Praise for
A Government of Wolves
"John Whitehead is one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable defenders of liberty, and opponents of the growing American police state, writing today. I am pleased to recommend A Government of Wolves to anyone interested in learning how modern America increasingly resembles a dystopian science fiction film instead of a Constitutional Republic."
—Ron Paul
Twelve-term US Congressman and former presidential candidate
"I was privileged to have Duke Ellington as a mentor, who said of the jazz that was unsuccessfully banned in their countries by Stalin and Hitler: 'The music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.' But only a basically free country could have produced back then such freedom of expression that has become so energizing a global presence. If we are to be again this free a nation, John Whitehead will have had a lot to do with our being able to swing again."
—Nat Hentoff
American historian and nationally syndicated columnist
"The loss of liberty doesn't begin with invading armies, but with creeping government that slowly and almost imperceptibly invades our privacy with cameras, drones, wiretaps and monitoring of email communication. We are told this is for our own good. In this book, John Whitehead sounds a warning about overreaching government we had better heed before the point of no return has been reached."
—Cal Thomas
Syndicated and USA Today Columnist/Fox News Contributor
"A masterfully documented chronicle of frightened citizen vassalage to a Leviathan state in a hopes of a risk-free existence. An end to liberty is at hand."
—Bruce Fein
Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan
Author of American Empire Before the Fall
"Cynical, brutal, dehumanizing. Pervasive, insidious, incremental. Any hope of getting out of this prison we've found ourselves in and in the service of—Wake up! The paramilitary junta is breaking down your door! Your Miranda rights? Where have you been? They don't need no stinking badges! Get out of the way—it's your new police state in action. We're about to be herded—digitally, of course—into some nightmarish gulag that we can't even see because it's crept up on us incrementally like a toxic fog under the insidious guise of national security and other mendacious Newspeak. How did we become the prey of capitalistic jackals, ruthless corporations and power-intoxicated lackeys of the one percent terraraptors? Where is Thomas Paine now that we need him? He's here just in the nick of time in the person of John Whitehead, an uncompromising debunker of lies, rhetoric mongers, rights-shredders and the criminal acts of our shameless, double-crossing government. Drop everything and read A Government of Wolves before it's too late! I loved and was horrified by this disturbing and courageous book."
—David Dalton
New York Times best-selling author
and a founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine
Copyright © 2013 by John W. Whitehead
All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.
This edition published by SelectBooks, Inc.
For information address SelectBooks, Inc., New York, New York.
First Edition
ISBN 978-1-59079-975-8
eISBN :9781590799833
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Whitehead, John W., 1946-
A government of wolves : the emerging American police state/ John W. Whitehead.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59079-975-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Civil rights--United States. 2. United States—Politics and government. 3. Police power—United States. 4. Constitutional law—United States. I. Title.
JC599U5W5245 2013
323.4'90973-dc23
2013006480
Cover art and illustrations by Christopher Combs
Interior book design and production by Janice Benight
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 987654321
For Nisha Whitehead, my inspiration
"A nation of sheep will "beget
a government of wolves."
– EDWARD R. MURROW
CBS BROADCAST JOURNALIST
1908-1965
CONTENTS
Introduction by Nat Hentoff
PART I IS THIS AMERICA?
1 I Am Afraid
2 Who Will Protect Us from Our Government?
3 On the Road to a Police Stat
PART II THE FUTURE IS HERE
4 Fiction Has Become Reality
5 Reality Check
6 Smiling at Big Brother
PART III WELCOME TO THE POLICE STATE
7 1984
8 America's New Way of Life
9 SWAT Team Mania
10 Dominate. Intimidate. Control
11 The New York Prototype
PART IV THE ELECTRONIC CONCENTRATION CAMP
12 The Matrix: Where They Live
13 The Federal "Gestapo"?
14 Living in Oceania
15 The Watchers and the Watched
16 A Total Control Society
PART V AMERICA THE RATTLEFIELD
17 Subduing a Populace: THX
18 Tactics of Intimidation
19 Tasering Us into Compliance
20 The Goodbye Effect
21 Attack of the Drones
PART VI THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER
22 Soylent Green Is People
23 Are We All Criminals Now?
24 The Criminalization of America's School Children
25 The Prison Industrial Complex
26 The Psychology of Compliance
PART VII THE POINT OF NO RETURN?
27 V for Vendetta
28 Have We Reached the Point of No Return?
29 Know Your Rights or You Will Lose Them
30 Compliant Lambs or Nonviolent Gadflies?
31 What Kind of Revolutionary Will You Be?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
About the Author
Introduction
By Nat Hentoff
If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life, they would not recognize this country.
We have been through some troubling times before in our nation's history. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 when newspaper editors, civilians–who criticized the government–were placed in jail. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. He even arrested members of the Maryland legislature and all kinds of people around the country who objected to his policies.
We had the Red Raids in the early 1920s that started off J. Edgar Hoover's career in which hundreds of people were arrested, some of them deported without any due process at all. During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson not only practically suspended but also discarded the First Amendment. Then there were the Japanese internment camps of World War II, followed by Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, which was ended by fellow senators who realized that he had gone too far.
What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep ou
r country free from our own government.
Whereas we once operated under the Constitution, we are now, for example, under the USA Patriot Act, among other government dragnets, that permits pervasive electronic surveillance with minimal judicial review. The government listens in on our phone calls. It reads our mail. You have to be careful about what you do and say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, since the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious. We have no idea how much the government knows about average citizens. This is not the way the government born under the Declaration of Independence is supposed to operate.
Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI agents with a court order from a secret court, can enter people's homes and offices when they are not present, look around and take what they like. They can examine a hard drive and install in your computer the magic lantern, known less metaphorically as the keystroke jogger, which means they can record while you are not there everything you have typed on your computer, including stuff you have never sent. Then, under the USA Patriot Act, they can come back when you are not at home and download whatever information of yours they so desire. With advances in technology, they can even accomplish their clandestine objectives from a remote location.
All of this makes a prophet out of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who, during the first wiretapping case back in 1928 [Olmstead v. U.S.], said in his dissent: "Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."
Government officials like to claim that everything they are doing is for security, to keep America safe in the so-called war against terrorism. What they are really effectuating is a weakening of why we are Americans. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans today have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, let alone why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights. People are becoming accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment, for example. One of the things that is taught so badly in our schools, from elementary and middle school through graduate school, including journalism schools, is the Constitution—our liberties and rights.
Too many Americans appear unconcerned about the loss of fundamental individual liberties—such as due process, the right to confront their government accusers in a courtroom, and the presumption of innocence–that are vital to being an American. Yet the reason we are vulnerable to being manipulated by the government out of fear is that most of us do not know and understand our liberties and how difficult it was to obtain them and how hard it is to keep them.
We are Americans because, under our Constitution, we are guaranteed freedom–which makes us the oldest living constitutional democracy. I think the greatest decision by the United States Supreme Court was rendered by Justice Robert Jackson in West Virginia Board of Education v. Barnette in the middle of the Second World War. When the children of Jehovah's Witnesses would not salute the flag, they were expelled and their parents threatened with jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors. Their religion forbade them to salute the flag, which was a graven image. Jackson said, and I am paraphrasing here, that in this country there is no orthodoxy of belief or of conscience whether political, religious or anything else. You can't say that about any other country in the world.
So that's why we are Americans: we are free to be ourselves; to believe in what we believe; to not interfere with other people's beliefs or conscience. Ronald Reagan was known for this phrase, but the first time I heard it was from William O. Douglas, who was a great Supreme Court justice in terms of liberty. Douglas used to say that the government has to be off our backs when it comes to our individual liberties: the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to be who we are.
For more than sixty-five years as a reporter and an author (the latter beginning with The First Freedom: The Tumultuous History of Free Speech in America), my primary mission has been provided by James Madison: "Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives." I have spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now.
Barring that, a good place to start is with John W Whitehead, whose writing exemplifies George Orwell's freedom-saving advice: "If Liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." If Orwell were still alive, he would be an avid reader of Whitehead's work.
As you'll find in this book, John is unequalled in revealing the removal of the Constitution's separation of powers by an executive branch that turns the Declaration of Independence upside down. At this stage of our history, with ever advancing government digital technology causing our Fourth Amendment right to privacy to hang by the thread, I can say without exaggeration that no American guardian of the Constitution has done more continually–indeed, almost daily–than John W. Whitehead, through his writing and his legal work. Unlike any other Madisonian investigative reporter and analyst, he deploys his Rutherford Institute allied attorneys to defend–at no charge–Americans of all backgrounds whose personal constitutional liberties are being invaded by government.
The danger we now face is admittedly greater than any we have had before. If I were to judge what I do and write on the basis of optimism, I would probably go back to writing novels, but I figure you have to do what you feel you have to do and just keep hoping and trying to get people to understand why we are Americans and what we are fighting to preserve. That is why I keep writing. That is why John Whitehead continues to write and advocate for those whose rights are being trampled.
I was privileged to have Duke Ellington as a mentor, who said of the jazz that was unsuccessfully banned in their countries by Stalin and Hitler: "The music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country." But only a basically free country could have produced back then such freedom of expression that has become so energizing a global presence. If we are to be again this free a nation, John Whitehead will have had a lot to do with our being able to swing again.
CHAPTER 1
I Am Afraid
"America will never be destroyed from the outside.
If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because
we destroyed ourselves."2–ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Who can forget the television and Internet images of sinister-looking, black-garbed police officers in riot gear facing down unarmed groups of nonviolent protesters? Or the young family cowering in fear while a SWAT team crashes through their front door, killing their dog and holding them at gunpoint? Or the young Marine handcuffed, arrested, and held against his will in a hospital psych ward simply for posting song lyrics and antigovernment rhetoric on his Facebook page? Or the small farmers who had their farm raided and their equipment destroyed by armed agents of the Food and Drug Administration simply because they shared unpasteurized goat milk with friends? Or the father of six young children who was jailed for sixty days for holding religious studies in his home?
Occupy Protester Arrested by NYPD
(AP Photo/John Minchillo)
While scenarios may vary, the police state response remains virtually the same—brutality, oppression, and intolerance.
The response by law enforcement to the 2011 Occupy protests in cities across America perfectly illustrates this state of affairs. Armed with pepper spray, rubber bullets, tear gas, and other instruments of compliance, the police waged war against the protesters from Oakland, California to New York City. For example, police in Seattle peppersprayed an 84-year-old woman and a pregnant 19-year-old, among others, in their efforts to break up a non-violent rally.3 The young woman
allegedly suffered a miscarriage due to the pepper spray.4 Police fired tear gas and flash grenades at peaceful protesters in Oakland in an effort to force them to disperse.5
Signs
With each passing day, America is inching further down the slippery slope toward a police state. And while police clashes with protesters, small farmers, and other so-called "law breakers" vividly illustrate the limits on our freedoms, the boundaries of a police state extend far beyond the actions of law enforcement. In fact, a police state is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions. In this regard, the signs of an emerging police state are all around us. In Orwellian fashion, it has infiltrated all aspects of our lives.
We were once a society that valued individual liberty and privacy. Increasingly, however, we have morphed into a culture that has quietly accepted surveillance in virtually every area of our lives–police and drugsniffing dogs in our children's schools, national databases that track our finances and activities, sneak-and-peek searches of our homes by government agents without our knowledge or consent, and anti-terrorism laws that turn average Americans into suspected criminals. All the while, police officers dressed in black Darth Vader-like costumes have become armed militias instead of the civilian peacekeepers they were intended to be.
This is not to say that the police are inherently "bad" or "evil." However, in enforcing policies that both injure citizens and undermine freedom, the police have become part of the bureaucratic machine that neither respects citizen dignity nor freedom. Operating relatively autonomously, this machine simply moves forward in conveyor-belt fashion, utilizing the police and other government agents to establish control and dominance over the citizenry.
Gradually, but with increasing momentum, a police/surveillance state has been erected around us. This is reflected in the government's single-minded quest to acquire ever-greater powers along with the fusion of the police and the courts and the extent to which our elected representatives have sold us out to the highest bidders–namely the corporate state and military industrial complex. Even a casual glance at the daily news headlines provides a chilling glimpse of how much the snare enclosing us has tightened and how little recourse we really have.
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State Page 1
