(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)
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By John W. Whitehead
December 30, 2013
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”—George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Vol. 1
In Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, TV
weatherman Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray) is forced to live the
same day over and over again until he not only gains some insight into
his life but changes his priorities. Similarly, as I illustrate in my
book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,
we in the emerging American police state find ourselves reliving the
same set of circumstances over and over again—egregious surveillance,
strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, government spying,
the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, etc.—although
with far fewer moments of comic hilarity.
What remains to be seen is whether 2014 will bring more of the same or
whether “we the people” will wake up from our somnambulant states.
Indeed, when it comes to civil liberties and freedom, 2013 was far from a
banner year. The following is just a sampling of what we can look
forward to repeating if we don’t find some way to push back against the
menace of an overreaching, aggressive, invasive, militarized government
and restore our freedoms.
Government spying. It’s hard to understand how anyone
could be surprised by the news that the National Security Agency has
been systematically collecting information on all telephone calls placed
in the United States, and yet the news media have treated it as a
complete revelation. Nevertheless, such outlandish government spying
been going on domestically since the 1970s, when Senator Frank Church
(D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on
Intelligence that investigated the NSA’s breaches, warned the public
against allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of
national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at
any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American
would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor
everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There
would be no place to hide.” Recent reports indicate that the NSA, in
conjunction with the CIA and FBI, has actually gone so far as to
intercept laptop computers ordered online in order to install spyware on
them.
Militarized police. With almost 13,000 agencies in all
50 states and four U.S. territories participating in a military
“recycling” program, community police forces across the country continue
to be transformed into outposts of the military, with police agencies
acquiring military-grade hardware—tanks, weaponry, and other equipment
designed for the battlefield—in droves. Keep in mind that once acquired,
this military equipment, which is beyond the budget and scope of most
communities, finds itself put to all manner of uses by local law
enforcement agencies under the rationale that “if we have it, we might
as well use it”—the same rationale, by the way, used with deadly results
to justify assigning SWAT teams to carry out routine law enforcement
work such as delivering a warrant.
Police shootings of unarmed citizens. Owing in large
part to the militarization of local law enforcement agencies, not a week
goes by without more reports of hair-raising incidents by police imbued
with a take-no-prisoners attitude and a battlefield approach to the
communities in which they serve. Sadly, it is no longer unusual to hear
about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask
questions later, such as the 16-year-old teenager who skipped school
only to be shot by police after they mistook him for a fleeing burglar.
Then there was the unarmed black man in Texas “who was pursued and shot
in the back of the neck by Austin Police… after failing to properly
identify himself and leaving the scene of an unrelated incident.” And
who could forget the 19-year-old Seattle woman who was accidentally shot
in the leg by police after she refused to show her hands? The lesson to
be learned: this is what happens when you take a young man (or woman),
raise him on a diet of violence, hype him up on the power of the gun in
his holster and the superiority of his uniform, render him woefully
ignorant of how to handle a situation without resorting to violence,
train him well in military tactics but allow him to be illiterate about
the Constitution, and never stress to him that he is to be a peacemaker
and a peacekeeper, respectful of and subservient to the taxpayers, who
are in fact his masters and employers.
The erosion of private property. If the government can
tell you what you can and cannot do within the privacy of your home,
whether it relates to what you eat or what you smoke, you no longer have
any rights whatsoever within your home. If government officials can
fine and arrest you for growing vegetables in your front yard, praying
with friends in your living room, installing solar panels on your roof,
and raising chickens in your backyard, you’re no longer the owner of
your property. If school officials can punish your children for what
they do or say while at home or in your care, your children are not your
own—they are the property of the state. If government agents can invade
your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your
furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer
private and secure—it belongs to the government. Likewise, if police can
forcefully draw your blood, strip search you, and probe you intimately,
your body is no longer your own, either. This is what a world without
the Fourth Amendment looks like, where the lines between private and
public property have been so blurred that private property is reduced to
little more than something the government can use to control,
manipulate and harass you to suit its own purposes, and you the
homeowner and citizen have been reduced to little more than a tenant or
serf in bondage to an inflexible landlord.
Strip searches and the loss of bodily integrity. The
Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the
citizenry from being subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures”
by government agents. While the literal purpose of the amendment is to
protect our property and our bodies from unwarranted government
intrusion, the moral intention behind it is to protect our human
dignity. Unfortunately, court rulings undermining the Fourth Amendment
and justifying invasive strip searches have left us powerless against
police empowered to forcefully draw our blood, strip search us, and
probe us intimately. For example, during a routine traffic stop, Leila
Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in
plain view of passing traffic, while her two children—ages 1 and
4—waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in
an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer “forcibly removed” a
tampon from Tarantino. No contraband or anything illegal was found.
