Big Brother is Watching - 10 January 2003

Just before Christmas, in the dying hours of the old Congress, a new department of government called Homeland Security was established by law.

An enormous undertaking, it brought together all the old government departments that had to do with the safety, the security of the country from airplane baggage handlers to the CIA, the Coastguard, counter-terrorist squads.

And it added one or two more departments and one in particular that slipped through the Congress without protest or notice.

It was tucked away in the suffocating bedclothes of the law and given a name worthy only of George Orwell and his Big Brother government.

It's called the Information Awareness Office of the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency.

How we love elephantine Latinisms. Does anyone remember when idle or lazy boys were so-called and told to pull their socks up?

Today in this country they're diagnosed as victims of attention deficit syndrome and treated at public expense accordingly - maybe with tranquillisers or, with luck, nitro-glycerine - that would get them going. In tiny quantities of course.

Well the Information Awareness Office.

It has the power to keep extensive government files on anybody in the country who gives off a whiff of suspicion.

This means your bank account, your medical records, telephone calls, correspondence with lawyers, bookies, friends, e-mails to anybody.

Isn't this illegal, doesn't it come under the Constitution's protection?

It is and it does - or did. No longer.

And that's what stirred a small rumpus from commentators right, left and centre.

It appeared to some people that in the new Congress, which assembled this week, the Democrats would have a ready-to-hand issue to oppose and deplore.

I assumed the department would never be funded. But an old reporter friend told me: "Oh no, he's sitting in his office right now with a preliminary $150m budget."

The plot thickens and takes on a very tasty flavour when you realise who he - the appointed head of this department - is.

He is - was - a convicted felon.

Anyone remember the Iran-Contra scandal in which a marine colonel was on trial for illegally passing money from arms sales to Iran to help the Nicaraguan rebels?

It sounds dull and complicated now but it was simple and horrifying at the time.

Because the haunting suspicion, all through the trial, was that President Reagan himself had approved this illegal act.

However the president, questioned in a deposition, failed to recall anything to do with it.

Incidentally it could well be that he was telling the absolute truth. His testimony, looked at now, gave signs that he was already showing early symptoms of senile dementia.

Anyway one Admiral Poindexter, involved in the affair, now stepped in to save the president.

In exchange for a grant of immunity from prosecution he confessed that he was the presidential aide who'd given the order and approved the funds.

His felony conviction was overturned and so far as most of us knew he vanished into obscurity - a lucky villain to some people, a hero to others, for taking all the blame.

Well now the first we'd heard from him since the Iran-Contra mess was the news that he'd been appointed by President Bush to head up this ghoulish Information Awareness Office.

As I speak nobody, no congressman, has risen in an explosion of righteous indignation to declare Admiral Poindexter's office an abomination, a downright assault on civil liberties.

It may be they're waiting for the outcome of a comical plot thought up by a San Francisco newspaper columnist. This is what happened.

One Matthew Smith - I think he deserves to be identified - a journalist, thought he'd look into the new office and get Admiral Poindexter's view of how it will proceed and why it had managed to legalise so many invasions of privacy.

Mr Smith telephoned the Admiral but only Mrs Poindexter was at home. Too bad.

Not really. Mr Smith now had the Poindexter home number and he printed it in his next column, begging his readers to ask their own questions of the admiral.

Just think of the possibilities. Does the admiral watch cartoons, violent video games, why does he need to know about that embarrassing operation I had, why must he know what drugs we buy at the pharmacy, and so on?

Well Mr Smith's readers responded with a will. The Poindexters' telephone was as busy as a teenager's. They had to disconnect it.

But the mischief makers were not foiled. They put on the web a photograph of the Poindexters' house and lots of identifying details.

At the moment the issue is in suspense. Maybe the Democrats will not need to mount a crusade to abolish Orwellian Office of Awareness. Maybe it will die in a storm of public ridicule.

In the holiday break between the old Congress and the new, there was an announcement from the Bush administration which to most Americans would have been a stunner if they'd not been busy shovelling snow and opening presents and in general taking a holiday from thoughts of government.

Here, from the Republicans - from a party which for most of a century has stood for individualism, the free market, for Thomas Jefferson's ideal of as little government as possible - came a federal order of a magnitude I can't match since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

The federal government told the largest, most populous state that it could no longer keep to itself its own water supply, even though it was claiming a shortage; it is taking too much from the Colorado River and California would have to share it with five other - the largest western states.

Throughout history water has been the fount, the spring, of the Far West's growth and prosperity.

Here is the opening sentence of a famous book on the history of Los Angeles:

"Los Angeles, sometimes called 50-odd suburbs in search of a city, has a population of three and a half million people but in area it verges on 500 square miles, the physically largest city in America.

People often wonder why - the answer is water."

Water has always been the blessing and the bane of the Far West. And the lack of it the reason why the desert states of Nevada, Arizona remain so scantily populated.

Not, I hasten to say, because a third of the Far West is desert but because there is not enough water to make it blossom.

Desert land is extremely fertile. The folk saying "spit on the desert and watch a flower grow" is not too much of an overstatement.

But no city can become a big city once the neighbouring artesian wells and underground streams have been exhausted.

Such a crisis fell on Los Angeles just a century ago.

With the discovery of oil, the rapid development of motion pictures and the state's being the central market for a vast variety of fruits and vegetables Los Angeles was ready to bound into prosperity.

But it had drained all the available water.

It now found all the water it needed 250 miles to the north and east from a great river - the Owens River running through a huge arid valley, a river edged with a long rim of small settlements of prosperous farmers.

In a famous move, both audacious and sordid, real estate men, city officials in the water department, and others, went buying up land all along the Owens Valley, under the pretence of looking for sites for federal storage basins and dams.

They planned the longest aqueduct in the world and in 15 years they built it.

Need I say that the Owens Valley farmers languished, went bust, or gave up and the valley returned to a vast, barren, windswept waste.

Meanwhile Los Angeles could offer water to little towns 40 miles away if they would agree to be incorporated as "Los Angeles".

When I read the announcement about California's having to share its water with Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, I was jolted back to a personal memory, an unforgettable assignment exactly 60 years ago.

1942. America had been in the second war for five months. 1943.

From the early days, after Pearl Harbour, all the able-bodied Japanese - young, middle-aged, some old - who lived on the coast and did a great deal of the farming, had been rounded up and sent off to so-called relocation centres, camps, far off in the inland mountains.

I drove off one morning from Los Angeles up north, over the Tehachapi Mountains, into the Owens Valley and visited one of the largest camps where the Japanese were set up in small, individual little houses, shanties. The next year I found they'd all built little gardens in front of them.

It was very like a children's summer camp - as to dining halls, sanitation, playground, hospital, hall for religious services and so on.

I was saddened to see the Japanese so isolated, so set apart, though everybody else at the time, including Franklin Roosevelt, thought the sequestering was necessary.

On the drive back I stopped at the southern end of the valley at an obviously old gas - petrol - station, a lonely run down one storey building in a bare landscape.

I went into the men's room and was startled to see on a wooden panel nailed above the toilet a sign. It had been burnt, branded, into the wood, possibly with a red hot poker.

In clumsy but eloquent letters it said: "Please don't flush the toilet, Los Angeles needs the water."

Probably 20, 30-some years old - one farmer's bitter protest against the city that stole his river and his livelihood.

That assignment, I now realise, is one of the very few stories I've covered that has come full circle, like a happy ending Hollywood movie.

The Supreme Court made formal apology to all the Japanese families that had been encamped and paid handsome money settlements.

And Los Angeles, the thief of the Owens River, has been ordered by the federal government to give back and share its water and the power that can come from it.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.