of people of the time, a supporter of the Grown.Hamilton did so in the face of an angry mob, knowing that he risked the end of his career, because he believed sostrongly in rule of law. John Adams represented the reviled British soldiers who had killed American colonists in theBoston Massacre. He too risked his career and reputation. These patriots, like the patriotic lawyers of the JAG, theprivate law firms, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, defended these hated men and women because they lovedand believed in the rule of law.Are the tribunals likely to lead to just outcomes?The following is from a transcript of a U.S. military tribunal. The detainee, Mustafa al Idir, was asked to respond to acharge that he had associated with a known al-Qaeda operative while living in Bosnia.idir: Give me his name.tribunal president: I do not know.idir: How can I respond to this?tribunal president: Did you know of anyone that was a member of al Qaida?idir: No, no. . . . [T]hese are accusations that I cant even answer.... You tell me I am from al Qaida, but I am not alQaida. I dont have any proof to give you except to ask youto catch Bin Laden and ask him if I am part of al Qaida---- What should be done is you should give me evidenceregarding these accusations because I am not able to give you any evidence. I can just tell you no, and that is it. 59The Tribunal concluded that this man was an enemy combatant. This is an account of Eugenia Ginzburgs trial before aSoviet Military Tribunal:The Military Tribunal of the Supreme Court—three officers and a secretary—faced me across a table. On either sideof me were two warders....... I checked the time at the beginning and end of the trial. Seven minutes ...."You have read the indictment?" said the president in tones of unutterable boredom. "You plead guilty? No? Butthe evidence shows ..."He leafed through a bulky file and muttered through his teeth, "For instance the witness ... Kozlov ...""Dyakonov.""Yes. Well, they both state ..."But what they stated the judge was too pressed for time to read. Breaking off, he asked me:"Any questions you wish to ask the court?""Yes, I do. I am accused under Section 8 of Article 58, which means that I am charged with terrorism. Will you pleasetell me the name of the political leader against whose life I am supposed to have plotted?"The judges were silent for a while, taken aback by this preposterous question. They looked reproachfully at theinquisitive woman who was holding up their work. Then the one with grizzled hair muttered:"You know, dont you, that Comrade Kirov was murdered in Leningrad?""Yes, but I didnt kill him. It was someone named Nikolayev. Anyway, Ive never been to Leningrad. Isnt that whatyou call an alibi?""Are you a lawyer by any chance?" said the gray-haired man crossly."No, Im a teacher.""You wont get anywhere by quibbling. You may never have been in Leningrad, but it was your accomplices whokilled him, and that makes you morally and criminally responsible."In two more minutes Ginzburg, who was innocent, received a sentence: ten years in solitary confinement. 60American torture is now systematic. Investigative reporter Seymour M. Hirsh, in his 2004 New Yorker essay "Tortureat Abu Ghraib," showed that the torture there was not a deviation by a few psychotic privates, but a systematic policy.61 Stephen H. Miles, M.D., also established that torture at Guantanamo was a "systematic" policy. 62President Bush had asked his lawyers to find the legal equivalent of " outer space, a lawless universe," in which tokeep the detainees. 63 His lawyers argued that the Geneva Convention did not apply to the prisoners. (Hitler urged hissoldiers to use "unprecedented, merciless and unrelenting harshness" against Russians because "Breaches ofinternational law by German soldiers were to be excused since Russia had not participated in the Hague Conventionsand had no rights under it.") 64 Then, Guantanamos abuses became well publicized to U.S. citizens.
  • 30. That is unusual. The U.S. intelligence agents who have abused prisoners in the past have always sought to avoidscrutiny. Yet in September 2006, Bush confirmed without shame that a suspected network of secret prisons did existworldwide. 65 Guantanamo is being built up without apologies: It was initially a $30-million-dollar construction project,but in December 2006 the Pentagon asked for $125 million to expand it further as a "permanent compound for awar-crimes court." 66What is this really about?In the wake of the press frenzy over Abu Ghraib, the calm of the Bush administration was striking. Have the torturersbeen prosecuted—or have they been protected? To rephrase: Is it a dictatorship yet?Of 800 subsequent investigations of primarily low-ranking U.S. soldiers, only 250 cases have resulted in any action atall; of these, there were only 89 convictions—and critics argue that the penalties in these cases have been far too soft.Only 14 members of the military out of 34 who have been suspected of causing a prisoners death have been sentencedat all. And the toughest sentence anyone received for killing a prisoner? Five months in jail. 67 Human Rights Watchreported on July 23,2006, that "To date, not a single military intelligence officer has been court-martialed in connectionwith abuse allegations in Iraq." 68 So in our secret prison system now, torturers are unlikely to be punished even whenthey murder people. In other words, as in the prison camps of the Gestapo and of Stalin, prisoners simply died, andthat was the end of it as far as blame was concerned.This institutional calm in the face of reports of torture, even death, suggests that the goal of establishing torture in aplace beyond the rule of law may have been tactical. Americans now know a lot about how terrible the fate of aGuantanamo prisoner is.I say again: you do not need ovens to create a fascist reality. All you need is fear. At this point, you need one highlypublicized arrest of one sympathetic, non-Muslim, English-speaking Westerner caught up in the tangle of the War onTerror to be tried at Guantanamo in a publicly inadequate trial; you need one American editor or reporter or peaceactivist to be kept in isolation on a navy brig, unable to speak to an attorney for months. It would take one suchhigh-profile arrest, or a mere handful of them, to chill dissent quickly in America.We will see later how the Espionage Act, and political accusations of "espionage" and "treason," mean that we haveto consider the worst-case scenarios, so we can act in time to make them impossible.If we dont act, we are one step away from leaving the company of free democracies—nations such as the UnitedKingdom, France, and Sweden—and joining the ranks of such nations as Egypt, Morocco, and Pakistan.Military TribunalsMilitary tribunals are the enablers of a fascist shift.Lenin responded to an assassination attempt by setting up secret military tribunals that bypassed the establishedcourt system. 69 Mussolini set up military tribunals to dispense summary justice. Stalin used a revived system ofsecretive military tribunals that also bypassed the judiciary.The Nazis also set up a tribunal system, "Peoples Courts," that bypassed the formal legal system. These courts hadoriginally been established as "an emergency body set up to dispense summary justice on looters and murderers" in1918. These "courts" were able to sentence those charged with "treason" and were characterized by "the absence ofany right of appeal against their verdicts." The "will of the people" took the place of the rule of law.™When the Nazis first came to power, not only was there still an independent judiciary in Germany—there were stilljudges outraged at SA and SS abuses of prisoners, and human rights lawyers who shared their outrage. Earlier, one ofthese independent lawyers had actually sought to prosecute the SS for prisoner abuse. It was at that point that the"Peoples Courts" went after the lawyers, the military tribunals were strengthened, and Hitler sought legislation thatretroactively protected the SS from prosecution for acts of torture. 71 (The Bush administration seeks to shieldinterrogators from prosecution for war crimes.)This too opened the door for what followed.To push an open society closer to a closed one, leaders establish state-sanctioned torturers. In a democratic society,citizens can sue their torturers: Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant to New York City, won nearly $9 million from theGiuliani administration and the Patrolmens Benevolent Association after members of the police department hadsodomized him with a broomstick while he was under arrest. 72 The leadership was held accountable for torture.But in a dictatorship, the torturers and those who defend torture are placed in charge of the law. At the request of theCIA, then-legal counsel to the president Alberto Gonzales solicited the "torture memo" from the Justice Department.After the Abu Ghraib scandal, Bush did not fire Gonzales, or turn him over to authorities to face criminal charges;instead, he appointed Gonzales Attorney General of the United States of America.The torturer was now in charge of the law.Why torture?It is hard to think of another policy goal that this administration has pursued with such single-minded focus as it haslegalized torture. Draft memos, a Supreme Court challenge, dozens of secret meetings, and finally a full-court press to
  • 31. Congress: This team is trying very hard to establish a place beyond the rule of law where people can be tortured, andhas effectively succeeded.You must ask yourself: Why? Why work so hard at this?The administration gives several explanations: Bush claims that "harsh interrogation" helps investigators gatherintelligence. Law professor Alan M. Dershowitz supports the use of torture by raising the specter of a hypotheticalterrorist with information about a "ticking bomb." 73 But the studies of the history of torture show that this is apractically impossible scenario. Torture makes it less likely, as military leaders and FBI interrogators confirm, thatdecent intelligence will come out of a prisoners mouth. Torture is effective only at stacking up false confessions:When Chinese interrogators in the 1940s tortured U.S. prisoners of war, the Americans "confessions" were phrased inCommunist cliches. 74 As Ratner puts it, "The intelligence about terrorism and terrorists that is coming out of theGuantanamo interrogations is . . . basically garbage." Many of the prisoners confessed to whatever their U.S.interrogators forced them to, because they were being denied food or medical care or simply to protect their familiesfrom the harm that U.S. interrogators threatened—as you or I would in similar circumstances. 75"Cooperate and you can go home," the camps loudspeaker used to blare.Since 2002 Bush had spearheaded a PR push for an approach—abusive treatment of prisoners—that is not thatpopular domestically and is horrifying to the rest of the world. Setting up a location outside the rule of law whereabuse takes place seems to be one of the administrations most significant long-term goals and probably, given itsperformance on other fronts, one its greatest successes.Because torturing prisoners is counterproductive if the goal is securing the Homeland, and because it makes uspariahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, then what could be some genuine reasons why this is so important to thisWhite House?Consider: If you have a much-hyped threat that youve used to lead the nation into war—and if case after case againstthe "dangerous terrorists" falls apart—dont you need false confessions? If you torture prisoners, you will certainlyobtain an endless stream of false confessions. In this sense, Guantanamo is an efficient machine for producing ahigh-value political product: false confessions by brown people with Muslim names.Bruce Fein of the AFA argues that the trials are for political "optics": "One might ask: Why even bother to have trialsif you can hold someone forever?"The answer I believe is political stage management: Because how can we demonstrate we are at war without militarycommissions and detainees? " 76If there were a fair legal system that sorted out the guilty from the innocent, it would be impossible to maintain themain goals— not to mention the profits, though this pressure is doubtless unconscious—of the War on Terror. Toomany innocent people would be sent home.This elaborate push to torture brown people to confess to crimes they didnt commit makes political sense—eventhough it should make the moral sense recoil.But why not stop at coercing Muslims? Why move on to create laws that threaten U.S. citizens themselves? Why isthe language crafted by this administration now opening the door to the ability to detain and mistreat ordinaryAmericans who have committed no crime?A little-noticed New York Times article in 2006 reported that a federal judge, Gerard E. Lynch, asked the Department ofJustice attorney, Anthony J. Coppolino, if "an American lawyer who had communicated with Al-Qaeda could begrabbed on the street and interrogated about it."Mr. Coppolino responded, I would say it is possible, depending on the scenario at stake." 77As Alexander Hamilton put it in "The Federalist No. 83," "Arbitrary impeachments, arbitrary methods of prosecutingpretended offenses, and arbitrary punishments upon arbitrary convictions have ever appeared to me to be the greatengines of judicial despotism." 78
  • 32. — CHAPTER FOUR — DEVELOP a PARAMILITARY FORCE A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. Second AmendmentWhen you speak out in America, you probably feel physically safe. You dont expect that you will be intimidatedphysically, let alone beaten up. In a shift toward dictatorship, though, marching and speaking out become physicallyscary. Often, paramilitary groups—aggressive men who have no clear, accountable relationship to the government orthe party seeking power—come into play.The Founders were driven by a vision of equality. Strong or weak, if you were counted as a citizen you had the right tospeak freely. Because the Colonists had experienced abuse at the hands of the soldiers of an occupying army, theFounders set up our system to prohibit the rise of unaccountable armies on our soil. That is why the Founders gavethe states the rights to establish Militias accountable only to the people. In contrast, a would-be dictator neverbypasses the step—key among the ten steps—of creating a paramilitary force accountable only to himself.I am sorry to have to tell you that a for-profit paramilitary force is being developed right now. Since 2001, as RobertYoung Pelton reports in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, a new kind of access to men who act likesoldiers has emerged internationally, and has begun to show up at home.The American revolutionaries fought Hessian mercenaries.Today there is a new kind of Hessian, represented by the paramilitary forces of a company called Blackwater. JeremyScahills book, Blackwater: The Rise of the Worlds Most Powerful Mercenary Army, shows how the threat fromBlackwater has become ever more extreme: the firm now has2,300 private soldiers deployed in nine countries, including inside the United States. It maintains a database of 21,000former Special Forces troops, soldiers, and retired law enforcement agents on whom it can call at a moments notice.Blackwater has a private fleet of more than twenty aircraft, including helicopter gunships and a surveillance blimpdivision. Its 7,000-acre headquarters in Moyock, North Carolina, is the worlds largest private military facility.. . .Blackwater has more than $500 million in government contracts—and that does not include its secret "black" budgetoperations for U.S. intelligence agencies.One congressman noted that in purely military terms, Blackwater could "overthrow many of the worlds governments."1 Blackwater is the worlds largest private security force, works closely with Halliburton, and is available for actionoutside the scrutiny of Congress.At the height of the war, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors in Iraq, one for every U.S. soldier. 2Blackwater paramilitary soldiers there have been reported to have shot at Iraqi civilians randomly out of cars, killing atleast one, and to have harassedjournalists. 3 An independent contractor for the C.I.A (not employed by Blackwater)was charged in 2006 with beating an Afghan prisoner to death. 4 But Paul Bremers last decision as head of theCoalition Provisional Authority in Iraq was to issue "Order 17," which made private contractors such as these immunefrom prosecution for what would otherwise be war crimes. (Recall that the Nazis also sought laws retroactivelyshielding their paramilitary from prosecution for war crimes). Blackwaters lobbyists are still working hard to make surethat their men cant be prosecuted as U.S. military can: "Blackwater has openly declared its forces above the law,"writes Scahill.The companys lawyers argue that Blackwater cant be held accountable to the Pentagons Uniform Code of MilitaryJustice, because its soldiers are civilians. But they cant be sued in civil court either—because they are part of the U.S.military. 5If you think that violent dictatorship cant be directed imported to the United States, consider the case of Blackwatersubcontractor Jose Miguel Pizarro Ovalle. A Chilean army officer during Pinochets reign of terror, and a passionatePinochet supporter, Pizarro denies the mass executions of the coup leader and claims that Bushs current andPinochets past missions are "exactly the same war on terror." Red Tactica, Pizarros company, recruits former Chileancommandos to work for Blackwater: A Chilean sociologist who was tortured by Pinochets men asserts that these
  • 33. recruits "are valued for their expertise in kidnapping, torturing and killing defenseless civilians." Other valuedBlackwater recruits are Jordanians, Peruvians, Nigerians, and Salvadorans—all trained by countries that practicesavage abuse of their civilians. 6 The president—or anyone with the cash—now has access to a paramilitary force thatincludes some of the worlds most vicious thugs. And the president can now direct a private army of highly trainedmen who are not accountable to Congress—exactly one of the possibilities the Founders feared.Blackwater is coming home, and one of our constitutional protections is at stake. The Department of HomelandSecurity has already begun to bring Blackwater forces to Main Street. The department paid for Blackwater soldiers topatrol the streets of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to Scahill, "By June 2006, the companyhad raked in some $73 million from its Katrina work for the federal government—about $240,000 a day." Oneunidentified private security guard said he heard "black gangbangers" shooting; the guards, armed with AR-15s andGlocks, showered bullets in the direction of the noise: "After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and theshooting stopped." 7The private security industry boomed after 9/11, because the CIA simply didnt have enough trained people to deployin hostilities (and the National Guard was busy in Iraq). Before 2001, no U.S. firm specialized solely in trainedex-military operators. But after 9/11, firms such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy boomed, because the war "created amassive market for this type of service." 8The money to be made is immense. Blackwater took off with an initial $5.4 million six-month U.S. military contract. Asof fall 2006, Blackwater was on track to train thirty-five thousand men over the following twelve months. 9 "Those withthe money could also rent fire support, complete with private gunship, intelligence gathering, aerial surveillance,armed helicopters, armored vehicles, remote-controlled blimps, and fast-attack aircraft with JDAMs (joint direct attackmunitions) or cluster bombs," Pelton writes. 10Blackwaters business model plans increasingly to deploy its unaccountable private army in the U.S.—in the aftermathof natural disasters, and also in cases of "national emergency."In Florida in 2000, as the disputed vote was recounted, angry mobs of young men—later identified as Republicanpolitical staffers, though they refused at the time to give their names—materialized in politically critical settings aroundthe state, all dressed similarly, in chinos and white shirts. While the ballots were being counted and distributed in oneoffice, one group made it clear to the officials behind the glass that they could see who was doing what." Some groupsof aggressive young men also congregated menacingly outside voting booths in districts in which there is a majorityof African-American voters. 12 In some cases they prevented black voters from voting at all. (When, in the run-up tothe Reichstag elections, the Brownshirt uniform was banned in one German municipality, Hitlers Brownshirts simplymarched in formation wearing identical white dress shirts. 13 )We have seen groups of violent, unaccountable men in America before: for instance, in the draft riots of New YorkCity in the 19th century, the 1912 Ludlow Massacre, and Southern lynch mobs. But American mobs have notpreviously been disciplined, clean-cut groups such as this.Are these random events—spontaneous meetings of young white men who shop at J. Crew and are simply quite upsetabout politics? Leaders who seek dictatorial power often direct a thug caste to intrude on the voting process, or toexert a sense of menace though their presence.Mussolini was, as so often, the innovator, but both Mussolini and Hitler directed groups of aggressive young men tomenace voters in or near voting booths: By 1923, a Fascist prefect in Bologna was recommending to Mussolini thatmembers of the Fascist party should be assigned to stand "inside local polling booths, where they could act as astimulus to responsible voting." In Ferrara, the prefects running the election went so far as to suggest that if standingin the voting booth wasnt enough, that the first voter should be beaten publicly and accused of having votedsocialist—as an example to other members of the electorate. 14Hitler too saw the benefits of this. In 1938, William Shirers diary recorded the "voting" that would validate Austriasannexation by Germany: "The Austrians, according to Goebbelss count, have voted ninety-nine per cent Ja. Maybeso. It took a brave Austrian to vote Mo, as everyone felt the Nazis had some way ofchecking up on how they voted-----There was also a wide slit inthe corner of the booth which gave the election committee sitting a few feet away a pretty good view of how youvoted!" 15Could there ever be physical intimidation in America?The Secret Service is traditionally nonpartisan. It mission is to protect the President and other principals, not to bullyAmericans.But Steven Howards, an environmental consultant from Golden, Colorado, was taking his son to a piano lesson oneday in June 2006 when he saw that Vice President Cheney was appearing at a nearby mall. Howard approached his vice
  • 34. president and expressed his views, saying words to the effect of "I think your policies in Iraq are reprehensible."Howards continued on his way to his sons lesson. Ten minutes later, Virgil D. Reichle Jr., a Secret Service agent,handcuffed him. Agent Reichle told Howards he would be charged with "assaulting the vice president." Local policeofficers later filed charges against Howards that could have put him in jail for a year.Two U.S. citizens lawsuits charge that Secret Service or White House staff members have physically intimidated them:In 2005 three citizens—including Leslie Weise and Alex Young—were physically removed from the Presidentstaxpayer-financed appearance in Denver for having an antiwar bumper sticker on their car in the parking lot outside.Jeff and Nicole Rank said that on Independence Day, 2004, they were arrested at a Bush appearance in Charleston,West Virginia, because they were wearing anti-Bush T-shirts. 16Mussolinis ThugsMussolini, among the dictators of his era, practically invented the strategic use of drugs: As Parliament resistedinvolving Italy in World War I, pro-war, proto-Fascist thugs organized street violence, attacks on newspapers, streetdemonstrations, and other violence; Finally, when the thugs menaced members of the political leadership themselves,Parliament caved to their wishes. 17 (Hitler picked up this intimidation scenario as well, at one point lining the halls ofthe working Reichstag with Brownshirts.)By the 1922 March on Rome, Mussolinis thugs were more sophisticated and better-trained: men dressed identically inblack pants and black shirts, recruited from the ranks of World War I veterans and organized into networks byMussolinis central command. These Arditi did the strategic work of smashing newspaper offices, torchingfarmhouses, beating workers, and sexually assaulting women in the countryside. They "softened up" the populationso that people were scared to resist Mussolinis forces.Nazi ThugsThe violence of orchestrated gangs, just like their sophistication, tends to escalate over time as well. In Germany, afterWorld War I, political parties allied themselves with armed, uniformed paramilitary groups. Their task was to march,harass members of opposing groups, and beat them—sometimes to kill them.In 1920 the Partys paramilitary arm was founded and named the "Gymnastics and Sports Section." Their uniform wasbrown shirts, riding breeches, and boots. These paramilitaries roamed Munichs streets, assaulting their perceivedenemies and harassing Jews. By 1921 the Free Corps, a right-wing group, was taken on board. The group wasrechristened "the Storm Division," or SA, that same year. Hermann Goering led the SA by 1923. That year the stormtroopers began creating a decade-long strategy of terror. These thugs would intimidate German citizens more and moredirectly and formally, evolving from a ragged assortment of civilians to a highly disciplined paramilitary arm of Nazicontrol. 18 By 1927, this thug caste was a force for the Party to direct overly. Joseph Goebbels, now regional leader ofBerlin, staged SA-led brawls in meeting-halls and in the streets. By 1929, Hitler, Goebbels, and the regional leaders ofthe party made a practice of hinting to the SA about what kind of violence was expected, and the SA would deliver.This strategy let the Nazi leadership remain free of legal responsibility for the violence, and it reassured middle-classlaw-abiding citizens that Hitler himself and his colleagues really were not to blame for this savagery. 18 The randombullies had become a parallel army.In 1938, Nazi gangs were unleashed to wreak the chaos of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass: they destroyedJewish businesses and terrified German Jews. Joseph Weinberg was a twenty-four-year-old business student fromStuttgart whose mother had run a market stall: "The next morning I went to the Markthalle with my mother and sister,"he recounted. "When we walked upstairs, all the doors were ripped out; all the food was smashed together and lyingin the center of the store and the money and everything was taken away. All we had—butter, flour, herring,everything—was piled up there. My mother, of course, cried and ... cried. There was nothing we could do." 20Thugs are the advance men of every dictatorial ascendancy, and thug violence is the advance work.In our nations past, police action in the United States that has directed violence at citizens has backfired: SouthernCivil Rights protesters in the 1960s won more public support with every image of water hoses and snarling dogstrained against them. When members of the National Guard fired on student protesters at Kent State University in1970, killing four and wounding nine, the image helped turn the tide against the Vietnam War. There has been stateviolence in the United States against protesters and voters before: The possibility of it exists here just as it does in anynation. But our laws have driven such violence back again. And we havent had members of a mercenary army on ourstreets since we won our independence.
  • 35. — CHAPTER FIVE — SURVEIL ORDINARY CITIZENS People need to watch what they say, watch what they do. Ari FLEISCHER; former White House Press Secretary, 2001 I warn every animal on this farm to keep his eyes very wide open. Squealer, in George Orwells Animal FarmAccording to the ACLUs Barry Steinhardt, you should assume, if you are an activist, that your e-mail may bemonitored and your phone calls tracked. He says that if your communications reach a certain level of interest to thegovernment, a human being may be tasked to read and listen in on what you are saying and you wont know about it.The White House surveillance program is triggered by certain key words and names. (The sophisticated Stasi listeningstation on Brocken Mountain, which monitored ordinary citizens calls between East and West Germany, was alsoprogrammed to record conversations when a certain name or word came up.)Even though you pose no terrorist threat to the state, there is a reason you can be placed under surveillance now.Tyrants place populations under surveillance because this is a prime means of control. The Gestapo, the NKVD, theKGB, the Stasi, and the Chinese Politburo all requisitioned private data such as medical, banking, and library records;now, with the Internet, Chinese authorities track citizens computer use. One reason dictators demand access to suchprivate data is that this scrutiny breaks down citizens sense of being able to act freely against those in power. Suchintrusions also erode citizens loyalties to civil and professional groups and redirect their primary loyalty to the state.Torture doesnt get you better information, but the Bush team wants to be able to torture—and to let you know thattorture takes place. Many critics have noted that illegal wiretapping doesnt speed intelligence gathering, but the Bushadministration wants to eavesdrop on your calls and e-mails without a warrant—and to let you know that there is suchsurveillance underway.Why?The Iron Triangle in American LifeThe Department of Homeland Securitys surveillance apparatus is certainly aimed at prosecuting the War on Terror.But it may also be aimed at us, for domestic political purposes.As I noted, all the societies we are looking at were facing real enemies and used surveillance to seek out their enemies.But all of them also used state surveillance against ordinary citizens to make them docile. Each dictatorship defendedthis on national security grounds.In July of 2002, the Bush administration rolled out Operation TIPS, the Terrorism Information and Prevention System,which sought to recruit "a million letter carriers, meter readers, cable technicians, and other workers with access toprivate homes as informants to report to the Justice Department any activities they think suspicious." 1 TIPS was tobegin with a pilot program in ten cities and offered citizens a toll-free number to call. The million citizens the programhoped to enlist would have worked out to one informant for every twenty-four Americans. (The ACLU notes that thispilot program alone would have doubled the Stasis ratio of informant to citizen. In 1989, when the Stasi records wereopened, the people of the former GDR were amazed to find that only a minority of citizens had actually been watched,because most had simply assumed they had open files on them. 2 That is why surveillance is effective—evencost-effective: You dont have to actually monitor citizens—just let them know they might be monitored.)Tom Ridge, then-Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, suggested that Americans report to the hotlineabout their neighbors. This trial balloon was met with mockery: Train the cable guy to spy! Though Congress soonprohibited the administration from funding TIPS, according to the ACLU, a version of the program was simply shiftedto the Pentagons "black budget." ("I dont make this stuff up," commented Steinhardt. 3 )In China, Communist officials subject citizens to three forms of government surveillance, together called the "irontriangle." (Bush referred to three of his aides as "the iron triangle.")This consists of the residence permit, which limitswhere you live; the secret personnel file, which records your sins and political liability; and the work unit, whichsupervises every aspect of your life. The dangan, or secret personnel file, shadows every Chinese citizen. "Thedangan looks like a manila envelope, and there is a special postal system for transferring them around the country. Ifyou make a serious political mistake, your leaders put a note in your dangan, and it will haunt you in the futurewhenever you try to change your job, go abroad, or get a promotion." 4
  • 36. American citizens now have a dangan: Three new forms of state surveillance were initiated in 2005 and 2006. NewYork Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen exposed an e-mail and phone monitoring program that wasoperating without legal warrants in 2005; 5 in 2006 they revealed that U.S. treasury officials, under the auspices of a CIAprogram, were reviewing millions of private bank transactions without individual court-ordered warrants or subpoenas.6 The stories ran as scoops. But were these scoops undermining the governments broader agenda, or inadvertentlyadvancing it? If you dont know you are under surveillance, you wont be intimidated. Dictatorships want citizens toknow they are being watched.The net effect of the stories, whether they were scoops or leaks (or both), was that U.S. citizens now knew that theyhad an "iron triangle" of surveillance over them: phone calls—social and sexual life; e-mails—work life; and bankrecords—financial life. Where else does one communicate private and confidential information?Americans understand, even if most of us feel it would be only a remote possibility, that our most intimatecorrespondence can now be monitored by the State.This surveillance is chilling dissent already: Emily Whitfield notes that "people are already reluctant to sign petitions.They are saying, I dont want my name to go on a list."Many citizens have noted how relatively muted Democratic and other opposition leaders seem to be in the face of allof this. The new surveillance reality helps to explain this unusual moderation in tone. Politicians understand what statesurveillance means faster than ordinary people do: Political candidates assume as a matter of course that theiropponents are trying to monitor them.When I worked on the Gore 2000 campaign—working on issues of concern to women and the youth vote—stafferstook it for granted that they should have sensitive conversations on landlines because cell phones were assumed tobe unsecured. Before you work for the White House or for a presidential candidate, you go through a search ofanything potentially embarrassing in your past or present life because everyone knows that if the opposition can findsomething with which to blackmail or embarrass you, they will use it. You go through your stock holdings and taxreturns; review any past drug use; you have to confess to your own team any illicit affairs or mental health treatmentor addiction treatment; you disclose how you pay your babysitter. You have to do this because your team needs toknow what the other team can find. The National Committees devote vast amounts of money and staff time to this kindof scrutiny: its called "opposition research," and while its not nice, it is still playing within the rules of democracy.But now, opposition research that used to be reserved for political leaders alone can be directed at the rest of us.Politicians are not bland and inhibited because they are naturally boring; they arc bland and inhibited because theyknow they are being watched. So they censor themselves.If our governments only goal were to fight terror, most Americans would have no major problem with this kind ofsurveillance: They would feel that the benefit of being spared another 9/11 outweighs the discomfort of being listenedin upon. Whitfield says that people often remark, "If I am not doing anything wrong, why should I worry about it?"That faith presupposes that no one can get away with using your words or actions against you unfairly. This is agood assumption in a working democracy—but disastrous naivete in a fascist shift.Dictatorships use citizen surveillance in a clear way: to blackmail and coerce the people, especially critics. In the 1960sand 1970s, J. Edgar Hoovers FBI amassed files on the private lives of political, union, Civil Rights, anti-war, and otherleaders, and blackmailed or harassed them. The FBIs Counter Intelligence Programs (COINTELPRO) actions againstcivil rights workers and the left in the 1960s included planting fake evidence on them, sending bogus letters accusingthem of adultery to ruin their marriages (one fake letter called Dr. King an "evil, immoral beast" and suggested he killhimself), disclosing activists sexually transmitted diseases, tapping their phones, getting activists fired from their jobs,distributing false articles that portrayed them as drug abusers, and planting negative articles about them innewspapers. 8We all have things we wish to keep private: a flirtation or even an affair, a struggle with alcohol, an old brush with thelaw. Think about all the things you have said in a phone conversation, sent to I friend in an e-mail, or discussed withyour accountant that could, if available to someone who wanted to shut you up, be used or taken out of context toblackmail or smear you. Now understand that all of these things are available and can be used against you.The USA PATRIOT Act set the stage for booksellers, librarians, and even doctors to have to turn over to the stateinformation about Americans that had been private up until then. The American Booksellers Foundation for FreeExpression took a stand against this and librarians spoke out as well. (National Socialists also went after thebooksellers, librarians, and doctors.)When closed societies gather information on ordinary peoples lives—when people know that their book-buying andlibrary records are open, their sexual behavior and financial decisions are no longer private, their conversations arebugged, their class lectures are taped, their protests are photographed by police, their medical records are exposed,and that all this information can be used against them— their will to challenge the regime in power falters.Fascist and Totalitarian SurveillanceSpying is the fuel of fascism. Mussolini pioneered the use of spying as a way to control his people. After 1922,
  • 37. Fascists ostentatiously made lists of names of communists to be punished. By 1927, Fascists were tapping phonelines, and even spying on the Pope. Mussolini tapped his own party secretarys phone in order to blackmail him. 9 By1933 the secret police encouraged ordinary Italians to inform on their neighbors. People were turned in for things ascommonplace as singing the wrong song after they had been drinking. Secret police also tapped business leaders,including Giovanni Agnelli. Finally, Italians at every level of society understood that they were being watched. 10SS leader Himmler used surveillance too: He "whipped the Gestapo into an organization which ... watches over almostevery department of life in the country and which keeps for Hitler and the politicians a watchful eye on the army itself."11 Most people in Germany did not at first support the Nazis. But as Nazis paired citizen surveillance with stateviolence, opposition stilled.From 1930 onwards, the SS spied on the Brownshirts and kept files to use against them. 12 That year, police put massesof citizens under surveillance: half a million Berliners alone. Welfare officers and medical researchers began keepinglists of "asocial" citizens: Once on "the list," it was difficult to get off, and you lost jobs and benefits. 13 By themid-1930s, most citizens understood that their conversations were no longer private, and National Socialists werebugging the conversations of reporters and political leaders. "Amusing to note of late," wrote Shirer in 1940, "on thedesks of the German officials I have business with, copies of cables which I have received from, or sent to, my NewYork office. I of course have known for some time that they saw all my outgoing and incoming messages and have hadno end of fun sending absurd messages to New York criticizing these officials by name or concocting something thatwould keep them guessing." 14 Amusing—if youre not subject to arrest.Many people who lived through the Nazi years said in one survey that they had been spied on by neighbors,coworkers, fellow pupils, and police. People said that nannies, maids, office coworkers, and teachers were all enlistedas spies. As in the GDR, only a minority—between 3 and 25 in 100—were actually sure of having being spied on, butthe paranoia extended to everyone. 15Nazi surveillance increased over the years."You never knew who it might be when the doorbell rang," one person told the interviewers."[W]e children were not allowed to touch the curtains. There was always somebody with a leather trench coatstanding there in the hallway. And, especially when there were two or three people at our place, there would be severalpeople standing outside in front of our house." 16Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is an expert on at least one surveillance society, which she analyzed in a book sheco-authored, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. The German film The Lives of Others brings this everydayStasi surveillance to life: The playwrights assume there are bugs in their friends apartments and discuss politics onoutdoor walks; journalists assume their own apartments will be ransacked, and hide their manuscripts underfloorboards. Neighbors had to inform against neighbors; students informed on professors; children were encouragedto turn in their parents. Information equaled control.Czech authorities also used surveillance during the Cold War to crush pro-democracy agitation. Havel describes theanxiety that the Czech Secret Police cultivated as "that hideous spider whose invisible web runs right through society[causing] a dull, existential fear that seeped into every crack and crevice of daily life and made one think twice abouteverything one said and did." 17China too uses surveillance to crush democracy. Reporters Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, evoke a scenesimilar to those played out in the GDR. A Chinese friend asks Kristof to go for a walk:"You know Hongjun, dont you?" she asked."Well, you should know that hes not for real. Hes a spy for State Security, and you should never, ever trust him withany information. Hes been a spy for a long time, and now hes interested in you and Sheryl. Hes been asking abouta book he thinks youre writing, and about how youre writing it. He wants to know if youre writing it on the harddrive of the computer, or on floppy disks. If you are writing a book, you might want to be very, very careful with it.""I was speechless," writes Kristof. "I hadnt told Hongjun about a book." 18With these early steps in place, people start to restrict their own activities voluntarily. They start to think twice aboutbulk-e-mailing the "Impeach George Bush" message, or checking Amnesty Internationals Website to see what Iraqiswith relatives held in U.S.-run prisons are saying, or sending information about the Professor Ward Churchillcontroversy to a friend.In that atmosphere, dissent stifles itself before it can develop. Surveillance leads to fear and fear leads to silence.And silence is un-American.
  • 38. — CHAPTER SIX — INFILTRATE CITIZENS GROUPS Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting. . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. First AmendmentThe next time you meet with your antiwar group, I am afraid you have to ask yourself if everyone present really is whoyou think he or she is. Incredible as it sounds, you may well have undercover investigators hanging out with you.Dictatorships and would-be dictators routinely infiltrate legal citizen groups and report back to the group in power orseeking power. Historically, infiltrators are also directed to disrupt and harass such organizations. The goal: to makesure that it becomes too costly and nerve-wracking to act out as a citizen.In Italy, Fascist spies infiltrated groups of trade unionists. In Stalins Russia, spies reported on the activities ofintellectuals and dissidents." In Germany, National Socialist agents infiltrated groups of anti Nazi students,Communists, and labor activists; these agents were busy, even attending cabarets where jazz and other "unGerman"music was being played, in order to denounce the musicians. 2 In the GDR, the Stasi infiltrated dissident groups of theusual targets. In Prague in 1968, infiltrators joined in with groups of writers, theatre workers, journalists, andintellectuals. In Chile, Pinochets agents joined groups of prodemocracy students. 3 The Chinese Politburo sends stateagents to infiltrate forbidden pro-democracy and banned religious groups.Infiltration is not just an intelligence tool; like surveillance, it is also a psychological pressure point. When the stateinfiltrates citizen groups, people feel vulnerable about acting in accord with one another and so are less likely to riskthe assertive collective behavior that democracy requires.In dictatorships, infiltrators are joined by agents provocateurs at marches and rallies. These provocateurs dont justact and dress like the protesters: Their task is to provoke a violent situation or actually to commit a crime. One FBIinfiltrator, Gary Thomas Rowe, for instance, warned his handler of an impending police attack on the FreedomRiders—then went ahead to participate energetically in the beatings that followed. 4 Provocateurs also serve a PRpurpose: They set up protesters to look like lawless threats to society, thus providing would-be dictators with therationale for declaring martial law as a means to "restore public order."Since 2000, there has been a sharp increase in U.S. citizen groups that are being harassed and infiltrated by police andfederal agents, often in illegal ways. A 2006 ACLU report notes that police departments in California had infiltratedantiwar protests, political rallies, and other constitutionally protected gatherings and were secretly investigating them,even though the California state constitution forbids this. 5But that was just the beginning. A Defense Department program called Talon created a database of "anti-terror"information about peaceful U.S. citizen groups and activists. 6 Talon included details of antiwar groups planningmeetings in churches; a church service for peace in New York City; even details of the meetings of such all-Americangroups as Veterans for Peace. The Defense Department even had e-mails that had been forwarded to it by people whohad pretended to be members of the groups. 7 Some of the groups were placed in this database with the rationale thatwhile they werent violent yet, they might become so. Jen Nessel of the Center for Constitutional Rights said, "Wehave absolutely moved over into a preventive detention model—you look like you could do something bad, you mightdo something bad, so were going to hold you." 8Harassment is a more serious tactic. Before the Republican convention in New York in 2004, the police departmentsintelligence team sent detectives throughout the city to infiltrate groups planning to demonstrate peacefully at theconvention. When the New York Civil Liberties Union asked to unseal the records of this undercover spying, lawyersfor the city argued that the records should be kept secret, because the news media would "fixate upon andsensationalize them." 9It is in a fascist shift that the truth is recategorized as being unseemly—destructively inflammatory.Today, if you are outspoken, you are increasingly likely to face other kinds of harassment, such as an IRSinvestigation: All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, was scrutinized by the IRS after a rector gave asermon that characterized Jesus as antiwar. (A year after the 1917 Espionage Act was passed, Rev. Clarence Waldronwas sentenced to prison for fifteen years for passing out a pamphlet that said that war was un-Christian. 10 )The IRS asked for the California churchs internal documents and e-mails in order to investigate if it had violated tax
  • 39. law.11 Many conservative churches have helped Republicans: Two Ohio churches turned their facilities over toRepublican groups, hosted Republican candidates, and were credited with turning out voters lor Bush in 2004. Butthey were not investigated by the IRS. 12Harassment takes many forms: Peace activist Cindy Sheehan wore a T-shirt with the message, "2,245 Dead. How manymore?" referring to the war in Iraq, in the gallery of the House of Representatives. Capitol Police arrested her andcharged her with "unlawful conduct," which could have given her a year in prison. Beverly Young, a Republicancongressmans wife, wore a T-shirt in the same place that read, "Support Our Troops"; she was asked to leave, but wasnot arrested or charged with a crime. 13On July 25,2006, Jim Bensman, a coordinator with Heartwood, an environmental organization, was at a public meetingin Illinois convened by the Army Corps of Engineers to discuss proposed construction of a channel on a dam in theMississippi River. Bensman advocated a standard solution to the problem under discussion: using explosives. Damsare typically destroyed with explosives, a point which the Corps of Engineers own presentation at the meeting noted.News coverage of the meeting included the summary that Bensman "would like to see the dam blown up."Less than a week later, Bensman got called an FBI agent. The agent persuaded him that the call was for real by tellingBensman about items in his FBI file. The agent also told Bensman that he wanted to visit him at home. Bensmanrecalls: "I was thinking, I need to talk to an attorney. .. and he said, Well, O.K., I will put you down as notcooperating." 14So Americans do need to watch what they say, watch what they do. Be careful how you phrase things. Dont leaveyour meetings minutes lying around. Check your gut reaction when you are talking to people in your local group. Bemindful while you pursue your activism.Have the number of a good lawyer handy.But most important of all, lead your friends and community to unite in a grassroots movement to restore our nationsfreedom.
  • 40. — CHAPTER SEVEN — ARBITRARILY DETAIN and RELEASE CITIZENS The Press Department of the Foreign Ministry judged that. . . I was urging the "spread of counterrevolutionary developments in the GDR." Because of the role I was clearly playing "in the ideological war of imperialist media against the GDR" I should be placed on the list. . . Timothy Garton AshProtest has been lively in our nation throughout most of our history because being free means that you cant bedetained arbitrarily. We have also felt free in the security of our homes, believing that the state cant break in and gothrough our possessions.All that is changing."The List"In 2002,1 began to notice that almost every time I sought to board a domestic airline flight, I was called aside by theTransportation Security Administration and given a more thorough search. When this was happening on nine flightsout of ten, I asked the officials about the special search. They told me that the search was due to the quadruple "S"that routinely came up on my boarding pass. There are several reasons why one might receive a quadruple "S" onones boarding pass if one doesnt fit a terrorist profile: buying a ticket at the last minute, for instance, or paying incash. But those circumstances didnt apply to me. I kept asking, but not getting real answers.This stepped-up search became so routine as I traveled that companions who were flying with me began to simply say,"Ill meet you at the gate," even before we got through the security line.On yet another preboarding search, I asked yet again. The TSA agent searching me, a young woman, said pleasantly,"Youre on the list.""The list?"" I asked. "What list?" Her supervisor abruptly ended our exchange, took over from her, and then movedme on.Indeed, the TSA Administration does keep a "list." The American citizens on the list who do not fit a terrorist profilerange from journalists and academics who have criticized the White House to activists and even political leaders whohave also spoken out.These TSA searches and releases would be trivial in a working democracy. In the 1960s, peace activists found itmerely irksome to be trailed by FBI agents, and in the 1980s those who organized The Committee in Solidarity with thePeople of El Salvador (CISPES) on college campuses were even amused sometimes to find, on submitting a Freedom ofInformation Act request, that there was a file open on them. But once the first steps in a fascist shift are in place, beingon "the list" is not really funny anymore.When you are physically detained by armed agents because of something that you said or wrote, it has an impact. Onthe one hand, during these heightened searches of my luggage, I knew I was a very small fish in a very big pond. Onthe other hand, you get it right away that the state is tracking your journeys, can redirect you physically, and can havearmed men and women, who may or may not answer your questions, search and release you.Our faith in non arbitrary "safe" detention helps to make us Americans. When I was twenty, I joined a group ofgraduate students who traveled from Oxford to London—to get arrested. We all went over to the American embassy:There we sat, self-consciously, on the chilly concrete steps, with our "U.S. OUT OF EL SALVADOR" banner unfurledon our knees. A police van arrived.Bored British police officers took us away. We were locked up for a few hours and then, of course, released."Silly season," one of the bobbies commented civilly as he signed the paperwork that let us go. I wasnt scared tospeak out because I was in a democracy and the rule of law protected me.That kind of experience of accountable detention and release is eroding in America. Activists are not being beaten. Butthey are being watched, and sometimes intimidatingly detained and released.In America, people are not supposed to be detained because of their political beliefs. But Senator Edward M. "Ted"Kennedy, the liberal senator from Massachusetts who is a thorn in the side of the Bush administration, was detainedfive times in East Coast airports in March, 2004. Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia has also beensubjected to extra security measures. 1
  • 41. On September 21, 2004, U.S. security officials diverted to Bangor, Maine, a United Airlines flight from London toWashington D.C. On board was Usef Islam, once known as the singer Cat Stevens. Customs and Border Protectionagents questioned him on "national security grounds." 2 Most Americans associate Cat Stevens not withbomb-building in al-Qaeda training camps, but with slow-dancing to "Wild World" in suburban rec rooms. Islamsdetention helps "blur the line"—he is "one of us."Jan Adams and Rebecca Gordon, American peace activists, tried to check in at the San Francisco airport for a trip toBoston in August 2002. Airport personnel who said that these middle-aged women were on the "master list" called thepolice and notified the FBI. At least twenty other peace activists are confirmed to be on the list: A 74-year-oldCatholic nun who works for peace was detained in Milwaukee; Nancy Oden, a leader of the Green Party, wasprevented from flying from Maine to Chicago. 3 Free speech advocates are on the list: King Downing of the ACLU wasdetained in the Boston airport in 2003." David Fathi, also of the ACLU, was detained as well. 5 Scholars who defend theConstitution are on the list: in 2007, Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton, one of the nations foremostConstitutional scholars, who had recently spoken critically of Bushs assault on the Constitution, was detained forbeing on a "watch list." A TSA official confirmed informally that it was probably because Murphy had criticized thePresident, and warned him that his luggage would be ransacked. 6In 2005, "Evo Morales"—which is the name of the President of Bolivia, who has criticized Bush—appeared on the list,beside President Morales birthdate. 7 After Hugo Chavez, the President of Venezuela, gave a speech at the UnitedNations criticizing Bush, Chavezs foreign minister, Nicolas Maduro, was detained at Kennedy Airport. When Maduroexplained that he was Venezuelas foreign minister, he said that officers "threatened and shoved" him. According toPresident Chavez, the officers accused Maduro of participating in terrorist acts. 8 The chilling effect from this lastexample could be profound: Any staffer of any foreign government or international regulatory body can be detained.Now, there are tens of thousands of people on the list. 9Where did the list come from? In 2003, President Bush had the intelligence agencies and the FBI create a "watch list"of people thought to have terrorist intentions or contacts. These agencies gave the list to the TSA and the commercialairlines. 60 Minutes got one copy of the list: It was 540 pages long. That list of people to be taken aside for extrascreening had 75,000 names on it. The more stringent "no-fly list" had 45,000 names; before 9/11 there were just 16names. The list is so secret that even Congress people have been prevented from looking at it. People on the listendure searches that can last for hours. One American citizen, Robert Johnson, described "the humiliation factor" ofbeing strip-searched: "I had to take off my pants. I had to take off my sneakers, then I had to take off my socks. I wastreated like a criminal." Donna Bucella, who was at that time head of the FBI program that oversaw the list, told 60Minutes, "Well, Robert Johnson will never get off the list." 10On December 6,2006, Democrats in Congress tried to find out more about recent reports that the Department ofHomeland Security "was using a scoring system" that rated the dangers posed by people crossing American borders.The Democrats were worried that these lists did not simply keep people from flying—they could keep them fromgetting jobs as well. According to the New York Times, Vermont Senator Patrick J. Leahy said that "the program andbroader government data-mining efforts could make it more difficult for innocent Americans to travel or to get a job—without giving them the chance to know why they were labeled a security risk." 11 So now there is not just the anxietythat you might be detained—you could also, if you are on certain secret lists, be turned down for a job and neverknow why.Being on the list can get also get some people detained and tortured—although they are innocent.Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen, a software consultant, husband, and father—a North American yuppie. The UnitedStates detained Arar when he was changing planes at Kennedy Airport in 2002. He was "rendered" to Syria. Securityforces there kept him in prison for over a year, beating him repeatedly with a heavy metal cable. The Canadiangovernment pursued a two-year investigation and concluded that it had all been a terrible mistake—Arar actually hadno ties to terrorists whatsoever. Canadians were so appalled by this miscarriage of justice that the head of the RoyalCanadian Mounted Police resigned. After he was released with his governments help, Arar, emboldened perhaps byliving in a working North American democracy, sued the U.S. government.The Bush administration refused to concede that it had been wrong; refused to provide documents or witnesses to theCanadian investigators; and finally announced in January 2007 that they had "secret information" that justifiedkeeping Arar on the list. 12So Arar, a North American citizen like you or me, has to live in fear, perhaps for the rest of his life (his CCR lawyer sayshe suffers from post-traumatic stress): Arar turns down offers to receive honors overseas, for whenever he travels—ifhe dares to—over borders, he fears being taken off the plane or train, shipped to another country and subjected totorture again.Making it more difficult for people out of favor with the state to travel back and forth across borders is a classic part ofthe fascist playbook. As Nazi Germany closed down, borders tightened and families fleeing internment were
  • 42. traumatized by the uncertainties that they knew they faced at the borders. When reporter Timothy Garton Ashpublished essays that offended the Stasi, he was forbidden to re-enter the GDR. The United States has recently beenrefusing visas to various respected Muslim scholars from universities such as Oxford—scholars with no tieswhatsoever to terrorists—because they have been critical of U.S. policy. This has happened before in America: in the1950s the FBI confiscated the passports of intellectuals and journalists who had been critical of anticommunist witchhunts. 13William Shirer described the tension of airport searches of suspect individuals—reporters—in Berlin in 1938:Hans Kaltenborn, our star foreign news commentator, was turned back by the secret police when he arrived atTempelhof [airport] from London this afternoon. ... I became suspicious when the passport officials continued to holdhim after all the other passengers had been cleared. . . . [Kaltenborns] German relatives, who were exposing themselvesto possible arrest by merely being there, remained bravely at the rail. I finally complained to a Gestapo man aboutkeeping us standing so long. . . . [A] Gestapo officer came up and announced that Hans would be taking the six oclockplane back to London."Why, hes just come from there," I spoke up."And hes returning there now," the officer said."May I ask why?" Hans said, boiling inside but cool outside, though beads of sweat bubbled out on his forehead.The officer had a ready answer: Looking in his notebook, he said with tremendous seriousness: "Herr Kaltenborn, onsuch and such a date in Oklahoma City, you made a speech insulting the Fuehrer.""Let me see the text of that, please," Hans spoke up. But you do not argue with the Gestapo. . . . Hans was hushedout.... Then he disappeared. 14Are the cases we hear of Americans being caught up in detention, searches, and releases merely Homeland Security orTSA zealotry? Or are the stories effective PR about a new reality? Fascist propagandists target individuals, detain andrelease them, and then publicize the stories. Could all these—Bensman the fish defender and Cat Stevens the balladeerand the little elderly nun and the lady peace activists—be victims not of simple clumsiness but, rather, examples of thefact that perfectly ordinary Americans can now get entangled in the increasingly punitive apparatus of the state?Could what happened to Maher Arar happen to a U.S. citizen?Chaplain James Yee was arrested and investigated on suspicion of "espionage and possibly treason" on September10,2003. It is not widely reported that he had also spoken up on behalf of better treatment for the detainees inGuantanamo. Military officials claimed that Yee had classified documents that included diagrams of cells atGuantanamo and lists of detainees. He was also said to have "ties to [radical Muslims in the U.S.]."Chaplain Yee was taken to a navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and interrogated. 15 He was blindfolded; his earswere blocked; he was manacled and then put into solitary confinement for seventy-six days; forbidden mail, television,or anything to read except the Koran. His family was not allowed to visit him. He was demonized on TV, radio, and theInternet and accused of being an operative in "a supposed spy ring that aimed to pass secrets to al-Qaeda fromsuspected terrorists held at Guantanamo. . . . Court papers said he would be charged with espionage, spying, aidingthe enemy, mutiny or sedition, and disobeying an order." Chaplain Yee, born in New Jersey and raised a Lutheranbefore he converted to Islam, was baffled at the accusations. His lawyers were told he could face execution. Within sixmonths, the U.S. government had dropped all criminal charges against Yee. But the government said it did so to avoidmaking its sensitive evidence public, not because Yee is innocent.Yee was released—but charged with what looked like punitive "Mickey Mouse" charges: "adultery, lying toinvestigators and two counts of downloading porn." In the presence of his humiliated wife and his four-year-olddaughter, military prosecutors compelled Navy Lt. Karyn Wallace to testify about their extramarital affair. The militaryrarely prosecutes adultery. The government never presented the evidence on which it based its first accusationsagainst Yee. But after Yee was set free, he was placed "under a new Army order not to talk about his ordeal in any waythat might be seen as critical to the military." If he says anything negative about what happened to him, he facesfurther prosecution. 16(In 2007, Lieutenant Colonel William H. Steele, who like Chaplain Yee has spoken up for a more humane situation forthe detainees, would also find himself accused of "aiding the enemy," for various charges, and facing possibleexecution. 17 )So in Yees case a United States citizen innocent of the initial charges was kept in solitary confinement, this time for 76days. His name was destroyed, his family humiliated—and he cant talk about it or he will be arrested again.On July 24,2006, Chaplain Yee said he had been detained once again, this time at the Canadian border as he was tryingto come home after a trip to Vancouver to see a performance. Yee was questioned for two hours. 18 You can imaginehow that "Come with us" might have felt.In Germany, by 1933, arbitrary arrest and release was common. On November, 27, 1938, two police officers came toVictor Klemperers house to search for weapons. As they ransacked the possessions of the two middle-aged GermanJews, Mrs. Klemperer made the mistake of asking them not to go through the linen cupboard with unwashed hands.
  • 43. Professor Klemperer was taken into custody and released: "[A]t four oclock I was on the street with the curiousfeeling, free—but for how long?" (In 1941, Klemperer would spend eight days in prison for forgetting to close thecurtains on his windows for the blackout.)The charges against those taken into custody and then released were often vague and uncontestable. In a survey ofGerman citizens who had lived through that era, 36 percent reported having been arrested, questioned, and released. Awell-known Cologne priest who was outspoken about the Nazis was arrested and released repeatedly. 19 As the 1930sprogressed hundreds of thousands of German citizens were arbitrarily detained and released. 20General Pinochet used this tactic too: Every so often the military would enter a slum, arrest people in random sweeps,keep them behind bars briefly, and then let them go. The only real reason was to intimidate the population. 21"Arbitrary Search and Seizure"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches andseizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath oraffirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.The Fourth AmendmentYouve heard the phrase "unreasonable searches and seizures," and like so much about the Bill of Rights, in a timewhen democracy has been subcontracted out to lawyers and activists, it is hard for ordinary people to understandwhat the urgency of this could be. If you dont know the history of tyranny out of which our nation was formed, thisarcane language, which no one puts in context for you, can almost sound like an unimportant scolding to "playfair"—like a parent insisting that your brother not go through your things without permission. Whats the big dealabout "unreasonable search and seizure"?The FBI accused Brandon Mayfield, another ordinary yuppie— an American lawyer from Portland, Oregon—ofsupporting terrorism. They asserted that it was his fingerprints on evidence from the bombings in Madrid. Agentssecretly broke into his house and law office and seized his computer. Mayfield, a convert to Islam, has a wife andchildren. You can imagine the feeling of coming home with your kids to find that strangers have broken in and beenthrough your—and their—possessions.You probably heard the saturation news coverage that implied that Mayfield was involved with terrorism. It turned outthat Mayfield was innocent. But even when the Spanish government protested that his fingerprints did not match theprints from the bombings, the United States—again—refused to acknowledge the mistake and jailed Mayfield for twoweeks in 2004, including time in solitary confinement and the prisons mental ward. 22 The charges were eventuallydropped. (In November 2006 the U.S. government agreed to pay Mayfield two million dollars to settle a lawsuitchallenging the constitutionality of the USA PATRIOT act which the FBI had used to obtain his personal records. 23 )Most of us dont fully understand the details of the debate over the Bush administrations efforts to avoid getting alegal warrant for each time that it reads our e-mails, opens our mail, and listens in on our phone calls—or enters ourhomes unbeknownst to us. President Bush wants to get, effectively, a "blanket warrant" to do these things. Many ofus might think that "a blanket warrant" sounds reasonable, even efficient, in a time of war.The Founders knew how scary a blanket warrant was, in war or peace. The Fourth Amendment specifically rejectsvague general warrants.Why? Because colonial Americans knew firsthand how abusively authorities could use the power of a blanket warrantto break into their homes and seize their private papers. General warrants had let officers of the British crown violatethe privacy of colonial American homes and businesses again and again. The British Crown taxed everything fromstoves to soap to papers, from candles to glass to, of course, tea. At that time, customs agents of the Crown wouldviolently break into peoples homes, rip up their trunks and cabinets, loot their papers, and haul off their goods—evenif they werent hiding anything that they should have paid taxes on.Colonial pamphleteers in 1754 warned of the danger of these agents having the power to destroy doors, break openlocks, bolts, and chains, and invade peoples bedrooms and cellars armed with no more than a general warrant. Ageneral warrant meant that these agents could go wherever they wanted without having to show a magistrate thatthere was a reason for their suspicion that a certain person was breaking the law. It meant that no ones home was evertruly private or safe. 24 Because of these violations of their homes, drafters of the Constitution created the FourthAmendment. It is tyrants and dictators who send agents to break into peoples homes and offices, to seize theirpapers, and destroy their goods.Curtailing Citizens AssemblyIf there is a march for, say, the Constitution, we expect to be able to get on a bus, or take a subway, and join ourassembled fellow citizens. Every pro-democracy movement depends on people being willing and able to march as amass; the sheer numbers of citizens is one of a budding or threatened democracys most potent weapons. It is massesof people united who brought down the Berlin Wall; stood up to Chinese tanks; and overwhelmed a dictator in the
  • 44. Philippines. Massed citizens ended Jim Crow laws and brought the war in Vietnam to a close. It is so simple a tool, butso powerful.This is why a dictatorship restricts the movements and assembly of its citizens—usually through municipal ordinancesand curfews: Mussolinis arditi, for instance, warned Italian citizens to stay indoors during the fascists mass rallies. InMexico, police shot at and wounded student protesters in 1968. 25 General Pinochets forces also fired at protesters in1982.26 Suppression of protests habituates citizens to the idea that the state has the right to direct their movements andto disperse large groups or to keep them from gathering in the first place.In America, citizens are supposed to have the right "peaceably to assemble." But in 2004, during the RepublicanNational Convention, New York City officials denied demonstrators access to the Great Lawn in Central Park. MayorMichel Bloombergs administration denied that politics had played a role in banning the demonstration. But theNational Council of Arab Americans and the ANSWER Coalition, an antiwar group, brought suit. E-mails revealed thatwhile Bloombergs aides gave the rationale of "security" for denying the permit, the true reasons were political: "It isvery important that we do not permit any big or political events for the period between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 2004," readone Parks Department e-mail. 27In New York, that wasnt the end of the pressure against free assembly. In August of 2006, the New York PoliceDepartment sought new rules that made it illegal for groups of more than 35 people to gather for sidewalk marcheswithout a permit. The NYCLU pointed out that this proposal would have restricted a wide range of citizens daily groupactivities, such as school field trips and funeral processions: "A couple jaywalking or a family riding bicycles withoutstopping at every red light would be subject to arrest for parading without a permit," the NYCLU wrote in an op-ed inthe Times. 2SFor now, U.S. citizens can still assemble, march, and make their voices heard. You must ally with the manyIndependents and Republicans around you who love their country and cherish these rights—dont just talk to yourlike-minded friends. We must practice our rights now while our voices can still carry—raising them together in defenseof freedom.
  • 45. — CHAPTER EIGHT — TARGET KEY INDIVIDUALSNo one can equate the consequences for those who are spied on. (In East Germany: loss of university place, like Young Brecht; loss of job, like Erhard Haufe; reprisals against your children, as happened to Werner, and imprisonment, as in the case of Dr. Warmbier, with the courts sentence decided in advance—by the prosecution.) Timothy Garton AshAll dictatorships and would-be dictators strategically target key individuals. Job loss or career setbacks are the firstkinds of pressure these people are likely to face.In 2001, the National Science Foundation made it clear that its grants would no longer go to research on the basis ofthe science alone if that research undermined the Bush administrations agenda. If a researchers grant sources areclosed down, he or she is neutered as a scientist. The Bush administration has stacked scientific advisory committees,which are not supposed to be political, with partisans. In February of 2004, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued acondemnation of these abuses, signed by 6,000 scientists. 1Again, this pressure is not an original idea. Goebbels purged the sciences as well—even setting up an institute forrace-based science to replace the degenerate science-based science of non-"co-ordinated" reality. When Germanscientists complained that scientific enquiry was suffering because their ranks had been purged of those who did notagree with the "party line," Hitler remarked that in his view Germany could get along without physics or chemistry for ahundred years. 2Universities keep alight the campfires of free speech, so its not surprising that Bush supporters seems have a strategyto target critics on campus. In California, a bill called SBR, the "Student Bill of Rights," seeks legally to "balance"classroom discussion. David Horowitz, of the well-funded right-wing Center for the Study of Popular Culture, drafted amodel of this law. His version has found supporters in Congress. (On May 1,1933, the JVeue Studentenrecht law waspassed in Germany, aimed at using student organizations to align universities with the values of the National Socialiststate.) 3Campus Republicans, helping their Senator introduce SBR, said "certain instructors at SRJC (Santa Rosa JuniorCollege) are in violation of California State Law." On February 24, 2005, someone posted bright red stars on the doorsof ten left-wing faculty members at that college—a state-funded institution. 4State legislators in the United States are putting pressure on regents to put pressure on academics who criticize theBush agenda—another tactic with historical antecedents. Professor Ward L. Churchill was a tenured professor ofEthnic Studies at the University of Colorado. He wrote an essay that argued metaphorically that many of the 9/11victims were not "innocent." Ill-timed? Callous? Certainly. But in an open society, hearing offensive language is theprice we pay for open debate.A group of alumni supportive of the Bush administration called on the Board of the University of Colorado to takeaction against Churchill. Republican state legislators added their pressure. The state legislature oversees the Board ofRegents, and the Board of Regents oversees the President of the University of Colorado. 5 In June 2006, ProfessorChurchill, who has tenure—which means they pretty much cant fire you—was accused of "academic misconduct."His lawyer says the real reason is his political speech. 6In 2006, Kevin Barrett, a lecturer on Islam at the University of Wisconsin—another state school—was at the center ofa similar firestorm. Barrett has "disputed official findings on the perpetrators of the Sept 11 attacks," though aUniversity review established that he had not discussed his personal views in the classroom.But conservative talk radio attacked Barrett, and Wisconsin Republicans in the legislature asked for action:"Republican Representative Stephen Nass announced: Barrett has to go." Representative Nass used the strategy thathad worked in Colorado. Sixty-one Wisconsin state legislators—60 of them Republicans-condemned Barretts"academically dishonest views" and asked that he be fired. The resolution was sent to university officials. TheUniversity of Wisconsin is a state institution like Churchills university (and Klemperers own Dresden TechnicalUniversity, where he had been Chair of Romance Languages and a Montesquieu scholar, before he was fired). ProvostPatrick V. Farrell, whose own budget and salary is determined by the state legislature, tried to resist the pressure: "Iwant to avoid as much as we can creating some kind of political test for instructors or faculty," he said. 7In times of pressure, citizens can soon tell "which way the wind is blowing." Individuals realign themselves and theirviews. Shortly after this furor, Stanley Fish, now a professor of law at Florida International University, wrote an op-ed
  • 46. for The New York Times that argued that professors who introduce partisan ideas in their lectures deserve to be fired.Academic freedom, he wrote, does not include the right to express such views in the classroom. 8 (Martin Heideggerwrote an essay in 1933, "The Self-Assertion of the German University." Supporting Nazi views of purpose of theacademy, Heidegger argued that "academic freedom" was a passe notion that should be expelled from the Germanuniversity. 9 )Ideally, professors shouldnt advocate directly to students in the classroom. But in the atmosphere of self-censorshipthat Fish was defending, a professor could get in trouble for teaching the history of the Bush administrations failure tosign accords to stem global warming, or the history of the Constitution in light of recent events. Professors of politicalscience, journalism, economics, and Constitutional law are in special jeopardy: There is no way to advance adiscussion about these live issues without stumbling upon an observation that could be construed as "a politicalopinion."Whether driven by Mussolini or by Goebbels, by Pinochet or by Chinas Politburo, its always the same tactic: Thestate leans on university administrators, who lean on professors and students.Italian Fascists leaned on university rectors to scrutinize the politics of those whom they oversaw: The rector ofMilans Catholic University actively informed on politically anti-Fascist students to the secret police. If you were eithera student or a professor in Mussolinis Italy, expressing unpopular views could get you fired—or even arrested andsent to internal exile. By 1927, if you wanted to secure welfare benefits or get a job or a promotion, citizens, includingacademics, faced a political litmus test. 10Germany emulated the tactic: From the early 1930s, professional purges led so many Jewish and "communist"academics and scientists to emigrate that this led to a major brain drain. By 1933, about 2,000 of the nations premierartists and writers had fled as well. 11 The Nazi periodical The Nettle depicted this emigration as "a triumph for theGerman nation." 12The National Socialist German Students League was set up in 1926. It sought to get independent professors fired andto direct the universities resources toward Nazi goals rather than toward pure research. By 1933, Propaganda MinisterGoebbels set in motion one of these purges: "By the beginning of the academic year 1933-34, 313 full professors hadbeen dismissed. ... By 1934, some 1600 out of 5000 university teachers had been forced out of their jobs. . . . Veryquickly, newly Nazified Education Ministries made political criteria central not only for appointments but also forteaching and research." 13 On May 10,1933, pro-Nazi students also orchestrated a series of book burnings—eventsdesigned to look "spontaneous" but actually directed behind the scenes by Goebbels. 14This pressure on students and academics worked in Chile in the early 1970s as well. Chilean students had been amongthe few who still dared to march, hold meetings, pass out flyers, and create posters attacking Pinochet after his militarycoup. But Pinochet purged nonaligned academics and university administrators and put his own military officers inthose positions. He closed down whole departments, gutted some university programs, and moved others to newlocations. He made it clear that student life was now under new management: that of his cronies. It was obvious toChilean academics that they had to support the Junta or give up their careers. 15Students and academics are always democracys foot soldiers: Czech students helped bring about the Prague Springdemocracy movement. Students in Shanghai and Beijing led the democracy movement in 1989: It was Chinese artstudents who set up the stature of Lady Liberty in Tiananmen Square.You may not get hurt if you are a prodemocracy student in a violent dictatorship, but you can become unemployable:Tang Rimei, an advocate of the Tiananmen democracy movement at her university, fled arrest. When she returned toher university, her professors begged the state police not to arrest her: They protected her by promising to punish heradministratively. Tang was grateful: "That meant I was able to stay at the university and graduate . . . [but] I couldntget a job." 16Pressure on Artists and EntertainersThe Bush administration and its supporters use economic pressure to silence or punish another group of the "usualsuspects" who are always targeted in a fascist shift: artists and entertainers. In 2001, Politically Incorrect host BillMaher said the 9/11 hijackers were "not cowards." Right-wing media drove a volley of criticism. Mahers advertisers,major corporations such as Sears, withdrew their support of the show. ABC cancelled the show when the seasonended.During a London concert on the eve of the Iraq war, Natalie Maines, the Dixie Chicks lead singer, said that "Wereashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Right-wing bloggers attacked the group: the highlyorganized blog called for a consumer boycott. By the end of the week there was a 20 percent declinein the airplay of their songs. 17 Cumulus Media, which owns 262 stations, stopped 42 of its stations from playing theirmusic. Their manager said the boycott was not spontaneous but organized. The New York Times reported in 2006 thatother recording artists were scared to express views critical of the Bush administration—out of fear of being "Dixie
  • 47. Chicked." 18A Cumulus station in Shreveport, Louisiana, held an event that included a bulldozer crushing the Dixie Chicks CDs. 19As I mentioned earlier, other "spontaneous" groups burned the CDs. The band is back in favor—now with differentfans—and even winning Grammys; but the lesson of what can happen to an artist remains.In 2007, the Bush administration even threatened action against filmmaker Michael Moore, raising questions aboutwhether it would confiscate his new film Sicko before it had a chance to be released in theaters. 20Goebbels understood well the power of image to shape opinion, and thus the need to control all aspects ofcommunications and culture: In 1933, he set up separate departments to Nazify "propaganda, radio, the press, film,theatre, and popular enlightenment." 21 Cabaret singers, actors, directors, and musicians who would not "co-ordinate"with the regime were closed down professionally. Those who did support it often saw their careers thrive.Czech arts saw a similar freeze in 1948. But two decades later, Czech theater, writing, cartooning, and visual arts sprangback to life during the Prague Spring. This explosion was seen as destabilizing: The government cracked down onceagain. Finally, only "official" art, music, writing, and theatre was left unthreatened. General Pinochet also went afterartists and performers: One of the first people to be "disappeared" in the coup was the beloved folk singer Victor Jara.22 (Castros Cuba and Somozas Nicaragua jailed artists, writers, and performers too. The creative voice is dangerous todictators of any persuasion.) In the 1950s, McCarthys supporters in Congress threatened movie studios heads withboycotts unless they in turn pressured their actors, producers, and screenwriters to cooperate with the Senatehearings. Those who still refused to comply were blacklisted by major media outlets such as CBS and Hearst, andfound it difficult to work. 23Pressure on Civil ServantsIn a fascist shift, while entertainers are the most visible, civil servants are the most vulnerable to being targeted withjob loss: They work directly for the leadership. Goebbels, as we saw, purged the civil service in 1933, and privateindustries followed suit. He directed special ire at lawyers and judges.Victor Klemperer writes of a senior district attorney at the High Court in Berlin who was not a Party member. Thegovernment fired him, calling the move "temporary retirement." Independent district attorneys across the nation werepurged as well, and replaced by lawyers who were loyal to the regime. 24The Bush administration has purged civil servants who do not follow the "party line," long before the United StatesAttorneys scandal. When Washington Post reporter Dana Priest exposed the secret CIA prisons, the Bush WhiteHouse fired the civil servant who leaked the information. 25 The Justice Department also let it be known that it wasopening a criminal investigation into the leak of information to the New York Times about the NSA eavesdroppingprogram. 26In 2003, Lt. Commander Charles D. Swift was assigned to represent Salim Hamdan, a 26-year-old Yemeni taxi driveraccused of having been a driver for bin Laden. The Bush administration wanted the military lawyer to get his client toplead guilty. Swift was appalled that his clients access to a lawyer was dependent on his willingness to have himnegotiate a "guilty" plea. 27You cant go along with that, if you are a lawyer in America: You have taken an oath to represent your client for real."Instead of carrying out this morally repugnant task," noted the New York Times, "Commander Swift concluded thatthe commissions were unconstitutional. He did his duty and defended his client.... The Navy responded by killing hismilitary career." This sent a message to all the other military attorneys about what they risked if they refused to sell outtheir clients. 28Private lawyers who helped detainees were also threatened with career hits: In January 2007, Charles Stimson, DeputyAssistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, expressed "shock" that American law firms would represent thedetainees, and suggested that companies refuse to do business with them—in essence, a boycott. He read out a list ofthe names of those very law firms on a radio station. 29 A boycott could cripple those firms. (Senior Nazis orchestratedan economic boycott of Jewish-owned law firms, among other boycotted businesses. Germans who were legallyrepresented by Jews or who shopped at Jewish-owned firms were "traitors.") These boycotts not only destroyed Jewseconomically years before "the final solution": they also created a "no-go zone" in which ordinary Germansunderstood that if they spoke up for the "others" they, too, would face reprisals.If you can show citizens that they can lose their livelihood if they refuse to comply with the party line, it doesnt takelong to "co-ordinate" an intimidated civil society.
  • 48. — CHAPTER NINE — RESTRICT the PRESS Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press .. . First AmendmentIn all dictatorships, targeting the free press begins with political pressure—loud, angry campaigns for the news to berepresented in a way that supports the group that seeks dominance. Attacks escalate to smears, designed to shamemembers of the press personally; then editors face pressure to fire journalists who are not parroting the party line. Acaste of journalists and editors who support the regime develops, whether out of conviction, a wish for advancement,or fear. Such regimes promote false news in a systematic campaign of disinformation, even as they go afterindependent voices.America is still a fairly open society in which assertions can be independently verified and a thriving Internetcommunity can tear apart false allegations. Even in the United States, though, opinion is being penalized, and falsenews is being disseminated which disorients the public.Early on in the Bush administration, the press experienced unusually quick, tough pushback: The White House toldreporters critical of the administration that they could be cut out of the information loop. This is aggressive, but stillfair game as part of democracys playbook.Then the pushback escalated to personal smears. When anti-terror czar Richard Clarke wrote Against All Enemies, theWhite House tried to discredit him by sending into the news stream negative personal information. Again, thisapproach, though unattractive, is still part of democratic debate. Personal smears in the press go back toRevolutionary America.But starting in 2003, people who published or broadcast information damaging to the administration began to lose theirjobs. Diplomat Joseph Wilsons wife, CIA operative Valerie Plame, was famously "outed" by Deputy Secretary of StateRichard Armitage and possibly by Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheneys chief of staff, in retaliation against her husbandsop-ed in The New York Times arguing that the "weapons of mass destruction" rationale for the war in Iraq was basedon false information. 1In 2004, Dan Rather, then-CBS News anchor, ran a segment on the show on documents that purported to detail GeorgeBushs failure to show up for his duties during the Vietnam War as a member of the Texas Air National Guard. When itbecame clear that the documents were fake, a powerful Republican PR group-Creative Response Concepts, the samegroup that led the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to attack John Kerrys campaign in 2004— led an aggressiveright-wing media and blogger push against Rather. Rather was forced into early retirement. 2Then the Bush administration began to exert job pressure on employees of PBS and NPR.Public Radio and TelevisionThe Public Broadcasting System was reconfigured in 2004 after the Bush administration installed a supporter, KennethTomlinson, as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Tomlinson hired a firm to tabulate a list accounting forthe political leanings of different pundits involved with PBS, in order to purge the network of its "liberal" bias. 3(Goebbels had done the same to state radio employees in 1933). Press reports played this out, once more, as absurdoverreaching, and Tomlinson resigned in 2005. However, the net effect of the tallys being now public was to let thechattering classes know that their political tendencies may be; tracked by the state.The next year, in July of 2006, Melanie Martinez, a presenter for a PBS childrens show, The Good Night Show, wasdiscovered t< > have, years earlier, acted in a video spoof of abstinence education programs.PBS executives fired her. They did not claim that she had lied on her resume or in any way failed to do her job. Theyjust noted that the video made her "inappropriate" for the role. There is hardly an employee of PBS or NPR who hasnot engaged in political speech at one time. PBSs own ombudsman, Michael Getler, wrote that Ms. Martinezs firinghad "too much of a whiff of after-the-fact loyalty oaths and purity checks on performers who do lots of differentthings." 4This is just a kids TV show. But recall that this tactic tends to begin inoffensively, but set a precedent. PBS also doesnews coverage and debates. Many viewers have begun to notice a more reserved tone on PBS.
  • 49. In a climate in which they face orchestrated smear campaigns, reporters will still report critical stories. But in a climatein which they can lose their jobs—as Bill Maher and Dan Rather did—many will tread more carefully.Threaten the Press with Prison at Home and with Violence AbroadNo one hurts reporters in the United States in 2007. But reporters are getting hurt under U.S. oversight in Iraq incircumstances that journalists rights organizations have called suspicious.In 2003, respected BBC correspondent Kate Adie told Irish Radio in an interview that the Pentagon had threatened tofire on independent reporters locations from the air—to "target down"— if they detected the electronic signals thatindicated that the reporters were transmitting stories. Adie said that when a senior Pentagon officer was asked aboutthe possibility that reporters might be killed, he replied, "Who cares ... theyve been warned." Adie also said that theU.S. military was demanding that independent reporters reveal their political positions on the war. 5By the beginning of April 2003, administration figures such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were attacking thecoverage of the war in Iraq by unembedded journalists. They singled out Al-Jazeera in particular. April became abloody month for unembedded journalists in Iraq.The organization Reporters Without Borders noted that on April 8, 2003, "three journalists were killed by the U.S. armyin a single day." Al-Jazeera cameraman and bureau chief, Tarek Ayoub, 35, died when a U.S. missile hit the offices ofAl-Jazeera. Reporters rights organizations claimed that U.S. forces appeared to target the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, 35, died as well, as did a 27-year-old Spanish cameraman. "The places targetedwere all known to be used by journalists but the U.S. army investigation brazenly cleared all those involved,"protested the journalists organization.The organization claims that, contrary to the U.S. militarys assertion that the United States fired at the Palestine Hotelin self-defense, in fact the firing was unprovoked. "We are appalled at what happened because it was known that bothplaces contained journalists," said the groups secretary-general Robert Menard. He notes that film shot by a FrenchTV station shows that the area was quiet, "and that the US tank crew took their time, waiting for a couple of minutesand adjusting its gun before opening fire. This evidence does not match the US version of an attack in self-defenseand we can only conclude that the US army deliberately and without warning targeted journalists----Very manynon-embedded journalists have complained of being held and interrogated for several hours. One group ofnon-embedded journalists was held in secret for two days and roughed up by the US military police," Menard said. 6Robert Fisk, the well-known correspondent for The Independent, had been at Al-Jazeeras offices in Baghdad on April4. He had told Ayoub that Ayoubs office would make an easy target if the Unite< I States wanted to take it out. "Dontworry, Robert," Ayoub had said, reassuring Fisk that the Al-Jazeera team knew it was safe—after all, it had alerted U.S.forces of its exact position a few days before. 7Even Al-Jazeera believes that America would keep reporters safe.A year later journalists were still at risk. According to Amy Goodmans interview with Al-Jazeera reporter AhmedMansur on Democracy Now!, and also according to Jeremy Scahill in The Nation, senior military spokesman MarkKimmitt had announced that stations such as Al-Jazeera that were filming American soldiers killing women andchildren in Fallujah were not legitimate news sources but "propaganda." 8 The U.K. Daily Mirror reported that at aboutthe same time, Bush had told Prime Minister Tony Blair that he wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera. 9 On April 15, 2004, DonaldRumsfeld declared that Al-Jazeeras coverage of the siege of Fallujah was "vicious, inaccurate and inexcusable. Itsdisgraceful what the station is doing." 10An Al-Jazeera cameraman has been held by the U.S. for almost six years. Kristof describes what happened to37-year-old college-educated, English-speaking Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al-Hajj. Al-Hajj was detained by theUnited States while covering the war in Afghanistan. In the American military prison in Bagram, he was "repeatedlybeaten, kicked, starved, left out in the freezing cold and subjected to anal cavity searches in public." Six months laterhe was flown to Guantanamo and also brutally beaten. His interrogators claimed he had obtained video footage ofOsama bin Laden, but that claim fell apart when it seemed that they had confused al-Hajj with someone with a similarname. They made many other accusations but scarcely followed up on them in interrogations, preferring to try to getdirt on Al-Jazeera.According to his lawyer, the interrogators told Mr. Hajj that he would be freed immediately if he agree to spy on hisemployer. When al-Hajj asked what would happen if he did not do so, "You would not do that," Mr. Hajj quoted hisinterrogator as saying, "because it would endanger your child." 11It is not just journalists from "alien" news outlets such as Al-Jazeera who face risks from U.S. forces in Iraq: CBS andAP staff have also been singled out.Larry Doyle, the CBS News bureau chief in Baghdad, received an e-mail at 10 p.m. on March 21, 2006, telling him thathis cameraman, Abdul Ameer Younis Hussein, would face a trial in less than twelve hours. Mr. Husseins lawyers weregiven no notice of the trial at all. Mr. Hussein had been wounded by the U.S. military and taken into custody. 12(Reporters Without Borders had demanded an investigation of the incident: "Once again the US forces have targeted a
  • 50. journalist just doing his job." 13 )Doyle said that CBS was "stymied" in trying to find out what evidence there might be against his staffer. Hussein washeld for a year at Abu Ghraib. "All we are seeking is due process for Mr. Hussein," said CBS spokeswoman SandyGenelius. 14 The little information his colleagues could uncover about his arrest indicated that a U.S. task force hadclaimed that Hussein "appeared to be instigating a crowd" in Mosul, but those charges against the man were not madepublic. For a more than two years, no one at CBS was able to find out the charges or evidence against him. He facedlife in prison if convicted. Hussein was eventually cleared of all charges by the Iraqi attorney general. 15AP couldnt keep its employees safe either: The U.S. military in Iraq imprisoned Pulitzer Prize-winning APphotographer, Bilal Hussein (no relation to the CBS cameraman), in April 2006, claiming that he was a security threat.Bilal Husseins images of women and children suffering in the war are famous. But U.S. authorities have never filedcharges or allowed a public hearing: "We want the rule of law to prevail," said Tom Curley, AP president and CEO. "Heeither needs to be charged or released."But Major General Jack Gardner e-mailed APs international editor that "[Bilal Hussein] has close relationships withpersons known to be responsible for kidnappings, smuggling, improvised explosive device attacks and other attackson coalition forces."" This jeopardizes all of us who are reporters: any decent reporter will eventually have to develop"relationships"—even "close relationships"—with sources who are very bad people, in order to do their jobs. ManyPulitzer Prizes have been won because a story started with a journalist closely befriending a very nasty person.If you have not heard much about these two cases, it may be because CBS and AP management, understandably, donot want to jeopardize their imprisoned staff further.But imagine what it means today to be the head of CBS News or AP—and know that you cant get one of yourreporters a fair trial, let alone get him or her out of jail. Yes, all this happened in a country far away. But do these arrestshave no ripple effect in our own nation? Does that act of state terror not send a message to the community ofjournalists here at home—even if just in the form of informal gossip? And if one were a reporter for such anorganization, would one not be hesitant—if only unconsciously—to write something that might enrage theadministration and jeopardize ones colleague further?In a closing society, reporters start to get hurt more directly.Right now, Russia claims some of the trappings of a democracy. But in 2006, famed reporter Anna Politkovskaya, whoreported on truths that the government wanted to suppress about Chechnya, was shot to death in her apartmentbuilding. 17 In January of 2007, newspaper editor Hrant Dink, who published truths the government did not wantexposed about the massacre of Armenians in that country, was shot and killed in Turkey. 18 The people who committedboth murders will probably get away with them. That is what can happen to reporters and editors in countries thatarent truly free.Though no one threatens reporters physically in the United States, they are facing new threats of other kinds. It isstandard practice for dictators to start to recategorize the gathering of news as "a threat to national security." Thisprepares the way for further targeting: On a U.S. Army Website in 2007, the media is listed as another threat, alongside"al-Qaeda," "warlords," and "drug cartels." 19 The Columbia Journalism Review warned that this sends "theunambiguous message to soldiers and DoD employees that reporters are to be treated as enemies." 20Reporters are facing escalating numbers of investigations and subpoenas in the United States. In August 2006, a NewYork appeals court ruled that the prosecutor could seize Judith Miller and reporter Philip Shenons phone records froma story they were reporting on an Islamic charity. 21 Time Inc.s editors warned their reporters that "Most electronicrecords, including e-mail, can be subpoenaed and retrieved in litigation." 22 David Barstow, a reporter at The New YorkTimes, told The Observer that his newspaper had begun legal seminars to help reporters avoid what executive editorBill Keller called "the persistent legal perils that confront us." "With this crazy environment, with subpoenas and soon, there is this feeling that you have to act like a drug dealer or a Mafioso ... [A subpoena is] just no longer anabstract threat," said Barstow. A columnist in The Observer wrote that some of the advice given to reporters in theseseminars had "the sound of advice for reporting behind the Iron Curtain before the fall—recalling A.M. Rosenthalburning his notes as a reporter in Communist Poland." 23You might not just be subpoenaed as a reporter: You might face charges yourself. In August 2006, the Department ofHomeland Security accused Greg Palast, author of the bestselling critique of the administration, Armed Madhouse, andTV producer Matt Pascarella of "unauthorized filming of a critical national security structure." Palast and Pascarellawere in Louisiana, filming evacuees who had been made homeless by Hurricane Katrina. They filmed an ExxonMobilrefinery behind the encampment, to give a sense of how unhealthful the setting was for children and the elderly.Shortly thereafter, Palast got a call from Detective Frank Pananepinto: Palast was facing charges for the filming.Palasts tone on his blog is upbeat: "Matt and I look pretty good in orange." But it is also anxious: "First, this aint nofoolin around: Matt and I are facing these nutty charges." 24This is what it sounds like when the ground starts to shift from a democracy to something less. There are variations intone: Is this a joke? Or am I really in trouble?
  • 51. One such story is kind of funny—if it ends there. But thirty such stories make a "tipping point." In the histories of theclosing down of open societies, it doesnt take many such events for things to change entirely.Control of the Press in the Past"As long as I have a pen in my hand and a revolver in my pocket, 1 fear no man," wrote Mussolini, who had been anewspaper editor. 2 Each fascist leader we have been looking at has sought aggressively to control the press and beensuccessful at securing that control in short order.By 1923, Fascist prefects were permitted by the leadership in Rome to take possession of newspapers and demandfines from the publishers if the newspapers published something that could "damage national credit at home orabroad," alarm and dismay public opinion and so disturb "order." The edict that provided for this was ambiguouslyworded—as so many Fascist edicts are—in order to ensure that the press would curtail its own freedom. Mussolinicreated a registry system to make sure the Italian press toed the line: All reporters had to register as Fascist by 1928.This method would be imitated precisely by Goebbels. Mussolini justified this control over the press in the name ofpatriotism: "Discipline" over the news, it was claimed, writes Bosworth, "served in the interests of the nation." 26Mussolini also understood that it was crucial for him to gain control of public radio—which of course, at the time, waspopular culture. By 1925 Mussolini had created an investigative commission, the EIAR, to tighten government controlof public radio. A substantial Fascist film industry was developed after 1933. 27In closing or closed societies, reporters are arrested for revealing "state secrets" or "classified information": in 1931,for instance, the influential left-wing editor Carl Ossietzky was sentenced to 18 months in prison for publishingdocuments that showed that the German army was engaged in combat that violated the Treaty of Versailles; he wouldbe arrested, released, rearrested, and tortured throughout the Nazi era and, despite an international outcry and a NobelPrize, he would die from the abuse he suffered. 28During the 1933 purges in Germany, Goebbels fired 13 percent of the state radios employees in six months. The radiostaff that were fired were not only Jews but also Liberals, Social Democrats, and others not in harmony with the newregime. Radio managers and reporters who were seen as being friendly to the prior liberal broadcasting regime werearrested on corruption charges and taken to Oranienberg concentration camp, where they were condemned in a hugeshow trial the following year. 29In Communist China after the prodemocracy protests of 1989, reporters were targeted as well. "The authoritiesharassed us, denounced us and almost expelled us from the country," wrote Kristof and WuDunn, "In at leasteighteen cases since . . . 1978 Chinese have gone to prison or labor camp for terms of up to life imprisonment becausethey helped foreign correspondents." 30False News and Faked Documents"The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims of a big lie than a small one," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf.Fascists rely on "perception management"—what the intelligence community calls "info ops"—because their tacticswont stand scrutiny by a free press. So in a fascist shift, as real reporters are being frozen out, smeared, or faced withunemployment, there is an increasing use of spectacle in conveying "message"—and the spectacle is accompanied bythe. production of fake news and false documents.The messaging, combined with the spectacle, can be stunning in a fascist ascendancy. Fascist messaging hasadvantages that democratic communications and advocacy, even of the highest sophistication, just cant demonstrate:You can use a monolithic, harmonized voice and vision, unimpeded by dissent, rather than trying to break though aclash of pluralistic arguments. This power of epic messaging in combination with the power of spectacle is awell-known aspect of the seduction of fascism.Goebbels coordinated the Nazi message with the monumental sets, blazing klieg lighting, and heroic backdrops thatarchitect Albert Speer designed. The sets conveyed might and permanence—the thousand-year Reich that it would behopeless to contest. Hitler, who had been trained as a visual artist, also understood the emotional power of spectacle:He commissioned a young filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl to create Triumph of the Will, a classic propaganda film.Hitler admired her Nordic risk-taking persona and wanted her to create that magic for him. Riefenstahls film was shownagain and again to German movie audiences and saturated their consciousnesses, creating a sense of invincibilityaround Hitler and the Nazis.Riefenstahl had begun her career as a daredevil action film actress. In SOS Iceberg, she flies a small plane—byherself—and lands it dramatically. She also crafted a scene in an early film of her own that shows a young Nazi warhero greeted by admirers as he opens the door of his small plane.Triumph of the Will repeats this motif: Hitlers plane descends through the clouds and lands. Uniformed paramilitary
  • 52. personnel and civilians gather around the planes door to welcome him. Hitler emerges to review his troops, who aredressed identically and massed in orderly rows. Hitler is wearing his own uniform, a black leather belt and a blackleather bandolier across his chest. His tan jodhpurs are tucked into black leather boots and he carries a military hat inhis left hand. Some scenes later, Hitler greets and addresses the vast, orderly mass of troops in an epic scene of thetroops hailing their leader. Huge vertical banners are visible throughout the crowd. Backing the parade ground isSpeers enormous stylized eagle with its wings outspread, in the center of which is a circle containing the intersectinglines of a swastika. In another film of the Nuremberg Rally speeches, Hitler says, "I ask ... for your support for theaccomplishment of this mission ... ours is a great mission."In the "Mission Accomplished" photo opportunity, Bush descends over water, in a small plane that he is copiloting.He lands on an aircraft carrier, where he emerges to review and address the gathered troops. Uniformed militarypersonnel clamor to open his planes door and welcome him.Bush is dressed in a green flight suit with many leather straps and with a great deal of hardware across the chest. He iswearing black leather boots and holds his helmet in his left hand. A massive horizontal banner reading "MissionAccomplished" stretches behind him. The troops are standing in a vast expanse of orderly rows. Their cheering lastsfor long minutes.The USS Lincoln event was stage-managed by a team of TV production experts: Scott Sforza, a former ABC producer;Bob DeServi, a former NBC cameraman and lighting expert; and Greg Jenkins, formerly a Fox News producer.According to Elisabeth Bumiller, the team orchestrated every aspect of the visuals of the event, "even down to themembers of the Lincoln crew arrayed in coordinated shirt colors over Mr. Bushs right shoulder." The Presidentsremarks were delivered during what film and TV producers call "magic hour light," which cast a golden glow on Mr.Bush." 31Propaganda is part of both fascist and democratic advocacy: American political ads, for instance, are a form ofpropaganda. But, while exaggeration and "spin" are part of democracys playbook, flat-out lies and false documentsare not.Dictatorships specialize in faking news and falsifying documents. Hitler wrote that "all effective propaganda must belimited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands whatyou want him to understand ..." He argued that good propaganda speaks to feelings and not reason, and that "itshould never admit a glimmer of doubt in its own claims, or concede the tiniest element of right in the claims of theother side," according to Evans. 32To back up its disinformation campaigns, such regimes often rely on false documents. These counterfeit documentsoften assert that there is a threat to the home population. As Orwell satirized this tactic in Animal Farm, "[Snowball]was Joness secret agent all the time. It has all been proved by documents which he left behind him and which we haveonly just discovered." 33On May 10,1940, Colonel Joachim von Ribbentrop explained at a press conference that the Reich had found itnecessary to send its troops to invade the Low Countries in order "to safeguard the neutrality of Belgium andHolland." William Shirer called this assertion "nonsensical hypocrisy" and noted with disgust that it was "backed up"by a faked document that purported to show that those countries were about to invade the Ruhr. 34 Nazi propagandistsalso claimed—falsely—that three million ethnic [Sudeten] Germans in Czechoslovakia were being persecuted andabused. 35After Pinochets coup, TV and magazines showed the images of the arms caches that the coup leaders claimed to havefound in the homes of the leaders of the opposition party. (A series of images from Iraq have shown such arms cachestoo, the weapons lined up in neat stacks). The Chilean coup leaders also published a "white book" on "Plan Z"—theelaborate conspiracy that they claimed had been set in motion to kill a group of Chiles leaders simultaneously. SomeChileans believed that "Plan Z" was real; others believed that the charges were trumped up to provide an excuse totake over the country. 36 But it didnt really matter.After a certain point in a fascist shift, it doesnt matter whether most people believe the faked news or not—eventuallythey simply dont have access to enough good information to assess what is real and what is not. In accounts of theChinese prodemocracy uprising in 1989, you can hear well-intentioned Chinese citizens struggling with this: The Voiceof America radio station was reporting on the uprising accurately, describing the protesters as idealistic students—butthe Politburo was accusing the VOA of spreading unpatriotic lies. Chinese state TV, print, and radio called theprotesters counterrevolutionary "criminals" and "ruffians." Citizens, frightened by this, were writing letters to theirnewspapers haplessly explaining that they had diligently compared the VOA reports and the Politburo reports—andthey found the Politburo reports to be more accurate.I find those citizens struggles to sift truth from lies to be so moving. At that point, the state had made truth fungible.History shows us some reasons why the administration may be so intent on sending lies into the press stream andaccusing those who tell the truth of lying.
  • 53. Perhaps the barrage of lies serves a more substantial purpose than simply advancing a certain position. Sending acurrent of lies into the information stream is part of classic psychological operations to generate a larger shift—a newreality in which the truth can no longer be ascertained and no longer counts.In this reality citizens no longer feel empowered or able to establish the truth on either side—and therefore give uptheir agency. At this point people can be manipulated into supporting almost any state action. For how can citizensknow what is right? Truth itself has been cheapened, made subjective and internal, not absolute and external.Frank Rich, Sidney Blumenthal, Amy Goodman, and Joe Conason have all impressively documented the outright lies ofthe White House.In The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and. Fall of Truth, Rich singles out the fake "yellowcake in Niger" and"mobile biological and chemical weapons labs" stories, both of which led us into war. According to polls, Rich noted,51 percent of Americans in 2003 believed that Iraqis were personally involved in 9/11. Not only were the "yellowcake"documents cited in the State of the Union speech fake, but Rich shows that the White House then lied about thoselies. He demonstrates that the administration lied about the claim that Mohammed Atta met with a senior Iraqi officialin Prague—and then lied about that lie.37 Reports in 2005 noted that the Department of Education created fakedindependent TV features and sent them to local stations (Goebbels sent out pro government newsreels andgramophone records through the mail to be shown around the country, an innovation at the time). And conservativecolumnist Armstrong Williams earned $241,000 from the Department of Education to promote the No Child Left Behindprogram. 38Critics have exposed the role of The Lincoln Group, a Washington-based PR firm, which secured a lucrative contractfrom the Bush administration to place false news supportive of the United States in Iraqi media. In September 2006, TheNew York Times reported that the Bush administration had been paying reporters for The Miami Herald for certainkinds of positive coverage. 39Why does this matter so much? Why does a governments promotion of lying help facilitate a fascist shift? What doesthe truth have to do with democracy?Democracy depends on a social agreement that is so obvious to us that it usually goes unspoken: There is such thingas truth. In an open society, we know facts may be hedged and spun in the back-and-forth of debate, but truth is theground from which the hedging or spinning begin. Democracy depends upon accountability; accountability requiresus to be able to tell truth from lies; and to be able to tell truth from lies, we all first must agree that truth matters.If the ground of democracy is truth, the ground of dictatorship is assertion. In a dictatorship, reality belongs towhoever has the greatest power to assert.Critics such as Goodman, Rich, and Conason are engaged in a valuable public service by exposing the governmentslies. But they are still participating in the game of democracy: someone lies, you expose the lie—like a tennistournament in which there is a net and a score and impartial referees.In democracy, lying is at most a sneaky tactic in the game. But in a fascist system, lies are the game board itself. Whyshould Soviet leaders have bothered to have party members who had been purged airbrushed out of officialphotographs? Not just to diminish their memory—but to assert to citizens that the state held power over memoryitself.Why, in Animal Farm, do the pigs, the ruling caste, erase elements of their mission statement, and then deny to theother animals that they have done so? Not simply to advance a specific outcome, but also to make the other animalslose their ability to trust in their own judgment. Orwell wrote of "a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some rulingclique, controls not only the future but the past." 40Tom Kean, the co chair of the 9/11 commission, OKd an ABC miniseries, to be broadcast without commercials on thefive-year anniversary of 9/11, that portrayed scenes of former Clinton White House staff that were fictional. Themade-up scenes showed, for instance, former national security advisor Sandy Berger hanging up on a CIA official at acrucial moment in a military action and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright allowing Osama bin Laden to slipaway from capture. Albright told Disney, ABCs owner, that the miniseries "depicted scenes that never happened,events that never took place, decisions that were never made and conversations that never occurred." 41Kean was unapologetic. According to the New York Post, "he was all right with the made-up scene—even though thevideo is being peddled to high schools as a teaching aid." 42Remember the voices of Chinese citizens struggling to make sense of their own recent history—and getting itheartbreakingly wrong. How can they know otherwise?Now listen to Tom Kean introduce a new epistemology into American discourse: An ordinary lie distorts or hides thetruth; the fascist lie is the assertion that truth is not a marker anymore. "I dont think the facts are clear whether SandyBerger, if the CIA [hung up] or if the line went dead," Kean said. "But they [the producers] chose to portray it thisway. My memory is that it could have happened any number of ways." 43
  • 54. "It could have happened any number of ways."When part of Animal Farms mission statement is erased.All the animals remembered passing such resolutions: or at least they thought that they remembered it-----Squealer ...assured them that the resolution against engaging in trade and using money had never been passed, or evensuggested. It was pure imagination, probably traceable in the beginning to lies circulated by Snowball. A few animalsstill felt faintly doubtful, but Squealer asked them shrewdly, "Are you certain this is not something you have dreamed,comrades? Have you any record of such a resolution? Is it written down anywhere?" 44"A little girl Rambo." Pat Tillmans heroic death. John Kerrys Purple Heart. The Iraq War death toll.Are you certain this is all not something you have dreamed, my fellow Americans?Once you accomplish this flooding of the plain of discourse with lies, you are much closer to closing down an opensociety. If citizens cant be sure you are telling the truth or not, you can manipulate people into supporting almostanything the state wants to undertake; and it is also much more difficult for citizens to advocate or mobilize on theirown behalf: How can they be sure what is right and what is wrong?At a time such as this, it is up to U.S. citizens who are not part of the formal media world to publish online, researchaggressively, check facts assiduously, expose abuses, file Freedom of Information Act requests, publish zines, writeop-eds, and take ownership of producing as much of the news and information stream as they can. Above all, youneed to push through the laws proposed by the American Freedom Agenda and the American Freedom Campaign, sothat journalists will be shielded from threats and prosecution.Blogging has to lead the way, because this is the access point for citizen journalism. But bloggers must take theirimpact far more seriously, becoming warriors for truth and accountability: Citizens have to start to produce reliablesamizdat. Opinion is important, but opinion alone is totally inadequate when the ground of truth itself is under assault.Bloggers must become rigorous and fearless documentarians and reporters—not just to critique the news, but also togenerate the news. Citizens in every venue must now apply to their work the accuracy and accountability that newseditors have traditionally expected of their writers and researchers. The locus of the power of truth must be identifiednot in major news outlets but in you. You—not "they"—must take responsibility for educating your fellow citizens.It was librarians, schoolteachers, booksellers, and small publishers who helped to push back dictators in countrieswhere speech was under attack. Journalists are in the line of fire now; but history shows that these producers anddistributors of free speech are next in line.In the Revolutionary era, farmers, artisans, and small shopkeepers read and wrote pamphlets, distributed broadsheets,gave speeches at town assemblies, and ripped essays from the presses in order to debate with one another the pointsthey made. They didnt subcontract out the patriots task of speaking up to a professional pundit class. They saw theirown voices as being vitally necessary to the crafting of the Constitution and, even more important, to the life of thenew nation.We have to abandon the passive role we have accepted as mere consumers of media; we must see ourselves in a newlight—or rather, see ourselves once again in a Revolutionary light—as citizen leaders with responsibilities to speak thetruth.
  • 55. — CHAPTER TEN — CAST CRITICISM as "ESPIONAGE" and DISSENT as "TREASON" Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. Article 3, U.S. ConstitutionThe Constitution defines treason as actually "levying war" against America or giving "aid and comfort" to its enemies.The Founders intentionally made it difficult to throw around the term traitor, which had so often been used tointimidate the Revolutionary generation.But in every fascist shift, more and more kinds of speech and protest become cast as "treason," "terrorism,""subversion," "espionage" or "sabotage." (A charge of "slander" tends to prepare the ground first: In Stalins Russia,criticism of the state was first defined as "slander" and then redefined as "treason." Ann Coulters book Slander waspublished one year in advance of her book, Treason.)The Bush team is trying to move "treason" from its narrow Constitutional definition to a looser definition. The smearof treason has a long, ugly—and unfortunately time-tested—history of use by mid-twentieth-century dictators, as dothe accusations of sabotage and espionage. The Bush administration has started to use the notion of treason in itsStalinist sense: as a weapon designed to harass critics and to frighten opposition leaders.In a fascist shift, as Ive noted, leaders introduce and then seek to establish new categories of offenses that criminalizecitizens ideas, actions, or speech.This is an important turning point. The next step is that new laws or new interpretations of existing laws attach newcriminal penalties for these acts of "treason." As this verbal "third rail" becomes established, certain subjects becometoo charged to address, or begin to be avoided altogether, because addressing them carries possible criminal penalties.The Heimtuckegesetz law of 1934 in Germany criminalized political libel and slander. Though penalties were not usuallysevere under this law, the prosecutions were many: more than 100,000. People were being sent to prison for tellingjokes. Klemperer notes about the jokes of the day that "Conversations in heaven are popular. The best one: Hitler toMoses: But you can tell me in confidence, Herr Moses. Is it not true that you set the bush on fire yourself?" The manwho told this joke was sentenced to ten months in prison. 2 In cold-war Czechoslovakia, if you read banned printedmaterial— samizdat—you were not committing a crime, but if you handed the material to a friend, you had committed acrime.Right-wing pundit Coulters 2003 bestseller Treason repackaged the "speech-as-treason" concept for post-World WarII U.S. popular culture. Coulters book introduced "treason" as a legitimate term to characterize the opinions of artists,entertainers, and press critical of the Bush administration: "While the form of treachery varies slightly from case tocase, liberals always manage to take the position that most undermines American security." 3 In 2003, this approachwas a rhetorical feint with no real consequences. However, four years on, with the invocation of the Espionage Act, apiece of rhetoric becomes something much more serious. Coulter re-introduces the idea that in wartime America,speech, so long as it is identified as "treason," can be criminally prosecuted.Fortunately for Hollywood liberals and former Democratic presidents, the country discontinued prosecutingtreasonlong ago. World War II-era traitors were prosecuted and sentenced to long prison terms for radio broadcasts heardby no one within America. Axis Sally was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Tokyo Rose got six years in prison.Hanoi Jane makes aerobics videos. During the Vietnam War, Fonda gave wild, inflammatoryanti-American speeches from Hanoi----At the time, serious thought was given to prosecuting her, but the ruling classwas equivocal about treason. The refusal to prosecute Fonda was just one more indication that we werent fightingthat war to win___ 4The "treason" rollout continued: on June 23, 2006, when The New York Times published the SWIFT banking story, therhetoric of treason was put to use in a new way: Though New York Times executive editor Bill Keller pointed out thatthe administration itself had boasted of the program, a right-wing push to criminalize what Keller had done ensued.
  • 56. President Bush personally called the publication of the story "disgraceful." A week later, a Republican Congressmancalled for an investigation and a special prosecutor. Right-wing blogs exploded with the themes of "treason" and"crime." Right-wing pundits began to call in unison for Bush to invoke the 1917 Espionage Act against the publisherand editors of The New York Times. 5In San Francisco, KSFO radio host Melanie Morgan "called for New York Times editor Bill Kellers potential executionif both charged and found guilty of treason." She said:I made it clear with my very first words that I saw this as a case of treason. Yes, for those of you in the "cut and run"crowd, I said TREASON.[Chris] Matthews was shocked. He seemed to think he misunderstood me. I couldnt have really meant that, could I?Long prison sentences for reporters because they repeatedly leaked classified information on Americas efforts tocombat terrorism?Absolutely.... New York Times editor Bill Keller and his accomplices should face prosecution by the government of the UnitedStates for willfully and repeatedly undermining the war effort against terrorism by repeatedly violating the law andreporting on classified anti-terrorism programs. 6(Nikolai Bukharin, the editor-in-chief of Izvestia, who had been a critic of Stalin, was accused of "espionage" and"treason" in the Moscow show trials, found guilty—and actually executed. 7 )The blogosphere also invoked the 1917 Espionage Act. Weekly Standard editor William Kristol demanded that theJustice Department prosecute the Times under the Espionage Act. 8 National Review Online contributing editor DeroyMurdock wrote:Strict punishment for the Timess crimes (and it has behaved criminally) is in order.... So, what is to be done with thisirresponsible rag? . . . Congress in 1950 passed something called the "Comint statute". . . . the resulting law, U.S.Criminal Code Tide 18, Section 798, reads:"Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to anunauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or forthe benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information . . . concerningthe communication intelligence activities of the United States . . . shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisonednot more than ten years, or both."Murdock concluded: "Under this law, and perhaps also the 1917 Espionage Act, the Times deserves to be indictedimmediately for its NSA and Swift stories." 9During the Swift banking story controversy, conservative pundits calls for the prosecution of the Times were stillrhetorical still a play, if a rough one, in an open societys game.But the Justice Department was actually using the Espionage Act, and not rhetorically any more: In 2005, it prosecutedtwo former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, for havingaccepted a leak from a government employee. 10 The 1917 Espionage Act makes it illegal for an unauthorized person tohave "unlawful possession" of "information relating to the national defense." This revived use of the law couldpotentially criminalize conversations in many serious newsrooms—not to mention even conversation at manyfrivolous Washington dinner parties.And if the Justice Department only goes after reporters who disclose classified information—as did the reporters whoexposed the Pentagon Papers and My Lai—you still have a minefield: This administration classifies and declassifiesmaterial continually. If this new benchmark prevails, American reporters can be charged, convicted, and sent to prisonfor tripping over any number of newly electrified tripwires: if you run a photograph of Vice President Cheneys housethat inadvertently reveals where security staff are posted; if you publish an expose of interrogation conditions at AbuGhraib, as Seymour Hirsh did. GIs who write books about their Iraq experiences and inadvertently reveal troopmovements, diplomats who write op-eds like Joseph Wilsons expose of the yellowcake claim, which was based onclassified documents-all these Americans could be prosecuted.Historically the shift from rhetoric to reality happens quickly. Based on the historical blueprint, one can guess that itwouldnt take long not only for "espionage" but for "treason" too, to move from inflammatory accusations to criminalcharges.Three years after Ann Coulters book asked us to imagine this possibility, on October 12, 2006, the Justice Departmentcharged the first American in more than half a century with treason. Adam Gadahn, a young Southern Californian whois accused of helping al-Qaeda create videotapes urging violence against the United States, was charged in a sealedindictment in a California federal court. As in Padillas case, officials do not claim to have evidence that Mr. Gadahnhas taken part in planning terrorist attacks against the United States. His words are his crime. Paul McNulty, theDeputy Attorney General, said that Gadahn provided the enemy with "aid and comfort" by acting as a propagandist
  • 57. for Al Qaeda." Making such propaganda is wrong, but a frightening precedent has been set. For anyone, even thosewho are not even on a battlefield or in a war zone, a charge of treason carries a possible death sentence.If you dont know anything about the 1917 Espionage Act, it sounds kind of salutary. In 1917, the nation was at war; ofcourse we need to root out spies during wartime. But its history is sinister.In the nineteen-teens, a wave of left-wing activism swept the nation. Many of the activists working for betterconditions and higher wages were also against the nations entry into the war.So as the country prepared for war, President Woodrow Wilsons communications machine issued a wave ofpropaganda to whip up war fervor. Congress quickly passed the 1917 Espionage and Trading with the Enemy Act,which criminalized antiwar remarks. Hundreds of American citizens were prosecuted for objecting to militaryrecruitment or for speaking or writing things that could remotely be interpreted as dissent from the governments line.Citizens meetings were raided by government spies and there were sweeping arrests without warrants. It was againstthe law under the 1917 Espionage Act to mail an antiwar opinion or even to advocate for a referendum on whether ornot the United States should enter the war. Officials of the post office leaked files on antiwar "traitors" to newspapers.Sentences were severe: A Kansas City man got ten years in prison for having written a letter to a newspaper. A motherof four criticized the war and got five years in jail. Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, tried to challenge the Act in1918, invoking the First Amendment. Debs was found guilty and was sentenced to ten years. 12The Palmer Raids were the culmination of these events. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer used the 1917 EspionageAct and the 1918 Sedition Act to gather information on 260,000 citizens; the raids arrested 10,000 citizens as well asimmigrants in 1919. The mass arrests were warrantless and the authorities created fake documents to deport whomthey could. Teachers, librarians, and working men and women were jailed. Scores in Connecticut alone were "beaten,starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death in futile efforts to extract confessions." But in spite of all thesearrests and imprisonments, evidence to support Palmers accusations of a revolutionary network never surfaced. 13The pendulum swung back: a group of patriotic lawyers, led by future Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, issued areport calling the raids and arrests "utterly illegal." Palmers power waned. Nonetheless, the fear remained. After thePalmer raids, many Americans were scared to subscribe to certain journals; teachers policed what they said in theclassroom; editors weighed their words. Dissent was muted for a decade. People turned their energies to safer mattersthan activism: flappers, talkies, and bathtub gin. 14"Sabotage" is another of these code words: Stalins arrests of 1937 frequently accused people of sabotage. OnFebruary 15, 2007, Republican Congressman Don Young said: "Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartimethat damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged" [italics mine].15 (In the U.S., executions take place by lethal injection; death by hanging was a 20th century dictators method ofexecution.)Often the laws that criminalize dissent in a fascist shift are enacted quietly. In November of 2006, the Senate passedThe Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act—which allows federal prosecutors to "enhance" prison terms for convictedactivists. When I first saw this, I thought that it was likely that soon an American environmentalist or animal rightsactivist would be prosecuted severely under "terrorism enhancement" guidelines aimed at crimes against animalprocessing facilities. Indeed, those trials began seven months later. The "terrorists" being sentenced for attacks oncommercial processing facilities now looked like the boys and girls next door.New terms join treason and espionage to criminalize citizens themselves, who can suddenly become "enemies of thepeople," "disturbers of the peace," "subversives," "saboteurs," or "spies." Stalin would add "wrecking" to Lenins"treason" and "subversion" list. 16 Hitler called Nazism "a voice crying treason." Hitlers SA arrested citizens as"traitors" and "spies." Blackshirt anthems boasted, "we shall defend [Italy] against its enemies and traitors." Thefascist Gabriele DAnnunzio railed in 1915 against those in the Parliament who opposed him: "Hear me—heedme—treason is out in the open today ..." he cried. 17"Treason," "subversion," and "espionage" did their work in Czechoslovakia, Chile, and China too. Vaclav Havel wrotecritically about the Czech state, and found he had committed a crime. It was called disturbing the peace andsubversion. Havel was returned to prison in "an unsuccessful attempt to put me out of circulation, with the help of afabricated indictment for disturbing the peace.. . . Like most of my colleagues," he said, "I was driven out of everyposition Id once held, I was publicly branded an enemy, and I was even indicted for subversion (there was no trial orprison sentence.)" 18Do we want to be China, where prodemocracy Internet use makes one a "ruffian" or a "criminal," or Syria, where Jewsare arrested as "spies"? Do we think that if the government no longer protects us, the private sector will? Google justaccepted the Chinese states restrictions on citizens Internet use; 19 Yahoo! and AOL yielded data to the JusticeDepartment about millions of U.S. users searches. The ACLU is suing Boeing; it claims the company participated inrendition flights. 20What would Google or Yahoo! do in the United States if our government compelled these companies to comply?
  • 58. Votes still count. And the only thing that will push Congress is the threat of hundreds of thousands ofvoters—especially Republican and swing voters—demanding that our leaders dismantle these laws or else lose theirseats. Which means that we on the left must snap out of our "its-all-the-WTO-the-two-parties-are-the-same" torpor;and we on the right must snap out of the "if America does it, it is right" torpor as well.We all have to reengage in an old-fashioned commitment to democratic action and believe once again in anold-fashioned notion of the Republic. We need you to help lead a democracy movement in America like the ones thathave toppled repressive regimes overseas. We cant, as a nation, switch on the metaphorical iPod and go for a run,somehow expecting a magical shift in the winds.
  • 59. — CHAPTER ELEVEN — SUBVERT the RULE of LAW I do solemnly swear... that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Presidential Oath of OfficeIn March 2007, a scandal erupted in which eight—later, nine— U.S. attorneys were abruptly fired, perhaps withAttorney General Alberto Gonzaless knowledge. Internal Justice Department e-mails indicated that they had beentargeted as being insufficiently loyal to White House policies.New Mexicos U.S. attorney David Iglesias received an intimidating phone call from a Republican official who wasupset that Iglesias hadnt prosecuted a Democratic voter registration group. Iglesias thought that there had beeninsufficient evidence to warrant prosecution.In the Congressional uproar that followed, e-mails showed that while only eight prosecutors had actually been ousted,the e-mails had discussed the possibility of purging all of the U.S. attorneys. The e-mails stressed that in thiseventuality, the department should stay resolute in the face of the inevitable blowback.Congress called for subpoenas of Karl Rove and Harriet Miers. (As of this writing, Bush is simply invoking executiveprivilege to let him ignore the subpoenas.) But commentators were still puzzled at first: Why had the administrationpurged these attorneys, and why might it have considered purging the entire corps of U.S. attorneys?(On April 7, 1933, in one day, recall, when Goebbels purged the civil service—specially targeting state attorneys andjudges - the baseline measure was "loyalty.") 1 How would a purge of "disloyal" U.S. attorneys in 2007, more than ayear before the next national election, serve these leaders?Remember the Alabama case of Secretary of State Worley, in which her authority to oversee the voter rolls was takenaway? The Justice Department has enormous power over elections. And U.S. attorneys have the power to decidewhich voting registration groups to investigate and potentially prosecute.Think again about 2008. Now think about human nature.We assume, with our habits of democracy, that we can simply "throw the bums out" in the 2008 election.But do people change direction so dramatically? Is it reasonable— is it really a matter of common sense—to assumethat leaders who are willing to abuse signing statements; withhold information from Congress; make secret decisions;lie to the American people; use fake evidence to justify a pre-emptive war; torture prisoners; tap peoples phones;open their mail and e-mail; break into their houses; and now simply ignore Congress altogether—leaders with,currently, a 29 percent approval rating—will surely say, come 2008, "The decision rests in the hands of the people.May the votes be fairly counted"?In trusting that "the pendulum will swing" when it is time for the votes to be counted, we are like a codependentwoman with an abusive boyfriend; surely next time he will do what is right.Its a truism that the definition of madness is to do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. If foreight years this group has flouted other equally precious rules of the democratic game, arent we rash to assume thatthis same group will see a transparent, fair election as sacrosanct? The Founders asked us to err on the side ofvigilance when it came to liberty. History and current events around the world—Nigeria, Turkey, Ukraine, thePhilippines—show many examples of leaders in weak or weakening democracies who were able to "co-ordinate" thecivil bureaucracy with their cronies; they then tamper with the vote, and sully the outcome of elections.If there had been a purge so that all the U.S. attorneys were Republicans in 2008, what would happen in an evensomewhat close Presidential election?Would that be America?We in America are used to a democratic social contract in which there is agreement about the rules of the game: WhenCongress demands an answer, for instance, the President does not simply refuse to pick up the phone. So we keepbeing startled when the steps of the democratic interplay are ignored: "He cant do that!" Its time to notice that thatthey are playing a different game altogether.Look at this Presidents use of "signing statements." The debate about this has taken place mostly among lawyersrather than among citizens, and lawyers are not tasked with explaining to ordinary Americans what that neutral, blandterm signing statements actually means. So many of us dont get what a dramatic threat they represent.Bush has used more signing statements than any other president. The way Bush is using signing statementsessentially relegates Congress to an advisory role. This abuse lets the President choose what laws he wishes toenforce or not, overruling Congress and the people. So Americans are living under laws their representatives never
  • 60. passed. Signing statements put the president above the law.So given such moves, why take for granted that this administration will uphold the rules of a free, fair election? Justbecause the steps of democracy have prevailed for more than 200 years does not guarantee that they will prevailtomorrow.Fascists coming to power in a weakened democracy simply start to ignore those assumed agreements. What hashappened in the past is that at a certain point in a weakening democracy, would-be dictators pretend that everything isas it should be, but simply stop responding to the will of the people and the representatives. While the nation is tryingto grapple with this interim period, then such leaders deploy sudden unexpected changes that assertively upendParliamentary protocols and expectations.At this point, the speed of these moves itself is disorienting: It takes people some time to figure out what hashappened. (In a very moving scene, Italian legislators were still frantically trying to engage in standard politicalnegotiations with Mussolini—even as he simply waited for them to realize that the time for negotiating was over.).That psychological hangover-that delay in "getting it" is a very dangerous time. This is the moment when action ismost necessary, and this is the moment when the window is closing.In Italy and Germany, legislators kept believing that they were still engaged in the negotiated dance ofdemocracy—even as the militaristic march of dictatorship had already begun.At a point in both Mussolinis and Hitlers takeovers, citizens witnessed a stunning series of quickly escalatingpronuncia-mentos or faits accomplis. After each leader made his bids for power beyond what the Italian Parliamentand the German Reichstag allowed him, each abruptly started to claim all kinds of new rights that wereextra-parliamentary: the right unilaterally to go to war, to annex territory, to veto existing laws, or to overrule thejudiciary."I am not a dictator," said Hitler in 1936. "I have only simplified democracy." 2At this stage, shock follows shock so quickly that the civil society institutions start to reel. At this point, in weakerdemocracies than ours, the police forces and the army are negotiated with. In any late shift, the final stage is theestablishment of government by emergency decree or actual martial law and the leaders assertion—usually using thelaw to defend this assertion—that he is above the law, or that he is the law: the decider.This is a classic coup: In Chile, in 1973, during a national strike, rumors circulated daily that there would be a militarycoup.Early in the day on September 11, 1973, the military left their barracks before dawn and occupied most of the radiostations. They began broadcasting marches and periodic bulletins that they were assuming control of the country.They offered [President] Allende a plane to fly out of the country and declared a national curfew that would beginat 11:00 a.m. Informed of the militarys demands, Allende first told all the workers to go into the streets and defendthe government, but he later changed his mind and asked them to remain alert at their factories. Allende refused tosurrender, so at noon the air force bombed the national palace. Allende died. . . . The military began arresting anumber of prominent government leaders while others sought refuge in foreign embassies. 3Some opposition members tried to resist but found they could not overcome the power of the military. The game wasquickly over. Pinochet even had a commission rewrite the Constitution; the logic of the rewrite is echoed in the U.S.Fiscal Year 2007 Defense Authorization Bill: The military could intervene on behalf of the State whenever there was athreat to the state.Historically, the shift to martial law, or to government by emergency decree, generally takes place during a crisis. Acrisis allows a would-be dictator even in a democracy to use emergency powers to restore "public order." This kind ofthing wont happen in America. But we now have a legal infrastructure in place that could support a "paper coup"—amore civilized, more marketable version of a real crackdown.At the end of September 2006, with little outside debate, Congress passed the Fiscal Year 2007 Defense AuthorizationBill—a bill that, according to journalist Major Danby, represents "a sizeable step toward weakening states authorityover their [National] Guard units." He continues: "The provision make[s] it easier for the President to declare martiallaw, stripping state governors of part of their authority over state National Guard units in domestic emergencies."This guts the Posse Comitatus Act, the provision that the states control their own National Guard units. When thepresident invokes section 333, he may expand his power to declare martial law and take charge of the National Guardtroops without the permission of a governor when "public order" has been lost; he can send these troops out into ourstreets at his direction—overriding local law enforcement authorities—during a national disaster epidemic, seriouspublic health emergency, terrorist attack, or "other condition." He can direct these troops to disperse citizens—that is,us—and direct them to stay in their homes. The president must submit a report to Congress within 24 hours—after thefact, nonetheless.
  • 61. According to this new provision, the president on his or her say-so alone can send troops from Tennessee to quellwhat he or she calls a threat to civil order—say, a peace march—in Oregon, over the objections of governors of bothstates." The president can send what has become his or her army, not the peoples, into our nations streets and notjust this president, but any president in the future may do this.Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy warned, though few paid much attention, that the 2007 Defense Authorization Billwould serve to encourage a President to declare martial law. 5A New York Times editorial marked the shift—even as Americans were focused on Britney Spearss meltdown and thequestion of which airline serves the worst food: "A disturbing recent phenomenon in Washington is that laws thatstrike to the heart of American democracy have been passed in the dead of night. Beyond actual insurrection, thepresident may now use military troops as a domestic police force in response to a natural disaster, a disease outbreak,terrorist attack or any other condition." 6We scarcely remember how terrified the Founders were of a standing army with the power to override the leadership ofthe states. The Revolutionaries knew how quickly a standing army can become bloody janissaries subduing localcitizens. The Revolutionaries were certain that an American president, if he was not checked, might raise a standingarmy of Americans and unleash it against American citizens. This was not a far-fetched notion to them at all. Theycherished their state militias as belonging to the people and responsive to the people, precisely because of this fear ofa centralized American power taking up arms against them."If, by some turn of events, the federal government did manage to encroach on, assault, the powers of the states orvice versa, and threaten the union, the people could defeat it because the power of a republic rests in its citizens," theFederalists reassured worried fellow-citizens. 7 The Framers believed that this kind of military aggression was notpossible so long as the Constitution functioned: they could not foresee the Fiscal Year 2007 Defense AuthorizationBill. Nor could they have foreseen the development of private armies such as Blackwater. But their passionate debates,and the Second Amendment to the Constitution that they eventually ratified, make it clear that the Founders weredesperate to protect the new nation from just what has happened while we were distracted, while we were shoppingonline, while we were in a Ambient-heavy sleep on the couch.In the last phase of a fascist shift, all of the pressures that we have spelled out here tighten around ordinary citizens,working together in a kind of full-circle torsion: At this point, these pressures ensure that there is no democraticmovement left. The pendulum comes to a standstill.Of course, you will take up the Founders banner so that can never happen.I will say again that the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing down of the system that followedMussolinis March on Rome or Hitlers roundup of political prisoners. Our press, military, and judiciary are tooindependent for a scenario like that.But there are erosions possible in all of our institutions, that could close down our experiment in democracy in waysthat would look very American and familiar, but still leave us less than free.Say, for instance, God forbid, that in a year and a half there is another terrorist attack. Say we have a PresidentRudolph Giuliani— or even a President Hillary Clinton. If the crisis is severe enough, the executive can and perhapsshould declare a state of emergency.But without checks and balances, history shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergencypowers after the crisis has subsided. In the absence of traditional checks and balances, President Hillary Clintonendangers us no less than President Giuliani. Any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edictrather than submitting to the arduous process of negotiation and compromise. The Founders knew, as I wrote at thestart of this primer, that excessive power was certain to corrupt equally. This danger is not about partisanship; it isabout power.Our representatives judiciary, and press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in what a WhiteHouse acronym calls GWOT— Global War on Terror: a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe. So ahollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still-free institutions and the foundation can yieldwith certain kinds of pressure.Knowing what you know now about how easy it is to close down an open society, I have to ask you to consider aseries of "what-ifs." It is only if we face the "what-ifs" that we can act to make them impossible.What if, because of a reported "threat to public order," the National Guard, now reporting directly to the President,were "backed up" with Blackwater personnel?What if, close to the election, a Democratic voters mobilization group were infiltrated, so that Democratic votersnames and addresses were all over the Internet? What if, as a result, you didnt believe your vote would be secret?What if some of the members of voters groups were prosecuted for minor crimes or for immigration violations by more
  • 62. compliant U.S. attorneys than the nine who were purged? Those events would feel like plausible setbacks in whatwould still seem like home: The events would feel like an American drama, not like a beer hall putsch. But what if thosekinds of events became more and more the norm?Would that be the end of America?What if a Washington Post reporter covering a story reported a classified list of detainee rights activists that had beenleaked to him by a concerned civil servant? What if that reporter were charged under the 1917 Espionage Act,convicted, and sent to prison for a decade? How would it affect you to read about it the next morning?You would read about it. If history is a guide, newspapers would continue to publish. But they would suddenlybecome very polite.Would that be the end of America?Think of the Palmer raids.Now imagine the Palmer raids under todays legal conditions: Imagine that an equivalent of Eugene Debs—say, thehead of Amnesty International—is arrested for giving a speech against torture; he is sent to a navy brig where hewaits in isolation for three years to see a lawyer.Would that be the end?This is the United States Constitution: "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unlesswhen in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it."Now listen to this exchange:arlen specter: Now wait a minute, wait a minute. The Constitution says you cant take [habeas corpus] away except inthe case of invasion or rebellion. Doesnt that mean you have the right of habeas corpus unless there is an invasion orrebellion?alberto gonzales: I meant by that comment, the Constitution doesnt say, "every individual in the United States orevery citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas." It doesnt say that. It simply says the right of habeascorpus shall not be suspended... . 8Whatever scenario led Gonzales and his colleagues to think that one through—will that be the end?Global AmericaI have written this book first as an American speaking to Americans. But the scenario that is unfolding has immenseimplications internationally.If the United States continues on this dark road further, then truly, as James Baldwin once said, "There is no safety." 9Americas aspirations have long been global; and at our best we have offered our example as a benchmark fordemocracy throughout the world. But if the United States does stay this course, what "city on a hill" can shed lightinternationally as powerfully as we, at our best, have done?The United States has stood for the rule of law in the past: We set a standard for other leaders, and set a point ofaspiration for other citizens. If we lose that, what force on earth will stem any barbarism that any despot wishes toimpose on his people?The bureaucrats of the European Union? The fragmented voices of the United Nations?Egyptian security forces just rounded up some of its citizens: They threw opposition leaders and a blogger in jail.When challenged, the Egyptians invoked the example of the USA PATRIOT Act.If Fascist Germany—a medium-sized modern European state— could destabilize the globe in a matter of a few years,and it took a world war to overcome the threat, what force on earth might restrain an America that may haveabandoned the rule of law—an America with its vastly greater population, wealth, and land mass; its far moresophisticated technology; its weapons systems; its already fully established global network of black-site secretprisons, and its imperial reach?If a democratic America, with working checks and balances, often exempts itself from international agreements if itsstrategic interests dont coincide with international goals, would a United States led by a dictatorial regime be likely tosubdue in itself any level of aggression internationally, or restrain itself from any plunder of resources that it seeks,simply because it was upsetting the rest of the world?If we keep going down this road, the "end of America" could come, for each of us, in a different way, at a differentmoment. Each of us might experience a different event that would force us to look back and think: "That is how it wasbefore—and this is the way it is now"; when we each of us alone realizes we must yield a little further our memories ofa certain grace and fineness and courage that was alive in the world for a bit longer than 230 years.Or else we can stop going down this road: We can stand our ground and fight for our nation, and take up the bannerthe Founders asked us to carry.
  • 63. — CONCLUSION — THE PATRIOTS TASKSo it turns out we really are at war—a long war, a global war, a war for our civilization. It is a war to save ourdemocracy. Each one of us needs to enlist. We have no one to spare.We need citizens from across the political spectrum to carry forward the Founders banner together. Everyone can seethis movement as expressing his or her most cherished values and will frame the effort according to his or her ownsubculture and language. Progressives may see this "American awakening" as a liberation or, at the least, as acampaign, while conservatives may well see the same movement as "conservative" in the truest sense—a return to astewardship of the Founders vision. Surely "liberty" as the Founders understood it—eighteenth-centuryEnlightenment liberty—is the grounding of both classical conservative and classical liberal American values.These diverse American citizens may even, in this movement, truly encounter their counterparts across the politicalspectrum and learn to talk to each other once again directly, as neighbors, interlocutors, and fellow patriots.New surveillance technologies mean that todays patriots have some housekeeping to do before they can moveforward effectively. This is not glamorous, but it is important to address.Before I wrote this book, I asked an accountant to comb my tax returns, my employer records, and so on, and toidentify anything that could be used against me or distorted. This process of turning an "opposition research" eye ononeself or ones organization before speaking out will have to become more common. If we are under surveillance as anation, citizens are freer if they have disclosed their secrets to loved ones and gone over their records with a criticaleye. Those in the public eye who are afraid to be forceful in opposition because of a secret they want to keep hadbetter talk to their families or their constituencies, or their lawyers and accountants, painful as that may be in the shortterm. You cant fight this fight in earnest unless there is nothing left with which to blackmail you.Some Americans, especially civil servants and members of the military, risk losing their jobs if they take up the patriotstask and speak out, or they may even risk prosecution.Most of the rest of us?We must be willing to experience personal smears, and possibly the exposure of our secrets. Having accepted that, weall need to act and speak with courage and passion: parents, teenagers, union members, corporate leaders; theprincipled men and women of the military; the men and women of the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service who did not committheir lives to advance values that are un-American; those of the police forces and the National Guard who did not signup for duty in order to suppress American rights. We need the powerful conservative Christian movement—who mayrecall that their own hero was a political prisoner seized by a powerful state, convicted without a trial, and tortured bymilitary who were just doing their jobs—and we need the powerful environmental movement.We need to hold house parties, set up town halls, convene our neighbors, pass out users guides to the Constitution,overwhelm our representatives and the Presidential candidates with demands for them to restore the rule of law.Finally, we must stand up directly to confront those who have committed crimes against the Constitution—and holdthem accountable, as the Founders trusted us to do.Yesterday afternoon, I saw something amazing. I was trying to walk across Sixth Avenue with my little boy. But wehad to pause, because dozens of colorfully dressed bicyclists—men and women and children of all races andages—were streaming across the avenue.It was an event organized by Critical Mass, the bike-riders group; their goal was to show the power and benefit of tensof thousands of bike riders using city streets. I knew about this group because the Bloomberg administration had usedsimilar Critical Mass bike rallies as a pretext to pass new laws to restrict citizens assembly.There were so many of them. My son and I waited, transfixed, but the numbers did not diminish: Thousands ofAmericans, no two of them alike, sped past us, exulting in freedom—and simply enjoying the sunshine of the day.The power of all these Americans—moving separately yet in unison—seemed to me like the opposite of the power ofthe frightened and frightening masses I had been studying.How mighty this current of citizens seemed to be once they had chosen a direction.Bullies are cowards: Time and again, when people have awakened to danger and risen together to confront those whohave sought to oppress them, citizens in their thousands have crumbled walls and broken open massive prisons. Inour own nation, in times of eclipse, patriots have become rebels again and said: "No; the nation is not going down, not
  • 64. on my watch."When that happens, there is no power that can hold these patriots back.I hope this emboldens you.Yours,NaomiNew York CityJuly 14, 2007
  • 65. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSI am grateful to John Brockman, Katinka Matson, Max Brockman, and Russell Weinberger for their insights about themanuscript; to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; to Michael Ratner at the Center for Constitutional Rights andhis colleagues—Gitanjali Gutierrez, Shayana Kadidal, Wells Dixon, Emi Maclean, Bill Goodman, Jen Nessel, EstherWang, Barbara Olshansky, Susan Hu, and Jessica Baen—for orienting me in regard to detainee issues; to AmandaMurray and David Rosenthal for their ongoing support; to Marcia Gallo of Lehman College, John Stern of John JayCollege of Criminal Justice, and Zachary Heiden of the Maine Civil Liberties Union, for their valuable legal andhistorical readings of the manuscript; to Emily Whitfield and Barry Steinhardt of the ACLU; to my editors at theLondon Guardian, Kath Viner, Emily Wilson, and Philip Daoust, who encouraged me to publish an earlier version ofthis argument; to Carlton Sedgeley, Lucy LePage, and Helen Churko for their own examples of citizenship and for theirinsistence that this message get out; and to my colleagues Wes Boyd, Joan Blades, David Fenton, and Dr. WilliamHaseltine of the American Freedom Campaign, for their sustained encouragement with this project and for theirleadership in spearheading a citizen drive to help restore the Constitution.Thanks to my remarkable team at Chelsea Green—editors John Barstow and Shay Totten, publisher Margo Baldwin,Mike Dyer, Kalen Landow, Erica Jong, and Emily Foote; and to Susan Devenyi, Dr. Robin Stern, Tara Bracco, DavidChristian, and Thomas Jackson. I am lastingly grateful to Nancy Crompton and Mary Fratini for their extraordinarycommitment, dedication, and skill in the research, fact-checking, copyediting and editorial process.I am grateful too, as always, to my beloved family, who, like all families, deserve freedom.
  • 66. NOTESINTRODUCTION1. Mark Mazzetti, "C.I.A. Worker Says Message on Torture Got Her Fired," New York Times, July 22,2006, All.2. R. Jeffrey Smith, "On Prosecuting Detainees: Draft Bill Waives Due Process for Enemy Combatants," Washington Post, July 28,2006, A23.3. "The Court Under Siege," Editorial, New York Times, July 29,2006, A12.4. Walter Dellinger, Editorial, "A Slip of the Pen," A"«w York Times, July 31, 2006, A17.5. Jesse Mckinley, "Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Orders," New York Times, August 2,2006, A15.6. Adam Liptak, "Government Wins Access to Reporter Phone Records," New York Times, August 2, 2006, A12.7. "Strong-Arming the Vote." Editorial, New York Times, August 3,2006, A20.8. Howard Fineman, "Rove Unleashed," Newsweek, December 6,2004. Available at: http://www.msnbc.msn . com/id/6597631/site/newsweek/.9. Dana Canedy, and Dexter Filkins. "Counting the Vote: Miami-Dade County: A Wild Day in Miami, With an End to Recounting, and Democrats 1 Going to Court,"New York Times, November 23, 2000, A31.10. Nigel Williamson, "Free the Dixie Three," The Guardian, August 22, 2003. Available at: .,12102,1026475,00.html.11. Kirk Johnson, "Colorado U. Chancellor Advises Firing Author of Sept. 11 Essay," New York Times, June 27,2006, All.12. "ACLU Uncovers FBI Surveillance of Maine Peace Activists," ACLU Press Release, October 25,2006. Available at: .13.Transcript for September 14, NBC News, Meet the Press, Sunday, September 7, 2003. Available at: 44/.14. "We Got Him, and Then a Call by American and Iraqi Officials for Reconciliation." Excerpts from a news conference, as recorded by Federal Document ClearingHouse, Inc., New York Times, December 15,2003. Available at: 2003/12/15/politics/.15. "JFK Airport Security Forces Woman to Drink Own Breast Milk," USA Today/Associated Press, August 12, 2002. Available at: -09-jik-security.htm.16. Max Gallo, Mussolinis Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: MacmiUan, 1973,117.17. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 341.18. James Bovard, "Moral High Ground Not Won on Batdefield," USA Today, October 8,2002. Available .19. Ernestine Bradley, The Way Home: A German Childhood, an American Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 80.20. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Documentary, Synapse Films, 1935.21. Reid J. Epstein, "University Warns Students of Patriot Act Disclosures: Government Can Get Medical Records," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, December 17,2004.Available at: http://wwwjsonline.eom/story/index.a spx?id=285173; see also "Reform the Patriot Act," ACLU. Available at:; Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 144-45.22. Howard Kurtz, "Newsweek Apologizes: Inaccurate Report on Koran Led to Riots," Washington Post, May 16,2005, Al.23. Michael Ratner and Ellen Ray. Guantdnamo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Press, 2004), 60.24. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (New York: Black Dog Sc Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 89.25. "Sesame Street Breaks Iraqi POWs: Heavy Metal Music and Popular American Childrens Songs Are Being Used by US Interrogators to Break the Will of TheirCaptives in Iraq," BBC News, May 20, 2003. Available at: east/3042907.stm.26. Shirer, Berlin Diary, 8927. "How U.S. Used Iraqi Wives for Leverage: Suspected Insurgents Spouses Jailed to Force Husbands to Surrender," Associated Press, January 27, 2006.Available at: < http://www . .28. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 269.29. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper Perennial, 1962,1971), 267,374.30. Vice Presidents Remarks at the Pentagon Observance of September 1 lth. Office of the Vice President, September 11,2006. Available at: ses/2006/09/20060911 .html; see also Dr. Condoleezza Rices Opening Remarks to Commission on Terrorist Attacks, Officeof the Press Secretary, April 8,2004. Available at: releases/2004/04/20040408.html.31. Steven Bach, Leni: The Life and Wort of Lent Riefenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 187.32. Shirer, Berlin Diary, 324-344.33. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Kael Alford, Thorne Anderson, Rita Leistner, Philip Jones Griffiths, and Phillip Robertson, Unembedded: Four IndependentPhotojournalists on the War in Iraq (White River Junction, Vermont: Chelsea Green Press, 2005), p.ii.34. Randal C.Archibold and JeffKearns, "Prosecution Sees Setback at Terror Trail in California," New York Times, April 10,2006, A20.35. "California Father in Terror Case Released," USA Today, August 26, 2006. Available at: http://www . -25-calif-terror_x.htm.36. Philip Shenon and Don Van Natta Jr., "A Nation Challenged: The Investigation; U.S. Says 3 Detainees May Be Tied to Hijackings," New York Times, November1,2001, Al.37. Archibold and Kearns, ibid.38. Eric Lichtblau, "Ex-Prosecutor in Terror Inquiry Is Indicted," New York Times, March 30,2006, A18.39. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 341, 354.40. Jennifer Quinn, "British Foil Plan to Wreak Terror and Kill Thousands Over the Atlantic," Associated Press, printed in The Seattle Times, August 10,2006.Available at: http://seattletimes.nw 1 88108_londonplotl O.html41. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: HarperCollins, 1962,1991), 266-67,374.42. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie. The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006), 56.43. Thomas Fuller, "Thai Junta Imposes Curbs on News Media," International Herald Tribune/New York Times, September, 22,2006, A13; "Wider Ban on PoliticalActivities." Associated Press/New York Times, September 25, 2005, A3; "Thai Junta Revokes Ousted Prime Ministers Diplomatic Passport," New York Times, January11,2006,A13.44. "President Bush Signs Military Commissions Act of 2006," Office of the Press Secretary, October 16, 2006. Available at: http://www.whitehouse .gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017-l.html.45. Author interview, October 10, 2006.CHAPTER ONE1. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life Under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 215.2. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), xxiii, xxvi, xxx.3. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 28.
  • 67. 4. Columbia University, Paul Lagasse, Lora Goldman, Archie Hobson, and Susan R. Norton, eds., Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press,2001-2005), 926.5. Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (New York: St. Martins Press: 2007), 22.6. Concise Oxford English Dictionary,1 lth ed. (London: Oxford University Press), 2006.7. Arendt, ibid.; Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), as citedin Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband,What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2005), xv.8. Johnson and Reuband, What We Knew, xv, xvi9. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner), 69.10. MacPherson, All Governments Lie!, 115.11. MacPherson, All Governments Lie!, 125; see also Sinclair Lewis, It Cant Happen Here (New York: Signet Classics, 2005).12. Leonard W Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 175.13. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, Clinton Rossiter, ed. (New York: The Penguin Press, 1961, 2003), 75,103.14. Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Birth of Modern Nations (New York: Viking, 2006), 246.15. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 54-55.16. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 110, 111.17. Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 123. Bailyn expanded on this theme: "Tension—networks of tensions—was the fundamental necessity for free states. Thewhole of the Constitution, The Federalist makes clear, was a great web of tensions, a system poised in tense equilibrium like the physical systems Newtonianmechanics had revealed....Pressures exerted at one point would activate rebalancing responses elsewhere; and it was in this mechanism of tense equilibria thatMadison placed his hopes....," 121.18. Denis Mack Smith, Benito Mussolini: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 21.19. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 621,632.20. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company), 275.21. Dana Priest, "U.S. Instructed Latins on Executions, Torture: Manuals Used 1982-91, Pentagon Reveals" Washington Post, September 21,1996, Al.22. Max Gallo, Mussolinis Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 72.23. Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004), 53,179; Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness: ADiary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941 (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 150-76.24. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 106-108, 145-49; Harold Donaldson Eberlein et al., Down the Tiberand Up to Rome (London: J. Lippincott, 1930), 107.25. Austin Considine and Newley Purnell, "Thailand Tourists: Coup? What Coup?" New York Times, October 8, 2006, Travel Section. Available at: travel/08journeys.html.26. Evans, Coming of the Third, Reich, 122-129,396-397,403,405.CHAPTER TWO1. Nat Hentoff, The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 11.2. Max Gallo, Mussolinis Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York:. MacmiUan, 1973), 275.3. "President Discusses Global War on Terror," Office of the Press Secretary, September 5,2006. Available at: . Sheryl Gay Stolberg, "Buzzwords: The Decider," New York Times, December 24, 2006, A4.5. Michael Gerson, "Michael Gerson on How 9/11 Changed Bush: A Former Bush Adviser on 9/11, Iraq, and The Lessons of Five Tumultuous Years— For thePresident and the Public," Newsweek, August 21-28,2006, 59-60.6. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 103-112.7. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 37.8. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 84.9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 424.10. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, 41.11. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life Under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 141,146.12. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 75.13. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 227.14. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 284-87.15. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 293,298.16. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 80,251,254.17. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 274.18. Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph Des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Documentary, Synapse Films, 1935.19. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 293,298.20. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 310,313-14,332.21. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 311,331-36,349,354.22. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 332.23. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 311,331-36,349,354.24. Anne Appelbaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Anchor Books, 2003), 46.25. Barbara Miller, The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers), 44,49, 97.26. John L. Rector, The History of Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 187.27. Jim Stewart, "Another Terrorist Attack Coming Soon?" CBS News, June 5, 2006. stories/2006/06/05/terror/mainl683 852.shtml.28. Jay Stanley, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of aSurveillance Society (New York: ACLU, 2004), 27-28.29. Philip Shenon, "Aftereffects: Domestic Security; Former Domestic Security Aides Make a Quick Switch to Lobbying," New York Times, April 29, 2003,A1.30. Author interview, December 18, 2006.31. Author interview, January 21,200732. Jay Stanley, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex, 28-29.CHAPTER THREE1. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), illustration #26; Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York:Anchor Books, 2003), 92-115.2. Gail Shister, "24 Tamps Down on Torture." Philadelphia Inquirer, February 15, 2007. Available at: William Glaberson, "Plea of Guilty from a Detainee in Guantanamo." New York Times, March 27,2007, Al.
  • 68. 4. Noam Chomsky, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1979), 113.5. Chomsky, The Washington Connection, 10.6. "Egypt: Mass Arrests and Torture," Human Rights Watch, February 2005. Available at: 2005/egypt0205/index.htm.7. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life Under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 241-42,332.8. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 317, 336,341,344-47,357-58.9. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 347.10. Earle Rice, Jr. The Nuremberg Trials (San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1997), 31.11. Evans, Richard J. The ThirdReich in Power (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 81.12. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, 344-49.13. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 279.14. Michael Ratner, Guantanamo: What the World Should Know (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Press, 2004), 3.15. John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael Isikoff, "The Roots of Torture," Newsweek International, May 24, 2004. Available at: ; Nina Totenberg, "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: Path to a Landmark Ruling," , July 15, 2007. Available ?storyId=5751355.16. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 145.17. Joshua Denbeaux and Mark Denbeaux, Report on Guantanamo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Department of Defense Data, April2005. Seton Hall University, 2-3.18. Ratner and Ray, Guantanamo, 35.19. Ratner and Ray, Guantanamo, 36.21. Rattier and Ray, Guantdnamo, 36,38, 39,40-41,44,62; Applebaum, Gulag, 243.22. Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 74.23. Author interview, August 13, 2006.24. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 25.25. "Hamdi voices innocencejoy about reunion—Man held as enemy combatant now back in Saudi Arabia." CNN, October 14,2004. Available at: meast/10/14/hamdi/.26. Nina Totenberg, "Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: Path to a Landmark Ruling," , July 15, 2007. Available at: Mike Doming, "U.S. releases details in case against Padilla," Chicago Tribune, June 2, 2004. Available at: http://www .>.28. "Profile: Jose Padilla," BBC News, November 22,2005. Available at: americas/2037444.stm.29. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 45.30. Naomi Klein, "A Trial for Thousands Denied Trial," The Nation, March 12, 2007. Available at: http://www.the .31. Nina Totenberg, "U.S. Faces Major Hurdles in Prosecuting Padilla," NPR Morning Edition, January 3,2007. Available at: 6682846.32. Karen J. Greenberg, ed., The Torture Debate in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 283.33. Greenberg, The TortureDebate,312.34. Greenberg, The Torture Debate, 317-57.35. Greenberg, The Torture Debate, 317-57.36. Lloyd C. Anderson, "The DetentionTrilogy: Striking the Proper Balance Between National Security and Individual Liberty in an Era of Unconventional Warfare," Whittier Law Review, 2005. Availableat: cstudents/wir-v2 7n 1 -anderson-ab stract.pdf.37. Author interview, September 20, 2006.38. Applebaum, Gulag, 46.39. Amy Newman, The Nuremberg Laws (San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 1999), 23,60.40. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 18, 24. 26.41. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 258-59. For a detailed discussion of the terror in the context of party politics, see Nikolai I. Bukharin, "Crackdown on the Party,"138-145, and Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski. "The Model of Totalitarianism," 198-213, both articles in Robert V. Daniels, ed., The Stalin Revolution:Foundations of Soviet Totalitarianism (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1972).42. Medvedev. Let History Judge, 260.43. Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace 8c Company, 1995), 154.44. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 37.45. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 62.46. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 264-6547. "Turning Back the Clock on Rape," Editorial, New York Times, September 23,2006,A10.48. John Barry, Michael Hirsh, and Michael IsikofF, "The Roots of Torture," Newsweek International, May 24,2004. Available at: http://www .49. Joseph Margulies, Guantdnamo and the Abuse of Presidential Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 133.50. Joseph Margulies, Guantdnamo, 99.51. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 271.52. Ginzburg, Journey, 79.53. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 278.54. Matthew Restall, "The Decline and Fall of the Spanish Empire?" The William and Mary Quarterly, Volume 64, Issue I. 2006. Available wm/64.1/br_l.html.55. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 277-78.56. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 39, 151.57. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 276-77.58. "After the Lawyers," Editorial, New York Times, April 27,2007, A26.59. Margulies, Guantdnamo, 163-64.60. Ginzburg, Journey, 170-72.61. Seymour M. Hersh, "Torture at Abu Ghraib," New Yorker, May 10,2004. Available at: http://www.newyorker . com/archive/2004/05/10/040510fa_fact.62. Steven H. Miles, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror (New York: Random House, 2006).63. Michael Isikoff and Stuart Taylor Jr., "The Gitmo Fallout," Newsweek, July 17,2006,22-25.64. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: HarperCollins, 1962,1991), 374-75.65. Nick Hawton, "Hunt for CIA Black Site in Poland," BBC News, December 28, 2006. Available at: http://news . Nat Hentoff, "Our Own Nuremberg Trials," Village Voice, December 20-26, 2006,14.67. Patrick Quinn, "U.S. War Prisons Become Legal Vacuum for 14,000," Associated Press, September 18, 2006. Available at: cwcIraqPrisoners. 1 f7e92fd.html.68. "U.S.: Soldiers Tell of Detainee Abuse in Iraq," Human Rights Watch, July 23, 2006. Available at: english/docs/2006/07/19/usintl3767. htm.69. Applebaum, Gulag, 9.70. Evans, Third Reich in Power, 136-37.
  • 69. 71. Evans, Third Reich in Power, 68-70, 453.72. Peter Noel, "The Louima Millions," Village Voicejuly 18-24,2001.73. Alfred W. McCoy, "The Myth of the Ticking Time Bomb," The Progressive, October, 2006. Available at: 100 6; Alfred WMcCoy, A question of Torture (New York: Henry Holt, 2006), 111.74. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006), 272.75. Ratner and Ray, Guantdnamo, 43.76. Aumor interview, January 27, 2007.77. Adam Liptak, "Judge Hears Arguments on Federal Spying Program," New York Times, September 6,2006,A14.78. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed. by Clinton Rossiter (New York: The Penguin Press, 1961, 2003), 498.CHAPTER FOUR1. Jeremy Scahill, Blachwater: The Rise of the Worlds Most Powerful Mercenary Army (New York: Nation Books, 2007), xviii-xix.2. Scahill, Blackwater, xix.3. Scahill, Blackwater, 72-73.4. Scott Shane, "C.I.A. Contractor Guilty in Beating of Afghan Who Later Died," New York Times, August 18, 2006, A8.5. Scahill, Blackwater, xx-xxi.6. Scahill, Blackwater, 186,190-99,200, 202.7. Scahill, Blackwater, 327-298. Robert Young Pelton, Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006), 31.9. Pelton, Licensed to Kill, 2.10. Pelton, Licensed to Kill, 4-5.11. Sidney Blumenthal, How Bush Rules (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006), 2.12. Don Van Natta, Jr., "The 2000 Campaign: The Florida Vote; Democrats Tell of Problems at the Polls Across Florida," New York Times, November 10,2000, A26.13. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 274.14. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 95.15. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 90.16. Kirk Johnson, "Man Sues Secret Service Agent Over Arrest After Approaching Cheney and Denouncing War," New York Times, October 4, 2006, A22.17. Gallo, Mussolinis Italy, 41-45.18. Evans, Coming of the ThirdReich, 181-82,191.19. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 230.20. Eric A.Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nan Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 54.CHAPTER FIVE1. Nat Hentoff, The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 75.2. Barbara Miller, The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers), 2.3. Author interview, August 2006.4. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 49.5. Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts," New York Times, December 16,2005, Al.6. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "BankData Sifted in Secret by U.S. to Block Terror," New York Times, June 23, 2006, Al.7. Author interview, August 13,2006,8. David Cunningham, Theres Something Happening Here— The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),2.9. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 233.10. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy, 310.11. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (New York: Black Dog 8c Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 469.12. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 229.13. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 143-144.14. Shirer, Berlin Diary, 448.15. Barbara Miller, The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in Unified Germany (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004), 3-25.16. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 181.17. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A.Knopf, 1990), xi.18. Kristof and WuDunn. ibid., 22.CHAPTER SIX1. Roy A. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. Colleen Taylor (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 352-54.2. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 403.3. John L. Rector, The History of Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 202.4. David Cunningham, Theres Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004),109.5. Mark Schlosberg, "The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern 8c Central California," ACLU of Northern California, July2006. Available at: ment_surveillance/fl]te_state_of_sur veillance.shtml.6. Joe Conason, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush (New York: St. Martins Press: 2007), 192-93.7. Eric Lichtblau and Mark Mazzetti, "Military Documents Hold Tips on Antiwar Activities," New York Times, November 21,2006, A18.8. Author interview, May 9,2007, Center for Constitutional Rights.9. Jim Dwyer, Jim. "City Asks Court Not to Unseal Police Spy Files," New York Times, March 26,2007, Bl.10. Mark Bushnell, "The Minister Was Jailed for Anti-war Beliefs," Times Argus Sunday Magazine, December 12, 2004. Available at: D=2004121/NEWS/412120306/1013; Geoffrey R. Stone, War and Liberty: An American Dilemma, 1790 to the Present (NewYork: WW. Norton, 2007), 55.11. "Taxing an Unfriendly Church," Editorial, New York Times, November 22,2005,A22.12. Stephanie Strom, "Group Seeks I.R.S. Inquiry into 2 Ohio Churches Accused of Improper Campaigning," New York Times, January 16, 2006, A9.13. "Activist Sheehan Arrested in House Gallery," February 1,2006. Available at: 2006/POLITICS/01/31/sheehan. arrest/.14. Cornelia Dean, "A Man, a Plan, a Dam.Then, an FBI Call," New York Times, August 22,2006, A15.
  • 70. CHAPTER SEVEN1. Sara Kehaulani Goo, "Sen. Kennedy Flagged by No-Fly List," Washington Post, August 20,2004, A01.2. Sara Kehaulani Goo, "Cat Stevens Held after D.C. Flight Diverted." Washington Post, September 22, 2004, A10.3. Bob Cuddy, "Caught in the Backlash: Stories from Northern California," ACLU of Northern California, September 11,2002, 8.4. "ACLU of Massachusetts Challenges Use of Behavioral Profiling at Logan Airport," ACLU. Available at: < Author interview, August 31,2006.6. Mark Graber, "Another Enemy of the People?" Balkinization Blog, April 8, 2007. Available at: http://balkin . "Unlikely Terrorists on No-Fly List," CBS News, October 8, 2006. Available at: 10/10/60minutes.8. Timothy Williams, "Aide Detained at Kennedy en Route to Venezuela," New York Times, September 24, 2006, A37.9. "Frequently Asked Questions About the No-Fly List," ACLU. September 22,2005. Available at: http://www . CBS, ibid.11. Eric Lichtblau, "Democrats Set to Press Bush on Privacy and Terrorism," New York Times, December 7, 2006, A37.12. Scott Shane, "Canadian to Remain on U.S. Terrorist Watch List," New York Times, January 23, 2007, All; author interview May 9, 2007, Center for ConstitutionalRights.13. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone. New York: Scribner, 2006,339.14. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 143-44.15. Chris Plante, "U.S. Army Muslim chaplain arrested," CNN, September 22, 2003. Available at: < http://www . . arrest.16. Laura Parker, "The Ordeal of Chaplain Yee," USA Today, May 16,2004. Available at: news/nation/2 004-05-16-yee-cover_ x.htm.17. Damien Cave, "The Struggle for Iraq: U.S. Jailer in Iraq Admits Mistakes, Investigator Says^A^tf York Times, May 2,2007, A10; "Senior U.S. officer in Iraqaccused of aiding the enemy," CBS News, April 26,2007.18. "Former Army Chaplain Is Stopped at Border," New York Times, July 24, 2006; Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941(New York: Modern Library, 1999), 276.19. Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 290,291.20. Evans, Third Reich in Power, 603.21. Rector, History of Chile, 188.22. "FBI apologizes to lawyer in bombing case." Associated Press/MSNBC, May 25, 2004. Available at: http://www . Dan Eggen, "U.S. Settles Suit Filed by Ore. Lawyer," Washington Post, November 30,2006, A03.24. Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 153-57.25. Mark Kurlansky, 1968: The Tear That Rocked the World (New York: Random House, 2005), 339.26. John L. Rector, The History of Chile(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 208.27. Diane Cardwell, "In Court Papers, A Political Note on 04 Protests," New York Times, July 31,2006, Bl.28. Christopher Dunn and Donna Lieberman, "License to Stroll," New York Times, August 13, 2006, 14:11.CHAPTER EIGHT1. "Science Under Siege: The Bush Administrations Assault on Academic Freedom and Scientific Inquiry," ACLU,June2005,29,31.2. Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 426.3. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 5-13.4. "Intellectual Diversity: Slogan for the New McCarthyism" Reprinted from the Community College Perspective, May 2005. Available at: http://www sared.html.5. Michelle York, "Professor Is Assailed by Legislature and Vandals," New York Times, February 3, 2005, B6.6. Kirkjohnson, "Colorado U. Chancellor Advises Firing Author of Sept. 11 Essay," New York Times, June 27,2006, All.7. Gretchen Ruethling, "A Skeptic on 9/11 Prompts Questions on Academic Freedom," New York Times, August 1, 2006, All.8. Stanley Fish, "Conspiracy Theories 101," New York Times,Juy 23, 2006, 4:13.9. Heidegger, ibid.10. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 243.11. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 416; Jean-Michel Planner, Weimar in Exile: The Anti-Fascist Emigration in Europe and America (London: Verso, 2006),1-47.12. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, Illustration #28.13. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 419, 422-23,425,568.14. Palmier, Wei-mar in Exile, 44.15. John L. Rector, The History of Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 200-02.16. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 27.17. Warren St. John, "The Backlash Grows Against Celebrity Activists," New York Times, March 23,2003,9:1.18. Theo Emery, "In Nashville, Sounds of Political Uprising From the Left," New York Times, August 19, 2006. Available at: 9nashville.html? ex=l 183780800&en=fea052dbd5163 444&ei=5070.19. John Schwartz and Geraldine Fabrikant, "War Puts Radio Giant on the Defensive," New York Times, Mar 31,2003, Cl.20. Michael Moore, "Sicko is Completed and Were Off to Cannes!" May 17, 2007. Available at: www.michael Evans, Comingoftke Third Reich, 398; Palmier, Weimar in Exile, 113.22. Rector, History of Chile, 22.23. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006,302-03.24. Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 19.25. David Johnston and Scott Shane, "C.I.A. Dismisses a Senior Official Over Data Leaks," New York Times, April 22,2006, Al.26. Scott Shane, "Criminal Inquiry OpensInto Leak in Eavesdropping," New York Times, December 31,2005, Al.27. Davidjohnston and Neil A. Lewis, "Lawyer Says Military Tried to Coerce Detainees ¥ea? New York Times, June 16,2005,A25.28. "The Cost of Doing Your Duty," Editorial, New York Times, October 11, 2006, A26.29. "Apology Not Accepted," Editorial, New York Times, January 19, 2007, A22; Amy Newman, The Nuremberg Laws: Institutionalized Anti-Semitism (San Diego:Lucent Books, 1970), 18-19.CHAPTER NINE1. Joseph C. Wilson, 4th, "What I Didnt Find in Africa," New York Times, July 6,2003,4:9.
  • 71. 2. Eric Boehlert, "Swift Boat flacks Attack CBS," , September 10, 2004. Available at: . com/story/news/feature/2004/09/10/forgery/index.html.3. "Politicizing Public Broadcasting," Editorial, New York Times, May 4, 2005, A22.4. Elizabeth Jensen, "PBS Firing of the Host on a Show for Children Draws Protest," New York Times, August 5, 2006,A15,A20.5. Fintan Dunne, "Pentagon Threatens to Kill Independent Reporters in Iraq," March 10, 2003. Available at: adie030310.htm.6. "Reporters Without Borders Accuses U.S. Military of Deliberately Firing at Journalists," Posted on Reporters Without Borders: For Press Freedom, April 8, 2003.Available at: http://www . Robert Fisk,"No Wonder al-Jazeera was a target," The Independent, November 26, 2005. Available at: http: // . htm.8. "EXCLUSIVE: Al Jazeera Reporters Give Bloody First Hand Account of April 04 U.S. Siege of Fallujah, interview posted on Democracy Now! February 22,2006. Available at: =06/02/22/1434210. 9. Kevin Maguire, "Exclusive: Bush Plot to Bomb His Arab Ally." Daily Mirror,November 22,2005. Available at: Jeremy Scahill, "Did Bush Really Want to Bomb Al Jazeera?" The Nation, November 23, 2005. Available at: 212/scahill.11. Nicholas Kristof, "Samis Shame, and Ours," New York Times, October 17, 2006, A21.12. "Trial for Detained CBS News Cameraman Set for April," CBS News, March 2, 2006. Available at: publiceye/.13. "CBS freelance cameraman shot and wounded by US soldiers," Reporters Without Borders, April 6,2005. Available at: "Iraqi Cameraman for CBS Faces Trial," CBS News, March 22,2006. Available at: http://www.cbsnews . com/stories/2006/03122/Iraq.15. "CBS Cameraman Acquitted in Iraq Panel Rules There Was a Lack of Evidence a Year after Arrest," CBS News, April 5, 2006. Available at: 04/05/iraq/mainl472263.shtml16. "U.S. Holds AP Photographer in Iraq," CBS News, September 18,2006.17. C.J. Chivers, "Journalist Critical of Chechen War Is Shot Dead in Moscow," New York Times, October 8, 2006, sec. l,p. 16.18. Sebnem Arsu, "Editor Who Spoke for Turkeys Ethnic Armenians Is Slain," New York Times, January 20,2007, A3.19. "Army: Milblogging Is Therapy, Media Is Threat," Wired BlogNetwork, May 2, 2007. Available at: http://blog.wired.eom/defense/2007/0 5/army_milbloggin.html.20. Paul McLeary, "Is This What the Army Thinks of Us? A new Army manual paints American reporters as a national security threat," Columbia Journalism Review.May 3, 2007. Available at: < politics/is_this_what_the_army_thinks _o.php?.21. "Protecting ReportersPhone Records," Editorial, New York Times, November 29,2006, A28.22. TomSocca, "Off the Record," New York Observer, September 8,2006, p. 6.23. Michael Calderone, "Times Studies How to Shake Feds: Disposable Phones, Erasable Notes: Act Like a Drug Dealer," The New York Observer, September17,2006. Available at: .24. Greg Palast, "Palast Charged with Journalism in the First Degree," September 11,2006. Available at: < .25. Max Gallo, Mussolinis Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, 1964), 38.26. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy: Life under Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 217-18.27. Bosworth, Mussolinis Italy, 220.28. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 153.29. Evans. Third Reich in Power, 407; Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co.), 75-192.30. Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power (New York: Vintage, 1995), 25-26.31. Elisabeth Bumiller, "Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights," New York Times, May 16, 2003, Al; Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Wittens(Triumph of the Will), 1935, Documentary, Synapse Films, 1935; Ray Miiller, The Wonderful, Horrible Life ofLeni Riefenstahl, Channel Four Films, Germany,1994; Steven Bach, The Life and Work ofLeni Reifenstahl (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 116.32. Evans, Coming of the Third Reich, 168.33. George Orwell, Animal Farm (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), 57.34. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1941), 269.35. Evans, ThirdReich in Power, 664-71.36. John L. Rector, The History of Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 187.37. Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 229-307.38. Howard Kurtz, "Administration Paid Commentator: Education Dept. Used Williams to Promote No Child Law." Washington Post, January 8,2005, Al.39. Katharine Q. Seelye, "Miami Publisher Steps Down Over Payments to Reporters," New York Times, October 4,2006,A16.40. George Orwell, "Looking Back on the Spanish War," in Essays by George Orwell. Available at: http://www . Jess McKinley, "Three from Clinton Administration Urge Disney to Cancel or Revise 9/11 Mini-Series," New York Times, September 7, 2006, A27.42. "Media reports fail to probe 9-11 Commission chairman Keans role with ABCs factually flawed path to 9/11 miniseries," Media Matters, September 7, 2006.Available at: 070007.43. Don Kaplan and David K. Li, "Secrets of First 9/11 Miniseries," New York Post, July 28,2005.44. Orwell, Animal Farm, 47-48.CHAPTER TEN1. Eric A. Jones, Urbanization and Grime: Germany, 1871-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 27; Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness: ADiary of the Nazi Years, 1933-1941, trans. Martin Chalmers (New York: The Modern Library, 1998), 77,130,190; Roy A. Mededev, Let History Judge: The Originsand Consequences of Stalinism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 346-47.2. Klemperer, ibid., 79-120.3. Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (New York: Random House, 2003), 203.4. Coulter, Treason, 257-58.5. Deroy Murdock, "Gray Ladys Serial Spills," National Review Online, July 6, 2006. Available at: .6. Brian Maloney, "Still Going," The Radio Equalizer,jAy 10,2006. Available at: http://radioequalizer . . html.7. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 175-78.8. Maloney, ibid.9. Murdock, ibid.10. Dan Eggen and Jerry Markton, "2 Senior AIPAC Employees Ousted: FBI Investigating if Pair Gave Classified Information to Israel," Washington Post, April21,2005, A8.11. Eric Lichtblau, "American in al-Qaeda Tapes Accused of Treason," New York Times, October 12,2006, A22.12. Myra MacPherson, All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I. F. Stone (New York: Scribner, 2006), 54-55.13. MacPherson, All Governments Lie!, 57.14. MacPherson, All Governments Lie!, 58-59.15. "ACLU Letter to Congress Urging Opposition to the Animal Enterprise Act, S. 1926 and H.R. 4239," ACLU, March 6, 2006. Available at
  • 72. g20060306.html.16. Applebaum, Gulag, 46.17. Max Gallo, Mussolinis Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 43.18. Vaclav Havel, Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Hvizdala, trans. Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 120,143.19. Jim Hopkins, "Bill would keep servers out of China," USA Today, February 12, 2006. Available at: http://www.usa ACLU Sues Boeing Subsidary for Participating in CIA Kidnapping and Torture Flights." ACLU, May 30, 2007. Available at http://www.aclu .org/safefree/torture/29920prs2007053 O.html.CHAPTER ELEVEN1. Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), 14-15.2. Victor Klemperer, / Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Tears, 1933-1941 (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 157.3. John L. Rector, The History of Chile (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 182.4. Major Danby, "Bush Guts Posse Comitatus, Grabs National Guard." Mews From Underground, Wednesday, October 18,2006.5. Patrick Leahy, "Remarks of Sen. Patrick Leahy, National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2007, Conference Report, Congressional Record," September29, 2006. Available at: http://leahy . . html.6. "Making Martial Law Easier," Editorial, New York Times, February 19,2007,A147. Levy, Origin of the Bill of Rights, 193.8. Available at: monitor/2007/01/gonzales-surveil lance-authorization.php See also: Fred L. Stanley and Louis H. Pratt, eds., Conversations with James Baldwin (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 78.
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  • 75. The American Freedom CampaignThroughout history, Americans faith in liberty and justice been tested, and we are living in such a time today. The AmericanFreedom Campaign is a nonpartisan alliance of citizens aimed at restating nine basic American principles: 1.Fully restore the basic right to trial, habeas corpus, for everyone accused of a crime; 2.Prohibit torture and the use of secret evidence; 3.Prohibit the detention of American citizens as "enemy combatants" without proof of criminal activity on the presidents say-so alone; 4.Prohibit the government from secredy breaking and entering our homes, tapping our phones or e-mail, or seizing our computers without a court order, on the presidents say-so alone; 5.Prohibit the president from kidnapping, detaining, and torturing abroad; 6.Prohibit the executive from claiming "state secrets" to deny justice to victims of government misdeeds, and establish legislative-executive committees in the Congress to rule on the withholding of information on claims of "executive privilege" which obstruct Congressional oversight and an open government; 7.Challenge the constitutionality of signing statements, where the president seeks to disregard duly-enacted provisions of bills, by empowering the House and Senate to challenge them in court; 8.Prohibit military commissions except in places of active hostilities where a battlefield tribunal is necessary to obtain fresh testimony or prevent anarchy; and, 9.Amend the Espionage Act to permit journalists to report on classified national security matters without fear of prosecution.For additional resources on what you can do as an individual and to learn more about the issues addressed in End ofAmerica, visit these websites:American Freedom Campaignwww.americanfreedomcampaign.orgChelsea Green Publishingwww.chelseagreen.comAmerican Civil Liberties Unionwww.aclu.orgHuman Rights Watchwww.hrw.orgThe Center for Constitutional Rightswww. ccr-ny. org The Pledge of the American Freedom CampaignWe are Americans. We do not torture, imprison people without charge or legal recourse, allow our phones and e-mails to be tapped without a court order, and above all we do not give any President unchecked power above the law and Constitution. I pledge to fight to protect and defend the Constitution from the Presidents assault. The Constitution protects American freedom. With checks and balances, and basic legal rights, it has prevented tyranny and safeguarded our liberty. Yet today, under the pretense of the "war on terror," the White House is dismantling the Constitution, concentrating power in the President, and undermining the rule of law.I hereby join the American Freedom Campaign to educate my neighbors about the threat and urge my representatives to confront and correct these abuses of our America.
  • 76. ABOUT NAOMI WOLFFeminist, social critic, and political activist, Naomi Wolf raises awareness of the pervasive inequities that exist inpolitics and society and encourages people to take charge of their lives, voice their concerns, and enact change.Wolfs landmark international bestseller, The Beauty Myth, challenged the cosmetics industry and the marketing ofunrealistic standards of beauty, launching a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s. The New York Times called it oneof the most important books of the 20th century.Wolfs latest book, The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, is an impassioned call to return to theaspirations and beliefs of the Founding Fathers. Wolf shows how events of the last six years parallel steps taken in theearly years of the 20th centurys worst dictatorships.She is the author of, among other books, Fire With Fire: The New Female Power and Promiscuities: The SecretStruggle For Womanhood.Wolf is co-founder of The Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization that teaches young women howto become leaders and agents of change in the 21st century.A graduate of Yale and a former Rhodes Scholar, Wolf has written essays for The New Republic, The Wall StreetJournal, Glamour, and The New York Times.