Russ Feingold: Censure in the Wilderness

Kurt Nimmo
Mar. 14, 2006

Senator Russ Feingold is one of a handful of Congress critters brave enough to oppose the Police State Act, otherwise known as the Patriot Act, and the NSA trampling of the Fourth Amendment as well. Now Feingold has introduced a proposal to “censure President George W. Bush for ordering domestic eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a warrant,” according to Reuters. Bush deserves nothing short of impeachment, and then an orange jumpsuit, and his Straussian neocon crew should be rounded up and prosecuted for treason—but none of this will happen, not now, next week, next year, or after the next president is elected, or appointed.

Feingold’s “censure” (in essence, Congress critters issuing a “rebuke,” or a mild slap on the wrist instead of indicting Bush for high crimes and misdemeanors) is a pathetic effort that will fail miserably because the whores of Congress are either onboard with the neocons or were long ago cowed into silence, as whores with closets filled with skeletons usually are.

Russ Feingold will soon enough become the poster child for Karl Rove’s effort to portray Democrats as friends of “al-Qaeda” and Islamic terrorism. “We are a nation at war,” declared Scott McClellan, even though we are not officially or legally a nation at war, and “if Democrats want to argue that we shouldn’t be listening to al Qaeda communications, it’s their right and we welcome the debate.” Of course, the NSA snoop program has nothing to do with “al-Qaeda” phone calls. It has everything to do with snooping Americans in opposition to Bush and his neocon La Costra Nostra.

If we are to believe a poll released by the CIA’s newspaper, the Washington Post, far too many “adults in the United States see nothing wrong with the domestic electronic surveillance program initiated by their federal government.” 54% believe trashing the Bill of Rights is “acceptable,” while a scant 32% are against reducing the Constitution to little more than “just a goddamned piece of paper,” as our supreme leader, our Reichspräsident, Der Führer, declared not long ago. Such survey results, if we can trust them, demonstrate most Americans have flat brainwaves when it comes to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But when it comes to naming Simpson cartoon characters, they are sharp as shiny new tacks.

Of course, all of this is moot, to say the least. The NSA has spied illegally on Americans for decades, as the Church Committee revealed in 1976. “In 1967, as part of a general concern within the intelligence community over civil disturbances and peace demonstrations, NSA responded to Defense Department requests by expanding its watch list program. Watch lists came to include the names of individuals, groups, and organizations involved in domestic antiwar and civil rights activities in an attempt to discover if there was ‘foreign influence’ on them,” explains a supplementary staff report issued by the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity, otherwise known as the Church Committee. “In response to pressures from the White House, FBI, and Attorney General, the Department of the Army established a civil disturbance unit.”

As Frank Morales documents, the response to “domestic antiwar and civil rights activities” resulted in Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2, code-named Operation Garden Plot. “By 1971, Senator Sam Ervin, later of Watergate renown, had convened his Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights which ‘revealed that Military Intelligence had established an intricate surveillance system covering hundreds of thousands of American citizens. Committee staff members had seen a master plan—Garden Plot that gave an eagle eye view of the Army-National Guard-police strategy…. At first, the Garden Plot exercises focused primarily on racial conflict. But beginning in 1970, the scenarios took a different twist. The joint teams, made up of cops, soldiers and spies, began practicing battle with large groups of protesters. California, under the leadership of Ronald Reagan, was among the most enthusiastic participants in Garden Plot war games,’” Morales writes.

In 1975, the details of Garden Plot and an associated program, Lantern Spike, were revealed to journalist Ron Ridenhour. It should be noted that under proposed legislation by Sen. Mike DeWine and Sens. Olympia Snowe, Lindsey Graham, and Chuck Hagel, Ridenhour would now be locked up in prison for 15 years and fined a million dollars (see my Booking First & Fourth Amendment Fifth Columnists) for reporting such information. Following nine eleven, Garden Plot, going under the name Noble Eagle, was activated “to respond to major domestic civil disturbances within the United States,” as Wikipedia summarizes.

In 1984, the feds launched Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984, an extension of Garden Plot, a plan to detain a large number of Americans to “fight subversive activities” and arrest “certain unidentified segments of the population,” according to scholar Diana Reynolds. The FBI had meticulously collated a list of these “unidentified segments of the population” (dubbed the “ADEX” list, or in FBI parlance, the “Custodial Detention” list; see Frank Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims & Methods of America’s Political Intelligence System. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1980).

In addition to Noble Eagle, the Pentagon, under a program called Eagle Eyes, activated TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) and CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity) to deal with “domestic terrorist threats against the military” and report and collate into sprawling databases “suspicious activity,” for instance a “peanut-butter protest [against the Houston headquarters of Halliburton]”regarded as a “potential threat to national security,” according to Newsweek. In January, Dick Cheney called the CIFA program “vital” to the “country’s defense against Al Qaeda,” that is to say peanut butter sandwich wielding “al-Qaeda” operatives. Another Pentagon database, according to an “NBC Investigative Unit,” including “nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center” and additional “documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities.”

According to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer who “blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests” in 1970, the documents revealed by NBC “tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again.” Pyle worked as an investigator for the late Senator Sam Ervin’s Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and later for the Church Committee, mentioned above.

NBC comments that the “public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens—many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.,” in other words the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, violated by Bush and his minions, and prompting Russ Feingold to introduce his ill-fated censure, “an appropriate and responsible step for Congress to take in response to the President’s undermining of the separation of powers and ignoring the rule of law,” as the Post Chronicle reports.

Indeed, in the mid-70s, the “public was outraged” over military snooping on citizens. But that was then and this is now—and now the public has bought the “al-Qaeda” fairy tale (a myth that “threatens to overthrow history,” as Gore Vidal would have it) and the benighted masses believe the government when it promises the NSA snoop program is limited to phone calls placed from caves in Afghanistan or huts in the tribal area of Pakistan. Most Americans, afflicted with amnesia and intellectual incuriosity, are unaware of what the NSA has done since Truman wrote his October 24, 1952, memorandum establishing the National Security Agency and thus the National Security State. “58 years later, the National Security State has metastasized into a horror for the United States and the world,” writes Sheldon Drobny.

Russ Feingold is a brave man to oppose all of this. Unfortunately, he is performing a certain bodily function in the face of a cyclone.