A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (6 page)

Moreover, in its landmark 2010 decision in
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
, the Court favored corporate interests over democratic principles, granting unfettered free speech rights to corporations.
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That case brings us full circle back to the
Reichle
case which, by placing government interests ahead of the free speech rights of the citizenry, reaffirmed the prevailing mindset that reigns supreme at the U.S. Supreme Court today–one that largely defers to government and corporations and, except in the most extreme of circumstances, refrains from limiting or even questioning the reach of government officials, whether it be the president, the police, or the military.

Tip of the Iceberg

These court rulings are merely the tip of the iceberg. However, what these assorted rulings and incidents add up to is a nation that is fast imploding, one that is losing sight of what freedom is really all about and, in the process, is transitioning from a republic governed by the people to a police state governed by the strong arm of the law. In such an environment, the law and the police agencies that enforce them become convenient tools to oppress those whom the government decides to target.

While these decisions on their own may be somewhat disturbing, the courts are not really introducing anything new into our lives–they are merely reflecting and reinforcing the reality of the age in which we live, and that is one in which the citizen is subordinate to the government and what the "state"–be it the police and/or local or federal agents–says goes.

Indeed, this paradigm of abject compliance to the state is also being taught by example in the schools through school lockdowns where police and drug-sniffing dogs enter the classroom, and zero tolerance policies that punish all offenses equally and result in young people being expelled for childish behavior. As a consequence, school districts are increasingly teaming up with law enforcement to create what some are calling the "schoolhouse to jailhouse track" by imposing a "double dose" of punishment: suspension or expulsion from school accompanied by an arrest by the police and a trip to juvenile court. In this way, having failed to learn much in the way of civic education while in school, young people find themselves in a learning environment where they have no true rights and government authorities have near total power over them and can violate their constitutional rights whenever they see fit.

This is true of the average citizen as well, who is helpless in the face of police equipped with an array of sophisticated weapons, both lethal and nonlethal. The increasing militarization of the police, the use of sophisticated weaponry against Americans, and the government's increasing tendency to employ military personnel domestically have taken a toll on more than just our freedoms. They have seeped into our subconscious awareness of life as we know it and colored our very understanding of freedom, justice, and democracy.

CHAPTER 3

On the Road to a Police State

"Totalitarianism differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship. Wherever it rose to power, it developed entirely new political institutions and destroyed all social, legal and political traditions of the country. No matter what the specifically national tradition or the particular spiritual source of its ideology, totalitarian government always transformed classes into masses, supplanted the party system, not by one-party dictatorships, but by a mass movement, shifted the center of power from the army to the police, and established a foreign policy openly directed toward world domination."
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–Author HANNAH ARENDT,
The Origins of Totalitarianism

M
ovements toward police states are very subtle. As author Naomi Wolf recognizes, police state environments slowly seep into a populace's consciousness:

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface: peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere–while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster."

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedent-edly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are "at war" in a "long war"–a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president–without US citizens realising it yet–the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.
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Welcome to the American Gulag

When most people think of a police state, they think of mass arrests, detention camps, and storm troopers with automatic rifles standing on street corners. But with the rapid advances in technology and the development of a mass media aimed primarily at entertaining the public, such methods of coercion no longer need to be employed on a mass scale. In fact, technology now allows the government to erect an electronic concentration camp over entire populations and countries using much subtler and less jarring means than those employed by past regimes. Nevertheless, the results remain the same: total control.

Total control of whom, though? Despite the government's colorcoded alerts and fear-inducing warnings about terrorists lurking among us, the individuals being targeted for government surveillance, control, and detention are, more often than not, Americans merely exercising their constitutional rights. To the government, however, these individuals are known by other labels–extremists, malcontents, activists, rule-breakers, disrupters of the peace, and misfits.

We would do well to remember that the original purpose of concentration camps, which have operated historically as gulags or detainment and/or detention centers, was for the prevention of crime (preventive detention) and re-education (that is, "rehabilitation") of dissidents or "social misfits." Such individuals, depending upon the definition, can mean anyone: peace activists, those involved in the Occupy movement, a Tea Party supporter, an "irritant" at a city council meeting, or grade-school children who engage in a food fight.

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum observes in
Gulag: A History:

The exile of prisoners to a distant place, where they can "pay their debt to society," make themselves useful, and not contaminate others with their ideas or their criminal acts, is a practice as old as civilization itself. The rulers of ancient Rome and Greece sent their dissidents off to distant colonies. Socrates chose death over the torment of exile from Athens. The poet Ovid was exiled to a fetid port on the Black Sea.
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The advent of psychiatry eliminated the need to exile political prisoners, allowing governments instead to declare such dissidents unfit for society. For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally
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through the use of electric shocks, drugs, and various medical procedures. Insisting that "ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure,"
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the psychiatric community actually went so far as to provide the government with a diagnosis suitable for locking up such freedom-oriented activists.

In addition to declaring political dissidents mentally unsound, Russian officials also made use of an "administrative" process for dealing with individuals who were considered a bad influence on others or troublemakers. Author George Kennan describes a process in which:

The obnoxious person may not be guilty of any crime ... but if, in the opinion of the local authorities, his presence in a particular place is "prejudicial to public order" or "incompatible with public tranquility," he may be arrested without warrant, may be held from two weeks to two years in prison, and may then be removed by force to any other place within the limits of the empire and there be put under police surveillance for a period of from one to ten years. Administrative exile-which required no trial and no sentencing procedure-was an ideal punishment not only for troublemakers as such, but also for political opponents of the regime.
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Sound familiar? This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards for extended periods of time is a common practice in present-day China.
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What is particularly unnerving, however, is that this practice of making individuals disappear is happening with increasing frequency in America.

Disappearing Citizens

Brandon Raub's case exposes the seedy underbelly of a governmental system that is targeting Americans–especially military veterans–for expressing their discontent over America's rapid transition to a police state. On Thursday, August 16, 2012, a swarm of local police, Secret Service, and FBI agents arrived at Raub's home, asking to speak with him about posts he had made on his Facebook page. These posts were made up of song lyrics, political opinions, and dialogue used in a political-thriller virtual card game. Among the posts cited as troublesome were lyrics to a song by the rap group Swollen Members.

After a brief conversation, and without providing any explanation, levying any charges against Raub, or reading him his rights, law enforcement officials then handcuffed Raub and transported him first to police headquarters, then to a medical center, where he was held against his will due to alleged concerns that his Facebook posts were "terrorist in nature." Outraged onlookers filmed the arrest and posted the footage to YouTube, where it quickly went viral, which may have helped prevent Raub from being successfully "disappeared" by the government. A subsequent hearing, reminiscent of the kangaroo courts of earlier days, sentenced the decorated Marine up to thirty days' confinement in a Veterans Administration psych ward.

Under so-called "civil commitment" laws in place in all fifty states, tens of thousands of similar arrests are taking place across the country, with Americans being made to "disappear" into mental institutions. So it was no surprise, then, that within days of Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward, news reports started surfacing of other veterans having similar experiences. These incidents were merely the realization of various U.S. government initiatives dating back to 2009. One such initiative, Operation Vigilant Eagle, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorists because they may be "disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war."
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Right- and Lef t-Wing "Extremists"

Two reports from the Department of Homeland Security, one dubbed "Rightwing Extremism" and the other, "Leftwing Extremism," made a broad swipe at individuals and groups who engage in political activism. For example, the "Rightwing Extremism" report broadly defines as extremists those individuals and groups "that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely"
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Obviously, these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.

Although these initiatives caused an initial uproar when announced in 2009, they were quickly subsumed by the ever-shifting cacophony of the news media and its ten-day cycles. Yet while the American public may have forgotten about the government's plans to identify and disable anyone deemed a potential "threat," the government put its plan into action. Thus, what began as a blueprint under the Bush administration was used as an operation manual under the Obama administration to exile those who are challenging the government's authority.

An important point to consider, however, is that the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent-it is also locking up individuals
trained in military warfare
who are voicing feelings of discontent. Under the guise of mental health treatment and with the complicity of government psychiatrists and law enforcement officials, veterans are increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs in need of intervention.
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In 2012, for instance, the Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations involving highly trained and often heavily armed combat veterans.
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As we saw with Brandon Raub, one tactic being used to deal with vocal critics of the government is through the use of civil commitment laws, which have been employed throughout American history to not only silence but cause dissidents to disappear. For example, in 2006, officials with the National Security Agency (NSA) attempted to label former employee Russ Tice, who was willing to testify in Congress about the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program, as "mentally unbalanced" based upon two psychiatric evaluations ordered by his superiors.
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In 2009, NYPD Officer Adrian Schoolcraft had his home raided, and he was handcuffed to a gurney and taken into emergency custody for an alleged psychiatric episode. It was later discovered byway of an internal investigation that his superiors were retaliating against him for reporting police misconduct. Schoolcraft spent six days in the mental facility, and as a further indignity, was presented with a bill for $7,185 upon his release.
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