The Sovietization of America

Ex-Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA), quoted by Steven Clemons:

Fire chiefs in the Big Apple, for example, already have been granted federal security clearances to further this "integration" of firefighters into the homeland security. According to published accounts of such training, firefighters are being trained to watch for "hostile" or "uncooperative" individuals, or those "expressing discontent" with our government. They are also trained to watch for and report on things that "seem out of place" in a home or business such as firearms and video recording equipment. Rooms with "little or no furniture" fall within the reportable suspicious activity.

The New York Times, via dkos

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

Other telecomm providers, reportedly have had no such qualms.


David Habbakuk, via turcopolier:

I find myself here being reminded of the conclusion of the famous Long Telegram which the figure generally regarded as the architect of 'containment', George Kennan, sent from Moscow on 22 February 1946. As his final thought, Kennan stressed that 'we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society.' The 'greatest danger' that could befall the United States in coping with the problem of Soviet communism, he wrote, is that ' we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.' As regards the neoconservatives at least, his warning seems to have been to the point.

As a spoiled British child of the post-war Pax Americana, what staggers me about so many of the neocons is their patently inability to grasp that American success in the Cold War was in very substantial measure due quite precisely to the fact that your country did not behave as the Soviets did. Why then this sudden enthusiasm for Soviet-style thuggery? Allies are 'to be commanded not consulted' -- precisely as in the Warsaw Pact. War and violence the 'birthpangs of a new Middle East' -- sounds very Leninist, doesn't it? This does not mean that military power was unimportant to the outcome of the Cold War -- far from it. But it seems to quite extraordinary that the neoconservatives simply cannot understand that the moral authority of the United States was crucial to the success of the post-war Pax Americana, and also to the retreat and collapse of Soviet Communism.