Subscribe to Workers Vanguard

View archives

	Workers Vanguard No. 909	29 February 2008

Republicans, Democrats Step Up War on Our Rights

Government Wiretapping: Big Brother Is Listening

On February 12, the Democratic-controlled Senate approved a bill by a vote of 68 to 29 (with 19 Democrats voting “yes”) that would extend for six years the government’s legal authority to spy on U.S. citizens through warrantless wiretaps. This bill, known as the FISA Amendments Act, was an extension of last year’s Protect America Act, a time-limited law. The Protect America Act authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor the telephone and Internet communications of U.S. citizens without a court warrant as long as there is “reasonable belief” that one party in the conversation is not in the U.S. Importantly, the FISA Amendments Act grants retroactive immunity from lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages from phone companies, such as AT&T and Sprint, that have been collaborating with the government’s eavesdropping schemes. Democratic presidential candidates and Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were conspicuously absent for this vote (although Obama had earlier supported an amendment against the immunity for telecommunications companies).

For its part, the Democratic-controlled House adjourned for a week’s recess without taking action on the Senate bill, allowing the Protect America Act to lapse. Reflecting pressures from the Democratic base in an election period, many House Democrats are hesitant to provide retroactive immunity to the phone companies. Bush declared that “our country is more in danger of an attack” because of the House Democrats’ refusal to pass the bill (and then promptly left for his tour of Africa). Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi replied that “the President knows full well that he has all the authority he needs,” referring to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). On February 14, House Republicans staged a well-publicized walkout, riled up by the failure to pass the Senate bill and the Democrats’ attempts to get a contempt of Congress vote against White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten and former counsel Harriet Miers for unanswered subpoenas in a Congressional probe of last year’s U.S. attorney firings scandal.

The New York Times (15 February) remarked, with unintentional irony, that the resistance to passing the Senate bill constituted the Democrats’ “greatest challenge to Mr. Bush on a major national security issue since Democrats took control of Congress last year.” Indeed, as the Times article continued: “Last summer, Democrats allowed the surveillance law to be put in place for six months although many of them opposed it. They have also relented in fights over spending on the Iraq war under White House pressure.” All this was preceded by the Democrats’ near-unanimous support for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and bipartisan backing by Congress for the 2003 Iraq invasion.

The Democrats, the other party of war and racism, are no less committed than the Republicans to the reactionary “war on terror”—an all-purpose pretense for the U.S. imperialist rulers to invade and attack other countries while shredding the civil liberties of the population “at home.” One week after the September 11 attacks, Congressional Democrats overwhelmingly joined Republicans in authorizing Bush to “use all necessary and appropriate force” to find the perpetrators—a vote Bush pointed to as giving him legal authority for warrantless wiretapping, communications data mining and the like. One month later, the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s authority to monitor anyone it claims is involved in international “terrorism,” was passed with near-unanimous support from the Democrats. And in 2006, the Patriot Act was re-authorized and extended with the support of key Democrats, including both Clinton and Obama.

The current infighting between Bush and the Republicans on one side and Congressional Democrats on the other is merely over how best to secure and enhance the government’s apparatus of repression. Indeed, the sole sticking point for House Democrats is the retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that assisted the government in what both parties agree will henceforth be legal.

Not content with the post-9/11 laws and measures expanding its spying powers, the Bush administration had pushed through an expanded program of surveillance by the NSA, which in turn gained the cooperation of phone companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications. The NSA now has a direct hookup into AT&T’s massive database of nearly two trillion phone records. After disclosure of this wiretapping by the New York Times in December 2005, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched a class-action lawsuit against AT&T, based in part on documents provided by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, charging the company with illegally giving the government access to its customers’ communications and records.

As we noted in “Government Spy Network Exposed, Again” (WV No. 871, 26 May 2006):

“The current expansion of the government’s repressive apparatus is a significant escalation in the war against the rights of working people and the oppressed. The NSA’s invasion of privacy can carry drastic consequences. Now, if you are singled out and labeled a terrorist based on ‘classified’ evidence, the government claims the right to ‘disappear’ you as an ‘enemy combatant’ with no legal recourse. The ‘war on terror’ has accelerated the drive toward unfettered power by the executive branch.”

This corresponds to the needs of U.S. imperialism as it asserts itself as cop of the world.

The NSA domestic spying program caused something of a stir when it first came to light, and even now the full extent of this surveillance cannot be known. Meanwhile, open “debate” over torture techniques such as waterboarding used against those seized in Afghanistan and Iraq has become commonplace in bourgeois circles, no longer a dirty CIA practice cloaked in secrecy. The world has watched in horror as graphic scenes and revelations of torture of prisoners have come out from Bagram in Afghanistan to Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The same goes for the U.S. practice of “extraordinary rendition,” where “terror suspects” are shipped abroad, to places such as Egypt, Syria and “black site” secret prisons in Europe, to be tortured. (“Rendition” has indeed become part of American popular culture, as shown by last year’s movie, Rendition.)

All this underlines that the struggle against the U.S. rulers’ attacks on working people and the oppressed “at home” must be integrally linked to the fight against their depredations abroad. For the immediate, unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq and Afghanistan! Hands off Iran! Free all the detainees now!

FISA, Government Surveillance and Other Dirty Tricks

Liberal mythology to the contrary, Bush & Co. did not invent, but expanded upon, draconian attacks on such civil liberties as exist, wrested through hard class and social struggle. The perceptive historian and novelist Gore Vidal noted: “Though Bush’s predecessors have generally had rather higher IQs than his, they [Democrats], too, assiduously serve the 1% that owns the country” (London Guardian, 27 April 2002). Vidal pointed out that it was former Democratic president Bill Clinton who “set in place the trigger for a police state which his successor is now happily squeezing.”

Indeed, the Clinton administration’s Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, while greatly curtailing habeas corpus rights for death row inmates, provided much of the structure for the further abrogation of democratic rights under Bush & Co. by establishing secret courts and denying “terror” suspects the right to see the evidence against them or to cross-examine their accusers. The NSA itself was founded in 1952 by secret order of Democratic president Harry Truman primarily to spy on the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The NSA’s domestic spying underwent significant expansion under the Democratic Johnson administration in 1967 and again under the Republican Nixon administration. In the 1960s and early ’70s, the government targeted black militants—killing 38 Panthers and imprisoning hundreds more—under its COINTELPRO campaign. At the same time, other radicals, leftists and Vietnam antiwar activists were gone after based on “watch lists” given to the NSA by the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the mid 1970s, the government’s secret police were nominally reined in. Revelations that the Nixon administration was carrying out “black bag jobs” even against the Democratic Party were cause for concern among significant sections of the American bourgeoisie over such “excesses” as came out in the 1975-76 Senate Church Committee hearings. In 1978, the Democratic administration of Jimmy Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Billed as a barrier to NSA/CIA domestic spying, FISA in fact codified such surveillance by adding a veneer of legality. In 27 years, the secret FISA court that is supposed to vet requests for wiretap warrants has turned down only five of nearly 20,000 wiretap applications.

The Protect America Act that expired this February expanded on FISA, whose standards were already loosened by the Patriot Act. Cases can now be pursued when surveillance is a “significant” rather than a “primary” purpose of the investigation. A single warrant can cover multiple communications involving a target, without specifying a particular telephone line, computer or facility, while the requirement to establish a connection between the target of surveillance and a “foreign power” has been eliminated.

In the past few years, the FBI has served tens of thousands of “national security letters” to libraries, phone companies and other businesses demanding the records of anyone deemed to be “relevant” to an investigation “against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities” (Wired News, 16 March 2006). To justify these police-state measures, the government concocts stories about “terrorist sleepers” who lead outwardly normal lives—i.e., everybody is suspect. Another program, “Secure Flight,” which is temporarily suspended, aims to mine commercial databases of personal information on airline passengers. Data on a staggering number of air travelers has been turned over to the government by major airlines (15 million in 2004 alone), which the government has duly used to suppress protest. During the protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the government used its “no-fly” list (which today has at least 44,000 people on it) to prevent activists from attending demonstrations against the war.

The number of files maintained under the government’s “Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment” (TIDE) has reached hundreds of thousands, with the names of those on “watch lists” distributed to airlines, cops, border guards and U.S. consulates. One man on such a list was Maher Arar. A Canadian citizen born in Syria, Arar was detained by U.S. authorities while trying to change planes at JFK airport. Accused of being a “terrorist” on the basis of bogus information provided by Canadian authorities, Arar was deported to Syria, where he was held in solitary confinement in a coffin-size cell and tortured for nearly a year before being released back to Canada. Arar secured an apology and a settlement of $11.5 million from the Canadian government. He remains, however, on the State Department’s “watch list.”

The sinister web of the “war on terror” is exemplified by the ordeal of Jose Padilla, an American citizen who was kidnapped, tortured and stripped of his citizenship rights as an “unlawful enemy combatant.” Padilla was finally granted a show trial that ended with his conviction on “conspiracy” charges and a sentence of 17 years in prison with absolutely no evidence of any crime (see “Free Jose Padilla!” WV No. 908, 15 February). In 2003 and 2004, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee filed two amici curiae (friends of the court) briefs on Padilla’s behalf. We wrote:

“The case of Jose Padilla tests the very existence of the fundamental rights of due process…. It poses the evisceration of the rights and privileges of citizenship embodied in the first ten Amendments to the Constitution and secured on the battlefield of the Civil War and in class and social struggle over the past hundred and more years. If the imperial President is upheld, Padilla’s detention threatens to become the Dred Scott case of our time, a declaration that ‘Citizens have no rights that the government is bound to respect’.”

Break with the Democrats! For a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Behind the labyrinth of draconian measures is the fundamental fact that as long as the capitalist rulers hold state power—regardless of which capitalist party governs—they will repress and persecute their political opponents. In 1984, the Spartacist League won a legal victory against the FBI and Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations, which sought to slander Marxist advocacy as “terrorism” —a modest but genuine blow to the government’s efforts to criminalize leftist political dissent. As we wrote in “FBI Admits: Marxists Are Not Terrorists,” (WV No. 368, 7 December 1984):

“We have no illusions that the government’s secret police have stopped or will stop their harassment, infiltration and disruption of Marxist political organizations and other perceived political opponents of the government. We do know that the secret police have not changed since Karl Marx was harassed by secret agents of Prussia, that as long as the capitalists hold state power, their police agents will continue their dirty work against any real or perceived challenges to their class rule. Our suit certainly has not changed, nor could it, this fact of life in American capitalist society.”

In contrast, our reformist opponents on the left pin their hopes on a “reformed” capitalist state and imperialist policy, and to this end seek the election of a Democratic Party candidate to the post of U.S. imperialism’s Commander in Chief. In particular, the reformist left has positioned itself to be cheerleaders from the “left” for Barack Obama, whose rigorous defense of the interests of U.S. imperialism is in no doubt—from his support to the Afghanistan occupation to his bellicosity toward Pakistan as well as Iran and the North Korean deformed workers state.

Obama’s campaign is in large part based on the lie that racist oppression has been overcome “90 percent of the way,” as he put it. As we underlined in “The Obama Campaign and the ‘End of Racism’ Myth” (WV No. 906, 18 January): “Contrary to the myth promoted by Obama and other liberals, black oppression continues to be the central defining feature of U.S. society. It is materially rooted in and central to American capitalism.” We stated that “our struggle for black liberation is based on the program of revolutionary integrationism,” the understanding that “full equality for the black masses requires that the working class rip the economy out of the hands of the capitalist rulers and reorganize it on a socialist basis.”

Against this revolutionary perspective, pseudo-socialist groups such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO) fawn over this bourgeois politician. A recent Bay Area ISO leaflet titled “Elections ’08: The Obama Phenomenon Hope for Change” all but called for a vote to Obama, declaring:

“Anyone committed to fighting for change today should see how Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign has raised hopes and expectations. People are becoming convinced of the most basic sentiment at the heart of all the great struggles of the past: that what we do matters—and that could mean more in the future than the candidate trying to employ this sentiment to gain votes.”

The pro-Democratic Party left, which the reformist ISO so well exemplifies, is far less influential than the trade-union bureaucracy, while reflecting the labor tops’ pro-capitalist policies. Many millions of hard-earned union dollars have been and will again be poured into the coffers of the capitalist Democratic Party. Unless forced into action by the bosses’ provocations or pressure from labor’s ranks, the labor bureaucrats recoil from waging even the most basic struggle on behalf of their members’ rights, let alone taking up the struggle against black oppression or for full citizenship rights for all immigrants, especially targeted by the “war on terror.”

The apparatus of the capitalist state has been greatly strengthened by measures enacted to wage the “war on terror.” However, what the government is able to get away with will ultimately be determined by the level of social struggle. What is necessary is a fight to forge a new, class-struggle leadership in the labor movement. This must be linked to the fight to build a revolutionary, multiracial workers party that acts as the tribune of the people and stands for the political independence of the working class against the capitalist state and its parties—an internationalist beacon, capable of mobilizing the social power of the proletariat on behalf of all the oppressed. In the course of such political struggle, we seek to win the working class to the understanding that only a fight to smash the capitalist state through socialist revolution and to establish workers rule can emancipate labor and rid the planet of the horrors of U.S. imperialism.