HOMELAND SECURITY AT WORK

It was not just labor unionists that were feeling the chill in the wake of the hot patriotism caused by 9/11. Two members of a Chicago group opposed to the sanctions against Iraq were confronted by police when they went to buy some postage stamps.

Daniel Muller, a coordinator for Voices in the Wilderness, along with Andrew Mandell, went to a Chicago post office to purchase a quantity of stamps. They were paying in cash. “We needed 4,000 stamps for a mailing we were doing,” explained Muller, “and I asked for one not with the American flag on them.” When the clerk asked if Statue of Liberty stamps were acceptable, Mandell replied, “Yes, we love liberty.” “She asked us to step aside from the counter and she went to the back, out of view,” recalled Muller. “I knew something was up because this was a bit out of the ordinary. And Andrew said, ‘She's calling the cops,’ but I didn't believe him.”

However, about 20 minutes later two policemen entered and asked for the pair's identification. “They asked if we had any outstanding warrants. They ran a check on us. They asked why we had asked for stamps without American flags on them. I said we're very rooted in nonviolent activities and we would rather have the Statue of Liberty than the American flag.”

The pair was finally released but had to return to the post office the next day to obtain their stamps and then, only after a further half-hour interview with a postal inspector.

“The fact that they did ask for anything but flag stamps did raise a question for the clerk,” explained Silvia Carrier, a public relations officer for the Chicago Postal Inspector's office. “Right now, since September 11, clerks have been told to be cautious, to be looking out for anything suspicious.

The experience of Muller and Mandell shows that it matters little that in mid-July 2002 the US Postal Service stated that it would not participate in a snitch program called Operation TIPS.

TIPS or Terrorism Information and Prevention System was trotted out in mid-summer 2002, and was hailed on its website as “a national system for concerned workers to report suspicious activity.” The program was part of the Citizen Corps, a program announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address. It was originally scheduled to be launched by early fall 2002 but eventually was officially dropped following public outrage.

In a statement, the Postal Service stated it had “been approached by Homeland Security regarding Operation TIPS; however, it was decided that the Postal Service and its letter carriers would not be participating in the program at this time.” Nothing was said about individual carriers deciding to join and the “at this time” left the final word unsaid.

And the experience of the men and the stamps indicated that some persons within the Postal Service still were reporting anything they viewed as suspicious behavior.

In published material, TIPS advocates said the program was to be administered by the Justice Department and coordinated with FEMA, which would bring it under the Homeland Security Department. It would involve “millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.” This, of course, referred to postmen, meter readers, repairmen or anyone who might have an axe to grind against their neighbors.

The TIPS plan was immediately compared to the Nazi Gestapo, the former East German secret police service and to Fidel Castro's Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) in which Cubans are encouraged to spy on and report any “counterrevolutionary” behavior by their neighbors. An estimated eight million Cubans belong to more than 121,000 committees in the CDR, established by Castro on September 28, 1960.

In October 2000, the CDR held parties across the island nation to celebrate their 40 years of existence. “If we see some sort of attack on society or the government, then that is counterrevolution and you have to root it out,” voiced one jubilant CDR member while toasting with a glass of rum at a Havana street party.

The CDR’s keep detailed records of all neighborhood inhabitants, not only listing each inhabitant but also keeping files on schooling and work history, spending habits, any potentially suspicious behavior, any contact with foreigners and attendance at pro-Castro meetings. The system has evolved into one that routinely provides an individual's information to prospective employers, medical authorities or any law enforcement official.

Needless to say, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other public watchdog organizations reacted negatively to Operation TIPS, saying it would create an atmosphere in which Americans would be spying on each other. “The administration apparently wants to implement a program that will turn local cable or gas or electrical technicians into government-sanctioned Peeping Toms,” declared ACLU legislative counsel Rachel King.

John Whitehead, executive director of the Rutherford Institute, said, “This is George Orwell's ‘1984.’ It is an absolutely horrible and very dangerous idea. It's making Americans into government snoops. President Bush wants the average American to do what the FBI should be doing. In the end, though, nothing is going to prevent terrorists from crashing airplanes into buildings.”

A review of the Citizen Corps website showed a marked softening of both language and details after the program began to make a national stir.

In July 2002, the website stated Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. Operation TIPS, a project of the US Department of Justice, will begin as a pilot program in 10 cities…Operation TIPS, involving 1 million workers in the pilot stage, will be a national reporting system that allows workers, whose routines make them well-positioned to recognize unusual events, to report suspicious activity… Everywhere in America, a concerned worker can call a toll-free number and be connected directly to a hotline routing calls to the proper law enforcement agency or other responder organizations when appropriate.”

By early August, the list of occupations had been dropped and “suspicious terrorist activity” and “unusual events… suspicious activity” had changed to “suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity” and “Potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places.”

The TIPS program was merely an official extension of snooping in America, already so pervasive that author Jim Redden called modern life a “snitch culture.” Neighborhood Watch groups already in existence were being brought into Homeland Security. In the spring of 2002, Ashcroft had earmarked almost $2 million in an effort to double the number of Neighborhood Watch groups to about 15,000. He claimed this would “weave a seamless web of prevention of terrorism” across the country.

TV personality Ed McMahon went from pitching for Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes to pitching the War on Terrorism. The National Neighborhood Watch Institute already had been shipping out rectangular street signs reading, “We Support Homeland Security.”

From the school kid Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program to professional finger pointers such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, more and more Americans were being encouraged to spy and report on one another.

Although most Americans believe that neighborhood snooping went out with Bush-era fear mongering, it has continued through the Obama administration. The Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, which includes police chiefs from 63 of the largest departments in the US and Canada, endorsed a program called iWATCH during an annual conference in Denver on October, 3, 2009. Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, whose department developed the iWATCH program, called it “the 21st century version of Neighborhood Watch.” The program's watchword is “If you see something, say something.”

As a policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a former FBI agent who worked terrorism cases, Mike German criticized iWATCH despite assurances that the program would not infringe on individual liberties. German told the Associated Press he suspects people will fall back on personal biases and stereotypes of what they think a terrorist should look like when deciding to report someone to the police. He said “That just plays into the negative elements of society and doesn't really help the situation.”

In 1997, informing on fellow citizens was codified, at least for the federal government, when the Supreme Court in US vs. Singleton exempted federal prosecutors from a statute prohibiting the bribery of witnesses to testify favorably for the government.

There have been many cases, usually not played up in the media, in which innocent people have had their lives unsettled, ruined or even lost due to egregious snitching. The purchase of “snitch” information continues to be a mainstay of federal law enforcement. In 1994, the DEA spent $31.7 million while Customs spent $16.5 million on thousands of informants. Such practices have prompted protests from civil libertarians and attorneys but in today's fearful society, no one seems too concerned.

Although accurate numbers are hard to come by, a book entitled Informants and Undecover Investigations reported that a 2005 Inspector General's report revealed the DEA has about 4,000 “confidential sources” at hand on any given day. They may be paid up to $100,000 a year for their information, although their paycheck must be approved by DEA headquarters. The book's author, Dennis G. Fitzgerald, is a former police supervisor with the Miami Police Department and was a special agent with the DEA. He was the co-founder and director of the National Institute for Drug Enforcement Training and a visiting faculty member at the FBI’s International Law Enforcement Training Academy.

The FBI can pay up to $25,000 to informants for information on serious crimes. Under a program called “Rewards for Justice,” both US State and Treasury Department, can offer money to informants for information leading to the arrest and conviction of any terrorist or terrorist group. By September 2005, more than $50 million had been paid out from this fund. One can only imagine how the lure of $100,000 to a million dollars simply to find some sort of terrorist activity could highly induce an average person to make false claims.

If opposition to the TIPS network and the growing “snitch culture” in America seems a bit paranoid, consider the plight of A. J. Brown, a freshman at Durham Tech in North Carolina who received some unwelcome visitors on October 26, 2001. Answering a knock on her apartment door, Brown found herself face to face with two men in suits. “Hi, we're from the Raleigh branch of the Secret Service,” said one of the men flipping out an ID folder. “I was like, ‘What?’ recalled Brown. “And they say, ‘We're here because we have a report that you have un-American material in your apartment.’ And I was like, ‘What? No, I don't have anything like that.’ ‘Are you sure? Because we got a report that you've got a poster that's anti-American.’ And I said no.” The agents wanted to enter Brown's apartment but she asked if they had a warrant. “And they said no, they didn't have a warrant but they wanted to just come in and look around. And I said, ‘Sorry, you're not coming in.’”

Standing in her doorway, the agents said they knew she had a poster in her apartment of President Bush hanging himself. Brown denied this and after long minutes opened the door wide enough for the agents to see her poster. It was a picture of Bush holding a rope with the caption, “We Hang on Your Every Word. George Bush Wanted: 152 Dead.” The poster also contained drawings of people being hanged. It was a political poster referring to the number of persons subjected to the death penalty in Texas while Bush was governor.

The agents finally left after about 40 minutes but called Brown back two days later to confirm her name, address, phone number and nicknames. “Obviously, I’m on some list somewhere,” she commented.

Dwight Scarbrough is a Navy veteran who served as a machinist on submarines from 1975 to 1980. He was a good American until February 7, 2006 when he showed up for his work at a federal natural resource agency at Boise, Idaho. That's when he was ordered to the parking lot by armed officers of Homeland Security and told he was in violation of the Code of Federal Regulations. His violation? His pickup truck had bumper stickers reading “Honor Vets, Wage Peace,” and “Another Veteran Against War with Iraq.” Even though Scarbrough noted the stickers were not on federal property but on his own private property, he was told to remove them or be cited for a violation.

The quick-thinking vet brought a tape recorder and taped the following conversation: “Sir, you've got signs posted on your vehicle. I’m informing you that you're in violation,” said one officer.

Scarbrough replied, “That's not illegal. That's not illegal.”

The Homeland Security men continued to demand that he remove the signs or be cited for a violation.

“You know this is BS,” Scarbrough exclaimed. “So any vehicle that comes on with, like a police sign, or with delivery or FedEx or something, that's not a sign?”

One officer replied: “All signs are prohibited.”

Once this story broke in the local media, no further action was taken and no official of Homeland Security would comment on the incident.

And it's not all about college students or Navy veterans. A New York comedian, reported only as “Joe” on National Public Radio in September 2010, for reasons which will become obvious, became irked when he could not get an iPhone to work after spending $600 and getting the runaround at the store where he made the purchase. After picking some aggressive lines from the cult movie Fight Club, Joe posted them on his “personal” profile on Facebook. He intended them only for some of his friends, so Joe was shocked when less than an hour after his posting he answered his door to find four plainclothes government agents with drawn guns. They pushed their way into his home and began ransacking the place, all the time telling Joe, “Homeland Security wants to talk to you, so we're taking you downtown.”

After the agents quoted lines back to him from his Facebook post, Joe realized they had monitored his private Facebook profile. Joe was told by the agents he would get into even more trouble if he gave speeches about the Constitution or suggested that surrendering our rights to a police state would mean the “terrorists have won.” Joe was charged with two counts of “terroristic threatening,” but after he kept demanding a jury trial and refusing government plea bargains, the charges were dropped.

Even school kids are not immune to Homeland Security. Katie Sierra, a 15-year-old sophomore at Sissonville High School in West Virginia, wanted to form an Anarchist Club at her school and handed out fliers, stating, “Anarchism preaches to love all humans, not just of one country…” She also wore a tee shirt which read, “Racism, Sexism, Homophobia, I’m So Proud of People in the Land of the So-Called Free.”

Sierra was suspended and her fellow students shoved her and posted pictures of the girl with bullet holes in her head. After losing a court battle for reinstatement in the State Supreme Court by a 3-to-2 vote, Sierra said, “I’m really disgusted with the courts right now and with the school. I’m being punished for being myself.”

Children were especially susceptible to recruitment through the various programs being dreamed up today. And the US military played it own role. The principal of Mount Anthony Union High School in Bennington, VT, was shocked in the spring of 2002 to receive a letter from military recruiters demanding a list of all students, including names, addresses and telephone numbers. As the school's privacy policy prevented the disclosure of such individual information, the principal told the recruiters no. She was doubly shocked to learn that buried deep within President Bush's new education law passed earlier in 2002, the No Child Left Behind Act, public schools must provide such information to military recruiters or face a cutoff of federal funds.

Republican Rep. David Vitter of Louisiana, who sponsored the recruitment requirement in the education bill, noted that in 1999, more than 19,000 US schools denied military recruiters access to their records. Vitter said such schools “demonstrated an anti-military attitude that I thought was offensive.”

“I think the privacy implications of this law are profound,” commented Jill Wynns, president of the San Francisco Board of Education. “For the federal government to ignore or discount the concerns of the privacy rights of millions of high school students is not a good thing, and it's something we should be concerned about.”

Even journalists and academics have come under fire for not acceding to the mob mentality. Robert Jensen is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He published a column in the Houston Chronicle on September 14, 2001, pointing out that while the 9/11 attacks were “reprehensible and indefensible,” the acts were “no more despicable [than] the massive acts of terrorism, the deliberate killing of civilians for political purposes, that the US government has committed during my lifetime.”

Jensen's column was rebutted by the university president, Larry R. Faulkner, who labeled Jensen as “not only misguided but [he] has become a fountain of undiluted foolishness on issues of public policy.” “I’ve been marginalized on this campus,” lamented Jensen.

Newspaper writers Dan Guthrie of Oregon's Grants Pass Daily Courier and Tom Gutting of the Texas City Sun both wrote caustically of President Bush's irregular flight across American on 9/11. “What we are stuck with is a crippled President who continues to be controlled by his advisers. He's not a leader. He's a puppet,” wrote Gutting, who said that the day his piece ran his publisher assured him he would not be fired for expressing his opinion. But the publisher printed a front-page apology for Gutting's column and a few days later changed his mind about firing him.

Guthrie, who had won several awards, including best columnist in Oregon, wrote that Bush “skedaddled” on September 11. “The picture of Bush hiding in a Nebraska hole [was] an embarrassment,” he wrote. Even though the paper's editor and his city editor had signed off on his piece, Guthrie soon joined Gutting in the ranks of the unemployed.

Still, the reporters got off lighter than Richard Allen Humphreys, who described himself as a religious prophet. He was found guilty in late October 2002, by a Sioux Falls jury of threatening President Bush and faced as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A bartender at a truck stop overheard Humphreys mention “burning bush” and called police. A search of Humphreys’ hotel room yielded a card with President Bush's name on it and the words, “Intimidation in the First Degree.” In a transcript of a Internet Chat room conversation, Humphreys had written, “now going to ask Bush for justice, and if I don't get it don't be surprised to see a Burning Bush.” Humphreys, who represented himself in court, said he was on a “discipleship journey” and was not threatening the president but merely exercising his right to religious expression.

Apparently not even traditional American activities such as taking pictures around town are exempt from the scrutiny of Homeland Security enforcers. Amateur photographer Mike Maginnis was intrigued by all the activity around Denver's Adams Mark Hotel in early December 2002, which included Denver police, Army rangers and rooftop snipers. Maginnis, who works in information technology and frequently shoots photos of corporate buildings and communications equipment, took a few snapshots. He was then confronted by a Denver policeman who demanded his camera. When he refused to hand over his expensive Nikon F2, he was pushed to the ground and arrested.

After being held in a Denver police station, Maginnis was interrogated by a Secret Service agent. He learned that Vice President Cheney was staying in the area and that he was to be charged as a terrorist under the USA PATRIOT Act. According to Maginnis, the agent tried to make him confess to being a terrorist and called him a “raghead collaborator” and “dirty pinko faggot.”

After being held for several hours, Maginnis was released without explanation. When his attorney contacted the Denver police for an explanation, they denied ever arresting Maginnis.

Yet another case involved a kindergarten student who only wanted to play. In May 2002 Scott and Cassandra Garrick of New Jersey, sued the Sayreville School District after their 6-year-old kindergarten student and three classmates were disciplined for playing cops and robbers. It seems other students saw the youngsters playing on the school-yard while pretending their fingers were guns. They told a teacher and the kindergartners were suspended from school.

US District Judge Katherine S. Hayden dismissed a civil suit filed by the parents, claiming school authorities have the right to restrict violent or disruptive games. The parents’ attorney, Steven H. Aden, commented, “They have the right to be children. The school and the courts shouldn't censor their play [even if] it's politically incorrect.”

Such incidents are rarely covered in the corporate mass media and never distributed to a large audience but they worry thoughtful people.

“I’m terrified,” said Ellen Schrecker, author of Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. “What concerns me is we're not seeing an enormous outcry against this whole structure of repression that's being rushed into place by the Bush administration.” Former ACLU President Nadine Strossen also voiced concern. “I’ve been talking a lot about the parallels between what we're going through now and McCarthyism. The term ‘terrorism’ is taking on the same kind of characteristics as the term ‘communism’ did in the 1950s. It stops people in their tracks and they're willing to give up their freedoms. People are too quickly panicked. They are too willing to give up their rights and to scapegoat people, especially immigrants and people who criticize the war.”

“Besides being unconstitutional and un-American, snooping on innocent people in a free society is cowardly, divisive and just plan evil,” argued Internet columnist Paul Proctor. “Regardless of whether or not President Bush's motives are honorable, the fact remains that in tattle tailing for the federal government, anyone with a personal grievance against another individual or group could literally wreck havoc on them with such powers. Needless to say, the potential for tragedy and abuse is huge.

“How secure do you think you are going to feel in this escalating ‘War on Terrorism’ burdened with the grim knowledge that you're always going to be watched by someone somewhere reporting your personal activities, conversations and correspondence to an unaccountable hierarchy that, in the interest of ‘Homeland Security,’ has the legal authority to take from you whatever they want, anytime they want, without so much as a warrant or a knock on the door.”

Such concerns came to full fruition in September 2010, when, under President Obama's administration of “change,” government agents launched raids against anti-war activists in Illinois, Minneapolis, Michigan, and North Carolina. One of the homes raided by FBI and BATF agents was that of Minneapolis activist Mick Kelly, who viewed the government's action as nothing more than harassment to intimidate those who organize war protests. Some saw this action as a natural follow up to the words of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who claimed such efforts were “to counter violent extremism right here at home.” Former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts said such words “clearly indicate that the federal police agency and the judges who signed the warrants do not regard anti-war protesters as Americans exercising their constitutional rights, but as unpatriotic elements offering material support to terrorism.”

Explaining the tactics in play, Roberts explained, “As this initial FBI foray is a softening up move to get the public accustomed to the idea that the real terrorists are their fellow citizens here at home, Kelly will get off this time. But next time the FBI will find emails on his computer from a ‘terrorist group’ set up by the CIA that will incriminate him. Under the practices put in place by the Bush and Obama regimes, and approved by corrupt federal judges, protesters who have been compromised by fake terrorist groups can be declared ‘enemy combatants’ and sent off to Egypt, Poland, or some other corrupt American puppet state—Canada perhaps—to be tortured until confession is forthcoming that anti-war protesters and, indeed, every critic of the US government, are on Osama bin Laden's payroll.

“Almost every Republican and conservative and, indeed, the majority of Americans will fall for this, only to find, later, that it is subversive to complain that their Social Security was cut in the interest of the war against Iran or some other demonized entity, or that they couldn't have a Medicare operation because the wars in Central Asia and South America required the money.”

Even under the Obama administration, the erosion of civil liberties continued unabated. In September 2010, Obama's Justice Department urged a federal appeals court to allow the government to place GPS tracking devices on suspects’ vehicles without a court warrant, arguing that Americans should not expect privacy in public places. This argument came after Justice Department attorneys sought to rehear a case in which a three-judge panel had reversed the conviction of a drug dealer whose vehicle was tracked for a month without a court-issued warrant. Assistant US Attorney Peter Smith argued, “The panel's conclusion that [the defendant] had a reasonable expectation of privacy in the public movements of his Jeep rested on the premise that an individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the totality of his or her movements in public places.” Smith noted three other circuit courts had already ruled that authorities do not need a warrant for GPS vehicle tracking.

Noting President Bush's claim that terrorism threatens our freedom, columnist Paul Proctor added, “But, you see—terrorists don't want your freedom—they want your life. It is tyrants and dictators that want your freedom.”