"Has the United States become a police state?"

That's the stark question I was asked at the beginning of a recent radio interview. Framing the current political climate in these terms is quite blunt, and can be jarring to some people because it automatically conjures images of, for example, Nazi Germany. That's clearly different than what is occurring right now in the United States. So how do we conceptualize the current state of government repression, and how do we put it in a historical context?

Is this a police state? If not, what is it?

The image that most people hold of a "police state" is a representation of extreme power dynamics, and repressive tactics to maintain them, at specific points of history. The current political climate in the United States is unique in many ways, and distinct from those eras. However, it shares core attributes that we generally associate with a "police state":

1. Raids, Harassment, and Intimidation of Dissidents by Police

When FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force agents raided multiple activist homes in the Northwest recently, they were in search of "anti-government or anarchist literature."

2. Militarization of Domestic Law Enforcement

As Arthur Rizer wrote for The Atlantic:

In an effort to remedy their relative inadequacy in dealing with terrorism on U.S. soil, police forces throughout the country have purchased military equipment, adopted military training, and sought to inculcate a "soldier's mentality" among their ranks.

3. Disproportionate Prison Sentences for Political Activists

The reason Marie Mason, who destroyed property, received a prison sentence twice as long as racists, who harmed human beings, is because of her politics. Likewise Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to two years in prison for non-violent disrupting an illegal oil and gas lease auction because he cost corporations thousands of dollars.

4. Creation of New Laws for People Because of Their Political Beliefs

The Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act was created solely to prosecute activists who threaten the "loss of profits" for corporations.

And now 10 states have considered "Ag Gag" bills that go so far as to criminalize non-violent undercover investigations. The new bills have passed in two states, Utah and Iowa.

5. Creation of Special Prison Units

In addition to Guantanamo Bay, which Obama has refused to close, there are now two experimental prison units on U.S. soil for "domestic terrorists." These Communications Management Units are for political prisoners that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons describes as having "inspirational significance."

6. Pervasive Use of Surveillance

Spy drones are being used by domestic law enforcement for surveillance, artificial intelligence, and monitoring social movements (here's a great overview from Salon). Recently, Tampa police wanted to use them against RNC protesters.

This is in addition to widespread surveillance measures such as TrapWire.

7. Criminalization of Ideology

In my opinion this is the hallmark of any police state: the targets of the state have little to do with criminal activity, and everything to do with their perceived subversive ideology. For example, consider these FBI "domestic terrorism" training documents which say that anarchists are "criminals seeking an ideology to justify their activities."

A final, more nebulous characteristic of a police state is the extent to which all of the tactics above take place. It's a question of degree and intensity, and some would argue that, even though these tactics are occurring with increasing frequency, they are not at the level that would merit this kind of "police state" language. I think that's completely reasonable.

But no matter how you feel about the characterization of what is occurring right now, the most important point is this: if we're not a police state already, we are marching closer and closer every day.

In the following interview, I try to dispel some of the myths about police states and how they are created, including the flawed idea of a "tipping point" leading up to extreme states of repression.

Listen to the full interview here (starting at 55:43) or download it from iTunes (it's the 8/23/12 show)
(c) 2012 Will Potter is the author of "Green Is the New Red: An Insider's Account of a Social Movement Under Siege," recently published by City Lights.

I AM sitting here writing this article 39 years to the minute from that moment when the sirens started screaming, announcing the beginning of the war.

A minute before, total quiet reigned, as it does now. No traffic, no activity in the street, except a few children riding bicycles. Yom Kippur, the holiest day for Jews, reigned supreme. And then...

Inevitably, the memory starts to work.

THIS YEAR, many new documents were released for publication. Critical books and articles are abundant.

The universal culprits are Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.

They have been blamed before, right from the day after the war, but only for superficial military offences, known as The Default. The default was failing to mobilize the reserves, and not moving the tanks to the front in time, in spite of the many signs that Egypt and Syria were about to attack.

Now, for the first time, the real Grand Default is being explored: the political background of the war. The findings have a direct bearing on what is happening now.

IT TRANSPIRES that in February 1973, eight months before the war, Anwar Sadat sent his trusted aide, Hafez Ismail, to the almighty US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. He offered the immediate start of peace negotiations with Israel. There was one condition and one date: all of Sinai, up to the international border, had to be returned to Egypt without any Israeli settlements, and the agreement had to be achieved by September, at the latest.

Kissinger liked the proposal and transmitted it at once to the Israeli ambassador, Yitzhak Rabin, who was just about to finish his term in office. Rabin, of course, immediately informed the Prime Minister, Golda Meir. She rejected the offer out of hand. There ensued a heated conversation between the ambassador and the Prime Minister. Rabin, who was very close to Kissinger, was in favor of accepting the offer.

Golda treated the whole initiative as just another Arab trick to induce her to give up the Sinai Peninsula and remove the settlements built on Egyptian territory.

After all, the real purpose of these settlements -including the shining white new town, Yamit - was precisely to prevent the return of the entire peninsula to Egypt. Neither she nor Dayan dreamed of giving up Sinai. Dayan had already made the (in)famous statement that he preferred "Sharm al-Sheik without peace to peace without Sharm al-Sheik." (Sharm al-Sheik, which had already been re-baptised with the Hebrew name Ophira, is located near the southern tip of the peninsula, not far from the oil wells, which Dayan was also loath to give up.)

Even before the new disclosures, the fact that Sadat had made several peace overtures was no secret. Sadat had indicated his willingness to reach an agreement in his dealings with the UN mediator Dr. Gunnar Jarring, whose endeavors had already become a joke in Israel.

Before that, the previous Egyptian President, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, had invited Nahum Goldman, the President of the World Jewish Congress (and for a time President of the World Zionist Organization) to meet him in Cairo. Golda had prevented that meeting, and when the fact became known there was a storm of protest in Israel, including a famous letter from a group of eighth-graders saying that it would be hard for them to serve in the army.

All these Egyptian initiatives could be waved aside as political maneuvers. But an official message by Sadat to the Secretary of State could not. So, remembering the lesson of the Goldman incident, Golda decided to keep the whole thing secret.

THUS AN incredible situation was created. This fateful initiative, which could have effected an historic turning point, was brought to the knowledge of two people only: Moshe Dayan and Israel Galili.

The role of the latter needs explanation. Galili was the eminence grise of Golda, as well as of her predecessor, Levy Eshkol. I knew Galili quite well, and never understood where his renown as a brilliant strategist came from. Already before the founding of the state, he was the leading light of the illegal Haganah military organization. As a member of a kibbutz, he was officially a socialist but in reality a hardline nationalist. It was he who had the brilliant idea of putting the settlements on Egyptian soil, in order to make the return of northern Sinai impossible.

So the Sadat initiative was known only to Golda, Dayan, Galili and Rabin and Rabin's successor in Washington, Simcha Dinitz, a nobody who was Golda's lackey.

Incredible as it may sound, the Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, Rabin's direct boss, was not informed. Nor were all the other ministers, the Chief of Staff and the other leaders of the armed forces, including the Chiefs of Army Intelligence, as well as the chiefs of the Shin Bet and the Mossad. It was a state secret.

There was no debate about it - neither public nor secret. September came and passed, and on October 6th Sadat's troops struck across the canal and achieved a world-shaking surprise success (as did the Syrians on the Golan Heights.)

As a direct result of Golda's Grand Default 2693 Israeli soldiers died, 7251 were wounded and 314 were taken prisoner (along with the tens of thousands of Egyptian and Syrian casualties).

THIS WEEK, several Israeli commentators bemoaned the total silence of the media and the politicians at the time.

Well, not quite total. Several months before the war, in a speech in the Knesset, I warned Golda Meir that if the Sinai was not returned very soon, Sadat would start a war to break the impasse.

I knew what I was talking about. I had, of course, no idea about the Ismail mission, but in May 1973 I took part in a peace conference in Bologna. The Egyptian delegation was led by Khalid Muhyi al-Din, a member of the original group of Free Officers who made the 1952 revolution. During the conference, he took me aside and told me in confidence that if the Sinai was not returned by September, Sadat would start a war. Sadat had no illusions of victory, he said, but hoped that a war would compel the US and Israel to start negotiations for the return of Sinai.

My warning was completely ignored by the media. They, like Golda, held the Egyptian army in abysmal contempt and considered Sadat a nincompoop. The idea that the Egyptians would dare to attack the invincible Israeli army seemed ridiculous.

The media adored Golda. So did the whole world, especially feminists. (A famous poster showed her face with the inscription: "But can she type?") In reality, Golda was a very primitive person, ignorant and obstinate. My magazine, Haolam Hazeh, attacked her practically every week, and so did I in the Knesset. (She paid me the unique compliment of publicly declaring that she was ready to "mount the barricades" to get me out of the Knesset.)

Ours was a voice crying in the wilderness, but at least we fulfilled one function: In her "March of Folly", Barbara Tuchman stipulated that a policy could be branded as folly only if there had been at least one voice warning against it in real time.

Perhaps even Golda would have reconsidered if she had not been surrounded by journalists and politicians singing her praises, celebrating her wisdom and courage and applauding every one of her stupid pronouncements.

THE SAME type of people, even some of the very same people, are now doing the same with Binyamin Netanyahu.

Again, we are staring the same Grand Default in the face.

Again, a group of two or three are deciding the fate of the nation. Netanyahu and Ehud Barak alone make all the decisions, "keeping their cards close to their chest." Attack Iran or not? Politicians and generals are kept in the dark. Bibi and Ehud know best. No need for any other input.

But more revealing than the blood-curdling threats on Iran is the total silence about Palestine. Palestinian peace offers are ignored, as were those of Sadat in those days. The ten-year old Arab Peace Initiative, supported by all the Arab and all the Muslim states, does not exist.

Again, settlements are put up and expanded, in order to make the return of the occupied territories impossible. (Let's remember all those who claimed, in those days, that the occupation of Sinai was "irreversible". Who would dare to remove Yamit?)

Again, multitudes of flatterers, media stars and politicians compete with each other in adulation of "Bibi, King of Israel". How smoothly he can talk in American English! How convincing his speeches in the UN and the US Senate!

Well, Golda, with her 200 words of bad Hebrew and primitive American, was much more convincing, and she enjoyed the adulation of the whole Western world. And at least she had the sense not to challenge the incumbent American president (Richard Nixon) during an election campaign.

IN THOSE days, I called our government "the ship of fools". Our current government is worse, much worse.

Golda and Dayan led us to disaster. After the war, their war, they were kicked out - not by elections, not by any committee of inquiry, but by the grassroots mass protests that racked the country.

The International Criminal Court, a dispenser of one-sided justice to a select group of Africans targeted by the U.S. and its allies, "violates the letter and spirit of the UN Charter, principles of legality, and fair and equal justice for all without discrimination." That was the sentiment of many of the 100 or so lawyers, law students and human rights activists who gathered in Montreal, Quebec, for a conference under the heading: "International justice for whom?" This Third International Conference on the Defense of International Criminal Law found little to defend in the conduct of the ICC.

The International Criminal Court is a strange legal animal. Despite its global mandate to prosecute persons for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, the ICC has pursued indictments only in Africa, where it has charged 29 people in cases involving eight countries. The organization, based in The Hague, Netherlands, purports to fight against a "culture of impunity," yet is prohibited from prosecuting crimes committed prior to July 2002, the date of its founding under the Treaty of Rome. Thus, hundreds of years of European slavery, genocide, and every other conceivable form of human rights atrocity are beyond the reach of the ICC. Europe is effectively granted impunity from centuries of crimes in Africa and around the globe.

Countries that are not signatories to the founding treaty, such as the United States, remain outside its jurisdiction, yet cases can be referred to the ICC for prosecution by the United Nations Security Council, where the U.S. is by far the most influential player. The ICC's former chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, actively sought to enlist the "special forces" and "rare and expensive capabilities" of the U.S. to enforce ICC arrest warrants, and U.S. "observers" take part in most high-level ICC parlays.

"African states did not contemplate that the administration of justice at the ICC, in particular within its first decade of existence, would be discriminatory, selective justice and focused totally on Africa," said Chief Charles A. Taku, a traditional leader from Cameroon who is also legal counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the African Court on Human Rights and Peoples Rights in Arusha. The ICC has turned out to be "a tool of imperialism," said Taku.

Selective, or discriminatory, justice is no justice at all. The West - meaning Europe's former colonial powers and the U.S. - is allowed to posture and pontificate about "fighting impunity," while the ICC's exclusive prosecution of Africans gives the impression that "Blacks are inherently criminal and have a propensity to kill each other," said Taku.

Who pulls the ICC's strings? In the ICC's Kenya case, the Court initiated the proceedings on its own authority against Uhuru Kenyatta, the son of the country's founding father, Jomo Kenyatta, and others in the deaths of 1,200 people in violence following disputed elections in 2007. However, it is widely believed that the United States and Britain are using the Court to favor Kenyatta's political rival, Raila Odinga, and to chastise the country for opening up to diversified trading partners, especially China.

"The U.S. controls the ICC, first of all through the NGOs," said Otachi Bw'Omanwa, defense lawyer for Kenyatta and his co-defendant, cabinet secretary Francis Muthaura. Much of the evidence used in ICC indictments is actually gathered by non-governmental organizations funded by the United States, said Bw'Omanwa. "More importantly, the U.S. exerts political and military muscle through the UN Security Council."

Both the Kenyan administration and the national assembly tried to stop the ICC's intervention in the country's affairs, and many fear the process will inflame tensions, rather than promote reconciliation. However, reconciliation among Africans does not appear to be the ICC's mission, especially in its cases stemming from the 1994 mass killings of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda and the genocide of six million Congolese that followed. Instead, the ICC behaves much like an international arm of Rwanda's minority Tutsi government and its U.S.-trained president, Paul Kagame.

Iain Edwards is a young lawyer based in London, defense counsel for Victoire Ingabire. A leader of the opposition to Kagame, Ingabire returned to Rwanda from exile in 2010, intending to run in elections under the Unified Democratic Forces banner. Instead, she was charged with collaborating with terrorists and promoting "genocidal ideology" - a catch-all for anyone that does not buy into the version of events that put Kagame in power after the bloodletting of 1994 and drove much of the majority Hutu political class into hiding.

Ingabire's legal prospects are not good. "The law is simply not respected in the courts of Rwanda," said Edwards. It is nearly impossible to mount a defense when potential witnesses are treated as accomplices in crime. Yet, the ICC routinely extradites Rwandans back home, despite zero prospects of even rudimentary justice. Edwards say he has 49 witnesses who would testify that one of his clients, Jean-Bosco Uwinkindi, a Pentacostal pastor, was not involved in killing Tutsis in 1994. However, none of them "will accept guarantees of safety" to testify in a Rwandan court "whilst the current regime is in power," said Edwards. "It is not clear if the accused could even testify in his own defense."

"ICC behaves much like an international arm of Rwanda's minority Tutsi government and its U.S.-trained president, Paul Kagame."

The test for ICC extradition to Rwanda should be: Will the defendant receive a fair trail? The answer is clearly, No, yet the ICC sends most defendants to Kagame's courts, anyway. "Things look pretty bleak for Rwandans in the diaspora," said Edwards.

If that is the case, then "isn't the whole reason for the ICC undermined by transferring defendants to Uganda?" asked David Jacobs, a labor and civil liberties lawyer from Toronto. "Why did it exist in the first place?"

One speaker came to the ICC's defense. Professor Fannie Lafontaine, of Laval University, a specialist in international humanitarian and human rights law, noted the ICC's many mistakes, including its "idiotic decision" to issue an arrest warrant against Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur, which "simply alienated the African Union." However, she declared: "We will simply not go back to where the worst criminals are sitting on a beach sipping a drink."

We? Who is "we"? Are "we" the North Americans and Europeans that run the ICC show? And who are "the worst criminals"? Are they the all-African defendants in the ICC's dock, or the imperial powers that dominate international structures, including the ICC? Aren't there war criminals sipping drinks in the halls of power in Washington, London and Paris? "The ICC has been used as an instrument of war, not an instrument of peace, but war by other means," said Toronto's David Jacobs. It's time to "scrap it."

Phil Taylor, a journalist who has worked as an investigator for the ICC, mocked the Court's claim to seek "an end to a culture of impunity." The Rwandan Patriotic Front, Paul Kagame's army, which has been repeatedly implicated in the Congolese genocide and the mass killing of Hutus in Rwanda, "was never charged with any crime," said Taylor.

"A racist, biased, colonialist court has no credibility," said John Philpot, a defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and the ICC, and an organizer of the conference. Junking the ICC is not akin to "throwing out the baby with the bathwater." Under the current political arrangements, the ICC is hopelessly selective in its prosecutions. "If there is a political change, then proper international tribunals can arise. But you cannot respect these [current] tribunals."

Defense lawyers, whose natural inclination is to work behind the scenes, to speak within the narrow confines of legal immediacies, must expose the ICC as a tool of global power, not justice.

In the category of "the sky is blue," "fire is hot" and "the sun rises in the east," the Guardian reports on a new study showing that Washington's murderous drone killing campaign in Pakistan is "counterproductive."

The sarcasm above is not meant to cast aspersions on the report itself -- which is detailed, devastating, and very productive -- but on the prevailing mindset in the ruling circles of the West (the self-proclaimed "defenders of civilization") that makes such a study even necessary, much less 'controversial.'

For of course even the denizens of the many secret services and black-op armies and intelligence agencies that make up America's world-straddling security apparat have said, repeatedly, that Washington's policy of murdering, torturing, renditioning and indefinitely detaining innocent people all over the world -- day after day, week after week, year after year -- is in fact creating the very extremism and anti-Americanism the policy purports to combat.

Thus the new report, by the law schools of New York University and Stanford (a famously if not notoriously conservative institution) should be, in a sane and rational world, a case of carrying coals to Newscastle or selling ice to the Inuit: an exercise in redunancy.

But instead, sadly, the report, "Living Under Drones," is a very, very rare instance of speaking truth to the power that is waging a hideous campaign of terror -- there is no other word for it -- against innocent people all over the world.

The personal testimonies gathered by the researchers -- on the ground, in Pakistan -- are shattering ... at least for those who actually believe that these swarthy foreigner are actually human beings, with "hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions .. fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is." You can be sure -- you can be damned sure -- that the Nobel Peace Laureate in the White House has never and will never read these stories of the ones he is terrorizing, night and day. These testimonies will never appear beside the scraps of rumor, conjecture and brutal prejudice that constitute the "reports" he sees each Tuesday -- "Terror Tuesday" -- when he meets in the Oval Office with his death squad team to decide who will be assassinated that week.

The Guardian gives a good overview of the report:

The CIA's programme of "targeted" drone killings in Pakistan's tribal heartlands is politically counterproductive, kills large numbers of civilians and undermines respect for international law, according to a report by US academics. The study by Stanford and New York universities' law schools, based on interviews with victims, witnesses and experts, blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of "signature strikes" in which groups are selected merely through remote "pattern of life" analysis.

Families are afraid to attend weddings or funerals, it says, in case US ground operators guiding drones misinterpret them as gatherings of Taliban or al-Qaida militants.

"The dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling 'targeted killings' of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts. This narrative is false," the report, entitled Living Under Drones, states. ...

The "best available information", they say, is that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in Pakistan between June 2004 and mid-September this year -of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children. The figures have been assembled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which estimated that a further 1,300 individuals were injured in drone strikes over that period. ...

"US drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in north-west Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning," the American law schools report says. "Their presence terrorises men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves.

"These fears have affected behaviour. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims."

The study goes on to say: "Publicly available evidence that the strikes have made the US safer overall is ambiguous at best ... The number of 'high-level' militants killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -estimated at just 2% [of deaths]. Evidence suggests that US strikes have facilitated recruitment to violent non-state armed groups, and motivated further violent attacks ... One major study shows that 74% of Pakistanis now consider the US an enemy."

A powerful story, setting out the lineaments of the report with admirable concision. But then the Guardian correspondent, Owen Bowcott [or his inserting editors], betray heartbreaking naivete:

Coming from American lawyers rather than overseas human rights groups, the criticisms are likely to be more influential in US domestic debates over the legality of drone warfare.

As the story notes:

Reprieve's director, Clive Stafford Smith, said: "An entire region is being terrorised by the constant threat of death from the skies. Their way of life is collapsing: kids are too terrified to go to school, adults are afraid to attend weddings, funerals, business meetings, or anything that involves gathering in groups. George Bush wanted to create a global 'war on terror' without borders, but it has taken Obama's drone war to achieve his dream."

However, there can be no sensible disagreement over certain salient facts: first, the US now has more than 10,000 weaponised drones in its arsenal; second, as many as six Predator drones circle over one location at any given time, often for 24 hours a day, with high-resolution cameras snooping on the movements of everyone below; third, the Predators emit an eerie sound, earning them the name bangana (buzzing wasp) in Pashtu; fourth, everyone in the area can see them, 5,000ft up, all day -and hear them all night long; fifth, nobody knows when the missile will come, and turn each member of the family into what the CIA calls a "bugsplat". The Predator operator, thousands of miles away in Nevada, often pushes the button over a cup of coffee in the darkest hours of the Waziristan night, between midnight and 5am. So a parent putting children to bed cannot be sure they will wake up safely.

Stafford Smith also speaks of his mother, who lived through the attacks by Adolf Hitler's drones -- the V1 and V2 rockets -- toward the end of World War II, and he notes:

So little changes. Current RAF doctrine tells us, euphemistically, how "the psychological impact of air power, from the presence of a UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] to the noise generated by an approaching attack helicopter, has often proved to be extremely effective in exerting influence ..." Perhaps they mean "terror", as described by David Rohde, a former New York Times journalist kidnapped and held by the Taliban for months in Waziristan. Rohde, quoted in Living Under Drones, describes the fear the drones inspired in ordinary civilians: "The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death."