The architecture of a different America
More than a decade ago, when prisoners captured in Afghanistan and Iraq began arriving at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, I remember thinking, “We already know how to do this.”
The clumsy thought flashing through my mind was that America’s government already had the infrastructure, the ideas, the personnel and the contingency plans — heck we even had the weird orange jump suits — to process these so-called “detainees.”
And of course we did.
Over the last forty years, the United States has evolved into the society that imprisons more of our own citizens than any other nation on earth — by a long shot.
Though incarceration rates have dipped slightly, we still keep more than 2 million of our citizens behind bars, many of them for non-violent crimes that at one time in our history would have been considered medical problems, or mental health issues.
Set aside for a moment the justice of mass-incarceration.
Whatever you think about the spread of prisons in America — including the nearly twenty local, state and Federal jails and prisons here in the North Country — the reality is that they represent a new kind of architecture.
It is literally the architecture of a different America.
It is an America where we have the capacity, at any given time, to process and incarcerate millions of people. The system is efficient, scalable and like all well-made tools, it sits on the shelf waiting to be used.
Since 9/11, another parallel architecture has been erected — or at least expanded — with astonishing speed.
“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” reported the Washington Post’s Dana Priest in 2010.
We now have more than a million Americans working as prison guards and corrections officers in the US, but we also — according to Priest’s reporting — have more than 850,000 Americans working in intelligence, with some level of top-secret security clearance.
We now know that at least a significant number of those people are working to monitor and keep tabs on our behavior, collecting our private phone data and surveilling peaceful political groups, including the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
We know that law enforcement and security agencies are operating unmanned drones over our communities, a well as in the skies above Pakistan and Somalia.
We also know that our government has pushed to the outer limits what it views as legal and acceptable measures, including interrogation practices once viewed as torture, and the assassination of American citizens without trial or due process.
Let me say bluntly that I think these systems were designed and built with the best of intentions. Protecting America from lawlessness and terror is a noble pursuit.
But it is worth taking stock of the fact that this vast architecture now exists and holds enormous potential for misuse. We now have the capacity to watch, monitor, detain, incarcerate, interrogate and even kill with great skill and efficiency.
Is it conceivable that those powers could fall into the wrong hands or be used to the wrong ends?
It’s also worth asking, I think, what happens when so many of us now work as soldiers, intelligence operatives, Homeland Security agents, or prison guards.
Are we changed as a people if so many of us are in the business of prison, surveillance and war? At what point, does the architecture of the new America begin to seem normal, quotidien and beyond questioning?
As always, your comments and ideas welcome.
We always assume we are the good people – and it matters little who “we” are – but it isn’t always true. Sometimes there are many good people, and sometimes there are many evil people, and often they are the same people.
Fear makes people do bad things.
http://poststar.com/blogs/i_think_not/larson-shows-nazis-were-clowns-and-monsters/article_f81f341c-d1d2-11e2-a50b-001a4bcf887a.html
Quotidien? Whoh!
khl says “We always assume we are the good people…”
In an interesting juxtaposition I just finished reading Lawrence Gooley’s piece on The Adirondack Almanac http://www.adirondackalmanack.com/2013/06/the-ku-klux-klan-in-the-north-country.html
before reading this. It seems that, as a nation we go through these things on a cyclical basis. When times are good we come closer to being the image we have of ourselves but when times aren’t so good we lash out at whomever we perceive to be the enemy whether they bear any responsibility for the situation or not.
“We now have the capacity to watch, monitor, detain, incarcerate, interrogate and even kill with great skill and efficiency.”
Well put, Brian. The most powerful institutions in the country – defense contractors, government security agencies, the prison/industrial complex – have become war profiteers. With so much of our economy tied into these industries, WE have become war profiteers. Legislators have no incentive to rock the boat and the public is bewilderingly uninterested in taking stock. Are we numb, or are we apathetic because we don’t see any different road to take in the future?
Is there an off-ramp from this highway?
You don’t like paying taxes? Well all this so called safety costs a lot of money.
Also take note, you probably have more to fear from the “good people” than you do of the “bad people.”
If you doubt that, remember the terrorists consider themselves to be the “good people.”
Despite our founder’s best intentions and the Constitution, this country has become what they despised. We are now the world’s biggest bully, spending more on our military than the next 17 nations combined. We have military bases all over the world to protect corporate interests, interfere with sovereign nations, invade on false pretenses, rendition for torture, detain prisoners indefinitely, assassinate Americans in foreign countries, use remote drones in foreign air space that kill innocent civilians, etc. Is it any wonder why some people hate us enough to say, fly planes into US buildings or plant pressure cooker bombs at an event in a big US city? It is called “blowback,” a term used by the CIA and terrorist experts to describe the expected reaction to our military actions in foreign countries. And what is our response – more military buildup and a gross expansion of surveillance that even includes US citizens.
And this military buildup extends to US civilian police forces. Under the ruse of Homeland Security local police forces have been outfitted with equipment more appropriate for war than responding to accidents, disasters robberies, murders and other crimes. It is not unintentional that the war equipment is also effective in controlling, dispersing or arresting crowds of people who might be protesting the government or corporations. Think about the police brutality that took place at many of the Occupy sites last year and the tactics and equipment used to intimidate and clear out protesters. Watch what will happen to Keystone XL protesters. Officials can call anyone a terrorist, especially those that reveal government wrongdoing or those who protest in the street. For a politician/government official there is nothing that requires a swift severe response more than being embarrassed. Hence the recent prosecutions of whistleblowers and the nasty personal vilifying of Manning and Snowden.
At the same time we spend more for prisons than education. This week we learn Philadelphia is closing 23 schools and laying off thousands of teachers because of a $300 million dollar budget deficit. Yet the state is going to build a $400 million dollar prison to house inmates that will mostly come from, you guessed it – Philadelphia.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/mattstroud/2013/06/17/philadelphia-schools-closing-while-new-400-million-prison-under-construction/
Certainly with an even lesser quality educational experience many more kids from Philly will wind up in that new prison. That is the direction we are heading. Many schools now have police officers in the buildings and students in trouble are often processed through the criminal system instead of the vice-principal’s office. The power of incarceration corporations who build and often run prisons along with police/corrections unions have much greater political power than inner city minorities and teachers unions.
Of course sometimes juveniles get a “go directly to Jail” card:
http://www.npr.org/2012/03/03/147876810/after-scandal-new-rules-for-juveniles-in-pa-courts
Then there is the War on Drugs. Totally useless, unless you are in the police/prison business. Or want to disenfranchise minority populations who are disproportionately represented in drug arrests and lose many rights including voting.
And who can forget the recently exposed NSA spying programs. This is what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez had to say (was allowed to say) after a classified briefing by the NSA last week.
“… I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”
So yes, it is a changed America. And not for the better. We have abdicated too much power to the military, surveillance and incarceration industry corporations. They pay the politicians to pass laws favorable to their profits, hire former politicians and agency staff, and get their employees appointed to positions inside the agencies responsible for contracts with those corporations. It is a carousel that siphons off billions of our tax dollars to corporations while the same politicians claim we have to cut spending on social, education and health programs for Americans.
Can we change it? I don’t know. But to have any chance we need to at least:
Have public funding of political campaigns with limits on spending.
Overturn Citizens United.
Require all states use independent commissions to determine Congressional boundaries.
Impose meaningful restrictions on the flow of employees between government and corporations.
What Myown said. And said very well I might add.
Here’s a recent article from USA Today that highlights three other not very well known former NSA whistle blowers who have some very enlightening things to say about Snowden and the security apparatus we’ve built in the past 12 years. These three people have sacrificed their careers in order to inform Congress and the public just exactly how our rights are being trampled in the name of “The War on Terror.” Everyone should read this short article:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblowe r-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
Let me try that again:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblowe r-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
Well, if you’re interested in reading the article, you’ll need to cut and past the entire URL above. It’s worth the effort:
One more try:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/06/16/snowden-whistleblower-nsa-officials-roundtable/2428809/
The founders had an ocean to protect them.
Brian, who has the tea party and occupy under surveillance?
Paul: we don’t know. That information is classified. We’re supposed to have “healthy” debates without any information to base those debates on.
I was asking Brian Mann, but thanks. So are you (MOFYC) talking about the NSA program collecting data all over the place? I thought that maybe he was referring to some other program that was specifically spying on the Tea Party and Occupy I had not yet heard about. Hard to keep track these days.
But somebody in Occupy pooed once. We should be monitoring such threatening movements.
Once these sorts of institutions are built, funded and staffed they are very hard to shrink, they become self perpetuating entities mainly concerned with their own survival. So the threat always grows, the need for more always increases. We are still building weapon systems that were designed to fight a Soviet Threat in an air war over Western Europe, the F-22 in particular for example. So think how hard it is going to be to EVER say that the threat of terrorism is lowered. Its the perfect threat pretext, you can never really objectively show the threat has gone away or never really existed.
I mean just at a micro level look how much we locally have fought to keep our prisons going, it is a natural thing to do, its our jobs our economy, our schools dependent on this prison system. Yet we all know the system itself is not a good thing.
An additional part of this monitoring and control system not mentioned above is the incarceration camps we have in the Southern Border states, where large numbers of people are kept who have tried to enter the US illegally, regardless of how you feel about immigration, it is really creepy to drive by one of these facilities and know that there are families and children incarcerated inside of them, most of the facilities are privately run, frankly they look like concentration camps.
Mervel, very true. Yet it is so hard to make people look at things they don’t want to see.
I think this is an area that could join conservatives and liberals.
“But it is worth taking stock of the fact that this vast architecture now exists and holds enormous potential for misuse. We now have the capacity to watch, monitor, detain, incarcerate, interrogate and even kill with great skill and efficiency.
“Is it conceivable that those powers could fall into the wrong hands or be used to the wrong ends?”
What are the wrong ends? The fact is we don’t agree on this most of the time, thus we should never allow this sort of power and control to the government ever, because it is not a question of if they will be used for wrong ends but only a matter of when and by how much, they are being used for wrong ends now to some degree. It could be much worse of course, but power gets used, thus we must limit government power.
That is essentially the point of our constitution.
What we need is limited government…so that we can contract out the fighting and the spying and the prisons and the education and the educational testing (you get the picture) out to the private sector.
Contracts and cronyism IS big government. Government resources and power are government resources and power regardless if they are being spent by GE, Booze Allen or the NSA, its all the same.
Limited government is not the point, reducing the power and unconstitutional actions of a government that is far to powerful and intrusive is the point.
How can you look at the picture above and be proud of your government,our big wonderful government? Big government is not helping the poor, big government is in the end persecuting the poor and weak.
We should not get caught up in the momentary politics of this.
Why are we always the ones trying to persuade others to go to war? I see one of the things we are doing now is working to persuade other countries that we should all should get more involved in the Syrian civil war. I mean why are we always the ones doing the convincing? It seems to me that if this were important the world in general would be trying to convince us to get involved, not the other way around.
But it goes to Brian’s point about having the capability and thus we seek a mission to use it.
Paul –
Inappropriate government scrutiny of the tea party and other groups has been acknowledged by the IRS. Meanwhile, CNN and other have reported on the scrutiny of the Occupy political movement by the FBI and by police counter-terror agencies. This from CNN:
“The FBI extensively monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement around the United States, using counterterrorism agents and other resources, according to recently released FBI internal documents.”
http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/26/us/fbi-occupy
–Brian, NCPR
Actually, the contention that we already knew how to “do this” – to detain the prisoners from Enduring Freedom and other silly named military programs – is wrong. We apparently didn’t know how because we invented a whole new infrastructure in order to put people into a form of purgatory from which even people who are considered innocent or no longer a threat cannot be extricated. We invented ways to do evil that previously had not existed. There is no limit to the imagination of Ivy League educated lawyers.
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Mervel – sarcasm.