Obama’s Secret Police; Government Spies Infiltrate Antiwar Movement

by Justin Raimondo

"Well, we can relax, because the bad old days of the Bush administration, when government agencies routinely spied on the antiwar movement and other dissidents, are over — right? 

Wrong – very wrong. 

Amy Goodman has the scoop (and it hasn’t gone much further than that): The Seattle Port Militarization Resistance (SPMR) group in Washington state thought their listserv coordinator, who went by the name "John Jacob," was one of them: a dedicated antiwar activist and self-described anarchist. They trusted him, they put him in a key position, they befriended him – and then they found out that he was a government informant.  

The antiwar movement is not a collection of "terrorist cells," and yet that is precisely how the US government is dealing with them: infiltrating and spying on our organizations, planning "raids" on activist gathering places and homes, and no doubt engaging in further disruptive activities yet to be revealed. How is this possible in the land of the free?

It’s possible – and, indeed, inevitable – due to the post-9/11 national security industry that grew up in the wake of 9/11. A vast bureaucracy sprang up around the stream – nay, river – of tax dollars that flowed out of Washington in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history. No expense was spared, no contractor was left behind – and the money spigot has only been opened wider now that Obama and his Keynesian advisors have decreed we must spend our way out of the economic recession. All these people, busily compiling "intelligence" on anything deemed "suspicious," are a police state waiting to be born."

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/07/30/obamas-secret-police/

Comments

[Nine Over]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/05/us-army-spying-activists-washington

"Towery's alleged spying is yet another sign that Barack Obama's reluctance to come to terms with the legacy of George Bush and Dick Cheney's legacy is simply not tenable. By attempting to move on without accountability, Obama is becoming complicit in the very activities against which he ran."