The Persecution of Juan Cole
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The revelation
by Glenn Carle, a former CIA official, that the Bush White House
sought information on Prof. Juan
Cole, an academic and critic of the Iraq war, in order to discredit
him is hardly shocking, at least to anyone of my generation. After
all, I reached political consciousness during the administration
of Richard
M. Nixon, whose hijinks – the Watergate
break-in, the infamous COINTELPRO
operation – are well known. Less well-known is the long history
of police state tactics by previous administrations, running all
the way back to FDR
and Woodrow
Wilson, two wartime presidents who set
the pace for their successors.
Sure, now we have laws supposedly forbidding a repeat of history,
and yet, existing right alongside these prohibitions, we have legislation
like the
PATRIOT Act, which empowers the feds to read our emails, monitor
our political activities, and pretty
much do what it pleases in the name of fighting our endless
“war on terrorism.” Congress has renewed the Act, year after year,
with clocklike regularity, and the nation’s liberals, as well as
the supposedly “limited government” conservatives, aren’t making
much of a fuss about it. As the first
in a series of articles by Dana Priest and William M. Arkin in the
Washington Post, “Top
Secret America,” pointed out,
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“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”
It’s the only growth industry we have left, apparently:
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“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.”
Granted near
absolute power to operate with impunity – to collect information
on us, through fair means or foul – this vast army of spies, stool
pigeons, and “analysts” is bound to do precisely what they were
doing to Professor Cole because that’s their job. The idea
that the information-gathering function of our national security
bureaucracy can be separated out from any malign intent – and that
it was this intent, rather than the act of collecting information,
that was the real transgression – is reflected in the New York
Times’ account:
“The experts said it might not be unlawful for the C.I.A. to
provide the White House with open source material – from public
databases or published material, for example – about an American
citizen. But if the intent was to discredit a political critic,
that would be improper, they said.”
For what purpose would the CIA or any similar government agency be collecting information on American citizens other than to discover facts that might bring discredit on them? The idea that such intelligence gathering is basically benign, and can only be considered illegal and/or impermissible on account of intent, is how they manage to get away with it.
June 18, 2011
Justin Raimondo [send him mail] is editorial director of Antiwar.com and is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard and Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement.
Copyright © 2011 Antiwar.com