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In March, the mainstream media outed Shannen Rossmiller as an "anti- terrorist spy."(1) She invents several online Internet characters to infiltrate "terrorist networks" in order to inform for the FBI unpaid.
The FBI in Montana has applauded:
"FBI spokesman Bob Wright, a special agent in Salt Lake City — the field office responsible for FBI activities in Montana — said the agency would not discourage individuals like Rossmiller.(2)"'We've always relied on our good relationship with citizens as our eyes and ears in the community,' Wright said. 'This is just a new twist on an old theme. It's sort of like a cyber Neighborhood Watch.'"
These are the type of people who think nothing of killing a million Iraqis but lose sleep at night thinking about 9/11, where less than 3000 people died in retaliation for countless U.$. acts of war on the Arab peoples. These anti-small- terrorist vigilantes are the current equivalent of the "red under the bed" freaks. People outlawing smoking in public places will end up saving many more lives due to second-hand smoke than these self-styled FBI vigilantes who only degrade the accountability of capitalist government.
This sort of spy will be unaware of existing federal infiltration efforts thanks to a lack of formal integration into fed networks. This is the only means by which it is possible for the citizenry to identify vigilante-spies as apart from the federal government--by knowing what the federal government should know and what a vigilante does not know. Vigilante spies will be difficult to tell apart from lying federal agents, clueless federal agents or agents simply lacking alertness--a large portion.
The Rossmiller vigilante characters add to the unaccountability of government. The citizenry will now have to contend with not just uncovering corruption and undercover acts against the people by the government, but also separating that from people who merely behave the same way, as if they had the same interests as the government. MIM operates in a clandestine manner, but it does not act in the same interests as the U.$. government; hence the two can be distinguished.
Recently, we have a problem where an investigator of undercover federal abuses named Ward Churchill is under attack. Ward Churchill co-authored a book titled Agents of Repression on the details of FBI abuses. This sort of work is most challenging and there is no government agency or university that specializes in training the citizens how to do the kind of work Ward Churchill does. The people who do Ward Churchill's work do not receive mass recognition, because their work is too creative, not possible with cookie-cutters. In contrast, whatever the government says appears instantly on AP, CNN, FOX News, as newsworthy no matter how false.
Unthinking citizens do not realize how difficult it is what Churchill puts together, how path-breaking. Many believe only the government side of events. They will believe for example that the Patriot Act only results in taking phone logs, Internet mails and bank records. Stupid liberals in the media won't even know what to ask about such assertions by the FBI duly reported as fact by CNN, FOX etc. The only way to know what to ask about the covert struggle is by participating on the anti-government side--and such participation will take longer than learning the government side at a military or police academy for instance.
The same government lackeys jump on Churchill for putting together the role of John Smith in an epidemic killing indigenous people. It is discussion of an obscure historical set of events that is outraging the descendants of John Smith, who yet do not have an entirely persuasive account themselves of why smallpox killed a higher portion of indigenous people than whites. The underlying point is the same: if the FBI did not say it happened, if John Smith did not say it happened, then whitey-fascist-vigilante believes it did not happen, period, no need for academic or journalistic inquiry--and all this in a world where selfish family, money and ethnic motivations have not disappeared yet.
At the same time, the federal government is now pretending to be deaf on the question of weapons provocations for example. The federal government and its agencies is pretending not to know the chronology of what MIM is talking about, nor the abuses involving joint federal work. When MIM threatens to uncover the details, we receive threats regarding Valerie Plame style laws.
As the FBI Director Mueller and Attorney General Gonzales just admitted, the FBI collects private information MIM says it should not have, does not document what it does with that information as it recently admitted and then releases that private information to the public while claiming not to. The CIA then uses FBI's information in an inappropriate manner and takes the Valerie-Plame-approach that it is illegal to expose what a CIA agent (or any agent with similar laws protecting identity) does. Thus, an unconstitutional act is at least superficially illegal to expose.
All manners of corrupt favors are done among cooperating agencies and vigilantes. The joint work of the vigilantes/FBI and CIA creates a Catch-22 where the government can do what it wants and the citizens face daunting legal tasks to expose it. Alternatively, the people can decide that since the government does work with Shannen Rossmillers who spy indistinguishably from the CIA, then there is no harm in exposing their identities. The people have the right to an accountable government and it is not their fault that ordinary citizens are carrying out the same tasks usually assigned to federal agencies-- whether as border vigilantes such as Minutemen or anti-small-terrorist vigilantes like Rossmiller.
Although Valerie Plame is standing up for supposedly apolitical intelligence gathering that might have stopped the Iraq War had the public known it,(3) her means is creating more of the same problem. That is to say that by putting an emphasis on the laws protecting clandestine government agents, Valerie Plame is leaving aside their blame in the Iraq War situation but also any situation. The real relationship that needs addressing is how the people can keep clandestine forces in check, whether following Bush's orders or Clinton's. Yet it is not surprising that intra-government disputes are the substance of media coverage, because quoting government officials as gospel is much easier than doing one's own original investigative work.
The theory of the vigilante-government alliance in a capitalist world is fascist--harking back to brownshirts working for the bankers and industrialists of Nazi Germany. The fascist theory of service to the capitalist state allows unbridled private interests of various agencies to come into play under the cloak of "joint work," by which these "anti-terrorist" activists mean that they cannot be held accountable for what other agencies do, when in fact they are one government/vigilante alliance.
It is one thing to abolish the Bill of Rights in a world where the underlying motivations for corruption are under attack--where money is illegal and borders separating nations are gone for example. That would be proletarian dictatorship. Where agencies have contending self-interests, where careers and money are at stake and where agencies have varying degrees of unaccountability, the attack on the Bill of Rights is fascist.
Going from the government to the vigilantes there is another layer of cooperation--the left-wing of parasitism. Since 9/11, Liberals masquerading as Marxists at Che-Libs and the RCP=CIA have denied the existence of FBI informers that went into motion with 9/11, and the reality of the state, only to have the mainstream media report on them later. These forces cooperated with FBI informers. They are less than worthless to the proletarian struggle.
The final layer, the final hurdle for the people to clear in the difficult imperialist country conditions is the undercover agent pretending to belong to the proletarian camp. These undercover agents imitating MIM in places as far away as India are also indistinguishable from those revising the principles of Marxism while claiming to be Marxist.
MIM has already reported that there are 100,000 spies working for federal agencies, not counting local and state police. Then we have to add in the vigilante informers who value Amerikkkan lives thousands of times more than Arab lives, just as Hitler valued German lives 1000 times more than Slavic, Jewish and Roma lives.
There is no real follower of Marx in the united $tates who is not bringing to the fore the reality of the spy industry and the state in service of the imperialists. The spy-vigilante complex vastly outnumbers the communist, socialist and social-democratic movement combined and must be accounted for in the political conditions of struggle in some imperialist countries. The strategy and tactics in such countries must adapt to minority status, even while in the world as a whole the exploited far outnumber the exploiters.
Notes:
1. The Week March 23 2007, p. 10.
2. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001957222_montana16m.html
3. See for example, http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/16/cia.leak/index.html