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Originally Posted by Andrea
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The NSA-DEA police state tango
This week's DEA bombshell shows us how the drug war and the terror war have poisoned our justice system
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/10/the_...e_state_tango/
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…this is a genuinely sinister turn of events with a whiff of science-fiction nightmare, one that has sounded loud alarm bells for many people in the mainstream legal world. Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law professor who spent 18 years as a federal judge and cannot be accused of being a radical, told Reuters she finds the DEA story more troubling than anything in Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. It’s the first clear evidence that the “special rules” and disregard for constitutional law that have characterized the hunt for so-called terrorists have crept into the domestic criminal justice system on a significant scale. “It sounds like they are phonying up investigations,” she said. Maybe this is how a police state comes to America: Not with a bang, but with a parallel construction.
Millions of people have been sent to prison on drug-war convictions over the last 20 years. Most of those people have been poor and black. We will never know how many of those cases resulted from secret evidence collected by spy agencies, but it might not be a small number. One of the Reuters articles that broke this story quotes DEA officials as saying that the “parallel construction” tactic had been used by the agency “virtually every day since the 1990s.” Legal scholar Michelle Alexander, author of the recent bestseller “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” sent me an email from her family vacation to say that these revelations “certainly lead one reasonably to wonder how many people — especially poor people of color, who have been the primary targets in the drug war — have been spied on by the DEA in the name of national security.” Michelle Alexander’s book depicts the mass imprisonment of African Americans as a new system of racial control that is more efficient than the old one precisely because it is veiled by official colorblindness. In the recent documentary “How to Make Money Selling Drugs,” David Simon of “The Wire” and “Treme” describes the United States as a society that “hunts down and incarcerates poor people.”
From the outset, there have been moral, philosophical and technological connections between the war on drugs and the war on terror. Both campaigns involve the unprecedented expansion of executive power and the use of high-tech paramilitary policing. Both involve “adjusting” our supposedly cherished constitutional rights and privileges in the name of protecting us from evil. Both involve targets that are easy to demonize and marginalize, and both embody troubling questions about race, class and power. Most important of all, both conflicts are immensely expensive and shockingly self-destructive. If these parallel wars had been designed to fail – designed to create a state of permanent crisis, empower and enrich a caste of warrior-bureaucrats and undercut constitutional democracy – they could hardly have been designed more perfectly.
All this underscores, of course, that while drug-war prosecutions are supposed to be just like other kinds of criminal cases, in practice they have a special status and are treated differently. But one may still ask, given that this administration and the last one (and quite likely the one before that) have repeatedly misled the public about the existence, extent and scope of surveillance programs, whether there is any reason to believe that the pipeline of secret data and the manipulation of the justice system is limited to drug cases. Should we be confident that NSA intercepts and foreign-intelligence wiretaps and “parallel construction” will never be used to build criminal cases against hackers, leakers, Occupy activists, investigative journalists, unfriendly pundits and any other dissidents on the left or the right whom the government decides to persecute?
In theory, the DEA disclosures could and should have outraged Americans across the political spectrum, especially when added to all the other bad things we’ve learned about our government this year. Except that blind partisan loyalty now trumps everything in national politics, and almost nothing about our country’s slide toward soft police state still shocks anybody. Conservatives only care about civil liberties when they affect rich and/or rural white folks, and support any degree of tyranny when it comes to conducting the drug war and locking up poor people. As Bruce A. Dixon of Black Agenda Report notes, liberals of all races would have howled about this stuff under Bush-Cheney, but with a black Democrat in the White House they make excuses or pretend it isn’t happening.
Maybe we’re all just dazed by the tide of NSA revelations, distracted by celebrity sex scandals and the idiotic infighting of Washington, and insulated by the techno-workaholic bubble of ordinary life, in which America still seems like a calm and normal place. If I had to break it down, I would guess that half the population clings to the optimistic belief that reasonable people are in charge and things will work out for the best, while the other half has become entirely cynical. I mean, who still thinks that drug dealers have rights? That’s so 20th century!