Editor's Note: We're squatting in Bob's space today to direct you to a transcript of a recent interview Bob did with Amy Goodman on DemocracyNow:
AMY GOODMAN: Good to have you with us. Can you talk about your concerns about the bill that President Bush is about to sign?
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, I think first of all, you need to put it in context. After 9/11, and since then, there's been a stampede toward creating a surveillance society, toward creating a larger and more powerful intelligence community and merging the CIA and the FBI. We saw that in the PATRIOT Act that passed 99-1 in the Senate. We saw it again with this latest intelligence bill, which comes, by the way, after a tremendous expansion of the U.S. intelligence community. The budget -- and of course these figures are somewhat in doubt because they're so secret -- but the budget apparently for the intelligence community has gone from something like $26 or $27 billion before 9/11, to about $40 billion today. So, there's been a gigantic expansion of the intelligence community already.
Now, as sort of part of a political football debate in Congress, the 9/11 commission recommendations have basically, with some changes, been enacted into law, which leads to yet another expansion, not only of the size of the intelligence community, but of the scope of the intelligence community. It creates, just like the PATRIOT Act did, new powers for the federal government, creates a centralization of the intelligence community under what they're calling a National Intelligence Director. And it was basically rushed through Congress with almost no voice being raised about the kind of concerns that I have about this bill. In fact, all of the opposition to it, at least if you read the newspaper accounts of this, was coming from the Pentagon, which feared that this new Intelligence Director would agglomerate too much power, reducing the Pentagon's control over its share of the intelligence community activity and budget. Once that was resolved through a compromise, there was nobody, I think, with the exception of Senator Byrd from West Virginia, who even blinked about the dangers in this bill. I'm -- I frankly -- I'm shocked that no Democrats have gotten up to scream about this. In fact, they all saw it as some sort of a perverse triumph over the White House to have enacted this bill. Meanwhile, I think it's just yet another part of the pendulum, which is continuing still to swing away from civil liberties, and toward a surveillance state because of the alleged threat of terrorism since 9/11.
It creates, just like the PATRIOT Act did, new powers for the federal government, creates a centralization of the intelligence community under what they're calling a National Intelligence Director. And it was basically rushed through Congress with almost no voice being raised about the kind of concerns that I have about this bill. In fact, all of the opposition to it, at least if you read the newspaper accounts of this, was coming from the Pentagon, which feared that this new Intelligence Director would agglomerate too much power, reducing the Pentagon's control over its share of the intelligence community activity and budget. Once that was resolved through a compromise, there was nobody, I think, with the exception of Senator Byrd from West Virginia, who even blinked about the dangers in this bill. I'm -- I frankly -- I'm shocked that no Democrats have gotten up to scream about this. In fact, they all saw it as some sort of a perverse triumph over the White House to have enacted this bill. Meanwhile, I think it's just yet another part of the pendulum, which is continuing still to swing away from civil liberties, and toward a surveillance state because of the alleged threat of terrorism since 9/11. " READ THE ENTIRE INTERVIEW HERE .
