Spying Policies
Bring Whiff
Of Dictatorship

Right now, President George W. Bush is mustering his forces to defend and continue unchecked spying. This is where the United States will turn a new corner toward tyranny or turn back to the system of checks and balances that pits the executive, legislative and judicial systems against each other when they seek to work alone.

Yes, the systems always work against each other unless or until they are oiled by compromise and a reliance upon Constitutional principles. This is the way they are supposed to function, grinding against each other with the Constitution as the mainspring. The founding fathers were well aware of government power and they knew very well that the three sources of government power have to work somewhat at odds with each other to form a stable government.

The concept is the foundation of this country; the very center of all stable order: three equal pillars of power.

Always there has been worry about George W. Bush, ever since his questionable appointment to the presidency by a GOP oriented majority 9on the supreme court. The fear was the same from the start; i.e., that Mr. Bush would try to push the presidency to a higher position than the Congress or the Supreme Court. That fear is now being realized. George Bush has now plainly and clearly declared that he alone has the right to tap the telephones of Americans, just in case they might be called by terrorist forces.

This, he says, is necessary for American security. Terrorists must be stopped at all costs. But what does ‘all costs’ mean?

- All costs means the executive can dispense with or throw out all other laws; he just has to declare it is all in the interests of catching or thwarting terrorists. The latter is very convenient because freedoms can be breached or curtailed and it can be suggested that since no terrorist attacks have occurred, the policies were successful. Double-think.

- At all costs means this will continue until all terrorists are quelled.

- All costs means trumping the Constitutional rights of Americans until terrorists are brought to justice.

- All costs mean the president has the sole power and discretion to decide who shall be considered terrorists, anywhere, at any time.

In other words, such a president would have absolute power, and could spy on anything or anyone at any time for any reason. Oh, it might not happen overnight. These forms of absolute power usually take a little time to develop into a codified system; a ruling power structure.

But such will be the case if they aren’t halted at the outset. This is not a guess.

This will happen. Any time a mighty head of state takes on new powers of state, he or she uses them. And any time they are not checked by a contrary government power, they expand. And it is always, always accomplished under the excuse that dire necessity is driving the leader to use excessive power.

In the 1930’s, the Nazi takeover of German government power was notorious, and simplistic; making the Jewish minority the scapegoat and excuse was easy to do, given Europe's long, prejudiced history. In less than ten years after coming to power, killing Jews had become codified as the ultimate goal of the law structure, although not widely acknowledged publicly, even to the mass of the German people. What was shown was that the Jews were going to be removed, by law, to make the country stronger and more ethnically pure, more German. The fact they were to be liquidated was simply a well-known secret.

There always has to be a scapegoat. And now, unfortunately, America is confronted with an amorphous, elusive enemy driven by radical, fundamentalist ideology, and this Islamic-Fascist movement, while rooted in the Middle East, has been spreading like a virus among Muslim’s everywhere. This terrorist ideology has created much havoc, and is responsible for many innocent deaths, but its magnitude – so far – is much less than the death and destruction brought about by the earlier fascist movements that swept Europe and brought about WWII. But instead of seeking to attack the disease at its roots, offering positive alternatives to the downtrodden Arab populations that are so vulnerable to Islamo-fascist propaganda because they see no alternatives, the Bush Administration fights the symptoms as they erupt, which of course serves to ensure that terrorism will be a constant threat and a reason for radical domestic policies.

What has given the Islamic-Fascist movement its weight has been the advances of real-time, international electronic media; television and the world-wide net. Its crimes, particularly its one spectacular success, the 9/11 attack, are presented immediately and discussed incessantly.

So terrorism is the current catalyst for power grabs.

In China, supposedly fighting the corruption of the Chiang Kai Shek national government, and its failure to protect the country against the Japanese in WWII, Mao se Tung won power and drove even the professionals to the farms for government purposes.

On the other side of the globe, Russia’s Josef Stalin had been slaughtering thousands for the ‘good of government,’ after co-opting the so-called Communist Revolution and developing the system into Communist Totalitarianism that rivaled German Fascism..

It is not hard to imagine that if Mr. Bush gets his way in his drive toward nearly or complete executive power that he will not press his new powers toward ill ends too.

But it might not be Bush. It doesn’t have to be Bush; it’s the creation of a super-branch of government that is to be feared. If Mr. Bush is able to make the executive branch more powerful than the legislative and judicial branches, it will be only a matter of time before the unchecked power is used against everyone, beginning with data collection and spying.

It is inevitable that it will be misused. It is human nature to abuse unfettered power. Branding an issue ‘terrorist’ related will be the nitroglycerin. It can be used to describe anyone who thinks differently than the president. They don’t need guns and suicide bombs, just a different way of thinking. That will make them targets. And that literally means anybody who doubts the executive’s wishes.

Not his policies or official declarations but his wishes, for no one but he can deem a bit of spying necessary and only his own, personal judgments hold any weight. This is not a theory. This will happen.

History shows again and again that people given worldwide power use it and always end up abusing it. There are no exceptions. Congress will hold some hearings this new year and discuss this presidential power to spy at will and without oversight. But any congressman should be able to see that this flies in the face of Constitutional law.

This shreds the Constitution.

It makes the war against zealots a one-man war: Bush vs. zealots, the supporters of zealots, the people who teach children about zealots, the mothers who bear zealots, anybody the president thinks might become a zealot, and then vs. any American who sees a different way of approaching the problem and is therefore most likely a closet zealot.

What’s to stop it?

In such a scenario, no one will stop the president unless they somehow start a rollback of the Bush revolution. Literally, it will take at least a Congressional or Supreme Court counterrevolution to reverse this unchecked power. If neither can manage it, then there will be unhidden dictatorship.

Make no mistake, if the president can spy on anyone at all, he will. That is why this year’s battle in the Congress is the most important test the country has gone through since the Civil War. Sure, Bush is saying his programming of spying is "limited." By whom is it limited? By Mr. Bush? 

Congress cannot be so foolish as to think for a moment that one person’s idea of what is "limited" can be trusted. Spying is, by its nature, unlimited. So far Americans have seen Bush’s administration reveal Valerie Plame as a Central Intelligence Agency because her husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson IV, did not find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Nigeria.

Screw the agent.  Just make the ambassador look bad. That was the attitude.

How about the American treatment of the press in Iraq? Americans paid Iraqi newspapers to publish the stories that Americans had written. They made America look good. This, mind you, in the land we are trying to convert to democracy.

Democracy requires, above all else, a free press. This is not a maybe. Free press is America’s bloodline. Without it, America dies. But Bush allowed the "free" press to operate with Americans pretending to create Iraq news: a press for sale. Well, some may say, the Plame problem was a mistake and the buying of Iraq press space is just the way things are done over there. OK, then, consider if you dare that those two instances are simple errors.  But do not think of the unauthorized spying as a simple little measure to better insure American security. It is not that at all.

It is America, before Congress, deciding whether it will be free: Nothing less.

W.F.