Preemptive Strikes Come Home To Roost

“Shoot first, ask questions later” seems to be the Bush Administrations motto both abroad and now here at home. The same twisted moral logic that led to illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (“preemptive strikes”) seems to have now come to St. Paul, Minnesota. It doesn’t matter whether you are innocent or not, the Bush Administration just wants to kick your ass.

Interestingly this latest ramping up of the United States police state was predicted five-and-a-half years ago by FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley.

From Storm Troopers at the RNC by Ray McGovern:

Ten days ago, as the nation focused attention on the hurricane nearing the Mississippi delta, another storm was brewing far upstream in St. Paul, Minnesota — a storm far more dangerous, it turned out, but one by and large overlooked by the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).

When I flew into St. Paul on the evening of Aug. 30, I encountered a din in local media about “preemptive strikes” on those already congregating there to demonstrate against the Iraq war and injustice against the poor in our country.

St. Paul’s Pioneer Press expressed surprise that “despite preemptive police searches” and arrests, a group calling itself “the RNC Welcoming Committee” was still intent on “disrupting the convention.”

A headline screamed, “Preemptive Arrests of Protesters in Twin Cities.” But it was the article’s lead that hit home: “Borrowing from the Bush administration’s ‘preemptive war’ playbook, police agencies in the Twin Cities have made ‘preemptive strikes’ against organizations planning to protest at the Republican National Convention.”

In the following days I was to see, up close and personal, a massive and totally unnecessary display of ruthlessness.

What struck a bell was that this domestic application of the doctrine of “preemption” was totally predictable — indeed, predicted by those courageous enough to speak out before the U.S. “preemptive” attack on Iraq.

Ironically, it was FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley, living in the St. Paul area, who served warning of precisely that in her hard-hitting Feb. 26, 2003, letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, three weeks before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Read the rest here.

Freedom Of The Press?

From FBI Apologizes to Post, Times by Carrie Johnson:

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III apologized to two newspaper editors yesterday for what he said was a recently uncovered breach of their reporters' phone records in the course of a national security investigation nearly four years ago.

Mueller called the top editors at The Washington Post and the New York Times to express regret that agents had not followed proper procedures when they sought telephone records under a process that allowed them to bypass grand jury review in emergency cases.

The Justice Department's inspector general, who is reviewing the bureau's procedures in such cases, uncovered lapses that allowed FBI agents in 2004 to obtain telephone records of Post staff writer Ellen Nakashima, who was based in Jakarta, Indonesia, at the time. The FBI also obtained telephone records of an Indonesian researcher in the paper's Jakarta bureau, Natasha Tampubolon.

Read the rest here.

It Just Keeps Getting Worse

Pretty soon I’m going to go hide in a hole. I don’t know how much more insanity I can take.

From Get spied on without doing anything wrong by D. Parvaz:

If you're wondering how desperate of a pickle we're in in our "war on terror," check out the following item: The Department of Justice is mulling over whether to let the FBI investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents without evidence of wrongdoing. Instead, investigators would be allowed to use racial profiling, targeting, according to The Associated Press, "Muslim, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups. ... The changes would allow FBI agents to ask open-ended questions about activities of Muslim- or Arab-Americans, or investigate them if their jobs and backgrounds match trends that analysts deem suspect." Attorney General Michael Mukasey denies this is happening. Then again, just as he doesn't consider waterboarding torture, perhaps Mukasey has a new term for racial profiling ("racial recognition" would sound downright complimentary). Also, senior FBI agents and law enforcement officials spoke to the AP about the potential new guidelines, so we know it was/is being considered. Say hello to the World War II days, when just being Japanese was enough to be seen as a threat. So, we're being told that racial profiling might be allowed as a legitimate investigative tool. I guess that means all that warrantless spying on thousands of Americans, snooping through our mail and e-mail and keeping tabs on whom we call hasn't been yielding much in the way of evidence. Anyway.

Read the rest here.

A Crisis Of Civil Society In America

From A Troubled Sewer of a Government: FBI & the Failure to Act on Torture Reports by Valtin:

Nothing could be clearer: torture is the policy of the United States, and even the protests of their own agents in the field are unacceptable. I wonder how many -- or even if any -- FBI agents resigned in protest over this inhumanity and criminality by our own government. While the report lauds the integrity of the agents, I note that few if any chose to resign in protest, or publicly bring this information to the American people who they supposedly serve.

Glenn Greenwald turns his intellectual guns upon the Congress and the American people themselves, noting:

While there is much rhetorical protest over these torture programs in the halls of Congress and in our elite media institutions, there has been little real action in response. Indeed, it has long been known that we are torturing, holding detainees in secret prisons beyond the reach of law and civilization, sending detainees to the worst human rights abusers to be tortured, and subjecting them ourselves to all sorts of treatment which both our own laws and the treaties to which we are a party plainly prohibit. None of this is new.

But our elite political institutions have decided, collectively, to do nothing about that. Quite the contrary, with regard to many of the revelations of abuse, our elected representatives — with some noble exceptions — have chosen to remain largely in the dark about what was done. When forced by court rulings or media revelations to act at all, they have endorsed and legalized this behavior — not investigated, outlawed or punished it.

Read more here.