Can You Say 'Stasi'?

Welcome, boys and girls. It's a lovely day in the Neighborhood, or, as us grown-ups call it, police state.

Today we're going to learn all about that nice Mr. Negroponte, and how, with his friends in Congress, he's working very, very hard to stop that nasty Mr. McLeaky.

If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation's spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses. ...

At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is "just clarifying the authority" of agency security officers "to arrest individuals."

It would apparently overrule a written opinion by the Maryland attorney general's office, which stated that the NSA's police powers are limited to the agency's grounds and to streets within a 500-foot perimeter of its Fort Meade campus.

The June 2005 opinion concluded that, under Maryland law, NSA officers "may make a citizen's arrest" and would have no immunity from liability for their actions if they are outside their jurisdiction. It notes that NSA officers can only carry firearms within that jurisdiction. The bill would allow them to carry guns.

Critics of the new arrest provision said it would create the potential for abuses.

Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a "worrisome" expansion of power.

"That's why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials," he said. "I don't know that this needs to be an intelligence officer's function. I wouldn't think it should be."

Aftergood [a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists] termed the proposal "shocking" and said "it raises the specter of a secret police force that is unaccountable and operates outside of the normal law enforcement parameters."

You see, boys and girls, for some reason the FBI, which managed to get us through the Cold War and WWII, with all those Soviet and Nazi spies trying to steal state secrets, isn't good enough anymore. The leaking has gotten so bad that we need to give our secretive intelligence services domestic police powers! Oh, my, that must be very bad indeed. But don't be frightened; Mr. Negroponte says they're just "clarifying" their authority.

Don't freak out, just because Mr. Negroponte, in a past job, pretty much lied to Congress about the activities of Central American death squads.

Substantial evidence subsequently emerged to support the contention that Negroponte was aware that serious violations of human rights were carried out by the Honduran government, with the support of the CIA, if perhaps not with its direct approval. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, on September 14, 2001, as reported in the Congressional Record, aired his suspicions on the occasion of Negroponte's nomination to the position of UN ambassador:

Based upon the Committee's review of State Department and CIA documents, it would seem that Ambassador Negroponte knew far more about government perpetrated human rights abuses than he chose to share with the committee in 1989 or in Embassy contributions at the time to annual State Department Human Rights reports.

I'm sure he's learned his lesson, and would never use his very own police forces to do anything untoward.

Anything untoward, like, say, spiriting someone off to an undisclosed CIA prison in a foreign country for interrogation. You know, the kind of thing that was disclosed by one of the leaks that has gotten Mr. Negroponte and his Congressional buddies so upset.

And no wonder! Imagine the devastating effect it has had for the terrorists to find out that we are kidnapping suspects and torturing them, and that we are eavesdropping on telephone calls! I mean, of course they knew that already, but if it weren't for those leaks, they might have forgotten it! With such devastating blows to our ability to fight, how can we survive?

Now, some of you may have been asking, if that nice Mr. Negroponte and his boss the very nice Mr. Bush are so worried about leaks, why do they keep promoting policies and activities that make good, law-abiding, career intelligence people "go rogue"? Maybe, you might be thinking, if the administration wasn't doing so many things that seem so clearly in violation of every tradition of our nation, and counter-productive to boot, maybe there wouldn't be so many leaks? (I mean, it's not like we think these people are spilling the beans for cash, or because they believe in jihad, right?)

But children, this is why we let grown-ups who understand these things run our government. Because they can understand why the answer is to create secret police. Instead of governing in a way that inspires career intelligence officers, and military generals, and all the rest to keep their mouths shut, they'll just use the Staatssicherheitsdienst.