John Whitehead - A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State

Praise for

A Government of Wolves

"John Whitehead is one of the most eloquent and knowledgeable defenders of liberty, and opponents of the growing American police state, writing today. I am pleased to recommend A Government of Wolves to anyone interested in learning how modern America increasingly resembles a dystopian science fiction film instead of a Constitutional Republic."

Ron Paul

Twelve-term US Congressman and former presidential candidate

"I was privileged to have Duke Ellington as a mentor, who said of the jazz that was unsuccessfully banned in their countries by Stalin and Hitler: 'The music is so free that many people say it is the only unhampered expression of complete freedom yet produced in this country.' But only a basically free country could have produced back then such freedom of expression that has become so energizing a global presence. If we are to be again this free a nation, John Whitehead will have had a lot to do with our being able to swing again."

Nat Hentoff

American historian and nationally syndicated columnist

"The loss of liberty doesn't begin with invading armies, but with creeping government that slowly and almost imperceptibly invades our privacy with cameras, drones, wiretaps and monitoring of email communication. We are told this is for our own good. In this book, John Whitehead sounds a warning about overreaching government we had better heed before the point of no return has been reached."

Cal Thomas

Syndicated and USA Today Columnist/Fox News Contributor

"A masterfully documented chronicle of frightened citizen vassalage to a Leviathan state in a hopes of a risk-free existence. An end to liberty is at hand."

Bruce Fein

Associate Deputy Attorney General under President Reagan

Author of American Empire Before the Fall

"Cynical, brutal, dehumanizing. Pervasive, insidious, incremental. Any hope of getting out of this prison we've found ourselves in and in the service ofWake up! The paramilitary junta is breaking down your door! Your Miranda rights? Where have you been? They don't need no stinking badges! Get out of the wayit's your new police state in action. We're about to be herdeddigitally, of courseinto some nightmarish gulag that we can't even see because it's crept up on us incrementally like a toxic fog under the insidious guise of national security and other mendacious Newspeak. How did we become the prey of capitalistic jackals, ruthless corporations and power-intoxicated lackeys of the one percent terraraptors? Where is Thomas Paine now that we need him? He's here just in the nick of time in the person of John Whitehead, an uncompromising debunker of lies, rhetoric mongers, rights-shredders and the criminal acts of our shameless, double-crossing government. Drop everything and read A Government of Wolves before it's too late! I loved and was horrified by this disturbing and courageous book."

David Dalton

New York Times best-selling author

and a founding editor of Rolling Stone Magazine

Copyright 2013 by John W. Whitehead

All rights reserved. Published in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

This edition published by SelectBooks, Inc.

For information address SelectBooks, Inc., New York, New York.

First Edition

ISBN 978-1-59079-975-8

eISBN :9781590799833

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Whitehead, John W., 1946

A government of wolves : the emerging American police state/ John W. Whitehead.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59079-975-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Civil rights--United States. 2. United StatesPolitics and government. 3. Police powerUnited States. 4. Constitutional lawUnited States. I. Title.

JC599U5W5245 2013
323.4'90973-dc23

2013006480

Cover art and illustrations by Christopher Combs

Interior book design and production by Janice Benight

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 987654321

For Nisha Whitehead, my inspiration

"A nation of sheep will "beget
a government of wolves."

EDWARD R. MURROW

CBS BROADCAST JOURNALIST

1908-1965

CONTENTS

By Nat Hentoff

I f James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life, they would not recognize this country.

We have been through some troubling times before in our nation's history. There were the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 when newspaper editors, civilianswho criticized the governmentwere placed in jail. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. He even arrested members of the Maryland legislature and all kinds of people around the country who objected to his policies.

We had the Red Raids in the early 1920s that started off J. Edgar Hoover's career in which hundreds of people were arrested, some of them deported without any due process at all. During the First World War, Woodrow Wilson not only practically suspended but also discarded the First Amendment. Then there were the Japanese internment camps of World War II, followed by Senator Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror, which was ended by fellow senators who realized that he had gone too far.

What we have now may be more insidious. Indeed, I believe we are in a worse state now than ever before in this country. With the surveillance state closing in on us, we are fighting to keep our country free from our own government.

Whereas we once operated under the Constitution, we are now, for example, under the USA Patriot Act, among other government dragnets, that permits pervasive electronic surveillance with minimal judicial review. The government listens in on our phone calls. It reads our mail. You have to be careful about what you do and say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, since the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious. We have no idea how much the government knows about average citizens. This is not the way the government born under the Declaration of Independence is supposed to operate.

Under the USA Patriot Act, FBI agents with a court order from a secret court, can enter people's homes and offices when they are not present, look around and take what they like. They can examine a hard drive and install in your computer the magic lantern, known less metaphorically as the keystroke jogger, which means they can record while you are not there everything you have typed on your computer, including stuff you have never sent. Then, under the USA Patriot Act, they can come back when you are not at home and download whatever information of yours they so desire. With advances in technology, they can even accomplish their clandestine objectives from a remote location.

All of this makes a prophet out of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who, during the first wiretapping case back in 1928 [Olmstead v. U.S.] , said in his dissent: "Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."

Government officials like to claim that everything they are doing is for security, to keep America safe in the so-called war against terrorism. What they are really effectuating is a weakening of why we are Americans. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans today have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, let alone why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights. People are becoming accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment, for example. One of the things that is taught so badly in our schools, from elementary and middle school through graduate school, including journalism schools, is the Constitutionour liberties and rights.