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If somebody asks me which issue I most focus on and which issue this program was designed to bring the most attention to, I will certainly say it is the abuses of the U.S. Security State in general, but in particular, how these U.S. Security State agencies have been weaponized, particularly in the Trump years, to target increasingly domestic dissent. Seemingly every week brings a new story about the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security, trying to censor the Internet, monitoring and surveilling the political opponents of the Biden administration and of the neoliberal order that runs the United States and, in general, looking for ways to criminalize, suppress, outlaw and punish all forms of political dissent.
To highlight how true that is, I want to show you a couple of stories just from the last couple of days that illustrate what a great crisis this has really become to then put this into its historical context and to really try to understand the roots of where this came from.
Earlier this week, the news site Newsweek, on October 5, published an exclusive investigation by a reporter named William Arkin, who has spent his entire life within established media organizations – in 2011 he published one of the most important investigative series on the U.S. Security State entitled “Top Secret America,” which he co-authored with the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dana Priest, and it was really that article that in a lot of ways spurred my interest in the NSA, and that led to the Snowden reporting. It talked about how there was this sprawling secret part of the government that was completely unaccountable and that was so big that no one could understand. Bill Arkin is the author of this new investigation in Newsweek entitled
In other words, this is not Fox News claiming the FBI is being weaponized against Trump supporters, nor is it a right-wing site. This is a journalist who has been an investigative reporter inside most mainstream organizations his entire life and is now reporting this. And what he wrote is the following:
The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump's army of MAGA followers.
"The FBI is in an almost impossible position," says a current FBI official, who requested anonymity to discuss highly sensitive internal matters. The official said that the FBI is intent on stopping domestic terrorism and any repeat of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. But the Bureau must also preserve the Constitutional right of all Americans to campaign, speak freely and protest the government. By focusing on former president Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) supporters, the official said, the Bureau runs the risk of provoking the very anti-government activists that the terrorism agencies hope to counter.
What the FBI Data Shows
From the president down, the Biden administration has presented Trump and MAGA as an existential threat to American democracy and talked up the risk of domestic terrorism and violence associated with the 2024 election campaign.
"Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country," President Biden tweeted last September, the first time that he explicitly singled out the former president. "MAGA Republicans aim to question not only the legitimacy of past elections but elections being held now and into the future," Biden said. (Newsweek. October 5, 2023)
There are so many reasons that should disturb everybody. That is not the role of the FBI to decide which political ideologies are sufficiently threatening, that American citizens who are not found to have engaged in any violence or engaged in illegality should be tracked and monitored, but we, of course, know that this is exactly what the U.S. Security State is being used for. The neoliberal order really does believe, the kind of bipartisan establishment wings of both parties, that anyone who is a critic of the establishment and any kind of an effective way is somebody who is a threat, somebody who is a danger, not just a threat or a danger, but the primary threat, the primary danger. They see domestic dissidents and what they call domestic extremists as the greatest threat to the American homeland and national security – not ISIS, not al-Qaida, not foreign terrorist groups, not Russia – and that is where the bulk of their powers and their budget are being directed: inward, internally, domestically, for domestic dissent.
No viewers of this program think that's hyperbole. We've reported on the Fifth Circuit decision just a month ago that the Biden administration is responsible for one of the grievous assaults of the First Amendment in decades, if not in the history of the judiciary, by constantly pressuring social media companies, using the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA and the CDC to censor political speech the Biden administration thinks is dangerous and it dislikes. That's, of course, something we report on frequently, but to really understand their real mindset, I think it's really worth looking at a clip of an interview given to CNN's Christiane Amanpour this week by Hillary Clinton, who in a lot of ways has become the “id” of American liberalism. She's the person who says the things liberals really believe in and that they really think, but they know better than to admit publicly that they believe. But she's so bitter about the 2016 election and her defeat there still – in fact, more bitter than ever – that she has no internal filter and she just says what liberals really think about their political enemies. That's, of course, where her notorious phrase basket of deplorables came from, looking down her nose at Trump supporters and saying how they're just irredeemably bad people. That, of course, is what liberals think about their political opponents.
Here she is on CNN, saying that she thinks the Trump movement is a cult that needs to be deprogrammed. What here what she said.
Video. Hillary Clinton, CNN Interview. October 5, 2023
Hillary Clinton: […] Very strong partisans in both parties in the past. And we had very bitter battles over all kinds of things, gun control and climate change and the economy and taxes. But there wasn't this little tail of extremism waving, you know, wagging the dog of the Republican Party as it is today. And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure. He's only in it for himself. He's now defending himself in civil actions and criminal actions. And when do they break with him? You know, because at some point, you know, maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members, but something needs to happen.
And did you see there? Christiane Amanpour kind of chuckled, thinking she was deliberately using hyperbole, but she didn't laugh at all. She meant that. She thinks there should be a formal reeducation, a formal deprogramming of Trump supporters. That is increasingly how establishment liberals see people who support Donald Trump or support his set of beliefs: not as citizens exercising their rights to free thought and free speech and free political organization, but as criminals, as people who are sick and need to be monitored, surveilled, deprogrammed and reeducated. And this is what they all think. She is the only one in her bitterness willing to say it now.
As I said, the War on Terror over the last 20 years created the impression that the CIA, Homeland Security and the NSA were primarily focused on domestic and foreign threats and not domestic ones. And so, it seems like that's this new pathology that these U.S. Security State agencies are so focused instead on domestic politics. But that really isn't true. The first report that we did that initiated the Snowden reporting was one that proved the NSA was collecting massive dossiers on American citizens, including all of their phone records, collecting with whom people were speaking and for how long, where they were when they were speaking. And they were doing it in mass by the millions, not people who were suspected of any wrongdoing, just monitoring the entire population domestically. But a major part of the War on Terror, even though it was constantly talked about as a war against foreign threats, was focused domestically. That's obviously what the Patriot Act was, which ended up getting used in far more domestic cases and domestic investigations than it did in cases involving foreign terror threats. But the entire edifice of the War on Terror ended up, once it eroded, being directed inward. Many of the techniques and weapons that were developed and intended to be deployed on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan were instead imported into the United States. As a result, our law enforcement agencies here at home now resemble paramilitary forces of the kind you deploy to war zones, much more so than domestic police forces.
Here's The Atlantic in 2011, reporting on just one of the many programs that militarized the U.S. Security State here at home. It was entitled “How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police.”
Over the past ten years, law enforcement officials have begun to look and act more and more like soldiers. Here's why we should be alarmed.
Ever since September 14, 2001, when President Bush declared war on terrorism, there has been a crucial, yet often unrecognized, shift in United States policy. Before 9/11, law enforcement possessed the primary responsibility for combating terrorism in the United States. Today, the military is at the tip of the anti-terrorism spear. This shift appears to be permanent: in 2006, the White House's National Strategy for Combating Terrorism confidently announced that the United States had "broken old orthodoxies that once confined our counterterrorism efforts primarily to the criminal justice domain."
In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks. Though the reasons for this increasing militarization of American police forces seem obvious, the dangerous side effects are somewhat less apparent.
Undoubtedly, American police departments have substantially increased their use of military-grade equipment and weaponry to perform their counterterrorism duties, adopting everything from body armor to, in some cases, attack helicopters. The logic behind this is understandable. If superior, military-grade equipment helps the police catch more criminals and avert, or at least reduce, the threat of a domestic terror attack, then we ought to deem it an instance of positive sharing of technology — right? Not necessarily. Indeed, experts in the legal community have raised serious concerns that allowing civilian law enforcement to use military technology runs the risk of blurring the distinction between soldiers and peace officers. (The Atlantic. November 7, 2011)
The establishment knows as much as you do. That anti-establishment sentiment is at an all-time high. It's been growing for years. People don't trust the establishment institutions of 39 states. They don't like them. They feel hostile toward them. They feel attacked by them. And the remedy that has been adopted for that is to militarize the U.S. Security State, to turn it into a weapon against the American people – to intimidate the population domestically to know that if you try to exercise your rights of dissent if you try to protest or organize, you're going to be surveilled. You're going to be monitored. You're going to be criminalized and prosecuted. And if it comes down to it and you present enough of a threat, you will be crushed. That is what the abuse of the U.S. Security State is about, controlling every aspect of domestic politics in exactly the way it was never supposed to.
What is happening now is a mirror image of what happened in the 1990s under the Clinton administration when the left and American liberals started putting all their faith and trust in the FBI and these other law enforcement agencies, because they were told the real threat America faced, is not foreign, but one from domestic extremists or anti-government extremism from people who were opposed to the political establishment and the federal government. Even before the domestic terrorist attack in Oklahoma City in 1995, the Clinton administration was exploiting this threat to demand all kinds of authoritarian powers and once that terrorist attack happened in Oklahoma City, then they were off to the races. Every week, the major media outlets in the United States were hyping this threat and insisting that we needed to invest more powers in the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA to stay safe. This is where this mentality comes from that these U.S. security agencies should be directed inward at domestic dissent. So, you cannot understand today's crisis without understanding this decade and every year that goes by, more and more people don't know about these events because they become more and more distant historical events. It's really worth, even for those of you who remember it, revisiting it and using the political transformation of Gore Vidal to use it, which I find incredibly fascinating but also relevant today.
So, one of the very first events that spawned this anti-government rage was the raid I referenced earlier at Ruby Ridge in Idaho, where the Weaver family had an ideology of white separatism, of anti-government ideology that happens to be illegal in the United States.
You may not like it, you may not support it, but you're allowed to move to Idaho to get off the grid and to decide that you want to live a life of separation from society because you don't think society is healthy any longer. That is your absolute right to do. But the U.S. government didn't think so. They harassed the family. They tried to prosecute them. They tried to serve warrants on them. It finally led to an 11-day siege by the FBI, ATM and other agents at their ranch in Idaho where federal agents just killed several members of the Weaver family.
The New York Times article tells us that:
Randy Weaver, a white supremacist whose defiance of the law made him a hero to hate groups in the West, surrendered to the authorities today, ending an 11-day siege at his mountaintop cabin in the woods of north Idaho.
The standoff, which began with two days of gunfire that killed Mr. Weaver's 13-year-old son, Samuel, his wife, Vicki, and a deputy United States marshal, William F. Degan, ended early this afternoon without a shot being fired.
The 44-year-old fugitive had vowed to die rather than turn himself over to the small army of Federal agents, National Guard troops and police officers who had surrounded his cabin atop steep cliffs in the Selkirk Mountains. Supporters of Mr. Weaver, who taunted and cursed the authorities for the last week, have accused them of overkill. A fugitive for 19 months, Mr. Weaver was wanted on Federal gun charges. (The New York Times. September 1, 1992)
So, of course, The New York Times was trying to justify that. It turned out Randy Weaver sued the government and started other people who were injured there. They won multimillion-dollar settlements. The investigation by the FBI concluded that the FBI used reckless force and was essentially harassing a citizen for purely ideological ends and ended up shooting and killing members of his family unjustly. But that was the mentality that had taken hold of the U.S. Security State, that they were there not to fight foreign terrorist organizations – at the time, al-Qaida was very active and they would end up attacking the World Trade Center that decade – but they were focused, as they are now, primarily on domestic dissent.
That anti-government rage escalated severely with the hideous government assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Here is the New York Times version of it on April 20, 1993: “Apparent Mass Suicide Ends a 51-Day Standoff in Texas.”
DEATH IN WACO: The Overview -- SCORES DIE AS CULT COMPOUND IS SET AFIRE AFTER F.B.I. SENDS IN TANKS WITH TEAR GAS; Apparent Mass Suicide Ends A 51-Day Standoff in Texas
Hours after Federal agents began battering holes in the walls of the Branch Davidian compound and spraying tear gas inside, David Koresh and more than 80 followers -- including at least 17 children -- apparently perished today when flames engulfed the sprawling wooden complex on the Texas prairie.
Officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they believed that Mr. Koresh, a self-described messiah who prophesied to his followers that they would meet their end in an apocalyptic confrontation with the law, gave the order to burn the compound down in the 51st day of a standoff with Federal agents.
F.B.I. officials said smashing the walls and filling the building with tear gas was intended to increase pressure on the cult members, who had resisted all previous demands for surrender. But the officials insisted that the tear gas was not flammable and that the fire was set by cult members who poured fuel around the perimeter of the compound and lit matches. 'They All Willingly Followed'
F.B.I. officials said they believed that 95 people were inside the compound when the fire began, including 17 children under the age of 10, and that it only knew of the 9 survivors, 4 of whom were at hospitals this evening and 5 of whom were taken to the local jail. (The New York Times. April 20, 1993)
Investigations of the incident at Waco under Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, created a much different picture than The New York Times depicted, namely that it was almost definitely the case that the FBI agents who had seized that compound or seized it shot canisters that caused this fire and incinerated the people inside and killed them. And I'm going to show you Gore Vidal's attacks on the FBI in just a minute and let him express the critiques in its most eloquent form. Critiques that got him expelled from left-liberal circles which he had spent his entire life inhabiting for the crime of questioning the U.S. Security State and its abuse of its power against American dissidents. But the propaganda was that David Koresh was a threat to those children, that he was molesting them and I guess the government decided it would be better to burn them alive and kill them, which is what the government did than allow that to continue.
Here is a news report from a local affiliate at the time reporting on what happened in Waco.
Host: The flames may be out, but a firestorm of controversy rages on after the assault on the Branch Davidian compound. Officials are starting to look for answers after doomsday in Waco. This morning, investigators began sifting through the embers of the Waco compound, searching for the bodies of more than 80 cult members believed killed in the fire. In Washington, President Clinton says he gives his full support to the decisions made by the attorney general and the FBI to end the siege but the family members of those killed in Waco have bitter words for those they say must bear the responsibility for needless deaths under the blistering Texas sun. Investigators comb the smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound. More than 80 people are believed to have died in yesterday's fiery conclusion to the 51-day siege, 24 of them children. Today, the FBI said it's not responsible for the deaths.
Jeff Jammar, Special Agent: Those children are dead because David Koresh had been killed. There's no question about that. He had those fires started. He had 51 days to release those children. He chose those children to die. We didn't have anything to do with their deaths.
Host: The FBI said cult members didn't panic as tanks began to ram the compound. Yet calmly, apparently under orders from Koresh, began to gather in an underground bunker and donned gas masks. Federal agents tried to help the few people they could see, including a man clinging to the roof.
Jeff Jammar, Special Agent: And he finally fell off the roof and exposed himself to danger. […] He was on fire and saved him. Another woman came out. They appear to be disoriented. She went back into the compound. They got out and went to get her. So there was constant communication with everybody to try to get them to come out.
Host: Only nine people were rescued from the flames as to why the FBI lost its patience after weeks of waiting. Law enforcement officials revealed today that they had electronic listening devices inside the compound. Their eavesdropping led them to believe Koresh was becoming more violent and that intervention was necessary.
So, again, you don't have to like these groups. These were two groups that decided to isolate, to live by themselves. The government couldn't tolerate that and used a lot of violence. Of course, you had The New York Times and most media outlets propagandizing in defense of the FBI, in defense of the government for what they're getting at. Investigations revealed – as so often happens – that that was propagandistic lies.
One of the outcomes of Ruby Ridge, and especially Waco, was that a former member of the U.S. military concluded that the U.S. government was waging war on Americans and that what he had learned in the military taught him that it was justified to wage a war back, planted a bomb at the Oklahoma City federal courthouse and killed 157 people, including a couple of dozen children, Timothy McVeigh, and the minute that happened, the Clinton administration seized on that attack to insist that the gravest threat that the United States faced was one of anti-government right-wing sentiment and began demanding a huge series of powers just like the Bush administration did after 9/11 that would have vested the administration in the U.S. government with previously unthinkable powers of surveillance, detention and monitoring, all in the name of this huge threat that they built up after Oklahoma City.
But even before, here you see the New York Times article that is really right to the point: “Clinton seeks broad Powers in Battle against terrorism; Oklahomans mourn their loss.”
They didn't even wait until the bodies were clear from the courthouse before the Clinton administration began demanding powers and the government engaged in a nonstop propaganda campaign about the dangers posed by domestic extremism.
Here you see the cover of Time Magazine back when Time Magazine mattered, in 1995.
They had really turned opposition to the government into a crime, saying that these people who feared the federal government, who opposed the federal government, even after seeing what they did in Ruby Ridge and Waco were terrorists. These were people who were not permitted to be free.
The New York Times, of course, led the way here. You see their week in review in 1995, “Men at War. Inside the World of the Paranoid.”
We may never know what part of the shadows of rage and conspiracy Timothy J. McVeigh emerged from. The man charged with the worst act of terrorism in the nation's history is said to consider himself a political prisoner, telling authorities no more than his name and date of birth.
But anyone who has leafed through the literature of self-styled patriot groups, sampled the worst of anti-government postings on the computer Internet or looked at hate tracts will find that there is an old root of paranoia that runs deep in the national cellar and has sprouted rage and conspiracy for generations.
One current branch leads to the right-wing militias and a world view that Mr. McVeigh was apparently exposed to, and may well have shared, in the months before the Oklahoma City blast.
Even as a Republican ascendancy has shifted political discourse rightward, the militias accept almost as an article of faith that the Government has betrayed the people, that its leaders are corrupt and that the Constitution has been subverted. Ross Perot has said some of the same things. But militia members and other right-wing extremists then go into another dimension, transforming frustration and alienation into a black-and-white world in which the forces of one-world government are at the nation's doorstep and the Federal Government and the F.B.I. together are bitter enemies of true patriots. It is a world of hate and fear, with a shared belief in the same sinister global forces binding disparate groups and individuals who have fallen under its sway. (The New York Times. April 30, 1995)
Do you see how none of this is new? How? Back then they were also attempting to say that anybody who fears the FBI, who thinks the worst of the federal government, is an extremist who ought to be stopped by the federal government. They immediately exploited the acts of this one person in Oklahoma City to claim that this entire movement of people who dislike the federal government and distrust the federal government, the FBI, and who saw Ruby Ridge and Waco as examples of government attempts to crush dissent were somehow not free people exercising their constitutional rights but were criminals. Bill Clinton as his top priority, repeatedly exploited Oklahoma City and all of this anti-government sentiment to demand what he called anti-terrorism powers exactly like the Bush administration did after 9/11.
Here from The New York Times in May, just a month or so after Oklahoma City:
The President expressed particular concern over opposition to three of his recommendations, which would expand wiretapping authority, ease the ban on military involvement in law enforcement and require that materials that can be used to make explosives be tagged with particles to make them easier to trace.
But, backed by a bipartisan group concerned about infringing on the civil liberties of domestic political groups, the Republican plan does not go as far as the President wants in expanding wiretapping authority.
Mr. Clinton's public approval ratings have risen significantly since the bombing on April 19, and the White House is eager to keep the initiative on an issue that makes the President appear tough. Mr. Clinton particularly cited his proposal to allow investigators to conduct wiretaps on suspected terrorists who move from telephone to telephone, or roving taps, without obtaining a new court order each time. "I don't care whether a terrorist is trying to knowingly evade the police. I care that he or she may be trying to plan another Oklahoma City bombing." (The New York Times. May 28, 1995)
They've been after these powers for decades, and they use anything and make everything in anything they can to scare people into giving it to them. Even before Oklahoma City, the year before, the Clinton administration was demanding something called a “Clipper chip” That would have, before the Internet could even breathe, given the federal government almost ubiquitous control over it.
Also from The New York Times, in June 1994, a year before the Oklahoma City bombing or so:
The Clipper chip has prompted what might be considered the first holy war of the information highway.
