Dude, Where's My Country_ - Michael Moore [48]
In a highly critical report, the Justice Department’s own inspector general found that while imprisoned at the federal detention center in Brooklyn, detainees faced “a pattern of physical and verbal abuse” as well as “unduly harsh” detention policies, including 23-hours-per-day lockdown, 24-hours-per-day cell lighting, a communications blackout, and excessive handcuffing, leg irons and heavy chains. The report also criticized the FBI for making “little attempt to distinguish” between immigrants who had possible ties to terrorism and the vast majority who did not, including many swept up by chance.
It is un-American to incarcerate a large group of people when there is no credible reason to think they are dangerous.
Even worse, some detainees have been subjected to secret deportation proceedings. Soon after the September 11 attacks, immigration courts from coast to coast began conducting scores of hearings in secret, with court officials forbidden even to confirm that the cases existed.
Now, perhaps some of you are saying to yourselves, as card-carrying Americans, that you are safe from Bush’s terror. Don’t count on it. The Bush administration has never let the law limit its bigger goals. Bush maintains that he has the inherent power as commander in chief—i.e., without any basis in the laws of our country—to label anyone an “enemy combatant,” then lock them up and throw away the key. According to this novel approach—a wholesale violation of international law and everything this country stands for—an enemy combatant is a person with no legal rights whatsoever.
The USA Patriot Act and the enemy combatant designation are just a hint of what Bush has in store for us. Consider something called “Total Information Awareness,” developed by the Pentagon. When some objected to the scary term “total,” this got toned down to “Terrorist Information Awareness” (TIA). This program, first headed by Iran-Contra perp Adm. John Poindexter and run under the auspices of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), will have the capacity to search the records of every kind of transaction made by hundreds of millions of Americans. Every query run by the good admiral—for example, “give me the names of people who bought an optical mouse at CompUSA this week”—amounts to the government asking every person in the United States an intrusive and inappropriate question about his or her life. But these questions are not asked to your face—they take place in secret, as the government looks at data you may not even know has been collected about you, and gives you no opportunity to answer the questions yourself so you could perhaps explain errors or extenuating circumstances in the information that has been gathered about you.
Another brainchild of Poindexter and DARPA was the “Policy Analysis Market,” which the government was to put up on a Web site. Apparently, Poindexter reasoned that commodity futures markets worked so well for Bush’s buddies at Enron that he could adapt it to predicting terrorism. Individuals would be able to invest in hypothetical futures contracts involving the likelihood of such events as “an assassination of Yasser Arafat” or “the overthrow of Jordan’s King Abdullah II.” Other futures would be available based on the economic health, civil stability, and military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey. All oil-related countries. The proposed market lasted about one day after it was revealed to the Senate. Senators Wyden and Dorgan protested the Pentagon’s $8 million request, and Wyden said, “Make-believe markets trading in possibilities that turn the stomach hardly seem like a sensible next step to take with taxpayer money in the war on terror.” As a result of