“The National Applications Office”.
Sounds an innocuous enough name, doesn’t it? But, according to Lindsay Bayerstein’s latest article at In These Times, like Dickens’ Circumlocution Office it’s merely a euphemism intended to hide any amount of skulduggery and underhandedness.
The NAO is a Bushco creation intended to promote, market and sell valuable information obtained by military spy satellites about us to private companies and civil law enforcement – and no-one in the Bush administration can say, or is willing to say, exactly what or who gives them the legal right to do so.
The National Applications Office, which is schedule to go live on October 1, is an office within the Department of Homeland Security.
The NAO will serve as a clearinghouse for spy satellite data for civil applications (science and the environment), homeland security, and law enforcement (national, state, and local).
The NAO is a massive expansion of the dissemination of intelligence to an entirely new group of clients. The program raises serious constitutional and civil liberties issues. Also, the DHS has said little about whether making this data available to thousands of people across the country might compromise sources and methods.
[…]
When DHS officials were called to testify before the House Committee on Homeland Security in early September, they admitted that many of their standard operating procedures hadn’t even been written down yet! The top DHS lawyer declined to testify at all.
Lindsay’s put her finger right on what’s so disturbing about this latest develeopment,
The Skynet aspect of all this is disturbing enough, as is the subterfuge and the end-run around accountability – but that’s SOP for this bunch. What’s important is the the continued blurring of the dividing line between business, private security, civil law enforcement and the military. Soon there will be no dividing line at all, there’ll just one big amorphous ‘security force’ ith sweeping and draconian powers.
These days if you were to line up an officer of each you’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference: all have become little more than standard-issue paramilitaries and the government is pushing this militisation yet further. Even the Right is concerned.
I suppose this answers my question about what the Forest Service might need 700 tasers for. One security force, indivisible, with spy data for all…Bush may be stupid but he’s learned a lot from Argentina.
4. Consolidate power
Once a national security state has created a culture of fear and suppressed dissent, it may safely consolidate power, with minimal questioning by the media or challenges from dissident voices. In Argentina, power was consolidated in the military, which was given full control in the fight against “subversion.” There was no separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches – the military ran all three. There were no local or provincial elections either, and all local leaders were appointed by the dictatorship.
A key strategy of the Argentine dictatorship was to strip the judiciary of its powers. The National Commission for the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), a commission created by the first democratically elected government after the dictatorship, specifically cited the elimination of the writ of habeas corpus as a constitutional guarantee as part of the apparatus that allowed forced disappearances to continue.
Similarly, the Bush administration is trying to consolidate power in the Executive Branch. At the President’s request, Congress agreed to handover its war-making powers to the president first in Fall 2001 with the Authorization for Use of Military Force and next in Fall 2002 with the Iraq War Resolution. (8) The Department of Homeland Security was created to manage a variety of previously independent government agencies including: the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Secret Service, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Coast Guard.
Remember that executive order Bush signed back in May? The one that enables him to take entire autocratic control of the US shoudl he declare it necessary in a ‘national emergency’, which he too gets to declare?
Not much point in being able to do that, if there’s a multiplicity of jurisdictions getting in the way of having your orders carried out. Better to bring it all under one big, convenient, dictatorial umbrella.
