This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Truth comes from practice:


Liberals don't know what to say about civil liberties

March 24 2007

Democrats have changed the subject from the "Patriot Act" that they co-authored and voted for to the subject of attorney firings. In particular, Dianne Feinstein, Senator of California, and former New York mayor Ed Koch are issuing bland and ignorant statements about the FBI. Koch said:

The most persuasive argument given in defense of the Patriot Act for me was the challenge of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif., to the ACLU to produce anyone whose rights had been violated by the U.S. government under the powers granted to it to collect information that would help our security agencies to protect us from terrorists.

The ACLU was unable to produce a single person who could prove that he or she had had their civil rights violated. (1)

This is a cheap trick to force the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to know what it is talking about concretely! In other words, the ACLU is a straw man to run down, because it is an empty and formalist dispenser of civic dogmas that supposedly all Amerikans abide by. The political substance of the question is that ACLU should not have to produce individuals that Koch and other demagogues run down as politically unpopular. To ask for substance is to oppose civic dogma, and that pretty much is the ACLU's point.

Likewise, in "crossfire"-like television programs on this topic we always see a reactionary pitted against a liberal who does not know anything concrete and would never dream of questioning the motivations and self-interests of police. Putting up a white middle-class persyn with no experience in anti-government politics against a reactionary is never going to serve the interests of freedom, because the liberals simply do not know anything real. We are much more likely to get explanations from former FBI agents on why there are FBI motivations, connected to DC politics but also employment self-justification than we are from dumb white liberals with no real experience in activist politics.

At least Koch called for resignation of Mueller and Gonzales. University of California professor John Yoo ignorantly stated that Patriot Act abuses are just "clerical mismanagement," but we do agree with Yoo that FBI is in a quandary right now where a solution of "break-up" and "spinoff"(2) are necessary, because mixing "anti-terrorism" international duties with domestic duties does not work.

Almost all other democracies that face terrorist threats divide internal security from domestic law enforcement. Britain has MI5; France has its Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire; Israel has Shin Bet. We can learn from their experiences, dividing the FBI into a traditional law enforcement arm and a separate, independent counter-terrorism unit.(2)

Specifically, it is inevitable that MIM will call FBI to task for mixing together its Abu Ghraib-like interest in pornography with its political interests via academia with questions of international spying and terrorism. It would be much better for relevant authorities to realize that this combination of things that FBI is doing does not work and it is a matter of competence, of foreseeing what sorts of situations arise given the current organizational confusion.

It is not just MIM that notices shades of Abu Ghraib in the collection of persynal information and how it ends up being used. An FBI agent who quit after 13 years also noticed:

"All of the horrible green lights have originated from the seat of power. Just as little Lynndie England and other prison guards' derelict actions at Abu Ghraib stemmed in some measure from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's green light, FBI field agents getting carried away with obtaining records by executing over 200,000 NSL requests since 9-11 is the direct result of a similar green light stemming from the massive data collection and 'no tip will go uncovered' dictums of the FBI Director and other high- level intelligence officials in Washington D.C."(3)
MIM is not going to play by rules of spy or journalist etiquette while people's pensions, jobs or persynal lives free of FBI-instigated pornography are at stake. Nor are we going to stay tactically stagnant while there are attacks on our means of communication. That should be predictable to any competent persyn looking at why intelligence functions have to be separated from normal FBI functions.

Unknown to ignorant liberals claiming to be concerned, FBI media outlets have already started a counter-attack on MIM's position, as if the problem were one of journalistic balance and not what the FBI is doing! They actually claim that federal agent death threats only balance out other death threats allegedly by private citizens! How about FBI not get the death threat ball rolling and admit that it started the ball rolling in a situation where it is justifying its own employment and protecting its historical image. Huh? Save everyone a lot of trouble. Let the private citizens balance things out. As it is, the situation the FBI is trying to justify is hundreds of private citizen death threats on the FBI side against what FBI is trying to scrounge up--one or two against them. The FBI is not supposed to be a media outlet justifying its use of private information in public.

Yoo says that intelligence agents are more likely to apply blackmail than FBI. MIM has witnessed new-fangled use of blackmail against U.S. citizens toward old-fashioned FBI goals. Yoo and various unexperienced liberals simply do not understand the real-world motivations of the FBI, as an agency with its own self-interests. Any CIA agents or military intelligence agents who got involved were not thinking ahead about FBI's self-motivations when they rubbed shoulders in "joint work."

So Yoo is wrong to whitewash the FBI, but he is right that functions are being mixed together. MIM retains multiple legal abilities to retaliate for extortion and the FBI is not above the law. Trying to handle MIM, Ward Churchill etc. as if they were Third World Islamic teenagers is not going to work. The fact that we are politically unpopular does not remove our means of retaliation. We may not use the avenues that the ACLU uses, but we are aware of the inherent nature of bourgeois politics and we will see to it that politics do not regress beyond those limits. The nature of the conflict that the "Patriot Act" crowd wants has historical precedents and the enemy has overreached out of ignorance of bourgeois dynamics.

Notes:
1. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,259180,00.html
One former FBI agent admitted that mission expansion has gone to the point where nothing against terrorism is being done, just attacks on civil liberties.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_joan_bru_070315_former_fbi_agent_3a_re.htm
2. http://www.journaltimes.com/articles/2007/03/22/opinion/21897287.txt ;
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-yoo21mar21,1,5259263.story?coll=la-news-comment
3. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/when-will-we-ever-learn-_b_44056.html