Dragged Down by the Stone

Not really sure why this resonates with me. Perhaps it will make sense at the end of this thing.

Things have been a little skinny here at Moronathon. Life is intervening with increased ferocity and we are working quite hard at doing that full speed ahead, chin up thing. Leaves little time for complaining. None the less, we return to our friends Responsibility, Justice and Rule of Law. Hmm. Perhaps we had better start with Paranoia instead as it is a little easier to find in this day and age.

Those of you who read this blog with regularity know that I have a fascination with the relationship between our Government and our Privacy. In reading the following, please think about the utility and reasoning behind keeping even the idea of a government keeping an organization or plan secret. A rational might be created for hiding details - ie we hold up the following people in the event of a flying gerbil attack on Gotham City - but this gets a little less strong when you feel the need to hide the existence of the FGAPP (Flying Gerbil Attack Preparation Plan) or more likely the whole DFGAP (Department of Flying Gerbil Attack Preparation).

Attack Preparation... The US Government has quite reasonably developed plans for dealing with rotten things happening to the country and itself in order to maintain a continuity of operations. This is a Good Thing. For the past thirty years though these plans have added a significant inward looking component which is somewhat troubling. A very interesting article by Christopher Ketcham goes into a great deal of detail with regard to a good number of these changes. The points I make in this section are shamelessly taken from that reading.

The 'enemy lists' of Hoover's FBI are well known and understood. During the same time period the Federal Preparedness Agency (now known as FEMA) maintained a database of at least 100,000 Americans located at Mount Weather, which was publicly investigated in 1975 by Senator John V. Tunney. From the Ketcham article:

The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Moving ahead 10 years enter Oliver North. I am unable to express my contempt for this POS, except to say that he gives the usual group of political scoundrels like Donald Rumsfeld a bad name. We are also seeing the same distancing of the executive branch from congressional oversight via the same legal condescension that is being enjoyed today. Another quote:

A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

I am going through the information a little differently than the original article - 'Main Core' is the current implementation of the big unregulated database holding personal information about suspicious people that might need special attention in the event of a 'national emergency'.

The exact details are less important than the main points: information is being collected outside of the normal scope of regulation and oversight whose main purpose will be the detection and survaliense of American Citizens. The decision to use these rests with the executive branch as defined in Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. Finally, the historical firewall between states and the use of Federal troops - Posse Comitatus - was reduced in scope as well.

For the record I am somewhat skeptical that any notion of regulation or oversight is meaningful in the context of this sort of operation. It exists at a layer of government which is not all that well defined for those of us brought up in the now quaint notion of three house government.

I am also skipping the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as there has been some further clarifications act brought to us by the Supreme Court which I would need to look up and do not really have the space. Google "Salim Hamdan and Military Commissions Act" for more details.

So what? Those fans of the old X-Files series remember the tin foil hat brigaded talking about FEMA and a Vast Conspiracy to lock up countless Americans. Such a joke right? Until quite recently I felt the same way. Where we sit today the people with the power to do this are without shame or dignity. They have expressed contempt for the Rule of Law. They have sullied and destroyed our national reputation and treasure. American Citizens can and are being held without constitutional protections. They feed on the hopes and dreams of us leaving nothing but bitter ruin.

We - the United States - are currently holding more than 27,000 human beings in secret prisons around the world. The overwhelming majority of them are being held indefinitely, without charges, without rights, cut off from the outside world, and subject to "harsh interrogation techniques" (to use the prim locution for "torture" used by the Bush Administration and universally adopted by the American media).

Do you really think that they would be afraid to use this if it was in their best interest?