Seven Steps To A Homeland Security Campus

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/story/73504

Seven Steps to a Homeland Security Campus
By Michael Gould-Wartofsky, The Nation and TomDispatch.com. Posted January 11, 2008.

Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Blackwater and other private security contractors... College campuses join the Homeland Security state.

In November 2006, the Taser infamously broke into the news on campus when a student at the University of Florida, questioning Senator John Kerry harshly, was dragged off, Tased, and subdued by campus police. His plea, "Don't Tase me, Bro!," is now the stuff of bumper stickers, T-shirts, and cell phone ring tones. Thanks largely to him and the publicity the incident got, the New Oxford Dictionary made "Tase" one of its 2007 words of the year, the Yale Book of Quotations put it at the top of its yearly list of most memorable quotes, and the rest of us got a hint that something new might be happening in America's "ivory towers."

As Michael Gould-Wartofsky indicates below, that incident was just the tip of an enormous homeland-security presence on campus. Gould-Wartofsky's remarkable report -- a piece that the Nation Magazine and Tomdispatch.com are sharing -- offers real news about just how deeply the new homeland security state is settling into every aspect of our world. -- Tom Engelhardt, editor of TomDispatch

Repress U

How to Build a Homeland Security Campus in Seven Steps

By Michael Gould-Wartofsky

Free speech zones. Taser guns. Hidden cameras. Data mining. A new security curriculum. Private security contractors... Welcome to the new homeland security campus

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" -- as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name -- have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Building a homeland-security campus and bringing the university to heel is a seven-step mission:

1. Target dissidents: As the warfare state has triggered dissent, the campus has increasingly become a target gallery -- with student protesters in the crosshairs. The government's number one target? Peace and justice organizations.

From 2003 to 2007, an unknown number of them made it into the Pentagon's "Threat and Local Observation Notice" system (TALON), a secretive domestic spying program ostensibly designed to track direct "potential terrorist threats" to the Department of Defense itself. Last year, via Freedom of Information Act requests, the ACLU uncovered at least 186 specific TALON reports on "anti-military protests" in the U.S. -- some listed as "credible threats" -- from student groups at the University of California-Santa Cruz, State University of New York, Georgia State University, and New Mexico State University, among other campuses.

At more than a dozen universities and colleges, police officers now double as full-time FBI agents and, according to the Campus Law Enforcement Journal, serve on many of the nation's 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These dual-purpose officer-agents have knocked on student activists' doors from North Carolina State to the University of Colorado and, in one case, interrogated an Iraqi-born professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst about his antiwar views.

MORE

[midnight]

1. They have thought about everything.

Let's just have the second investigation into 9-11, and I bet we find out we don't need all this policing.

[Richard Steele]

2. K&R

[flordehinojos]

3. and bush has the chutzpah to crying half way around the world about AUSCHWITZ when he has created

our very own AUSCHWITZ mentality right here in our nation, right now? !!! it really takes a bush boy to pull the wool over the village idiots!

[Sadie4629]

5. This might be an unpopular sentiment

but I think you seriously diminish the horrors of the Holocaust when you compare security measures here to Auschwitz. Mengele, "final solution," etc. There is no comparison. None.

[flordehinojos]

6. no. i am not diminishing the horrors of the holocaust by comparing bush's horrors here in the u.s.

to auschwitz. i know we have no gas chambers, here. yet. a few years ago, they were planning to build something of the sort out in the guantánamo gulag ... where they torture and water board people... i know we have no six million people in holding chambers, that we know of ... but because we want clean hands, we have created prisons/torture chambers/and gulags around the world, where we send the undesirables ... those whom we accuse of being terrorists at whim, without proof, and without right to defense, right to know what they are being accused of, and without right to stand trial... Auschwitz didn't just start one day. It slowly got built up ... the ideology behind it ... bush's ideology about national security is pretty much consistent with that ... and in that we are running a parallel line with auschwitz--like it, or not.

[emanymton]

4. Orwell's "1984" Is Their Training Manual.

.
_NOTHING_ is overlooked. Exploit every weakness to their advantage.
.

[F_L_I_P_S_I_D_E]

7. Wartofsky's analysis is hysterical at best

"Repress U" is entertaining, but a work of an overactive imagination by someone who was recently kicked out of the Menudo that is Ivy League protesting. Mike leaves a lot out of his article, and I have addressed the glaring omissions here:

http://www.contextflexed.com/storywartofskygraduates.html