Obama Must Rein in 'Terrorist' Databases

[Joanne98]

by Jules Boykoff

While the country's economic infrastructure gyrates, the infrastructure to squelch political dissent quietly thrives after years of post-9/11 behind-the-scenes buttressing.

The Bush administration will long be remembered for placing the country on war footing abroad, but it should also be remembered for liberating the forces of political suppression at home.

President Obama has a historic opportunity to right this lurching ship.

In October 2007 during a Democratic debate in Philadelphia, Obama spoke of the "politics of fear" that was "undermining basic civil liberties in this country" and "our reputation around the world."

Now he must swerve sharply from this "politics of fear" and repression, reinstalling respect for civil liberties and the rule of law. This would undoubtedly improve "our reputation around the world."

This is no small task, even for a constitutional scholar like Obama. Not only did Bush and company jump-start high-profile measures like the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, but they also fashioned an astonishing assortment of clandestine databases to collect and store information about potential terrorists.

All too often, activists carrying out above-board political activity were sucked into these databases' wide-swirling vortex and labeled "terrorists."

This misguided mentality has led to a trickle-down theory that actually works: trickle-down political suppression that starts at the federal level and drops scale to inform the practices of state and local law enforcement officials.

Nowhere has this been more evident than in Maryland, where the most recent revelation du jour is that state police dubbed bicycle advocates seeking additional bike lanes "terrorists" and branded the DC Anti-War Network a white supremacist group. If the officials responsible for these shenanigans ever get the pink slips they deserve, they could always start penning scripts for Stephen Colbert.

The U.S. intelligence budget in fiscal year 2008 was a whopping $47.5 billion, and this doesn't include at least $10 billion spent on the Military Intelligence Program. Compare this to 1997 when the U.S. spent $26.6 billion on intelligence.

A significant swathe of this spending has gone toward surveillance: the gateway drug on the road to full-blown addiction to political suppression.

continued>>>
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/01/22-4