[Peace-discuss] Fwd: [SRRTAC-L:9683] Fwd: Bagdikian / Beware the Geeks Bearing Lists / Dec 24

[Al Kagan]

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>Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 17:24:27 -0500
>To: SRRT Action Council <srrtac-l at ala.org>
>From: Charles Willett <willett at liblib.com>
>Subject: [SRRTAC-L:9683] Fwd: Bagdikian / Beware the Geeks Bearing 
>Lists / Dec 24
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>Ben H. Bagdikian is a journalist, professor emeritus,and former dean 
>of the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at 
>Berkeley.   Most famously he is the author of The Media Monopoly 
>(Beacon Press, 1983), the bible for students of media-industry 
>concentration, now in its sixth edition,  which describes the 
>ever-increasing power of mainstream news conglomerates in 
>influencing public opinion.
>
>In this essay he warns about the new McCarthyism of the Bush 
>administration.  I am forwarding it to these lists because libraries 
>are an important form of media.   Larry Romans' articles (forwarded 
>a few days ago) concerned SRRT's effectiveness in ALA.   Bagdikian 
>leads to a much more basic question:
>
>During this new era of severe government repression, how can a 
>thousand SRRT and PLG members (not just the tiny inner circle) work 
>together with librarians in their communities (not just ALA elites) 
>to preserve and promote intellectual freedom and social 
>responsibility in public, school and academic libraries across the 
>country?
>
>Charles
>
>----Forwarded message----
>Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2002 06:14:21 -0800
>From: ZNet Commentaries <sysop at zmag.org>
>Subject: Bagdikian / Beware the Geeks Bearing Lists / Dec 24
>To: willett at liblib.com
>
>Commentaries are a premium sent to Sustainer Donors of Z/ZNet.  To 
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>Today's commentary:
>http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-12/07bagdikian.cfm
>
>==================================
>
>ZNet Commentary
>Beware the Geeks Bearing Lists December 24, 2002
>By Ben Bagdikian
>
>"I have here in my hand, a list ...." Senator Joseph McCarthy, 
>Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1946.
>
>Senator McCarthy's list turned out to be a mish-mash of changing 
>numbers, names, and wild charges that paralyzed the government and 
>brought chaos to normal political life.  It was an "emergency" -- 
>the post-war world was one of atomic bombs, the Soviet Union, evil 
>leaders, and spies.   The senator had sympathy and support from a 
>lot of newspapers and access to their often sloppy and prejudicial 
>news files for anything embarrassing he could use. But at least he 
>did not have the Internet.  But McCarthy was a wild man looking for 
>headlines and in time he disappeared in an alcoholic haze. He never 
>unearthed anyone dangerous who was not already under surveillance.  
>
>Richard Nixon and his Watergate crew reflected the paranoid streak 
>in their boss and looked for dirt on enemies, including raiding 
>therapy files of
>Daniel Ellsberg.  
>
>We have been here before in American history.
>
>In the past, creating massive and largely uninhibited intrusions 
>into the private life of all its citizens, have  brought 
>self-defeating abuses and irrationalities. But the Bush 
>Administration, at the height of its hubris, has acted as though it 
>has no memory.
>
>Within days, officials of the Bush Administration and the 
>conservative courts reflecting their values have announced, for 
>example,  that it has techniques to comb the Internet using key 
>words to compile lists of possible terrorists.
>
>It has institutionalized secret detentions. The Department of 
>Justice said it would not reveal the names on a list of 700 people 
>being held in secret for alleged violations of immigration 
>regulations because disclosing the names would aid "the enemy."
>
>And an appeals court said the new "USA Patriot Act" had "swept away" 
>the distinction between names gathered in secret intelligence 
>investigations and laws governing rights of people accused of crime.
>
>The search will look at our telephone bills to see who called whom 
>and what they talked about, our banking records, and travel 
>documents -- all without search warrants. It is almost a bad joke in 
>a nightmare-- there will  be the Pentagon Information Awareness 
>Program.  The office and its title seems like a parody of Orwell. 
>Except it's no joke.
>
>To add insult to injury, the Director of the Pentagon's Information 
>Awareness Office is John M. Poindexter, a major player in the 
>Iran-Contra's scandal in which he was indicted and convicted of 
>conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and 
>destroying evidence. The convictions were later overturned because 
>Congress had granted him immunity in exchange for his testimony. 
>
>Former protections against abuse and damaging mistakes are gone, 
>unless there is the unlikely rejection of the United States Supreme 
>Court.  When the program objections reach the high court, only the 
>government will be permitted to argue.  Objectors like the American 
>Civil Liberties Union, were not permitted to be parties to the suit, 
>but allowed only the passive role of submitting amicus briefs 
>stating their arguments. Given the past record of the Rehnquist 
>majority, nobody is euphoric about the results.
>For example, the lists of people in prisons who might be prosecuted 
>as criminals is secret with no disclosure of  who they are and the 
>nature of the offense that put them in prison.
>
>There is a special administrative body that is entrusted to judge 
>whether in precisely this kind of  investigation and arrest  in 
>national security cases the government has  "probable cause" for a 
>criminal charge.  It had been assumed up to now that the special 
>court, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court (known in the 
>trade  by its acronym FISA) was the ultimate authoritative body 
>sensitive to the need to protect the United States from secret 
>agents bent on malicious action against this country but capable of 
>passing judgment on the reasonableness of governmental acts and 
>procedures. .
>
>That special Court had placed certain minimal constitutional rules 
>on the rights of government to make secret wiretaps and other 
>surveillance. The chief justice of FISA said the restrictions had 
>become necessary because Justice officials, as the New York Times 
>reported it, "had frequently misled the court by claiming they were 
>seeking wiretap authorization for intelligence gathering but had 
>been deceptive in that they were trying to obtain wire tap for 
>criminal investigation."  Put less diplomatically, that court said 
>the Department of Justice officials had frequently lied to the court.
>
>But that court can be over-ridden by a three-member super Court of 
>Review (all appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist). In  the 
>first decision it has been called on to make since it was created, 
>the higher court over-ruled the lower Court, freeing the Department 
>of Justice to conduct more or less unrestricted Internet and other 
>searches. And, if the original FISA court were correct, also free to 
>lie if  convenient.
>
>Thus, a special "Court of Review" could negate decisions designed to 
>prevent abuse of secret surveillance.
>
>The super Court of Review brings thoughts of the Iranian super 
>religious courts that assume the power to stop pro-democratic 
>decisions by that country's Prime Minister and the Parliament.
>
>We have had experience with the mischief and damage secret lists can 
>create.  It goes back to the administration of John Adams and the 
>Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.  American politicians friendly 
>toward France were considered dangerous.  Adams's 1798 Act made it a 
>crime for a newspaper to criticize the government.  It was a 
>political move in an attempt to destroy Thomas Jefferson. It 
>completely ignored the First Amendment and a newspaper editor was 
>actually imprisoned. 
>
>More recently, during the Cold War McCarthy hysteria, the Department 
>of Justice had its list of "subversives."  How one got on the "The 
>Attorney General's List"  was a mysterious process, but people lost 
>their jobs, were called to executive and then open sessions of a 
>Senate Committee and commanded to list their friends and associates. 
>Right-wing sympathizers compiled their own lists of what they 
>considered excessively liberal entertainers, writers, journalists, 
>and others, many of whom also lost their jobs or worse. 
>
>(To add a personal note, some time ago I asked, under the Freedom of 
>Information Act, for my FBI and CIA records.  Along with long 
>blacked-out sections, there were an appalling number of gross errors 
>and reports from what apparently were dinner party conversations  in 
>which my statements were the direct opposite of what I actually 
>said.  Given the present atmosphere, if that is repeated, we are all 
>in trouble, including if you praise John Poindexter to the skies at 
>a dinner party or phone conversation.)
>
>Now with the USA Patriot Act and Justice Rehnquist's appointees on 
>the Court of Review, we are on a course in which government 
>officials and criminal investigators of persons suspecting of malice 
>toward  the United States can sweep away constitutional provisions 
>we thought would prevent abuse.  It will be aided by the Internet, 
>which did not exist during the hysteria and abuse by John Adams and 
>Joe McCarthy. It is also aided by the appalling performance of 
>Democratic Party leaders. 
>
>John Adams ignored the First Amendment under the rubric of 
>"emergency." President Bush in ordering intrusion into personal 
>computers, phone conversations, easy wiretapping, and private 
>records has ignored the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution:
>
>"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, 
>papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, 
>shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue but upon probable 
>cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing 
>the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
>
>Few people would argue that the acts of September 11 and other 
>violent destruction of life and property are not real, or that there 
>are secret organizations bent on doing the United States harm. 
>
>That danger is real. But the rush to sweep away constitutional other 
>protective provisions not only inflicts long-lasting wounds to the 
>Constitution. It also ignores past history that shows that those 
>constitutional provisions have been important in bringing careful 
>and discerning investigations, rather than uncontrolled and 
>indiscriminate imperious intrusions that have always encouraged 
>abuse and unprofessional behavior. There is a long history, here and 
>abroad, of the injustices and self-defeating clutter produced by 
>uncontrolled policing.
>
>Sweeping away  proven sensible procedures creates hysteria and 
>chaos. There are individuals and groups those whose malice toward 
>the United States is not only zealous and determined, but backed by 
>high intelligence and low morality.  They know how to play a system 
>-- false alarms mixed with real plans to overload local and national 
>protective agencies, straw men as sacrificial goats to confuse the 
>search system, planted lies about loyal Americans.   
>
>A security system that is sweeping and uninhibited and virtually 
>unaccountable does not make us safer but can be a danger to genuine 
>national security.  It is the way certain viral infections cause 
>the human body's immune system to attack itself.
>
>Ben H. Bagdikian is a writer, author of The Media Monopoly and other 
>works, including a study of the 1947 Truman loyalty-security program 
>of government employees.
>
>----------------------------------
>
>Charles Willett, MLS
>Member, Social Responsibilities Round Table since 1989
>Member, Progressive Librarians Guild since 1991
>Chair, North Central Florida ACLU
>Past president, ACLU of Florida
>Founding Editor, Counterpoise
>http://www.civicmediacenter.org/counterpoise/
>Co-founder, Civic Media Center and Library, Inc., Gainesville, FL
>http://www.civicmediacenter.org/
>Publisher and President, CRISES Press, Inc.
>http://www.liblib.com/
>1716 SW Williston Road
>Gainesville, FL 32608-4049 USA
>352/335-2200 willett at liblib.com


-- 


Al Kagan
African Studies Bibliographer and Professor of Library Administration
Africana Unit, Room 328
University of Illinois Library
1408 W. Gregory Drive
Urbana, IL 61801, USA

tel. 217-333-6519
fax. 217-333-2214
e-mail. akagan at uiuc.edu
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