The computerized system will coordinate records gathered by the police and spy agencies involving 1.2 million cops and government agents at federal, state, and local levels.

The program is the latest step taken by Washington to expand domestic spying and attacks on political rights carried out by the government in the name of “fighting terrorism.”

U.S. president George Bush and other government officials first proposed the plan in 2002. It has received its most forceful boost from Democrats, however, who have used the hearings of the 9-11 Congressional commission to argue that because of “intelligence failures” the Bush administration was unable to prevent the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The alleged failures include not sharing records across the board between various spy agencies and the police.

“No single agency or government alone can win the war on terrorism,” said Ashcroft at the May 14 news conference in Washington, D.C.

Related steps include the government’s demand for airlines to turn over passenger records, a national registration system for immigrants entering the country, and steps towards the implementation of a national identification card. They are all aimed at greater government control of information and access to it for all cop agencies spying at home and abroad.

Since many FBI and other police records are based on allegations by informers, these steps will further legitimize, and elevate to the level of facts, rumors and innuendo by spies. One result will be the arrest and victimization of thousands on charges of “terrorism” with no evidence. The most recent example of this was the arrest in March by the FBI and jailing for two weeks of Brandon Mayfield, a lawyer from Aloha, Oregon. The FBI alleged that his fingerprints matched prints on a plastic bag found near the scene of the recent train bombing in Madrid and argued for his detention as a “material witness” to the crime. On May 24, a federal judge in Portland, Oregon, threw out the case against Mayfield, who is a converted Muslim and is married to a woman from Egypt. The FBI said it had made an error in matching the fingerprints—claiming the mistake stemmed from the poor quality of a digital image of the print sent from Spain—and issued a formal apology to Mayfield.

Building on the bipartisan momentum provided by the ongoing congressional intelligence hearings on the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, said, “We must end the multiple watch lists.” In a statement posted in his campaign website in response to the White House plan, Kerry pledged to create a Director of National Intelligence with “real control” of all national intelligence personnel and budgets, if he is elected.

Kerry has also extended his support to renewing and strengthening the USA Patriot Act, which Congress will vote on in the coming year.

The Patriot Act allows police to carry out arbitrary searches and seizures in private homes and businesses, expands the powers of police agencies to wiretap phones and personal e-mail, and authorizes police to jail immigrants without charges as “terrorist suspects,” among other provisions.

The “watch lists” Kerry referred to include the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), and the immigration department IDENT fingerprinting databases, which the government is also working to merge.  
 
 
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