Dem's colorblind racism in the name of 'unity'

Watching the DNC this past week, I couldn't help but feel unnerved by the overload of moralistic, abstract liberalism jargon of 'unity', 'diversity', 'meritocracy', and the realization of the 'American Dream'. Everyone appeared so reasonable and moral, it just seemed too good to be true. Delegates and media commentators threw the word 'unity' around all week, but was there really a clear consensus of what unity meant for the party? Does unity imply the moral change of 'people's hearts', and institutional oppression like racism and sexism be put to the side?

I'm afraid white democrats (and some democrats of color) are taking this propaganda of 'unity' to frame and potentially erase racial inequality (and all forms of inequality for that matter) into an abstract nonexistence. I'm afraid people will use Obama and Clinton as tokens of 'equal opportunity' success stories. I'm afraid people are beginning to equate 'unity' to mean we now live in a colorblind society, free from institutional oppression and white privilege, and that anyone who cannot gravitate toward 'unity' and success failed simply out of individual and natural failure, but NOT out of past and present racial, class, or gender discrimination.

Because, well, OBAMA did it, so why couldn't you?

We know racial inequality still exists in economic, social, and cultural capital today. We look at poverty among communities of color in California, where 60% of communities o. color in poverty are still disproportionately African American, or we take a look at the endless amount of racist media coverage of Olympics, and their portrayals of Chinese people(local and abroad), cuisine, and athletes as 'foreign, robotic, deceiving liars'- 1950s parallels, anyone? You don't even have to go back that far: just replace 'Chinese' with "Mexican" or "Muslim", and you've got the anti-immigrant racist rhetoric of 2008.

I understand the significance of the nomination of an African-American presidential candidate, and I believe every person of color is entitled and deserves to celebrate this moment in all its historical weight and glory.
My concern is with what happens after this moment, and we wake up to realize what we have allowed to pass for the sake of 'unity' and 'party solidarity'. How much can we allow to sacrifice for the sake of 'unity'? California, Washington, and Michigan have already passed state referendums banning affirmative action policies because according to these states, we've already achieved 'equal opportunity' for all. Poverty, New Orleans, immigration, and corporation finance control are issues the Dem party still haven't fully challenged and barely addressed.
How will our restraint and silences help barricade and absolve leaders and those responsible from seeing the realities of racism, sexism, and imperialism?
why can't this be the time to unite to engage in a real, honest conversation? why can't this be the time to unite to demand FULL ACCOUNTABILITY, TO STAND ON THE BASIS OF REAL EQUITY?

Supporting Obama doesn't mean we support him in blind faith; it means we take responsibility and become critics of his actions from here on out. This is not a rant about fault or blame; this is a call for ACTION. If we the people do not stand up for ourselves and each other, if we do not demand accountability from politicians, NO ONE WILL. Already we're hearing people tokenize Obama and Hilary as if inequality is no longer a current issue but all a thing of the past. We need to bite this trend of colorblind racist liberalism in the butt, or it will come back to bite us tenfold.

Immigrant Rights are Labor Rights

Mr Zine
8/19/08

by Peter Rachleff

Today's critical labor struggles revolve around immigrants' rights, while today's struggles over immigrants' rights are grounded in workplace and labor organizing. Global, national, and local histories have woven these issues tightly together. In the U.S. we are seeing the beginnings of a multifaceted movement which engages these dynamically linked histories.

Twenty-five years ago, U.S. labor activists thought we were enmeshed in a struggle against concessions, fueled by a process of deindustrialization and capital flight. Here in the Midwest, the epicenter of that formation was the Hormel strike of 1985-86, extending from plants in southern Minnesota to Iowa and Nebraska. Hormel management wanted to reorganize everything about the work in their new flagship plant in Austin, from the calculation of wage payments to the sharpening of knives, with the intent of replicating these strategies throughout their plants. They pushed veteran workers to retire, while insisting that remaining workers and new hires had no choice in a competitive industry but to accept management's terms. They made similar demands on Austin city officials -- tax breaks, the construction of infrastructure at public expense, and subsidized access to electric power.

Hormel's behavior was typical of the meatpacking industry, which was being swept by tumultuous change in the early-mid 1980s. Companies went out of business; new companies, often conglomerates, bought those facilities and rehired their workers at cut-rate wages. New plants were opened in small towns, away from urban centers, in search of isolated, even captive workforces. Here and there, especially within the Hormel chain, local unions wanted to make a fight, but these efforts were consistently undermined by their own union, the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union. The UFCW national strategy of "controlled retreat" turned into a thorough rout. By 1990, wages in the meatpacking industry had fallen 44% below their 1980 level. They have never recovered, while working conditions in this dangerous industry have deteriorated even further.

Meatpacking proved to be the canary in the coal mine for U.S. labor relations in the late 20th Century. Steel, auto, electronics, newspaper publishing, corn processing, and farm implement manufacturing followed suit, with transportation (from urban buses to transnational airplanes), services (from hospitality to healthcare), and public employment sliding downhill as well. By the early 1990s it became apparent that what was happening was bigger than "the deindustrialization of America" and corporate America's demands for concessions from its unionized workforce.

A major paradigm shift was afoot in the global economy, with neoliberalism and its "race to the bottom" supplanting the Keynesian, demand-driven economics of the post-WWII era. Around the world, workers, peasants, and citizens were being sucked into a vortex of commodification and competition, with only shredded safety nets for protection. Some lost land, some lost jobs, and many lost their way of life. In response, many individuals and families moved. Immigration to the U.S. reached levels never seen before in U.S. history, with much of it coming from Central and South America, Asia, and Africa. In the U.S., some individuals and families sought to sell more labor, by taking two or three jobs or having more family members work for wages, but the markets paid less and less for their labor.

The very forces which drove down wages and benefits and undermined working conditions in an industry like meatpacking have also driven workers and peasants in southern Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Bosnia, India, Pakistan, and many, many other places to leave their home communities and find their way to jobs in meatpacking and poultry processing plants, or behind the wheels of taxi cabs, pushing gurneys in hospitals and mops in commercial skyscrapers, from the metropolises of New York City and Los Angeles to the small Midwestern towns of Worthington and Willmar, Minnesota. Neoliberalism's grip on the world economy has created, on the one hand, certain kinds of jobs, and, on the other, the workers who have little choice but to fill them. By imperiling the economic security of native-born workers in industrialized countries, neoliberalism has also fanned the flames of nativism and xenophobia, providing fearful and angry workers with immigrant scapegoats as the objects of their furor. In the U.S. these dynamics seem scripted by a long history of racism (most of the native-born workers at risk are white; most of the immigrants are not), and anti-immigrant nativism enforced by the state (the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the immigrant quotas of 1923-24, the deportation of Mexicans and Filipinos in the 1930s, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, etc.). It is little wonder that the regime which celebrates the dismantling of the Berlin Wall seeks to build a wall along the U.S./Mexican border.

It is in these contexts that we must consider the small (population 2,200) northeastern Iowa town of Postville, where a corporate meatpacking employer called AgriProcessors has built a workforce willing to work hard, for long hours and low wages. Responding to AgriProcessors' call for workers, hundreds of indigenous Guatemalans, driven from their rural communities, have found their way to Postville and taken those jobs. Add to these conditions an ineffective and out-of-favor federal administration, desperate in an election year to look tough on "illegal" immigration. In May 2008, Postville and AgriProcessors, became the target of the biggest immigration raid in U.S. history. Hundreds of men and women were arrested on felony charges. A legal procedure was cobbled together which placed the men in prison and the women under house arrest in electronic ankle bracelets for five months, until they switch places. Ten months after the raid, all will be deported, with no possibility of return because of felony records.

Such raids and legal railroading reflect the redoubled efforts of ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit of Homeland Security, to criminalize immigrants, in this worsening economic environment. Their actions fan the flames of popular nativism. In Minnesota, for instance, ICE arrests and prosecutions have increased 650% in the past five years. Meat and poultry processors have cut jobs and wages -- while expecting production to stay up -- while resisting union organizing campaigns. The Republican state administration of Minnesota (led by a Governor who would like to be John McCain's Vice-Presidential candidate) has rebuffed proposals to issue drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants, to open public colleges and universities to undocumented youth who have graduated from local high schools, and to order local police not to ask questions about immigration status of people they interview in relation to other investigations. All of this has fed representations of undocumented immigrants as "illegal" and "criminal," adding fuel to popular nativism and racism. Such forces have, not surprisingly, obscured and stifled the immigrant and labor rights movements which had roared into the public view in April and May 2005.

AgriProcessors is the largest kosher meatpacking plant in the U.S., selling not only to Jewish communities across the country but also exporting their products to Israel. Only a few years ago they were a poster child for "diversity" in the U.S., hailed by "60 Minutes" and a best-selling book, Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (Harvest Books, 2001). Both the highly praised author of the book and the award-winning TV news magazine show were so captivated by the presence of Orthodox Jews in small town Iowa that they failed to ask many questions about who was actually working in the plant, how they were treated, and what they earned. In the wake of ICE's May 12, 2008, raid, coming in the midst of a UFCW union organizing campaign, AgriProcessors and Postville have become the poster children for the exploitation of labor in the U.S. within the neoliberal, global economy.

Commentators and consumers alike have had to give credence to the grim predictions of 1980s labor activists that management's attack on unions and workers would bring meatpacking "back to the jungle" of Upton Sinclair's heyday, the early 20th Century. The brutality and horror of the May 12 raid and the ensuing judicial nightmare, detailed eloquently by interpreter Erik Camayd-Freixas in his impassioned public letter, grabbed widespread attention. His letter provoked questions about the work experiences, treatment, pay, and conditions endured by the workers, as well as about the lives and hopes of the workers themselves. Investigations by Conservative Jewish rabbis, the Jewish Daily Forward, the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus have unearthed far more than the employment of workers who lacked proper documentation. "Jungle" stories abound: the employment of underage workers; work and safety violations; forced overtime; abuse of workers by foremen, including the physical beating of men and the sexual harassment of women; pressure to buy cars from certain dealers in order to keep jobs; and the distinctly non-kosher abuse of animals. Alarms have also been sounded by: an International Indian Treaty Council meeting in Guatemala who addressed the pressures on indigenous peoples to migrate in search of work; Jewish organizations that have asked how the treatment of workers in this plant and elsewhere should be included in the setting of kosher standards (what's called hekhsher tzedek); the United Food and Commercial Workers' Union, who questioned whether the timing of the raid bore a relationship to a growing organizing drive in the plant; and advocates for immigrants rights from around the world.

Hormel's Austin plant was not only the icon of the corporate attack on workers in the mid-1980s but also the epicenter of an impassioned solidarity movement to resist that attack. Today, Postville, Iowa, is the locus of a revived immigrant and labor rights movement which had sputtered after the great immigrant rights marches of the spring of 2005. On Sunday, July 27, led by Jewish organizations such as Twin Cities Jewish Community Action and the Chicago-based Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, with the support of the New York City-based Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, buses converged on Postville from the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, Chicago, and LaCrosse, Wisconsin, while others drove in smaller groups from Madison, Iowa City, Des Moines, and elsewhere. Nearly 2,000 people rallied on behalf of immigrant and labor rights, calling for lost wages and accrued vacation pay for the detained immigrants, the establishment of a $100,000 hardship fund by AgriProcessors, management neutrality in the face of workers' efforts to unionize, and the passage in Iowa of a version of the "Meatpackers' Bill of Rights" which had been approved by the Minnesota Legislature in 2007. This coalition also called for "comprehensive immigration reform," better federal oversight of working conditions, and a national environment that respects worker justice. Jewish leadership of the protest reflected two years of work on the notion of hekhsher tzedek, the expansion of kosher guidelines to include worker treatment, several months of organizing in both the Twin Cities and Chicago, and the determination to tell the owners of AgriProcessors that their exploitation of workers cannot be done in Jews' name. On the four hour ride from the Twin Cities to Postville, bus riders discussed their relationship to the tradition of the civil rights freedom rides of the early 1960s and the immigrant rights freedom rides of 2003-2004 and participated in workshops that connected immigrant and workers' rights with Jewish tradition and labor history. On the way back, protestors discussed strategies for promoting change and made commitments to take on specific steps from lobbying congress to pressuring retailers and consumers.

While in Postville, labor, social justice, and immigrant rights activists mixed with Jewish activists. Protestors from different cities shared experiences and stories, as well as phone numbers and email addresses. The groups in Postville participated in an interfaith service at St. Bridget's Catholic Church, which has been the center of assistance to the immigrant families, then marched a mile to the AgriProcessors plant (where there was a large sign reading "Now Hiring"). At a children's park, a group of Postville children, who were born in the U.S. and had experienced the raids as pulling their friends out of school, read a poem together, titled "I Am Latino." It was modeled after a poem "I Am A Jew," that they'd learned while studying the Holocaust in school. Children from many communities were very visible in the parade, embodying the movement's ideals of education and change into the future.

In the weeks since the march (I am writing in mid-August), grassroots organizations have met and begun to lay out a plan of action, including: internal education about worker and immigrant rights through churches, synagogues, and community organizations; expanding a base for hekhsher tzedek in Jewish and non-Jewish organizations and families; raising material aid for immigrant families still victimized by the ICE raid; organizing a "rapid response network" in anticipation of future raids; lobbying Congress for comprehensive immigration reform; expanding the network of people and organizations in our communities who are committed to justice for immigrants, workers, and immigrant workers.

While there has been significant participation and support in the Twin Cities from UFCW Local 789 and some support from UNITE-HERE, SEIU, and the Workers' Interfaith Network, there is much work yet to be done to bring the formal labor movement on board this project. If we are to learn from the failures of the mid-1980s, when major labor organizations stood apart from -- and even undermined -- local union struggles, with disastrous consequences, activists from inside and outside unions must insist that the labor movement at all its levels bring its solidarity and resources to the new historic campaign, one that recognizes that labor rights and immigrant rights are tightly woven together.

Peter Rachleff
August 16, 2008

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Peter Rachleff is a professor of history at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. In 1985-86 he served as chairperson of the Twin Cities Support Committee for Local P-9, the Hormel strikers. In 1993 South End Press published his Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement. He is currently working with Twin Cities Jewish Community Action on immigrant rights projects.

To NBC and everyone else broadcasting Olympics:

THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CRITICIZING ACTIONS AND POLICIES OF CHINESE GOVT AND FALSELY DISCRIMINATING AGAINST CHINESE INDIVIDUALS ONLY TO THEN MAKE BROAD RACIST GENERALIZATIONS ABOUT CHINESE PEOPLE AS 'CONNIVING AND UNTRUSTWORTHY LIARS.'
And for god's sake, stop broadcasting degrading, colonialist segments about your disgust in Chinese cuisine. Yes, this is what many people in China eat- GET A GRIP. GET OVER IT.

Beijing Reflections

Beijing Reflections


August, 14 2008
By Street, Paul


The Cold War Hoax and Non-Paradox of McMaoism

Nineteen years and two months ago, hundreds of peasant soldiers in Red China's "People's Liberation Army" (PLA) bivouacked in the world's largest McDonald's in downtown Beijing. Followed by the vapid gaze of Ronald McDonald, the troops marched out to join a larger force assembled to attack students conducting mass protests against the Chinese dictatorship in Beijing's historic Tiananmen Square. The 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations received considerable support from Beijing workers, who were concerned about increased inequality, insecurity and corruption resulting from "capitalist road' economic "reforms" introduced by China's "Marxist" masters. Many of the students sang the socialist "International" as PLA tanks lined up to crush the rebellion. Thousands of Chinese civilians died in the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre - an event that has been officially deleted from Chinese collective memory with assistance from the U.S.-based Internet company Google [1].

Nearly two decades after the blood was cleaned off the Tiananmen killing grounds, "Communist" China stands in a long-established relationship of political-economic symbiosis with the corporate-captive United States. A large number of leading U.S. multinational firms invest directly in coal-fired, smog-choked (around industrial centers) China to exploit its cheap, state-repressed labor and its willingness to subordinate environmental concerns to the holy imperatives of "economic growth" (capitalist throughout). This investment feeds global warming and China's massive trade surplus with the U.S, which skyrocketed from $83 billion to $252 billion between 2000 and 2007 [2].

CAPITAL WINS, LABOR LOSES

This trade deficit is a critical factor in the ongoing decline of livable-wage employment for working-class Americans. As the Economic Policy Institute recently reported, "The growth of U.S. trade with China since China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 has had a devastating effect on U.S. workers and the domestic economy. Between 2001 and 2007 2.3 million jobs were lost or displaced, including 366,000 in 2007 alone. New demographic research shows that, even when re-employed in non-traded industries, the 2.3 million workers displaced by the increase in China trade deficits in this period have lost an average $8,146 per worker/year. In 2007, these losses totaled $19.4 billion" [3].

At the same time, the internal Chinese market is a source of no small interest to American corporations. General Motors (GM) made most of its profit out of China sales in 2001-2002. It reports that China is its single biggest market outside the US. GM (which built a $750 million factory in Shanghai in 1998) invested $3 billion in China between 2004 and 2007 "in hopes," the Associated Press reported last year, "it will drive a revival for the company, which is cutting production and closing factories in its home North American market"[4].

This hardly means that Chinese conditions are anything to envy or uphold. China is home to 17 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world. And China's march down the "capitalist road" has left its working classes "in an increasingly precarious position." As the American labor and civil rights activist and researcher Robert Weil noted in Monthly Review two years ago, "a rapidly widening polarization-in a society [China] that was among the most egalitarian-is occurring between extremes of wealth at the top and growing ranks of workers and peasants at the bottom whose conditions of life are daily worsening. Exemplifying this, the 2006 Fortune list of global billionaires includes seven in mainland China [who]...represent the emergence of a full-blown Chinese capitalism. Rampant corruption unites party and state authorities and enterprise managers with the new private entrepreneurs in a web of alliances that are enriching a burgeoning capitalist class, while the working classes are exploited in ways that have not been seen for over half a century."

On a visit to examine to the Dickensian underside of the spectacular outward Chinese prosperity currently being celebrated on NBC, Weil learned that "tens of millions" of Chinese workers had been "thrown out of their former jobs in the state-owned enterprises, once the pillars of the economy, with the loss of virtually all of the related forms of social security that were part of their work units: housing, education, health care, and pensions, among others. As these state-owned enterprises have been converted into profit-driven corporations, whether by being sold outright to private investors or semi-privatized by managers and state and party authorities, corruption has been common."

Weil met and interviewed peasants who were "struggling to deal with the long-term effects of the enforced dissolution of the rural communes and the introduction of the family responsibility system, in which each household contracts with the village for a portion of land to farm. With the throwing open of the country to the global marketplace, the sale of lands by local officials to developers without adequate compensation to the villagers, and rampant environmental devastation of the rural areas," Weil found, "this policy has left hundreds of millions struggling to find a viable way to earn a living, while stripping them of the collective social supports that they had previously enjoyed. Over 100 million of them have become part of the massive migration to the cities, seeking work in construction, the new export oriented factories, or the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs, where they lack even the most basic rights. For many migrants, conditions are deteriorating rapidly as they settle semi-permanently in the urban communities and as they age and health problems mount."

Worker and peasant resistance to these conditions is regularly met with state repression, with soldiers and police sweating allegiance to the legacy of Mao enlisted to enforce wage-slavery on the model of what is portrayed in the first volume of Marx's Capital [5].

KEEPING UNCLE SAM AFLOAT

Meanwhile, surplus Chinese capital flows into the purchase of U.S. government securities, helping keep the ever more cash-poor American Empire afloat. Chinese profits wrung from the backs and lungs of the Chinese proletariat subsidize the deficit-generating arch-plutocratic tax cuts and messianic militarism of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush's America, owner of two illegally invaded colonies in Southwest Asia (Afghanistan and Iraq) and more than 720 military bases located in nearly every country on Earth. This has nothing to do with a Chinese desire to help Bush. It's about China's wish to sustain the exchange value of their currency against the dollar and thus the competitiveness of their goods in the giant U.S. consumer market - a critical lynchpin of China's state-orchestrated capitalist expansion over the last twenty-plus years.

THE OLYMPICS BROUGHT YOU TO BY GENERAL ELECTRIC AND HENRY KISSINGER

Along with the massive profits multinational corporations plan to make directly off the Olympics, these underlying economic relationships are why U.S. corporate media is helping the Chinese regime use the Olympic Games to sell a softer global image of "Brand China." It's why Joshua Cooper Ramos - a managing director and partner of the Beijing Office of (Henry) Kissinger Associates (a leading agent of Western investment in China) - is providing "expert" commentary on China's supposedly forward-looking culture of "harmony" for General Electric Television's (NBC's) Olympic coverage [6]. It's why two leading U.S. war criminals named George Bush have been cavorting gaily with Chinese hosts and touting the glorious wonders of "engagement" (whatever the younger Bush's obligatory rhetoric about Tibet, Taiwan, Darfur, and smog). It's why Google (Barack Obama's sixth leading campaign contributor at $373,000 [7]) helps China keep the Tiananmen Square Massacre "down the memory hole" (George Orwell's term for the erasure of inconvenient history by state totalitarians) and why Yahoo helps China identify and imprison dissenters [8]. It's why U.S. corporate media is keeping Americans' focus on "the games" and off the terrible conditions experienced by ordinary Chinese working people beneath Chinese Olympic spectacles and "capitalist miracles" [9].

THE COLD WAR RUSE

Some "liberal" Americans are shocked at the extent to which America's "capitalist democracy" goes to uphold "socialist" China's entrance to the so-called "community of nations." I find these liberals' dismay and terminology extremely naïve. The Cold War was always a great and mutually reinforcing ruse on both sides. The totalitarian labor-exploiting and elite-dominated Soviet Union and Red China got to call themselves "socialist" even while they abolished and prohibited workers' control and popular democracy - two critical characteristics of any worthwhile and genuinely socialist peoples' project. Meanwhile, the totalitarian labor-exploiting and elite-dominated U.S. got to claim the mantles of "democracy" and "liberty" even while its homeland politics and society to the plutocratic rule of the wealthy and corporate Few. Political and cultural authorities in the capitalist West played along with the Soviet and Chinese state's claim to embody "socialism" since it helped them denigrate radical ideals by linking them to Stalinist and Maoist dungeons [10].

Never mind that their underlying "free enterprise" system was and remains fundamentally opposed to egalitarian and democratic ideals. "Capitalist democracy" has always been a self-negating oxymoron providing cover for what Karl Marx once aptly termed "the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie." You cannot meaningfully combine the concentration of wealth - an inherent characteristic and tendency of modern capitalism - with true democracy: one person one vote and equal policy making influence for all.

NO PARADOX

I see nothing paradoxical or shocking about the Sino-American love-fest currently being marketed by mass-cultural thought-coordinators on both totalitarian [11] sides of the U.S.-China divide. The dominant political classes of both state-capitalist Superpowers have more in common with each other than with the subject populations living under their respective domestic regimes. Their interests and ideals converge along numerous dark and authoritarian lines as the Olympics extravaganza helps the expanding Chinese capitalist elite deepen its power by supplementing hard Orwellian controls with the softer Aldous Huxlean medicine that Western authorities have long pioneered: cultural hegemony through hypnotizing and infantilizing mass entertainment [12]. Welcome to the totalitarian cross-national logic and class alliances of the world capitalist system, wherein "socialist revolutions" assembled proletariats beyond the Western core to be ruthlessly exploited by both domestic masters and global capital. The Red Army and Ronald McDonald are not so far apart or inconsistently co-joined. The merging of the legacy of Mao with the profit calculations of General Electric and General Motors makes perfect sense. There's no paradox, as any serious left-Marxist or left-anarchist knows.


Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, order at: www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987).

DEMAND SENATE AND JUDICIARY INVESTIGATION AND IMPEACHMENT OF BUSH ADMIN FOR ORDERING IRAQ-9/11 FAKERY

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE WATCH THIS VIDEO-

http://www.archive.org/stream/dn2008-0814_vid/dn2008-0814_256kb.mp4

Transcript below:

JUAN GONZALEZ: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind joins us again today to discuss his explosive new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism.

Suskind reports that in 2003 the White House ordered the CIA to forge and disseminate false intelligence documents linking al-Qaeda and Iraq. The CIA allegedly forged a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein. It was backdated July 1, 2001 and stated 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was trained for his mission in Iraq.

While much of the attention on the book has focused on the forged letter, Suskind also reveals that the Bush administration and the British government knew prior to the war that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: Ron Suskind interviewed Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, Britain’s secret intelligence service. Dearlove said Britain received intelligence in the beginning of 2003 about Iraq’s lack of WMDs, but the Bush administration buried the information. Dearlove told Suskind, “The problem was the Cheney crowd was in too much of a hurry, really. Bush never resisted them quite strongly enough.”

Ron Suskind joins us again here in our firehouse studio. We’re also joined on the phone by Congress member John Conyers, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Congressman Conyers has said his committee will review some of the explosive findings in Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! For those listeners and viewers who didn’t get a chance to hear you lay out the allegations, Ron—well, first, many people wrote in through the day, and we’re going to be reading some of their questions to you. But why don’t you lay out the kernel of the key allegation you have made about this letter?

RON SUSKIND: The Iraq intelligence chief is a one-year saga that started in January of 2003. The United States and Britain get together. They open a secret back channel to this man. He slips out of Baghdad, meets with a British intelligence official in Amman, Jordan. The information flows up through the White House. They’re the real customer here. And he says, from the start, there are no WMD. He of course has real credibility here as the Iraq intelligence chief, the number one man. He oversees the biological program himself, and he said it’s over.

He also said the mind of Saddam Hussein is something you all don’t understand. He’s really afraid of the Iranians and their nascent nuclear program. He doesn’t want them and others in the region to see that he’s a toothless tiger, that he has no weapons. He doesn’t even believe the United States would ever want Iraq.

All of this ends up being made very public later. It’s all briefed right up to the White House to the President starting in January of 2003. The final report’s delivered in February. At that point, we cut off the channel to Habbush. But, of course, we already have an arrangement with him, the United States. We resettle him in Amman, Jordan. As the summer unfolds, it becomes clear to the world, the things that Habbush told us ahead of time. We pay him $5 million, the United States. We hide him.

And then the letter. In the fall of 2003, when the White House is facing the most serious charge of the Bush presidency, that we went to war under false pretenses, they come up with a plan of how they might use Habbush, the White House. They order the CIA to have a fabricated letter created ostensibly in Habbush’s hand, backdated July 2001, solving all the White House’s political problems. As one of the key on-the-record sources says, it was a check-the-box for all of the problems politically the White House was facing in the United States.

That, of course, is illegal. You cannot have the CIA run disinformation campaigns on the American public. Just imagine the havoc that would ensue if that were not a law. That’s why right now Congress is investigating.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And the information, though, that he provided initially, obviously British intelligence, as you say, was involved, so this would have an impact on the knowledge that Tony Blair and the British government, as well, had about the reality of whether Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. You know, it’s interesting, because in the extensive interviews with both Richard Dearlove, who was the head of British intelligence in this period, now he’s at Cambridge University, and Nigel Inkster, who was the number two British intelligence chief, they talk about the fact that this was, in a way, sort of a last chance for the British. They didn’t want to go to war with the ardor that the Americans did, as Dearlove’s comment reveals. And they said, “Let’s exercise real intelligence.” As Dearlove says, “We’re better at this than you people. We have relationships where you often have none. Let’s try to exercise the known and the knowable here, so that we can bring at least some clarity to this debate,” which, of course, the British understood was gusty, full of assumption, without real evidence. That’s why the meeting with Habbush was set up.

AMY GOODMAN: Our first question from a listener and viewer that has been emailed into us was: Have you actually seen this letter? And you have said $5 million was the money that the US government paid to Habbush as hush money. How exactly do you know this?

RON SUSKIND: There are extensive conversations with people inside of CIA, again, many of them on the record in the book, not just about the $5 million, but about when the payment was made, about how the figure was arrived at, discussions, again, with senior officials on the record, and sort of saying $5 million figures, where, in the broad context—after all, we paid the guy who turned in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed $25 million. And so, they discussed with some openness how we arrived at the $5 million figure. It was not and is not in dispute.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we also have Congressman John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, with us. Congressman Conyers, you have been looking at a lot of issues dealing with the Bush administration. To what degree do these revelations, if they prove to be true, affect the—will affect the outcome of your investigations?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, that’s what we’re investigating now. Top of the morning to three excellent investigative reporters.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Good morning to you, sir.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: It’s going to have a great effect. That’s why I’m investigating.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk, Ron Suskind, about what it would mean for Congress to investigate? We now know the House Judiciary Committee Chairman Conyers is talking about investigating, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. What were you able to gather? What could they gather?

RON SUSKIND: The fact is, the book, as readers now around the country know, lays this out, letter and verse, with great clarity, again, with on-the-record sources, and a great number of off-the-record sources, as well, were helpful in the overall project.

What you can see now, I think, is Congress having an opportunity to exercise some of its constitutional mandates, which has been very difficult during the history of this administration, as Chairman Conyers and certainly even more people on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence know. They have not been briefed on key issues, as well as key issues in and around this matter of Habbush. You know, the fact is, is that the administration has consistently, consistently undercut Congress’s role of oversight, which of course is statutory in its clarity and its legal strength, to oversee what the administration does, especially in matters of secrecy. This was all set up very, very carefully so Congress will be briefed so they’ll know what’s happening so we don’t have essentially a secret foreign policy carried forward by any president. This is an opportunity for them to finally exercise, essentially, their obligations in Congress.

For instance, there are many things laid out in the book that the administration has not in any way either commented on or denied. They’re focusing on this specific letter because it means illegality, which could, you know, go right up to impeachment hearings, ostensibly, in the next couple of months. However, this Habbush matter, from beginning to end, is an extraordinary array. For instance, Congress simply now should be saying, tell us exactly why the entire Habbush report, from British intelligence to the CIA and briefed to the President—what is the justification for that being secret at this juncture?

You know, time and again, the administration basically says everything that’s classified is classified, and frankly, we have to give you no reason why. Those even involved inside of the administration say that process of classification is woefully broken. The fact is, is that for all this period of classification, from the concept starting, the line between national security, which is what it’s supposed to be about, and national embarrassment has been one that people in administrations have tried to draw, because they said if it’s not justifiably national security, someone should really be looking at that, and if it is a matter of national embarrassment, it should be revealed. This is clearly in the category of national embarrassment and not national security, the entire Habbush mission, now that it’s public.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you go through your conversations with Dearlove, the head of MI6, telling him that you—well, you didn’t have this letter, but you knew of this letter.

RON SUSKIND: Well, when I get to Richard Dearlove, as I point out in the book, I first, just simply knowing about Habbush—Habbush, our secret source, has been kept quiet for five years as essentially, you know, the most portentous secret that the United States is holding—when I first see Richard Dearlove, I know about the mission with the Iraq intelligence chief, and he’s shocked that I know.

AMY GOODMAN: He’s in the playing cards—wasn’t he?—that they gave out to soldiers in Iraq.

RON SUSKIND: Yeah, he’s the jack of diamonds, I guess, which would befit his financial arrangement, as opposed to hearts or clubs. But, you know, Habbush also is somebody that the United States claims publicly to be someone they’re seeking. There’s a million-dollar reward out for his capture.

AMY GOODMAN: That the US government is giving?

RON SUSKIND: Well, it’s on—yeah, it’s on—

AMY GOODMAN: But they’ve given him $5 million.

RON SUSKIND: Right. So I guess the $4 million would be the net there, but, you know—but ostensibly, this is a matter of a vast disinformation campaign about the Iraq intelligence chief. The United States should have known about this in present tense, frankly. You know, imagine just if the President, for his sixteen words at the State of the Union address, did not say, “We have recently learned about British intelligence finding Niger documents on uranium.” Imagine if he had said, “We now know that there may be no WMD in Iraq.” Imagine the debate that would have gone forward from that point. An actual debate, as I think is constitutionally mandated when it comes to an act of war, would have actually occurred at that time with Congress and the American public. I submit that virtually every president of the twentieth century would have said we have to have a real debate, as something as portentous as going to war.

Dearlove is startled that I know anything about the back-channel mission with the Iraq intelligence chief. He says, “Well, only a few people know about this. I don’t understand how you know. Clearly, you do. Do you want me to talk about it, confirm it?” I said, “Well, I don’t really need it confirmed.” But we chat, and he lays it out, letter and verse, what the thinking was, what the British thinking was, what Tony Blair’s thinking was, and ultimately the reaction, when the Americans said, “Thank you very much, but no thank you.”

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, “Thank you very much”?

RON SUSKIND: Well, we—the report goes in. Dearlove said, “We did our best.” Obviously there were doubts. It was never, you know, to use that overused phrase, a slam dunk. You know, the fact is, should we believe this guy? Should we not? How can we check what he says? All of those were things that were roiling through both Britain and America at that point. I think, as Rob Richer says clearly, or even better, Buzzy—

AMY GOODMAN: Top CIA.

RON SUSKIND: Top CIA guy—or the number three guy at CIA, Buzzy Krongard, he says, “Look, 25 percent of us thought it was denial and deception. 25 percent said he’s the real McCoy. Others said, ‘Ooh, I don’t know how to touch this,’” because ultimately this is a hot potato inside of the government. Ultimately, what’s clear is the United States government didn’t want to know, frankly, almost anything that it didn’t have to know at this moment. It was moving forward, as Dearlove says and as Nigel Inkster says, his deputy—he says the United States, at this moment, was like a runaway train.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, let’s get to your next question after break. We’re talking to Ron Suskind. And we also have on the line with us the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers. Ron Suskind’s explosive book is The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. We are talking about where the findings in Suskind’s book go from here. Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind—his new book is out, it’s called The Way of the World—we’re also joined by the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers. He says he’s looking into investigating the findings of Ron Suskind’s book. Juan?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Congressman Conyers, I’d like to ask you, would you consider trying to get the former Israeli intelligence chief—I’m sorry, Iraqi intelligence chief to come and testify before Congress and get to the bottom of—because, obviously, he would have quite a bit of information on the allegations in Ron Suskind’s book?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, he does, and so do a lot of other people. But, dear friends, I’m in the third day of an—I’m not considering an investigation. I’m investigating.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: What do I mean, I am investigating?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes, what does it mean to be in the third day of that investigation? How do you begin?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: What do you think that means? You’re an investigative reporter. What do I mean, I’m investigating? You know what? You’re asking me to tell you what I’m investigating. I didn’t ask Ron Suskind when he was taking months to put the book together, I didn’t start investigating him. How can I tell you three days into an investigation? And you say, what do I mean?

RON SUSKIND: I’m sympathetic to you, Chairman Conyers. You know, people maybe shouldn’t see how the sausage is made, really just how it tastes and how you get to the finish.

I mean, one of the things, though, that I think we’re talking about here, which is interesting, is what powers Congress has to get many of these documents declassified. You know, the fact is, throughout this Habbush mission, from beginning to end, especially this year from January 2003 until December, when the letter comes out, there are, I’m certain, a pile of documents that are stamped “classified” inside of the government that I can’t imagine have any actual justification at this point for remaining classified. And I guess one of the questions is, what powers Judiciary or other committees in Congress, both House and Senate, might have to get these documents immediately declassified. Obviously, no one in the government, frankly—and I’ve said this before—there’s virtually no one inside of the executive branch that pushes for the declassification of documents. It’s certainly Congress’s role, though, to say this must be made public. And throughout the chain here on Habbush, there are many such documents. What powers do you think Congress will have to get these brought into daylight?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, you’re talking to maybe the most frustrated person attempting to exercise the oversight responsibilities that I have on Judiciary. There’s nobody who’s been trying harder than me to get to access all of the things in the Department of Justice, the executive branch, the FBI, the CIA. No one has been more zealous in that than I.

RON SUSKIND: Chairman, I—

REP. JOHN CONYERS: But for me to get engage in a discussion this morning, the third day into the most critical investigation of the entire Bush administration, is a little bit much, I think.

RON SUSKIND: I’m just trying to get a sense—I think the viewers here are sort of trying to get a sense of the barriers. I know you’ve been the most ardent of anybody. But what sort of barriers do they throw up, in terms of saying, well, either “No, we can’t” or “It’s difficult to declassify documents” or “Well, we’ll look for that one, and we’ll get back to you.” I know they’ve offered you virtually every dodge and fake and excuse. I think it’s something I understand, but I think viewers may not understand how difficult it is to get them to cough this stuff up.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: Well, Ron, look, let’s—the past is already history. The present is going on right now.

RON SUSKIND: I hear you.

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I’m not here to tell you my troubles with the administration or—I’m happy to be on the program, because I’ve already read 96 percent of the book, and we’re investigating, but for me to start telling you what might be available and what the problems are and what the challenges are going to be, I think, is very unprofessional in an investigation of this seriousness.

RON SUSKIND: I agree.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Congressman, I’d like to ask you, as a veteran member of the Congress, you recall another investigation that occurred decades ago in the waning days of another administration: the Iran-Contra scandal. And when quite a bit of information was dug up about what President Reagan and the administration knew or didn’t know about the lies to the American people around Iran-Contra, and the general thrust of a lot of the people those days was, “Hey, these are the last days of this administration. It’s over. Forget it. What’s the use of continuing the investigation?” The lessons you learned from that investigation and how it might affect the way you proceed in these waning months here?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: I don’t want to make that comparison. I was there, and you were on the case, as usual. And this is not—this is not a retrospective. The 110th Congress isn’t over. We’re starting our work, and then we’re doing it in a period where the Congress is in recess. I’m calling everybody back. We’ve got a huge amount of work to engage in. And because I don’t have the appropriate radio to hear the program at 8:00 in the morning, I am happy to be invited on, because I don’t have to wait ’til this evening until the releases come out at 11:30 to read what all of you said. So this is a wonderful service to me, and I’m grateful to you for it. But I am not here to tell you what was—it was like with Iran-Contra, as I know you know it well. But this isn’t a history lesson we’re in.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me put this question to Ron Suskind. Yesterday, we went through the responses of everyone from Condoleezza Rice to George Tenet to Rob Richer. And I want to know what he would have to say if he was put under oath. Now, he responded to your book—he was one of the people you interviewed—by saying—he’s former head of CIA’s Near East Division—“I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind’s book.” So, tell us about what he actually said to you.

RON SUSKIND: Richer went through letter and verse on the Habbush mission, the reaction of people inside of CIA, his recollection specifically of Tenet getting the assignment, turning to him. He talks about “Hey, Marine, you’re not going to like this.” Tenet clearly is sort of holding it out like a fish that’s rotting. He passes it to Richer. He knows that this is something that down the ranks they’re not going to be too pleased with. Tenet is following orders. That’s certainly the take that Richer has at this point.

AMY GOODMAN: He says he remembers a cream-colored letter, like stationery from the White House?

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. I said, “Talk about what exactly you remember.” And I put that on the transcript, which I put up on the internet, so people can see. As I’m pressing him, not for what he thinks or not over what he supposes, but exactly what he remembers, he says he’s sure it’s from the Vice President’s Office. I said, “Why?” He says, “I’d bet my career on it. Everything was coming from those guys at this point. ‘Go check this. Go do this.’ Some of it fanciful.” I said, “Well, certainly, in terms of specifically disinformation, a lie, they hadn’t done the deception.” He says, “No, that’s what made this different.” I said, “But do you know specifically it was from the Vice President?” He says, “No, what I know is it was from the White House.”

AMY GOODMAN: George Tenet, the CIA director.

RON SUSKIND: George Tenet. Richer saw the stationery. You know, and the fact is, is that Richer then talked to others inside of CIA about this specific mission, including one of the deputies who ran the Iraq Division, who—John Maguire, who of course is in the book, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Who gives the same kind of comment—

RON SUSKIND: Of course.

AMY GOODMAN: —“Not within my chain of command was I told to fabricate…”

RON SUSKIND: Right. But the fact is, is that it’s never within Maguire’s chain of command, so he’s answering something that’s not being alleged. When it comes to Richer, there’s fuzzy words about who fabricates. Well, the fabrication happens way down the ranks. That’s actually a specific act. The chain of command issues are very legally narrow. Ostensibly, this is the kind of thing written very, very carefully, with a lawyer involved, which doesn’t really answer, well, the many, many things that are in the book. As to the specifics of what is not alleged, the evidence is in the book.

And the fact is, is it’s not a matter of a passing conversation. We had many conversations on this specific issue, on the Habbush matter, with all of the key sources. There was never any mystery about what it was, what the Habbush letter was, what the Habbush mission entailed, in terms of the setup with the Iraq intelligence chief. I mean, exhaustive, hour after hour. And the way I do it as an investigative reporter, is you go back again and again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: Did they get Habbush to sign it?

RON SUSKIND: No. Interestingly, Maguire talks about this. He’s really the expert on Iraq. He’s a real American hero guy. He’s been to Iraq many times, and he’s—

AMY GOODMAN: He’s in Iraq now?

RON SUSKIND: Well, he’s not in America right now. But, you know—but the fact is, is that he talks about the fact that in his discussion with Richer, he’s like, “It’s ridiculous. Habbush isn’t going to want to sign this thing. He’s too smart for that. You know, he’s the intelligence chief of Iraq. He’s a guy like us.” He knows if he were to sign a letter that was truly authentic, alright, in his own hand, if you will, that his family could face real trouble. You know, he has relatives, extended family, still back in Iraq. If he’s seen as actively supporting the United States—at this point he’s seen as missing—you know, his family could be in trouble. You know, and he wouldn’t do anything, you know, that disastrous for him, even though we paid him the $5 million.

The sense from Maguire—again, he’s not handling it, he’s just discussing it with Rob when he first hears about it. And then Maguire is going off to a new assignment. It’s passed down to his successor, who runs Iraq for CIA. Maguire says—

AMY GOODMAN: Richer’s new assignment, of course, is vice president of Blackwater.

RON SUSKIND: Well, he’s actually now working mostly with King Abdullah of Jordan as his main job. But, you know, he’s a guy with connections all through the government and has briefed Congress many times. He’s a credible guy. He has been around. He was also a character, a minor one, in my last book, The One Percent Doctrine. I’ve known him for many years.

But interestingly, Maguire says, “We’re probably just going to have to fabricate it ourselves, get someone to write it and then just deliver it.” And John Maguire and I talked at length about that. Now, Maguire is not involved in the actual fabrication and execution of this, but Maguire is a pro, you know, very good at this. And he looked at the optics of it, so to speak, right at the start, and said, “Well, we’ll probably just”—you know, to Richer—“We’re probably just going to have to, you know, have somebody do it.” And Maguire, of course, is delighted he’s not going to be the one who has to do this ugly work.

JUAN GONZALEZ: But what does that say about—even about the quality of the work that was done, that they produce a letter that the principal has not signed and that other reporters then—they leak it to reporters, who then—

RON SUSKIND: Well, of course, the principal—they’ll have someone sign it as Habbush. You know, it’s someone else will do the handwriting. You know, but the—

AMY GOODMAN: And Habbush is paid $5 million to be silent, not to comment on this.

RON SUSKIND: Of course not, of course not. And that’s the sense. Habbush will stay silent. He’s not going to give us any trouble.

But mind you, what’s interesting is that, you know, Maguire’s view—and we talked at length about this—is that, you know, this was amateur hour, you know, an order from the White House. And he says, Tenet should have pushed back. Tenet, remember, George Tenet, is not an intelligence man; he was a staff man in the Senate. He’s really sort of a staffer politician sort of guy. And inside of CIA, even though he became the director of CIA, there’s a separation between people who really have done CIA operations for decades and Tenet, who really doesn’t have real acuity for that. So Maguire talks, in the book—and there’s a quote, people who read it—he’s, “I wish George had more experience in actual operations, like some CIA directors, because he could have told his bosses in the White House, ‘This is a bad idea. Habbush is never going to sign it. We don’t think this is such a good plan.’” But Tenet doesn’t push back. And as he said, “That’s one thing,” Maguire says, “we blame George about.” Other directors might have pushed back. George didn’t. Instead, he took the assignment, passed it down the ranks, and CIA executed.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, George Tenet denies this and has responded to your book, saying that it is not true. But—

RON SUSKIND: Well, he says, “to the best of my recollection,” and that’s something reporters in Washington know is a classic George move.

AMY GOODMAN: And now say what exactly the letter says.

RON SUSKIND: The letter says that—it’s a letter, sort of a personal letter from Habbush to Saddam, again, dated July 1, 2001, and it talks about the fact that Mohamed Atta has been in Iraq training for the upcoming mission, which is not named, but sort of suggested—obviously it’s 9/11 that they’re suggesting—and he has trained, you know, in and around Abu Nidal, who of course is ostensibly hiding in Iraq at this point. There’s some talk, sort of flowery language, about the great mission ahead, you know, and its righteousness. That’s one major part of the letter. And again, it’s only altogether really in, you know, just a very short space of a few paragraphs. And then, there’s talk about Saddam buying yellowcake uranium from Niger with the help from a small team from the al-Qaeda organization, which they throw in ostensibly for good measure.

What’s interesting is that what really undid them here was the overreach of the assignment from the White House. Again, as Maguire says—and others in CIA, I’m sure, agree—it was amateur hour. You know, CIA wouldn’t have come up with an operation like this. It was clearly something they were ordered to do from the White House, which had a kind of ham-handedness to it. That overreach, the desire of the White House to solve all of its problems, really doesn’t fit with how actual deceptions are run. CIA actually does this sort of thing. You know, we would never put all of that in one letter. It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t pass the smell test, which it doesn’t after a week in the global news cycles, where people are writing about it and reporting about it and going, “Jeez, this is an awful lot in one letter.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, not only that, but it sounds like the talking points for Dick Cheney on all the Sunday shows. These were the main things that he was constantly raising.

RON SUSKIND: Precisely. Look—and again, Maguire and I talked a lot about this. I said, “How does this fit in what CIA generally does?” He says, “Well, actually, you know, this is not the kind of thing that we would do on our own.” If you really want to do a deception, he explained to me, what you do is you get something a little off. You put in things that are clearly true, and then there’s one part that you’re interested in, and you twist it just a teeny bit. Then maybe there’s one other thing that’s brand new, again, so it has plausibility, instead of this, which is really, as he said, a check-the-box for all of the major political issues that the administration is facing at this moment about the march to war and false pretenses being under our Iraq case.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, the head of MI6, Richard Dearlove—

RON SUSKIND: Yes, that’s right.

AMY GOODMAN: What exactly does he say about the letter? First, you say, he’s startled that you even know about it.

RON SUSKIND: Well, he and I are not discussing the letter. He’s discussing the front end of it. He’s discussing the Habbush mission and all of the British engagement, their hopes, in some cases their fears, and their reaction, when the United States, after—he says, this very dangerous mission—he says this is a high-risk mission here, and there’s fear at the start that maybe it’s a trap. Maybe the British intelligence manager or an extraordinary agent, Michael Dearlove, who runs the Mid-East for the British, that, you know, he might die.

And one of the reasons it’s in Jordan is that we have leverage in Jordan, again, through Rob Richer, the CIA intelligence official, because he is so close to the Jordanians. He is a very close associate of King Abdullah’s and others in Jordan intelligence. That’s why it’s set up in Jordan. That’s why everybody is on tinder hooks, as it unfolds.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And presumably Saddam Hussein was aware that all this was going on.

RON SUSKIND: It’s a debate inside of the government, you know, and there’s back-and-forth on that. Again, in the exhaustive reporting on this—and it was exhaustive—I talked to many officials. Does Saddam know, or does he not? All the way from the British to the Americans, there’s debate. It’s not clear Saddam knows. There’s a sense he does. And, you know, and the fact is, is that at the end of the day, what everybody says is that it’s clear, no matter if Saddam knew or not, that much of the intelligence provided by Habbush, especially about the mind of Saddam Hussein, is something he never ever would have authorized being revealed, because it shows Saddam is addled, isolated, his fears, and ultimately, that Saddam is not really exactly who we think he is at this point. All of that, as Richer says, is the most valuable intelligence we get from the Habbush mission. It really gets us into the mind of Saddam Hussein.

Also, fascinating, the operators inside of CIA were delighted that a window had been opened to Saddam Hussein. All the folks in the Iraq Operations Group, which is a vast group of operatives who are actually working Iraq—of which many of them had worked operations in Iraq for years, they’re saying, “This is a golden opportunity. We have a window right into Saddam’s inner circle through the intelligence chief, Habbush. We can put anything through that window. We can put misinformation through that window. We can turn Saddam in various directions. We even can send Habbush in with a team to take Saddam out.” As Maguire says, I think with great clarity, “Imagine, then we could walk to Baghdad instead of fight our way to Baghdad, something that could save many American lives.”

That debate is going on in January between the operators who are saying, “Golden opportunity, this channel has been opened,” in January of 2003 and folks who are very anxious about the case for war, most of them from the White House—two teams fighting. When it’s clear that the evidence from Habbush is that there are no WMD, the White House gets spooked, and the White House cuts off the channel. Operators inside of CIA are livid. They’re saying, “My goodness, American lives are at stake here! You’re cutting off the channel because you don’t want to know more? And we have to now go forward without the advantages and opportunities that Habbush might have provided?”

Meanwhile, of course, we had made our arrangement, and we resettled Habbush. But nonetheless, operationally, when it comes to Iraq, this is kind of an abomination, to be frank.

AMY GOODMAN: And who does Dearlove say, head of MI6—

RON SUSKIND: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: —British intelligence, who does he believe in the White House wants this to go forward? Does he feel that Bush wanted it from January and before that? Was it Bush?

RON SUSKIND: From the beginning—I have reported in a previous book, The Price of Loyalty, that it was from the first National Security Council meeting of this presidency. The President said, “How are we going to do this?” Not “whether” or “why” but “how.” The fact is, inside of CIA, many people now echo that. They talk about that in the book. It was from the first Bush—it was—

AMY GOODMAN: This was about Paul O’Neill, the Treasury secretary, that you write the book.

RON SUSKIND: Right, but throughout CIA, people involved in this say the same thing. It was about the very first meeting that the President wants to get Saddam Hussein.

Now, mind you, Dearlove says, I think with real interesting clarity here—he talks about the fact that Cheney was pushing so ardently, so fiercely for war that Bush ultimately almost hands over the basic responsibilities of the presidency. He says—Dearlove says, in a sort of a grave finish to this interview, where he says it wasn’t too late for Cheney—it was too late for Cheney when the intelligence comes, because he was going, no matter what. But it was not too late for Bush to say, “Now, hold on a minute”—hold on, the American public, wait, in terms of the whole world, that is now behind us on this case for war. And I think that is where historical judgment may be harshest.

AMY GOODMAN: This is a lot to take in, Chairman John Conyers, a lot of big scope for your committee, for the House Judiciary Committee. Is there a chance that you would join together with the Senate? Is there a way the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence—maybe actually, Ron Suskind, you could tell us—Jay Rockefeller is the head of that—what exactly are their intentions? There are joint House-Senate committees.

RON SUSKIND: Generally—and I’m sure Chairman Conyers would echo this—generally, the way it has worked before is that there are joint engagements between the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee, because, remember, they’re very carefully constructed, where they have staff and of course congressmen, congresspersons, who have security clearance opportunities. They get to see things that the American public doesn’t get to see. Sometimes there are small groups who get to see the most precious stuff, because the administration, any administration, is afraid of leaks. But generally, a joint effort between those two intelligence committees is the way it has worked in the past.

AMY GOODMAN: And what would that mean? What could Senate intelligence do? Jay Rockefeller?

RON SUSKIND: Senate Intelligence can move forward in ways that, frankly, even Congressman Conyers, with his greatest ardor, would have trouble doing, again because they can go into the shadows. They can talk directly to CIA and say, “We understand this is classified, but we have people here who are charged to look at classified information in a kind of lockbox.” CIA—you know, traditionally, CIA says, “Well, let’s look for what you need.” They tend to drag their feet. Sometimes they say it is problematic to even get this information to some people in Congress, because they’re ongoing operations. There are all manner of ways the CIA over these past few years has basically said, “We’ll give it to you when we’re good and ready.”

This is not an instance, I don’t think, of that, though, because if you have a violation of law, things do change. And if there is a stated violation of law—and the book seems it does indicate in its evidence that they’re in that realm here—then Congress has more powers to say, “Your executive privilege claims,” which the White House often makes, “they don’t hold water in courts when there is the issue of wrongdoing.”

JUAN GONZALEZ: I’d like to—I mean, you’ve written now several books, as you say, on this administration. And I’d like to ask you, for those who, looking at American history, say this is not the first time that presidents have fabricated reasons to go to war—John Quincy Adams accusing President Polk of fabricating reasons to go to war with Mexico, obviously the Gulf of Tonkin—what, in your view, makes this administration unique or distinct compared to the other lies that have been foisted on the American people in the past?

RON SUSKIND: You know what? The fact is that we are ever in a pull and tug, an ebb and flow, when it comes to these issues, in terms of what the public says. We have a right to know in a democracy, especially on issues of greatest import, where young and women may die in battle. And what an administration often will say, a president will say, “This is my business. You’re on a need-to-know basis. I’ll tell you what I believe you’re supposed to know.” This back-and-forth has gone on for many years.

I think it’s clear in these past few years that we’ve had a kind of hammerlock here between the cult of message, where, frankly, people are not having discussions that are real ones, certainly not in the Fourth Estate, as we might have in previous decades, with senior officials, even with a president, where they’re giving the good enough reasons that underlie action A and B.

Combine that with an extraordinary spread of secrecy. You know, they are classifying everything down to the most minor documents. And I’ve looked at documents that are classified, and you say, “That is impossible that you would think that is an issue of national security.” That is a core problem of this period. You know, and frankly, some people inside of the administration, you know, and some wise heads who have served other presidents say what we need, we need a 9/11 Commission-style group, bipartisan, elder statesmen, who say these things should be made public, because right now everything gets classified. And there is nobody, nobody of consequence, inside of this government—and it may be true going forward—who says this must be made public, even if it’s going to hurt like hell. And that’s really an issue now for the democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: In your coverage of movements, do you think people demanding this will make the biggest difference?

RON SUSKIND: Absolutely. It’s the only thing that makes a difference in a democracy. I mean, the fact is, a lot of people have been sitting here for years, going, “Oh, what can I do? Well, you know, where do I engage? You know, they’re the pros, and I’m just going about my life.” Well, it’s not the way it actually works, because at this point, at this late period in this administration, before they leave the stage, many people are saying, “Now, wait a second. I kind of own this government. The way this works is I’m the sovereign, the people. They’re servants, public servants.” It’s an interesting sort of phrase with tension in the words. They have awesome powers, but they actually serve the public. And the notion of rule of law being supreme to any individual is the core of what the founders understood, in terms of the tyranny of power.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Congressman Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, do you think there is any chance of a bipartisan commission like this being set up?

REP. JOHN CONYERS: It has been suggested. It’s under investigation and consideration right now. But the importance of this discussion today is critical not only to the committees—there are four committees, and how they relate to each other will come forward very shortly—but there is also the question of the media, the Fourth Estate, the press. This is now public information that, it seems to me, shouldn’t be great breaking news over a progressive news program, but this has to be investigated by the rest of the media, unless they consider this to be irrelevant or too late, or whatever reasons are, that they’re coerced or afraid themselves, too timid. But what you’re doing is a great service. And I consider the relationship of the committees on the subject matter, the responsibility of the media, and the American people being brought into this discussion as the citizens, that in a representative democracy, that’s what all of us are supposed to be working on. And so, you have my congratulations for allowing me to be here and with you and with all of the large number of people that are also taking part in this by listening to it.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Chairman John Conyers of the House Judiciary Committee. We have to break. We have a very late break. I want to apologize to our radio and television stations for that. When I come back, I do want to ask—I want to ask Ron Suskind about the media, because we do have listeners and viewers who have asked questions about them picking up this story. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. We’ll be back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind, here for the second day. We have been overwhelmed with questions and comments from our audience all over the world. His book is called The Way of the World. One of the listeners or viewers who wrote in said, “I have seen no coverage of Ron’s allegations in the New York Times. I think such is important to legitimize the issues he raises. Has Ron been contacted by the Times, why does he think there has been no coverage?” Ron Suskind?

RON SUSKIND: There have been a variety of reporters who are working on this story from the major media. The fact—and the major newspapers. The fact is, it’s gotten enormous publicity, God knows. It’s been everywhere, and it’s been—you know, I was on The Today Show for two days. It’s been on the network news programs. It’s certainly been on the cable news programs. And the blogosphere is all but burning up with it.

I think for the newspapers, they are actively trying to advance the story. That’s sort of the way they do it at a newspaper. I was at the Wall Street Journal for ten years, and I write for the New York Times Magazine periodically. You know, I think what reporters are saying—and we have some of the best reporters in the world, make no mistake—is, “How can I advance the story? How can I find, essentially, my own fresh added corroboration, added evidence, essentially, to what is clearly laid out in the book?”

I think what’s interesting is that it’s been a difficult period for reporters. Everyone understands that. But I think right now they’re trying to get their bearings back. I’ve been writing for years my books, disclosures in them dovetailing with, you know, great reporters, like Dana Priest of the Washington Post, Jim Risen of the New York Times, you know, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, whose book Dark Side is out now, too. We’re all trying to do essentially the same thing, which is to pull loose this crucial information for the American public to know, so they can judge their government fairly and then know how to act. At this point, there is a body of evidence. Thank goodness it’s out. But on this one, reporters around the world are out hunting right now to nail down other parts of the story, and I think we’ll probably see yield from that in the next few days or certainly weeks.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, we have about thirty seconds, but there was one other question that was forwarded to us: How culpable was the media in persuading the American public to digest the talking points of the White House? And has there been any radical shift in the war coverage since the beginning of the war?

RON SUSKIND: Yeah, absolutely. The media has gone through a real therapy session on this, because, you know, on balance, everybody understands that the White House used a new method of sort of fear, anti-patriotic—you’re not patriotic for doing your job—intimidation on the media. It worked. Power works in this way, and the media is now trying to recover, step by step. But the fact is, the White House operations for these sorts of things, as we see just in the last week, are still intact and operating to try to terrorize, to try to bring fear to sources. They’ve been hunting for sources for many reporters for years. It chills sources. It makes them fear for their families, for their future. And this is still going on.

Second Yellowface incident and "Nations don't invade other nations"

This time, the Spanish tennis team, in the name of "fun and humor", engages in this racist gesture prior to their Federation cup match this past April. Again, the team used the same argument of"intentionality" to free them from accountability of their actions. When will they realize that their intentions in no way absolve them from their actions?
I don't even know how to react anymore. I am pissed off beyond words, but at a certain point I know I must detach myself and refocus.

As to the Spanish tennis team, all I have to say is grow the fuck up and pick up a history book or two.




On a humorous note, guess what McCain said during a campaign gaffe Wednesday? Quoting word for word, he said, "I want to have a dialogue with the Russians. I want them to get out of Georgian territory as quickly as possible. And I am interested in good relations between the United States and Russia. But in the twenty-first century, nations don’t invade other nations."

Doesn't support invading other nations MY ASS- what do you call supporting the Iraq INVASION and joking about an invasion in Iran? I bet he wishes now he had retracted his statement because he sure sounds like a hypocrite right about now.

YELLOWFACE IN THE OLYMPICS

No one seems to understand the racist undertones around this picture.
After London's The Guardian published this picture of the Spanish Toronto Raptors basketball team posing in a racist gesture, Jose Calderon of Toronto Raptors tried to justify their actions and said, “We did it because we thought it was going to be something nice, something with no problem. [...]But somebody wants to talk about it. It is too much of a big deal with you guys (the media) and everybody talking about that.” He called this whole fiasco as "absurd", "blown out of proportion."

Head coach Aíto García Reneses also responded, “If I go to play with a taller team and I put here (raising up on the tips of his toes) it is not an offense,” Reneses said. “I can’t understand anything more.” SERIOUSLY?!

Basketball player Paul Gazol said, “I didn’t find it very funny. I didn’t find it offensive, either. [...] If you put it in the wrong context and put it with the wrong people or a different kind of people, you could take it that way,” he said. “But not with our group and not with our people. I would find that a wrong read.”

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?
Would the players (and the world, for that matter) have dared to react the same way if they posed with blackface or Nazi symbols on their bodies, and claim this was 'absurd and blown out of proportion?' I am disgusted and saddened, but quite honestly unsurprised by this. This shows how much more we have to go in educating the mass media and general public on Imperialism and Racial history 101.

DEMAND IMPEACHMENT!! US govt FORGES false intelligence papers linking Al-Qaeda and Iraq

Democracy Now transcript and podcast of "The Way of the World: Ron Suskind on How the Bush Admin Deliberately Faked an Iraq-al-Qaeda Connection and Undermined Diplomacy, Democracy in Pakistan"

This is more than enough evidence for IMPEACHMENT AND CRIMINAL CHARGES. Why hasn't this been on the front cover of every newspaper?!

"There is more inspiration and humanity in defeat than there is in victory."- Mahmoud Darwish, poet of Palestine, (March 15, 1941 – August 9, 2008)

Rest in peace.

I Belong There


I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.

I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell

with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.

I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,

a bird's sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.

I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.

I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to

her mother.

And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.

To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.

I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a

single word: Home.


"Identity card"

Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks ...
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?

Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew

My father ... descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather ... was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman's hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!

Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks ...
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!

Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate poeple
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper's flesh will be my food
Beware ...
Beware ...
Of my hunger
And my anger!


Below is an interview Darwish did with an Israeli journalist. I've never seen someone claim space and presence as powerfully as Darwish:

"Truth has two faces.
We've listened to the Greek mythology,
and at times we've heard the Trojan victim speak
through the mouth of the Greek Euripedes.
As for me, I'm looking for the poet of Troy
because Troy didn't tell its story.
And I wonder
does a land that has great poets
have the right to control a people
that has no poets?
And is the lack of poetry amongst the people
enough to justify its defeat?
Is poetry a sign or is it an instrument of power?
Can a people be strong without having its own poetry?
I was a child of people
that had not been recognized until then.
And i wanted to speak in the name of the absentee,
in the name of the Trojan poet.
There is more inspiration and humanity
in defeat
than there is in victory.
If i belonged to the victor's camp,
I'd demonstrate my support to the victims.

Do you know why we Palestinians are famous?
Because you are our enemy.
The interest is in you,
not in me.
So we have the misfortune of having Israel as an enemy
because it enjoys unlimited support.
and we have the good fortune of having Israel as our enemy
because the Jews are the center of attention.
You've brought us defeat and renown."

Taxi to the Dark Side

Taxi to the Dark Side focuses around the murder of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in detention at the Bagram Air Base.

The film examines America's policy on torture and interrogation, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation, opposition to as well as defense of the use of torture from its political and military opponents, and attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture.

Maybe Not- Cat Power

Theres a dream that I see, I pray it can be
Look cross the land, shake this land
A wish or a command
I Dream that I see, dont kill it, its free
Youre just a man, you get what you can

We all do what we can
So we can do just one more thing
We can all be free
Maybe not in words
Maybe not with a look
But with your mind

Listen to me, dont walk that street
Theres always an end to it
Come and be free, you know who I am
Were just living people

We wont have a thing
So wed got nothing to lose
We can all be free
Maybe not with words
Maybe not with a look
But with your mind

Youve got to choose a wish or command
At the turn of the tide, is withering thee
Remember one thing, the dream you can see
Pray to be, shake this land

We all do what we can
So we can do just one more thing
We wont have a thing
So weve got nothing to lose
We can all be free
Maybe not with words
Maybe with a look
But with your mind

But with your mind

“This is the Olympics the West Wanted”–Dave Zirin on US Corporations Entering China, Athletes Speaking Out and the Games from ’68 to Today

"The most important [issue], the most—one that speaks to the hearts of people in China, are the fact that between 1.5 and two million people were literally removed from their homes in Beijing to make way for the Olympics. I mean, China has spent $40 billion on the Olympic Games. Just to give a point of comparison, Greece in 2004 spent $9.5 billion, and that was considered wildly over budget. So, $40 billion were spent, most of that on removing people from their homes.”

"I think is one of the most important points for people to remember, is that what’s happening in China is not really a China problem as much as it is an Olympics problem.
One of them is a crackdown on ordinary people. The other is the tearing down a public housing. And one of the biggest ones, which is one of the things that I think is the most—the biggest concern, is the ramping up of police powers."

"A lot of people say the slogan of the Olympics—well, the famous slogan is “bigger, faster, stronger.” And I think the slogan should be “Something wicked this way comes,” because wherever the Olympics go, they leave behind just a wreck of a city behind it and a busted economy."

The Olympics: Unveliing Police State 2.0

An article by Naomi Klein

China's "success" transformation into censorship-police state, and corporations profiting the entire way


Surveillance cameras marking Tiananmen Square

US becomes more like China, China becomes more like US

A Rolling Stones article by Naomi Klein on the implicit role of U.S. technology and media companies directly partnering with the state of China to put the people under police surveillance.
This is not an article bashing on China as an 'evil state'; rather, it explains the US corporations' accountability for actions and a warning that we must not allow US to become a police state ourselves.

China's All-Seeing Eye
With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export.

Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it — thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port — to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture — the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer.Hundreds of luxury condominiums tower over the city; many are more than 40 stories high, topped with three-story penthouses. Newer neighborhoods like Keji Yuan are packed with ostentatiously modern corporate campuses and decadent shopping malls. Rem Koolhaas, Prada's favorite architect, is building a stock exchange in Shenzhen that looks like it floats — a design intended, he says, to "suggest and illustrate the process of the market." A still-under-construction superlight subway will soon connect it all at high speed; every car has multiple TV screens broadcasting over a Wi-Fi network. At night, the entire city lights up like a pimped-out Hummer, with each five-star hotel and office tower competing over who can put on the best light show.

Many of the big American players have set up shop in Shenzhen, but they look singularly unimpressive next to their Chinese competitors. The research complex for China's telecom giant Huawei, for instance, is so large that it has its own highway exit, while its workers ride home on their own bus line. Pressed up against Shenzhen's disco shopping centers, Wal-Mart superstores — of which there are nine in the city — look like dreary corner stores. (China almost seems to be mocking us: "You call that a superstore?") McDonald's and KFC appear every few blocks, but they seem almost retro next to the Real Kung Fu fast-food chain, whose mascot is a stylized Bruce Lee.

American commentators like CNN's Jack Cafferty dismiss the Chinese as "the same bunch of goons and thugs they've been for the last 50 years." But nobody told the people of Shenzhen, who are busily putting on a 24-hour-a-day show called "America" — a pirated version of the original, only with flashier design, higher profits and less complaining. This has not happened by accident. China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism," it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism — central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance — harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism.

Now, as China prepares to showcase its economic advances during the upcoming Olympics in Beijing, Shenzhen is once again serving as a laboratory, a testing ground for the next phase of this vast social experiment. Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network, an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range — a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.)

The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology — thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric — to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.

Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.

Zhang Yi points to an empty bracket on the dashboard of his black Honda. "It used to hold my GPS, but I leave it at home now," he says. "It's the crime — they are too easy to steal." He quickly adds, "Since the surveillance cameras came in, we have seen a very dramatic decrease in crime in Shenzhen."

After driving for an hour past hundreds of factory gates and industrial parks, we pull up to a salmon-color building that Zhang partly owns. This is the headquarters of FSAN: CCTV System. Zhang, a prototypical Shenzhen yuppie in a royal-blue button-down shirt and black-rimmed glasses, apologizes for the mess. Inside, every inch of space is lined with cardboard boxes filled with electronics parts and finished products.

Zhang opened the factory two and a half years ago, and his investment has already paid off tenfold. That kind of growth isn't unusual in the field he has chosen: Zhang's factory makes digital surveillance cameras, turning out 400,000 a year. Half of the cameras are shipped overseas, destined to peer from building ledges in London, Manhattan and Dubai as part of the global boom in "homeland security." The other half stays in China, many right here in Shenzhen and in neighboring Guangzhou, another megacity of 12 million people. China's market for surveillance cameras enjoyed revenues of $4.1 billion last year, a jump of 24 percent from 2006.

Zhang escorts me to the assembly line, where rows of young workers, most of them women, are bent over semiconductors, circuit boards, tiny cables and bulbs. At the end of each line is "quality control," which consists of plugging the camera into a monitor and making sure that it records. We enter a showroom where Zhang and his colleagues meet with clients. The walls are lined with dozens of camera models: domes of all sizes, specializing in day and night, wet and dry, camouflaged to look like lights, camouflaged to look like smoke detectors, explosion-proof, the size of a soccer ball, the size of a ring box.

The workers at FSAN don't just make surveillance cameras; they are constantly watched by them. While they work, the silent eyes of rotating lenses capture their every move. When they leave work and board buses, they are filmed again. When they walk to their dormitories, the streets are lined with what look like newly installed streetlamps, their white poles curving toward the sidewalk with black domes at the ends. Inside the domes are high-resolution cameras, the same kind the workers produce at FSAN. Some blocks have three or four, one every few yards. One Shenzhen-based company, China Security & Surveillance Technology, has developed software to enable the cameras to alert police when an unusual number of people begin to gather at any given location.

In 2006, the Chinese government mandated that all Internet cafes (as well as restaurants and other "entertainment" venues) install video cameras with direct feeds to their local police stations. Part of a wider surveillance project known as "Safe Cities," the effort now encompasses 660 municipalities in China. It is the most ambitious new government program in the Pearl River Delta, and supplying it is one of the fastest-growing new markets in Shenzhen.

But the cameras that Zhang manufactures are only part of the massive experiment in population control that is under way here. "The big picture," Zhang tells me in his office at the factory, "is integration." That means linking cameras with other forms of surveillance: the Internet, phones, facial-recognition software and GPS monitoring.

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

Shenzhen is the place where the shield has received its most extensive fortifications — the place where all the spy toys are being hooked together and tested to see what they can do. "The central government eventually wants to have city-by-city surveillance, so they could just sit and monitor one city and its surveillance system as a whole," Zhang says. "It's all part of that bigger project. Once the tests are done and it's proven, they will be spreading from the big province to the cities, even to the rural farmland."

In fact, the rollout of the high-tech shield is already well under way.

When the Tibetan capital of Lhasa was set alight in March, the world caught a glimpse of the rage that lies just under the surface in many parts of China. And though the Lhasa riots stood out for their ethnic focus and their intensity, protests across China are often shockingly militant. In July 2006, workers at a factory near Shenzhen expressed their displeasure over paltry pay by overturning cars, smashing computers and opening fire hydrants. In March of last year, when bus fares went up in the rural town of Zhushan, 20,000 people took to the streets and five police vehicles were torched. Indeed, China has seen levels of political unrest in recent years unknown since 1989, the year student protests were crushed with tanks in Tiananmen Square. In 2005, by the government's own measure, there were at least 87,000 "mass incidents" — governmentspeak for large-scale protests or riots.

This increased unrest — a process aided by access to cellphones and the Internet — represents more than a security problem for the leaders in Beijing. It threatens their whole model of command-and-control capitalism. China's rapid economic growth has relied on the ability of its rulers to raze villages and move mountains to make way for the latest factory towns and shopping malls. If the people living on those mountains use blogs and text messaging to launch a mountain-people's-rights uprising with each new project, and if they link up with similar uprisings in other parts of the country, China's dizzying expansion could grind to a halt.

At the same time, the success of China's ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this "floating" population will swell to more than 350 million. Many will end up in cities like Shenzhen, which is already home to 7 million migrant laborers.

But while China's cities need these displaced laborers to work in factories and on construction sites, they are unwilling to offer them the same benefits as permanent residents: highly subsidized education and health care, as well as other public services. While migrants can live for decades in big cities like Shenzhen and Guangzhou, their residency remains fixed to the rural community where they were born, a fact encoded on their national ID cards. As one young migrant in Guangzhou put it to me, "The local people want to make money from migrant workers, but they don't want to give them rights. But why are the local people so rich? Because of the migrant workers!"

With its militant protests and mobile population, China confronts a fundamental challenge. How can it maintain a system based on two dramatically unequal categories of people: the winners, who get the condos and cars, and the losers, who do the heavy labor and are denied those benefits? More urgently, how can it do this when information technology threatens to link the losers together into a movement so large it could easily overwhelm the country's elites?

The answer is Golden Shield. When Tibet erupted in protests recently, the surveillance system was thrown into its first live test, with every supposedly liberating tool of the Information Age — cellphones, satellite television, the Internet — transformed into a method of repression and control. As soon as the protests gathered steam, China reinforced its Great Firewall, blocking its citizens from accessing dozens of foreign news outlets. In some parts of Tibet, Internet access was shut down altogether. Many people trying to phone friends and family found that their calls were blocked, and cellphones in Lhasa were blitzed with text messages from the police: "Severely battle any creation or any spreading of rumors that would upset or frighten people or cause social disorder or illegal criminal behavior that could damage social stability."

During the first week of protests, foreign journalists who tried to get into Tibet were systematically turned back. But that didn't mean that there were no cameras inside the besieged areas. Since early last year, activists in Lhasa have been reporting on the proliferation of black-domed cameras that look like streetlights — just like the ones I saw coming off the assembly line in Shenzhen. Tibetan monks complain that cameras — activated by motion sensors — have invaded their monasteries and prayer rooms.

During the Lhasa riots, police on the scene augmented the footage from the CCTVs with their own video cameras, choosing to film — rather than stop — the violence, which left 19 dead. The police then quickly cut together the surveillance shots that made the Tibetans look most vicious — beating Chinese bystanders, torching shops, ripping metal sheeting off banks — and created a kind of copumentary: Tibetans Gone Wild. These weren't the celestial beings in flowing robes the Beastie Boys and Richard Gere had told us about. They were angry young men, wielding sticks and long knives. They looked ugly, brutal, tribal. On Chinese state TV, this footage played around the clock.

The police also used the surveillance footage to extract mug shots of the demonstrators and rioters. Photos of the 21 "most wanted" Tibetans, many taken from that distinctive "streetlamp" view of the domed cameras, were immediately circulated to all of China's major news portals, which obediently posted them to help out with the manhunt. The Internet became the most powerful police tool. Within days, several of the men on the posters were in custody, along with hundreds of others.

The flare-up in Tibet, weeks before the Olympic torch began its global journey, has been described repeatedly in the international press as a "nightmare" for Beijing. Several foreign leaders have pledged to boycott the opening ceremonies of the games, the press has hosted an orgy of China-bashing, and the torch became a magnet for protesters, with anti-China banners dropped from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. But inside China, the Tibet debacle may actually have been a boon to the party, strengthening its grip on power. Despite its citizens having unprecedented access to information technology (there are as many Internet users in China as there are in the U.S.), the party demonstrated that it could still control what they hear and see. And what they saw on their TVs and computer screens were violent Tibetans, out to kill their Chinese neighbors, while police showed admirable restraint. Tibetan solidarity groups say 140 people were killed in the crackdown that followed the protests, but without pictures taken by journalists, it is as if those subsequent deaths didn't happen.

Chinese viewers also saw a world unsympathetic to the Chinese victims of Tibetan violence, so hostile to their country that it used a national tragedy to try to rob them of their hard-won Olympic glory. These nationalist sentiments freed up Beijing to go on a full-fledged witch hunt. In the name of fighting a war on terror, security forces rounded up thousands of Tibetan activists and supporters. The end result is that when the games begin, much of the Tibetan movement will be safely behind bars — along with scores of Chinese journalists, bloggers and human-rights defenders who have also been trapped in the government's high-tech web.

Police State 2.0 might not look good from the outside, but on the inside, it appears to have passed its first major test.

In Guangzhou, an hour and a half by train from Shenzhen, Yao Ruoguang is preparing for a major test of his own. "It's called the 10-million-faces test," he tells me.

Yao is managing director of Pixel Solutions, a Chinese company that specializes in producing the new high-tech national ID cards, as well as selling facial-recognition software to businesses and government agencies. The test, the first phase of which is only weeks away, is being staged by the Ministry of Public Security in Beijing. The idea is to measure the effectiveness of face-recognition software in identifying police suspects. Participants will be given a series of photos, taken in a variety of situations. Their task will be to match the images to other photos of the same people in the government's massive database. Several biometrics companies, including Yao's, have been invited to compete. "We have to be able to match a face in a 10 million database in one second," Yao tells me. "We are preparing for that now."

The companies that score well will be first in line for lucrative government contracts to integrate face-recognition software into Golden Shield, using it to check for ID fraud and to discover the identities of suspects caught on surveillance cameras. Yao says the technology is almost there: "It will happen next year."

When I meet Yao at his corporate headquarters, he is feeling confident about how his company will perform in the test. His secret weapon is that he will be using facial-recognition software purchased from L-1 Identity Solutions, a major U.S. defense contractor that produces passports and biometric security systems for the U.S. government.

To show how well it works, Yao demonstrates on himself. Using a camera attached to his laptop, he snaps a picture of his own face, round and boyish for its 54 years. Then he uploads it onto the company's proprietary Website, built with L-1 software. With the cursor, he marks his own eyes with two green plus signs, helping the system to measure the distance between his features, a distinctive aspect of our faces that does not change with disguises or even surgery. The first step is to "capture the image," Yao explains. Next is "finding the face."

He presses APPLY, telling the program to match the new face with photos of the same person in the company's database of 600,000 faces. Instantly, multiple photos of Yao appear, including one taken 19 years earlier — proof that the technology can "find a face" even when the face has changed significantly with time."

It took 1.1 milliseconds!" Yao exclaims. "Yeah, that's me!"

In nearby cubicles, teams of Yao's programmers and engineers take each other's pictures, mark their eyes with green plus signs and test the speed of their search engines. "Everyone is preparing for the test," Yao explains. "If we pass, if we come out number one, we are guaranteed a market in China."

Every couple of minutes Yao's phone beeps. Sometimes it's a work message, but most of the time it's a text from his credit-card company, informing him that his daughter, who lives in Australia, has just made another charge. "Every time the text message comes, I know my daughter is spending money!" He shrugs: "She likes designers."

Like many other security executives I interviewed in China, Yao denies that a primary use of the technology he is selling is to hunt down political activists. "Ninety-five percent," he insists, "is just for regular safety." He has, he admits, been visited by government spies, whom he describes as "the internal-security people." They came with grainy pictures, shot from far away or through keyhole cameras, of "some protesters, some dissidents." They wanted to know if Yao's facial-recognition software could help identify the people in the photos. Yao was sorry to disappoint them. "Honestly, the technology so far still can't meet their needs," he says. "The photos that they show us were just too blurry." That is rapidly changing, of course, thanks to the spread of high-resolution CCTVs. Yet Yao insists that the government's goal is not repression: "If you're a [political] organizer, they want to know your motive," he says. "So they take the picture, give the photo, so at least they can find out who that person is."

Until recently, Yao's photography empire was focused on consumers — taking class photos at schools, launching a Chinese knockoff of Flickr (the original is often blocked by the Great Firewall), turning photos of chubby two-year-olds into fridge magnets and lampshades. He still maintains those businesses, which means that half of the offices at Pixel Solutions look like they have just hosted a kid's birthday party. The other half looks like an ominous customs office, the walls lined with posters of terrorists in the cross hairs: FACE MATCH, FACE PASS, FACE WATCH. When Beijing started sinking more and more of the national budget into surveillance technologies, Yao saw an opportunity that would make all his previous ventures look small. Between more powerful computers, higher-resolution cameras and a global obsession with crime and terrorism, he figured that face recognition "should be the next dot-com."

Not a computer scientist himself — he studied English literature in school — Yao began researching corporate leaders in the field. He learned that face recognition is highly controversial, with a track record of making wrong IDs. A few companies, however, were scoring much higher in controlled tests in the U.S. One of them was a company soon to be renamed L-1 Identity Solutions. Based in Connecticut, L-1 was created two years ago out of the mergers and buyouts of half a dozen major players in the biometrics field, all of which specialized in the science of identifying people through distinct physical traits: fingerprints, irises, face geometry. The mergers made L-1 a one-stop shop for biometrics. Thanks to board members like former CIA director George Tenet, the company rapidly became a homeland-security heavy hitter. L-1 projects its annual revenues will hit $1 billion by 2011, much of it from U.S. government contracts.

In 2006, Yao tells me, "I made the first phone call and sent the first e-mail." For a flat fee of $20,000, he gained access to the company's proprietary software, allowing him to "build a lot of development software based on L-1's technology." Since then, L-1's partnership with Yao has gone far beyond that token investment. Yao says it isn't really his own company that is competing in the upcoming 10-million-faces test being staged by the Chinese government: "We'll be involved on behalf of L-1 in China." Yao adds that he communicates regularly with L1 and has visited the company's research headquarters in New Jersey. ("Out the window you can see the Statue of Liberty. It's such a historic place.") L1 is watching his test preparations with great interest, Yao says. "It seemed that they were more excited than us when we tell them the results."

L-1's enthusiasm is hardly surprising: If Yao impresses the Ministry of Public Security with the company's ability to identify criminals, L-1 will have cracked the largest potential market for biometrics in the world. But here's the catch: As proud as Yao is to be L-1's Chinese licensee, L-1 appears to be distinctly less proud of its association with Yao. On its Website and in its reports to investors, L-1 boasts of contracts and negotiations with governments from Panama and Saudi Arabia to Mexico and Turkey. China, however, is conspicuously absent. And though CEO Bob LaPenta makes reference to "some large international opportunities," not once does he mention Pixel Solutions in Guangzhou.

After leaving a message with the company inquiring about L-1's involvement in China's homeland-security market, I get a call back from Doni Fordyce, vice president of corporate communications. She has consulted Joseph Atick, the company's head of research. "We have nothing in China," she tells me. "Nothing, absolutely nothing. We are uninvolved. We really don't have any relationships at all."

I tell Fordyce about Yao, the 10-million test, the money he paid for the software license. She'll call me right back. When she does, 20 minutes later, it is with this news: "Absolutely, we've sold testing SDKs [software development kits] to Pixel Solutions and to others [in China] that may be entering a test." Yao's use of the technology, she said, is "within his license" purchased from L-1.

The company's reticence to publicize its activities in China could have something to do with the fact that the relationship between Yao and L-1 may well be illegal under U.S. law. After the Chinese government sent tanks into Tiananmen Square in 1989, Congress passed legislation barring U.S. companies from selling any products in China that have to do with "crime control or detection instruments or equipment." That means not only guns but everything from police batons and handcuffs to ink and powder for taking fingerprints, and software for storing them. Interestingly, one of the "detection instruments" that prompted the legislation was the surveillance camera. Beijing had installed several clunky cameras around Tiananmen Square, originally meant to monitor traffic flows. Those lenses were ultimately used to identify and arrest key pro-democracy dissidents.

"The intent of that act," a congressional staff member with considerable China experience tells me, "was to keep U.S. companies out of the business of helping the Chinese police conduct their business, which might ultimately end up as it did in 1989 in the suppression of human rights and democracy in China."

Pixel's application of L-1 facial-recognition software seems to fly in the face of the ban's intent. By his own admission, Yao is already getting visits from Chinese state spies anxious to use facial recognition to identify dissidents. And as part of the 10-million-faces test, Yao has been working intimately with Chinese national-security forces, syncing L-1's software to their vast database, a process that took a week of intensive work in Beijing. During that time, Yao says, he was on the phone "every day" with L-1, getting its help adapting the technology. "Because we are representing them," he says. "We took the test on their behalf."

In other words, this controversial U.S. "crime control" technology has already found its way into the hands of the Chinese police. Moreover, Yao's goal, stated to me several times, is to use the software to land lucrative contracts with police agencies to integrate facial recognition into the newly built system of omnipresent surveillance cameras and high-tech national ID cards. As part of any contract he gets, Yao says, he will "pay L-1 a certain percentage of our sales."

When I put the L-1 scenario to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security — the division charged with enforcing the post-Tiananmen export controls — a representative says that software kits are subject to the sanctions if "they are exported from the U.S. or are the foreign direct product of a U.S.-origin item." Based on both criteria, the software kit sold to Yao seems to fall within the ban.

When I ask Doni Fordyce at L-1 about the embargo, she tells me, "I don't know anything about that." Asked whether she would like to find out about it and call me back, she replies, "I really don't want to comment, so there is no comment." Then she hangs up.

You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in "extremely general" terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, "Stay tuned."

It is L-1's deep integration with multiple U.S. government agencies that makes its dealings in China so interesting: It isn't just L-1 that is potentially helping the Chinese police to nab political dissidents, it's U.S. taxpayers. The technology that Yao purchased for just a few thousand dollars is the result of Defense Department research grants and contracts going as far back as 1994, when a young academic named Joseph Atick (the research director Fordyce consulted on L-1's China dealings) taught a computer at Rockefeller University to recognize his face.

Yao, for his part, knows all about the U.S. export controls on police equipment to China. He tells me that L-1's electronic fingerprinting tools are "banned from entering China" due to U.S. concerns that they will be used to "catch the political criminals, you know, the dissidents, more easily." He thinks he and L-1 have found a legal loophole, however. While fingerprinting technology appears on the Commerce Department's list of banned products, there is no explicit mention of "face prints" — likely because the idea was still in the realm of science fiction when the Tiananmen Square massacre took place. As far as Yao is concerned, that omission means that L-1 can legally supply its facial-recognition software for use by the Chinese government.

Whatever the legality of L-1's participation in Chinese surveillance, it is clear that U.S. companies are determined to break into the homeland-security market in China, which represents their biggest growth potential since 9/11. According to the congressional staff member, American companies and their lobbyists are applying "enormous pressure to open the floodgates."

The crackdown in Tibet has set off a wave of righteous rallies and boycott calls. But it sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that much of China's powerful surveillance state is already being built with U.S. and European technology. In February 2006, a congressional subcommittee held a hearing on "The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?" Called on the carpet were Google (for building a special Chinese search engine that blocked sensitive material), Cisco (for supplying hardware for China's Great Firewall), Microsoft (for taking down political blogs at the behest of Beijing) and Yahoo (for complying with requests to hand over e-mail-account information that led to the arrest and imprisonment of a high-profile Chinese journalist, as well as a dissident who had criticized corrupt officials in online discussion groups). The issue came up again during the recent Tibet uproar when it was discovered that both MSN and Yahoo had briefly put up the mug shots of the "most wanted" Tibetan protesters on their Chinese news portals.

In all of these cases, U.S. multinationals have offered the same defense: Cooperating with draconian demands to turn in customers and censor material is, unfortunately, the price of doing business in China. Some, like Google, have argued that despite having to limit access to the Internet, they are contributing to an overall increase of freedom in China. It's a story that glosses over the much larger scandal of what is actually taking place: Western investors stampeding into the country, possibly in violation of the law, with the sole purpose of helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China. "Come help us spy!" the Chinese government has said to the world. And the world's leading technology companies are eagerly answering the call.

As The New York Times recently reported, aiding and abetting Beijing has become an investment boom for U.S. companies. Honeywell is working with Chinese police to "set up an elaborate computer monitoring system to analyze feeds from indoor and outdoor cameras in one of Beijing's most populated districts." General Electric is providing Beijing police with a security system that controls "thousands of video cameras simultaneously, and automatically alerts them to suspicious or fast-moving objects, like people running." IBM, meanwhile, is installing its "Smart Surveillance System" in the capital, another system for linking video cameras and scanning for trouble, while United Technologies is in Guangzhou, helping to customize a "2,000-camera network in a single large neighborhood, the first step toward a citywide network of 250,000 cameras to be installed before the Asian Games in 2010." By next year, the Chinese internal-security market will be worth an estimated $33 billion — around the same amount Congress has allocated for reconstructing Iraq.

"We're at the start of a massive boom in Chinese security spending," according to Graham Summers, a market analyst who publishes an investor newsletter in Baltimore. "And just as we need to be aware of how to profit from the growth in China's commodity consumption, we need to be aware of companies that will profit from 'security consumption.' . . . There's big money to be made."

While U.S. companies are eager to break into China's rapidly expanding market, every Chinese security firm I come across in the Pearl River Delta is hatching some kind of plan to break into the U.S. market. No one, however, is quite as eager as Aebell Electrical Technology, one of China's top 10 security companies. Aebell has a contract to help secure the Olympic swimming stadium in Beijing and has installed more than 10,000 cameras in and around Guangzhou. Business has been growing by 100 percent a year. When I meet the company's fidgety general manager, Zheng Sun Man, the first thing he tells me is "We are going public at the end of this year. On the Nasdaq." It also becomes clear why he has chosen to speak with a foreign reporter: "Help, help, help!" he begs me. "Help us promote our products!"

Zheng, an MBA from one of China's top schools, proudly shows me the business card of the New York investment bank that is handling Aebell's IPO, as well as a newly printed English-language brochure showing off the company's security cameras. Its pages are filled with American iconography, including businessmen exchanging wads of dollar bills and several photos of the New York skyline that prominently feature the World Trade Center. In the hall at company headquarters is a poster of two interlocking hearts: one depicting the American flag, the other the Aebell logo.

I ask Zheng whether China's surveillance boom has anything to do with the rise in strikes and demonstrations in recent years. Zheng's deputy, a 23-year veteran of the Chinese military wearing a black Mao suit, responds as if I had launched a direct attack on the Communist Party itself. "If you walk out of this building, you will be under surveillance in five to six different ways," he says, staring at me hard. He lets the implication of his words linger in the air like an unspoken threat. "If you are a law-abiding citizen, you shouldn't be afraid," he finally adds. "The criminals are the only ones who should be afraid."

One of the first people to sound the alarm on China's upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. In 2000, Walton was commissioned by the respected human-rights organization Rights & Democracy to investigate the ways in which Chinese security forces were harnessing the tools of the Information Age to curtail free speech and monitor political activists. The paper he produced was called "China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China." It exposed how big-name tech companies like Nortel and Cisco were helping the Chinese government to construct "a gigantic online database with an all-encompassing surveillance network — incorporating speech and face recognition, closed-circuit television, smart cards, credit records and Internet surveillance technologies."v When the paper was complete, Walton met with the institute's staff to strategize about how to release his explosive findings. "We thought this information was going to shock the world," he recalls. In the midst of their discussions, a colleague barged in and announced that a plane had hit the Twin Towers. The meeting continued, but they knew the context of their work had changed forever.

Walton's paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a "virtual, centralized grand database" that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. "It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for," Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: "Operation Noble Shield."

Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for "face prints," then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.

Such efforts have provided China's rulers with something even more valuable than surveillance technology from Western democracies: the ability to claim that they are just like us. Liu Zhengrong, a senior official dealing with China's Internet policy, has defended Golden Shield and other repressive measures by invoking the Patriot Act and the FBI's massive e-mail-mining operations. "It is clear that any country's legal authorities closely monitor the spread of illegal information," he said. "We have noted that the U.S. is doing a good job on this front." Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China Information Security Technology, credits America for giving him the idea to sell biometric IDs and other surveillance tools to the Chinese police. "Bush helped me get my vision," he has said. Similarly, when challenged on the fact that dome cameras are appearing three to a block in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, Chinese companies respond that their model is not the East German Stasi but modern-day London.

Human-rights activists are quick to point out that while the tools are the same, the political contexts are radically different. China has a government that uses its high-tech web to imprison and torture peaceful protesters, Tibetan monks and independent-minded journalists. Yet even here, the lines are getting awfully blurry. The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. And Sharon Hom, executive director of the advocacy group Human Rights in China, says that when she talks about China's horrific human-rights record at international gatherings, "There are two words that I hear in response again and again: Guantánamo Bay."

The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly — which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion — more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found — which, in the Big Brother business, means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.

In Shenzhen one night, I have dinner with a U.S. business consultant named Stephen Herrington. Before he started lecturing at Chinese business schools, teaching students concepts like brand management, Herrington was a military-intelligence officer, ascending to the rank of lieutenant colonel. What he is seeing in the Pearl River Delta, he tells me, is scaring the hell out of him — and not for what it means to China.

"I can guarantee you that there are people in the Bush administration who are studying the use of surveillance technologies being developed here and have at least skeletal plans to implement them at home," he says. "We can already see it in New York with CCTV cameras. Once you have the cameras in place, you have the infrastructure for a powerful tracking system. I'm worried about what this will mean if the U.S. government goes totalitarian and starts employing these technologies more than they are already. I'm worried about the threat this poses to American democracy."

Herrington pauses. "George W. Bush," he adds, "would do what they are doing here in a heartbeat if he could."

China-bashing never fails to soothe the Western conscience — here is a large and powerful country that, when it comes to human rights and democracy, is so much worse than Bush's America. But during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).

What is most disconcerting about China's surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain — only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn't just check my passport but takes a scan of it.

"Are you making a copy?" I ask.

"No, no," he responds helpfully. "We're just sending a copy to the police."

Up in my room, the Website that pops up on my laptop looks like every other Net portal at a hotel — only it won't let me access human-rights and labor Websites that I know are working fine. The TV gets CNN International — only with strange edits and obviously censored blackouts. My cellphone picks up a strong signal for the China Mobile network. A few months earlier, in Davos, Switzerland, the CEO of China Mobile bragged to a crowd of communications executives that "we not only know who you are, we also know where you are." Asked about customer privacy, he replied that his company only gives "this kind of data to government authorities" — pretty much the same answer I got from the clerk at the front desk.

When I leave China, I feel a powerful relief: I have escaped. I am home safe. But the feeling starts to fade as soon as I get to the customs line at JFK, watching hundreds of visitors line up to have their pictures taken and fingers scanned. In the terminal, someone hands me a brochure for "Fly Clear." All I need to do is have my fingerprints and irises scanned, and I can get a Clear card with a biometric chip that will let me sail through security. Later, I look it up: The company providing the technology is L-1.