by Jim Marrs
HATE CRIMES
IT SHOULD BE NOTED that the SPLC has come under its share of criticism, despite well-funded promotion and close ties to Democratic politics. Founded in 1971 by Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin Jr., the nonprofit center has fought to enact laws against hate crimes ranging from hate-inspired murder to outbursts of speech. The SPLC often invokes the name of Oklahoma City bomber McVeigh, thought to be connected to white supremacist groups, as an example of the results of hate crime.
The SPLC regularly conducts highly profitable fund-raising activities. According to Ken Silverstein of Harper’s magazine, one example occurred about ten years ago when “The Center earned $44 million…$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments—but spent only $13 million on civil rights programs, making it one of the most profitable charities in the country.” By 2005, the SPLC reported an endowment fund of more than $152 million.
Armed with millions of dollars, the SPLC has displayed a hatred for haters. The center disparaged the Minuteman Project, a group devoted to preventing illegal border crossings into the United States from Mexico. On the SPLC website, it was reported, “major elements of the Minuteman anti-immigration movement are broadening their agenda to become part of a resurgent antigovernment ‘Patriot’ movement.” Internet commentator Judy Andreas, who conducted an in-depth investigation of the SPLC, stated, “The Southern Poverty Law Center may, at one time, have been a force dedicated to preserving the American Values of freedom and constitutional rights through American law, but they have strayed far afield of their initially stated goals. Today they are wildly flailing accusations at anyone who, in their estimation, is guilty of a ‘hate’ crime. And as their brush continues to broaden, they are busily applying sweeping strokes to the word ‘racism’ and hungrily scanning the landscape for anyone who dares to oppose the actions of any non-white individual, group or nation. Whether the non-white individual has committed an act of criminal conduct appears to be irrelevant to the SPLC.”
Despite trying to obtain donations while pressing for more “hate crime” legislation, the SPLC’s own website, quoting crime experts, admitted that the whole hate crime reporting system is plagued with errors. Regardless, the SPLC’s lobbying efforts proved successful in late October 2009, when Congress passed (68–29 in the Senate; 237–180 in the House) the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act, named after a gay Wyoming college student murdered in 1998. This bill broadened the formerly narrow range of actions (e.g., discrimination in admittance to school or voting) that makes it acceptable for the federal government to intervene in cases where a state is unwilling or unable to prosecute an alleged hate crime.
Joe Solmonese, president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the nation’s largest gay rights group, was pleased with the bill, describing it as “our nation’s first major piece of civil rights legislation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Too many in our community have been devastated by hate violence.”
Yet there was still controversy with the bill. After Iowa Republican representative Steve King failed in his effort to add an amendment specifying that pedophiles could not use the law as protection of their conduct, the bill was derisively nicknamed “The Pedophile Protection Act.” South Carolina senator Jim DeMint believed the bill was a “dangerous step” toward thought crimes and serves “as a warning to people not to speak out too loudly about their religious views.” How could legislation that has prompted so much controversy and debate sail through Congress?
The answer is simple. It was attached to the $680 billion defense appropriations bill. Congress had the choice of voting for expanding the dubious hate crime laws or voting against funding the nation’s military personnel.
“The inclusion of the controversial language of the hate crimes legislation, which is unrelated to our national defense, is deeply troubling,” said Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, one of the Republicans who voted against the bill.
DARPA
EVADING CONFINEMENT IN A military-run FEMA camp or hoping for assistance from an Oath Keeper may be the least of a modern American’s worries. The government is now intruding into the public’s lives on a wide scale. In any police state, surveillance of the population is paramount.
In late 2002, it was revealed that the army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, planned to use high-powered computers to secretly search the citizenry’s e-mail messages, credit card purchases, telephone records, and bank statements on the chance that one might be associated, or sympathetic to, terrorists. Meanwhile, the Pentagon’s new Office of Information Awareness (OIA) was to create a “vast centralized database” filled with information on the minutest details of citizens’ private lives.
Opponents of this plan were incensed at the appointment of John Poindexter, a former national security adviser and vice admiral, as the head of the OIA. Poindexter had previously been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, which involved the illegal sale of weapons to Iran and using the profits to fund the CIA-backed Contra army fighting in Nicaragua, all done in defiance of Congress. Poindexter lost his national security adviser job in 1990 after being convicted of lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence. But from 1996 to 2003, as vice president of Syntek Technologies, Poindexter worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop Genoa, a powerful search engine and information-harvesting program. In 2002 and 2003, he served as director of the DARPA Information Awareness Office (IAO), tasked with creating all-encompassing electronic and computer surveillance—total information awareness—in the war on terrorism. But after a public outcry over the possibility that such a mass surveillance program could be turned on honest Americans, Congress stopped IAO funding and Poindexter lost his job. Researchers believe that some of the IAO programs continue to operate today under different names and other funding.
Christopher H. Pyle, a teacher of constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College, wrote, “That law enforcement agencies would search for terrorists makes sense. Terrorists are criminals. But why the Army? It is a criminal offense for Army personnel to become directly involved in civilian law enforcement [the Posse Comitatus Act]. Are they seeking to identify anti-war demonstrators whom they harassed in the 1960s? Are they getting ready to round up more civilians for detention without trial, as they did to Japanese Americans during World War II? Is counterterrorism becoming the sort of investigative obsession that anti-Communism was in the 1950s and 1960s, with all the bureaucratic excesses and abuses that entailed? This isn’t the first time that the military has slipped the bounds of law to spy on civilians. In the late 1960s, it secretly gathered personal information on more than a million law-abiding Americans in a misguided effort to quell anti-war demonstrations, predict riots and discredit protesters. I know because in 1970, as a former captain in Army intelligence, I disclosed the existence of that program.”
While writing two book-length reports on army spying for Senator Sam Ervin’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Pyle was struck by the harm that could be done to the nation if the government ever gained untraceable access to the financial records and private correspondences of its critics. “Army intelligence was nowhere near as bad as the FBI [with its infamous COINTELPRO], but it responded to my criticisms by putting me on Nixon’s ‘enemies list,’ which meant a punitive tax audit. It also tried to monitor my mail and prevent me from testifying before Congress by spreading false stories that I had fathered illegitimate children. I often wondered what the intelligence community could do to people like me if it really became efficient.”
Today, national security programs are gaining that efficiency, thanks to the proliferation of computer technology. In his book The Puzzle Palace, author James Bamford wrote about two new locations for National Security Agency (NSA) databases—one in Utah and the other in Texas. Apparently lacking space at Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA headquarters needed
new space to house “trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital ‘pocket litter.’
“Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T’s major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America’s version of [a] ‘big brother database,’” wrote Bamford.
Bamford was skeptical as to whether the NSA’s surveillance would even benefit the country in any ways. “Based on the NSA’s history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago,” said Bamford. “The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the [NSA] director’s office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.”
Although more thoughtful and aware citizens are concerned enough with the potential misuse of the nationwide electronic surveillance systems increasingly coming online, most are blissfully unaware that these systems, whether operated by military or civilian intelligence agencies, are commanded at the highest levels of the federal government, which have been demonstrated in this work to be filled with globalists seeking to control the world and its population.
ELECTRONIC SURVEILLANCE
THE POTENTIAL FOR “BIG BROTHER” surveillance has been part of American life for decades. As far back as 1975, Senator Frank Church performed a study of the National Security Agency (NSA) and warned Congress, “That [the NSA] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.” It is ironic that Bush bypassed the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was passed after President Nixon used the NSA to spy domestically on political enemies.
The PATRIOT Act, which clearly abridges many American rights, was built upon the little-known FISA bill, which cracked the door open to secret government searches. FISA was passed in the contingencies of the cold war and in the wake of revelations of abuse in surveillance by the FBI and CIA.
The FISA law created the secret federal Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which meets in total secrecy to routinely approve covert surveillances on non-Americans by intelligence agencies. All applications to the court must be approved by the attorney general. Either federal prosecutors are extremely efficient and effective in their work or the federal judges (originally numbering seven but expanded to eleven by the PATRIOT Act) who make up this secret court are not picky about the Constitution because out of the some twelve thousand requests for secret surveillances and physical searches made during the first twenty-three years of the FISC, not one application was denied until four in 2003.
Why the sudden scrutiny of surveillance requests to the FISC? This was due to provisions of the PATRIOT Act, drafted by the Bush administration and secretly fine-tuned by the House and Senate leadership, that expanded FISA to include Americans.
Although FISA legislation was meant to impose limits and a review process upon warrantless surveillance and searches conducted for “national security” purposes, the current use of the FISA process, now expanded through the PATRIOT Act and its revisions, has resulted in the erosion of numerous constitutional rights and basic legal procedures traced back to the Magna Carta.
Church’s warning that the NSA’s surveillance ability could be turned on Americans became reality thirty years later when President George W. Bush ordered the NSA to monitor Americans without seeking warrants from the special intelligence court (FISC) or any other court. It was also revealed in 2006 that the NSA had already been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans using data from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, the three largest companies in the United States. General Michael Hayden, appointed director of the CIA in 2006, oversaw the program during his tenure heading the NSA.
During the Bush years, wiretapping and surveillance became highly politicized after the New York Times disclosed to the public news of a secret electronic monitoring program that had swept up information on American citizens for years without court approval. Controversy grew in early 2006 when it was reported that President Bush had instructed the NSA to electronically monitor Americans for signs of terrorism.
It is interesting to note that elements of the PATRIOT Act existed even before George W. Bush came into office. One feature of the PATRIOT Act that was approved in 2001 had actually been introduced (yet failed to pass) in 1998.
During the Clinton administration, there was a brief furor over proposed new federal banking regulations that would require all banks to report to the government any large deposits, withdrawals, or unusual activity from the banking public. Euphemistically called the “Know Your Customer” program, it heralded a new era where law-abiding citizens might have to defend their financial matters before government agents.
Under the program, banks would be required to create a profile of each customer and report any deviation from the profile to the feds. For example, if a person sold an unneeded car and then deposited the cash into his bank account, the banks would report this to the government. The bank computer would flag the transaction because the money from the car sale was an unusually large deposit based on the person’s previous deposit record. Federal authorities would be notified and soon agents would be sent to interrogate the customer on the chance he or she might be a drug dealer or terrorist.
In 1998, Representative Ron Paul planned to introduce legislation to stop this intrusive program, but an irate citizenry saved him the trouble. The schemers behind the proposal, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, the IRS, and other agencies, quickly backed off. Paul said quite prophetically, “Somehow, though, I imagine such action will not stop them, only slow them down.”
Paul was right. Almost all of the provisions of the Know Your Customer program can be found in the PATRIOT Act.
This legislation can undermine the general public’s ability to carry out their daily lives. It can red-flag your bank account if you deposit or withdraw a certain amount of money and this amount keeps changing. Once the government was notified if there was more than $10,000 involved. By 2010, this amount had dropped to $5,000. In early 2006, Rhode Island retired schoolteacher Walter Soehnge and his wife tried to pay down an excessive credit card bill with a JC Penney MasterCard. They sent in a check for $6,500 to pay down their debt. When the Soehnges found the money had not been credited to their account, they began to make inquiries. They were told that when a payment is much larger than usual, Homeland Security must be notified and that the money is held until a threat assessment is made.
The couple’s money was eventually freed, although they never found out how making a large credit card payment posed a threat to national security.
“If it can happen to me, it can happen to others,” Soehnge said.
Even after Congress revised the PATRIOT Act in 2006, portions of the act still concerned both libertarians and some congressmen. Representative C. L. “Butch” Otter of Idaho was one of the three Republicans who found the entire act potentially unconstitutional from th
e onset. One section made it illegal for one citizen to tell another that the authorities were conducting searches of his property or business. “Section 215 authorizes the FBI to acquire any business records whatsoever by order of a secret US Court. The recipient of such a search order is forbidden from telling any person that he has received such a request. This is a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech and the Fourth Amendment protection of private property,” commented Otter. “[S]ome of these provisions place more power in the hands of law enforcement than our Founding Fathers could have dreamt and severely compromises the civil liberties of law-abiding Americans. This bill, while crafted with good intentions, is rife with constitutional infringements I could not support.”
The issue of leveling penalties against persons who reveal how the government intrudes on private life was a central point of controversy when Congress renewed the PATRIOT Act in late 2005. The PATRIOT Act’s Section 215 contains a “gag order” clause that was retained by Congress only after legislators reached a compromise on the wording. The gag order clause makes permissible the following scenario: if someone’s small business is searched by the FBI, that person is gagged from telling anyone that the feds were there. The compromise made gag orders effective only for a year after a secret search was conducted of a person’s property. But even then, one year seems too long for Americans to wait to learn that their government is spying on them.
It is no surprise that this compromise wasn’t sufficient for journalists covering the PATRIOT Act. According to a New York Times editorialist, “The compromise also fails to address another problem with Section 215: it lets the government go on fishing expeditions, spying on Americans with no connection to terrorism or foreign powers. The act should require the government, in order to get a subpoena, to show that there is a connection between the information it is seeking and a terrorist or a spy.”