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Saturday, June 24, 2006

Is It Huxley? Orwell? Or Something a Whole Lot Worse?

3:00 PM

The rate at which American citizens are willingly surrendering their personal liberties is scarier than any repressive hell I can imagine. I and others are at a loss whether to use Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or George Orwell's 1984, in search of metaphors when writing about something no American could have imagined only a few years ago. It wasn't enough that Bush & Company tapped our phones without judicial or Congressional oversight; now it's our bank accounts!

As an old crime writer and investigative journalist, I very much understand, advocate and teach the axiom "Follow the money." It works quite well in both police work and journalism. But, ethically, cops and reporters only do it in hot pursuit of folks under direct suspicion of committing a crime. Police officers need a warrant to do it, and journalists need the approval of their editors and a lot of worn gumshoe spent looking through old, dusty, public records--or someone who owes them a favor in the right place and slips them a file or two. But this mess? Get outta town!

Dubya says his crew of snoops is only reading the records of people actually transferring money in and out of the United States with known ties to terrorist organizations. Yeah? Buy that and I want to offer you some beachfront property in Kansas at a great price. Who and what is a terrorist organization? And who is in charge of defining it today, tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade?

I live and write in China, and have been for some 4 years now; but my bank account is still in Los Angeles. I transfer money all of the time electronically with a click of my mouse here in Beijing. I don't know enough about the fine points of international banking to know whether my transactions are crossing national boundaries.

More importantly, though, I do not know whether I am a "target" or not. I know this administration has every reason to believe I am not its friend. In my five decades of life, I have been called many unpopular things in America: a communist; a socialist; a hippie; an atheist; a n***er lover; a revolutionary; a radical; a troublemaker; a bad seed, etc., etc., you get the idea.

But to my knowledge never a terrorist. The trouble is that phrase: "to my knowledge." I know I was on an "enemies" list of a couple of administrations in the 60s and early 70s. Who is to say that with as much carping as I do on the criminal behavior of this administration that I am not on their list of enemies?

Now, I have so little money compared to the numbers that Shrub & Twigs do their accounting in, it is highly unlikely they would find my banking of any interest at all, other than perhaps to laugh at. But I don't know that for a fact. I also do not know if my e-mails and international phone calls are being monitored since I am so decidedly unfriendly to the current administration.

Rather than Huxley and Orwell metaphors, I am more concerned with a philosophy 101 phrase: A Slippery Slope. It surely appears to me that we are slipping mighty damn quickly down a slope so slippery with White House malfeasance and unimaginable hubris that it feels and smells like something that regularly goes down my toilet instead of underneath my rights as an American citizen. And what is at the bottom of this slope? I believe a cesspool that will make us someday think that 1984 and A Brave New World were comic books.

A whole lot of no-nothings back west harp about the monitoring of Chinese citizens by their Central Government; and yes it is a fact, the Internet and publishing is quite closely watched--manually! They say there are some 30,000 employees of the government whose job is to monitor what appears on blogs and university Internet bulletin boards; there are students whose volunteer jobs are to report on the Intranet chatter within the closed LAN systems of universities. But this is spotty and inefficient as hell in a country of 1.3 billion people!

Repression of free speech and individual liberties is more a threat than it is a real danger to the great majority of Chinese citizens. Here the government wants the people to think that what they say or do is being big-brothered--it does the trick without the dirty deed coming from Beijing; self-censorship is the shame of China, but it is increasingly not working.

In America under Bush, the "Central Government" wants like almighty hell to hide its efforts to spy on its citizens. This is a distinction with a difference. It was reported in The New York Times article excerpted and linked to below that, yet again, as in the wiretapping scandal, the administration tried to coerce The Times into not publishing the story.

It argued to The Times that national security would be gravely endangered if Americans found out that, like their telephones and Internet, their bank records were also being vacuumed up into a humongous electronic spying apparatus that looked for patterns of suspicious activity to then target and monitor up-close and personal. Dandy, but what constitutes a "suspicious pattern" to a bunch of neocons who believe they know best what Americans should be doing, saying, or spending their money on? It's not enough that they want to "nation-build" abroad, they want to citizen-rectify at home.

If this doesn't wake up even the most sublimely ignorant, apolitical yahoo in America, then I guess the whole lot of us deserves to slide down that slope greased with sewer waste into the foul pit stewing so unseemly below.

But, damn it, when did we lose our will to be free, and why?

Please read the opening graphs below and then click on through for the rest of a very sad and chilling story.

Bank Data Is Sifted by U.S. in Secret to Block Terror

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: June 23, 2006

WASHINGTON, June 22 -- Under a secret Bush administration program initiated weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials have gained access to financial records from a vast international database and examined banking transactions involving thousands of Americans and others in the United States, according to government and industry officials.

The program is limited, government officials say, to tracing transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records from the nerve center of the global banking industry, a Belgian cooperative that routes about $6 trillion daily between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges and other institutions. The records mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas and into and out of the United States. Most routine financial transactions confined to this country are not in the database.

Viewed by the Bush administration as a vital tool, the program has played a hidden role in domestic and foreign terrorism investigations since 2001 and helped in the capture of the most wanted Qaeda figure in Southeast Asia, the officials said.

The program, run out of the Central Intelligence Agency and overseen by the Treasury Department, "has provided us with a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks and is, without doubt, a legal and proper use of our authorities," Stuart Levey, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, said in an interview on Thursday.

The program is grounded in part on the president's emergency economic powers, Mr. Levey said, and multiple safeguards have been imposed to protect against any unwarranted searches of Americans' records.

The program, however, is a significant departure from typical practice in how the government acquires Americans' financial records. Treasury officials did not seek individual court-approved warrants or subpoenas to examine specific transactions, instead relying on broad administrative subpoenas for millions of records from the cooperative, known as Swift.

Please continue reading at: The New York Times

3:00 PM / Editor / permalink 11 comments

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11 Comments:

I hope that more people find your blog and read how Bush's administration can touch each of us no matter where we reside. I suspect we are closer to 1984 than most of us realize.

By Gay in Florida, at 2:14 AM

Joe,

Let me "EASE" your mind. You are being Tracked (Monitored) by The Feds just like I am being tracked (Monitored) by The Feds (And in my Case The State of California also) in just about everything we say and do. Some of what You are being tracked for is what you say on this (Your) Website, The LongBow Papers.

Some of what I am being tracked (Monitored) NOW for is what I "Got" in certain situations in The Anthony Pellicano Federal Indictment Case. And Actually, The Feds have Illegally and Criminally Attacked me again because of other situations and cases I have information about. One is the Knowingly Poisoning of Children by a children's toy across The United States years ago by a Company called Mr. Bath Bear, and another company called Pertec. Certain Government agencies and People, and in particular, Former Los Angeles District Attorney Gil Garcetti and others in the California State Government, along with certain people in the Federal Government, Illegally and Criminally covered-up this Horrible and Horrific Situation. WHY? LOT'S of reasons. $$$$$$ Big Money is one reason.

Big Brother is watching you Joe, just like Big Brother is Watching me, and like I said, in my Case, Illegally and Criminally Attacking me, AGAIN!!!!!!!!

MarioGeorgeNitrini111
mariogeorgenitrini111
_________

The OJ Simpson Case

By MarioGeorgeNitrini111, at 2:23 AM

To the Gentleman from Florida,

Thank you for taking the time to leave your comment. I am afraid your insight will prove all too prescient.

All the best,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 12:32 PM

Dear Mario,

I am certain that many of us are being monitored; I live my life knowing that what I write or say may very well come back and bite me in the ass. My questions in the piece above were rhetorical.

You of course know of my interest in the Pellicano case; I follow it closely in the press. Occasionally I had to be in his general presence, but happily I only had to speak with him once out of public courtesy.

You want to know a great irony: I had the occasion to listen to tapes of his phone conversations that he did not know were being recorded.

Keep up the good fight, my friend. Me? I am happy and secure in perhaps the most dynamic place on Earth these days, China.

All the best,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 12:59 PM

Thanks Joe,

Keep following this Anthony Pellicano Federal Indictment Case. There are "THINGS" that are going to come out, and unlike certain happenings in The OJ Simpson Case, this time, they WILL NOT BE COVERED-UP.

I know who threatened you from The OJ Simpson Case that is an enemy of yours and an enemy of mine. It can only be one person. Well this person is going to have a BIG LEGAL SURPRISE FROM ME.

There is some information you need to know. I will E-mail you.

Both of us are Hard-Headed.........We're friends, and that's REAL GOOD...........

MarioGeorgeNitrini111
mariogeorgenitrini111

By MarioGeorgeNitrini111, at 11:44 PM

I think this sort of thing goes in cycles. People get spooked and want extra security. Then they realise they're not any safer, a political party remodels itself as the party of natural justice and uses it to springboard back to power. The Democrats would be fools not to use this tactic in 2008. The Conservatives already are in the UK vrs a flagging Labour Party.

Anyway, at least Americans have a constitution that grants rights, which in turn are protected by the judiciary. Unlike a certain Asian country we all know.....

By Raj, at 2:28 AM

Dear Raj,

Yes, if history teaches us anything it is that the pendulum swings left and right, left and right--sometimes, stopping dead still during a total breakdown in civilization. I am just afraid that this rightward arc might leave permanent scarring. But then perhaps my pessimism there is also unwarranted. We did survive Gunner Joe McCarthy without permanent damage to the nation--although a number of lives were damaged beyond repair.

And your point about a certain Asian nation is well-taken. However, China actually has a rather splendid Constitution; the trouble is that very few Chinese know of it and far less have ever read it. Not that the government is going out of its way to put in front of the masses to be sure.

Little by little, though, more and more regular citizens are using it to seek redress and finding some relief.

All the best,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 3:07 PM

Censorship has become the crudite at American human rights banquet, and secrecy the main course. Those who tough it out, both in the States and abroad, are more than appetizers, we're the main course. The gambol of history depends upon the aimless lice who currently pawn themselves off as legislators, and leaders, in a nation founded by those with the misguided belief that merely crossing a great body of water wound take them to new shores. I propose a toast to them, to you, and others, who dare speak out, and venture beyond the border of despair; amen, Joseph, amen...

By jayne stahl, at 10:15 AM

Dear Jayne,

Thank you for being you and being in this world with your wonderful heart and your beautiful words that always strike to core of all that is good and all that is evil in our world. I will be in your e-mail box soon; closer if I could.

Most gratefully yours,

Joseph

By Joseph, at 7:46 PM

This is a satire site, right? It has to be...nobody that stupid could possibly survive past age 3

By Anonymous, at 12:20 AM

I would say that the stupid--and cowardly one, to boot--is he who knows not truth and is so ashamed of it he cannot identify himself.

Why is it that the right-wing nut cases are the ones who most often hide behind the anonymous button?

Joseph Bosco

By Joseph, at 1:38 AM