An Iron Curtain is Descending - And Most Americans Don't Know

http://www.counterpunch.com/pariah01302007.html


"Why are you travelling so often to Canada?" the tough U.S. border guard barked. I was on Amtrak, going from New York to Montreal, as I'd done dozen of times before over several decades. This was my first experience (summer 2006) of the increasingly standard and intrusive "U.S. Exit Interviews" on trains crossing the border. I've been hassled on every train crossing since then, most recently January 2007. The U.S. now has a combined FBI-compiled file of all arrests and charges at all government levels for millions of Americans, and this is instantly viewable by police in many jurisdictions, including border officials of the U.S. and most other countries. In some cities, local police can access this file via one's license plate. The files do NOT show the favorable disposition of arrests that did not lead to charges or of dismissals and findings of innocence. "And what's this entry stamp from Canada, with no country of departure? Was that from Cuba? You know U.S. citizens may not travel to Cuba--you could be imprisoned and fined."

-snip-

Most Americans are unaware of the new police state procedures of U.S. officials who seek to keep millions of Americans from traveling--including trips across the border to our North, once thought the least difficult international frontier in the world to cross. There are now regular stops an "internal" checkpoints for cars traveling toward, away from or near the border in states from Maine to Washington. This includes permanent checkpoints on interstates one hundred or more miles from the border in New York and Vermont, as well as moving patrols who stop motorists in all parts of the border states. Some have called these "whiteness checkpoints," since the border guards often pull over dark-skinned motorists and people perceived as Middle Easterners. Civil libertarians and others in the border states--including conservative farmers--have protested this dramatic departure from the assumed tradition of allowing Americans freedom of travel--certainly freedom to leave their own country. Homeland Security, which supervises the "U.S. Customs and Border Protection" squads (CBP), admits that few terrorists (some say none) have been apprehended by this dubious process, but various "sex offenders and other criminals" have been caught, and drugs and other contraband seized. This is in addition to the "exit interviews" of Americans leaving by train or bus, which are now routine.

One group, aside from dark-skinned people and Muslims, targeted by the internal checkpoints, are students and other young people. Persons under 18 cannot cross a U.S. border alone, unless they are with a guardian and have notarized letters from a parent, as well as a passport issued in their own name. Persons between 18 and 21 may be questioned about their intention to engage in behavior (sex or drinking or marijuana use) strongly penalized in the U.S., but either decriminalized or lightly punished in Canada. Up until three years ago, unaccompanied persons over 16 were seldom checked--and longer ago, even younger persons could travel alone or with a non-parental adult. Student groups, including bus tour groups, now report very close scrutiny from the U.S. Exit police. Some bus companies now refuse to take groups of students under 21 across U.S. borders because of hassles they face. Gone are the days when an 18 or over driver could skit across from Burlington to Montreal with a car-full of late-teens hoping to taste the more liberal morals up north.

-snip-

One group that gets very special attention are registered sex offenders, of whom there are now just over 600,000 in the U.S. The public generally approves of all measures to limit or control this group of pariahs, never mind the fact that few of these were violent rapists, and that many are forced to register for decades or life, long after minimal offenses--including prostitution and public sex, or in some cases even urinating in public. Beyond sex offenders, though, virtually all the 5 million plus persons who are on parole or probation for state and federal felonies will be unable to keep or get passports. Another large group are the 4 million or so who are "child support delinquents." At the very least, about 2 million (mostly male, but some female) "deadbeats" meet the minimum requirement of being $5,000 or more behind in their payments, which triggers (since 1994) automatic passport cancellation or denial. Among these are at least a half million teenage fathers, mostly very low income school drop-outs, often unemployed and sometimes homeless.

-snip-

At the beginning of the Cold War, Winston Churchill made his famous comment about an iron curtain descending across Europe. Like many others, I experienced this iron curtain. I faced incessant exit and entry police interrogations in places like East Berlin and at the Soviet borders. In those days, such long waits to get OUT of a country, as well as to get in, were limited to the "Communist" block primarily. Thank goodness, we'd think, this could not happen in America. Now that virtually all travel barriers have fallen throughout Europe--including Eastern Europe, and with travel in and out of China or Vietnam far easier than before, it is around the U.S. that the iron curtain seems to be descending. As in the Soviet or Chinese blocks before (or more recently in Cuba), the elites could travel, but the various dissidents, deviants and ordinary folk could not. This sad fact is becoming increasingly the case for many U, S, citizens today. So far, very few liberals or libertarians have taken note of this chilling trend to limit travel for huge numbers of Americans. Unless protests against these measures grow quickly, it will be too late to stop or even slow them down. America, like Russia and China before it, will become a prison for many of its people.
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Every time I come back from Europe (and I go two or three times a year) I am increasingly disturbed by the intrusiveness of the entry interview.
I've also had several 'Exit interviews' which seem to me to be a real violation. You don't need to know where I'm going or who is going with me.
It's never made any sense, in the same way that our strange agricultural prohibitions make no sense.

so apart from people coming in with ag products from the tropics it's pretty much the whole Security Theatre/Shoe Carnival thing all over again.

We're paranoid people with extreme xenophobia.

I lived in England for 10 years, and they're almost as bad there. I'm planning on moving to France. I've had it with the nonsense here.

"our strange agricultural prohibitions make no sense"

is what our controllers would rather have you do than wake yourself and others to the realities as they are coming to pass. You think that they are invasive now, wait until RFID chips are in your national i.d. cards (May 2008). They will not even have to ask you these questions, because you will be under a constant state of automated surveillance. The controllers will know what you ahve bought, where you have gone, any presccriptions that you take, any firearms that you own, your credit score, and much much more. The "iron curtain" will be made of silicon and instead of a uniformed control officer on every street corner, they will be sitting off site in front of computers and video screens. You dont think that all those cameras are for traffic, do you?

tinfoil top-hat time

the legislation calling for the nation id card.

Plus we have seen already that they cannot stop the surge. Everyone is against the war and the dems have yet to act- oh excuse me I forgot the non-binding resolution. Virtually no one knows anything about the reai i.d. or rfid. It simply does not have the groundswell of outrage as does the war or even the minimum wage and we see where the minimum wage increase is dead.

This is going to happen. The only thing that can be done is to educate the masses so that enough people refuse to accept the real id with rfid chips.

The masses are tranquilized to what is going on under their noses.

Slow, insidious indoctrination or is it in the water? Most people don’t know what goes on right under their noses, the information is out there, they just can’t grasp what some people are capable of.

yeah...that's what this country's gonna look like in 20 or 30 years

scary shit

bhn

Remember this made for TV movie from the 80s (set in Kansas) that showed the aftermath of nuclear war?

"The Day After Tomorrow" is the title of a recent theatrical film depicting environmental, not nuclear, catastrophe.

But I'm so glad you mentioned the 1983 TV movie called "The Day After," because it has been in my mind a lot recently as Mad "King" George keeps rattling the nuclear sabre at Iran.

I guess this is veering off topic for this thread, so I'll start another one to discuss the potential for nuclear war that many believe is a very real danger the world is facing -- AGAIN.

However, I'll go ahead and mention here, for those interested, that the presentation on TV of "The Day After" was a very big deal in America in 1983 -- and indeed around the world, and with good reason. So here's an excellent place to read about it, from the Museum of Broadcast Communications:

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/D/htmlD/dayafterth/dayafter.htm

The first few sentences hint at the emotional and political impact of this historic film:

The Day After, a dramatization of the effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack on the United States was one of the biggest media events of the 1980s. Programmed by ABC on Sunday, 20 November 1983, The Day After was watched by an estimated half the adult population, the largest audience for a made-for-TV movie to that time. The movie was broadcast after weeks of advance publicity, fueled by White House nervousness about its anti-nuclear "bias."

As for the OP here and the "new Iron Curtain" that is descending around the United States (and other scary issues about governmental monitoring and control of citizens this implies), I strongly agree that we citizens should be both aware AND very concerned!

I found a great resource dealing with these matters in David Brin's book, The Transparent Society. I read it the first time upon its publication in 1998, and his provocative ideas for preserving our most precious values have stayed with me ever since.

There are ways to reverse the trend of government control of citizens through the one-sided monitoring of high-tech systems we're seeing today! We must learn what needs to be done, however, how to take control BACK -- and we'd better learn it fast, before the elites solidify their exclusive use of the very technologies that can actually SAVE AND PROTECT our freedoms and our privacy....

"Amerika."

Totalitarian takeover. Borders closed. People living in constant fear. A staged "terrorist" attack.

How ironic is it, that a 1980s RW-type flick (which was supposed to be the "rebuttal" to "The Day After") would so capture what is going wrong with today's Amerika.

Wow, I do appreciate your very well informed response. I am very, very concerned that this administration is going to cause a world-destroying event.

and my personal idea of hell.

...and learn the cross-country routes.

:kick:

The Border Guards hassled my Mom and Dad when they were coming back through Detroit/Windsor from Canada. My Mom leads bus tours for her retirees group. She had one that went to Ottawa last spring. She said that the Border Guards were so rude to her group of senior citizens that she's not taking a tour group to Canada again. She said that they were worse than when my parents went to Europe and got hassled by the Austrian border guards on their bus.

Real Id, RFID,Internet surveillance,exit interviews,"christian" military contractors, idiot trying to start WWWIII and bring the apocalypse. Man.We gotta stop it.

It's weird being hassled by our guards when trying to get back home.

When I go to Canada I remark that it is nice to be reminded what living in a free country is like. When I return to the U.S. it makes me want to cry or scream at our friggin brown shirted Nazi border guards. We are just one step away from becoming East Germany.

of what being in a FREE country is like might draw attention to you from some of "our own" who might peg you as "anti-American" for saying such a thing?

Man... what on earth are we letting happen to our country? :mad: :eyes: :think: :grr: :banghead:

As Edweird said, "We gotta stop it!"

He's right -- we MUST -- and I do believe we still CAN. But we must ACT and act SOON or else it really will be too late, my friends.

and then emphasize that the administration is ANTI-American, but we the people are still the Americans of old!

rather than target potential terrorists.

I just thought that I would try the lame-O 9-11 OCTers game. As you can see Im not very good at it.

9-11 was an inside job.

Recommended to Greatest as it should be

are Canadians living in this country and the one who is French-Canadian is having continuing trouble traveling back and forth across the border to visit her elderly mother. Trouble meaning she's been detained and questioned for hours. Several times. Really. This woman is in her mid-50's, maybe 90# soaking wet and hasn't a political and/or violent bone in her body.

Why the hell are they wasting our tax payer money doing this crap?

Can I add something? I am a clerk at a job tangentially related to the airline industry and now I have to register with Homeland Security and TSA. All the office ladies around me are doing this without question. I keep grilling our compliance manager on ways to get out of the form.

Also, now, did you know no foreign purchasers can fly cargo in the belly of a passenger aircraft exiting the US? (This really affects my job) And it's not grandfathered. Now, for example, John Doe in London, who we have been doing business with for 20 years, has to fly his small item to Heathrow on a cargo freighter only, limiting the space available and types of service we can give him. Passenger flights make a lot of money from cargo, too...sometimes I think they want to kill the domestic airlines (although I have a hunch that perhaps this was one of the non-passed items in the 9/11 commission report)

edit: typo

nt

This is one more thing that needs to be pinned on the Bush admin. .

I was almost denied entry some thirty years ago because of carrying Mace (which was the sole protection I had in the very bad low income neighborhood we students inhabited.)

Greatly appreciate this post, and find it very chilling. Crossing back and forth from Canada to the USA used to be just a small deal in terms of Customs.

Everytime I go, I have American border agents harass me. They make me get out of the car, search everywhere, ask me like a billion questions. Even that would be understandable, but they are always so fucking rude and condescending. Then when I come back to Canada, they ask me to show my drivers license, smile at me, then wish me a good day.

I'm reall sorry..I don't mean to brag. But man do I love living in Canada.

Your nation has become a pariah due to the twisted paranoia that has suffused so much of your public life. Frankly, you people scare the crap out of me.