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This week for my six hours I've been reading Fair Game, learning more and more about the administration's criminal activity surrounding the leak of former CIA operative Valerie Wilson's identity. Thoughts of Wilson's memoir provided the background for my encounter with Dan Abram's broadcast last night.

Abrams updated us on the former Alabama governor who is languishing in prison, possibly as another Karl Rove political payback. (It was Rove who told Chris Matthews that Wilson was "fair game" after her Ambassador husband Joe Wilson spoke out about the administration's fast and loose "interpretation" of intelligence in the lead up to the Iraq invasion.)

On the same broadcast, we learned about an episode on the game show "The Moment of Truth", where people compete to win money by answering intimate questions while hooked up to a polygraph machine. One woman revealed that she had cheated on her husband and wanted to be married to another man. The couple has since separated. The show is pulling high ratings.

So, why have the fates given us this public spectacle in which people are paid to commit painful honesty that ruins their lives right around the time that a newly created database allows us to search and examine the administration's Iraq-related lies? Lies that have destroyed millions of lives? High crimes that have had few real life repercussions for the perpetrators?

Neither Congress nor the American people insist on truth and justice from our highest officials. As the public assents to illegal spying and official lying, we want to watch everyday individuals squirm in the messy, explosive orgies of honesty-fueled cringe.

Sadness and disgust don't even begin to describe how it feels to lose faith in public desire to maintain legitimate accountability and, thus, genuine democracy. We seem to only want truth in its most sadistic forms.

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From Joe Conason's It Can Happen Here:

The Pentagon had established a secret domestic counterintelligence program, known as TALON, to gather 'non-validated threat information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity.' What that bit of jargon meant in practice, according to documents obtained by NBC and Newsweek, was monitoring peace groups and other political groups deemed hostile to the administration. In TALON's database files were thousands of pages of dossiers devoted to antiwar meetings and protests.

The pretext for compiling this database of dissenters was that they might pose a threat to the Defense Department's installations and personnel, although there was no evidence that the protest groups had contemplated any violent or illegal action. As part of the 'terrorism threat warning process,' the TALON investigators filed reports on peaceful protests, including an antiwar rally at Hollywood and Vine streets in Los Angeles, a gathering at a Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida, and an anticorruption demonstration at the headquarters of the Haliburton Corporation in Houston, Texas.

Events such as these were labeled "suspicious incidents" and possible national security threats.

TALON was instituted in May 2003 at the behest of Paul Wolfowitz after the Iraq invasion was "completed," with operations housed in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Office (CIFA). The program was closed September 17, 2007 due to controversy. Reports are now funneled through an FBI database known as Guardian.

It Can Happen Here, pgs 192 - 193.
Pentagon Shutting Down Domestic Spying Database - Wired
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No major patriotic accomplishments this week -- unless you consider losing sleep productive. Finding out that there are Guantanamo-like no-man's lands on U.S. soil scared the shit out of me.

Australian-born U.S. citizen Anne Summers recently had trouble entering and leaving the U.S.:

Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer', she told TSA agents. `Ma'am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,' they replied. `You have not entered the United States.'

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States' -- though it is squarely inside the airport -- so the laws of the US do not apply.

What?? Who approved this? Is there a list of regions in the U.S. where the law doesn't apply so, you know, we can avoid them if we want to?

Imagine if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents who has done little more than exercise constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly but have found yourself "on the list." Until I started reading David Cunningham's sociological analysis There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, I didn't understand the logic behind endlessly investigating people who had broken no laws and only wanted to prevent senseless killing. But I think his detached study of the ways the FBI used counterintelligence against the New Left and the Klan can tell us a lot about what many Americans are enduring now at the hands of our politically saturated intelligence agencies:

"At times [The FBI's] intelligence activities have have been reactive, responding to illegal or politically extreme actions or rhetoric, but more often agents have monitored targets for their perceived potential to engage in such dissident activity. In this way, the Bureau has fashioned a mission that stresses agents' ability to anticipate future threats, often indiscriminately targeting suspects for their ostensible hidden activities. From the FBI's perspective, certain political groupings - including "anarchists," "communists," and "terrorists" - are subversive and are therefore legitimate intelligence targets, even in the absence of visible challenges to the state, precisely because they represent a broader, invisible conspiracy. The logic of conspiracy is insidious and self-reinforcing: the continued investigation of targets is justified whether or not agents uncover evidence of actual insurrectionary activities, as a lack of such evidence merely signals a deeper conspiracy that an be exposed only through still more intensive investigation" (pgs. 8-9).

What would it be like to be on the other side of such a wild goose chase? Are these the sort of intelligence expenditures that will shield us from people who actually want to harm us?

~~ There's Something Happening Here

Of course we have goodies for trick-or-treaters this Halloween week, but I'm also giving away books.

So far, around five of fifteen copies of the The End of America have been handed off to friends and acquaintances. Fifteen was what I could afford now, but thanks to a donation from my lovely mom ten more are on the way! It's a quick and dirty read -- I ask recipients to either pass it on or return it to me so I can give it to someone else.

If you want to get vital information into your friends' hands, copies are on sale at Amazon for only $8.37 at this moment. If you link through this page to shop, a portion of your purchase goes to Amnesty International.

~~ The End of America 

Naomi Wolf's The End of America is an essential tool. Every U.S. resident should read it. Yes, it has flaws, but they hardly diminish the book's impact. Please read it. ASAP. I finished it over the weekend: 155 pages and not very dense.

One of the great things about Wolf's call-to-action pamphlet is that, without succumbing to conspiracy theory or hyperbole, it paints a dire picture of the ways our civil liberties have been trampled in the last six years. Rhetorical comparisons between Bush and Hitler have always irritated me -- there's no quicker way to lose credibility than to throw the world "fascist" around willy-nilly. Wolf is careful, however. She compares ours with societies that have experienced "fascist shifts," and the "echoes" she identifies are quite resonant. Whether or not the steps taken by the Bush administration have been deliberate, we should be in a state of alarm.

To get a quick look at ten steps that fascist regimes take, and how our administration's actions fit, take a gander at this April Guardian article.

I do think that The End of America would have a broader appeal if it acknowledged explicitly from the outset that Americans have not experienced "liberty" equally. Noting the inequalities that were built into the Constitution, the run of the mill rights violations that are connected to racial and economic disparity, and the way in which the FBI has historically violated individuals' rights as a matter of practice would not diminish her argument.

Really, Wolf's is the privileged perspective of someone who (like yours truly) has always taken her rights for granted. But the fact of her alarm is telling. If an elite, white, former Rhodes Scholar is gravely concerned about her own basic liberties, the possibility of an America truly committed to justice and equality may truly be on the wane.

Read it!

~~ The End of America