Well we are less than a year from the 2004 United States presidential election. The current occupant of the White House, began his re-election campaign months ago with a host of publicity stunts and photo ops, including escapades aboard an American battleship in a U.S. Air Force flight suit (the closest he has ever been, or will ever be, to combat) and a surprise Thanksgiving visit to soldiers in Iraq (equipped with what was reported to be a plastic turkey). Meanwhile across the street a relatively large field, that is now down to 7 candidates vie for the Democratic Party’s nomination, in hopes of running against the Republican incumbent, Bush, in the November elections. Posturing has started and barbs have already begun flying, particularly between the democratic hopefuls, as the public tries to decide if they will bother voting at all, or who they will vote for in what seems to be a dizzying array of candidates proposing, what is a very finite array of ideas. Lost in all of this chatter has been what I’ve noticed seems to be a recurring theme particularly over the past 3-months – the possibility that there might not be an election at all, and if there was it would be dramatically altered!

Surprise! Surprise!

In a December 31^st, 2003 article by Conservative New York Times columnist William Safire, he predicts an “October Surprise”, which will affect the outcome of the 2004 election. What is Safire’s surprise you might ask? Why it’s “a major terror attack in the US”; what he believes is the most probable choice in his self-posed multiple choice question that also included the possibilities of the capture of Osama bin Laden in Yemen, the daring escape of Saddam Hussein, and finding a buried bag of anthrax in Tikrit. Safire, a former speechwriter and political aide for Richard Nixon and a connected Washington insider, doesn’t explain or elaborate on his prediction, which is made in a somewhat off-hand and “humorous” fashion, in his column titled “Office Pool, 2004.” Safire’s eyebrow-raising prediction comes on the heels of another well-connected columnists in Washington establishment circles, David Rothkopf, putting forth a similar possibility in the November 23^rd, 2003 Washington Post, as well as the former U.S. General Tommy Franks, interview in the December 2003 issue of the men’s lifestyle magazine, Cigar Afficianado, where he expressed similar sentiment.

In the piece written by David Rothkopf, entitled “Terrorist Logic: Disrupt the 200 Election”, which ran in the Washington Post, Rothkopf puts forth the possibility of a string of suicide bombings beginning the first day of the presidential debates and while the country has been on it’s highest alert level (call it “Very Cherry Red”) for about a month. As troops amass along the border of some Central Asian or Middle Eastern nation (Pakistan? Saudi Arabia?), that was formerly considered an ally, the “loudest voice on the campaign trail lately has been that of a terrorist leader hiding in a cave on the other side of the world”. And soon the only issue to be discussed in the elections is whether voters believe the candidate can make them safer. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official now at the Washington think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, express apprehension about his speculative scenario and how it would likely benefit a Bush re-election campaign, but truly alarming is the factors which caused him to come up with such a scenario. Rothkopf says “he recently co-chaired a meeting hosted by CNBC of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues. Almost three-quarters of them said it was likely the United States would see a major terrorist strike before the end of 2004. A similar number predicted that the assault would be greater than those of 9/11 and might well involve weapons of mass destruction. It was the sense of the group that such an attack was likely to generate additional support for President Bush”. He went on to add “these are serious people, not prone to hysteria or panic -- military officers, policymakers, scientists, researchers and others who have studied such issues for a long time”. He then goes on to highlight how such events have assisted the re-election hopes of candidates considered hardliners in several other countries including, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon in Israel, as well as candidates in Sri Lanka and Turkey, and Vladimir Putin in Russia (prior to the Russian election a string of bombings hit Moscow and other cities and were attributed to Chechen terrorists but it is widely believed to have been carried out or at least permitted by Vladimir Putin’s KGB).

The now retired, General Tommy Franks served 37 years in the military and in his final position before retirement, he served as the commander of U.S. Central Command, leading the conquest of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq last year, as well as serving as a commander in the first Persian Gulf War. In his Cigar Aficianado interview Franks states that if the United States or a “Western” ally was hit with a Weapon of Mass Destruction, or a Chemical or Biological attack, that caused massive casualties that the U.S. would likely discard the Constitution in favor of a military form of government. In his hypothetical scenario Franks attempts to lay the onus for the switch to dictatorship at the feet of the American people, stating “It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world—it may be in the United States of America—that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.”If that happens, Franks said, “... the Western world, the free world, loses what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty we’ve seen for a couple of hundred years in this grand experiment that we call democracy.” He gives no timetable about when this might happen but later in the interview he affirms his ardent support for the Bush Administration describing Bush as “a very thoughtful man” and “a person of extremely high character” who in years to come we’ll probably think of “as an American hero.” Franks eventually ended his quite lengthy interview with the magazine on a less-than-optimistic note stating, “It’s not in the history of civilization for peace ever to reign. Never has in the history of man. ... I doubt that we’ll ever have a time when the world will actually be at peace.”

The consistent resurfacing of this ominous possibility has left me wondering - just what is being planned. Is an attack, or the allowance of an attack, of the magnitude of September ¹¹th or greater, being planned or discussed as an option for keeping the current regime in power, and if so by whom? Or is some other event being cooked up to whip the American public into a right-wing lockstep right around election time. 

Although she has since claimed her comments were made ‘tongue-in-cheek’, in an December 18^th headline run by online version of the ChinaDaily newspaper, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wondered aloud whether the Bush administration is holding Osama bin Laden captive, waiting to break him out as an "October surprise", to precede the November 2004 presidential election. Witnesses to Albright's comment said the ambassador did not appear to be joking when she made the suggestion, while waiting in FOX News studio's green room before an appearance on one of their programs. I personally can’t say with any confidence whether the U.S. has bin Laden in custody somewhere overseas, but given the well-documented relationship between the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) and Pakistan's military intelligence, the Inter-services Intelligence (ISI), and the fact that Al-Qaeda has been known to receive substantial support from the ISI, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that bin Laden could be “turned over” by an informant or insider especially in light of the recent multiple assassination attempts on Pakistan’s president Musharraf by Islamic Fundamentalist. Albright’s statement, whether joke or otherwise, is also compounded by the recent proclamation made by FBI director Robert Mueller and reported in the January 14^th, 2004 Financial Times where Mueller predicted confidently that Osama bin Laden would be captured, even as he warned that "al-Qaeda would very much relish another high-profile attack inside the United States". Mueller continued, "we probably will have another attack”, but he believed intelligence and defense communities "have disrupted their [al-Qaeda's] capacity". Mueller did not give reasons for his newfound confidence but the article went on to site “media reports from south Asia suggesting that recent assassination attempts on General Pervez Musharraf have stiffened the resolve of the Pakistani president to ensure his country's assistance in the manhunt”.

Even without the occurrence of another large scale terrorist attack in the U.S., or Osama bin Laden being lowered onstage in a glittery globe like it’s the Grammy Awards, at this year’s Republican National Convention, it is clear that the highest levels of the power structure have ramped up their campaign to crush all who challenge their rule and officially turn the U.S. into a police state with an unaccountable secret government. 

This past year, led by House Republicans, the U.S. House of Representatives passed at least 6 measures outside of the normal hours of operation. As U.S. Congressman Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, synopsized recently, the House cut veterans benefits by three votes at 2:54a.m. on a Friday in March; slashed education and health care by five votes at 2:39a.m. on a Friday in April; passed a major tax cut by a handful of votes at 1:56a.m. on a Friday in May; passed the Medicare privatization and prescription drug bill by one vote at 2:33a.m. on a Friday in June; cut the “Head Start” program by one vote at 12:57.a.m. on a Friday in July; approved $87 billion for Iraq (more like $87 billion for private American defense and construction contractors) on an October Friday at 12:12a.m; and finally nearly 3 hours after the House roll call had begun – twice as long as any previous vote in U.S. House or Representatives history – they passed the most sweeping changes to Medicare in its 38-year history on a Saturday at 5:55 in the morning. This pattern of consistently passing legislation in the middle of the night, after the press deadlines, (not that the lazy and complicit corporate media would have accurately reported it anyway), while most people are asleep both figuratively and literally reveals a practice designed to hide the real operations of government.

And So They Creep.....

But perhaps people don’t find secret votes all that compelling, regardless of how potentially important they may be, so let us move to a related issue that everyone should understand – the most physical component of their suppression. On the same day David Rothkopf was proposing his suicide bomber scenario to readers of the Washington Post, on the other side of the country, William M. Arken was detailing the continued and increased assumption of domestic policing and surveillance roles by the U.S. armed forces, a phenomena referred to as “Mission Creep”. As some may remember it was Arken, a well-connected military analyst for the Los Angeles Times, who first revealed the Bush Administration’s revised military strategy to target Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, Syria, China and Russia for possible “pre-emptive” nuclear attacks last year. Arkin’s November 23^rd story features and interview with Air Force General Ralph E. Eberhart, the commander of the Pentagon’s Northern Command, the newly established center for controlling all US armed forces within the continental US, Canada and Alaska. In the article Arkin asserts that the Northern Command has defined three categories of operations, with increasing levels of activity: temporary, emergency and extraordinary. Arkin writes: “It is only in the case of ‘extraordinary’ domestic operations that the unique capabilities of the Defense Department are deployed. These include not just such things as air patrols to shoot down hijacked planes or the defusing of bombs and other explosives, but also bringing in intelligence collectors, special operators and even full combat troops” – but in the article Arkin reveals that Northern Command is “already working under the far-reaching authority that goes with ‘extraordinary operations.’”

In September 2003 Eberhart told PBS’s NewsHour, "We are not going to be out there spying on people," but added "we get information from people who do." And some of that information comes increasingly not from the FBI or those charged with civilian law enforcement but from the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) established last year. Originally established with the mission of protecting the Defense Department and its personnel, as well as "critical infrastructure," against espionage conducted by terrorists and foreign intelligence services, the CIFA had it’s mission expanded in August 2003, by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, additionally charging it with maintaining "a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense" , as well as “figuring out a way to process massive sets of public records, intercepted communications, credit card accounts, etc., to find ‘actionable intelligence.’” In essence this is the return of the Total Information Awareness program, headed by Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra infamy, which was supposedly shut down earlier this year by Congress after a public outcry. I would be willing to bet that this database will increasingly include not just legitimate terrorist threats, but information about protest groups and individuals that oppose the agenda of the wealthy, business interest that truly run this country, if it does not already include these people.

Those still questioning what is on tap, need look no further than Miami’s November 2003 protest of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) ministerial meetings. On November 23^rd, in what turned out to be a Sunday of news worth paying attention to, The New York ran a story featuring a leaked, confidential FBI memo that was circulated among 15,000 local law enforcement agencies. The memo urged law enforcement to “be alert to [these] possible indicators of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.” Among the suspicious and “extremist” activities of protestors catalogued in the memo are “use of the internet to recruit, raise funds, and coordinate their activities prior to demonstrations” as well as “[d]uring the course of a demonstration ... using cell phones or radios to coordinate activities or to update colleagues about ongoing events”, the use of tape recorders and video cameras, which “may be used for documenting potential cases of police brutality and for distribution of information over the internet”; wearing scarves and sunglasses “to minimize the effects of tear gas and pepper spray as well as obscure one’s identity”; and wearing “layered clothing” as a form of “body protection equipment.” While acknowledging that the FBI had no indication of any violent or terrorist activities being planned in conjunction with the protests, it nonetheless cautioned that, “elements of the activist community may attempt to engage in violent, destructive, or disruptive acts.”  

When tens of thousands of protestors arrived in Miami to voice their opposition to the FTAA’s plans to expand their corporate controlled “globalization” policies, they were met with police harassment, provocation, and brutality featuring police in full riot gear, including electrified shields, tanks, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets and bean bags. It is no coincidence that the $8.5 million dollars needed to finance the extra police measures was given from the $87 billion recently approved to finance the occupation of Iraq.  Miami’s police chief John Timoney made public comments that supported protestor accounts of police overreach stating, “we’re locking them up, piecemeal. We’ll try to do as many arrests as we can. If we don’t lock ’em up tonight, we’ll lock ’em up tomorrow.” And according to Miami mayor Manuel A. Diaz, Miami was a ‘model for homeland security.’ In the days following the protest a 60-year old Florida Judge, Richard Margolius, remarked in open court that he was taken aback by what he saw at the protest and witnessed ''no less than 20 felonies committed by police officers''. Judge Margolius added that he “probably would have been arrested [himself] if it had not been for a police officer who recognized [him],'' I can only imagine what law enforcement has planned for this September’s Republican National Convention in New York City.

But this is just the police, imagine if the military was involved, assuming such protest would even be allowed in that scenario. The U.S. military operates under the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the direct use of federal troops "to execute the laws" of the U.S., which has been interpreted by the courts to mean that the military is prohibited from any active role in direct civilian law enforcement, such as search, seizure or arrest of civilians. However, amendments approved by Congress in 1996 well before 9/11 and under everybody’s favorite “Vanilla Negro” former President Clinton, for that other phony war – the war on drugs – have already expanded the military's domestic powers so that Washington can unilaterally dispatch the military without waiting for a state's request authorizing the military to assist local law enforcement officials in domestic policing. Furthermore, the president, after proclaiming a state of emergency, can authorize additional actions. In New York City for example, uniformed and apparently armed, soldiers seem as common as regular police at some major train stations in Manhattan. So perhaps the cries to “bring the troops home” from Occupying Iraq will be partially headed, sooner than expected. Instead the troops may be ordered to occupy American streets -there is, after all, no place like home.

Agents of Repression

Spying and repression of dissent by the U.S. government is nothing new, only the intensity and breadth of the suppression may be new to some. In the United States there is a long history of wiretaps, surveillance and suppression of political opponents by the government, dating back to the “Red Scare” (Communism) of the 1920’s, to the McCarthyism of the 1950’s, to the counterintelligence programs (COINTELPRO) of the1960-70’s (made famous by J.Edgar Hoover’s FBI), and whatever we may find 30 years from now, that the period from the 1980’s until today should properly be called. During the COINTELPRO era targets of surveillance, suppression, sabotage, frame-ups, and occasionally assassination, included such well-known figures as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (happy belated birthday) and Malcolm X, as well as anti-Vietnam War groups, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) just to name a few. A 1976 US Senate report on intelligence excesses, known as the Church report for the special committee’s chair Frank Church, documented the existence of over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on American citizens and organizations at FBI headquarters—plus countless more in FBI regional offices. In 1972 alone, 65,000 such files - each likely to cover multiple individuals - were created. Although programs such as COINTELPRO were formally ended and guidelines were allegedly put in place to prevent their return there is little reason to be confident that, that was actually the case. Just as an example, in the 1980’s around the time of the Iran-Contra scandal (illegal sales of weapons to the Islamic fundamentalist government of Iran to finance a proxy US fighting force, known as the Contras - short for counterrevolutionaries-, attempting to overthrow the democratically-elected, Nationalist, and “left-leaning” government of Nicaragua), another scandal broke exposing FBI infiltration of the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador (CISPES) – a group opposed to President Reagan’s policies in Central America. CISPES was largely responsible for providing sanctuary to Salvadoran refugees seeking to escape government-backed death squads at home who were responsible for thousands of murders. Whatever the case Attorney General John Ashcroft officially rolled back or relaxed many of these guidelines last year, in the name of “fighting terrorism”.

You would think that with all the spying and intrusive powers those in power have afforded themselves that they might actually have caught some “terrorist”, domestic or otherwise. In the case of domestic terrorism the government seems hardly interested unless the offender looks “Middle-Eastern” or has a Muslim last name. For example when several members of a White Supremacist group were arrested in Texas, after being found to have made a sodium-cyanide bomb - and being in possession of nearly 500,000 rounds of ammunition, 65 pipe bombs, briefcases that could be detonated by remote control, approximately 800 grams of almost pure sodium cyanide, in addition to hydrochloric, nitric, and acetic acids, formulas for making bombs, as well as anti-Black, anti-Semitic, and anti-Government propaganda – NO national press conference was called, instead it was release to the local media in a half-page press release. If the acid were mixed with the sodium cyanide, an analysis showed, it would create a bomb powerful enough to kill everyone inside a 30,000-square-foot facility. This plot was uncovered by accident, when the post office accidentally delivered a package meant for one of the conspirators, which indicated the plot, to the wrong address. Of course when a terror suspect is arrested with a name something like “Yusef Ali Al-kasim Muhammad” John Ashcroft reports it personally on national television. It is only after the cameras are turned off, that we usually discover the government either has no case, has an extremely flimsy case, or used illegal means to gain what little “evidence” they have against their suspect. Meanwhile Tom Ridge and the ruling cabal push along with their program to fingerprint all foreign visitors to the U.S., with the exception of a list of 27 countries - that minus Japan, Singapore, and Brunei - looks more like an international Klu Klux Klan recruitment roster than anything drawn up in hopes of deterring terrorism. Currently residents of Andorra, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brunei, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, San Marino, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Portugal and Singapore will continue to enter the U.S. without being fingerprinted or photographed.

And the beat – better yet – The March Continues.....

In the past month while reading a Nazi Holocaust survivor’s account of the times that lead to the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich the similarities to today are eerie. When asked why nobody stood up to the Nazis the answers that came up were fear of the Nazis and appearing unpatriotic (which at the time could be fatal), and the fact that compared to the misery Germany was experiencing recovering from the first World War, at first life under the Nazi’s seemed better for much of the German population, as the German War Machine seemed to invigorate parts of the economy. In the United States and at this moment in history, citizens hardly have such excuses. You hear it. You see it. You may even taste it. The government lies and propaganda. The fervent nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. The visions of endless war. The promises of security and protection. The unprovoked and illegal invasions of other countries in the name of peace. The spying by the government, and encouraged spying, by citizens on each other. The militarization of the police and establishment of “Homeland security”. The media complicity. The systemic attacks on the poor and disadvantaged. The extralegal procedures and mass arrest. The belief in "our basic goodness". The ever-changing foreign face of "Evil". The belief in "Gott Mit UNS (German for "God (is) with us") and America's primacy beyond all else.

It can happen here and we may be no more than another “terror attack” away from everyone finally understanding that.

Released: January 21^th, 2004

Imbedded Links Used Above:

www.chinadaily.com.cn/en/doc/2003-12/18/content_291414.htm

http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO302A.html

www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/AAisidrugs.html

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/4572/1/194

www.unitedforpeace.org/downloads/fbi_memo_03_10_15.pdf

http:://www.playahata.com/pages/eyecalone/macked.htm

www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/gjp3.html

Suggested Reading:

Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party & the American Indian Movement by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall

The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives by Zbigniew Brzezinski (know thy enemy

WAR AT HOME: Covert Action Against U.S. Activist and What We Can Do About It by Brian Glick

Suggested Websites and Links:

http://www.wsws.org

http://www.globalresearch.ca

www.cooperativeresearch.org

www.whatreallyhappened.com

Independent Media Center

The views and opinions expressed herein by the author do not necessarily represent the opinions or position of Playahata.com.