Bigger Brother / The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims
Stove, Robert J. & Bovard, James
Bigger Brother Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil by James Bovard (Palgrave-Macmillan, 440 pages, $26.95) The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and...
...More money and more power are the ever-present solutions for tragedy, when in fact more responsibility, better prioritization of existing powers, and better use of existing resources, are needed...
...Bovard hits us over the head with a two by four, in an effort to awaken us to the dangers we face if we don't demand that government restrain itself...
...Some may wince at his frankness, or disagree with some of his positions, but one Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr is a contributing editor of The American Spectator...
...He chronicles in all these earlier events a series of missteps: bad intelligence, missed clues, ignored warnings, inadequate security, and above all, an unwillingness to find or assign blame and take true corrective measures...
...If we allow, for example, the government to continue establishing precedents such that it may gather evidence on American citizens with no probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion that they have committed a crime, which is precisely what the government is doing through various provisions of the PATRIOT Act and other governmentdata-mining programs, then very shortly we will find it is impossible to recover the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW cannot lay down this book without feeling some discomfort, and without at least understanding why the USA PATRIOT Act and related government power grabs have brought right and left together in an unprecedented coalition to bring some sense of balance to fighting the terrorist threat...
...Bovard pulls no punches...
...This left us tragically vulnerable to terrorist attacks...
...The road map painted by Bovard is not a pretty picture, but it is a true depiction of where we are, how we got where we are, and why we must alter our course...
...The response domestically by the Bush administration to the terror attacks has, unfortunately, risen to the level of knee-jerk over-reaction and obfuscation...
...There's no way of getting around this cold, hard fact...
...Robert Stove's The Unsleeping Eye chronicles the rise and fall of secret police organizations and movements from Elizabethan England through twentieth-century Germany, the Soviet Union, and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI...
...The government must have the tools it needs to do so...
...The point rather is to recognize that unquestioning deference to expanded government power as the only way to defeat acts of terrorism will result in less freedom for us, and a bigger nastier government...
...Bigger Brother Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil by James Bovard (Palgrave-Macmillan, 440 pages, $26.95) The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims by Robert J. Stove (Encounter Books, 367 pages, $25.95) Reviewed by Bob Barr AKEN TOGETHER, THESE BOOKS make us thank T our lucky stars we are Americans...
...James Bovard forces the reader of Terrorism and Tyranny to take a long, hard look at how the current war against terror threatens freedoms heretofore accepted as fundamental to the functioning of our government and our society...
...Rather than start his discussion of how the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, now frames our current war on terror, he argues that how the United States dealt with pre-9/11 acts of terrorism (Beirut in 1983...
...Let us not make the same error now and here in this "the last, best hope of mankind...
...c,, The response domestically by the Bush administration to the terror attacks has, unfortunately, risen to the level of kneejerk overreaction and obfuscation...
...Just as bureaucratic jealousies, skewed priorities, and blunders allowed a Joseph Fouche to terrorize the French population under Napoleon, or over-reliance on techniques of surveillance to render the KGB nearly omnipotent, so too, in twenty-first century America, can these same blind spots do irreparable harm to the fabric of our freedom...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61...
...the two assets that, when all else fails, are always thrown up to Congress as deficiencies for which Congress is to blame...
...As Bovard tells it, with well foot-noted facts, this path is fraught with dangers...
...Failure of people in other times and other cultures to learn the lessons of ceding power to government caused deeply tragic consequences for them...
...We must fight terrorists...
...In so doing, especially in detailing the horrors of secret police organizations in other lands in other times, they invite the reader, on completing the book, to offer a sigh of relief that he was born or naturalized as an American, and that even with the worst abuses of Hoover's FBI and other aberrations, America has never allowed the development of systematic fear and physical abuse to become a part of the manner in which our government operates...
...We have witnessed a two-year-long parade of administration spokespersons admitting no past errors or mistakes, and calling instead for more and more power and money...
...No critic of the PATRIOT Act would argue that if corrections are not made, we will suddenly find ourselves ensnared in the nightmare world of Gestapo-controlled Germany or KGB-run Russia...
...But We the People must not allow it to do so in a way that dismantles the very liberties that have always defined us...
...Indeed, more often than not, those responsible for bad decisions, which allowed successful terrorist attacks, were never punished...
...Robert Stove's thoroughly entertaining historical compendium of secret police organizations in various times and countries reminds us of how far down the road to depravity human nature run amok can take even otherwise civilized societies, if small bands of conscious-less individuals are allowed uncontrolled access to the levers of government power...
...ES, THE STAKES ARE THAT HIGH...
...And yet they remind us we have much work to do right now—to help ensure we stay Americans in the same sense we have in decades past...
...the previous World Trade Center bombing, the USS Cole) helped create the climate in which the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks could succeed...
Vol. 37 • March 2004 • No. 2
