Department of Injustice
Washington, D.C.
11:15 a.m. EST
THE PRESIDENT: A small, secret surveillance committee of goons and thugs
hiding behind the mask of patriotism was established in 1908 in Washington, D.C.
The group was led from 1924 until 1972 by J. Edgar Hoover, and during his reign
it became known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI agents spied upon
and infiltrated labor unions, political parties, radical groups—especially those
led by African-Americans—anti-war groups and the civil rights movement in order
to discredit anyone, including politicians such as Henry Wallace, who questioned the power of
the state and big business. Agents burglarized homes and offices, illegally
opened mail and planted unlawful wiretaps. Bureau leaders created blacklists.
They destroyed careers and sometimes lives. They demanded loyalty oaths. By the
time they were done, our progressive and radical movements, which had given us
the middle class and opened up our political system, were dead. And while the
FBI was targeting internal dissidents, our foreign intelligence operatives were
overthrowing regimes, bankrolling some of the most vicious dictators on the
planet and carrying out assassinations in numerous countries, such as Cuba and
the Philippines and later Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Iraq and
Afghanistan.
Throughout American history, intelligence services often did little more than
advance and protect corporate profits and solidify state repression and
imperialist expansion. War, for big business, has always been very lucrative and
used as an excuse to curtail basic liberties and crush popular movements.
“Inter arma silent leges,” as Cicero said, or “During war, the laws are
silent.” In the Civil War, during which the North and the South suspended the
writ of habeas corpus and up to 750,000 soldiers died in the
slaughter, Union intelligence worked alongside Northern war profiteers who sold
cardboard shoes to the Army as the spy services went about the business of
ruthlessly hunting down deserters. The First World War, which gave us the
Espionage Act and the Sedition Act and saw President Woodrow Wilson throw
populists and socialists, including Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, into
prison, produced $28.5 billion in net profits for businesses and created 22,000
new millionaires. Wall Street banks, which lent $2.5 billion to nations allied
with the United States, made sure Wilson sent U.S. forces into the senseless
trench warfare so they would be repaid. World War II—which consumed more than 50
million lives and saw 110,000 Japanese-Americans hauled away to internment camps
and atomic bombs dropped on defenseless civilians—doubled wartime corporate
profits from the First World War. Why disarm when there was so much money to be
made from stoking fear?
The
rise of the Iron Curtain and nuclear weapons provided the justification by big
business for sustaining a massive arms industry, for a huge expansion of our
surveillance capabilities and for more draconian assaults against workers and
radicals. The production of weapons was about profits rather than logic. We
would go on to produce more than 70,000 nuclear bombs or warheads at a cost of
$5.5 trillion, enough weapons to obliterate every Soviet city several times
over. And in the early days of the Cold War, with Hoover and Joe McCarthy and
his henchmen blacklisting anyone with a conscience in government, the arts,
journalism, labor unions or education, President Harry S. Truman created the
National Security Agency, or NSA.
Throughout this evolution, Americans were steadily shorn of their most basic
constitutional rights and their traditions of limited government. U.S.
intelligence agencies were always anchored in a system of secrecy—with little
effective oversight from either elected leaders or ordinary citizens. Meanwhile,
totalitarian states like East Germany offered a sterling example of what our
corporate masters might achieve with pervasive, unchecked surveillance that
turned citizens into informers and persecuted people for what they said in the
privacy of their homes. Today I would like to thank the architects of this East
German system, especially Erich Mielke, once the chief of the communist East
German secret police. I want to assure them that the NSA has gone on to perfect
what the Stasi began.
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