: Is Bush Administration Creating A Tyrannical State?

In the twentieth century, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin set historical standards for a police state by turning citizen informants against their neighbors, then removing those denounced to secret concentration camps. Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's KGB, respectively, terrorized their populations into meek submission. Personal freedom and liberty lost all meaning in those police states. But now George W. Bush is poised to compete with them as he and his cabinet gear up to create for the United States unprecedented American systems of citizen informers and, for all intents and purposes, concentration camps, under the rubric of national security.

The Bush administration recently charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to put in place by January 2003 sprawling temporary cities to handle millions of displaced persons. FEMA is the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness. But now it has been ordered to undertake a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S., reported in a July 2002 story by NewsMax. This is to get ready for nuclear, biological and chemical attacks against U.S. cities, including the possibility of multiple attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

Vendors, contractors and consultants have already notified by FEMA which is preparing to handle the logistics of aiding millions of displaced Americans who are expected to flee from urban areas that may be attacked by terrorist weapons of mass destruction. The Agency is planning to create emergency, makeshift cities that can house hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Americans fleeing urban homes when their cities are attacked. Ominously, FEMA was given a deadline of about six months to have the major American cities ready to go. The deadline is believed related to making the U.S. prepared for counterattacks when Bush orders a U.S. invasion of Iraq sometime next year.

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is also poised to recruit millions of United States citizens as homeland informants under the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS). Plans for the program would use at least 4 per cent of the American population for reporting "suspicious activity." This means, the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the infamous Stasi secret police did in the former East Germany.

Informant systems have tended to be tools of non-democratic states. According to a report by Harvard University's Project on Justice in 1992, the accuracy of informant reports is poor. Often, informants stretch the truth while others simply fabricate their reports. Indeed, denouncing one's neighbor more often was used to settle old personal scores rather than to help one's country.

With the passage earlier this year of Bush's Patriot Act, there is already potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens, as civil liberties groups have warned us already. The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted. Similarly, TIPS is being launched as part of the so-called war against terrorism, like the Patriot Act was, as a Department of Justice project under Attorney General John Ashcroft.