Bush Expands the War on Civil Liberties
San Francisco, CA - In December, the New York Times reported that President Bush ordered the wiretapping of Americans’ emails and telephone calls to other countries without a court order beginning in 2002. When anti-war and civil liberties groups pointed out that it was against the law for the government to spy on its citizens without permission from a judge, Bush insisted that it was his right as commander in chief and the Justice Department began an investigation of the New York Times.
The report that the National Security Agency (NSA) had expanded their spying from overseas into the United States followed reports that the U.S. military had begun to spy on anti-war protesters in the United States. The Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, also began in 2002 and now has a staff of more than 1000. In addition, the FBI has issued tens of thousands of “National Security Letters” to get the telephone and financial records of Americans who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.
State and local governments have also stepped spying on people and organizations opposed to the war. Here in California, the state National Guard had set up a special intelligence unit to spy on anti-war protesters. In New York City, the police department expanded spying and infiltration of political protesters, including the use of undercover police to provoke conflicts between the police and protesters.
These actions show a broad effort to enable local police and the military to crack down on opponents of Bush’s ‘war on terror,’ much as the government did in the 1960s and 1970s to those who opposed the war in Vietnam. Today, in echoes of 40 years ago, the president is claiming that those who expose and oppose his domestic spying are aiding the ‘enemy.’ With the occupation of Iraq going from bad to worse and growing calls for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, the government is preparing the way for more repression in order to try to maintain U.S. power in the Middle East and control over oil and natural gas sources there and in central Asia.
The Republican right is also trying to use fear of ‘foreign terrorists’ to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment against undocumented Latinos in the United States, calling for a wall to be built along the U.S.-Mexican border and to criminalize any aid to the undocumented. With the growing unpopularity of the war, the failure of Bush’s attempt to privatize social security and the criminal negligence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Republicans are hoping to use racism against Latinos with the fear of terror to find a new way to build popular support for the right.
This powerful brew of race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership is what led to the internment of Japanese Americans into concentration camps during World War II. Opposition to the Vietnam War and government spying led to limits on the military and government’s ability to spy on Americans in the 1970s. More recently, the California National Guard was forced to disband its intelligence unit after it was exposed. We need to fight against police, military and government spying on Americans and defend the rights of the undocumented, immigrants and Latinos to protect all of our civil liberties and to prevent another disaster like the World War II concentration camps.
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