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The FBI: The
Silent Terror of the Fourth Reich
By John W.
Whitehead
“After five
years of Hitler’s dictatorship, the
Nazi police had won
the FBI’s seal of approval.”— Historian Robert
Gellately
“Adolf
Hitler is alive and well in the United States,
and he is fast rising to power.”—Paul Craig Roberts,
former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, on the
danger posed by the FBI to our civil liberties
February 09/10,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Lately, there’s been a lot of rhetoric comparing
Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. The concern is that a
Nazi-type regime may be rising in America.
That process,
however, began a long time ago.
In fact,
following the second World War, the U.S. government
recruited Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols,
embraced his mindset about law and order, implemented
his tactics in incremental steps, and began to lay the
foundations for the rise of the Fourth Reich.
Sounds
far-fetched? Read on. It’s all documented.
As historian
Robert Gellately
recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so
admired for its efficiency and order by the
world powers of the day that J. Edgar Hoover,
then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his
right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in
January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret
police—the Gestapo.
The FBI was so
impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the
New York Times, in the decades after World War
II, the FBI, along with other government agencies,
aggressively
recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some
of Hitler’s highest henchmen.
All told,
thousands of Nazi collaborators—including
the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were
given secret visas and brought to America by way of
Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as
spies and informants, and then camouflaged to ensure
that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s
holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while,
thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas
to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten
national security.
Adding further
insult to injury,
American taxpayers have been paying to keep these
ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever
since. And in true Gestapo fashion,
anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s
illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon,
intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national
security.
As if the
government’s
covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World
War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government
agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have fully
embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics,
and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.
Indeed, with
every passing day, the United States government borrows
yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook:
Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government
agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation.
Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption.
Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.
These are not
tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule
of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme.
Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes,
where the only law that counts comes in the form of
heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler
who uses a secret police to control the populace.
That danger is
now posed by the FBI, whose laundry list of crimes
against the American people includes surveillance,
disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation
tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental
overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling
criminal activity, and damaging private property, and
that’s just based on what we know.
Whether the FBI
is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues
and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain
access to Americans’ phone records; using
intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are
critical of the government;
recruiting high school students to spy on and report
fellow students who show signs of being future
terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to
plot acts of terror and then
entrapping them, the overall impression of the
nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed
thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work
of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential
dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge
the status quo.
Whatever
minimal restrictions initially kept the FBI’s
surveillance activities within the bounds of the law
have all but disappeared post-9/11. Since then, the FBI
has been transformed into a mammoth federal policing and
surveillance agency that largely operates as a power
unto itself, beyond the reach of established laws, court
rulings and legislative mandates.
Consider the
FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain,
interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police and
generally act as a law unto themselves—much
like their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo—and then try to
convince yourself that the United States is still a
constitutional republic.
Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast
investigatory powers, and
vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of
the state.
Today, the FBI
employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more
than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S.,
as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and
more than 50 international offices. In addition to their
“data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of
fingerprints from across the United States and
elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of
“profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal
residents who are not accused of any crime.
What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously
to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.”
The FBI’s burgeoning databases on Americans are not only
being added to and used by local police agencies, but
are also being made available to employers for
real-time background checks.
All of this is
made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources
(its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was
$8.3 billion), the government’s vast arsenal of
technology, the interconnectedness of government
intelligence agencies, and information sharing through
fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies
spread throughout the country that constantly monitor
communications (including those of American citizens),
everything from internet activity and web searches to
text messages, phone calls and emails.
Much like the
Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls,
FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s
most personal information.
Working through
the U.S. Post Office, the
FBI has access to every piece of mail that passes
through the postal system: more than 160 billion
pieces are scanned and recorded annually. Moreover, the
agency’s
National Security Letters, one of the many illicit
powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI
to secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and
other businesses provide them with customer information
and not disclose those demands to the customer. An
internal audit of the agency found that the FBI practice
of issuing tens of thousands of NSLs every year for
sensitive information such as phone and financial
records, often in non-emergency cases, is riddled with
widespread
constitutional violations.
Much
like the Gestapo’s sophisticated surveillance programs,
the FBI’s spying capabilities can delve into Americans’
most intimate details (and allow local police to do so,
as well).
In addition to
technology (which is shared with police agencies) that
allows them to listen in on phone calls, read emails and
text messages, and monitor web activities, the FBI’s
surveillance boasts an
invasive collection of spy tools ranging from
Stingray devices that can track the location of cell
phones to Triggerfish devices which allow agents to
eavesdrop on phone calls. In one case, the FBI actually
managed to
remotely reprogram a “suspect’s” wireless internet card
so that it would send “real-time cell-site location data
to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI.” Law
enforcement agencies are also using
social media tracking software to monitor Facebook,
Twitter and Instagram posts. Moreover, secret FBI rules
also
allow agents to spy on journalists without
significant judicial oversight.
Much like the Gestapo’s ability to profile based on race
and religion, and its assumption of
guilt by association,
the FBI’s approach to pre-crime allows it to profile
Americans based on a broad range of characteristics
including race and religion.
The agency’s
biometric database has grown to massive proportions,
the largest in the world, encompassing everything from
fingerprints, palm, face and iris scans to
DNA, and is being
increasingly shared between federal, state and local law
enforcement agencies in an effort to target
potential criminals long before they ever commit a
crime. This is what’s known as pre-crime. Yet it’s not
just your actions that will get you in trouble. In many
cases, it’s also
who you know—even minimally—and where your
sympathies lie that could land you on a government watch
list. Moreover, as the Intercept
reports, despite anti-profiling prohibitions, the
bureau “claims considerable latitude to use race,
ethnicity, nationality, and religion in deciding which
people and communities to investigate.”
Much
like the Gestapo’s power to render anyone an enemy of
the state, the FBI has the power to label anyone a
domestic terrorist.
As part of the
government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the
nation’s de facto secret police force has begun using
the terms “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist”
interchangeably. Moreover, the government continues
to add to its growing list of characteristics that can
be used to identify an individual (especially anyone who
disagrees with the government) as a potential
domestic terrorist. For instance, you might be a
domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its
network of snitches) if you:
-
express libertarian philosophies
(statements, bumper stickers)
- exhibit
Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club
membership)
- read
survivalist literature, including apocalyptic
fictional books
- show signs
of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand
tools, medical supplies)
- fear an
economic collapse
- buy gold
and barter items
-
subscribe to religious views
concerning the book of Revelation
- voice
fears about Big Brother or big government
-
expound about constitutional rights
and civil liberties
- believe in
a New World Order conspiracy
Much
like the Gestapo infiltrated communities in order to spy
on the German citizenry, the FBI routinely infiltrates
political and religious groups, as well as businesses.
As Cora Currier
writes for the Intercept: “Using loopholes
it has kept secret for years, the FBI can in certain
circumstances bypass its own rules in order to send
undercover agents or informants into political and
religious organizations, as well as schools, clubs, and
businesses...” The FBI has even been
paying Geek Squad technicians at Best Buy to spy on
customers’ computers without a warrant.
Just as
the Gestapo united and militarized Germany’s police
forces into a national police force, America’s police
forces have largely been federalized and turned into a
national police force.
In addition to
government programs that provide the nation’s police
forces with military equipment and training, the
FBI also operates a National Academy that trains
thousands of police chiefs every year and indoctrinates
them into an agency mindset that advocates the use of
surveillance technology and information sharing between
local, state, federal, and international agencies.
Just as the
Gestapo’s secret files
on political leaders were used to intimidate and coerce,
the FBI’s files on anyone suspected of “anti-government”
sentiment have been similarly abused.
As countless
documents make clear, the FBI has no qualms about using
its extensive powers in order to blackmail politicians,
spy on celebrities and
high-ranking government officials, and
intimidate and attempt to discredit dissidents of
all stripes. For example, not only did the FBI follow
Martin Luther King Jr. and bug his phones and hotel
rooms, but agents also sent him anonymous letters
urging him to commit suicide and pressured a
Massachusetts college into dropping King as its
commencement speaker.
Just as
the Gestapo carried out entrapment operations, the FBI
has become a master in the art of entrapment.
In the wake of
the 9/11 terrorist attacks the FBI has not only targeted
vulnerable individuals but has also lured or
blackmailed them into fake terror plots while
actually equipping them with the organization, money,
weapons and motivation to carry out the
plots—entrapment—and then jailing or deporting them for
their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI
characterizes as “forward
leaning—preventative—prosecutions.” In addition to
creating certain crimes in order to then “solve” them,
the
FBI also gives certain informants permission to break
the law, “including everything from buying and
selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials
and plotting robberies,” in exchange for their
cooperation on other fronts. USA Today
estimates that
agents have authorized criminals to engage in as many as
15 crimes a day. Some of these
informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one
particularly unsavory fellow, later arrested for
attempting to run over a police officer, was actually
paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an
entrapment scheme.
When and if a
true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not
only track the rise of the American police state but it
will also chart the decline of freedom in America, in
much the same way that the empowerment of Germany’s
secret police tracked with the rise of the Nazi regime.
How did the
Gestapo become the terror of the Third Reich?
It did so by
creating a sophisticated surveillance and law
enforcement system that relied for its success on the
cooperation of the military, the police, the
intelligence community, neighborhood watchdogs,
government workers for the post office and railroads,
ordinary civil servants, and a nation of snitches
inclined to report “rumors,
deviant behavior, or even just loose talk.”
In other words,
ordinary citizens working with government agents helped
create the monster that became Nazi Germany. Writing for
the New York Times, Barry Ewen paints a
particularly chilling portrait of how
an entire nation becomes complicit in its own downfall
by looking the other way:
In what may
be his most provocative statement, [author Eric A.]
Johnson says that
‘‘most Germans may not even have realized until very
late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a
vile dictatorship.’’ This is not to say that
they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson
demonstrates that millions of Germans must have
known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes,
‘‘a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the
regime and the citizenry.’’ The government looked
the other way when petty crimes were being
committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way
when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they
abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th
century not through active collaboration but through
passivity, denial and indifference.
Much like the
German people, “we the people” have become passive,
polarized, gullible, easily manipulated, and lacking in
critical thinking skills. Distracted by entertainment
spectacles, politics and screen devices, we too are
complicit, silent partners in creating a police state
similar to the terror practiced by former regimes.
Can the Fourth
Reich happen here?
As I point out
in my book
Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
it’s already happening right under our noses.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is
founder and president of The
Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield
America: The War on the American People (SelectBooks,
2015) is available online at www.amazon.com. Whitehead
can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org.
The views
expressed in this article are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of
Information Clearing House. |
