Exhibit A for Smaller Government

But I'm not holding my breath waiting for any member of the Teabag Militia to argue for abolishing this government agency:

[T]hose [cables] describing the drug war do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the F.B.I. has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm’s length.

Because of the ubiquity of the drug scourge, today’s D.E.A. has access to foreign governments, including those, like Nicaragua’s and Venezuela’s, that have strained diplomatic relations with the United States. Many are eager to take advantage of the agency’s drug detection and wiretapping technologies.

But Julian Assange is a pervert. And Al Gore is obese. And no one need bother tracing the origins of this 40-year old monstrosity:

In January, 1969, only a few days after he had assumed office, President Nixon convened a meeting in the White House on possible law-and-order initiatives. The small inner circle of advisors who attended that meeting included John Mitchell, who in those early days acted as a "prime minister" to the president; John Ehrlichman, a Seattle land-use lawyer who had served as tour director in the 1968 campaign and was now counsel to the president; Egil Krogh, the young deputy to Ehrlichman; Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a former advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who was then the counsel for domestic affairs, and Donald Santarelli, a twenty-nine-year-old lawyer who had drafted many of the position papers on crime for the 1968 Nixon campaign, and who was in the process of joining the Justice Department as a strategist for the crime-control program.

The meeting began with President Nixon's defining law and order as his "principal domestic issue." In the extensive interviews that Egil Krogh had with me over a two-month period in 1974 he recalled that in that January meeting the president used general terminology such as "we are a tough, law-and-order administration, and we are going to crack down on crime." Since the rhetoric used during the campaign in 1968 was basically "get tough," Krogh explained, "there was a clear motivation to be able to deliver to the electorate In 1972 a record of improvement in crime control." Nixon stated that the two categories of crime that would be most useful to diminish were armed robbery and burglary, since they "instill the greatest fear" in the electorate. As Nixon continued to describe his objectives for crime control, John Mitchell began slowly shaking his head in a negative manner, and pulling on his pipe as if it were some sort of semaphore signal. Asked whether he thought there was any problem, Mitchell leaned back and explained that most of the crimes that the president was interested in controlling did not fall under the jurisdiction or powers of the federal government. Except for Washington, D.C.. where the federal government did have direct Jurisdiction, crimes such as homicide, assault, mugging, robbery, and burglary were not violations of federal law but of state or local law, and even the federal government found an indirect way of intervening in the problem, the local government would get the credit for diminishing those classes of crimes. Moreover, John Ehrlichman pointed out, the established agencies of the federal government, such as the FBI, the IRS, the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and the Treasury Department, had traditionally been reluctant to involve themselves in any sort of offensive against such local crimes. In all, there were only a few thousand federal agents (not including the CIA or the Department of Defense) and they could not realistically be expected to have much effect on street crimes in the urban centers of America. Such crimes were committed, according to the best police estimates, by teenage youth acting on spur-of-the-moment inspirations or on targets of opportunity. Nixon quickly comprehended, Krogh said, that "the reach of the federal government's power in law enforcement did not penetrate to the state or local level ... where most of the street crime people were afraid of existed" [...]

The new strategy thus emerged. Ehrlichman suggested to Krogh that since "there were clear limits on what the federal government could do," the alternative was to "jawbone ... to stimulate action at the state and local level simply by making the issue [verbally]." Though the administration lacked the "tools" actually to reduce crime, it could wage a symbolic war on crime. In 1974 Krogh explained to me that during the first year of Nixon's administration, a whole range of "symbolic strategies" were discussed. Harsh-sounding legislation could be proposed to Congress which would have little effect on law enforcement but would greatly enhance the administration's public reputation for toughness (and if Congress failed to enact these laws, it could be blamed for "softness" toward crime). Repressive-sounding words such as "preventive detention" could be bandied about by administration officials, thus provoking an outcry in the "liberal press" which would add to the appearance of the relentless war on crime by the administration. A presidential spokesman could also directly attack judges in the courts for being sympathetic to criminals in order to make the administration seem, by contrast, hardline. The Nixon strategists thus decided early on that though they could not directly reduce street crime in America, they could gain enormous publicity for their crime offensive by calling attention to their repressive-sounding plans and ideas for law enforcement, and thereby create a bete noire for the liberal press to focus on.

Yep, the whole fucking thing was premised on a PR campaign---a bureaucratic extension of a GOP political operation to improve a President's re-election chances by pretending to get tough on crime while baiting the mainstream press in the process. Naturally, our watchdog media swallowed it whole. And we have spent God-knows-how-many-tens-of-billions of dollars to keep it alive since Operation Intercept. Then, as now, nothing much changes, eh?

---Vitelius