DoD Didn’t Mean to Snoop on Antiwar Activists, Honest

Kurt Nimmo
Oct. 14, 2006

According to Maj. Patrick Ryder of the Department of Defense, or the Department of Illegal Invasion and Occupation, the â€œquestionable” collection of data on antiwar organizations and individuals, revealed by the American Civil Liberties Union under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, has “led to a tightening of military procedures to ensure that only information relevant to terrorism and other threats” is collected.

If you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you.

More likely, this revelation will lead to a “tightening of military procedures” to make sure such activity is not subject to Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, as we can expect the Pentagon to continue this practice. Snooping on Americans exercising their First Amendment right is not an “accident” or “questionable,” but business as usual, as the American people, or those who disagree with the government, are considered the enemy.

“A document first disclosed last December by NBC News showed that the military had maintained a database, known as Talon, containing information about more than 1,500 ’suspicious incidents’ around the country in 2004 and 2005,” the New York Times continues. “Dozens of alerts on antiwar meetings and peaceful protests appear to have remained in the database even after analysts had decided that they posed no threat to military bases or personnel.”

Reading the New York Times, you get the idea this is little more than “questionable” behavior on the part of a few over zealous individuals at the Department of Defense.

Earlier this year, however, we learned that the Ministry of Homeland Security was in on the act, providing the Department of Defense with information on antiwar protests. “Homeland Security was created to protect the American people from terrorist activities—not monitor political dissent on college campuses,” Mark Schlosberg, Police Practices Policy Director of the ACLU-NC, said in an ACLU press release in July. “These documents raise significant questions about the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring anti-war activities.”

In fact, the Ministry of Homeland—or, more apropos, the Ministry of Fatherland Security—was designed specifically to deal with the “terrorist threat” posed by domestic organizations and individuals opposed to the government, as there is not a threat posed by “al-Qaeda” terrorists, that is short of the government pulling off a terrorist event blamed on the largely mythical terrorist organization.

In 2004, the Congressional Quarterly, Christian Science Monitor, Wired, and others reported on Senate bill S. 2386, the Intelligence Authorization for 2005, to allow domestic spying by the Department of Defense. “Senate Report 108-258 accompanying the bill describes in Section 502 why DoD needs to have domestic spying prohibition lifted: so DoD can do what the CIA does!” notes Cryptome. Section 502 of the bill “provides a necessary Defense intelligence exemption to a provision of the Privacy Act.”

“The Pentagon has long had the authority to conduct intelligence within the United States to protect its military personnel or bases against an attack, according to experts. But, during the Vietnam War, a scandal broke out when it was revealed that military agents had spied on civilians as well as soldiers for their political beliefs instead of their threat to the Defense Department’s security,” writes Justin Rood for CQ Homeland Security. “Following the 1970 revelations of Christopher Pyle, then a graduate student at Columbia University, that the Pentagon spied against antiwar groups in the 1960s, Congress held hearings that resulted in recommendations that the Defense Department be barred from conducting domestic intelligence. But no new laws were created specifically prohibiting the practice.”

"The Pentagon gave [Congress] strong assurances they would not return to domestic spying on civilian political activity,” Pyle, now a professor at Mount Holyoke College, said by telephone Tuesday.

In 1974, the Privacy Act (PL 93-579) was signed into law, requiring representatives from most government agencies—including the Defense Department—to identify themselves when they collect information on U.S. citizens and legal resident aliens, and to identify the purpose of their information collection.

But language inserted in the Senate version of the intelligence authorization bill would exempt the Defense Department from those provisions, opening the door to an expanded authority to surreptitiously collect information on U.S. residents.

The change is necessary “to improve the ability of intelligence personnel of the Department of Defense to recruit sources,” according to the committee report accompanying the bill.

Defense Department compliance with the Privacy Act provisions “poses . . . risks to Defense intelligence personnel and to the Defense Department’s human intelligence mission,” the report states.

There is also the risk of not being able to get people to talk to them.

“Typically,” Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) spokesman Donald Black explained, “people are more inclined to open up and offer information if they don’t feel threatened, quote unquote.”

“Scratch that last comment,” Black added. “People are more inclined to be open in a casual conversation, as opposed to if they feel like they’re being interrogated.”

An official with the Office of the Secretary of Defense put it more directly (but only on the condition that neither his name nor his title be used, because, he said, he had not spoken with an expert on the topic).

“In some cases, when you reveal you’re an intelligence agent, people no longer talk to you,” the official said. “If a person has nothing to hide, then they should have no reason not to talk to you.”

In other words, if you refuse to talk with DoD operatives, you must have something to hide. If you refuse to cooperative with the Pentagon, you must be in league with Osama and crew.

Of course, now that habeas corpus is dead in the water, and much of the rest of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is dormant, the government will be able to get over this hurdle by simply abducting (or disappearing) a person reluctant to talk, ship him off to a dungeon, and use a little waterboarding to loosen his lips.

But not to worry. “Our intelligence capability is purely analytical,” a Northcom official told CQ Homeland Security.

“There is one law that appears to clearly limit the Pentagon’s ability to spy on Americans: The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 prohibits the Defense Department from engaging in law enforcement activity, and various court rulings have applied that to surveillance functions in support of law enforcement efforts,” Rood continues.

Obviously, the military does not follow or respect this law, as it is considered little more than a “procedural formality.” According to Major Craig T. Trebilcock, U.S. Army Reserve, Posse Comitatus is a myth. “Through a gradual erosion of the actâ€™s prohibitions over the past 20 years, posse comitatus today is more of a procedural formality than an actual impediment to the use of U.S. military forces in homeland defense,” Trebilcock wrote in October, 2000, well before “everything changed.”

As for the newly redefined purpose of Posse Comitatus, ask any resident who stayed in New Orleans after Katrina.

Mr. Trebilcock continues:

The Posse Comitatus Act was passed in an era when the threat to national security came primarily from the standing armies and navies of foreign powers. Today the equation for national defense and security has changed significantly. With the fall of the Soviet Union our attention has been diverted—from the threat of aggression by massed armies crossing the plains of Europe to the security of our own soil against biological or chemical terrorism. Rather than focusing on massed Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles as our most imminent threat, we are increasingly more aware of the destructive potential of new forms of asymmetric warfare.

In fact, the Posse Comitatus Act was passed in 1878 after the end of Reconstruction. “The Act was intended to prohibit Federal troops from supervising elections in former Confederate states,” explains Wikipedia. “It generally prohibits Federal military personnel and units of the United States National Guard under Federal authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within the United States, except where expressly authorized by the Constitution or Congress. The Posse Comitatus Act and the Insurrection Act substantially limit the powers of the Federal government to use the military for law enforcement.”

In short, it has nothing to do with “the threat to national security” posed by “standing armies and navies of foreign powers.”

Mr. Trebilcock needs to read his history a bit more closely.

“As I have said, much of the growth now affecting our intelligence and security apparatus is driven by technology, and would be going on even in the absence of the genuine threats of terrorism,” Christopher Pyle writes for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee. “Fear of terrorism has destroyed our sense of proportion. Few people stop to consider how many terrorists there are likely to be in the United States. If there are only a few dozen, or even a few hundred, then law enforcement (including law enforcement intelligence) is probably the best response. But if there are 120,000 potential terrorists in the U.S. alone, as MATRIX [the Multi-State Terrorist Information Exchange] alleges based on its handy-dandy computer algorithms, then we probably need to chuck the Constitution and militarize our society.”

Of course, if there were that many potential terrorists, then we would probably have experienced some attacks during the past three years. The absence of any attacks suggests that their numbers are small. So, too, does the Justice Departmentâ€™ failure to prosecute anyone special, despite extravagant claims to the contrary. Even the Departmentâ€™s defense of the Patriot Act is based on examples drawn from the war on crime, not the war on terrorism.

Either small, non-existent, or completely illusory, it is a case of smoke and mirrors designed to strike fear into the hearts of clueless Americans, plugged into the corporate media Borg Hive, and convince them we need pervasive surveillance, Ã la Orwell’s Big Brother, for their own safety, never mind there are no terrorists lurking about with radiological suitcases, or does there exist an “al-Qaeda” version of Dr. Peters, the mad scientist of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, ready to release a deadly virus on the world.

Unfortunately, Christopher H. Pyle seems to believe the pervasive snoop state is a bureaucratic phenomenon, one at odds with the threat we face, that is to say the illusory threat of “al-Qaeda” and the manufactured challenge of jihadist terrorism.

In fact, as history demonstrates, the snoop state exists because our rulers are determined to eliminate all effective opposition.

Operation CHAOS, Project RESISTANCE, MERRIMAC, and COINTELPRO, to mention but the most obvious, were initiated and unleashed explicitly to “expose,” “neutralize” and “disrupt” (as the FBI put it) opposition and resistance.

Lt. Col. Oliver North, now the darling of Fox News (thus demonstrating crime pays), “funded and orchestrated from the White House basement break-ins and other ‘dirty tricks’ to defeat congressional critics of U.S. policy in Central America and to neutralize grassroots protest,” as Mike Cassidy and Will Miller note. It was a deliberate and focused effort, not a case of bureaucracy spiraling out of control. “North also helped other administration officials at the Federal Emergency Management Administration develop contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, establishing martial law, and holding political dissidents in concentration camps in the event of ‘national opposition against a U.S. military invasion abroad.’ There were reports of similar activities and preparations in response to the opposition to the Gulf War in 1991.” As the above indicates, the Department of Defense continues this fascistic behavior, and will continue to do so.

Maj. Patrick Ryder may apologize and offer his assurance that TALON and other databases will not be used against Americans, but this is simply a rather transparent public relations stunt in response to embarrassing revelations brought to light, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, increasingly enfeebled.

As Tom Blanton, director of the nonpartisan National Security Archives at George Washington University, stated in 2004, the “Bush administration is mounting the most sustained assault on open government since President Gerald Ford vetoed the FOIA amendments in 1974,” most notably under the cover of Executive Order 13233, the so-called Presidential Records Act.

History is dangerous and must be kept under lock and key, lest the people learn the true nature of the state and its continual malfeasance against the people.

In Orwell’s 1984, the novel’s protagonist, Winston Smith, as a worker drone at the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, knows the state creates and modifies history, as all information contrary to the dictates of the state is habitually relegated to the memory hole.

“The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control’, they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink’.”