A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (4 page)

The Loss of Bodily Integrity

As journalist Herman Schwartz recognizes, "The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official."
¹³
Nowhere is this loss of Fourth Amendment protections more evident than in the practice of roadside police stops, which have devolved into government-sanctioned exercises in humiliation and degradation with a complete disregard for privacy and human dignity.

Consider, for example, what happened to 38-year-old Angel Dobbs and her 24-year-old niece, Ashley, who were pulled over by a Texas state trooper on July 13, 2012, allegedly for flicking cigarette butts out of the car window.
¹⁴
First, the trooper berated the women for littering on the highway. Then, insisting that he smelled marijuana, he proceeded to interrogate them and search the car. Despite the fact that both women denied smoking or possessing any marijuana, the police officer then called in a female trooper, who carried out a roadside cavity search, sticking her fingers into the older woman's anus and vagina, then performing the same procedure on the younger woman, wearing the same pair of gloves.
¹⁵
No marijuana was found.

Leila Tarantino was allegedly subjected to two roadside strip searches in plain view of passing traffic during a routine traffic stop, while her two children–ages one and four–waited inside her car. During the second strip search, presumably in an effort to ferret out drugs, a female officer "forcibly removed" a tampon from Tarantino's body. No contraband or anything illegal was found.
¹⁶

Meanwhile, four Milwaukee police officers have been charged with carrying out rectal searches of suspects on the street and in police district stations over the course of several years. One of the officers is accused of conducting searches of men's anal and scrotal areas, often inserting his fingers into their rectums and leaving some of his victims with bleeding rectums.
¹⁷
Half-way across the country, the city of Oakland, California, has agreed to pay $4.6 million to 39 men who had their pants pulled down by police on city streets between 2002 and 2009.
¹⁸

And then there's the increasingly popular practice of doing blood draws at DUI checkpoints, where drivers who refuse a breathalyzer test find themselves subjected to forcible blood extractions to test for alcohol levels. Police in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, actually had a registered nurse and an assistant district attorney on hand "to help streamline the 'blood draw' warrants and collect blood samples from suspected impaired drivers" at one exercise in holiday drunk driving enforcement.
¹⁹

It must be remembered that the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was intended to protect the citizenry from being subjected to "unreasonable searches and seizures" by government agents. While the literal purpose of the amendment is to protect our property and our bodies from unwarranted government intrusion, the moral intention behind it is to protect our human dignity. Unfortunately, the rights supposedly guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment have been steadily eroded over the past few decades. Court rulings justifying invasive strip searches as well as Americans' continued deference to the dictates of achieving total security have left us literally stranded on the side of the road, grasping for dignity.

Emerging Technology

As utterly distasteful as stop-and-frisks and roadside strip searches may be, soon there will be no need for the police to physically stop and search Americans. Technology now makes it possible for the police to scan passersby in order to detect the contents of their pockets, purses, briefcases, and see through their clothing. In fact, thanks to the federal government's willingness to share its surplus of military weapons with law enforcement, local police agencies now have a veritable arsenal of firepower and surveillance gadgets to inflict on the American people.

For example, local police agencies are now making use of the same drone technology employed by the military to bomb and spy on people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, and Yemen; only this time, these drones are being used to spy on American citizens. These aerial drones, some as small as insects, can stealthily spy on unsuspecting citizens without making their presence known.

Another military weapon that has been created in partnership with domestic police agencies is Terahertz Imaging Detection, which allows police officers to see through the clothing of citizens on the street, thus treating all passersby as if they were suspects.
²⁰
This portable scanning technology functions by detecting the radiation emitted by a human body and highlighting any objects–such as a gun, a pocketknife, nail clippers, or any other paraphernalia in one's possession–which block that radiation.
²¹

Caution: Police State (CS Muncy)

Full-body scanners, which perform virtual strip-searches of Americans traveling by plane, have gone mobile, with roving police vans that peer into vehicles and buildings alike–including homes.
²²
Nowadays, police drive through parking lots, scanning the license plates of parked cars and filing the information into police databases. Even if a car isn't tied to a crime, the time that a car was in a certain location is uploaded to a police database for future reference.
²³
In other words, the police can track you wherever you go–even if the places you visit are very intimate and private.

Police are also using mobile fingerprint identification scanners which instantly pull up the biographical information of those who are compelled to put their finger on it.
²⁴
Eventually, virtually all Americans will be going through this process–a process that was once only used for criminal suspects.

Have We Become a Government of Wolves?

Whereas we once abided by a rule of law–the U.S. Constitution–which guarded our freedoms and shielded us from government abuses, we have entered a phase in our nation's life where the government largely operates above the law, while the law has become little more than another tool for compliance and control.

CHAPTER 2

Who Will Protect Us From Our Government?

"The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them."
²⁵
-JOHN LENNON

S
ince the early days of the American republic, we have operated under the principle that no one is above the law. As Thomas Paine observed in 1776 in
Common Sense
, "in America, the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king and there ought to be no other."
²⁶
Several years later, John Adams, seeking to reinforce this important principle, declared in the Massachusetts Constitution that they were seeking to establish "a government of laws and not of men."
²⁷

Prisoner at Abu Ghraib

(AP Photo, File)

The history of our nation over the past two hundred years has been the history of a people engaged in a constant struggle to maintain that tenuous balance between the rule of law–in our case, the United States Constitution–and the government leaders entrusted with protecting it, upholding it, and abiding by it. At various junctures, such as during the McCarthy era, when that necessary balance has been thrown off by overreaching governmental bodies or overly ambitious individuals, we have found ourselves faced with a crisis of constitutional proportions. Each time, we have taken the painful steps needed to restore our constitutional equilibrium.

Now, once again, we find ourselves in a state of crisis, skating dangerously close to becoming a nation ruled not by laws but by men–and fallible, imperfect men at that. Yet this latest crisis did not happen overnight. Its seeds were sown in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, when fear-addled Americans started selling their freedoms cheaply, bit by bit, for the phantom promises of security. From the hideous torture at CIA black site prisons, extraordinary renditions of Abu Ghraib abuses, and TSA body scanners to warrantless wiretaps and the USA Patriot Act, Americans have failed to be outraged by the government's repeated violations of the rule of law. In this way, as the so-called "war on terror" has unfolded beyond our wildest imaginings–from the barbaric treatment of foreign detainees at American-run prisons to the technological arsenal being used by the U.S. government to monitor and control its citizens– our rights have taken a meteoric nosedive in inverse proportion to the government's rapidly expanding powers.

USA Patriot Act

Those who founded this country knew quite well that every citizen must remain vigilant or freedom would be lost. This is the true nature of a patriot: one who sounds the alarm when freedom–in our case, the rights protected by the Constitution–comes under attack. If on the other hand, people become fearful and sheep-like, it gives rise to a government of wolves. This is what we are faced with today, and it is epitomized by the USA Patriot Act.

Although the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures go far beyond an actual police search of our homes, the passage of the Orwellian-named USA Patriot Act in 2001 opened the door to other kinds of invasions, especially unwarranted electronic intrusions into our most personal and private transactions, including phone, mail, computer, and medical records.

The Patriot Act drove a stake through the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the Constitution's ten original amendments, namely, the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments–and possibly the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well. The Patriot Act also redefined terrorism so broadly that anyone desiring to engage in non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations, and civil disobedience–all historically protected First Amendment expressive activities which are now considered potential terrorist acts–is thereby rendered a
suspect
of the police state.

The Patriot Act justified much broader domestic surveillance, the logic being that if government agents knew more about each American, they could distinguish the terrorists from law-abiding citizens–no doubt an earnest impulse shared by small-town police and federal agents alike. According to Washington Post reporter Robert O'Harrow, this was a fantasy that had "been brewing in the law enforcement world for a long time."
²⁸
And 9/11 provided the government with the perfect excuse for conducting far-reaching surveillance and collecting mountains of information on even the most law-abiding citizen.

Suddenly, for the first time in American history, federal agents and police officers are authorized to conduct black bag "sneak-and-peek" searches of homes and offices and confiscate your personal property without first notifying you of their intent or their presence. FBI agents can come to your place of employment, demand your personal records, and question your supervisors and fellow employees, all without notifying you. And the government can access your medical records, school records, and practically every personal record about you, and secretly demand to see records of books or magazines you've checked out in any public library and Internet sites you've visited (at least 545 libraries received such demands in the first year following passage of the Patriot Act).
²⁹