The American people are now the enemy of the state – Bruce Gagnon
"They are doing everything possible to find new ways to restrict our freedoms, to spy on us, surveil us, to monitor us, to intercept our communications."
In the US, the corporate military industrial complex has completely taken over the Government. After the events of 9\11 the US Constitution has been completely shredded, leaving the American population the most surveilled, subjugated and restricted in the world. What was once considered the land of the free has now become the land of the surveilled, with average Americans afraid to do anything to protest a government which is out of control and looking after its own interests and not those of the people. Despite the almost complete and total surveillance state that has been implemented in the US, defense contractors, firms and governments continue to seek billions of dollars to develop even more means to surveil and control the populace, the classifying of peace activists and anyone who opposes the paradigm as terrorists is something the US populace has grown accustomed to. The Voice of Russia's John Robles spoke to long-time peace activist Bruce Gagnon on these issues and much more.
Hello! This is John Robles, you are listening to an interview with Bruce Gagnon the coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
Robles: Hello Bruce! How are you?
Gagnon: I’m fine!
Robles: Can you tell our listeners about the Maine Drone Peace Walk? What is that all about?
Gagnon: It is a nine-day peace walk that we are going to start up in the very northern part of Maine where our Government has announced that they are trying to put up a weaponized drone test center.
So, we are concerned about the domestic surveillance use of drones and, at the same time, we are obviously very concerned about the US military and the CIA using drones in Central Asia and on the African continent where they are killing increasingly large numbers of civilians.
We are really reacting to President Obama and Congress’ announcement that 30,000 drones will be flying around the US doing surveillance of the American people in the coming years.
In fact, 37 states have applied to be one of six drone test centers across the country and more than 500 drone manufacturing corporations are now bidding to be recipients of Pentagon’s funds.
Last spring here in Maine we worked with the ACLU (the American Civil Liberties Union) to try to get a bill passed in our state legislature that would require police to have warrants before they could spy on anyone with drones.
And the Attorney General of Maine, a Democrat, tried to kill the bill and she began talking about drones being “an economic driver here in Maine”. And it was then that we learned that up in the Aroostook County, one of the northern most counties in the state, that is where they wanted to have a weaponized drone test center.
The bill eventually did pass the state legislature, primarily because there was a sort of a conjunction of interests between Democrats and Republicans. There are a lot of Republicans now, that is grassroots Republicans, that are very concerned as well about drone surveillance. So, they pressured their party leaders and the bill passed. But the Attorney General was able to get an amendment to the bill which had an exemption for weaponized drone testing up in the northern part of the state, something we weren’t obviously very happy about.
But then the Governor, a Republican Tea Party conservative Governor vetoed the bill anyway. So, in the end nothing passed. And so, it was out of that that we in the Maine Veterans for Peace group that I belong to, as well as at the Bring our War Dollars Home Campaign here in Maine, which I co-coordinate, we decided to organize this walk through the significant parts of the state in order to really help the public better understand this drone issue and how our privacy is really in danger, as well as how the militarization and the weaponization of these drones, both in this country and around the world, would be a growing problem.
Robles: Is the facility still going to be built there or is it cancelled?
Gagnon: The bill that the Governor vetoed was the surveillance warrant bill, and they had attached to it, a provison allowing for a weaponized drone test center. But it has not yet been established.
Right now, actually, they don’t want to talk about it. The media doesn’t cover it, nobody in the Government is talking much about it, but we were lucky that we learned about it during those hearings last spring.
So, right now everything is sort of back to square one and we felt that it would be important to just literally walk across the state. And we are going to have a good number of people joining us to really bring this issue to the public.
Robles: In the US, they normally have to have a warrant to spy on someone if they tap the phone lines or if they run surveillance on someone, right? So, why are drones different?
Gagnon: You know, they are saying that drones are no different from helicopters. They use helicopters to chase suspects and identify suspects, and they don’t necessarily need a warrant for that. But they really fear the warrant requirements across the country.
There is a lot of organization going on, demanding that police be made to use warrants. But increasingly we’ve learned in these NSA disclosures by Edward Snowden, he’s helped us all learn that a lot of this spying is going on without warrants, whether it is phone, fax, email communications they are intercepting all those communications and they don’t have a warrant for any of that, really.
So, I think they are violating all of our constitutional rights. Our Constitution is being shredded now daily in this country. It started during the Bush administration and it’s accelerated under the Obama administration. So, it is really important for activists like us, who live and breathe because, supposedly, we have rights of assembly and free speech and other such things.
So, we are literally fighting for our rights in this country right now. And getting out on the street and walking across our state, it will help the public be more aware of this issue because the corporate dominated media isn’t really covering it much anymore either. So, we literally have to get out on the street in order to bring it to the people.
Robles: I think the US Constitution, after 9-11 was pushed to the side. One quick point here, if you could comment on it: now, what you were talking about, helicopters and suspects, that would be something like a hot pursuit situation, right, where of course they have a cause, but I think that's a false reasoning to implement these drones, that they will be used for that, I think that’s pretty obvious, and then, them trying to tag this into another bill, is like what they do with so many of the other things that they are trying to get away with, by attaching things to defense bills and stuff. Can you comment on that, on the fact that they are trying to sneak this in on the people and what you are doing to fight that?
Gagnon: It is becoming more and more prevalent in our world here today in the US, that they are doing everything possible to find new ways to restrict our freedoms, to spy on us, surveil us, to monitor us, to intercept our communications. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of the public has began to feel overwhelmed by it and sort of depressed by it and feeling like there isn’t anything we can do about it and that we are just going to have to get used to it.
You often hear people say: “Well, as long as you don’t do anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” But of course, what they don’t understand is that when you get politically active, because you don’t like our wars or you don’t appreciate the collapse of the economy and the way that the rich are getting richer, and the poor are increasingly getting poorer, and the Government is cutting back on social spending, so, when you move into opposing things, you start being identified as… frankly, some government agencies are now calling people like us terrorists. They are using the word “terrorist” to describe nonviolent activists who are out in the streets, who are organizing the public on all these kinds of issues.
We are frequently hearing the word “terrorist” used as a justification for this kind of monitoring that is happening to us in anincreasing manner. So, they are always trying to sneak in new ways, new technologies in order to carry out this corporate agenda of cracking down on our democracy in this country.
Robles: They’ve been labeling any independent country or anyone who is not under their control “terrorists” since 9-11. I also read, if you could comment on this, you were mentioning being labeled enemies of the state, recently there was some FEMA legislation that was passed that would allow them to incarcerate massive amounts of Americans if there was something like a large uprising against US war policies. Are you familiar with that?
Gagnon: For some years now there has been legislation and administrative decrees made by both the Bush Administration and even the Obama Administration essentially giving the Government unlimited powers to suspend the Constitution in any time of national emergency that is very broadly defined and could become a justification at any time. So, yes indeed, they now have these powers in this country and we increasingly are worried about it, because what we also see is the militarization of the local police forces.
Local police forces are almost becoming indistinguishable from the US military and you have a growing number of local policemen who have been either through the National Guard or through the regular military. They’ve been deployed in war zones and they often come back feeling that they have the freedom and latitude to treat the American citizens the way they’ve been treating people in the war zone, neither of which is acceptable. But they come back and increasingly we are seeing daily, we see stories of police overreacting, shooting people, killing people, beating people all over the country and not just people of color anymore, they are reaching now into white communities, middle class communities.
So, it is just becoming a crescendo of police brutality across the country, as they are trained in these ways of military tactics and everything else and they are starting to act like that. So, there is a real growing anger across the country about how local police are becoming militarized. And people clearly understand that this is being pointed to us, directly at us, that the American people have now become the enemy of this corporate state that intends to clamp down on us.
And so, these drones then become just another tool, a very significant tool to give them the capability to not only identify one person, but with this technology that they now have, via satellites they are able to literally see and monitor an entire city all at one time. They’ve used this in Afghanistan, Iraq and now they are bringing those technologies back to the US and they are going to use them against us.
You were listening to part one of an interview with Bruce Gagnon – the coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. Please check our website in the near future for the rest of this interview.
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Article published here: Voice of Russia. Image: KeyWiki. Biography
URL: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/index.php/2013/09/27/the-american-people-are-now
