posted 09-30-2003 02:06 PM            

MAY I SEE YOUR PAPERS PLEASE?

THE SOVIETIZATION OF AMERICA CONTINUES

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MCCAFFREY: "Every American should carry a card with a "biometric" chip, meaning one that would match a person's physical makeup with the card."

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666

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001752499_mccaffrey30m.html

Ex-government insider backs national-ID card.

By J. Patrick Coolican
Seattle Times staff reporter

Barry McCaffrey

Former drug czar and retired general Barry McCaffrey yesterday blasted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for overextending the American military. He also unapologetically called for a national-ID card, more surveillance of public spaces and billions of dollars more for homeland security and national defense.

Speaking to a group of security professionals and entrepreneurs at the Museum of Flight in Seattle, McCaffrey offered a sometimes stinging assessment of military and homeland-security needs.

The nation is safer as a result of the war in Iraq, McCaffrey said.

And though he praised Rumsfeld's energy and love of country, he said his "judgment is suspect, and he has trouble listening to other people's ideas."

Rumsfeld has ignored uniformed officers' advice that the Pentagon needs more active-duty combat troops. Citing North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan and other hot spots, "We're going off a cliff in a year," warned McCaffrey, who led the 24th Infantry Division during the 1991 Gulf War.

Like some former public servants, the retired four-star general now helps private-sector clients negotiate what he called the "Byzantine" labyrinth of government bureaucracy as a consultant. He's also an instructor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and an NBC analyst; he also sits on several corporate boards, including Fleishman-Hillard, a public-relations firm that organized yesterday's briefing of about 25 executives.

The United States is more secure now than on Sept. 10, 2001, but largely because of work abroad, McCaffrey said.

"The CIA and FBI and the armed forces are working much better than the domestic side in terms of funding and political energy," McCaffrey said in an interview before the briefing. "We have a lack of legislation to deal with the modern age."

He proposed a national-ID card to tighten up borders. "If you've got 350 million people flooding in and out of the border, how do you sort out illegals and terrorists and protect the Bill of Rights? We need a national-ID card." He said every American should carry a card with a "biometric" chip, meaning one that would match a person's physical makeup with the card.

Civil libertarians disagreed. "A national-ID card is a terrible idea," said Timothy Lynch, criminal-justice director at the libertarian Cato Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. "It would require more than 200 million Americans to surrender their privacy and freedom for something that won't work. It can easily be defeated by determined terrorists."

McCaffrey endorsed the USA Patriot Act, passed swiftly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that gives law enforcement more surveillance powers.

McCaffrey, who still wears a tightly cropped military haircut and speaks bluntly, called some opposition to the Patriot Act "hysteria."

A spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union disagreed. "I think he's out of step with 160 cities and three state legislatures, who've passed resolutions objecting to the Patriot Act," said Doug Honig, spokesman of the Seattle chapter.

McCaffrey said state and local police need federal funding to improve surveillance techniques. "You watch a wiretap operation (local police) are running compared to an armed-forces international intercept, and it's pathetic," he said, adding that the government should also install more video cameras in public places.

"This just gets us closer to a surveillance state," Lynch replied.

McCaffrey, who was director of National Drug Control Policy in the Clinton administration, said there was a new convergence of terrorism, crime and drugs.

"If you want real money, you have to deal drugs," he said. Drug profits are corrupting democratic societies, he said, and added that the federal government must work closer with local law enforcement on drugs and terrorism.

"The local police department has the maids, the cabbies, the dirt bags — that's the local intelligence," he said.

According to the Cato Institute's Lynch, it is the war on drugs that has created a massive black market and given al-Qaida and other terror groups opportunities for huge, terror-funding profits.