State Surveillance and Repression

Friends,

        A private correspondent who prefers anonymity has passed along a
variety of well-informed and detailed observations about the combined and
collaborative roles of the intelligence and military communities among the
core states in suppressing popular dissent aound the world.  After
considerable editing and condensation, I forward them along to you, along
with portions of a related article that originally appeared in--of all
unlikely places--"Soldier of Fortune" magazine.  Collectively, they
bolster the case that the global ruling class is working on constructing
the coercive component of an emerging global capitalist empire to
complement the WTO/"free trade" economic component. The outlines of the
agenda for this entity are gradually clarifying, and seem to involve an
effort to abandon geography as a defining aspect, abandon as well the
legitimation function of state operation, while cannibalizing those
functions as privitized scraps carved out as spoils for the TNCs.  I
believe that the success or failure of this effort is the defining class
struggle of our time.

--Peter Grimes

===============================================================

I have followed this issue for years ever since Minarett of NSA
was exposed by the Church Committee.  The National Guard was
integrated into law enforcement a decade ago.  Discovery motions
are routinely denied by the courts.  The Guard claims not to
violate the Posse Commitatas act (prohibiting military forces
from operating as a domestic police force) because it only
provides training, intelligence, translation and clerical
services and does not participate in arrests.  They have joint
operating agreements and a joint training institute.  The
clerical and intelligence functions provided in support relies on
DARPA developed products, such as infra-red marijuanna sensors,
electronic sniffers and, of course, communications intercepts.
Many alleged informers mentioned in affidavits are in fact
electronic interceptions through CARNIVORE and ECHELON.  The
militarization of police as  provided for in S-2, is part of the
development of a global police force  The citizens are now in
effect subject to an occupying force, disguised as local law
enforcement.
    The lessons of the Church and Pike committees are soon
forgotten.  Law enforcement is now self-funding through
forfeitures and not subject to checks and balances.  The power of
the police will increase as we acquire more characteristics of a
third world country with its extremes in wealth and governmental
corruption.  Guard-trained SWAT squads will become the norm in
law enforcement.  Recently, a psychological barrier was breached
at the University of Northern Colorado, when partying students
were branded as rioters and shot by Greeley police using bean bag
and rubber bullets.  Cops fired on fellow citizens.  This is not
about foreign troops and police, as the paranoid right would like
to believe.  It is domestic, where the citizens are viewed as
foreign and conquered.  There was not even a hint of an
allegation of terrorism.  The need for an outside enemy has
passed.  The guard was very active co-ordinating between Boulder
and Greeley, with cell phones monitered (echelon).  As explained
to me by a guardsman, the communications were actually
intercepted in another country and forwarded to law enforcement
personnel in Colorado, because of the prohibition on domestic
spying.


                     *    *    *     *


   .  I had some other observations and additional thoughts... 

Many years ago, the First Independent Stock Transfer Agency had
been taken over and was being used to launder funds for the
Contras.
     A Denver Grand Jury tracking funds in an inter-related
scandal involving a Brokerage firm (owned by an Argentinian
national) tracked the funds to Switz, Grand Turks, Bahamas and
then to Credit Leonaise in France.  That particular transaction
bought an Exocet Missile that shot down a British Harrier in the
Malvinas\Falklands war.  Essentially, the US Government was
aiding the Argentenians at the time, who were training the
Contras.  When the Argentinians discovered that the US was also
aiding the Brits, they refused to further train the Contras. 
This is when the Israelis took over the training.
    Meanwhile, the CIA was busy training Bolivian intelligence
employees through Klaus Barbie and essentially took over the drug
trade in Central America. After dominating the trade, the
intelligence community, through the guise of antiterrorism
implemented policy changes, [effectively] declaring war on the
citizenry, using black funding for the political organization,
essentially operating a "Black Ops" political action committee. 
The war on drugs is essentially an war on the citizenry.  when
there is a war, intelligence has to be collected against the
enemy, hence carnivore and echelon.
    Sovereign states emerge,  based upon capital rather than
geography. Gegraphical states can't defend, because the enemy is
not corporeal, but corporate, with no social contracts, citizenry
or other accoutrements of statism.  The ghost states can make war
on geographical states by subverting the citizenry, sowing
confusion, by control of information, propaganda and
surveillance.   Keeping war going in S America is a distraction
and a proving ground for electronic warfare by electronic states. 



============================================================


from the March 1999 issue of Soldier of Fortune,

Concerned Citizens Opposed to Police States

The Thin Blurry Line:
When Cops and Soldiers Are One-and-the-Same

By Wayne Laugesen


    The role of police today has blurred, along with that of the
military. Today, personnel from all branches of military are
acting as police on foreign and domestic soil. And police--
representing local, state and federal departments--are acting
more as highly trained specops military units, complete with
black Ninja suits and automatic weapons.

"Since the late '80s we've been seeing the militarization of
police, and the policization of military," says Peter Kraska, a
professor of police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, who
has studied the militarization of police for more than a decade.
"These are converging forces. Soldiers are told to be cops, both
domestically and on foreign soil, and cops are becoming more like
soldiers, working in elite SWAT-style units."

On a recent morning in Detroit, residents of Cass Corridor awoke
to the sounds of explosives and massive gunfire. Those who didn't
hide looked outside to find an 80-member "special forces" team
from the Detroit Police Department engaged in a practice assault
on a vacant four-story building. Such drills are performed
routinely throughout the country in conjunction with the U.S.
Army and other federal agencies. In peaceful Chapel Hill, N.C., a
local SWAT team recently conducted a large-scale, paramilitary
crack raid on an entire block of a predominantly African-American
neighborhood. The raid resulted in the detention and search of
nearly 100 people, mostly black, and nobody was found with drugs.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union has, unfortunately, led many
military officials to seek out a new enemy to justify continued
funding," writes David Kopel, a New York University law professor
and author of No More Wacos. "The North American Aerospace
Defense Command (NORAD) admits that it is no longer capable of
protecting Americans from incoming nuclear missiles. Yet NORAD
enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in annual funding, as part
of a $1.8 billion systems upgrade, having convinced congress to
assign NORAD the mission of tracking planes and ships that might
be carrying drugs."

The United States Marshals Service recently established a 100-man
Special Operations Group which is "ready to go anywhere in the
world at a moment's notice." The SOG is located at the William F.
Degan Memorial Special Operations Center in Louisiana, which is
named after one of the men involved in the shootout at Ruby
Ridge, Idaho, in which 14-year-old Sammy Weaver was shot in the
back and killed.

New special squads have popped up in the Bureau of Alcohol
Tobacco and Firearms in the past decade, making the federal vice
cops more of a violent military response agency. Some include,
the Tactical Response Teams, High-Risk Warrant Teams, Forced
Entry Teams, Entry Control Teams, and Special Response Teams
(SRTs).

On the state and local level it's no different. The federal
government is actively working to militarize local law
enforcement with grants. Mark Lonsdale, director of the federal
government's Special Tactical Training Unit, informs local law
enforcement of an array of grants available specifically for
training and marijuana control. "The thrust of this training is
toward developing more of a military approach to tactics,"
Lonsdale writes in his brochure "A Tactical Guide to High Risk
Warrant Service."

Kraska says his research has found that in small town America--
towns of 25,000-50,000--two of every 10 policemen serve on a
department paramilitary unit. Throughout America, 11% of police
departments have armored personnel carriers. Of all the country's
elite paramilitary police units, 20% are used for routine patrol
work, and 85% of their calls are to carry out no-knock warrants
for drug raids. In 1986, the nation had 3,000 deployments of
paramilitary police units. In 1996, it rose to 30,000.

Black Helicopters

The war on drugs, and the blur between police and military
duties, is responsible for the widespread conspiracy theories
among "Patriot" groups regarding black helicopters and a secret
war on the public. The helicopters, writes Kopel, "are part of
the National Guard's marijuana eradication program. They are
flying over rural property as a result of 1981 and 1989
congressional amendments which created a partial drug exception
to the Posse Comitatus Act."

Justice Department statistics showed an increase of uniformed
domestic police up 19% from 1992 to 1996. Nearly all police
departments at the federal, local and state levels have elaborate
SWAT units, which first emerged in Los Angeles to counter hostage
situations. Today, such units are normally sent out with no-knock
warrants whenever suspects may have weapons.

These days, it's not just the radical fringe types who warn of a
police state. Rather, it is quickly becoming a mainstream
concern.

"Once the military is used for local police activity, however
minor initially, the march toward martial law with centralized
police using military troops as an adjunct force becomes
irresistible," said Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, addressing the United
States Congress.


It Started With Drugs

By the accounts of most academic studies, the militarization of
American cops began when former President Ronald Reagan declared
a "war on drugs" in the 1980s. Before the war on drugs, in fact,
it was a criminal offense (under the Posse Comitatus Act) for
active duty military troops to engage in domestic law enforcement
without an official declaration of martial law.

"A series of drug war amendments to Posse Comitatus during the
1980s under Presidents Reagan and Bush, has changed that and
placed Marines on patrol at home," says Kevin B. Zeese, president
of Common Sense for Drug Policy.

A recent drug war update to the U.S. Code, in fact, names the
Department of Defense as the lead agency for drug interdiction on
American soil. (U.S. Code Annotated Title 10, Sect. 124)

Defense Secretary William Cohen went so far as to suggest border
states sign agreements to provide immunity to local criminal
laws, similar to the "status of forces agreements" the department
has with foreign governments. Imagine a world in which police are
immune from criminal laws. Because these Marines were acting as
police, and Cohen boldly made such a request, it's not a big
stretch.

Technology Fuels 'Militarization'

Although many of the freedoms and rights enjoyed by Americans are
written into the U.S. Constitution, they have largely been upheld
by the sheer inability of law enforcement to know what
individuals are doing. The habitual drunk driver who never
crosses a center line, never runs a red light or never crashes a
car is likely to get away with his crime for life.

Without "articulable suspicion," as defined in the Supreme
Court's Terry v. Ohio opinion, a cop can't even stop a motorist.
With constant advancements in technology, however, police are
becoming more capable each day of finding crimes and therefore
"articulable suspicion" that would otherwise go undetected. A new
computer program can tell users whether they should fear someone
as the potential perpetrator of a violent crime.

Attorney Dennis Blewitt, who has practiced federal criminal law
in 30 states, says technology is fueling the trend of police
militarization. No longer, he says, do police have to catch an
individual committing a crime. Rather, he says, police
departments can find groups of people committing crimes, such as
drunk drivers on a grid of streets or highways, and target the
group in military fashion. He says today's low-tech sting
operations, such as drunk driver check points, will be tomorrow's
high tech police department spy missions.

"For an army to have a war, it has to gather intelligence and
find out whatever it can about the enemy," Blewitt says. "That's
what police are able to do with technology today. They are able
to gather information about groups of citizens just as our
National Security Agency collects enemy signals and creates
groups of suspects, who then become enemies of the state. Random
enforcement is becoming a thing of the past. Today's police are
like small armies that target groups in the name of social
reform. Now and in the future, you'll have to watch out who your
friends are. You can be targeted for who you associate with."

Crowd Control Tactics

A new software program popping up in some American police
departments is known as the Close Action Environment program,
designed for control of demonstrations. The program provides a
"virtual reality" setting to train officers for close combat and
fighting in built-up areas. It allows geographical information to
be input, recreating real towns and locations on the screen.

The virtual towns can be populated by computer-generated
individuals, who can each be given specific characteristics of
behavior by the computer or its operator. The aim of the user is
to predict behavior and motivation of crowds, by spotting and
understanding the intentions of so-called "ringleaders" who may
turn a friendly demonstration into a police-hating mob. Software
developer Marcus Warren describes the program as suitable for
"anyone involved in conflict operations, rather than outright
war."

"There's an unsettling trend among police to view demonstrations
as crime scenes," says Blewitt. "Police are beginning to view
crowds of demonstrators as enemies of the state, to be
controlled, rather than groups of people exercising their
constitutional right of demonstration the police should be
working to uphold."

Post-Cold War Cops

While some legal scholars point to the drug war as the reason
American police have adopted military gear and tactics, Prof.
Geser says the end of the Cold War is mostly responsible for the
blurring of police and military roles in the United States and
abroad.

United Nations "peace-keeping" missions, he says, have
essentially created a "global police service," and a new type of
soldier who is more militaristic than his Cold War counterpart.
The whole thing, his research indicates, spills over to influence
domestic policing in the United States and other developed
countries.

"The end of the Cold War has substituted the single nuclear
threat with a multitude of smaller and less predictable
international security problems associated with local and
regional conflicts all over the world ... On a global scale, it
is now understood that the main problem of world peace-keeping is
no longer the prevention of wars, but the confinement of many
local and regional conflicts going on at the same time ... the
conflicts are 'administered' in order to prevent them from
escalating."


Made-For-TV Nightmare

In local newspapers and on local TV, police departments show-off
new programs in which Navy SEALS train local officers. Police
chiefs and sheriffs brag of acquiring helicopters, armored
personnel carriers and airplanes from the federal government's
post-Cold War military surplus programs.

One World Wide Web site (www. policeguide.com/swat.htm) features
links to 50 colorful home pages of local yokel SWAT teams
throughout the United States, in Mayberry settings like Ames,
Iowa, and Spartanburg, S.C.

"It's all being done out in the open, and many people don't see
it as frightening," says defense lawyer Blewitt. "That's because
Americans have been conditioned to think it will only affect
criminals. They've been convinced society is being destroyed by
crime even though violent crime has steadily decreased in recent
years and these military-style police are our only hope. What
they should worry about is an emerging police state that
threatens the very fabric of free society."

In the United States, says Zeese, of Common Sense for Drug
Policy, police will continue to resemble military special forces
units until the war on drugs is stopped. "We have come a long
way, in less than two decades, from prohibition of military
involvement (Posse Comitatus Act) to discussions of immunity for
fatal shootings," Zeese writes, referring to Cohen's request
after the fatal shooting of a Texas teenager.

While Blewitt says Americans should fear for their civil
liberties, Prof. Geser suggests it goes deeper than that.
International policing in the name of human rights, minority
rights, human welfare and ecological protection, he says, will
ultimately threaten those very values around the globe.

"Compared to 'classical' international law, which allowed war
only in cases of foreign aggressions, such multidimensional value
systems are dangerous because they provide limitless
opportunities for legitimizing almost any kind of violent
action," Geser writes. "Are we no longer aware of the fundamental
merits of classical international law, which has painfully
evolved out of centuries of fruitless war in order to limit
intergovernmental aggression? Don't we recognize that the
traditional principle of respecting national sovereignty was
particularly apt to preserve the security of small and weaker
countries, which nowadays are becoming the preferred targets of
international policing missions?"

Who knows? What's certain is this: a policeman is a person in
your neighborhood. And he just might be a U.S. Marine or a
SEAL-trained, Ninja-clad SWAT member riding in a tank.