one reason why GR remains relevant

[Doug Millison]

[...] Only the most gullible could believe that a desire to combat terror
is the sole agenda here. Every administration since Reagan's has chased
after rollbacks in the civil liberties and curbs on police power wrought in
the '60s and '70s by the civil rights movement, the Warren Court and
post-Watergate reformers. And it's usually done in the name of war, be it
on drugs, pornography, child abuse, "welfare as we know it," or terrorism.
The present threat is certainly more real and more precipitous than the
sham domestic wars of our recent past, but it's fair to ask how much
additional security we can expect to buy with a wholesale surrender of
freedoms and privacy rights. The answer, by FBI Director Robert Mueller's
own sidelong admission, is probably not much. Testifying before a Senate
committee in May, Mueller said that the 9/11 hijackers "contacted no known
terrorist sympathizers [and] left no paper trail. As best we can determine,
the actual hijackers had no computers, no laptops, no storage media of any
kind." In short, they seem to have done nothing that would have made them
any more visible under the expansive new Bush/Ashcroft rules on snooping,
electronic and otherwise, than they already were. [...] The apparent lesson
here is that the old powers of domestic surveillance are quite potent if
the FBI is doing its job. American intelligence had plenty of information
about September 11, we now know. What it lacked was the coordination or the
resolve to add two and two. Bush's new cabinet department is supposed to
remedy this, but no executive "clearinghouse" is going to make the FBI and
the CIA/NSA play well together. Jealously safeguarding what they know,
particularly from each other, is the foundation of their political power.
The official rejoinder is obvious enough: We have to err on the side of
sacrificing freedoms and empowering police agencies, however marginal the
gains in domestic security. The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Cold
comfort, wouldn't you say, when the most glaring problem exposed to date is
the intelligence machine's failure to do anything with the information it
already had?

from:
http://www.counterpunch.org/


June 13, 2002

Famous for 15 Seconds

How All the President's Men Buried Coleen Rowley

by Steve Perry