A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon For black and white liberals, a crime is only a crime when committed by Republicans. How else to explain the indifference of Obama supporters to the news that a pipeline of unknown dimensions exists connecting the NSA's vacuum cleaner surveillance of US citizens with the Drug Enforcement Administration and local cops who are directed to conceal their sources of evidence while assuring us that everything they do is perfectly legal...
NSA, DEA and Local Cops Share Information Concealed From Judges & Defendants, But No Liberal Outrage A Black Agenda Radio Commentary by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon The racist and hypocritical and failed war on terror has something in common with the racist, hypocritical and failed war on drugs. I mean, something new, not merely that they're both based on lies to propagate public fear, or that they're both great white holes politicians of both parties can shove billions of dollars into, making contractors wealthy and their own jobs secure.
A Monday morning Reuters news story confirms that the NSA shares unknown quantities of its vacuum cleaner surveillance of every American's electronic communications and whereabouts with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which duly passes it on to thousands of state and local police agencies in every jurisdiction.
Just as the power-mad generals at NSA pretends that everything they do is perfectly legal, DEA spokespeople also assure us that no laws are broken, even though their own manuals counsel local police to lie about their sources of information, and instruct them, where possible to fogey up so-called “reconstructive investigations” to yield material usable in court and free from annoying exculpatory evidence.
The information pipeline between the NSA, the DEA, your local police departments and assorted contractors is not overseen, even by legislators sworn to secrecy or clandestine courts. All oversight is in the hands of the Drug Enforcement Administration, a federal agency created for the express purpose of publicizing, politicizing and prosecuting the failed 40 years war on drugs. Given this complete lack of oversight, can we even begin to take seriously their declarations about the limits the information they pass on and the uses they put it to?
If the Bush-Cheney gang were still in the White House, the assurances of NSA generals and DEA cops, along with purported inquiries into the legality of these practices by a Department of Justice which recently pronouced that being profiled at a White House “Terror Tuesday” meetings was all the “due process ” required before summary execution by drone – these assurances would be met with a relentless storm of disbelief and ridicule.
But in the upside down universe of liberals in this, the age of Obama, violations of due process, mass incarceration, vacuum cleaner surveillance of the digital lives and correspondence of all Americans, and passing the results of this unconstitutional surveillance on to local police are beneath the notice of black and white Democrats, and unworthy of comment, even by black leaders who claim to oppose mass incarceration.
It may have taken the Bush-Cheney gang to initiate the so-called War on Terror. But only Barack Obama., only a black Democrat in the White House could make it OK in the eyes of black and white liberals to bring that war home in the forms of border walls, universal surveillance, and the sharing of that surveillance data with local cops who conceal its origin at the same time they claim that everything they do is legal. And nobody even laughs.
For Black Agenda Radio,. I'm Bruce Dixon. Find us on the web at www.blackagendareport.com.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, and a member of the state committee of the Georgia Green Party. He lives and works in Marietta GA, and can be reached via this site's contact page or at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.
This week’s featured author is Sami Schalk. Schalk is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Her book is Black Disability Politics.
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