This is not a theoretical discussion. A September 8, 2008 article in the Army Times reports that beginning October 1 an active duty Army combat brigade will be assigned for use within the US. Among its missions are “civil unrest and crowd control.” It is described as the “first ever nonlethal package that the Army has fielded” and will be equipped with bean bag bullets, tasers, spike strips, shields, and batons. What is important to realize is that this is both a reaction to the gutting of the National Guard (item 48) and a means to suppress legitimate dissent in contravention of First Amendment guarantees.

Then just days before the convention opening, the FBI and local law enforcement, especially of diehard Republican loyalist Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, initiated a series of punitive raids over the weekend against various groups. The first occurred at a central clearinghouse for protestors known as the “Welcoming Committee”. Those there were handcuffed, computers were seized, but no arrests were made. Sheriff Fletcher released a statement in which he described the “Welcoming Committee” as a “criminal enterprise made up of 35 self- described anarchists who are intent on committing criminal acts.” If such were the case, it is surprising no arrests were made. The following day raids were also carried out against other “dangerous” groups, such as Legalwatch and Food not Bombs. In one case, building inspectors arrived after a raid and gave owners until 6:30 the next morning to fix the door the police had kicked in or have the premises boarded up.

In the later raids, some 6 individuals were arrested but none charged. Instead they were kept on probable cause holds. Such a hold allows police to hold someone up to 36 hours, weekends not counting, without charge. Effectively, this permits law officers like Sheriff Fletcher to mete out 4-5 day jail sentences to anyone he doesn’t like, in other words, punishment without charge, conviction, or crime. Similar strong arm tactics by the New York police at the Republican convention in 2004 led to settlements in the millions. But with the federal government underwriting security costs this is not much of a disincentive.

On September 1, 2008, the police using pepper spray, tear gas, and “less lethal” projectiles fought numerous battles with demonstrators most of whom were peaceful. By the end of the first day, official figures listed 163 arrests, unofficial numbers 256.

This pattern of infiltration, fearmongering, high profile raids, large shows of military style force, aggressive indiscriminate treatment of demonstrators, and mass arrests has come to be known as the “Miami model” from its use against protesters to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations in Miami in November 2003.

In the early phases, police actions were largely ignored by the mainstream media and most of the reporting came from bloggers and independent media sources. As violence increased, the mainstream media did pick up the story but even they noted that most protesters were peaceful.

It is important to remember that the real object of these raids, seizures, and arrests is not to stop crime but dissent. They are meant to send a message, that if you protest, even legally, even peacefully, you risk arbitrary detention, seizure of your property, punishment, and humiliation by the powers that be. Dissent in this country has become for many un-American. Worse it is seen as a kind of terrorism. This is all the more bizarre and disheartening because our country was itself founded on dissent. Pilgrims, Quakers, believers and non-believers of all sorts, came to these shores precisely because they did not agree with the powers of their day. The Founding Fathers were dissenters and started a revolution and a country over their dissent. The Framers understood this and enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution the right to dissent in both the guarantees of freedom of speech and of peaceful assembly. Yet in the Age of Terror, dissent is no longer seen as a living, breathing expression of our democracy but as suspicious, probably criminal, certainly unpatriotic, a thing to be suppressed, especially so that the greater good, in this case the photo-ops of the national party conventions can proceed unquestioned, unchallenged, and unhindered.

A report released April 23, 2008 by the Union of Concerned Scientists found many instances of political interference in the work of EPA scientists. The study consisted of a questionnaire sent to 5,419 EPA scientists which genereated 1,586 responses. Of these, 889 (56%) reported such interference at least once in the last 5 years. 394 (25%) said they had experienced occasional to frequent instances of EPA officials misrepresenting their findings. 285 (18%) had seen selective or incomplete use of data to justify a particular regulatory outcome. 224 (14%) said they had been directed to exclude or alter technical data. Of 969 EPA scientists with more than 10 years of experience, 409 (43%) said political interference has increased in the last 5 years in comparison with the previous 5 years. 43 (4%) said it was less frequent. 492 (31%) said they could not express their views openly within the EPA; 382 (24%) said they felt they could not do so even outside the agency. Scientists who worked on regulations and on environmental risk assessments reported the most political interference, with the OMB (Office of Management and Budget) being the most frequently named offender.

An April 29, 2008 GAO report found numerous problems in the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System which does assessments of the health risks of some 540 chemicals (for example, what risk of cancer do they pose, and at what level of exposure?). At the same time that other offices in the EPA, as well as state and local authorities have asked for assessments on hundreds of other chemicals, IRIS’s production of these assessments as virtually ground to a halt. In 2003, the EPA estimated it needed to do 50 risk assessments a year to keep up with demand. However, in 2005 it finished 4. In 2006, it completed 2.

In 2007, the primary focus of the GAO report, the EPA had 77 IRIS studies in process. On December 31 of that year, 70 were ongoing, 5 had been suspended by the President’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) which demanded further studies. As in 2006 only 2 IRIS assessments were completed. Of the 70 which had not been completed, 48 had been in process for more than 5 years, and 12 of the 48 for more than 9 years. In particular, the GAO noted the case of trichloroethylene (TCE) an industrial degreasing agent and the most frequently reported organic contaminant in drinking water. It has been linked to cancer and other health hazards. Yet peer review questions about its cancer risk caused the EPA to pull its IRIS assessment in 1989. The EPA did not begin a new assessment until 1998 and this is not expected to be completed before 2010 at the earliest, a lag of 21 years at least.

The problems with IRIS aren’t just confined to the glacial pace at which it comes up with risk assessments for new chemicals but extends to those already in the system. As far back as 2003, the EPA thought that the data on 287 of the 540 chemicals in IRIS were out of date and that their risk assessments needed to be reviewed. In the intervening years, this number can only have grown.

There are several reasons why IRIS has not been able to keep up: funding, staff, the increasing complexity of doing the assessments, etc. but the real culprit is once again Bush’s OMB. It conducts not one but two reviews of the assessments. It seeks input from departments and agencies (such as DOD, DOE, and NASA) that might be affected by the assessments and that have an interest in watering them down and delaying them. The OMB reviews are not transparent. The input is treated as internal Executive Branch communications and is not made public. All of this happens before the assessment is let out for peer review. Worse the current leadership at the EPA wants to formalize this interference and give other agencies and departments even greater control over IRIS. With millions of chemicals in use in our society, it would be nice to know what the best guess health risks are of a handful of the more important ones, but as always happens in the Bush Administration anything that smacks of regulation is seen as something to be minimized, neutralized, or eliminated.

In fact, on April 10, 2008 EPA released its new guidelines for IRIS effective immediately. A GAO report of May 21, 2008 estimates that the EPA’s “streamlined” process will take 6-8 years to complete for each chemical and be out of date by the time it is finished.

On October 3, 2008, the EPA announced it would not set a standard for perchlorate in water because it did not pose a health risk as defined under the Safe Drinking Water Act. Perchlorate interferes with the uptake of iodine by the thyroid and has been linked to health problems in pregnant women and newborns. The Pentagon has resisted regulation of perchlorate because it is used in solid rocket fuels. The chemical occurs in the drinking water of about 16 million Americans.

The United States incarcerates its citizens more than any other country in the world. To put this all in perspective, the number 2 country in the world in terms of prison population is China. It has a penal population of 1.5 million, in other words 800,000 fewer than the US but with 4 times the population. The US prison population is so large because of the greater tendency for offenders to be sent to jail and kept there for longer periods than in other countries. The size of the US prison population is a national disgrace. While the Bush Administration wishes to give “Get out of jail free” cards to telecoms or minions like Scooter Libby, ordinary Americans, especially minority Americans, are not so fortunate. As so often happens in this Administration, policies are carried out without any regard for their consequences as long as those consequences are borne by others.