Rise of the garrison state: using the pretext of responding to terrorist threats, President Bush proposed changes that, in reality, have long been planned to consolidate police-state powers at the federal level.

Extract

---

Rise of the garrison state: using the pretext of responding to terrorist threats, President Bush proposed changes that, in reality, have long been planned to consolidate police-state powers at the federal level.

"Thousands of trained killers are plotting to attack us, and this terrible knowledge requires us to act differently." Thus spoke President Bush in his nationally televised June 6th address unveiling "the most extensive reorganization of the federal government since the 1940s." The centerpiece of this reorganization, explained the president, would be "a permanent Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security."

By presenting this proposal in a primetime address, the Bush White House staged a spin control coup that would do credit to the infamous Clinton "War Room." The president's announcement came on the same day that FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to the Joint Inquiry of the House and Senate concerning glaring intelligence failures surrounding the September 11th terrorist attacks. Rowley authored a blistering May 21st memo to Director Mueller describing how the Bureau's top echelon leadership had worked to "deliberately sabotage" the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, a suspected conspirator in the 9-11 attacks. In the memo, Rowley described how agents in the FBI field office in Minneapolis bitterly joked that key officials at...

See the full content of this document

---