Romney: We need more snoops and snitches in our neighborhoods

Kurt Nimmo | December 16 2004

Mitt Romney, governor of Massachusetts, has come up with a stupid if not particularly original idea—meter readers, E.M.S. drivers, law enforcement, private sector personnel, etc., should spy on American citizens, or as he told the New York Times, “be on the lookout for information which may be … useful.”

Since Ashcroft, the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA—now working, in violation of the domestic prohibition of their original charter, in league with the FBI—or local law enforcement has yet to find terrorists in America—or terrorists they can successfully prosecute, a handful of people have been arrested but none convicted of serious offense—thus Romney’s suggestion, betraying the spirit of the Constitution (i.e., people are to be left alone unless they are breaking laws), will do nothing except cause more animosity and in general create a state of distrust as public workers become Stasi stand-ins.

“We could increase our law enforcement personnel tenfold, but we can’t protect every target,” Romney said. “There are just too many schools, churches, stadiums, bridges, tunnels, roads, subways. We have to be able to find the bad guys before they carry out their acts, and that can only be done through intelligence. The financial resources of our nation and our states should be increasingly devoted to this effort.”

Bad guys. I don’t know about you, but I’m sick and tired of this trite and adolescent term, perfectly Bushian in its Manichean over simplification. Far as I can tell, the “bad guys” are in the White House and the Pentagon, subverting our civil liberties, planning additional wars (i.e., the mass murder of innocent people in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, including North Korea, Cuba, maybe even China, Colombia, Russia, France, anywhere and everywhere people stand up to the neocons and neolibs).

“The proposal by Mr. Romney’s working group represents a new and more assertive role for many local law enforcement agencies and other public and private entities in fighting terrorism, some experts on domestic security said.”

In other words, fighting non-existent terrorism. On 9/11, law enforcement had their hands on several people who appeared to know something about the terrorism in New York—they were joyfully dancing and slapping high fives as the towers collapsed—and yet they were quietly released to the master terrorist state, Israel. Since 9/11, there hasn’t been terrorist act one, or even a credible threat, although the Ministry of Homeland Security released numerous warnings, based on little more than thin air, and sufficiently scared the dickens out of the American people (admittedly not difficult to do). Even so, Romney wants to turn America into a police state, sort of a new fangled version of Orwell’s dystopian nightmare where neighbor spied and snitched on neighbor. I’m not sure what is worse—a few bridges blown up or a nation of snitches denouncing people for the crime of being Arab, or Muslim, or having anti-Bush posters on their walls, or complaining about Bush at the local gym.

“If you have a transit system that circles a major city and you get reports of people photographing trains at various locations, well, the report from one police station may be meaningless, but several of them may be a pattern,” said John D. Cohen, senior homeland security policy adviser to Massachusetts.

Somebody better warn the Japanese tourists. In Chicago, before 9/11, I did this on a routine basis. I wouldn’t think of it now. Last year, in Phoenix, I was taking photos of some trees outside a corporate office complex and was brusquely told by two rent-a-cops that I was trespassing and photographs were forbidden. I was made to feel like a criminal as they followed me down the street, making sure I was out of range of their precious office building so I couldn’t take photos for Osama bin Laden. Romney wants to make sure I can’t take photos of anything in public. So much for my photography career. In Bush’s America, merely having a camera in public makes you a suspect.

Dr. McIntyre said a potential pitfall of the working group’s proposal was the issue of making sure that local agencies and businesses did not violate civil liberties. “How do we properly ensure that we’re investigating some Americans without investigating all Americans?” he asked.

I don’t believe Dr. McIntyre has a clue—civil liberties simply do not matter anymore and many Americans, if not most, believe the Bill of Rights should be dismantled now that we are fighting a (phony) war on terrorism. Point is, the government wants to investigate all Americans, or at least have the capacity to investigate them. That’s what government does—as the framers knew—and that’s why they went out of their way to set up a system of checks and balances, a system Bush and Crew are dismantling in record time, not that most Americans care, or even know what the founding principles of this country are all about. Our government, public education, and mass media have done an exemplary job of rendering Americans into complete dufuses.

As a side note, this week I had cable TV installed, for free (some sort of trial basis), and tonight I watched “Law and Order,” a long running and popular TV show. After watching two cops physically abuse a suspect—he was a pedophile—although he was not officially charged with any crime, I realized what TV is doing to people in this country: brainwashing them into believing that if you are investigated by the police you must have done something wrong, that the Constitution is an excuse used by criminals (the show made this explicitly clear, as the pedophile said he has a “right” to sexually abuse children). In such an atmosphere, Mitt Romney’s idea will receive little criticism, except from the ACLU and civil liberty organizations, which most people revile, or at least think exist to make excuses for criminals.

Mr. Cohen, the security adviser, said: “When we’re talking about engaging frontline personnel, we’re not asking them to go out and spy on people. In the course of them doing their jobs day to day, they collect information. And we’re talking about teaching people to be more sensitive when information that is collected in the course of their day-to-day business may actually have a nexus with terrorism.”

Of course, this is pie-in-the-sky nonsense, if not disingenuous. Do you think the meter reader is going to be “sensitive” when he reads the meter at an Arab person’s house, or will he immediately assume the guy is a terrorist and act accordingly? Moreover, in the current political climate, where protesters are demonized as anti-American (at best) or dupes for Osama and Gang (at worst, ask David Horowitz), how do you think that UPS driver will act if he happens to notice a package arriving from a suspicious location (maybe a radical book publisher)? In Boulder not long ago, the Secret Service was actually dispatched after some kids sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” at a talent show. So sensitive were the police in Buffalo, New York, they called the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to investigate an artist who happened to be making the wrong political statements.

Mitt Romney, as an upper echelon statist, probably believes what he is proposing is a good idea and may actually prevent terrorism, even though there is no terrorism in this country to speak of, that is unless you consider dissent as a form of terrorism (as does the FBI and Bush). Unfortunately, Romney will probably get his way, may even get money from the feds to build his “fusion” (i.e., spy) centers. Either way, it will be a stupendous waste of money and resources.

Same as it was in East Germany.