Amerika, A modern day East Germany

[cablefreejunkie]

The definition of a Police State is:

A state in which the government exercises rigid and repressive controls over the social, economic, and political life of the people, especially by means of a secret police force.

History shows that mankind has been plagued by authoritarian governments since the dawn of collective governance. We have many instances of governments that fit the defintion of a Police State from the East German Stasi, Soviet KGB to the current Chinese government who still utilise whole teams of agents to follow westerners of interest around when they visit the country.

However these countries have all been authoritarian one party states and it has always been presumed that within western democracies the idea of a police state only existed in the nightmares of those sections of society who mistrusted the government no matter what it did. However with the recent Washington post investigation into the size of the intelligence community within the United States of America it may be successfully argued that the time for nightmares has arrived.

The Washington Post expose looked into the huge expansion of the securtity services and other intelligence agencies since the attacks of 9/11 and revealed some stunning facts such as:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings ? about 17 million square feet of space.

In case that second point escapes due attention it means that roughly 1 in every 150 adults within the USA has top secret security clearance and if that many people have the top level clearance how many more have one of the many lower levels? It does seem from this study alone that the USA is awash with spooks and spies and as we know from the past ten years of abuse they are not all engaged in fighting the war on terror and looking for the supposed architect of 9/11 Osama Bin Laden.

Instead the government has directed this huge intelligence apparatus onto the people they are supposed to protect and one can only wonder whether this was the original aim in the first place. No democratic country would have ever accepted such a huge intrusion of privacy, destruction of civil liberties and total disregard to the rule of law had the threat of terrorism not existed and been used as the excuse of the century to implement such draconian measures.

Like many governments throughout the ages from Roman times with Julius Caesar, to Hitler and the Reichstag fire, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were used by politicians to expand the power of the state at the expense of the citizenry using an outside enemy as the excuse. Whether you believe the attacks of 9/11 were staged or not is not the point as it is clear from succeeding events that they were used by the Bush government, and now the Obama administration to increase the power of the government to intrude into the lives of the public.

The main piece of legislation that started the ball rolling towards a Police State was the Patriot Act. This law was rushed through congress without proper consultation and debate and many senators later admitted that they didn?t even read the bill. The very suspiciously timed Anthrax attacks on likely opponents of the bill ensured that the politicians passed through a truly anti-libertarian bill that had been sitting around for years just waiting for the right ?event? to occur.

The law expanded the definition of terrorism to include many domestic activities and it enabled the federal government to increase it?s surveillance of the public through a systematic warrant-less wire-tapping campaign that trawled through every conceivable piece of electronic information from phone calls, emails, Internet traffic and credit card transactions whilst it built up a huge database of real time events in which it hoped to find signs of terrorist connections in a huge game of connect the dots.

The loosening of the terms that define what is and not terrorism should be a chilling warning to anyone concerned with the war on terror. We have seen here in the UK how the numerous anti terrorism laws have been misused by Police officers to prevent photographers from recording police assaults on the streets and in preventing legitimate protest. We have also seen our government abuse powers that were supposedly only there for exceptional purposes for non exceptional means such as when the UK froze the bank accounts of Iceland during the banking crisis.

The US government has now gone one step further in it?s expansion of the war of terror against it?s own citizens by enacting presidential powers that allow for the assassination of US born citizens throughout the world. The US government it seems is now perfectly willing to execute it?s own citizens if they believe them to be linked to terrorism. No trial is required to contest any evidence that may or may not exist and the defendant is not allowed to answer any charges to a jury of his peers. If the government deems you to be a terrorist with it?s newly relaxed definition of what constitutes terrorism then you may be assassinated.


the scariest thing of all is that the average emerikan cant see it !!

[TheCoder]

America has pretty much always been that way - nothing much has changed. Just look at the McCarthy era trials to see how paranoid they are.

[GastonJ]

I think one of the major differences is that the US has never really hidden such policies. The presidential power to have someone assassinated has been around for a very long time, Bush used it for Bin Laden, although he never managed it. People talk openly about the CIA, NSA and so on without fear. The press talk about them daily, it's out in the open. In East germany and teh like talking openly would almost certainly have got you arrested.

It's not that Americans can't see it, it's just that they don't care really. Your average American doesn't know that a world exists past the shores of the Pacific and Atlantic let alone caring what goes on. That was why there was so much shock to 11th September - they didn't realise that anyone disliked them so much and couldn't understand why, or even who. Made it much easier for Bush to persuade them that invading other countries was a good idea and would put a stop to it.