… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

This latest move by the administration follows a pattern replicated countless times by Obama since assuming the presidency in January: denounce the lawless behavior of his Oval Office predecessor while continuing, even expanding, the reach of unaccountable security agencies that subvert constitutional guarantees barring “unreasonable searches and seizures.” EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston wrote:

In a Court filing late Friday night, the Obama Administration attempted to dress up in new clothes its embrace of one of the worst Bush Administration positions–that courts cannot be allowed to review the National Security Agency’s massive, well-documented program of warrantless surveillance. In doing so it demonstrated that it will not willingly set limits on its own power and reinforced the need for Congress to step in and reform the so-called ’state secrets’ privilege. (Kevin Bankston, “As Congress Considers State Secrets Reform, Obama Admin Tries to Shut Down Yet Another Warrantless Wiretapping Lawsuit,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, November 2, 2009)

In June, Judge Walker dismissed EFF’s landmark Hepting v. AT&T lawsuit, when he ruled that the telecoms enjoyed immunity from liability after the Democratic-controlled Congress rammed through the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA) in July 2008.

That law, passed in response to citizen challenges to the state and their corporate partners in crime, granted the Attorney General exclusive power to require dismissal of the lawsuits “if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president,” the civil liberties’ watchdog group wrote in June.

In essence, it is not the co-equal and independent federal Judiciary that determines whether or not a crime has been committed that flaunts constitutional norms but rather, an unchallengeable assertion by an imperial Executive Branch.

As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, this craven capitulation by Congress to the Executive locks in place the statutory machinery for a presidential dictatorship, one where power is wielded with neither transparency nor accountability.

EFF’s Jewel v. NSA civil suit, brought on behalf of AT&T customers to halt the firm’s ongoing collaboration with the government’s illegal surveillance continues–for the moment.

In April however, taking a page from the Bush/Cheney playbook, the Obama administration argued that this lawsuit too, must be dismissed, claiming that should the litigation go forward it would require government disclosure of “privileged state secrets.”

Antifascist Calling reported at the time that the Obama administration has argued that under provisions of the disgraceful USA PATRIOT Act, the state is “immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act.”

Claiming “sovereign immunity” in practice, this means that under DoJ’s ludicrous interpretation of the Orwellian PATRIOT Act, the government can never be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statute. As Salon pointed out:

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad “state secrets” privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and–even if what they’re doing is blatantly illegal and they know it’s illegal–you are barred from suing them unless they “willfully disclose” to the public what they have learned. (Glenn Greenwald, “New and worse secrecy and immunity claims from the Obama DOJ,” Salon, April 6, 2009)

The “change” regime’s cynical maneuver to have Shubert kicked to the curb is all the more remarkable considering that the Justice Department announced a month earlier that the administration will “impose new limits on the government assertion of the state secrets privilege used to block lawsuits for national security reasons,” The New York Times reported.

“Under the new policy,” investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote, “if an agency like the National Security Agency or the Central Intelligence Agency wanted to block evidence or a lawsuit on state secrets grounds, it would present an evidentiary memorandum describing its reasons to the assistant attorney general for the division handling the lawsuit in question.”

According to the Times, “if that official recommended approving the request” it would be sent on to a high-level committee comprised of DoJ officials who would be charged “whether the disclosure of information would risk ’significant harm’ to national security.”

Under the new guidelines, Justice Department officials are supposed to reject the request to deploy the state secrets privilege to quash lawsuits if the Executive Branch’s motivation for doing so would “conceal violations of the law, inefficiency or administrative error” or to “prevent embarrassment.”

While Holder has claimed DoJ’s so-called “high-level committee” has reviewed the relevant material and concluded that disclosure would risk “significant harm” to “national security” if the case went forward, security analyst Steven Aftergood wrote in Secrecy News that “one aspect of the new policy that he did not address was the question of referral of the alleged misconduct to an agency inspector general for investigation.”

This is supposed to occur whenever “invocation of the privilege would preclude adjudication of particular claims,” as it certainly does in the Shubert litigation, particularly when the “case raises credible allegations of government wrongdoing.”

However as Aftergood avers, “somewhat artfully” (although this writer prefers a stronger phrase to describe the Attorney General’s actions) “the government denies that any such collection occurred ‘under the Terrorist Surveillance Program,’ implicitly allowing for the possibility that it may have occurred under some other framework.”

What that “other framework” is hasn’t been specified; however, in all probability it relates to other NSA above top secret Special Access Programs which haven’t come to light.

Whatever the secret state is continuing to do under Obama, a recent piece in InformationWeek provides striking details that it is massive.

The publication reports that the NSA “will soon break ground on a data center in Utah that’s budgeted to cost $1.5 billion.”

According to InformationWeek, the new facility will “provide intelligence and warnings related to cybersecurity threats, cybersecurity support to defense and civilian agency networks, and technical assistance to the Department of Homeland Security.”

The new data center will be located at Camp Williams, a National Guard training facility 26 miles from Salt Lake City in the conservative state of Utah. While providing few details on how NSA will use the 1.5 million square foot center, Glenn Gaffney, a deputy director of intelligence with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), claims that NSA will “protect civil liberties.”

“We will accomplish this in full compliance with the U.S. Constitution and federal law and while observing strict guidelines that protect the privacy and civil liberties of the American people,” Gaffney said.

As with other pronouncements by intelligence officials, Gaffney’s statement should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

The New York Times revealed in April and June that the ultra-spooky agency “intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year.”

Indeed, a former NSA analyst told investigative journalists James Risen and Eric Lichtblau that he was “trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants.”

We do know that NSA’s STELLAR WIND and PINWALE intercept programs are giant data mining vacuum cleaners that sift emails, faxes, and text messages of millions of people in the United States. These programs are not, as the Bush and now, the Obama regime mendaciously claim, primarily “targeting al-Qaeda.”

As Cryptohippie points out in their analysis of current global surveillance trends, “an electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.”

Answering those who claim they have “nothing to hide,” Cryptohippie argues that “state use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence” is primarily for use “against its citizens.”

Indeed, the information gathered by the secret state and stored in huge data warehouses scattered across the country “is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial,” and “it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.”

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database. (Cryptohippie, The Electronic Police State: 2008 National Rankings, no date)

How does this “quiet, pristine” system operate? As AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit that described how the company physically split and copied the traffic that flowed into its offices, NSA was virtually duplicating, sifting and storing the entire Internet. Klein wrote in his self-published book:

What screams out at you when examining this physical arrangement is that the NSA was vacuuming up everything flowing in the Internet stream: e-mail, web browsing, Voice-Over-Internet phone calls, pictures, streaming video, you name it. The splitter has no intelligence at all, it just makes a blind copy. There could not possibly be a legal warrant for this, since according to the 4th Amendment warrants have to be specific, “particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” …

This was a massive blind copying of the communications of millions of people, foreign and domestic, randomly mixed together. From a legal standpoint, it does not matter what they claim to throw away later in the their secret rooms, the violation has already occurred at the splitter. (Mark Klein, Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine… And Fighting It, Charleston, South Carolina: BookSurge, 2009, pp. 38-39.)

Klein’s revelations were confirmed by former NSA analyst and whistleblower Russell Tice, who told MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann in January that the NSA “had access to all Americans’ communications” and spied “24/7″ on domestic political activist groups and “U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.”

In demanding that the independent federal judiciary toss these cases, the Obama administration is asserting a broad interpretation of Executive Branch privileges that caused much outrage and hand-wringing by congressional Democrats–when they were out of power.

Under the “change” regime however, what were once viewed by Democrats and their supporters as prime examples of Bushist lawlessness and contempt for constitutional safeguards, are now deemed vital state secrets that “protect” the American people, even as the capitalist state wages an endless “War on Terror” to seize other people’s resources for geostrategic advantage over the competition. As Glenn Greenwald wrote:

That was the principal authoritarian instrument used by Bush/Cheney to shield itself from judicial accountability, and it is now the instrument used by the Obama DOJ to do the same. Initially, consider this: if Obama’s argument is true–that national security would be severely damaged from any disclosures about the government’s surveillance activities, even when criminal–doesn’t that mean that the Bush administration and its right-wing followers were correct all along when they insisted that The New York Times had damaged American national security by revealing the existence of the illegal NSA program? Isn’t that the logical conclusion from Obama’s claim that no court can adjudicate the legality of the program without making us Unsafe? (Glenn Greenwald, “Obama’s latest use of ’secrecy’ to shield presidential lawbreaking,” Salon, November 1, 2009)

Democrat or Republican, “liberal” or “conservative:” what matters most for all factions in Washington is the defense and preservation of the class privileges of the capitalist elite.

Criminality on such a scale requires that the armed fist of the state is mobilized and ever-vigilant; ready at the nonce to crush anyone who would challenge the prerogatives of our masters.

Taking a page from America’s political police force, the FBI, the British state is beefing-up an ever-growing watch list of “domestic extremists.”

As we know, that trend has taken on a Kafkaesque life of its own here in the heimat. Secrecy News reports that during a Q&A last year with the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller told the panel that each day between March 2008 and March 2009, “there were an average of more than 1,600 nominations for inclusion on the [Terrorist] watch list.”

With this in mind, The Guardian published a series of extraordinary reports that revealed the mass monitoring of legal political activities by British citizens by the secret state.

Investigative journalists Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor provided chilling details how police and corporate spies “are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.”

Are these activists part of a shadowy network of al-Qaeda “sleeper cells” or environmental saboteurs intent on bringing Britain to its knees by targeting critical infrastructure?

Hardly! According to The Guardian, a “hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor ‘domestic extremists’,” one that stores this information “on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.”

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the ‘terrorism and allied matters’ committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100. (Paul Lewis, Rob Evans and Matthew Taylor, “Police in £9m scheme to log ‘domestic extremists’,” The Guardian, October 25, 2009)

That’s a lot of boodle to spy on antiwar activists, environmentalists, arms’ trade opponents and the state’s usual suspects–anarchists, socialists and labor militants.

As the journalists point out, the phrase “domestic extremism” is not a lawful term. In fact, the widespread use of the term is a demonstration of how powerful constituencies have perverted law, thus creating their own all-embracing interpretation of the role of protest in a democratic society.

Indeed, senior officers “describe domestic extremists as individuals or groups ‘that carry out criminal acts of direct action in furtherance of a campaign. These people and activities usually seek to prevent something from happening or to change legislation or domestic policy, but attempt to do so outside of the normal democratic process’.”

Needless to say, that covers a lot of ground and under these fast and loose standards, it is clear that police intelligence agencies and their political masters are seeking to criminalize long-established forms of citizen action such as demonstrations, sit-ins, public meetings and strikes.

Among the newspaper’s revelations we discover that the National Public Order Intelligence Unit (NPOIU), housed at a secret London office, is a giant database of “protest groups and protesters in the country.”

NPIOU’s brief is “to gather, assess, analyse and disseminate intelligence and information relating to criminal activities in the United Kingdom where there is a threat of crime or to public order which arises from domestic extremism or protest activity”.

Chock-a-block with information gathered by Special Branch officers, corporate spies and paid infiltrators attached to the Confidential Intelligence Unit, ACPO’s national coordinator Anton Setchell told the publication that intelligence collected in England and Wales is shunted to NPIOU which “can read across” all the forces’ intelligence and regurgitate what are called “coherent” assessments.

Additionally, Lewis, Evans and Taylor reported:

• Vehicles associated with protesters are being tracked via a nationwide system of automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras.

• Police surveillance units known as Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT) and Evidence Gatherers, record footage and take photographs of campaigners as they enter and leave openly advertised public meetings. These images are entered on force-wide databases so that police can chronicle the campaigners’ political activities. The information is added to the central NPOIU.

• Surveillance officers are provided with “spotter cards” used to identify the faces of target individuals who police believe are at risk of becoming involved in domestic extremism. Targets include high-profile activists regularly seen taking part in protests. One spotter card, produced by the Met to monitor campaigners against an arms fair, includes a mugshot of the comedian Mark Thomas.

• NPOIU works in tandem with two other little-known Acpo branches, the National Extremism Tactical Coordination Unit (Netcu), which advises thousands of companies on how to manage political campaigns, and the National Domestic Extremism Team, which pools intelligence gathered by investigations into protesters across the country. (The Guardian, op. cit.)

Why would British police target law-abiding citizens exercising their right to protest the depredations of the capitalist order?

Because they can! With a logic that only a policeman’s mother could love, Setchell told The Guardian: “Just because you have no criminal record does not mean that you are not of interest to the police. Everyone who has got a criminal record did not have one once.”

And there you have it: Precrime washes up on Blighty’s fabled shores!

Merchants of Death and the Secret State: Best Friends Forever!

As if to underscore the point that the business of government in the UK, in the United States, indeed everywhere, is business, the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (NETCU) “helps police forces, companies, universities and other bodies that are on the receiving end of protest campaigns.”

Created by the Home Office in 2004, NETCU’s Superintendent Steve Pearl told The Guardian New Labour was “getting really pressurised by big business–pharmaceuticals in particular, and the banks–that they were not able to go about their lawful business because of the extreme criminal behaviour of some people within the animal rights movement.”

But as with all things relating to “security,” once our minders get a taste of what can be gleaned by deploying new technologies, mission creep inevitably follows. Seamlessly traversing the narrow terrain between “animal rights’ extremism” and environmental campaigners, Pearl told the newspaper that the Green movement has now been brought “more on their radar.”

But greens and antiwar activists aren’t the only ones making an appearance in the “domestic extremist” database. What with enterprising capitalist grifters, pardon, defense corporations, making a killing on a planet-wide scale, it should come as no surprise that the scandal-tainted arms manufacturer, BAE, would be keen to get a handle on who might object to their grisly trade.

Indeed, one of the “domestic extremists” listed on the police spotter card as “target X” was in fact “an alleged infiltrator from the arms company BAE.”

According to The Guardian Martin Hogbin “was national co-ordinator for the Campaign against the Arms Trade. He was later accused of supplying information to a company linked to BAE’s security department, but denied the allegation.”

With billions of pounds at stake, Europe’s largest arms manufacturer continues to be caught-up in a decades’ long bribery scandal that spans continents.

And New Labour under Bush’s poodle, former Prime Minister Tony Blair and current PM Gordon Brown, have done everything in their power to suppress BAE’s prosecution by Britain’s Serious Fraud Office. As the World Socialist Web Site reported earlier this month:

Labour has operated a revolving door between powerful companies, financial consultants and Whitehall, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into the civil service, giving the major companies enormous lobbying power. Following pressure from BAE, Rolls Royce and Airbus, the government put a stop to the Export Credit Guarantee Department’s attempts to introduce stronger anti-bribery measures. It took a judicial review to get them reinstated.

The late Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary, famously wrote in his memoirs, “I came to learn that the chairman of BAE appeared to have the key to the garden door to No 10. Certainly I never knew No 10 to come up with any decision that would be incommoding to BAE.” (Jean Shaoul, “Britain: BAE Systems faces prosecution for bribery,” World Socialist Web Site, October 5, 2009)

That “revolving door” between the secret state, arms manufacturers and the police campaign against protest is spinning ever faster.

When campaigners from the Smash EDO activist group sought to shut down an arms factory near their home, they were in for a shock.

EDO, an American arms’ firm gobbled-up by defense and communications giant ITT Corp. in 2007, reportedly for $1.8 billion according to Washington Technology, pledged to “unite EDO’s business with its own sensing and surveillance capabilities.”

ITT Corp. ranked No. 11 on the publication’s 2009 “Top 100″ list of prime federal contractors with some $2.5 billion in total revenue.

ITT is a piece of work itself. According to Anthony Sampson’s book The Sovereign State of ITT, one of the first American businessmen to pay homage to Adolf Hitler after the Nazis’ 1933 seizure of power was none other than Sosthenses Behn, ITT’s powerful CEO.

During the 1970s, the firm funded the far-right newspaper El Mercurio, the CIA’s propaganda arm that was instrumental in the overthrow of Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Documents published by The National Security Archive, revealed the close collaboration between ITT and the CIA “to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende.”

But that’s all in the past, right? Think again!

Smash EDO avers that “EDO’s military products include bomb racks, release clips and arming mechanisms for warplanes. They have contracts with the UK Ministry of ‘Defence’ and US arms giant Raytheon relating to the release mechanisms of the Paveway bomb system.” Needless to say, the firm’s “products” have been used in facilitating imperialist massacres of civilian populations in Afghanistan and Iraq.

One can see why EDO and parent ITT would be keen on gagging protesters who object to war crimes.

The Guardian reports that the firm, with the assistance of “Timothy Lawson-Cruttenden (nicknamed TLC by activists) has been accused of gagging protesters’ right to demonstrate. The former Household Cavalry officer’s favourite legal weapon is the 1997 Protection from Harassment Act. Numerous companies have hired Lawson-Cruttenden and other City lawyers to injunct protesters under the act, a law originally introduced to protect vulnerable women from stalkers.”

Under British law, protesters who defy draconian high court injunctions can be jailed for up to five years if they break the terms of the court orders.

Lawson-Cruttenden, who claims to have influenced the drafting of the law, obtained an injunction against Smash EDO in 2005 after the attorney worked with Sussex police to frame a statement that would be beneficial to his client, EDO, which claimed the demonstrators had been “intimidating and harassing” company employees.

But as documents obtained by The Guardian show, Lawson-Cruttenden “developed extensive links with many of the police forces across England and Wales to assist with the policing of injunctions”.

Although a high court judge criticized the attorney for obtaining confidential police material, after being hired by EDO he “continued to acquire secret police papers even though the high court judge in the case had ruled that he was not entitled to them, as they were irrelevant.”

Undeterred however, Lawson-Cruttenden obtained assistance from “the National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit (Netcu) which targets ‘domestic extremists’. The head of Netcu, Superintendent Stephen Pearl, has testified for a number of firms which have obtained injunctions.”

The Guardian revealed that private emails “show that Inspector Nic Clay and Jim Sheldrake of Netcu gave Lawson-Cruttenden the names and contact details of officers at two other police forces as he was ‘keen’ to obtain statements about the activities of the campaigners at a third firm.”

Pearl denied that NETCU had provided assistance to EDO and told the newspaper: “Let me make this quite clear: Netcu, or me, were not involved in the EDO injunction in any way.”

When his mendacious statement was exposed by a close reading of the documents, in an obvious climb-down a NETCU spokesperson claimed there had been a “misunderstanding” and that the unit “had not given evidence for the injunction.” Translation: police had “only” leaked the information to a high-priced corporate attorney who did the dirty work.

The firm lost, the injunction was lifted and the company was forced to pay court costs for the Smash EDO protesters.

Despite this minor victory the secret state, fully in cahoots with giant multinational corporations responsible for the current capitalist economic meltdown, endless imperialist wars of conquest and accelerating environmental destruction will continue to index and target citizens who object to capitalism’s systemic criminality.

Federal District Court Judge Jeffrey White denied a motion by the Obama administration that the court issue a 30-day stay to “release records relating to telecom lobbying over last year’s debate over immunity for corporate participation in government spying,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported.

The Justice Department had argued that the Bush, and now, the Obama administration’s Office of Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and Congress were exempt from releasing lobbying records under the Freedom of Information Act, since consultations amongst said grifters were protected as “intra-agency” records.

One might add, since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, a well-funded surveillance-industrial-complex fueled by giant defense firms and the telecommunications industry have, as investigative journalist Tim Shorrock reported back in 2005 “fielded armies of lobbyists to keep the money flowing.”

White’s denial of a motion for a stay followed a startling admission by Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys that America’s telecommunication firms are actually “an arm of the government–at least when it comes to secret spying,” Wired reported October 8. The government had argued that:

“The communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency because the government and the companies have a common interest in the defense of the pending litigation and the communications regarding the immunity provisions concerned that common interest.”

U.S. District Court Judge Jeffery White disagreed and ruled on September 24 that the feds had to release the names of the telecom employees that contacted the Justice Department and the White House to lobby for a get-out-of-court-free card. (Ryan Singel, “Telephone Company Is Arm of Government, Feds Admit in Spy Suit,” Wired, October 8, 2009)

EFF had sued the state in order to discover what role telecom lobbyists played in persuading Congress to grant the nation’s telecommunications’ giants retroactive immunity for their role in illegal spying as part of the Bush, and now, Obama regime’s Presidential Spying Program.

If congressional grifters who have reaped serious campaign contributions from deep-pocket telecoms had not granted companies such as AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and other carriers retroactive immunity, potential privacy breaches and claims from EFF’s Hepting vs. AT&T, and dozens of other lawsuits, could have potentially cost the firms billions in damages.

A federal district court judge dismissed Hepting in June, ruling that the companies had immunity from liability under provisions of the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

In dismissing the state’s motion for a stay in the telecom lobbying records case, EFF senior staff attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote,

On October 8, the day before the documents were due, the DOJ and ODNI filed an emergency motion asking the Court of Appeals for a 30-day stay while the agencies continue to contemplate an appeal. Around noon on October 9, the Ninth Circuit denied their emergency motion, telling the government it had to file for a motion for a stay pending appeal in the district court first.

Later that afternoon, the government filed again in the federal district court, but once again did not seek a stay pending an actual appeal. Instead, for the third time, the government insisted it could delay the release of telecom lobbying records while it considered the pros and cons of appealing. Briefing was complete by noon today, and Judge White denied the third attempt at delay this afternoon. (Kurt Opsahl, “Federal Court Denies Government Attempt to Delay Release of Telecom Records. Again.,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, News Update, October 13, 2009)

Judge White noted that the Obama administration’s cynical “directive on transparency in government” applied to “the warrantless wiretapping program” and insisted that the “public interest lies in favor of disclosure” of pertinent lobbying records.

The ruling is all the more remarkable when one considers that Judge White was appointed to the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, the most civil liberties’ friendly court in the nation, by none other than world class war criminal and corrupter-in-chief, George W. Bush.

Corrupting Congress, Subverting the Bill of Rights

Last year, Antifascist Calling reported that the congressional watchdog group, MAPLight, published a list of campaign contributions to congressional Democrats who had changed their votes on FAA’s crucial retroactive immunity provision.

Significantly, then congressman and current White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, pulled-in some $28,000, “blue dog” Democrat Steny Hoyer “earned” $29,000 while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hardly a slouch when it comes to contributions from her “constituents”–grifting capitalists–raked-in $24,500 from the telecoms.

Analyzing the “change of heart” by congressional Democrats between between the March 14, 2008 vote which rejected retroactive immunity and the June 20, 2008 vote approving it, MAPLight researchers discovered that “Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging: “$8,359 to each Democrat who changed their position to support immunity for Telcos (94 Dems)” and “$4,987 to each Democrat who remained opposed to immunity for Telcos (116 Dems).”

According to MAPLight: “88 percent of the Dems who changed to supporting immunity (83 Dems of the 94) received PAC contributions from Verizon, AT&T, or Sprint during the last three years (Jan. 2005-Mar. 2008).” The group reported that after the June 20 vote, “Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint gave PAC contributions averaging (for all House members): “$9,659 to each member of the House voting “YES” (105-Dem, 188-Rep)” and “$4,810 to each member of the House voting “NO” (128-Dem, 1-Rep).”

Daniel Newman, MAPLight’s Executive Director said at the time: “Campaign contributions bias our legislative system. Simply put, candidates who take positions contrary to industry interests are unlikely to receive industry funds and thus have fewer resources for their election campaigns than those whose votes favor industry interests.”

Proving once again, that ours’ is the best Congress money can buy.

White House Planning “Limited Hangout”

The saga over the release of secret state documents continues to rage out of public sight, even as the corporate media “reports” for endless hours on the (media manufactured) tale of the Colorado “balloon boy.”

So corrupt and degenerated has our political culture become that a simple Google search reveals that as of October 17 there are some 15,000,000 search results available for the term “balloon boy” while only 520,000 hits for the term “EFF warrantless wiretapping.”

As Project Censored notes, modern censorship is defined “as the subtle yet constant and sophisticated manipulation of reality in our mass media outlets. On a daily basis, censorship refers to the intentional non-inclusion of a news story–or piece of a news story–based on anything other than a desire to tell the truth. Such manipulation can take the form of political pressure (from government officials and powerful individuals), economic pressure (from advertisers and funders), and legal pressure (the threat of lawsuits from deep-pocket individuals, corporations, and institutions).”

Clearly, the series of lawsuits by EFF and other civil liberties’ watchdogs challenging the secret state’s pervasive surveillance of the American people is a case study of “intentional non-inclusion” by corporate media.

Nevertheless, the Electronic Frontier Foundation reported October 15, that the Director of National Intelligence and DoJ attorneys “filed yet another emergency motion with the Ninth Circuit, asking for a stay of the deadline to release telecom immunity lobbying documents, less than 24 hours before the documents are due to be released to the public.”

According to the government’s motion, the Executive Branch has refused to disclose the names of telecom lobbyists and company representatives because, get this, “the agencies … invoked Exemption 6 [to the Freedom of Information Act] which protects information about individuals whose disclosure ‘would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy’.” It doesn’t get any cheekier than that even by cynical Washington standards!

DoJ attorneys once again, have resurrected that old chestnut–national security–to conceal the identities of telecom shills and the politicians who do their bidding, claiming that “disclosure of such information would assist our adversaries in drawing inferences about whether certain telecommunications companies may or may not have assisted the government in intelligence-gathering activities.”

In other words, the public’s right to know how our rights are being systematically violated–and who profits–is, by inference, another “tool” that will allow al-Qaeda to kidnap your kids, impose sharia law and detonate a nuke in Wichita!

Indeed, the secret state’s new motion avers that “disclosure of the identities of those individuals and entities that may have assisted, or in the future may assist, the government with intelligence activities could impede the government’s ability to gather intelligence information.”

Meanwhile, Politico reported that the Obama administration “may be on the verge of a major concession in a long-running legal battle over records about so-called telecom immunity.”

A leaked email to the publication, probably by a friendly source inside the White House, reveals that the administration is preparing for “the possible release of some details of the Bush Administration’s lobbying for legislation giving telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits over their involvement in warrantless domestic wiretapping.” (emphasis added)

However, the devil as they say, is in those closely-guarded details. Politico reports that the administration will continue its legal battle “to keep secret the identities of the companies involved in the program.” In other words having lost in the court’s, the administration will move into damage control mode by disclosing a few insignificant “facts” as it camouflages the scope of these illegal programs and continues to conceal the identities of telecom lobbyists and their congressional partners in crime from public scrutiny.

This is nothing less than an updated version of a classic Washington “limited hangout.” The Obama administration’s Justice Department, similar to President Nixon’s sacrificial offering of close advisers to congressional investigators at the height of the Watergate scandal, will leverage these paltry “facts” into an opportunity to appear “transparent,” even as it continues to obfuscate, delay and deny; thus continuing the cover-up.

House legal counsel Irv Nathan informed relevant congressional committees that the White House Counsel’s Office agreed to “provide lawmakers and their staffs with copies of the records being prepared for release in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by an internet-focused civil liberties group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.”

Politico reported that “the move could also be a litigating tactic to surrender some of the less sensitive information in the case in order to bolster the government’s credibility for a determined attempt to protect the most sensitive data: the names of the companies which were seeking immunity.”

According to Nathan, the Justice Department plans “to renew its motion for a stay in the Court of Appeals limited to a very small number of documents, not including the communications with Congress.”

Among the details leaked to Politico, Nathan wrote House leaders: “We understand that there are few, if any, communications from Members that are in the materials. … We have been previously advised that there is nothing very disturbing or embarrassing in these particular communications, but a generalized worry about the precedent this sets for future inter-branch communications.” (emphasis added)

Unfortunately, neither Mr. Nathan nor Politico have revealed what might prove “very disturbing or embarrassing” to members of Congress in the documents the Obama administration plans to withhold.

If past lobbying practices are a signpost for the present, one can hazard an informed guess and conclude that Congress and their Executive Branch counterparts have much to hide.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics OpenSecrets.org database, lobbying by the Telecom Service & Equipment sector, the Telephone Utilities sector and the Computer/Internet sector amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars paid out to congressional grifters between 1998-2009.

Indeed, the “big four” firms caught-up in the warrantless wiretapping scandal have showered Congress with millions in payouts. According to OpenSecrets.org, AT&T contributed some $8,191,618; Verizon Communications showered some $6,830,000; Qualcomm Inc. handed over $3,080,000; Qwest Communications $1,829,542 and Sprint/Nextel coughed-up some $1,306,000 to “our” representatives. By any standard, this is serious money by powerful constituencies not to be trifled with.

Like their Republican colleagues across the aisle, the Democrats have operated a revolving door between powerful corporations, financial institutions and secret state agencies, under the guise of bringing entrepreneurial expertise into government and “security” for our nation’s citizens.

They do neither.

Something as trivial as the rights of the American people to speak their minds, protest endless imperialist wars of aggression, the looting of the economy and the degradation of the environment for profit will however, continue to come under the lens of an out-of-control national security state committed to facilitating the greasing of various palms well into the future.

Take the case of Elliot Madison. The 41-year-old anarchist was arrested in Pittsburgh September 24 at the height of G20 protests.

Madison, a social worker and volunteer with The People’s Law Collective in New York City, was busted by a combined task force led by the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and Pittsburgh’s “finest.” The activist was charged with “hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime,” according to The New York Times.

Did the cops uncover a secret anarchist weapons’ cache? Were Madison and codefendant, Michael Wallschlaeger, a producer with the radio talk show “This Week in Radical History” for the A-Infos Radio Project, about to detonate a “weapon of mass destruction” during last month’s capitalist conclave that witnessed the obscene spectacle of our masters avidly conspiring to impoverish billions of the planet’s inhabitants?

Hardly! In fact, Madison and Wallschlaeger’s “crime” was to set up a communications center in a hotel room that alerted demonstrators to movements by the police, who after all, had viciously attacked protesters–and anyone else nearby–with heavy batons, tear gas and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a so-called “non-lethal” weapon.

Kitted-out with police scanners, computers and cell phones, the intrepid activists used a Twitter account to assist protesters eager to elude a thrashing by some 5,000 heavily armed camo-clad cops who had sealed-off downtown Pittsburgh to keep the area safe–from the First Amendment.

National Lawyers Guild on-scene legal observers reported an “unwarranted display and use of force by police in residential neighborhoods, often far from any protest activity.” According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group:

Police deployed chemical irritants, including CS gas, and long-range acoustic devices (LRAD) in residential neighborhoods on narrow streets where families and small children were exposed. Scores of riot police formed barricades at many intersections throughout neighborhoods miles away from the downtown area and the David Lawrence Convention Center. Outside the Courtyard Marriott in Shadyside, police deployed smoke bombs in the absence of protest activity, forcing bystanders and hotel residents to flee the area.

Later, while some protests were ending, riot-clad officers surrounded an area at the University of Pittsburgh, creating an ominous spectacle that some described as akin to Kent State. Guild legal observers witnessed police chasing and arresting many uninvolved students.

Among other questionable tactics, officers from dozens of law enforcement agencies lacked easily-identifiable badges, impeding citizens’ ability to register complaints. (National Lawyers Guild, “National Lawyers Guild Observes Improper Use of Force by Law Enforcement at the G-20,” Press Release, September 25, 2009)

The Times reported that after his arrest the FBI raided the home that Madison shared with his wife, Elena, and conducted an exhaustive 16-hour search of the premises seizing computers, books and a poster (horror of horrors!) of the old mole himself, Karl Marx.

Criminalizing the First Amendment

“Anyone can tweet, but the truth is, sometimes speech can be criminal,” John Burkoff, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, told The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

By that standard, anyone who has the temerity to question the legitimacy of a system that drives millions into poverty, wages preemptive war to secure (steal) other people’s resources, destroys the environment or uses “speech” to oppose said crimes against humanity–and cheekily urges others to do the same–is, by definition, guilty, in “new normal” America.

Witold Walczak however, the legal director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union told the Post-Gazette, “investigating the government and broadcasting information about it would seem to be a constitutionally protected communication.”

The ACLU director elaborated, “If the police want to communicate privately, there are certainly ways to do that, and police radios are not one of those. How can it be a crime? It’s not a secure communication.”

The good professor had another take on the matter and told the Post-Gazette, “Were they sending it to people simply to protest, or to commit further crimes?”

“Further crimes”? What crime? Oh yes, legally protesting the depredations of the capitalist system, that crime!

That such a statement can be uttered by a purported legal expert is rather rich with unintended irony. Burkhoff’s maneuver to cast the best possible light on repressive police operations is all the more absurd given the fact that none other than the Obama administration’s State Department had stepped-in and pressured Twitter to forego a service upgrade, and downtime, just scant months earlier.

But context as they say, is everything. Champions of other people’s freedom (particularly when they are geopolitical rivals), the State Department intervened and told the instant messaging service in no uncertain terms that Iranian protesters relied on Twitter to monitor police movements in Tehran and other cities as protests over disputed elections took center stage in the Islamic Republic.

The New York Times reported back in June that the U.S. State Department “e-mailed the social-networking site Twitter with an unusual request: delay scheduled maintenance of its global network, which would have cut off service while Iranians were using Twitter to swap information and inform the outside world about the mushrooming protests around Tehran.”

According to Reuters, “Confirmation that the U.S. government had contacted Twitter came as the Obama administration sought to avoid suggestions it was meddling in Iran’s internal affairs as the Islamic Republic battled to control deadly street protests over the election result.”

Twitter said in a blog post it had delayed the firm’s planned upgrade because of its role as an “important communication tool in Iran.”

A day earlier, President Obama had said he believed “people’s voices should be heard and not suppressed”–in Iran.

Message to the American people: Official enemy: Twitter good! Official friend (grifting multinational corporations and the criminals who do their bidding in Washington): Twitter bad! How’s that for an imaginative interpretation of the “new media paradigm”!

“Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not”

Echoing the execrable logic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, America’s premier political police force, the FBI, executed a search warrant on Madison that authorized agents to look “for violations of federal rioting laws,” according to the Times.

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar, told the Times that “he and a friend were part of a communications network among people protesting the G-20.” Denouncing the raid, Stolar averred that “there’s absolutely nothing that he’s done that should subject him to any criminal liability.”

On October 2, Stolar argued in Federal District Court in Brooklyn “that the warrant was vague and overly broad. Judge Dora L. Irizarry ordered the authorities to stop examining the seized materials until Oct. 16, pending further orders,” the Times reported.

This is not the first time however, that the secret state has sought to curtail text messaging by activists during large-scale demonstrations.

In 2008, as a result of the heavy repression of legal protests–and subsequent lawsuits by victims–during the far-right Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, lawyers representing N.Y.’s “finest” demanded that M.I.T. graduate student Tad Hirsch and the Institute of Applied Autonomy, the inventors of TXTmob, turn over all “text messages sent via TXTmob during the convention, the date and time of the messages, information about people who sent and received messages, and lists of people who used the service,” The New York Times reported last year.

The FBI however, already possess the technological ability to hack into Wi-fi and computer networks as Wired revealed in April, citing internal Bureau documents released to the magazine under a Freedom of Information Act request.

According to a follow-up story by the publication, the Bureau’s Cryptographic and Electronic Analysis Unit, CEAU, has deployed software called a computer and internet protocol address verifier, or CIPAV, that is “designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, which it secretly sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia.”

Antifascist Calling reported in 2008, that when a whistleblower, security consultant Babak Pasdar, stepped forward and blew the lid off the Bureau’s massive telecommunications’ surveillance network, the agency’s so-called “Quantico circuit” in Virginia, he revealed that major wireless providers, including AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, had handed the state “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless networks, including billing records and customer data “transmitted wirelessly.”

According to Pasdar’s sworn affidavit, Verizon provided the FBI with with real-time access to who is speaking to whom, the time and duration of each call as well as the locations of those so targeted.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the San Francisco-based civil liberties’ watchdog group, has posted Madison’s motion and his attorney’s supporting declaration on their web site. It makes for very interesting reading indeed! According to the search warrant obtained by FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin from the U.S. District Court, the FBI were allowed to seize:

Computers, hard-drives, floppy discs and other media used to store computer-accessible information, cellular phones, personal digital assistants, electronic storage devices and related peripherals, black masks and clothing, maps, correspondence and other documents, financial records, notes, ledgers, receipts, papers, photographs, telephone and address books, identification documents, indicia of residency and other documents and records that constitute evidence of the commission of rioting crimes or that are designed or intended as a means of violating the federal rioting laws, including any of the above items that are maintained within other closed or locked containers, including safes and other containers that may be further secured by key locks (or combination locks) of various kinds. (Honorable Viktor V. Pohorelsky, Magistrate Judge to FBI Special Agent Edward J. Heslin, United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, Search Warrant, Case Number M-09-962, September 26, 2009)

Madison’s attorney, Martin Stolar averred that “a number of documents and other properties” seized by the FBI have “nothing to do with the governments investigation into what the search warrant characterizes as violations of ‘federal rioting laws’.”

According to Stolar “the seized items include political writings, notes, political associates and ideas, materials protected by the attorney-client and social work privileges, as well as property belonging to other persons residing in the premises which have no connection to any pending or contemplated criminal investigation.” Stolar declared that “the illegality of the search is in the overbreadth of the seizures and the vagueness of the term ‘federal rioting laws’.”

In other words, driftnet surveillance of American citizens is the norm for our secret state minders; an unambiguous sign of America’s slide into an extra-constitutional police state.

Fusion Centers: Leading the Charge

While Madison and Wallschlaeger’s arrest came as a result of actions undertaken by the Pennsylvania State Police, one cannot rule out that (a) informants had tipped off the cops to the pair’s activities, (b) CEAU had penetrated protest organizer’s computer net and therefore, were well aware of what the duo were up to, or (c) through some combination of the above, the FBI and presumably, their local fusion center allies, alerted PSP who then conducted the raid and shut the anarchist’s communications center down.

Federal Computer Week noted September 30, that the Department of Homeland Security “is establishing a new office to coordinate its intelligence-sharing efforts in state and local intelligence fusion centers,” and that the secret state’s new “Joint Fusion Center Program Management Office will be part of DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis.”

Among other things, the publication revealed that DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano said the new office will:

• Develop ways to assess threats and trends by gathering, analyzing and sharing local and national information and intelligence through fusion centers.

• Coordinate with state, local and tribal law enforcement leaders to ensure that DHS is providing the correct resources to fusion centers.

• Promote a sense of common mission and purpose at fusion centers through training and other support. (Ben Bain, “DHS established new office for intelligence-sharing centers,” Federal Computer Week, September 30, 2009)

Since Bushist–and now, Obama–securocrats designated fusion centers “a central node for the federal government’s efforts for sharing terrorism-related information with state and local officials,” the federal government has pumped some $327 million in taxpayer-funded largesse into these spooky “public-private partnerships.”

In Pennsylvania for example, the Criminal Intelligence Center (PaCIC), is described by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) as a “component of the Pennsylvania State Police.”

Washington Post investigative journalist Robert O’Harrow Jr., the author of No Place to Hide, revealed that “Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver’s license photos” and have “subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans’ locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like.”

One can only wonder whether these or other intrusive surveillance tools, including the CEAU’s CIPAV software were deployed against Madison and Wallschlaeger prior to their Pittsburgh arrest.

But gathering information on fusion centers is often an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. Investigative journalist G.W. Schulz reported that when the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) attempted to obtain information from the Colorado Information Analysis Center on that state’s fusion center, they ran into a brick wall.

CIAC spokesperson Lance Clem refused to release what should be public documents to CIR claiming that releasing the records would be “contrary to the public interest” and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.”

As of this writing, it cannot be determined with any certainty what role the Pennsylvania Criminal Intelligence Center played in repressing G20 protests. However, if past fusion center practices in Denver and St. Paul during last year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions are any guide, their management of pre-G20 intelligence along with their federal partners, was in all probability considerable.

One lesson that can be gleaned however, from the federal witch hunt targeting activists Elliot Madison and Michael Wallschlaeger, is that dissent in post-9/11 America, as during the COINTELPRO-era of the 1960s and ’70s, has been criminalized.

In unveiling an unclassified version of the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS), Blair asserts he is seeking to break down “this old distinction between military and nonmilitary intelligence,” stating that the “traditional fault line” separating secretive military programs from overall intelligence activities “is no longer relevant.”

As if to emphasize the sweeping nature of Blair’s remarks, Federal Computer Week reported September 17 that “some non-federal officials with the necessary clearances who work at intelligence fusion centers around the country will soon have limited access to classified terrorism-related information that resides in the Defense Department’s classified network.” According to the publication:

Under the program, authorized state, local or tribal officials will be able to access pre-approved data on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network. However, they won’t have the ability to upload data or edit existing content, officials said. They also will not have access to all classified information, only the information that federal officials make available to them.

The non-federal officials will get access via the Homeland Security department’s secret-level Homeland Security Data Network. That network is currently deployed at 27 of the more than 70 fusion centers located around the country, according to DHS. Officials from different levels of government share homeland security-related information through the fusion centers. (Ben Bain, “DOD opens some classified information to non-federal officials,” Federal Computer Week, September 17, 2009)

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the federal government has encouraged the explosive growth of fusion centers. As envisaged by securocrats, these hybrid institutions have expanded information collection and sharing practices from a wide variety of sources, including commercial databases, among state and local law enforcement agencies, the private sector and federal security agencies, including military intelligence.

But early on, fusion centers like the notorious “red squads” of the 1960s and ’70s, morphed into national security shopping malls where officials monitor not only alleged terrorists but also left-wing and environmental activists deemed threats to the existing corporate order.

It is currently unknown how many military intelligence analysts are stationed at fusion centers, what their roles are and whether or not they are engaged in domestic surveillance.

If past practices are an indication of where current moves by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) will lead, in breaking down the “traditional fault line” that prohibits the military from engaging in civilian policing, then another troubling step along the dark road of militarizing American society will have been taken.

U.S. Northern Command: Feeding the Domestic Surveillance Beast

Since its 2002 stand-up, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and associated military intelligence outfits such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the now-defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) have participated in widespread surveillance of antiwar and other activist groups, tapping into Pentagon and commercial databases in a quixotic search for “suspicious patterns.”

As they currently exist, fusion centers are largely unaccountable entities that function without proper oversight and have been involved in egregious civil rights violations such as the compilation of national security dossiers that have landed activists on various terrorist watch-lists.

Antifascist Calling reported last year on the strange case of Marine Gunnery Sgt. Gary Maziarz and Col. Larry Richards, Marine reservists stationed at Camp Pendleton in San Diego. Maziarz, Richards, and a group of fellow Marines, including the cofounder of the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center (LACTEW), stole secret files from the Strategic Technical Operations Center (STOC).

When they worked at STOC, the private spy ring absconded with hundreds of classified files, including those marked “Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information,” the highest U.S. Government classification. The files included surveillance dossiers on the Muslim community and antiwar activists in Southern California.

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune which broke the story in 2007, before being run to ground Maziarz, Richards and reserve Navy Commander Lauren Martin, a civilian intelligence contractor at USNORTHCOM, acquired information illegally obtained from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). This is the same classified system which fusion centers will have access to under the DoD’s new proposal.

Claiming they were acting out of “patriotic motives,” the Marine spies shared this classified counterterrorism information with private contractors in the hope of obtaining future employment. Although they failed to land plush private sector counterterrorism jobs, one cannot rule out that less than scrupulous security firms might be willing to take in the bait in the future in order to have a leg up on the competition.

So far, only lower level conspirators have been charged. According to the Union-Tribune “Marine Cols. Larry Richards and David Litaker, Marine Maj. Mark Lowe and Navy Cmdr. Lauren Martin also have been mentioned in connection with the case, but none has been charged.” One codefendant’s attorney, Kevin McDermott, told the paper, “This is the classic situation that if you have more rank, the better your chance of not getting charged.”

Sound familiar? Call it standard operating procedure in post-constitutional America where high-level officials and senior officers walk away scott-free while grunts bear the burden, and do hard time, for the crimes of their superiors.

Fusion Centers and Military Intelligence: Best Friends Forever!

Another case which is emblematic of the close cooperation among fusion centers and military intelligence is the case of John J. Towery, a Ft. Lewis, Washington civilian contractor who worked for the Army’s Fort Lewis Force Protection Unit.

In July, The Olympian and Democracy Now! broke the story of how Towery had infiltrated and spied on the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR), an antiwar group, and shared this information with police.

Since 2006, the group has staged protests at Washington ports and has sought to block military cargo from being shipped to Iraq. According to The Olympian:

OlyPMR member Brendan Maslauskas Dunn said in an interview Monday that he received a copy of the e-mail from the city of Olympia in response to a public records request asking for any information the city had about “anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), or Industrial Workers of the World.” (Jeremy Pawloski, “Fort Lewis investigates claims employee infiltrated Olympia peace group,” The Olympian, July 27, 2009)

What Dunn discovered was highly disturbing to say the least. Towery, who posed as an anarchist under the name “John Jacob,” had infiltrated OlyPMR and was one of several listserv administrators that had control over the group’s electronic communications.

The civilian intelligence agent admitted to Dunn that he had spied on the group but claimed that no one paid him and that he didn’t report to the military; a statement that turned out to be false.

Joseph Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesperson confirmed to The Olympian that Towery was a contract employee and that the infiltrator “performs sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community,” but “it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the media.”

In September, The Olympian obtained thousands of pages of emails from the City of Olympia in response to that publication’s public-records requests. The newspaper revealed that the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WJAC), a fusion center, had copied messages to Towery on the activities of OlyPMR in the run-up to the group’s November 2007 port protests. According to the paper,

The WJAC is a clearinghouse of sorts of anti-terrorism information and sensitive intelligence that is gathered and disseminated to law enforcement agencies across the state. The WJAC receives money from the federal government.

The substance of nearly all of the WJAC’s e-mails to Olympia police officials had been blacked out in the copies provided to The Olympian. (Jeremy Pawloski, “Army e-mail sent to police and accused spy,” The Olympian, September 12, 2009)

Also in July, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a 1525 page file on WJAC’s activities.

Housed at the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, one document described WJAC as an agency that “builds on existing intelligence efforts by local, regional, and federal agencies by organizing and disseminating threat information and other intelligence efforts to law enforcement agencies, first responders, and key decision makers throughout the state.”

Fusion centers are also lucrative cash cows for enterprising security grifters. Wikileaks investigations editor Julian Assange described the revolving-door that exists among Pentagon spy agencies and the private security firms who reap millions by placing interrogators and analysts inside outfits such as WJAC. Assange wrote,

There has been extensive political debate in the United States on how safe it would be to move Guantánamo’s detainees to US soil–but what about their interrogators?

One intelligence officer, Kia Grapham, is hawked by her contracting company to the Washington State Patrol. Grapham’s confidential resume boasts of assisting in over 100 interrogations of “high value human intelligence targets” at Guantánamo. She goes on, saying how she is trained and certified to employ Restricted Interrogation Technique: Separation as specified by FM 2-22.3 Appendix M.

Others, like, Neoma Syke, managed to repeatedly flip between the military and contractor intelligence work–without even leaving the building.

The file details the placement of six intelligence contractors inside the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) on behalf of the Washington State Patrol at a cost of around $110,000 per year each.

Such intelligence “fusion” centers, which combine the military, the FBI, state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on the domestic population. (Julian Assange, “The spy who billed me twice,” Wikileaks, July 29, 2009)

The Wikileaks documents provide startling details on how firms such as Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), The Sytex Group and Operational Applications Inc. routinely place operatives within military intelligence and civilian fusion centers at a premium price.

Assange wonders whether these job placements are not simply evidence of corruption but rather, are “designed to evade a raft of hard won oversight laws which apply to the military and the police but not to contractors? Is it to keep selected personnel out of the Inspector General’s eye?” The available evidence strongly suggests that it is.

As the American Civil Liberties Union documented in their 2007 and 2008 reports on fusion center abuses, one motivation is precisely to subvert oversight laws which do not apply to private mercenary contractors.

The civil liberties’ watchdog characterized the rapid expansion of fusion centers as a threat to our constitutional rights and cited specific areas of concern: “their ambiguous lines of authority, the troubling role of private corporations, the participation of the military, the use of data mining and their excessive secrecy.”

And speaking of private security contractors outsourced to a gaggle on intelligence agencies, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book Spies For Hire, that since 9/11 “the Central Intelligence Agency has been spending 50 to 60 percent of its budget on for-profit contractors, or about $2.5 billion a year, and its number of contract employees now exceeds the agency’s full-time workforce of 17,500.”

Indeed, Shorrock learned that “no less than 70 percent of the nation’s intelligence budget was being spent on contracts.” However, the sharp spike in intelligence outsourcing to well-heeled security corporations comes with very little in the way of effective oversight.

The House Intelligence Committee reported in 2007 that the Bush, and now, the Obama administrations have failed to develop a “clear definition of what functions are ‘inherently governmental’;” meaning in practice, that much in the way of systematic abuses can be concealed behind veils of “proprietary commercial information.”

As we have seen when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in 2004, and The New York Times belatedly blew the whistle on widespread illegal surveillance of the private electronic communications of Americans in 2005, cosy government relationships with security contractors, including those embedded within secretive fusion centers, will continue to serve as a “safe harbor” for concealing and facilitating state crimes against the American people.

After all, $75 billion buys a lot of silence.

Administration backpedaling on promises to end the more onerous features of the Bush years betray, not so much Obama’s duplicity but rather, the naïve and misplaced hope by his supporters that a centrist Democrat beholden to the corporate pirates and militarists who rule the roost, would actually do things any differently.

In areas of critical importance to civil libertarians, the Democratic regime continues to beef up Bushist programs and heighten government secrecy while limiting public accountability, particularly where the intelligence and security apparatus is concerned.

How else explain Obama’s plan, buried within the 2010 budget, to provide the Department of Homeland Security an additional $260 million to hire thousands more state and regional intelligence analysts to staff already bloated and controversial fusion centers?

In this context, The Washington Post reported September 6 that the administration “wants to maintain the secrecy of terrorist watch-list information it routinely shares with federal, state and local agencies, a move that rights groups say would make it difficult for people who have been improperly included on such lists to challenge the government.”

According to the ACLU’s “Watch List Counter,” as of September 8 some 1.27 million names appear on the U.S. government’s terror list!

Post reporter Ellen Nakashima writes that “intelligence officials are pressing for legislation that would exempt ‘terrorist identity information’ from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.”

Meanwhile, the right-wing Washington Times reported September 9 that the anti-secrecy group, OpenThe Government.org issued a new report challenging the administration to end the abusive practices of the Bush regime.

Patrice McDermott, the executive director of the group told the Washington Times, “This administration is continuing to use the enlarged executive powers of the Bush-Cheney administration.” In all areas where government transparency is essential for restoring democratic processes and the rule of law, the Obama administration has failed to deliver.

In essence the new Executive Branch initiative, spearheaded by the Democratic-controlled House and Senate Intelligence Committees would absolve “law enforcement agencies and intelligence ‘fusion centers,’ which combine state and federal counterterrorism resources” from even minimal levels of accountability for individuals damaged by an improper listing on the government’s national security index.

Claiming that disclosure would risk “alerting terrorism suspects” that they’re on the secret state’s radar and “may help them evade surveillance,” Michael G. Birmingham, a spokesman for the spooky Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), told the Post that the “intelligence community” is seeking “adequate protection from disclosing terrorist identity information” to the public because “no [such] exemption currently exists under FOIA.”

Circular logic such as this of course, means in practice that intelligence operatives–both federal and private–are aiming to increase their reach into our lives by exempting their agents, or well-paid private contractors manning a growth-rich “terrorism industry,” from minimal standards of disclosure.

“The goal,” according to Birmingham, is to “keep sensitive unclassified information from unintended recipients, including terrorism suspects.” And if someone has been improperly classified a “terrorism suspect” and prevented from boarding a plane or obtaining employment? Well, tough luck!

And with criteria for watch-listing that is vague at best, the prospects of ever having yourself removed from one is an exercise in Kafkaesque futility. According to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), an individual lands on a watch-list if he or she is “known or appropriately suspected to be or have been engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to terrorism.”

Ponder the phrase “in aid of, or related to terrorism.” What does that mean?

As I reported in October, citing a document published by the intelligence web site Cryptome, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon reveals the following:

US-Radicalized: A “US-radicalized” individual’s primary social influence has been the cultural values and beliefs of the United States and whose radicalization and indoctrination began or occurred primarily in the United States.

Ideologue or propagandist: An “ideologue” or “propagandist” establishes, promotes, or disseminates justifications for violent extremism, often through manipulation of primary text materials such as religious texts or historical accounts that establish grievances. He or she may not have strong links to any terrorist organization or be integrated into an organization’s command structure. Unless he or she directly advocates specific acts of violence, much of such an individual’s activity might be constitutionally protected. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon,” Washington, D.C., no date, pp. 4-5)

This covers a lot of ground. Would an anarchist, socialist or environmental critic of current U.S. policies, such as the escalation of America’s imperialist intervention in Afghanistan or West Virginia mountaintop removal for quick extraction of coal for example, fall into the category of an “ideologue” since his or her “activity might be constitutionally protected”?

And what about the equally suspect term “propagandist”? Would an historian or journalist for example, who cites primary source materials published by the CIA or the oxymoronic National Endowment for Democracy, and then builds a case that the United States attempted the 2002 overthrow of the Chávez government in Venezuela, thereby stand accused of “manipulating historical accounts” and fall under the FBI’s spotlight? And what if that person were subsequently watch-listed? What recourse would he or she have at discovering who their accusers were?

If the Executive Branch’s legislative proposal passes muster in the House and Senate, they’ll probably never know.

An Insatiable Surveillance Beast: Fusion Centers

Feeding the monstrosity known as the Terrorist Screening Center is the National Counterterrorism Center’s (NCTC) Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), a vast database of names powering the surveillance state.

“Every evening” according to an NCTC Fact Sheet, “TIDE analysts export a sensitive but unclassified subset of the data containing the terrorist identifiers to the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center” as well as to the Transportation Security Administration for inclusion on TSA’s “No Fly” list and the Department of State’s visa database of individuals to be denied entry into the U.S.

Information on “domestic terrorists” and “violent extremists” are provided to TSC and TIDE by the FBI, CIA, NSA, U.S. Northern Command and some 70 fusion centers scattered across the country. The Post article specifically states that state and local police agencies and fusion centers would be exempt from reporting “terrorist identity information” currently available under the Freedom of Information Act.

As the American Civil Liberties Union revealed in a series of troubling reports, fusion centers are “state, local and regional institutions [that] were originally created to improve the sharing of anti-terrorism intelligence among different state, local and federal law enforcement agencies.”

However, ACLU researchers Michael German and Jay Stanley revealed “the scope of their mission quickly expanded–with the support and encouragement of the federal government–to cover ‘all crimes and all hazards.’”

Ominously for privacy and individual rights, “the types of information they seek for analysis has also broadened over time to include not just criminal intelligence, but public and private sector data, and participation in these centers has grown to include not just law enforcement, but other government entities, the military and even select members of the private sector.”

German and Stanley identified serious problems with these largely unaccountable intelligence-gathering bureaucracies:

• Ambiguous Lines of Authority. The participation of agencies from multiple jurisdictions in fusion centers allows the authorities to manipulate differences in federal, state and local laws to maximize information collection while evading accountability and oversight through the practice of “policy shopping.”

• Private Sector Participation. Fusion centers are incorporating private-sector corporations into the intelligence process, breaking down the arm’s length relationship that protects the privacy of innocent Americans who are employees or customers of these companies, and increasing the risk of a data breach.

• Military Participation. Fusion centers are involving military personnel in law enforcement activities in troubling ways.

• Data Fusion = Data Mining. Federal fusion center guidelines encourage wholesale data collection and manipulation processes that threaten privacy.

• Excessive Secrecy. Fusion centers are hobbled by excessive secrecy, which limits public oversight, impairs their ability to acquire essential information and impedes their ability to fulfill their stated mission, bringing their ultimate value into doubt. (Michael German and Jay Stanley, What’s Wrong With Fusion Centers?, American Civil Liberties Union, December 2007)

In their 2008 follow-up report, German and Stanley wrote that “it is becoming increasingly clear that fusion centers are part of a new domestic intelligence apparatus.” They revealed that “elements of this nascent domestic surveillance system” include:

• Watching and recording the everyday activities of an ever-growing list of individuals
• Channeling the flow of the resulting reports into a centralized security agency
• Sifting through (”data mining”) these reports and databases with computers to identify individuals for closer scrutiny

Such a system, if allowed to permeate our society, would be nothing less than the creation of a total surveillance society. (Michael German and Jay Stanley, Fusion Center Update, American Civil Liberties Union, July 2008)

Driving home the point that pervasive surveillance has real-world consequences, not least of all in terms of limiting public accountability, the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR) disclosed during their investigation into police state tactics during last year’s Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Denver and St. Paul, that local authorities, federal agencies and private corporations, sought to suppress information on their activities.

Investigative journalist G.W. Schulz revealed that Denver officials “refused a public-records request sent by CIR.” The close proximity of USNORTHCOM’s headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base in nearby Colorado Springs, and their alleged participation in illegal intelligence gathering, may be one reason why Denver officials were less than forthcoming. In an echo of the current debate in Washington, Schulz reported:

The Colorado Information Analysis Center is run by the state’s Department of Public Safety. In a response letter, Spokesman Lance Clem said that releasing the records would be contrary to the public interest and “not only would compromise [the] security and investigative practices of numerous law enforcement agencies but would also violate confidentiality agreements that have been made with private partner organizations and federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.” (G.W. Schulz, “Are Things Any Different in Denver?,” Center for Investigative Reporting, September 1, 2009)

With a long-standing and well-documented history of illegal spying and infiltration of antiwar and other dissident groups by Denver police, it is clear that law enforcement repressors have much to hide.

CIR also revealed that Minnesota’s Joint Analysis Center (MJAC) and that state’s “ICEFISHX communications network, which collects reports about suspicious activity,” closely coordinated activist surveillance with both the FBI and “authorities in the neighboring states of North Dakota and South Dakota.” An additional layer of unaccountability and secrecy was added to the mix when CIR disclosed that corporate spies also contribute information to fusion centers.

Private corporations even contribute “intelligence” to ICEFISHX. Douglas Reynolds, security director for the Mall of America, the largest retail complex in the United States based in Bloomington, described his office to Congress in July of 2008 as the “number one source of actionable intelligence in the state,” having handed more information regarding suspicious activities to the fusion center than anyone else. Several attempts to reach Reynolds for elaboration failed. (G.W. Schulz, “Fighting Crime with Computers in Minnesota,” Center for Investigative Reporting, September 1, 2009)

The nexus among state spies and capitalist grifters point to an ongoing process whereby public, democratic institutions are systematically hollowed-out in favor of a perverse subversion of the public’s right to know into yet another proprietary commercial secret.

Encompassing all relationships in a social order mediated by a zero sum game where profit is king and the devil take the hindmost, the only meaningful exchange recognized by the system is the sterile transfer of cash from one palm to another.

Is it any wonder then that the Obama administration, like their Bushist predecessors seek to conceal these illegal surveillance programs from the American people by exempting their most egregious features, the neo-McCarthyite watch-list, from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act?

According to its website, the Group of 20 was created in the late 1990s as a response to the financial crisis that hit the capitalist world during that period. It was convened under the notion that so-called emerging economies should be provided a greater say in the control of the capitalist world that was then dominated by the Group of 7 (G-7( which in turn is dominated by Washington and London.) In other words, the primary purpose of the G-20 is to coordinate plans among capitalist nations that will ensure the continued existence of capitalism and, more precisely, the continued domination of that system by Western economies, especially Washington. In the current economic climate, the G-20 sees its role as one that requires “send(ing) a strong signal that it is prepared to take whatever further actions are necessary to stabilise the financial system and to provide further macroeconomic support. At the same time, the G-20 must commit to maintaining open trade and investment, to avoid a retreat to protectionism, and direct necessary additional support to emerging markets and developing countries.” In short, the G-20 must do whatever it takes to keep the current system of free trade and financial speculation going, no matter what the cost to the working and poor people on the planet.

It is quite fitting that this summit is taking place in Pittsburgh. If there is one US city that epitomizes the failure of late-twentieth century capitalism to provide for its working people, then Pittsburgh certainly fits the bill. If there is one US city that demonstrates capitalism’s need to pursue cheap labor in order to maximize profits, Pittsburgh certainly fits the bill. If there is one US city that forecasts the future of regular people under the domain of capitalism’s latest stage–a stage that has taken decent-paying unionized jobs away and replaced them with lower paying service positions for those lucky enough to have another job, Pittsburgh fits the bill. Like Richard Fox, a resident and shop owner in Pittsburgh who supports the intention of many of the protests, wrote to me in an email: “When the steel industry died, easily 1/2 of the city’s population as well as huge numbers of citizens of small mill towns (remember “the deer hunter” settings?) simply picked up and left. South or southwest. In some ways, the city has never recovered from the loss. When I was growing up here, the mills stretched, literally, for miles on both sides of the Monongahela river. employing tens of thousands. Three shifts all day everyday. It was quite a sight. Chicago the city of the big shoulders, had nothing on us…. How do you re-build a local economy and infrastructure after that sort of disaster? It is appropriate to mention something about the development of Pittsburgh as an important center for medical arts and the computer/hi-tech industry, but that fact in no way refutes or undermines the argument that the city was devastated by the loss of tens of thousands of industrial jobs. The balance between blue collar and professional jobs has swung in favor of the latter with predictable results. ” Those predictable results Fox refers to include not only a disparity in income but also in education and other social factors.

As any astute working person can tell you, the fate of Pittsburgh is slowly becoming the fate of hundreds, if not thousands, of other towns and cities around the world. The total domination of the capitalist giants of Wall Street in collusion with the sycophantic politicians in Washington and other capitols has drained the financial life from municipalities and their citizens at an astonishingly rapid rate. Behind the statistics showing rising unemployment and mortgage foreclosures lies the breakup of families in the western nations, while in the developing nations, the most recent crisis of the capitalist system means an even further deepening of the health and other human crises already in existence. In another metaphor for the greater economic havoc wreaked upon the world’s working and poor, those good-paying union jobs at the steel mils also impacted the African-American community in Pittsburgh. Such jobs were held by black men and women, too. Not only did this create stability and hope in that community, it also ensured a cultural vibrancy. Since the removal of those jobs from Pittsburgh, it has arguably been the communities of color that have been hurt the most.

This reality is repeated on a considerably larger scale throughout the world in the wake of the globalization of modern capital. Yet, the leaders of the capitalist world, as represented by the G-20 and other such organizations, prescribe more of the same. If it wasn’t clear before it should be now–these organizations are not interested in the welfare of those they consider their subjects. They exist only to ensure the continued existence of their profit making machine. Furthermore, they will do whatever it takes to ensure that that machine continues to run.

This is why it is necessary to protest the Pittsburgh Summit. The protests will begin several days before the summit itself. Much of the legal and organizing work for the week of protests is being coordinated by Pittsburgh’s Thomas Merton Center. According to a press release from the Center dated August 16, 2009, there will be a mass march on September 25, 2009 that is endorsed by all of the organizations planning to protest in Pittsburgh that week. As Jessica Banner of the Center’s Antiwar Committee eloquently stated: “Anyone who has lost a job, a home, a loved one to war, lost value to a retirement plan, gotten sick from environmental pollution, or lived without adequate healthcare, water, or food has been directly affected by policies set by the G20 and should join us on Sept. 25th.”

Several tent cities are being planned, among them a Music Camp beginning September 18th that will be situated at the South Side Riverfront Park near 18th Street and another encampment that will begin September 20th with a National March for Jobs on September 20th. This march and tent city is being facilitated by the Bail Out the People Movement (BOTM) and is but one part of the organization’s plans for the week. According to a spokesperson for the Pittsburgh branch of the BOTM, there is a struggle brewing over the permits which are being denied for sites in the downtown area. This is but one of the actions awaiting permits. According to the city of Pittsburgh, no permits have been issued yet because the city is waiting for the Secret Service to determine the so-called security perimeter it considers its right to impose whenever officials under Secret Service protection are present. Protest organizers have told the press that they hope they will get the necessary permits and continue to insure the public that there are no plans for violence among any of the protest groups.

There is also a women’s tent city being planned, a People’s Summit featuring speakers and debate regarding the nature of the G-20 and popular alternatives to these types of organizations, a direct action on the afternoon of the summit, a religious procession calling for social justice and a concert. Although the city continues to debate whether or not to grant these exercises in democracy permits, they have notified the public that there will be 4000 extra police on hand during the G-20 meeting. It seems that, once again, the state wants to portray ordinary citizens who are planning to peacefully assemble as potential criminals. We must not allow that to happen. If you can be in Pittsburgh while the capitalists are gathering hoping to determine the future according to their needs (which are not usually the same as ours), please be there. If you are a citizen who believes in the First Amendment, heed the suggestion of Anne Peterman of the Global Justice Ecology Project and call the White House to encourage Barack Obama to “tell the Secret Service to obey the Constitution and respect the First Amendment-protected rights of protesters.” (White House phone number is 202-456-1111). If you live or work in Pittsburgh, encourage the city council and other officials to grant the permits being requested. Most importantly, if you support the purpose of the protests let the organizers know, especially if you live in the Pittsburgh region. If you can afford the time, please attend.

Later that year, Frist and former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) covertly inserted language into the 2006 Defense Appropriations bill (H.R. 2863) that granted legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, even in cases of willful misconduct. It was signed into law by President Bush.

According to Public Citizen and The New York Times, Frist and Hastert benefited financially from their actions; the pair, as well as 41 other congressmen and senators owned as much as $16 million in pharmaceutical stock. revealed that “the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) is purported to be the key author of the language additions. This trade association represents virtually all major vaccine manufacturers.”

The Senate Majority Leader’s alarmist jeremiad at Davos was seconded by Dr. Tara O’Toole who added, “This [bioterrorism] is one of the most pressing problems we have on the planet today.”

Really? Not grinding poverty, global warming or the lack of access by hundreds of millions of impoverished workers and farmers to clean water, an adequate diet, health care or relief from epidemic levels of preventable diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis or diarrhea, but “bioterrorism” as narrowly defined by securocrats and their academic accomplices.

But Dr. Victor W. Sidel, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and an outspoken critic of the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex challenged O’Toole’s hysterical paradigm.

Sidel made the point that there is a fundamental conflict between the state’s national security goals and health care providers’ professional responsibilities to patients. He wrote in 2003 that “military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies and personnel have long histories of secrecy and deception that are contrary to the fundamental health principles of transparency and truthfulness. They may therefore be unsuitable partners for public health agencies that need to justify receiving the public’s trust.”

In this context, the choice of O’Toole as the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Undersecretary of Science and Technology is troubling to say the least. As former CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, critics charge that O’Toole’s appointment will be nothing short of a disaster.

No ordinary policy wonk with an impressive résumé and years as a government insider, O’Toole is a key player advocating for the expansion of dual-use biological weapons programs rebranded as biodefense.

Subverting the Biological Weapons Convention

The resuscitation of American bioweapons programs are facilitated by their secretive and highly-classified nature. Under cover of academic freedom or intellectual property rights, the U.S. Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex has largely been outsourced by the state to private companies and contractors at top American corporations and universities.

Efforts to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) by the inclusion of verification language into the treaty and regular inspection of suspect facilities by international experts have been shot-down since 2001 by the Bush and now, the Obama administrations. Why?

Primarily because the United States view onsite measures as a threat to the commercial proprietary information of multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies as well as to America’s reputedly “defensive” biological programs; initiatives that continue to work with nature’s most dangerous and deadly pathogens.

In fact, the problem of the dual-use nature of such research is a conundrum facing critics who challenge the break-neck expansion of concealed weapons programs. Simply put, military activities can be disguised as commercial research to develop medical countermeasures without anyone, least of all the American people, being any the wiser.

Highly-trained microbiologists deployed across a spectrum of low-key companies, trained for academic, public health, or commercial employment are part of the dual-use problem. Who’s to say whether scientists who genetically-manipulate pathogens or create Frankenstein-like chimera disease organisms (say, synthesized Marburg or Ebola virus as has already been done with poliovirus in a U.S. lab) are engaged in treaty-busting weapons research or the development of life-saving measures.

And what about the accidental, or more sinisterly, the deliberate release of some horrific new plague by a scientist who’s “gone rogue”? As researcher Edward Hammond pointed out:

British researchers pled guilty in 2001 to charges that they improperly handled a genetically engineered hybrid of the viruses causing hepatitis C and dengue fever. British authorities characterized the virus as “more lethal than HIV”. ‘Dengatitis’ was deliberately created by researchers who wanted to use fewer laboratory animals in a search for a vaccine for Hepatitis C. Under unsafe laboratory conditions, the researchers created and nearly accidentally released a new hybrid human disease whose effects, fortunately, remain unknown; but which may have displayed different symptoms than its parents and thus been difficult to diagnose, and have required a new, unknown treatment regime. (Emerging Technologies: Genetic Engineering and Biological Weapons, The Sunshine Project, Background Paper No. 12, November 2003)

A new report by the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation has charged that despite restrictions under the BWC prohibiting the development, production, stockpiling and use of weaponized disease agents such as anthrax, smallpox or plague, as well as equipment and delivery systems intended for offensive use, the rapid growth of “biodefense and research programs over the last decade” has placed “new pressure” on efforts to curb the development of banned weapons listed in the treaty.

In an interview with Global Security Newswire Gerald Epstein, a senior fellow with the hawkish Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) told the publication, “When one is doing bioresearch and biodefense, one has to be careful to not overstep the treaty itself.”

He cited the U.S biodefense effort Project Bacchus–an investigation by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to determine whether it was possible to build a bioweapons production facility using readily available equipment–as an instance where questions were raised if the treaty had been violated.

The type of biodefense activity that is most likely to raise questions regarding treaty compliance is “threat assessment,” the process of determining what type of biological attacks are most likely to occur, he told Global Security Newswire. A dangerous biological agent could inadvertently be developed during such research, Epstein said. (Martin Matishak, “Biodefense Research Could Violate Weapons Convention, Report Warns,” Global Security Newswire, August 20, 2009)

But Pentagon bioweaponeers did more than build “a bioweapons productions facility using readily available equipment.” They built banned weapons. According to Jeanne Guillemin, author of Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-Sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism, the Pentagon and CIA made and tested a model of a Soviet anthrax bomb and created an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax.

After consulting with scientists who strongly suggested that the CIA anthrax bomb project would violate the BWC, “CIA lawyers decided the project was within the allowed realm of defensive research,” Guillemin revealed. Project Clear Vision, a joint investigation by the CIA and the Battelle Memorial Institute, under contract to the Agency, reconstructed and tested a Soviet-era anthrax bomblet in order to test its dissemination characteristics. The Agency “decided the same” for the small, fully functional bioweapons facility built under the rubric of Project Bacchus.

The third initiative, Project Jefferson, led to the development of an antibiotic-resistant strain of anthrax based on a Soviet model. After the outgoing Clinton administration hesitated to give the CIA the go-ahead for the project, the Bush regime’s National Security Council gave the Pentagon permission. “They believed” Guillemin wrote, “the Pentagon had the right to investigate genetically altered pathogens in the name of biodefense, ‘to save American lives’.”

Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon authorized the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), one of the most secretive and heavily-outsourced Defense Department branches, to re-create the deadly anthrax strain.

What the scope of these programs are today is currently unknown. We do know however, that based on available evidence the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department and the oxymoronic Intelligence Community, using the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as a cover, continue to investigate the feasibility of transforming nature’s most deadly pathogens into weapons.

In close coordination, the United States government and their outsourced corporate partners are spending billions of dollars on research and simulation exercises, dubbed “disaster drills” by a compliant media, to facilitate this grisly trade.

Secrecy and Deceit

That the official bioterror narrative is a preposterous fiction and swindle as even the FBI was forced to admit during its much-maligned Amerithrax investigation, is hardly worth a second glance by corporate media beholden to the pharmaceutical industry for advertising revenue; call it business as usual here in the heimat.

As we now know, the finely-milled anthrax powder which killed five people and shut down representative government didn’t come from the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets known as al Qaeda, but rather from deep within America’s own Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex, to wit, from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. But such troublesome and inconvenient truths are barely worth a mention by “respectable” media, e.g. the corporate stenographers who sold two imperialist military adventures to the American people.

Indeed, a credible case can be made that without the anthrax attacks, the fear levels gripping the country in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist events–and the subsequent clamp-down that followed, from the USA Patriot Act to the indefinite detention and torture of “terrorism” suspects, and from warrantless wiretapping to the demonization of dissent–may very well have been impossible.

It is difficult not to conclude that from the beginning of the affair, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax terrorist(s) to draw a straight line between 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. From there, it was but a short step to stitching-up a case for “regime change” in Iraq. The media’s role in this criminal enterprise was indispensable for what Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has called“the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.” As Greenwald points out,

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax–tests conducted at Ft. Detrick–revealed that the anthrax sent to [former Senator Tom] Daschle contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since–as ABC variously claimed–bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.” (Glenn Greenwald, “Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News,” Salon, August 1, 2008)

Despite ABC News’ claims that their information came from “four well-placed and separate sources,” they were fed information that was patently false; as Greenwald avers, “No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.”

And as we will shortly explore below, the dubious “Dark Winter” and “Atlantic Storm” bioterror exercises designed by Dr. Tara O’Toole freely drew from the neocon’s sinister playbook, right down to the weaponized smallpox supplied to al Qaeda by Saddam.

Whether or not one buys the current permutation of the “lone nut” theory, this one alleges that Dr. Bruce Ivins, a vaccine specialist employed by USAMRIID, was the anthrax mailer; the fact is, when all is said and done the attacks, to use a much over-hyped phrase, were an inside job.

And like other “lone nuts” who have entered the parapolitical frame at their own peril, Ivins isn’t around to refute the charges.

The Alliance for Biosecurity: Insiders with a Mission and (Very) Deep Pockets

Before being pegged by the Obama administration to head DHS’s Science and Technology division where she will oversee the department’s billion dollar budget, with some 45 percent of it going towards chemical and bioweapons defense, O’Toole, as previously mentioned, was the CEO and Director of UPMC’s Center for Biosecurity, a satrapy which describes itself as “an independent organization dedicated to improving the country’s resilience to major biological threats.”

How “independent”? You make the call!

According to their web site The Alliance for Biosecurity is “a collaboration among the Center for Biosecurity and 13 pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies whose mission is to work in the public interest to improve prevention and treatment of severe infectious diseases–particularly those diseases that present global security challenges.”

Alliance partners include the usual suspects: Bavarian Nordic; Center for Biosecurity of UPMC; Cangene Corporation; DOR BioPharma, Inc.; DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, a CSC company; Elusys Therapeutics, Inc.; Emergent BioSolutions; Hematech, Inc., a subsidiary of Kyowa Kirin; Human Genome Sciences, Inc.; NanoViricides, Inc.; Pfizer Inc.; PharmAthene; Siga Technologies, Inc.; Unither Virology LLC, a subsidiary of United Therapeutics Corporation. Rounding out this rogues gallery are associate members, the spooky Battelle Medical Research and Evaluation Facility and the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute.

Among the chief activities of the Alliance is lobbying Congress for increased funding for the development of new drugs deemed “countermeasures” under the Project BioShield Act of 2004, previously described by Antifascist Calling as a particularly grotesque piece of Bushist legislative flotsam.

The Alliance avers that “the United States faces unprecedented risks to national security … by the clear and growing danger of bioterrorism or a destabilizing infectious disease pandemic,” and that “our nation’s vulnerability to biothreats is so severe” due to the fact that “most of the vaccines and medicines that will be needed to protect our citizens do not now exist.” Therefore, countermeasures needed to mitigate nebulous biothreats never spelled out once in the group’s literature “will likely require several years and several hundred million dollars each to successfully develop and produce.” (emphasis added)

An Alliance report, The State of Biosecurity in 2008 and Proposals for a Public/Private Pathway Forward, charts a course for “improving and accelerating” efforts to “develop medical countermeasures (MCMs) for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile (SNS).”

Under the Project Bioshield Act of 2004, Congress authorized $5.6 billion over ten years “to purchase MCMs for the SNS.” Funds were allocated for the procurement of the anthrax vaccine as well as for “therapeutic antibodies for inhalational anthrax, a botulism heptavalent antitoxin, a smallpox vaccine, and several products for radiological and nuclear threats, obligating a total of about $1.9 billion of the $5.6 billion BioShield fund.”

In 2006 as I noted previously, Congress created the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). BARDA was authorized to spend some $1.07 billion over three years for MCMs, “only $201 million has been provided by Congress through FY 2008″ noted the Alliance, “approximately one-fifth of the authorized level.”

According to an “independent economic analysis” carried out by (who else!) the Alliance’s academic partner, the Center for Biosecurity, “it would require $3.4 billion in FY 2009 to support one year of advanced development.”

“Similarly” according to the organization, “the original appropriation of $5.6 billion for Project BioShield is equally insufficient to ensure that once MCMs are developed there will be funds available to procure them and maintain the stockpile.” Indeed, “this level of funding would need to be sustained for many years.” You can bet however, that Alliance lobbyists are busy as proverbial bees in pressuring Congress to fork over the dough!

The report state’s that Alliance goals necessarily entail instilling “a sense of urgency … with Congress” by hyping the “bioterror threat.” But there’s much more here than a simple cynical exercise at preparing the “public diplomacy” ground through academic and industry “message force multipliers” that will enable Congress to shower Big Pharma with a veritable tsunami of cash. A “risk-tolerant culture” should be promoted within BARDA, one that “understands the realities, risks, timelines, and costs of drug development.”

The “risks” to whom and for what purpose are not enumerated, but one can be certain that a “risk-tolerant culture” crafted by industry insiders will come at the expense of the health and safety of the American people, one that pushes potential legal liability should things head south onto the taxpaying public.

The stealth nature of Alliance recommendations are clearly spelled out when they aver that “stakeholders” should “focus more on the potential biothreats and the corresponding countermeasures, rather than the price tag” and that BARDA, ostensibly a public agency, should be packed with insiders “who have drug development and manufacturing experience.” This will lead to the development of “a culture that is focused on partnering with industry and academia.”

But the bottom line as always, is the corporatist bottom line for Alliance shareholders! How else can one interpret their statement that emerging “biothreats” are all the more dire today now that “interest of the public and private capital markets in biodefense has declined over the last 2-3 years.” What better way then, to beef-up those sagging capital markets than to install an industry-friendly individual at DHS with a documented track record of overplaying the “bioterror threat.”

Dark Winter

O’Toole was the principal designer of two “tabletop” bioterror preparedness drills, the 2001 Dark Winter exercise and the 2005 Atlantic Storm run-through; both were criticized by scientific experts as fabrications of an alleged threat of a smallpox attack mounted by al Qaeda.

Reviewing Milton Leitenberg’s 2005 report, Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat, published the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, protein chemist Dr. Eric Smith wrote the following:

Of note is Leitenberg’s dissection of the process of assessment as practiced through bioterrorism threat scenarios conducted by the US government and private think tanks. Exercises like Dark Winter, which modeled an “aerosolized” smallpox attack, Top Off 2 and 3, both on pneumonic plague strikes, and Atlantic Storm, an exercise that purported to show an al Qaida group manufacturing a dry powder smallpox weapon, were rigged. In the cases of Dark Winter and the Top Offs, transmission rates of disease were sexed up beyond historical averages so that “a disastrous outcome was assured” no matter any steps taken to contain outbreaks. Eight pages are reserved to pointedly condemn the Atlantic Storm exercise on a host of sins which can generally be described as a bundle of frank lies and misinformation coupled with a claimed terrorist facility for making smallpox into a weapon that even state run biological warfare operations did not possess. And once again, juiced transmission rates of disease were employed to grease theoretical calamity. The reader comes to recognize the deus ex machina–a concoction or intervention added to dictate an outcome, in these cases very bad ones–as a regular feature of the exercises. However, the results of the same assessments–the alleged lessons learned–have never been reported with much, if any, skepticism in the media. (Eric Smith, “A Vaccine for the Hype: Milton Leitenberg’s new ‘Assessing the Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism Threat,” Global Security, National Security Notes, March 31, 2006)

In criticizing “the fancy that such attacks are easy and one of the most catastrophic threats faced by the American people,” Smith denounces the alarmist scenarios of Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm’s designers–people like Dr. Tara O’Toole and the coterie of industry insiders and other well-paid “experts”–as guilty of perpetrating a massive “fraud … and a substantial one” on the American people.

While one of Atlantic Storm’s architects proclaimed “this is not science fiction” and that “the age of Bioterror is now…” Leitenberg and Smith denounce O’Toole’s spurious claims as “not the least bit plausible.”

Leitenberg wrote that “well before October-November 2001, the spectre of ‘bioterrorism’ benefitted from an extremely successful sales campaign.” Indeed, hyped-up scenarios such as Dark Winter and Atlantic Storm that place “weapons of mass destruction” in the hands of shadowy, intelligence-linked terror outfits like al Qaeda provided “inflated predictions that … were certainly not realistic. Much worse, in addition to being wrong, inflated predictions were counterproductive. They induced interest in BW in the wrong audiences.”

But the implausible nature of the scenarios deployed in national exercises hardly prohibited the Bioweapons-Industrial-Complex from concocting scarecrow-like straw men designed to sow terror amongst the American people while extracting regular infusions of cash from Congress.

Among the eight exercises analyzed by Leitenberg between 1998-2005, he found that each and every one were fraudulently designed and the threat of bioterrorism had been framed as a rationalization for “political action, the expenditure of public funds for bioterrorism prevention and response programs,” that could “not occur without it.” This is “not benign,” Leitenberg concludes.

A second consequence of sexed-up “bioterror” drills have even more ominous implications for the immediate future. Because of national security state perceptions that mitigation of catastrophic bioterrorism is of supreme importance for national survival–perceptions reinforced by academic, corporate and militarist peddlers of crisis–”the US biodefense research program appears to be drifting into violation” of the Biological Weapons Convention. This is a menacing development and has happened, I would argue precisely because the evaluation process which justifies research into biological weapons threat capabilities and scenarios, are repackaged to conceal the offensive thrust of this research as wholly defensive in nature, which it certainly is not.

How else would one explain ongoing research funded by the National Institutes of Health to study botulism toxin, “with the added qualification” Smith points out, that because the protein toxin is “unstable, therefore there will be collaboration with other researchers to stabilize it.” The NIH grant “means preparing a much more effective botulinum toxin than had been available before.”

Smith goes on to cite “another problematical breakout” offered by two scientists to study the “aerobiological” characteristics of the lethal Marburg and Ebola viruses. How this is “defensive” in nature, in keeping with research restrictions under the Biological Weapons Convention, is another instance of a backdoor move to kick-start illicit bioweapons development.

According to Smith, the study “looks to define how the organisms can be aerosolized, an instance of research into examining vulnerability in the complete absence of a verified threat.” But I would argue that showering taxpayers dollars into such dark and troubling research tributaries deploy hyped-up threats as cover for the development of illegal weapons.

When her nomination was announced in May, Rutgers University and homeland security critic Richard Ebright told Wired,

“This is a disastrous nomination. O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush Administration. O’Toole is as out of touch with reality, and as paranoiac, as former Vice President Cheney. It would be hard to think of a person less well suited for the position.”

“She was the single most extreme person, either in or out of government, advocating for a massive biodefense expansion and relaxation of provisions for safety and security,” he adds. “She makes Dr. Strangelove look sane.” (Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Geek Chief is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” Wired, May 6, 2009)

And Dr. Smith told Wired that exercises designed by O’Toole and her colleagues show her to be “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived.”

As noted above, “[She's] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying,” Smith told Wired.

But Smith goes even further and denounces O’Toole as an industry shill who “has never obviously appeared to examine what current terrorist capabilities have been… in favor of extrapolating how easy it would be to launch bioterror attacks if one had potentially unlimited resources and scientific know-how.” It’s a “superb appointment if you’re in the biodefense industry and interested in further opportunity and growth.”

“Alternatively” Smith avers, O’Toole’s appointment is “a disaster if threat assessment and prevention” has “some basis in reality.”

Not that any of this matters in Washington. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee led by “independent Democrat” and arch neocon Sen. Joseph Lieberman, voted to send her nomination to the full Senate July 29.

Never mind that the deadly weaponized pathogen employed in the attacks didn’t originate in some desolate Afghan cave or secret underground bunker controlled by Saddam.

And never mind that the principal cheerleaders for expanding state-funded programs are Pentagon bioweaponeers, private corporations and a shadowy nexus of biosecurity apparatchiks who stand to make a bundle under current and future federal initiatives.

Leading the charge for increased funding is the Alliance for Biosecurity, a collaborative venture between the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and Big Pharma.

That project, code-named “Einstein,” may very well be related to the much-larger, ongoing and highly illegal National Security Agency (NSA) communications intercept program known as “Stellar Wind,” disclosed in 2005 by The New York Times.

There are several components to Stellar Wind, one of which is a massive data-mining project run by the agency. As USA Today revealed in 2006, the “National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.”

Under the current program, Einstein will be tied directly into giant NSA data bases that contain the trace signatures left behind by cyberattacks; these immense electronic warehouses will be be fed by information streamed to the agency by the nation’s telecommunications providers.

AT&T, in partnership with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the NSA will spearhead the aggressive new initiative to detect malicious attacks launched against government web sites–by continuing to monitor the electronic communications of Americans.

This contradicts President Obama’s pledge announcing his administration’s cybersecurity program on May 29. During White House remarks Obama said that the government will not continue Bush-era surveillance practices or include “monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic.”

Called the “flagship system” in the national security state’s cyber defense arsenal, The Wall Street Journal reports that Einstein is “designed to protect the U.S. government’s computer networks from cyberspies.” In addition to cost overruns and mismanagement by outsourced contractors, the system “is being stymied by technical limitations and privacy concerns.” According to the Journal, Einstein is being developed in three stages:

Einstein 1: Monitors Internet traffic flowing in and out of federal civilian networks. Detects abnormalities that might be cyber attacks. Is unable to block attacks.

Einstein 2: In addition to looking for abnormalities, detects viruses and other indicators of attacks based on signatures of known incidents, and alerts analysts immediately. Also can’t block attacks.

Einstein 3: Under development. Based on technology developed for a National Security Agency program called Tutelage, it detects and deflects security breaches. Its filtering technology can read the content of email and other communications. (Siobhan Gorman, “Troubles Plague Cyberspy Defense,” The Wall Street Journal, July 3, 2009)

As readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, like other telecom grifters, AT&T is a private-sector partner of NSA and continues to be a key player in the agency’s driftnet spying on Americans’ electronic communications. In 2006, AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein revealed in a sworn affidavit, that the firm’s Internet traffic that runs through fiber-optic cables at the company’s Folsom Street facility in San Francisco was routinely provided to the National Security Agency

Using a device known as a splitter, a complete copy of Internet traffic that AT&T receives–email, web browsing requests and other electronic communications sent by AT&T customers, was diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable connected to the company’s SG-3 room, controlled by the agency. Only personnel with NSA clearances–either working for, or on behalf of the agency–have access to this room.

Klein and other critics of the program, including investigative journalist James Bamford who reported in his book, The Shadow Factory , believe that some 15-30 identical NSA-controlled rooms exist at AT&T facilities scattered across the country.

Einstein: You Don’t Have to Be a Genius to Know They’re Lying

But what happens next, after the data is processed and catalogued by the agency is little understood. Programs such as Einstein will provide NSA with the ability to read and decipher the content of email messages, any and all messages in real-time.

While DHS claims that “the new program will scrutinize only data going to or from government systems,” the Post reports that a debate has been sparked within the agency over “uncertainty about whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency’s involvement in warrantless wiretapping during George W. Bush’s presidency would draw controversy.”

A “Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) for EINSTEIN 2″ issued by DHS in May 2008, claims the system is interested in “malicious activity” and not personally identifiable information flowing into federal networks.

While DHS claims that “the risk associated with the use of this computer network security intrusion detection system is actually lower than the risk generated by using a commercially available intrusion detection system,” this assertion is undercut when the agency states, “Internet users have no expectation of privacy in the to/from address of their messages or the IP addresses of the sites they visit.”

When Einstein 3 is eventually rolled-out, Internet users similarly will “have no expectation of privacy” when it comes to the content of their communications.

DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters, “we absolutely intend to use the technical resources, the substantial ones, that NSA has.” Seeking to deflect criticism from civil libertarians, Napolitano claims “they will be guided, led and in a sense directed by the people we have at the Department of Homeland Security.”

Despite protests to the contrary by securocrats, like other Bush and Obama “cybersecurity” initiatives the Einstein program is a backdoor for pervasive state surveillance. Government Computer News reported in December 2008 that Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) said that “the misuse or exposure of sensitive data from such a program [Einstein] could undermine the security arguments for surveillance.”

And with Internet Service Providers routinely deploying deep packet inspection tools to “siphon off requested traffic for law enforcement,” tools with the ability to “inspect and shape every single packet–in real time–for nearly a million simultaneous connections” as Ars Technica reported, to assume that ISPs will protect Americans’ privacy rights from out-of-control state agencies is a foolhardy supposition at best.

The latest version of the system will not be rolled-out for at least 18 months. But like the Stellar Wind driftnet surveillance program, communications intercepted by Einstein 3 will be routed through a “monitoring box” controlled by NSA and their civilian contractors.

Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the plan called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block computer codes designed to penetrate or otherwise compromise networks. (Ellen Nakashima, “Cybersecurity Plan to Involve NSA, Telecoms,” The Washington Post, July 3, 2009)

However, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reported last September “that the Bush administration has authorized massive surveillance of the Internet using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the ‘Einstein’ program.”

While some researchers (including this one) question Madsen’s overreliance on anonymous sources and undisclosed documents, in fairness it should be pointed out that nine months before The New York Times the NSA’s secret e-mail collection database known as Pinwale, Madsen had already identified and broken the story. According to Madsen,

The classified technology being used for Einstein was developed for the NSA in conducting signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations on email networks in Russia. Code-named PINWHEEL, the NSA email surveillance system targets Russian government, military, diplomatic, and commercial email traffic and burrows into the text portions of the email to search for particular words and phrases of interest to NSA eavesdroppers. According to NSA documents obtained by WMR, there is an NSA system code-named ”PINWALE.”

The DNI and NSA also plan to move Einstein into the private sector by claiming the nation’s critical infrastructure, by nature, overlaps into the commercial sector. There are classified plans, already budgeted in so-called “black” projects, to extend Einstein surveillance into the dot (.) com, dot (.) edu, dot (.) int, and dot (.) org, as well as other Internet domains. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has budgeted $5.4 billion for Einstein in his department’s FY2009 information technology budget. However, this amount does not take into account the “black” budgets for Einstein proliferation throughout the U.S. telecommunications network contained in the budgets for NSA and DNI. (Wayne Madsen, “‘Einstein’ replaces ‘Big Brother’ in Internet Surveillance,” Online Journal, September 19, 2008)

A follow-up article published in February, identified the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm as the developer of Pinwale, an illegal program for the interception of text communications. According to Madsen, “the system is linked to a number of meta-databases that contain e-mail, faxes, and text messages of hundreds of millions of people around the world and in the United States.”

In other words both classified programs, Pinwale and Einstein, are sophisticated electronic communications surveillance projects that most certainly will train the agency’s formidable intelligence assets on the American people “using as cover a cyber-security multi-billion dollar project called the ‘Einstein’ program,” as Madsen reported.

AT&T: “No Comment”

An AT&T spokesman refused to comment on the proposals and is seeking legal protection from the state that it will not be sued for privacy breaches as a result of its participation in the new program. “Legal certification” the Post reports, “has been held up for several months as DHS prepares a contract.”

NSA’s involvement is critical proponents claim, because the agency has a readily-accessible database of computer codes, or signatures “that have been linked to cyberattacks or known adversaries. The NSA has compiled the cache by, for example, electronically observing hackers trying to gain access to U.S. military systems,” the Post averred.

Calling NSA’s cache “the secret sauce…it’s the stuff they have that the private sector doesn’t,” is what raises alarms for privacy and civil liberties’ advocates. Known as Tutelage, NSA’s classified program can detect and automatically decide how to deal with malicious intrusions, “to block them or watch them closely to better assess the threat,” according to the Post. “The database for the program would also contain feeds from commercial firms and DHS’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, administration officials said.”

Jeff Mohan, AT&T’s executive director for Einstein, was more forthcoming earlier this year. He told Federal News Radio: “With these services, we will provide a secure portal from the agency’s infrastructure, or Intranet to the public internet. There is a technical aspect, which is routers, firewalls and that sort of thing that applies these security capabilities across that portal and looks a Internet traffic that comes from public Internet to Intranet and vice versa.”

The “technical aspect” will also provide federal agencies the ability to capture, sort, read and then store Americans’ private communications in huge data bases run by NSA.

Mohan said that AT&T will provide the state with “optional services such as scanning e-mail and placing filters on agency networks to keep malicious e-mail off the network as well as forensic and storage capabilities also are available through MTIPS [Managed Trusted Internet Protocol Services].”

In addition to AT&T, other private partners awarded contracts under the General Services Administration’s MTIPS which has a built-in “Einstein enclave” include: Sprint, L3 Communications, Qwest, MCI, General Dynamics and Verizon, according to multiple reports published by Federal Computer Week.

Claiming that the state is “looking for malicious content, not a love note to someone with a dot-gov e-mail address,” a former unnamed “senior Bush administration official” told the Post “what we’re interested in is finding the code, the thing that will do the network harm, not reading the e-mail itself.”

Try selling that to the tens of millions of Americans whose private communications have been illegally spied upon by the Bush and Obama administrations or leftist dissidents singled-out for “special handling” by the national security state’s public-private surveillance partnership!

As the “global war on terror” morphs into an endless war on our democratic rights, the NSA is expanding domestic operations by “decentralizing its massive computer hubs,” The Salt Lake Tribune revealed.

The agency “will build a 1-million-square-foot data center at Utah’s Camp Williams,” the newspaper disclosed July 1. The new facility would be NSA’s third major data center. In 2007, the agency announced plans to build a second data center in San Antonio, Texas after the Baltimore Sun reported that NSA had “maxed out” the electric capacity of the Baltimore area’s power grid.

The San Antonio Current reported in December, that the NSA’s Texas Cryptology Center will cost “upwards of $130 million.” The 470,000 square-foot-facility is adjacent to a similar center constructed by software giant Microsoft. Investigative journalist James Bamford told the Current that under current law “NSA could gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant, but merely a fiber-optic cable.”

A follow-up article by The Salt Lake Tribune that the facility will cost upwards of $2 billion dollars and that funds have already been appropriated by the Obama administration for NSA’s new data center and listening post.

The secretive agency released a statement Thursday acknowledging the selection of Camp Williams as a site for the new center and describing it as “a specialized facility that houses computer systems and supporting equipment.”

Budget documents provide a more detailed picture of the facility and its mission. The supercomputers in the center will be part of the NSA’s signal intelligence program, which seeks to “gain a decisive information advantage for the nation and our allies under all circumstances” according to the documents. (Matthew D. LaPlante, “New NSA Center Unveiled in Budget Documents,” The Salt Lake Tribune, July 2, 2009)

Not everyone is pleased with the announcement. Steve Erickson, the director of the antiwar Citizens Education Project told the Tribune, “Finally, the Patriot Act has a home.”

While the total cost of rolling-out the Einstein 3 system is classified, The Wall Street Journal reports that “the price tag was expected to exceed $2 billion.” And as with other national security state initiatives, it is the American people who are footing the bill for the destruction of our democratic rights.

According to the memorandum, CYBERCOM “will reach initial operating capability (IOC) not later than October 2009 and full operating capability (FOC) not later than October 2010.”

Gates has recommended that this new Pentagon domain be led by Lt. General Keith Alexander, the current Director of the ultra-spooky National Security Agency (NSA). Under the proposal, Alexander would receive a fourth star and the new agency would be based at Ft. Meade, Maryland, NSA’s headquarters.

Gates’ memorandum specifies that CYBERCOM “must be capable of synchronizing warfighting effects across the global security environment as well as providing support to civil authorities and international partners.”

Ostensibly launched to protect military networks against malicious cyberattacks, the command’s offensive nature is underlined by its role as STRATCOM’s operational cyber wing. In addition to a defensive brief to “harden” the “dot-mil” domain, the Pentagon plan calls for an offensive capacity, one that will deploy cyber weapons against imperialism’s adversaries.

One of ten Unified Combatant Commands, STRATCOM is the successor organization to Strategic Air Command (SAC). Charged with space operations (military satellites), information warfare, missile defense, global command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), as well as global strike and strategic deterrence (America’s first-strike nuclear arsenal), it should be apparent that designating CYBERCOM a STRATCOM branch all but guarantees an aggressive posture.

As Antifascist Calling reported in May, the Pentagon’s geek squad, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is currently building a National Cyber Range (NCR), a test bed for developing, testing and fielding cyber weapons.

In conjunction with “private-sector partners,” the agency averred in a January 2009 press release that NCR promises to deliver “‘leap ahead’ concepts and capabilities.”

The Armed Forces Press Service reported June 24, that Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff Morrell told journalists that CYBERCOM is “not some sort of new and necessarily different authorities that have been granted.” Obfuscating the offensive role envisaged for the command, Morrell told reporters: “This is about trying to figure out how we, within this department, within the United States military, can better coordinate the day-to-day defense, protection and operation of the department’s computer networks.”

Others within the defense bureaucracy are far more enthusiastic, and forthright, when it comes to recommending that cyber armaments be fielded as offensive weapons of war. Indeed, Armed Forces Journal featured a lengthy analysis advocating precisely that.

The world has abandoned a fortress mentality in the real world, and we need to move beyond it in cyberspace. America needs a network that can project power by building an af.mil robot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack. (Col. Charles W. Williamson III, “Carpet Bombing in Cyberspace,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2008)

We have heard these Orwellian arguments before; one can take it for granted that when militarists pontificate on the need for a “deterrent,” the bombers are preparing for take off.

As with other Pentagon schemes, the technological quick fix may prove as deadly as the alleged threat, particularly where botnets are concerned.

A botnet is a collection of widely dispersed computers controlled from one or more central nodes. Often built by cyber criminals to implant malicious programs or code, steal passwords and other encrypted data from targeted systems, botnets are the bane of the Internet.

In these endeavors, sophisticated hackers are aided and abetted by the miserable security code or lax practices of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) more concerned with facilitating commerce–and the bottom line–than in providing adequate protection against criminals.

Indeed in March, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) urged the Federal Trade Commission “to shut down Google’s so-called cloud computing services, including Gmail and Google Docs, if the web giant can’t ensure the safety of user data stored by these online apps,” The Register reported.

EPIC’s petition in part, was sparked “by a Google snafu that saw the company inadvertently share certain Google Docs files with users unauthorized to view them. Google estimates that the breach hit about 0.05 per cent of the documents stored by the service,” according to The Register.

Infected computers are referred to as “zombies” that can be controlled remotely from any point on the planet by “master” machines. Unwary users are often “spoofed” by hackers through counterfeit e-mails replete with embedded hyperlinks into “cooperating” with the installation of malicious code.

While criminals employ botnets to generate spam or commit fraudulent transactions, draining a savings account or running-up credit card debt through multiple purchases for example, botnets also have the capacity to launch devastating distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks against inadequately defended computers or indeed, entire networks.

As many commentators have warned, the best defense is to write better security programs and exercise a modicum of common sense when using the Internet. The Pentagon however, has something else in mind.

Col. Williamson proposes to transform the Air Force’s high-speed intrusion-detection systems into an offensive botnet by enabling “the thousands of computers the Air Force would normally discard every year for technology refresh, removing the power-hungry and heat-inducing hard drives, replacing them with low-power flash drives, then installing them in any available space every Air Force base can find.” In other words, creating thousands of zombie machines.

“After that,” Col. Williamson avers, “the Air Force could add botnet code to all its desktop computers attached to the Nonsecret Internet Protocol Network (NIPRNet). Once the system reaches a level of maturity, it can add other .mil computers, then .gov machines.”

Underscoring the risks posed by out-of-control military hackers to hold America’s, or any other nations’ communications infrastructure hostage to a militarized state, Williamson suggests that in order to “generate the right amount of power for offense, all the available computers must be under the control of a single commander, even if he provides the capability for multiple theaters. While it cannot be segmented like an orange for individual theater commanders, it can certainly be placed under their tactical control.” (emphasis added)

In other words, should an “individual theatre commander” desire to suddenly darken a city or wreck havoc on a nation’s electrical infrastructure at the behest of his political masters then by all means, go right ahead! A proposal such as this, should it ever be implemented, would in essence, be a first-strike weapon.

Other plans for “defending” Pentagon computer networks are even more extreme.

STRATCOM commander Gen. Kevin Chilton has even suggested that “the White House retains the option to respond with physical force–potentially even using nuclear weapons–if a foreign entity conducts a disabling cyber attack against U.S. computer networks,” according to a disturbing report published by Global Security Newswire. During a Defense Writers Group breakfast in May, Chilton told journalists:

“I think you don’t take any response options off the table from an attack on the United States of America. Why would we constrain ourselves on how we respond?” …

Should the breaches evolve into more serious computer attacks against the United States, Chilton said he could not rule out the possibility of a military salvo against a nation like China, even though Beijing has nuclear arms. He rejected the idea that such a conflict would necessarily risk going nuclear.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Chilton said.

At the same time, the general insisted that all strike options, including nuclear, would remain available to the commander in chief in defending the nation from cyber strikes.

“I think that’s been our policy on any attack on the United States of America,” Chilton said. “And I don’t see any reason to treat cyber any differently. I mean, why would we tie the president’s hands? I can’t. It’s up to the president to decide.” (Elaine M. Grossman, “U.S. General Reserves Right to Use Force, Even Nuclear, in Response to Cyber Attack,” Global Security Newswire, May 12, 2009) blockquote>
While Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told The New York Times that CYBERCOM’s launch “is not about the militarization of cyber,” how else can it be characterized?

Indeed, Whitman went on to say that CYBERCOM “is focused only on military networks to better consolidate and streamline Department of Defense capabilities into a single command.”

How then, should one interpret moves by the Pentagon to “consolidate and streamline” DoD “capabilities” under the purview of STRATCOM? Obviously, an entity defined as a “Unified Combatant Command” as clearly stated by General Chilton’s avowal to “leave all options on the table,” would combine cyber “defense” with STRATCOM’s global strike mission.

Antifascist Calling revealed last year, citing a U.S. Air Force planning document, that preparations are already underway to transform cyberspace into an offensive military domain. Indeed, Air Force theorists averred:

Cyberspace favors offensive operations. These operations will deny, degrade, disrupt, destroy, or deceive an adversary. Cyberspace offensive operations ensure friendly freedom of action in cyberspace while denying that same freedom to our adversaries. We will enhance our capabilities to conduct electronic systems attack, electromagnetic systems interdiction and attack, network attack, and infrastructure attack operations. Targets include the adversary’s terrestrial, airborne, and space networks, electronic attack and network attack systems, and the adversary itself. As an adversary becomes more dependent on cyberspace, cyberspace offensive operations have the potential to produce greater effects. (Air Force Cyber Command, “Strategic Vision,” no date, emphasis added)

Echoing Air Force strategy, SecDef Gates memo clearly states, since “cyberspace and its associated technologies … are vital to our nation’s security,” the United States will “secure freedom of action in cyberspace” by standing-up a unified command “that possesses the required technical capability and remains focused on the integration of cyberspace operations.”

Simply put, the Pentagon intends to build an infrastructure fully-capable of committing high-tech war crimes.

Under NSA’s Operational Control

Meanwhile in the heimat, CYBERCOM will effectively be under the day-to-day control of the National Security Agency. This is hardly good news when it comes to civil liberties.

Leaving aside considerations of bureaucratic trench warfare with the Department of Homeland Security, charged with defending the state’s .gov and .com domains, the unprecedented power of CYBERCOM to conduct offensive military and surveillance operations within the United States itself is underlined by the preeminent role NSA will assume.

Authorized by the criminal Bush regime to carry out massive electronic surveillance of Americans’ private communications in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, various driftnet spying operations continue under Obama’s purported “change” administration. As Antifascist Calling has averred many times, the only “change” that’s come to the White House has been the color of the drapes hanging in the Oval Office.

The New York Times June 17, that the “National Security Agency is facing renewed scrutiny over the extent of its domestic surveillance program, with critics in Congress saying its recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged.” According to the Times, “The agency’s monitoring of domestic e-mail messages, in particular, has posed longstanding legal and logistical difficulties, the officials said.”

I take issue with the Times’ characterization that such a breach of constitutional norms merely represent “logistical difficulties.” As with a Times’ report in April which alleged that NSA’s driftnet spying under Obama was simply a problem of “overcollection,” far from being mere technical issues, first and foremost, these violations represent political decisions made at the highest levels of the national security state itself.

Since April, when it was disclosed that the intercepts of some private communications of Americans went beyond legal limits in late 2008 and early 2009, several Congressional committees have been investigating. Those inquiries have led to concerns in Congress about the agency’s ability to collect and read domestic e-mail messages of Americans on a widespread basis, officials said. Supporting that conclusion is the account of a former N.S.A. analyst who, in a series of interviews, described being trained in 2005 for a program in which the agency routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants. Two intelligence officials confirmed that the program was still in operation. (James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress,” The New York Times, June 17, 2009)

Last year, congressional Democrats, including Senator now President, Obama, handed the NSA virtually unchecked power to spy on the private communications of Americans. In addition to granting retroactive immunity to telecom grifters who profited from their conspiracy to illegally spy on citizens for the state, the despicable FISA Amendments Act (FIA) gave NSA the legal cover to intercept Americans’ communications “so long as it was done only as the incidental byproduct of investigating individuals ‘reasonably believed’ to be overseas,” as the Times delicately put it.

CYBERCOM’s brief, and its deployment inside NSA with full access to the agency’s powerful computing assets, and with a mission to conduct global Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) at the behest of their STRATCOM masters, mean that despite bromides about “privacy concerns,” the Pentagon will most assuredly be interested in developing an attack matrix that can just as easily be turned inward. After all as General Chilton asserts, “it’s up to the president to decide.”

“One thing that is pretty clear,” Wired reports, “NSA will be leading this emerging command.” Indeed, NSA “may also come to dominate the wider government cyber defense effort, as well.” As The Wall Street Journal revealed, the Defense Department’s 2010 budget “envisions training and graduating more than 200 cyber-security officers annually.” In contradistinction to DoD, “the Department of Homeland Security has 100 employees dedicated to civilian cyber security, with plans to reach 260 next year,” the Journal reports.

In other words, right from the get-go NSA will be assuming operational control of CYBERCOM. This is driven home by the fact that the Pentagon is already receiving the vast majority of appropriations for state cybersecurity initiatives and have thousands of cyberwarriors across all branches of the military, including outsourced private contractors who labor for DoD, ready, willing and able to staff the new command.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in April, with billions of dollars already spent on a score of top secret cyber initiatives, including those hidden within Pentagon Special Access or black programs, the issue of oversight is already a moot point.

Defense analyst William M. Arkin in his essential book, Code Names, described some three dozen cyberwar programs and/or exercises, currently being pursued by the Pentagon. Since the book’s 2005 publication, many others undoubtedly have come on-line.

While NSA Director Alexander has explicitly stated that he does “not want [NSA] to run cybersecurity for the United States government,” CYBERCOM’s stand-up, and Alexander’s near certain appointment as commander, all but guarantees that the agency will be a ubiquitous and silent gatekeeper answerable to no one.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/07/cyber-command-launched-us-strategic-command-to-oversee-offensive-military-operations/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/obamas-cybersecurity-plan-bring-in-the-contractors/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/obamas-cybersecurity-plan-bring-in-the-contractors/#comments Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:05:51 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8512 With billions of dollars in federal funds hanging in the balance, President Barack Obama unveiled the Cyberspace Policy Review May 29 at the White House.

During his presentation in the East Room Obama said that “America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cybersecurity” and that efforts to “deter, prevent, detect and defend” against malicious cyberattacks would be run from the White House.

How this debate is being framed however, has a familiar ring to it. Rather than actually educating the public about steps to prevent victimization, state prescriptions always seem to draw from the same tired playbook.

First, issue dire warnings of an imminent national catastrophe; second, manufacture a panic with lurid tales of a “digital Pearl Harbor;” third, gin-up expensive “solutions” that benefit armies of (well-paid) experts drawn from officialdom and the private sector (who generally are as interchangeable as light bulbs however dim).

As Wired magazine’s ”Threat Level” editor Kevin Poulsen said during a panel at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Washington June 3, “the threat of cyber-terrorism is ‘preposterous’,” arguing that “long-standing warnings” that hackers will attack the nation’s power grid is so much hot-air. Poulsen contends “that calling such intrusions national security threats means information about attacks gets classified unneccessarily.”

While the president claims the new office “will not include–I repeat will not include–monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic,” and that his administration “will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans,” the devil is in the details and when they’re added together “change” once again, morphs into more of the same.

As with all things Washington, lurking wraith-like in the background, amidst bromides about “protecting America” from “cyber thieves trolling for sensitive information” are the usual class of insiders: the well-heeled corporations and their stable of retired militarists and spies who comprise the Military-Industrial-Security Complex.

Take Dale Meyerrose, for example. The former Air Force Major General served as U.S. Northern Command’s Chief Information Officer. After a stint at NORTHCOM, Meyerrose became Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Information Sharing for U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, the former NSA Director and ten-year executive vice president at the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm.

Last week, Meyerrose told The Wall Street Journal that “one important challenge will be finding a way to persuade private companies, especially those in price-sensitive industries, to invest more money in digital security. ‘You have to figure out what motivates folks,’ he said.”

He should know. After serving as McConnell’s cyber point man, Meyerrose plotted a new flight plan that landed him a plum job with major defense contractor, the Harris Corporation, where he currently directs the company’s National Cyber Initiative.

Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the firm boasts $5.4 billion in annual revenue and clocked in at No. 13 on Washington Technology’s “2008 Top 100 Government Contractors” list, with some $1.6 billion in defense-related income. Under the General Services Administration’s Alliant contract worth some $50 billion, the firm is competeing with other defense giants to provide an array of IT services to various federal agencies. Major customers include the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Reconnaissance Office and Defense Department.

Let’s be clear: “What motivates folks” is cold, hard cash and there’s lots of it to go around courtesy of the American people. The New York Times reported May 31, “The government’s urgent push into cyberwarfare has set off a rush among the biggest military companies for billions of dollars in new defense contracts.” According to the Times,

The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. And the race to develop weapons that defend against, or initiate, computer attacks has given rise to thousands of “hacker soldiers” within the Pentagon who can blend the new capabilities into the nation’s war planning.

Nearly all of the largest military companies–including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon–have major cyber contracts with the military and intelligence agencies. (Christopher Drew and John Markoff, “Contractors Vie for Plum Work, Hacking for the United States,” The New York Times, May 31, 2009)

As Washington Technology reported June 1, Zal Azmi, CACI International’s senior vice president for strategic law enforcement and national security programs, told the insider publication: “The timing is perfect. There is a lot of enthusiasm for it. “It’s a very comprehensive plan. It lays out a very good strategy.”

And there you have it.

A Cybersecurity Dream: Bundles of Cash

Although the position of Cybersecurity Coordinator has yet to be filled, its a sure bet whoever gets the nod will be drawn from a narrow pool of security executives, the majority of whom transit effortlessly between the Pentagon and defense corporations. That individual will oversee billions of dollars in funding for developing and coordinating the defense of computer systems that operate the global financial system as well as domestic transportation and commerce.

Under the administration’s plan, the Cybersecurity Coordinator will report to the president’s National Economic Council (NEC) and the National Security Council (NSC). The CSC will be a member of both NEC and NSC, Obama said in his East Room statement, “an acknowledgment that the threat is both to national security and to the economy,” The Washington Post reports.

According to the Post, Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence H. Summers, fought for a dominant role for the NEC, ensuring that “efforts to protect private networks do not unduly threaten economic growth.” This however, is unlikely to happen given the make-up of the administration’s team. Which raises the question: who exactly were Obama’s “private sector partners” who helped devise current state policy? The Cyberspace Policy Review sets the record straight.

The U.S. depends upon a privately owned, globally operated digital infrastructure. The review team engaged with industry to continue building the foundation of a trusted partnership. This engage­ment underscored the importance of developing value propositions that are understood by both government and industry partners. It also made clear that increasing information sharing is not enough; the government must foster an environment for collaboration. The following industry groups and venues participated: the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA), Business Executives for National Security (BENS), the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, the Communications Sector Coordinating Council (C-SCC), the Cross-Sector Cyber Security Working Group (CSCSWG), the Defense Industrial Base Executive Committee, the Financial and Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC), the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FS-SCC), the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), the Internet Security Alliance (ISA), the Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT-SCC), the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC), the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), TechAmerica, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (Cyberspace Policy Review, Appendix B: Methodology, pp. B 2-3.)

A bevy of heavy-hitters in the defense, banking, financial services, intelligence and security industries if ever there were one. And much like their predecessors in the Oval Office, the Obama administration has failed to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence” by the Military-Industrial-Security Complex which president Dwight. D. Eisenhower so eloquently warned against–and expanded–decades ago.

Round Up the Usual Suspects

Who then are the new peddlers of “unwarranted influence”? Let’s take a look.

Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA): The Fairfax, Virginia group describes itself as a “non-profit membership association serving the military, government, industry, and academia” to advance “professional knowledge and relationships in the fields of communications, IT, intelligence and global security.” AFCEA was founded at the dawn of the Cold War in 1946. It serves as an “ethical forum” where “a close cooperative relationship among government agencies, the military and industry” is fostered. With 32,000 individual and 1,700 corporate members, AFCEA was described by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in his essential book Spies For Hire as “the largest industry association in the intelligence business.” Its board of directors and executive committee are studded with players drawn from major defense and security firms such as CACI International, Booz Allen Hamilton, Science Applications International Corporation, ManTech International Corporation, QinetiQ North America, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and the spooky MITRE Corporation.

Business Executives for National Security (BENS): This self-described “nationwide, non-partisan organization” claims the mantle of functioning as “the primary channel through which senior business executives can help advance the nation’s security.” BENS members were leading proponents of former vice president Al Gore’s defense reform initiative that handed tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to BENS members in the heavily-outsourced intelligence and security industries. An advocacy group with a distinct neoconservative tilt, BENS “one special interest: to help make America safe and secure” is facilitated by executives drawn from the Pentagon. Its current Chairman and CEO is retired Air Force General Charles G. Boyd who served as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s “defense consultant.” Its board of directors and executive committee include members from Biltmore Capital Group, LLC; Janus Capital Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Cisco Systems Inc., Perot Systems Inc., Goldman Sachs and The Tupperware Corporation (!) to name but a few. BENS Advisory Council includes major war criminal Henry Kissinger, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, former U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering, former FBI and CIA Director William Webster, former CIA head honcho Michael V. Hayden and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. “Non-partisan” indeed!

Business Software Alliance (BSA): BSA describes itself as “the largest and most international IT industry group” comprised on the “most innovative companies in the world.” Its members are drawn from the top corporations in the computing and software industries and include Adobe, Apple, Cisco Systems, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens and Symantec. Most of these firms have extensive contractual arrangements with the Defense Department.

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): For decades, CSIS has been a major right-wing think tank closely tied to the defense and security industries. Since its founding in 1962 by David Abshire and Admiral Arleigh Burke, CSIS has been a mouthpiece for the Defense and Intelligence Complex. Its current President and CEO, John J. Hamre was a former Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Clinton administration and was hired by SAIC to work on the National Security Agency’s scandal-plagued Trailblazer program. The $361 million project to build a new communications intercept system for NSA was described as a “colossal failure” by investigative journalists Donald Bartlett and James Steele in a 2007 piece in Vanity Fair. CSIS was a major behind-the-scenes force urging the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and was an apologist for the Bush administration’s bogus allegation that the Iraqi government possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” citing “poor intelligence” rather than political mendacity on a grand scale. In the aftermath of the invasion, Booz Allen Hamilton organized a “major conference on rebuilding Iraq that attracted hundreds of corporations eager to cash in on the billions of dollars in contracts about to be awarded by the Bush administration,” according to Tim Shorrock. The closed-door event was held in the CSIS conference room and outlined the Bush regime’s plans for Iraq’s economic make-over–one that would sell-off state assets “in a way very conducive to foreign investment.” The Obama administration’s Cyberspace Policy Review has drawn extensively from CSIS’ Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency report, an alarmist screed that avers that “cybersecurity is now a major national security problem for the United States.” Indeed the CSIS report urges the Obama administration to “reinvent the public-private partnership” with “a focus on operational activities” that “will result in more progress on cybersecurity.” How might this be accomplished? Why by regulating cyberspace, of course! CSIS avers that “voluntary action is not enough,” and states “we advocate a new approach to regulation that avoids both prescriptive mandates, which could add unnecessary costs and stifle innovation, and overreliance on market forces, which are ill-equipped to meet national security and public safety requirements.” But with a dubious track record dating back to the Cold War, and a board of directors manned by multinational defense grifters and neoconservative/neoliberal insiders such as former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn, Henry Kissinger, Richard Armitage, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, James R. Schlesinger and Bush crime family insider Brent Scowcroft, CSIS’ cybersecurity prescriptions are anything but reliable.

Communications Sector Coordinating Council (CSCC): Created in 2005 “to represent the Communications Sector, as the principal entity for coordinating with the government in implementing the National Infrastructure Protection Plan (NIPP),” CSCC’s “unique industry-government partnership” facilitates the “exchange of information among government and industry participants regarding vulnerabilities, threats, intrusions and anomalies affecting the telecommunications infrastructure.” Certainly one “anomaly” not addressed by CSCC is the National Security Agency’s driftnet surveillance of Americans’ private communications. A major hub where telecommunications’ grifters meet, CSCC members include AT&T, Boeing, Cisco Systems, Comcast, Computer Sciences Corporation, Level 3, the MITRE Corporation, Motorola, the National Association of Broadcasters, Nortel, Quest, Sprint, Tyco, U.S. Internet Service Provider Association, VeriSign and Verizon. Many of the above-named entities are direct collaborators with the NSA and FBI’s extensive warrantless wiretapping programs.

Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA): As Antifascist Calling reported May 26, INSA was created by and for contractors in the heavily-outsourced world of U.S. intelligence. Founded by BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Computer Sciences Corporation, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Microsoft, the Potomac Institute and Science Applications International Corporation, The Washington Post characterized INSA as “a gathering place for spies and their business associates.” According to an INSA paper on cybersecurity, Critical Issues for Cyber Assurance Policy Reform: An Industry Assessment, the group recommended “a single leadership position at the White House-level that aligns national cyber security responsibilities with appropriate authorities.” Among other prescriptions, reflecting the group’s close ties to defense firms and the Pentagon INSA calls on the Obama administration to “establish a stronger working relationship between the private sector and the U.S. Government” (!) With their members heavily-banking on an expansion of Pentagon development of cyber attack tools, the group calls on the state to “Incorporate private sector cyber threat scenarios within government cyber-related test beds (e.g., DARPA’s Cyber Test Range). Government cyber-related test beds should reflect private sector operational scenarios, especially to demonstrate how similar threats are detected and deterred, as well as to demonstrate private sector concerns (e.g., exploitation of electric utility control system).” As I previously reported, INSA founding members BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin and SAIC have all been awarded contracts by DARPA to build and run the National Cyber Range.

Internet Security Alliance (ISA): According to a self-promotional blurb on their website, ISA “was created to provide a forum for information sharing” and “represents corporate security interests before legislators and regulators.” Amongst ISA sponsors one finds AIG (yes, that AIG!) Verizon, Raytheon, VeriSign, the National Association of Manufacturers, Nortel, Northrop Grumman, Tata, and Mellon. State partners include the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Congress, and the Department of Commerce. Among ISA’s recommendations for the Obama administration’s Cyberspace Policy Review was its unabashed claim that “the diversity of the internet places its security inescapably in the hands of the private sector.” When one considers that the development of the Internet was the result of taxpayer dollars, ISA’s cheeky demand is impertinent at best, reflecting capitalism’s inherent tendency to “forget” who foots the bill! In this vein, ISA believes that “government’s first role ought to be to use market incentives to motivate adhering to good security practices.” In other words, taxpayer-financed handouts. Considering the largess already extended to ISA “sponsor” AIG, “regulation for consumer protection” that use “government mandates” to “address cyber infrastructure issues” will be “ineffective and counter-productive both from a national security and economic perspective.” Give us the money seems to be ISA’s clarion call to the new “change” regime in Washington. And why not? Just ask AIG!

The Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT-SCC): According to their website, the IT-SCC was established in 2006 and brought together “companies, associations, and other key IT sector participants,” in a forum that “envisions a secure, resilient and protected global information infrastructure that can rapidly restore services if affected by an emergency or crisis,” and may “consider the use of government resources to support appropriate tasks such as administrative, meeting logistics, specifically defined and mutually agreeable projects, and communications support (particularly in response to government requests or needs).” With some six dozen corporate members, the majority of whom are heavily-leveraged in the defense and security industries, IT-SCC affiliates include the usual suspects: Business Software Alliance, Center for Internet Security, Computer Sciences Corporation, General Dynamics, IBM, Intel, Internet Security Alliance, ITT Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Northrop Grumman, Perot Systems, Raytheon and Verizon, to name but a few. One IT-SCC affiliate not likely craving public scrutiny is Electronic Warfare Associates, Inc. (EWA). According to Wired, one EWA company, the Herndon, Virginia-based EWA Government Systems, Inc., “is one of several firms that boasts of making tiny devices to help manhunters locate their prey. The company’s ‘Bigfoot Remote Tagging System’ is a “very small, battery-operated device used to emit an RF [radio frequency] transmission [so] that the target can be located and/or tracked.” Allegedly in use along the AfPak border, the devices are RFID beacons planted by local operatives “near militant safehouses,” which guide CIA Predator and Reaper drones to their targets. Sounds like any number of government-sponsored “mutually agreeable projects” to me!

The National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC): As Antifascist Calling reported last year (see: “Comcast’s Spooky Employment Opportunities”) NSTAC is comprised of telecom executives representing the major communications, network service providers, information technology, finance and aerospace companies who provide “industry-based advice and expertise” to the President “on issues and problems relating to implementing national security and emergency preparedness communications policy,” according to SourceWatch. Created in 1982 when former president Ronald Reagan signed Executive Order 12382, in all probability NSTAC facilitates U.S. telecommunication firms’ “cooperation” with NSA and other intelligence agencies’ efforts in conducting warrantless wiretapping, data-mining and other illegal surveillance programs in highly-profitable arrangements with the Bush and Obama administrations. NSTAC’s current Chair is Edward A. Mueller, Chairman and CEO at Qwest. The group’s Vice Chair is John T. Stankey, the President and CEO at AT&T. Additional corporate members include: The Boeing Company, Motorola, Science Applications International Corporation, Lockheed Martin, Rockwell International, Juniper Networks, the Harris Corporation, Tyco Electronics, Computer Sciences Corporation, Microsoft, Bank of America, Inc., Verizon, Raytheon and Nortel.

TechAmerica: Self-described as “the driving force behind productivity growth and jobs creation in the United States,” TechAmerica represents some 1,500 member companies and “is the industry’s largest advocacy organization,” one that “is dedicated to helping members’ top and bottom lines.” Indeed, the lobby shop offered lavish praise for president Obama’s Cyber Security plan. Calling the administration’s Cyberspace Policy Review a “historic step in the right direction,” one that will “protect America” (wait!) “from a digital 9/11.”

Conclusion

The Obama administration’s Cyberspace Policy Review is a corporatist boondoggle that will neither ameliorate nor frankly, even begin to address the most pertinent cybersecurity threats faced by the vast majority of Americans: hacking and spoofing attacks by criminals. Why? The wretched programs riddled with bad code and near non-existent “security” patches breeched as soon as they’re written are not part of the playbook. Indeed, the corporations and software developers who’ve grown rich off of the Internet have no incentive to write better programs!

After all, from a business perspective its far better to terrorize the public into demanding more intrusive, and less accountable, minders who will “police” the Internet–for a hefty price.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/06/obamas-cybersecurity-plan-bring-in-the-contractors/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/national-cyber-range-building-attack-tools-for-mass-destruction/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/national-cyber-range-building-attack-tools-for-mass-destruction/#comments Wed, 27 May 2009 16:43:14 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8404 A quintessential hallmark of an authoritarian regime, particularly one that operates within highly-militarized, though nominally democratic states such as ours, is the maintenance of a system of internal control; a seamless panopticon where dissent is equated with criminality and the rule of law derided as a luxury ill-afforded “during a time of war.”

In this context, the deployment of new offensive technologies which can wreck havoc on human populations deemed expendable by the state, are always couched in a defensive rhetoric by militarist aggressors and their apologists.

While the al-Qaeda brand may no longer elicit a compelling response in terms of mobilizing the population for new imperial adventures, novel threats–and panics–are required to marshal public support for the upward transfer of wealth into the corporate trough. Today, “cyber terror” functions as the “new Osama.”

And with Congress poised to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, an Orwellian bill that would give the president the power to “declare a cybersecurity emergency” and shut down or limit Internet traffic in any “critical” information network “in the interest of national security” of course, the spaces left for the free flow of information–and meaningful dissent–slowly contract.

DARPA–and Cybersecurity Grifters–to the Rescue

But protecting critical infrastructure from hackers, criminals and terrorists isn’t the only game in town. The Pentagon is planning to kick-start a new office, Cyber Command, armed with the capacity to launch devastating attacks against any nation or group deemed an official enemy by Washington.

As Antifascist Calling reported last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s “geek squad,” is building a National Cyber Range (NCR). As Cyber Command’s research arm, the agency’s Strategic Technology Office (STO) describes NCR as

DARPA’s contribution to the new federal Comprehensive National Cyber Initiative (CNCI), providing a “test bed” to produce qualitative and quantitative assessments of the Nation’s cyber research and development technologies. Leveraging DARPA’s history of cutting-edge research, the NCR will revolutionize the state of the art for large-scale cyber testing. Ultimately, the NCR will provide a revolutionary, safe, fully automated and instrumented environment for our national cyber security research organizations to evaluate leap-ahead research, accelerate technology transition, and enable a place for experimentation of iterative and new research directions. (”National Cyber Range,” Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Strategic Technology Office, no date)

According to a January 2009 press release, the agency announced that NCR “will accelerate government research and development in high-risk, high-return areas and work in close cooperation with private-sector partners to jump-start technical cyber transformation.”

Given the Pentagon’s proclivity to frame debates over defense and security-related issues as one of “dominating the adversary” and discovering vulnerabilities that can be “exploited” by war planners, one can hypothesize that NCR is a testing range for the creation of new offensive weapons.

Amongst the “private-sector partners” chosen by the agency to “develop, field, and test new ‘leap ahead’ concepts and capabilities” are:

BAE Systems, Information and Electronic Systems Integration Inc., Wayne, N.J. ($3,279,634); General Dynamics, Advanced Information Systems, San Antonio, Texas ($1,944,094); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel Md. ($7,336,805); Lockheed Martin Corp., Simulation, Training and Support, Orlando, Fla. ($5,369,656); Northrop Grumman, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Systems Division, Columbia, Md. ($344,097); Science Applications International Corp., San Diego, Calif. ($2,821,725); SPARTA, Columbia, Md. ($8,603,617).

While little-known outside the defense and intelligence establishment, SPARTA describes its “core business areas” as “strategic defense and offense systems, tactical weapons systems, space systems.” Its security and intelligence brief includes “intelligence production, computer network operations, and information assurance.”

Investigative journalist James Bamford wrote in The Shadow Factory that SPARTA “hired Maureen Baginski, the NSA’s powerful signals intelligence director, in October 2006, as president of its National Security Systems Sector.” According to Bamford, the firm, like others in the netherworld of corporate spying are always on the prowl for intelligence analysts “to pursue access and exploitation of targets of interest.”

Given their spooky résumé, information on SPARTA’s contracts are hard to come by. Indeed, the firm claims that under Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act they are exempt from providing the public with information because their products involve “the operation, or use of… intelligence activities… related to national security, command and control of military forces, equipment that is an integral part of a weapon or weapons system, or systems which are critical to the direct fulfillment of military or intelligence missions.” How’s that for openness and transparency! One can only hazard a guess as to the firm’s role in devising DARPA’s “leap-ahead” National Cyber Range.

While the initial outlay of defense funds for NCR may appear to be a substantial amount of boodle for enterprising contractors, it is merely a down payment on Phase I of the project. Melissa Hathaway, the Obama administration’s director of the Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force said, “I don’t believe that this is a single-year or even a multi-year investment–it’s a multi-decade approach.” Hathaway, a former consultant at the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation, told the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) in April,

Building toward the architecture of the future requires research and development that focuses on game-changing technologies that could enhance the security, reliability, resilience and trustworthiness of our digital infrastructure. We need to be mindful of how we, government and industry together, can optimize our collective research and development dollars and work together to improve market incentives for secure and resilient hardware and software products, new security innovation, and secure managed services. (”Remarks by Melissa E. Hathaway, Acting Senior Director for Cyberspace for the National Security and Homeland Security Councils,” INSA, April 30, 2009)

That Hathaway chose INSA as a forum is hardly surprising. Describing itself as a “non-profit professional association created to improve our nation’s security through an alliance of intelligence and national security leaders in the private and public sectors,” INSA was created by and for contractors in the heavily-outsourced shadow world of U.S. intelligence. Founded by BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, Computer Sciences Corporation, General Dynamics, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, ManTech International, Microsoft, the Potomac Institute and Science Applications International Corporation, The Washington Post characterized INSA as “a gathering place for spies and their business associates.”

“Partners” who benefit directly from the launch of DARPA’s National Cyber Range. No doubt, Hathaway’s remarks are music to the ears of “beltway bandits” who reap hundreds of billions annually to fund taxpayer-fueled “national security priorities.” That the Pentagon is richly rewarding INSA-connected firms with documented track records of “misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations,” according to the Project on Government Oversight’s (POGO) Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) hardly elicits a yawn from Congress.

Among the corporations selected by the agency to construct the National Cyber Range, Lockheed Martin leads the pack in “Misconduct $ since 1995″ according to POGO, having been fined $577.2 million (No. 1); Northrop Grumman, $790.4 million (No. 3); General Dynamics, $63.2 million (No. 4); BAE Systems, $1.3 million (No. 6); Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), $14.5 million (No. 9); Johns Hopkins University, $4.6 million, (No. 81)

But as disturbing as these figures are, representing corporate grifting on a massive scale, equally troubling is the nature of the project itself. As Aviation Week reports, “Devices to launch and control cyber, electronic and information attacks are being tested and refined by the U.S. military and industry in preparation for moving out of the laboratory and into the warfighter’s backpack.”

High-Tech Tools for Aggressive War

The American defense establishment is devising tools that can wreck havoc with a keystroke. DARPA is currently designing “future attack devices” that can be deployed across the imperialist “battlespace” by the “non-expert,” that is by America’s army of robosoldiers. According to Aviation Week, one such device “combines cybersleuthing, technology analysis and tracking of information flow. It then offers suggestions to the operator on how best to mount an attack and, finally, reports on success of the effort.”

The heart of this attack device is its ability to tap into satellite communications, voice over Internet, proprietary Scada networks–virtually any wireless network. Scada (supervisory control and data acquisition) is of particular interest since it is used to automatically control processes at high-value targets for terrorists such as nuclear facilities, power grids, waterworks, chemical plants and pipelines. The cyberattack device would test these supposedly inviolate networks for vulnerabilities to wireless penetration. (David A. Fulghum, “Network Attack Weapons Emerge,” Aviation Week, May 21, 2009)

As can be expected, the Pentagon’s rhetorical mise-en-scène is always a purely “defensive” response to future depredations by nefarious and shadowy forces threatening the heimat. In fact, the United States has systematically employed battlefield tactics that target civilian infrastructure as a means of breaking the enemy’s will to fight. Stretching across the decades, from Southeast Asia to Iraq to Yugoslavia, imperialist strategists have committed war crimes by targeting the electrical grid, water supply and transportation- and manufacturing infrastructure of their adversaries.

The NCR will potentially serve as a new and improved means to bring America’s rivals to their knees. Imagine the capacity for death and destruction implicit in a tool that can, for example, at the push of a button cause an adversary’s chemical plant to suddenly release methyl isocynate (the Bhopal effect) on a sleeping city, or a nuclear power plant to go supercritical, releasing tens of billions of curies of radioactive death into the atmosphere?

During NATO’s 1999 “liberation” of the narco-state Kosovo from the former Yugoslavia, American warplanes dropped what was described as a graphite “blackout bomb,” the BLU-114/B “soft bomb” on Belgrade and other Serbian cities during its war of aggression. As the World Socialist Web Site reported at the time,

A particularly dangerous consequence of the long-term power blackout is the damage to the water systems in many Yugoslav cities, which are dependent on pumping stations run by electrical power. Novi Sad, a city of 300,000 which is the capital of the Vojvodina province of Serbia, has been without running water for eight days, according to residents. Families have been compelled to get water from the Danube river to wash and operate the toilet, and a handful of wells to provide drinking water.

Sewage treatment plants have also been shut down, with the result that raw, untreated sewage has begun to flow into the network of rivers that feed into the Danube, central Europe’s most important waterway. (Marty McLaughlin, “Wall Street celebrates stepped-up bombing of Serbia,” World Socialist Web Site, May 5, 1999)

With technological advances courtesy of DARPA’s National Cyber Range and their “private-sector partners,” the potential for utterly devastating societies ripe for resource extraction by American corporatist war criminals will increase exponentially. As Wired reported,

Comparisons between nuclear and cyberweapons might seem strained, but there’s at least one commonality. Scholars exploring the ethics of wielding logic bombs, Trojan horses, worms and bots in wartime often find themselves treading on ground tilled by an earlier generation of Cold War nuclear gamesmen.

“There are lots of unknowns with a cyberattack,” says Neil Rowe, a professor at the Center for Information Security Research at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, who rejects cyberattacks as a legitimate tool of war. “The potential for collateral damage is worse than nuclear technology…. With cyber, it can spread through the civilian infrastructure and affect far more civilians.” (Marty Graham, “Welcome to Cyberwar Country, USA,” Wired, February 11, 2008)

Initiatives such as the National Cyber Range are fully theorized as one facet of “network-centric warfare,” the Rumsfeldian “Revolution in Military Affairs.” Durham University geographer Stephen Graham describes the Pentagon notion that dominance can be achieved through “increasingly omnipotent surveillance and ’situational awareness’, devastating and precisely-targeted aerial firepower, and the suppression and degradation of the communications and fighting ability of any opposing forces.”

Indeed, these are integrated approaches that draw from corporate management theory to create “continuous, always-on support for military operations in urban terrain,” an imperialist battlespace where Wal-Mart seamlessly morphs into The Terminator.

According to Aviation Week, the device currently being field tested will “capture expert knowledge but keep humans in the loop.” As a battlefield weapon, simplicity and ease of operation is the key to successfully deploying this monstrous suite of tools. And Pentagon “experts” are designing a console that will “quantify results so that the operator can put a number against a choice,” “enhance execution by creating a tool for the nonexpert that puts material together and keeps track of it” and finally, “create great visuals so missions can be executed more intuitively.”

A touch-screen dashboard beneath the network schematic display looks like the sound mixing console at a recording studio. The left side lists cyberattack mission attributes such as speed, covertness, attribution and collateral damage. Next to each attribute is the image of a sliding lever on a long scale. These can be moved, for example, to increase the speed of attack or decrease collateral damage. (Aviation Week, op. cit.)

A tunable device for increased destructive capabilities; what are these if not a prescription for mass murder on a post-industrial scale?

Additionally, DARPA sorcerers are combining “digital tools that even an inexperienced operator can bring into play. In the unclassified arena there are algorithms dubbed Mad WiFi, Air Crack and Beach. For classified work, industry developers also have a toolbox of proprietary cyberexploitation algorithms.”

What has been dubbed “Air Crack” deploys “open source tools to crack the encryption key for a wireless network.” Cryptoattacks on the other hand, “use more sophisticated techniques to cut through the password hash.”

One means to “penetrate” an adversary’s protective cyber locks is referred to as a “de-authorization capability.” According to Aviation Week, the attack operator “can kick all the nodes off a network temporarily so that the attack system can watch them reconnect. This provides information needed to quickly penetrate the network.” As The Register reported in January when the ink on the DARPA contracts had barely dried,

Thus the planned Cyber Range must be able to simulate not just large computer networks teeming with nodes, but also the people operating and using these interlocked networks. These software sim-people–users, sysadmins, innocent network bystanders and passers-by–are referred to in the Range plans as “replicants”. It seems clear that they won’t know that they are merely simulated pawns in a virtual network wargame designed to test the efficiency of America’s new cyber arsenal. They will merely have to live in a terrible Groundhog Day electronic armageddon, where the weapons and players change but destruction and suffering remain eternal. (Lewis Page, “Deals inked on DARPA’s Matrix cyber VR,” The Register, January 5, 2009)

Rance Walleston, the head of BAE’s cyber warfare division told Aviation Week in late 2008, “We want to change cyber attack from an art to a science.” And as The Register averred, the Pentagon’s “simulated cyber warzone” should be up and running next year, “ready to pass under the harrow of BAE’s new electronic pestilences, digital megabombs and tailored computer plagues.”

Is it any wonder then, that the Russian revolutionary Lenin wrote nearly a century ago that “the civilized nations have driven themselves into the position of barbarians”?

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/national-cyber-range-building-attack-tools-for-mass-destruction/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbis-use-of-national-security-letters-soar-in-2008/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbis-use-of-national-security-letters-soar-in-2008/#comments Fri, 22 May 2009 17:00:06 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8311 The FBI’s employment of Constitution-killing National Security Letters (NSLs) to nab the personal details of Americans without benefit of a court order soared in 2008.

NSLs are written demands by the Bureau (call them self-authorized subpoenas) that compel internet service providers, credit card companies, banks and other financial institutions to turn over records about their customers.

In a letter to the Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees May 14, U.S. Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich said that the FBI issued 24,744 NSLs in 2008 compared to 16,804 the previous year.

While less than the 49,000 letters issued by the Bureau in 2006, it still represents a dramatic rise in the use of these onerous warrants.

Under cover of counterterrorism or espionage investigations, the FBI can demand that communications records such as subscriber information, phone numbers, email addresses, web sites browsed or personal financial records can be seized and catalogued by Bureau snoops.

The draconian USA Patriot Act vastly expanded the type of information subject to seizure. Arriving without benefit of a court review and with a lifetime gag order attached, recipients are prohibited from ever disclosing they’ve received such an oppressive request. As Wired reported May 19,

The FBI’s use of NSLs has been sharply criticized. In 2007, a Justice Department Inspector General audit found that the FBI, which issued almost 200,000 NSLs between 2003 and 2006, had abused its authority and misused NSLs.

The inspector general found that the FBI evaded limits on (and sometimes illegally issued) NSLs to obtain phone, e-mail and financial information on American citizens, and under-reported the use of NSLs to Congress.

About 60 percent of a sample of the FBI’s NSLs did not conform to Justice Department rules, and another 22 percent possibly violated the statute because they made improper requests of businesses or involved unauthorized collections of information. (Kim Zetter, “FBI Use of Patriot Act Authority Increased Dramatically in 2008,” Wired, May 19, 2008)

As Gregory T. Nojeim, the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Director of that organization’s Project on Freedom, Security & Technology testified last year before the Senate Judiciary Committee:

The intelligence investigations in which NSLs are issued are not only secretive and long running but also encompass purely legal, even political activity. The PATRIOT Act seriously weakened the standard for issuance of NSLs, loosened internal oversight, and allowed NSLs to be used to get sensitive records on innocent persons suspected of absolutely no involvement in terrorism or espionage. The Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2004 dramatically expanded the scope of NSLs, so they can now be served on the US Postal Service, insurance companies, travel agents, jewelers, and car dealers, among others. Moreover, agencies other than the FBI have been authorized to issue NSLs, and the number of government officials who can authorize NSLs has been expanded. …

These realities are compounded by the fact that the FBI keeps records for a very long time, even when it concludes that the person to whom the information pertains is innocent of any crime and is not of any continuing intelligence interest. Information is increasingly being shared across agency boundaries, but without audit trails or the ability to reel back erroneous or misleading information, or information that is about people who are of no continuing criminal or intelligence interests. Finally, the PATRIOT reauthorization act made many NSLs for the first time ever compulsory and placed criminal penalties on violation of the non-disclosure requirement (commonly known as a “gag”), changes that probably make it even less likely NSLs will be challenged. (”Statement of Gregory T. Nojeim before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” Center for Democracy & Technology, April 23, 2008, pp. 2-3)

Weich’s letter to Congress said that the Bureau issued a number of “corrective NSLs” to “provide legal authority to retain information it had previously received,” primarily from so-called “exigent” or informal “emergency” requests to a business or individual to voluntarily hand over information until a formal warrant is issued to cover FBI demands. The Justice Department claimed,

As you may know, in March 2007, and again in March 2008, the Inspector General of the Department of Justice (OIG) released reports regarding the FBI’s use of NSLs. One of the Inspector General’s findings was that the manner in which the FBI tracked NSLs resulted in inaccuracies in the statistics reported to Congress. In response to the Inspector General’s findings and recommendations, the FBI has taken substantial steps to correct the identified deficiencies in its statistical tracking of NSLs. (”Letter to Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees,” U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legislative Affairs, May 14, 2009)

There it is, problem solved! While the DoJ may have “corrected” the FBI’s “identified deficiencies” in its “statistical tracking,” the wider question of issuing blanket orders to seize private data by an out-of-control domestic political police agency are not addressed by Weich, nor would it appear sought by Congress.

Antifascist Calling reported last year how Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a project founded in 1996 that created a digital library of the web, after being served with an NSL in 2007, sued the FBI–and won.

After a legal challenge mounted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation in Federal District Court in San Francisco, the Bureau was forced to withdraw the NSL and unseal the case, allowing the Archive’s founder to speak out.

On May 18, the ACLU reported that the administration will not ask the Supreme Court to “review a decision that struck down Patriot Act provisions that allow the government to impose unconstitutional gag orders on recipients of national security letters (NSLs).”

According to the civil liberties’ watchdog group, “A lower court ruled in 2007 that the gag order provisions were unconstitutional, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld that ruling in 2008. The government’s time for petitioning the Supreme Court for review has now expired.” Jameel Jaffer, the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project said:

“We’re very pleased that the government has decided not to seek further review of the appeals court’s decision. The appeals court was right to find that the FBI can’t be given the unchecked power to impose gag orders on the recipients of national security letters, and the government’s decision not to seek Supreme Court review means that FBI gag orders will finally be subject to meaningful judicial review. As the last few years have shown us, the blanket of secrecy that cloaks the FBI’s activities is an invitation to abuse. Judicial review may not end that abuse altogether, but it will certainly discourage it.” (”Obama Administration Will Not Ask Supreme Court to Take Up National Security Letter ‘Gag Order’ Decision,” American Civil Liberties Union, Press Release, May 18, 2009)

While certainly good news, I’m far less sanguine about the FBI’s interest in seeking “meaningful judicial review” before targeting political dissent in the United States.

Indeed, the same day the ACLU issued their press release, Federal Computer Week reported that the FBI “is looking for fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter to expand its ability to share information with millions of social media users.”

John Miller, a former “journalist” with ABC News and currently an Assistant FBI Director, told the technology publication: “To reach out to the public, we need to be where people are, and we know tens of millions of people spend their time in social media sites.”

The social media programs supplement other information technology tools the bureau has deployed in recent years to make it easier for people to submit tips and get news from the FBI, bureau officials said May 15. In addition to a Facebook page and tweets sent via Twitter, the bureau also has a YouTube page and is testing the usefulness of the virtual world Second Life. (Ben Bain, “FBI expands use of social media,” Federal Computer Week, May 18, 2009)

FBI securocrats said the widgets the Bureau have released in recent weeks have been “popular,” and the domestic spooks plan to release new ones in coming weeks for iPhones and iPod Touches.

Which just goes to show that during the new, golden age of Obama: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbis-use-of-national-security-letters-soar-in-2008/feed/ 0 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbi-going-dark-budget-request-for-high-tech-surveillance-capabilities-soar/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbi-going-dark-budget-request-for-high-tech-surveillance-capabilities-soar/#comments Mon, 18 May 2009 16:59:39 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8253 The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s budget request for Fiscal Year 2010 reveals that America’s political police intend to greatly expand their high-tech surveillance capabilities.

According to ABC News, the FBI is seeking additional funds for the development of “a new ‘Advanced Electronic Surveillance’ program which is being funded at $233.9 million for 2010. The program has 133 employees, 15 of whom are agents.”

Known as “Going Dark,” the program is designed to beef up the Bureau’s already formidable electronic surveillance, intelligence collection and evidence gathering capabilities “as well as those of the greater Intelligence Community,” ABC reports. An FBI spokesperson told the network:

“The term ‘Going Dark’ does not refer to a specific capability, but is a program name for the part of the FBI, Operational Technology Division’s (OTD) lawful interception program which is shared with other law enforcement agencies.”

“The term applies to the research and development of new tools, technical support and training initiatives.” (Jason Ryan, “DOJ Budget Details High-Tech Crime Fighting Tools,” ABC News, May 9, 2009)

Led by Assistant Director Marcus C. Thomas, OTD describes the office as supporting “the FBI’s investigative and intelligence-gathering efforts–and those of our federal, state, and local law enforcement/intelligence partners–with a wide range of sophisticated technological equipment, examination tools and capabilities, training, and specialized experience. You won’t hear about our work on the evening news because of its highly sensitive nature, but you will continue to hear about the fruits of our labor…”

According to OTD’s website, the Division possesses “seven core capabilities”: Digital Forensics; Electronic Surveillance; Physical Surveillance; Special Technology and Applications; Tactical Communications; Tactical Operations and finally, Technical Support/Coordination.

Under the heading “Electronic Surveillance,” OTD deploys “tools and techniques for performing lawfully-authorized intercepts of wired and wireless telecommunications and data network communications technologies; enhancing unintelligible audio; and working with the communications industry as well as regulatory and legislative bodies to ensure that our continuing ability to conduct electronic surveillance will not be impaired as technology evolves.”

But as we have seen throughout the entire course of the so-called “war on terror,” systemic constitutional breeches by the FBI–from their abuse of National Security Letters, the proliferation of corporate-dominated Fusion Centers to the infiltration of provocateurs into antiwar and other dissident groups–the only thing “impaired” by an out-of-control domestic spy agency have been the civil liberties of Americans.

Communications Backdoor Provided by Telecom Grifters

While the Bureau claims that it performs “lawfully-authorized intercepts” in partnership with the “communications industry,” also known as telecommunications’ grifters, the available evidence suggests otherwise.

As Antifascist Calling reported last year, security consultant and whistleblower Babak Pasdar, in a sworn affidavit to the Government Accountability Project (GAP), provided startling details about the collusive–and profitable alliance–between the FBI and America’s wireless carriers.

Pasdar furnished evidence that FBI agents have instantly transferred data along a high-speed computer circuit to a Bureau technology office in Quantico, Virginia. The so-called Quantico Circuit was provided to the FBI by Verizon, The Washington Post revealed.

According to published reports, the company maintains a 45 megabit/second DS-3 digital line that allowed the FBI and other security agencies virtually “unfettered access” to the carrier’s wireless network, including billing records and customer data “transferred wirelessly.” Verizon and other telecom giants have supplied FBI technical specialists with real-time access to customer data.

“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar wrote. Such access would expose customers’ voice calls, data packets, even their physical movements and geolocation to uncontrolled–and illegal–surveillance.

In April, Wired obtained documents from the FBI under a Freedom of Information Act request. Those files demonstrate how the Bureau’s “geek squad” routinely hack into wireless, cellular and computer networks.

Although the FBI released 152 heavily-redacted pages, they withheld another 623, claiming a full release would reveal a “sensitive investigative technique.” Nevertheless, Wired discovered that the FBI is deploying spyware called a “computer internet protocol address verifier,” or CIPAV, designed to infiltrate a target’s computer and gather a wide range of information, “which it sends to an FBI server in eastern Virginia.” While the documents do not detail CIPAV’s capabilities, an FBI affidavit from a 2007 case indicate it gathers and reports,

a computer’s IP address; MAC address; open ports; a list of running programs; the operating system type, version and serial number; preferred internet browser and version; the computer’s registered owner and registered company name; the current logged-in user name and the last-visited URL.

After sending the information to the FBI, the CIPAV settles into a silent “pen register” mode, in which it lurks on the target computer and monitors its internet use, logging the IP address of every server to which the machine connects. (Kevin Poulsen, “FBI Spyware Has Been Snaring Extortionists, Hackers for Years,” Wired, April 16, 2009)

“Going Dark” is ostensibly designed to help the Bureau deal with technological changes and methods to intercept Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone calls facilitated by programs such as Skype. But a tool that can seamlessly target hackers and cyber-criminals can just as easily be deployed against political opponents.

The FBI also intends to continue their use of automated link- and behavioral analysis derived from data mining as investigative tools. As a subset of applied mathematics, social network theory and its derivatives, link- and behavioral analysis, purport to uncover hidden relationships amongst social groups and networks. Over time, it has become an invasive tool deployed by private- and state intelligence agencies against political activists, most recently, as Antifascist Calling reported in February, against protest groups organizing against theRepublican National Convention.

These methods raise very troubling civil liberties’ and privacy concerns. The Electronic Privacy Information Coalition (EPIC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request, demanding that the General Services Administration (GSA) turn over agency records “concerning agreements the GSA negotiated between federal agencies and social networking services, including Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, and Facebook.”

With the proliferation of social networking sites, applications allow users to easily share information about themselves with others. But as EPIC points out, “Many online services relay information about online associations as users create new relationships. While government agencies may use social networking, cloud computing, and Internet services to create greater transparency on their activities, it remains unclear if there are data collection, use, and sharing limitations.”

And with “information discoverability” all the rage amongst spooky security agencies ranging from the FBI to the NSA, “connecting the dots,” particularly when it comes to dissident Americans, “is gaining increasing attention from homeland security officials and experts in their ongoing attempt to corral anti-terrorism information that resides across federal, state and local jurisdictions,” Federal Computer Week reports.

Will an agreement between Facebook and the FBI facilitate “dot connecting” or will it serve as a new, insidious means to widen the surveillance net, building ever-more intrusive electronic case files on dissident Americans?

The Electronic Police State

As reported earlier this month, citing the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) dossier on the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), the office had “transitioned to the operations and maintenance phase during FY 2008″ and now possesses some “997,368,450 unique searchable documents,” ready for data mining.

But as study after study has revealed, most recently the comprehensive examination of various programs by the National Research Council, automated data mining is “likely to generate huge numbers of false leads.”

Because the mountainous volumes of data “mined” for “actionable intelligence” are drawn from dozens of disparate sources on terrorism or criminal suspects, “they have an enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states.”

EFF documented that the Bureau’s Telephone Application (TA) “provides a central repository for telephone data obtained from investigations.” TA allegedly functions as an “investigative tool … for all telephone data collected during the course of FBI investigations. Included are pen register data, toll records, trap/trace, tape-edits, dialed digits, airnet (pager intercepts), cellular activity, push-to-talk, and corresponding subscriber information.”

Additionally, the civil liberties’ group revealed that “records obtained through National Security Letters are placed in the Telephone Application, as well as the IDW by way of the ACS [Automated Case] system.” It would appear that “Going Dark” will serve as a research subsystem feeding the insatiable appetite of the Investigative Data Warehouse.

In fact, these programs are part and parcel of what the security website Cryptohippie refers to as the Electronic Police State. Far from keeping us safe from all manner of dastardly plots hatched by criminals and/or terrorists, Cryptohippie avers:

An electronic police state is quiet, even unseen. All of its legal actions are supported by abundant evidence. It looks pristine.

An electronic police state is characterized by this:

State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are these:

1. It is criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial.

2. It is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

In an Electronic Police State, every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very, very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it–the evidence is already in their database. (”The Electronic Police State, 2008 National Rankings,” Cryptohippie, no date)

Unfortunately, this is not the stuff of paranoid fantasies, but American reality in the year 2009; one unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

In addition to “Going Dark,” the FBI is busily constructing what ABC News refers to as the “development of the Biometric Technology Center, a Joint Justice, FBI and DoD program.” At a cost of $97.6 million, the center will function as a research and development arm of the Bureau’s Biometric Center of Excellence (BCOE), one which will eventually “be a vast database of personal data including fingerprints, iris scans and DNA which the FBI calls the Next Generation Identification (NGI).”

The program is closely tied with technology under development by West Virginia University’s Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR). As the FBI’s “lead academic partner in biometrics research” according to a Bureau press release, CITeR provides “biometrics research support to the FBI and its law enforcement and national security partners and serve as the FBI liaison to the academic community of biometric researchers nationwide.”

Indeed, CITeR director Lawrence A. Hornak, “a visionary of the Big Brother school of technology” told The Register, he awaits the day “when devices will be able to ‘recognize us and adapt to us’.” The “long-term goal,” Hornak declared, is the “ubiquitous use of biometrics.”

But as The Register pointed out when the program was publicly rolled-out, “civil libertarians and privacy advocates are not amused.”

They claim that the project presents nightmare scenarios of stolen biometric information being used for ever-more outlandish forms of identity theft, which would be nearly impossible to correct. Correcting an inaccurate credit report is already an insulting and hair-raising experience in America, and critics contend that the use of biometrics would make correcting inaccurate credit reports or criminal histories nearly impossible. Besides, they argue, the US government does not exactly have a sterling record when it comes to database security–what happens when, as seems inevitable, the database is hacked and this intimate and allegedly indisputable data is compromised? …

Databases usually become less accurate, rather than more, the older and bigger they get, because there’s very little incentive for the humans that maintain them to go back and correct old, inaccurate information rather than simply piling on new information. Data entry typically trumps data accuracy. Furthermore, the facial recognition technology in its current iteration is woefully inaccurate, with recognition rates as low as 10 per cent at night. All in all, there is ample reason for skepticism–not that it will make much of a difference. (Burke Hansen, “FBI preps $1bn biometric database,” The Register, December 24, 2007)

But WVU’s CITeR isn’t the only partner lining-up to feed at the FBI’s trough. ABC reports that the Bureau “has awarded the NGI contract to Lockheed Martin to update and maintain the database which is expected to come online in 2010. After being fully deployed the NGI contract could cost up to $1 billion.”

However, Federal Computer Week reported in 2008 that although the initial contract will “consist of a base year,” the potential for “nine option years” means that “the value of the multiyear contract … could be higher.” You can bet it will!

Additional firms on Lockheed Martin’s “team” as subcontractors include IBM, Accenture, BAE Systems, Global Science & Technology, Innovative Management & Technology Services and Platinum Solutions. In other words, NGI is yet another in a gigantic herd of cash cows enriching the Military-Industrial-Security Complex.

Democracy “Going Dark”

The “vast apparatus of domestic spying” described by the World Socialist Web Site, greatly expanded under the criminal Bush regime is a permanent feature of the capitalist state; one that will continue to target political dissent during a period of profound economic crisis.

That the Obama administration, purportedly representing fundamental change from the previous government, has embraced the felonious methods of the Bush crime family and its capo tutti capo, Richard Cheney, should surprise no one. Like their Republican colleagues, the Democrats are equally complicit in the antidemocratic programs of repression assembled under the mendacious banner of the “global war on terror.”

From warrantless wiretapping to the suppression of information under cover of state secrets, and from the waging of imperialist wars of conquest to torture, the militarist mind-set driving capitalist elites at warp speed towards an abyss of their own creation, are signs that new political provocations are being prepared by America’s permanent “shadow government”–the military-intelligence-corporate apparatus.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/fbi-going-dark-budget-request-for-high-tech-surveillance-capabilities-soar/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/the-fbis-department-of-precrime/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/the-fbis-department-of-precrime/#comments Mon, 04 May 2009 16:59:10 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=8043 As they walked along the busy, yellow-lit tiers of offices, Anderton said: “You’re acquainted with the theory of precrime, of course. I presume we can take that for granted.” — Philip K. Dick, The Minority Report

From COINTELPRO to the illegal targeting of antiwar activists and Muslim-Americans, the FBI is America’s premier political police agency. And now, from the folks who brought us Wi-Fi hacking, viral computer spyware and al-Qaeda triple agent Ali Mohamed comes the Bureau’s Department of Precrime!

A chilling new report by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) reveals the breadth and scope of the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), the Bureau’s massive data-mining project.

With more than a billion records “many of which contain information on American citizens,” EFF is calling on Congress to demand FBI accountability and strict oversight of this Orwellian project. By all accounts IDW is huge and growing at a geometric pace. According to the Bureau’s own narrative,

The IDW received its initial authority to operate in September 2005, and successfully completed a Federal Information Security Management Act audit in May 2007. As of September 2008, the IDW had: 7,223 active user accounts; 3,826 FBI personnel trained on the system, and 997,368,450 unique searchable documents. The IDW transitioned to the operations and maintenance phase during FY 2008. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Investigative Data Warehouse,” no date)

EFF notes that “the Library on Congress by way of comparison, has about 138 million (138,313,427) items in its collection.”

Kurt Opsahl, EFF’s Senior Staff Attorney and the author of the new report said: “The IDW includes more than four times as many documents as the Library of Congress, and the FBI has asked for millions of dollars to data-mine this warehouse, using unproven science in an attempt to predict future crimes from past behavior. We need to know all of what’s in the IDW, and how our privacy will be protected.”

In 2008, the National Academy of Science’s National Research Council issued a stinging report that questioned the efficacy of data-mining as an investigative tool for combatting terrorism.

That report, “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Assessment,” concluded that automated programs such as IDW that collect and mine data should be evaluated for their impact on the privacy rights of citizens. An NRC press release stated candidly:

Far more problematic are automated data-mining techniques that search databases for unusual patterns of activity not already known to be associated with terrorists, the report says. Although these methods have been useful in the private sector for spotting consumer fraud, they are less helpful for counterterrorism precisely because so little is known about what patterns indicate terrorist activity; as a result, they are likely to generate huge numbers of false leads. Such techniques might, however, have some value as secondary components of a counterterrorism system to assist human analysts. Actions such as arrest, search, or denial of rights should never be taken solely on the basis of an automated data-mining result, the report adds.

The committee also examined behavioral surveillance techniques, which try to identify terrorists by observing behavior or measuring physiological states. There is no scientific consensus on whether these techniques are ready for use at all in counterterrorism, the report says; at most they should be used for preliminary screening, to identify those who merit follow-up investigation. Further, they have enormous potential for privacy violations because they will inevitably force targeted individuals to explain and justify their mental and emotional states. (National Academy of Science, National Research Council, “All Counterterrorism Programs That Collect and Mine Data Should Be Evaluated for Effectiveness, Privacy Impacts,” Press Release, October 7, 2008)

Noting that the Bureau is withholding critical information from public scrutiny, and that mining data gleaned from dozens of disparate sources is at the heart of IDW, EFF reports that the FBI “has identified only 38 of the 53 ‘data sources’ that feed into the IDW,” and has refused to hand over remaining documents, the result of a 2006 Freedom of Information Act request.

In a subsequent court action over the Bureau’s document stonewall, the civil liberties’ group reported that the Department of Justice told the court that “no additional material will be disclosed,” despite Obama administration assertions that it has “new policies on open government.”

Indeed, a May 12, 2005 email obtained by EFF from “an unidentified employee in the FBI’s Office of the General Counsel to FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni” notes that the author was “nervous about mentioning PIA [Privacy Impact Assessment] in context of national security systems.”

The author admitted that “It is true the FBI currently requires PIAs for NS [national security] systems as well as non-NS systems.” EFF reports that the author “thought that the policy might change.” Accordingly the anonymous writer “recommend[ed] against raising congressional consciousness levels and expectations re NS PIAs.” Caproni’s response is short: “ok.”

However, “congressional consciousness levels” were raised after an August 30, 2006 Washington Post piece exposed the intrusive nature of the IDW system.

The Bureau’s response? Several emails revealed the FBI’s desire to play down privacy concerns, noting cynically: “I’m with [Redacted] in view that if everyone [Redacted] starts running around with their hair on fire on this, they will just be pouring gas on something that quite possibly would just fade away if we just shrug it off.”

Given the corporate media’s snail-like attention span when it comes to anything other than puppies trapped in a well or the shenanigans of various “celebrities,” it’s a sure-fire bet something as mundane as the rights of ordinary citizens “would just fade away.”

IDW: A Web-Based Panopticon and Cash Cow for Corporate Spooks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s report, citing the Bureau’s own description, characterizes the Investigative Data Warehouse as “the FBI’s single largest repository of operational and intelligence information.”

In 2005, FBI Section Chief Michael Morehart said that “IDW is a centralized, web-enabled, closed system repository for intelligence and investigative data.” Unidentified FBI agents have described it as “one-stop shopping” for FBI agents and an “uber-Google.” According to the Bureau, “[t]he IDW system provides data storage, database management, search, information presentation, and security services.”

Documents released to EFF show that the FBI began spending funds on IDW in 2002 and that “system implementation was completed in FY 2005.” Version 1.1 was released in July 2004 “with enhanced functionality, including batch processing capabilities.”

But as with all things related to “national security,” early-on in the game the FBI forged a “public-private partnership” with spooky corporations in the defense and security industry, including Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Convera and Chiliad to develop the project.

As the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) notes in their Federal Contractor Misconduct Database, the San Diego-based SAIC has paid out some $14.5 million in fines on $5.3 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts in the defense, intelligence and security fields.

Misconduct ranged from false claims and defective pricing to conflict of interest violations. Last August, SAIC was forced to drop its bid with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for the agency’s TOPOFF 5 national disaster drill “after allegations of improprieties in the contracting process” were uncovered, according to Washington Technology.

Indeed, SAIC had been hired by the FBI to build an early version of IDW known as the Virtual Case File (VCF). According to Washington Technology, SAIC was contracted by the Bureau in 2001 to build VCF “but pulled the plug in 2005 after realizing the system would not work.”

The 2007 appropriations bill directed the Bureau to “retrieve as much as $104 million from the defaulted VCF contract” and in unusual language for the Senate, “expects FBI to use all means necessary, including legal action, to recover all erroneous charges from the VCF contractor,” Washington Technology revealed.

Federal Computer Week reported in 2005 that Aerospace, an independent contractor hired to evaluate the system concluded that SAIC “did a poor coding job” and that it was “virtually impossible to update the system.”

Despite these revelations, the San Diego defense and security giant has cornered billions of dollars in new contracts from the Defense, Homeland Security and Justice Departments.

Convera, describing itself as “the leading technology provider of intelligent search,” the Vienna, Virginia corporation claims it is “an established leader in the business of search technologies.” Apparently, the company is less than sanguine about trumpeting its products for the FBI. A search of their website returned zero hits on the terms “FBI-IDW.”

However, Washington Technology revealed in 2004, Convera won a contract worth more than $2 million to “provide an agency-wide search and discovery platform for the FBI.”

The contract “covers a perpetual license for the company’s RetrievalWare software as the search technology.” The 2004 award was “a follow-on from an earlier contract worth approximately $1.5 million … for search and categorization software for the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse,” the technology insider publication reported.

On the other hand Chiliad avers that they will help “organizations realize the full business value of all of their disparate information resources,” and their innovative products “in enterprise search and analysis technology, and virtual information sharing” will “help organizations ‘Connect the Dots’ and arrive at truly actionable intelligence.” In this spirit, Chiliad boasts that the FBI as the lead agency for “domestic counterterrorism” has purchased a “worldwide enterprise license to Chiliad’s software.”

Founded in 1999, the Washington, D.C.-based firm’s customer base include such spooky corporations as defense giant BAE, Booz Allen Hamilton, described by investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in Spies For Hire as a “revolving door” connecting the corporate security world and agencies such as NSA, General Dynamics, ITT, Northrop Grumman, SAIC and many, many more!

According to EFF, the FBI is busily putting these products to the test.

In addition to storing vast quantities of data, the IDW provides a content management and data mining system that is designed to permit a wide range of FBI personnel (investigative, analytical, administrative, and intelligence) to access and analyze aggregated data from over fifty previously separate datasets included in the warehouse. Moving forward, the FBI intends to increase its use of the IDW for “link analysis” (looking for links between suspects and other people–i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and to start “pattern analysis” (defining a “predictive pattern of behavior” and searching for that pattern in the IDW’s datasets before any criminal offence is committed–i.e. pre-crime). (Kurt Opsahl, “Report on the Investigative Data Warehouse,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 2009)

Accordingly, EFF revealed that then-Assistant Director for the Counterterrorism Division, Willie Hulon said in 2004 that the FBI was “introducing advanced analytical tools” that would “make the most” of IDW data.

Hulon went on to state that when IDW is completed, “Agents, JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] members and analysts,” using the new data-mining technology “will be able to search rapidly for pictures of known terrorists and match or compare the pictures with other individuals in minutes rather than days. They will be able to extract subjects’ addresses, phone numbers, and other data in seconds, rather than searching for it manually. They will have the ability to identify relationships across cases. They will be able to search up to 100 million pages of international terrorism-related documents in seconds.” EFF notes that since 2004, “the number of records has grown nearly ten-fold.”

According to an April 1 press release from the American Civil Liberties Union, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces and the related national nexus of Fusion Centers, comprised of the FBI, local police, the military (U.S. Northern Command) and private outfits in the corporate security world, relying heavily on data-mining and link analysis “have experienced a mission creep in the last several years, becoming more of a threat than a security device.”

Indeed, the ACLU noted that Fusion Centers have routinely targeted activists across the political spectrum, relying on specious data-mining techologies as well as paid provocateurs and informants (HUMINT) that label any and all government critics as “extremists” to be monitored and indexed in national security databases. The civil liberties’ group averred: “From directing local police to investigate non-violent political activists and religious groups in Texas to advocating surveillance of third-party presidential candidate supporters in Missouri, there have been repeated and persistent disclosures of troubling memos and reports from local fusions centers.”

Since 2004, EFF has identified 38 separate data sources feeding the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse. In addition to the FBI’s Automated Case System (ACS), soon to be replaced by the Sentinel Case Management System after the $170 million “Virtual Case File” fiasco briefly described above, IDW compiles information from the following sources:

Secure Automated Messaging Network (SAMNet). SAMNet consists of all message traffic sent by the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, including Intelligence Information Reports (IIRs) and Technical Disseminations (TD) to the FBI. These include Secret classified information but not those designated Top Secret and above, including Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI), the highest security classification.

Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry (JICI) Documents of “all FBI documents related to Islamic extremist networks between 1993 and 2002.”

Open Source News, collected from the MiTAP system run by San Diego State University. EFF describes MiTAP as a “system that collects raw data from the internet, standardizes the format, extracts named entities, and routes documents into appropriate newsgroups. This dataset is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) Open Source Data project.”

Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File (VGTOF), provided by the FBI National Crime Information Center (NCIC). It includes “biographical data and photos” of individuals “who the FBI believes to be associated with violent gangs and terrorism.” However, numerous abuses of the VGTOF classification system have been uncovered by the ACLU. According to the ACLU of Colorado, the FBI’s JTTF added anarchists and eight separate categories of “extremists” to the VGTOF, including “environmental extremist” and “Black extremist.” Indeed, Colorado antiwar activist Bill Sulzman, a campaigner against the weaponization of space, was listed in the VGTOF as a “terrorist,” according to an article in the Colorado Springs Independent.

CIA Intelligence Information Reports (IIR) and Technical Disseminations (TD), “designed to provide the FBI with the specific results of classified intelligence collected on internationally-based terrorist suspects and activities, chiefly abroad.”

Eleven IntelPlus scanned document libraries “related to FBI’s major terrorism-related cases.”

Eleven Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Databases.

Selectee List: Copies of a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) “list of individuals that the TSA believes warrant additional security attention prior to boarding a commercial airliner.”

Terrorist Watch List (TWL): according to EFF, the “FBI Terrorist Watch and Warning Unit (TWWU) list of names, aliases, and biographical information regarding individuals submitted to the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) for inclusion into VGTOF and TIPOFF watch lists. Also called the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), the database ‘contained a total of 724,442 records as of April 30, 2007′.” The TWL has balooned to 1,192,000 names as of May 3, 2009.

According to the ACLU, “members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ’suspicious characters’ … have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape.” Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project said last summer: “Putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning. I doubt this thing would even be effective at catching a real terrorist.” While true enough as far as it goes, perhaps the list’s true intent is not to prevent terrorism but rather to terrorize the American people.

At the heart of these systems is data mining, that is, the deployment of a vast infrastructure capable of receiving, processing, managing and analyzing data flowing into the system from disparate sources. Indeed, documents released to EFF disclosed that the Bureau’s 2008 budget justification explained that “[t]he Investigative Data Warehouse (IDW), combined with FTTTF’s [Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force] existing applications and business processes, will form the backbone of the NSB’s [National Security Branch] data exploitation system.” The FBI also requested “$11,969,000 … for the National Security Branch Analysis Center (NSAC).” The FBI claimed:

Once operational, the NSAC will be tasked to satisfy unmet analytical and technical needs of the NSB, particularly in the areas of bulk data analysis, pattern analysis, and trend analysis. … The NSAC will provide subject-based “link analysis” through the utilization of the FBI’s collection datasets, combined with public records on predicated subjects. “Link analysis” uses datasets to find links between subjects, suspects, and addresses or other pieces of relevant information, and other persons, places, and things. This technique is currently being used on a limited basis by the FBI; the NSAC will provide improved processes and greater access to this technique to all NSB components. The NSAC will also pursue “pattern analysis” as part of its service to the NSB. “Pattern analysis” queries take a predictive model or pattern of behavior and search for that pattern in datasets. The FBI’s efforts to define predictive models and patterns of behavior will improve efforts to identify “sleeper cells.”

When this request was submitted to Congress, NSAC said it would “bring together nearly 1.5 billion records created or collected by the FBI and other government agencies,” expected to quadruple by 2012. The House Science and Technology Committee was so alarmed that they demanded that the Government Accountability Office investigate the National Security Branch Analysis Center.

ABC News’ Brian Ross reported that lawmakers are “questioning whether a proposed FBI anti-terrorist program is worth the price, both in taxpayer dollars and the possible loss of Americans’ privacy.”

Noting that the the FBI has a history “of improperly–even illegally–gathering personal information on Americans, most recently through the widespread abuse of so-called National Security Letters,” ABC reported that congressional investigators are demanding to know “whether there are protections in place to make sure all the data in the program was legally collected.”

Given the track record of the Bureau when it comes to targeting political opponents, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Two years later, EFF notes in a letter to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that the FBI has refused to release documents filed under the Freedom on Information Act and that the Bureau “has published neither a ’system of records notice’ (as required by the Privacy Act) nor a ‘privacy impact assessment’ (as required by the E-Government Act) for the IDW, thus depriving the public of the kind of accountability that usually comes with the creation and maintenance of large database systems containing sensitive personal information.”

Citing Leahy’s own assertion that the IDW is a “system ripe for abuse,” EFF has called on the Judiciary Committee to examine IDW closely and “provide the public with needed assurances concerning its potential impact on the privacy rights of citizens.”

Stay tuned…

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/05/the-fbis-department-of-precrime/feed/ 3 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/targeting-the-rnc-welcoming-committee-a-case-study-in-political-paranoia/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/targeting-the-rnc-welcoming-committee-a-case-study-in-political-paranoia/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:45:10 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=6679 Political repression comes in all shapes and sizes: from the beat cop smashing the head of a demonstrator to the bureaucrat adding a name to a watch list. While the former has an immediate and shocking effect, the latter, more insidious and far-reaching in its probable consequences to the individual, is less amenable to redress. Once indexed, always indexed.

Certainly one of the more sinister trends in America today are the multiplicity of partnerships among state security agencies and their analogues in the corporate world. Indeed, many CIA or FBI officers upon retirement join the highly-lucrative and unaccountable world of corporate spying. Nowhere are these revolving-door relationships more toxic to a democracy than in the area of political intelligence.

A March 27, 2008 document prepared by the now-defunct Highway Watch (HW), a “public-private partnership” administered by the virulently anti-union American Trucking Associations (ATA)–a key member of the oxymoronic Coalition for a Democratic Workplace–and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Transportation Security Operations Center (DHS) has been published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks.

Authored by Cory Kutcher, a former intelligence analyst with HW’s Information Sharing & Analysis Center (ISAC) and now a government analyst “in the Defense and Space Industry” according to LinkedIn, the dossier is a veritable case study in political paranoia and pseudo-academic posturing. Breathless allegations and dire pronouncements abound which helped set the stage for wholesale repression.

The focus of Kutcher’s report was the anarchist/anti-authoritarian RNC Welcoming Committee (RNC-WC). Right from the outset, misrepresentations served the purpose of eliciting a harsh response from police. Kutcher warns “it is likely that they [RNC-WC] will target transportation infrastructure.”

In HW’s paranoid scenario, blocking traffic and civil disobedience was transformed into a scenario where hordes of masked anarchists utilizing a “diversity of tactics” threatend chaos in the furtherance of “terrorism.”

Background

The Republican National Committee (RNC) held its quadrennial convention in St. Paul, Minnesota on September 1-4, 2008. As I reported in November (”Preemptive Policing & the National Security State: Repressing Dissent at the Republican National Convention,” Antifascist Calling, November 18, 2008), the Minnesota Homeland Security and Emergency Management agency (HSEM), in tandem with the United States Secret Service (USSS), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and United States Northern Command (NORTHCOM) conspired to squelch dissent during the far-right conclave.

Having declared the RNC a National Security Special Event (NSSE), one that derived its “authorization” to target activists and journalists from the top secret 2006 National Security Presidential Directive-46/Homeland Security Presidential Directive-15 (NSPD-46/HSPD-15), local, state and federal law enforcement entities, the U.S. military, intelligence agencies such as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and corporate partners in the telecommunications industry and elsewhere, preemptively disrupted legal political dissent by a score of protest groups.

Prior to and during the Convention, local and state police and the FBI, raided the homes and organizing spaces of activists and media workers, seizing video equipment, cameras, cell phones and computers that were to be used to document the event. Under the pretext of preventing “terrorism,” agencies selectively targeted organizers on the basis of information provided authorities by informants and provocateurs.

The extent of state operations against dissenting citizens was revealed when Wikileaks published a leaked planning document, “Special Event Planning: 2008 Republican National Convention,” a 31-page schematic compiled by HSEM.

As I reported in January (”Betrayed! FBI Provocateur Sets-Up Anti-RNC Activists on Trumped-Up ‘Terrorism’ Charges,” Antifascist Calling, January 7, 2009), one FBI asset, Brandon Michael Darby, “carried out a thorough surveillance operation that dated back to at least 18 months before the Republican gathering,” according The New York Times and a sworn affidavit by his handler, Special Agent Christopher Langert.

One of the defendants in the so-called “Texas Two” trial who were Darby’s targets, David McKay, was freed on $25,000 bail February 3, after a mistrial was declared in his case according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. A re-trial is set for March 16. McKay’s codefendant, Bradley Crowder, pled guilty January 8 to charges of manufacturing explosive devices. Both face 10 years in prison.

The Wikileaks disclosure of Highway Watch’s “Plans to Target Transportation Infrastructure Surrounding Republican National Convention,” provides further documentation of extensive federal, state and corporate targeting of political dissent in America under the guise of “national security.”

Long-time readers of Antifascist Calling are certainly aware of the protection afforded actual terrorists by the Bureau when it served the geopolitical interests of the national security state. The case of al-Qaeda triple agent Ali Mohamed is certainly one of many illustrative examples.

“Social Networking” as Political Paranoia

As a subset of applied mathematics, social network theory purports to uncover hidden links and relationships amongst social groups and networks and has over time, become an invasive tool deployed by private- and state intelligence agencies against political activists.

According to the theory, by monitoring the communication patterns between various targeted nodes, a networked structure is discernible, one amenable to infiltration and disruption by a security agency. Indeed, in the context of HW’s discourse social network- and link analysis was applied for mass surveillance of dissident groups such as the RNC-WC prior to the Republican Party National Convention.

Having identified the RNC-WC as an enemy to be contained at all costs, HW cites the group’s open, legal political organizing, including obtaining “financial support” and “increased membership via the internet” as well as “public appearances at various locations across the US,” as a significant factor that rendered the group a legitimate target for surveillance and disruption.

One can argue, as did the late civil liberties scholar Frank Donner, that the RNC-WC’s legal organizing made them doubly suspect in the eyes of securocrats. In so far as the group’s stated goal was to expose the “enormous amount of … horror and devastation currently experienced by the world and its peoples” by the Republican Party, their dissident stance transformed them into dangerous “others,” ripe pickings for “aggressive intelligence.” Donner wrote,

The FBI’s assertedly modest intelligence function as an early warning alert to prosecutors and a decision-making resource masks its true role as a weapon against threats to the existing order. Planned injury, implemented by an illegal autonomous system of power, explains domestic intelligence far more convincingly than either the “pure” or “preventative” intelligence thesis. Investigation and accumulation of information are at root merely the means to the ends of punishment, intimidation, frustration, and defeat of movements for change of any kind. (The Age of Surveillance, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, p. 177)

In the context of a private entity such as Highway Watch (”an autonomous system of power”), funded by a public (though largely unaccountable) agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, a new hybrid methodology of repression emerges in the 21st century. Exempt from oversight by the citizens who fund it, Highway Watch and associated groups, combine the plausible deniability of intelligence agencies with a twist: as a private organization, public rules of disclosure and accountability do not apply. Right up front, HW asserts:

The following document is “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY” and “LAW ENFORCEMENT SENSITIVE.” It contains information that may be exempt from public release under the Freedom of Information Act, (5 U.S.C. 552). This document is to be controlled, handled, transmitted, distributed, and disposed of in accordance with DHS policy relating to FOUO information and is not to be released to the public, the media, or other personnel who do not have a valid “need-to-know” without prior approval of an authorized DHS official. No portion of this report should be furnished to the media, either in written or verbal form. Any requests for further dissemination outside of the intelligence and law enforcement community should be referred to the HWW-ISAC. (HW, p. 1)

As a direct action organization, RNC-WC endorsed disruptive but nonviolent tactics to bring the Convention to a halt. Civil disobedience and blockade tactics have long enjoyed a prominent place amongst left-wings groups and organizations, ranging from the Labor Movement of the 1930s to the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements of the 1960s, through the Antinuclear, Antiapartheid and Central American Solidarity Movements of the 1980s and continue to do so today.

A central tenet guiding the organization of protest activities is the proviso that participants only engage in activities for which they are prepared–morally and legally. While some activists willingly engage in “self-defense” of blockade zones, others may not wish to risk arrest and therefore, exercise a purely support function. A wide diversity of tactics ensure the broadest participation. However for HW “intelligence analysts,” this “layered approach” is indicative of nefarious intent.

The amount of information researched about the transportation infrastructure in the area is high (see Appendix 1 & 2). Overall, photographs placed on the RNC-WC website show a pattern of bridge and roadway pre-surveillance (Figure 1). RNC-WC’s members have proposed numerous methods of disrupting or closing the RNC, using the transportation infrastructure. These methods include setting vehicle tires on fire underneath expressway bridges, to decrease motorist visibility, or planting stalled vehicles, to limit thoroughfare access. Also, members have suggested spreading large metal chains across highway lanes or placing star-nails (caltrops) on access roads to restrict access to the RNC. The group also disclosed plans to use dump trucks to spill dirt or other large materials onto the road. Law enforcement should consider monitoring all potential methods to restrict or block traffic. (HW, pp. 2-3)

The sources cited by HW for the RNC-WC’s alleged plans to “target infrastructure” through sabotage? Two FBI Intelligence Information Reports, FBI IIR 4 201 1401 08 and FBI IIR 4 201 0748 08. The origin of these unsubstantiated claims most probably were provocateurs who themselves advocated these tactics as a means to set-up the RNC-WC for preemptive action by the Bureau.

To complete the picture of an out-of-control conspiracy, HW cites the RNC-WC’s collaboration with “other anarchist/anti-authoritarian groups, such as Unconventional Action (UA),” as evidence of the group’s illicit activity. As evidence of conspiratorial intent, HW avers,

The UA website posts copies of its own strategies, general anarchist guides/principles and a list of anarchist contacts across the country. On Feb. 9, 2008, the two groups co-sponsored an event called the “Northwest DNC/RNC Resistance Conference” at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. The “workshop” discussed topics “ranging from street tactics to supporting protests” and even had childcare available for its participants. Unconventional Action states that, after the completion of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), members will travel to Minneapolis to assist with the RNC effort. This will provide a quality venue for sharing information concerning general security procedures and effective counter-measures. Furthermore, at least one protest/anarchist group (i.e. PNC2RNC) is using an “open” wiki (accessible to the public, but only members can edit) as its website. Therefore, “private” wikis (only members can access and edit) may be in use to share tactics and/or strategy among these individuals or groups which are located across the United States. (HW, p. 4)

And in order to buttress its charge that RNC-WC and related anarchist groups are intent on violent confrontations rather than hard-edged civil disobedience, HW ominously declares:

The community at large appears to be a decentralized network since it does not possess one central hub; however, it does possess several important hubs. Consequently, these networks are more difficult to disrupt due to their loose connections and easy ability to replace damaged or compromised nodes. As such, the national convention anarchists are following the pattern of most terror networks in this aspect. (HW, p. 5, emphasis added)

Utilizing social network and link analysis to underscore their claims, HW purport that hyperlinks on various websites are indicative of the “power centrality” of the RNC-WC and UA to anti-Democratic and Republican Convention organizers. That like-minded groups pursuing a goal–the disruption of the political conventions of the major capitalist parties–would actually communicate with one another comes as a shock to these jokers!

The RNC-WC also possesses the highest amount of betweenness in this community. The Protest RNC 2008 and UA groups directly follow it. Overall, betweenness refers to the number of groups that a node, or individual group, has indirect ties to through the direct links that it possesses. In other words, it represents the number of times that a node lies along the shortest path between two others. Nodes with a high degree of betweenness act as liaisons or bridges to other nodes in the structure. Consequently, the concept shows the potential importance and information sharing capabilities that the RNC-WC, UA, Protest RNC 2008, and DNC Disruption 08 represent to the rest of the community. (HW, p. 5)

In the minds of HW analysts however, “the RNC-WC’s early formation, comprehensive membership drives, strategic partnerships, and flexibility will likely result in a more robust and balanced effort than in recent conventions. Consequently, security will likely be more to difficult to maintain than in previous years.”

But as we have seen, the national security state’s response was to initiate a preemptive strategy that targeted activists, journalists and the public in order to keep the lid on, marginalizing dissenting citizens and portraying them as violent extremists to be repressed.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/02/targeting-the-rnc-welcoming-committee-a-case-study-in-political-paranoia/feed/ 2 http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/nuclear-proliferation-terrorism-and-deceit-americas-deadly-game/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/nuclear-proliferation-terrorism-and-deceit-americas-deadly-game/#comments Mon, 19 Jan 2009 13:00:07 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=6262 Call it a coincidence, but one headline you’re not likely to have read just days after the Mumbai terrorist attacks concerned the quiet release by Swiss authorities of Urs Tinner. One of the key players in Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation network run by “rogue” scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and the military, Tinner had been held in administrative detention for nearly four years.

This is all the more ironic given that Dawood Ibrahim, the drugs kingpin, terrorist operative and underworld crime boss who allegedly helped infiltrate Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) commandos into Mumbai, is long-suspected of providing similar “expertise” to A.Q. Khan’s shadowy nuclear black market through a web of dodgy Dubai-based companies.

When the Khan scandal broke, some analysts wondered whether the United States “will at least conduct a thorough enquiry into the involvement of smugglers and black-marketers in the process of proliferation.”

Asia Times claimed “that a Dubai company run by Ibrahim, which has suddenly disappeared, was involved in procuring nuclear-related material from Pakistan,” and then shipping it to the highest bidder. To date, no such investigation has been publicly disclosed.

Just as pertinent however, is the security of the Pakistani people, not just its nuclear arsenal. With formidable internal threats from al-Qaeda and neo-Taliban elements linked to the Army and the shadowy Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and external threats from both the United States and geopolitical rival India, Pakistani secular and civil society is under siege.

However, at the center of this spider’s web of nuclear proliferation, terrorism and deceit sits the United States. After all, Khan’s shady activities have been well-known for decades and yet, to secure advantage over their capitalist rivals, the U.S. has been content to exploit Pakistan as a cats’ paw for destabilizing covert operations in dozens of global hot spots from Asia to the Balkans and beyond. But you wouldn’t know this by even the most cursory perusal of The New York Times.

One (among many) examples of the Times’ shoddy reporting and journalistic duplicity in the service of Pentagon war planners, was brought to light by Russ Wellen in Asia Times. Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured an alarmist screed by David Sanger, “The Worst Pakistan Nightmare for Obama.”

Sanger claims that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal faces the threat of being hijacked by jihadi groups intent on provoking “a confrontation between Pakistan and India in the hope that the Pakistani military would transport tactical nuclear weapons closer to the front lines, where they would be more vulnerable to seizure. Indeed, when the deadly terror attacks occurred in Mumbai … officials told me they feared that one of the attackers’ motives might have been to trigger exactly that series of events.”

Neoconservative hawks Frederic Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, respective members of the “Attack Iran” lobby at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, told Sanger, the “best bet” would be for American forces and the Pakistanis “to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place … like New Mexico … More Likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan.”

But as Brian Cloughley, a security analyst who writes for Jane’s and has contributed to the University of Bradford’s Pakistan Security Research Unit (PSRU) told Asia Times, moving nuclear warheads to remote locations is precisely the worst possible method of securing atomic arms, one that more likely would increase the chances of seizure by extremist elements.

Cloughley accuses Sanger of “cheap, nasty and silly journalese at its most risible depths.” As in other reporting by Sanger on the Khan network, alarmist rhetoric, half-truths and outright mendacity is the preferred method, particularly when it comes to covering-up Washington’s complicity.

While I necessarily focus here on Pakistan’s corrupt nuclear proliferation regime, a state-sanctioned program from which key military and civilian leaders profited handsomely, the biggest proliferator of this deadly technology is Washington. As the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported earlier this month, “the United States spent over $52 billion on nuclear weapons and related programs in fiscal year 2008, but only 10 percent of that went toward preventing a nuclear attack through slowing and reversing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technology.”

Why? With profits for America’s largest defense firms hanging in the balance, real peace and security are always trumped by the corporatist bottom line.

A Web of Shady Connections

While Washington claims that the 2004 exposure of some elements of Khan’s network as a “victory” for its alleged anti-proliferation efforts, key players including Khan and his top associates, remain out of reach.

By portraying itself as a “helpless giant” dependent on Pakistani “assistance” in its fraudulent “war on terror,” the United States is covering-up its own complicity and silence. As in the run-up to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, or the current Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, corporate media, primarily The New York Times, are key players obfuscating Washington’s role.

The BBC reported in June that Khan’s chief associate, Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, a Sri Lankan “businessman,” was quietly released from custody after four years detention by Malaysian authorities. While President Bush had described Tahir as A. Q. Khan’s “chief financial officer and money launderer,” the United States has “no plans” to seek Tahir’s extradition.

This is all the more remarkable considering that the Malaysian Police investigation into the Khan network found that Tahir’s family was closely connected with Dawood Ibrahim and that the D-Company’s terrorist don had helped the Pakistani nuclear establishment in their clandestine procurement and smuggling activities. According to numerous reports, D-Company has long had a major base of operations in Malaysia.

For years Tinner, along with brother Marco and father, Friedrich, were active in the smuggling network run out of Kahuta, the site of Pakistan’s Khan Research Laboratories (KRL). Located near Rawalpindi, KRL is the primary fissile-material production facility and long-range missile development site. For their enterprising efforts the Tinners’ allegedly earned millions in commissions.

According to reports, they were instrumental in setting up and operating a machining facility in Malaysia that produced centrifuge components for the production of highly-enriched uranium (HRE). The key element in manufacturing a weapon, thousands of centrifuges were sold by the network to governments such as Libya, North Korea and allegedly Iran, that were seeking to skirt restrictions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

That firm, Scope, was a subsidiary of the Scomi Engineering Group. Urs Tinner was hired by Tahir in 2002 as a full-time “consultant.” According to the Malaysian Police investigation, Tinner routinely erased all technical drawings kept in his computer at the Scope plant. When his “term of service” ended in October 2003, Tinner retrieved the hard disc from the company’s computer “designated for his use,” and gave the impression that he “did not wish to leave any trace of his presence there.”

Murkier still, are the relations between Tahir and the son of Malaysia’s current Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi. Kamaluddin Badawi sat on the board of a firm plugged into the proliferation network. In 2007, Asia Times reported, that Scomi built

components for centrifuges that were destined for use in Libya’s nuclear program. Scomi Group had since acknowledged that its subsidiary Scomi Precision filled a contract negotiated by Buhary to supply machine parts to Libya.

Documents obtained by the Associated Press reveal that Buhary was the chief financial officer of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan’s underground nuclear-proliferation network. How he was able to forge such high-powered alliances with Malaysia’s political elite is a question that remains unanswered. When the scandal broke, Abdullah said Tahir would remain free because there was no evidence of wrongdoing. (Ioannis Gatsiounis, “Malaysia’s axis mysteriously shifting,” Asia Times Online, August 28, 2007)

While Tahir will continue to be “under police watch,” no charges have ever been brought against Kamaluddin. According to the BBC, his firm was investigated “but cleared of wrongdoing.” How convenient!

Activities by Khan and the nuclear establishment were well-known to the CIA back in the 1970s. However, when Dutch authorities were alerted by Frits Veerman, a former colleague of Khan’s at the Physical Dynamics Research Laboratory (FDO), the Dutch partner of the European consortium Urenco, long after Khan had stolen Urenco plans for constructing high-speed centrifuges, nothing was done. For his troubles, Veerman was threatened with prosecution by Dutch security officials who demanded his silence. According to investigative journalists David Armstrong and Joseph Trento,

The Dutch considered reopening the case [against Khan] in 1986 but backed off at the request of the CIA, according to then-Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers. Lubbers had suggested that the United States wanted Khan left alone in part because Pakistan had by then become a key U.S. ally in the battle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. (America and the Islamic Bomb, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press, 2008, p. 67)

Among the concessions made by the United States to Pakistan for their support of numerous anticommunist destabilization operations across the decades was a cynical and cultivated blindness when it came to Pakistan’s development of atomic weapons and A. Q. Khan’s nuclear supermarket.

BCCI, the CIA and Nuclear Proliferation

During the 1970s, the Safari Club, a secret cabal of intelligence agencies including France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Shah’s Iran, Morocco and the United States, decided that it required a network of banks to help launder illicit funds and finance intelligence operations, according to investigative journalist John Cooley’s account in Unholy Wars. With the blessings of George H. W. Bush, then Director of the CIA, the task fell to Saudi Intelligence Minister Kamal Adham.

Within the space of a few years, Adham helped transform Agha Hasan Abedi’s small Pakistani merchant bank into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). According to investigative journalist Joseph Trento’s account in Prelude to Terror, under Adham’s guidance Abedi created “a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.” Indeed, BCCI was a major player in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, with powerful American intelligence officials deeply involved in the drugs-for-guns financing of the Nicaraguan Contras and Afghanistan’s “holy warriors.”

In 1991, Time Magazine described BCCI as not just a bank but also as “a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank’s offices in Karachi, Pakistan, the 1,500-employee black network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder. The black network–so named by its own members–stops at almost nothing to further the bank’s aims the world over.”

While the United States was pouring billions of dollars in aid to finance drug- and organized crime-linked “holy warriors” in Afghanistan such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, much of the money was actually siphoned off by the ISI. Sarkis Soghanalian, a “middleman” profiting from American largess, told Trento that most of the money flowing into Pakistan was diverted into BCCI accounts controlled by the Army and ISI and then distributed to A. Q. Khan’s weapons program and proliferation network.

According to Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark’s account in Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Secret Trade in Nuclear Weapons, Abedi created a “charity” called the BCCI Foundation. Pakistani Finance Minister Ghulam Ishaq Khan granted it tax-free status while simultaneously serving as the foundation’s chairman and overseeing finances for Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta.

Close to leading Islamists in the Army, Ishaq Khan served as Pakistan’s President between 1988-1993 and acquiesced to the Army’s “soft coup” against Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. As I reported in “Organized Crime, Intelligence and Terror: The D-Company’s Role in the Mumbai Attacks,” when Bhutto removed Islamist General Hamid Gul as ISI director, Army Chief Aslam Beg and Lt. General Asad Durrani created a BCCI-linked slush fund to finance Bhutto’s removal from power.

According to Time Magazine investigative journalists Jonathan Beatty and S. C. Gwynne’s 1993 book The Outlaw Bank, BCCI chairman Abedi announced that some 90% of the bank’s profits would be donated to the BCCI Foundation. In reality, the Foundation was a tax-dodge and money-laundering instrument that will “donate” most of the money it raised to A. Q. Khan’s illicit nuclear program. In 1987, according to Beatty and Gwynne, the Foundation gives a $10 million donation to an “institute headed by A. Q. Khan.”

All of this is known at the time and covered-up by the United States. By 1984, BCCI’s Black Network enforcement arm had effectively taken control of the port of Karachi (”management” subsequently transferred to Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company by his ISI masters), controlling the flow of arms to the Afghan mujaheddin, as well as overseeing drug flows, arms smuggling and the illicit trade in nuclear technology ebbing towards KRL in Kahuta.

The American response? A Senate investigation by John Kerry (D-MA) and New York City District Attorney Robert Morgenthau stumbled across BCCI’s role as an international money-laundering machine for drug dealers and arms merchants. At every step of the way, the investigation was blocked by the United States Justice Department during Bush I’s tenure as President. The cover-up accelerated when U.S. Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller took over the BCCI investigation. Mueller subsequently became Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2001 and oversaw the FBI’s “investigation” of the 9/11 attacks.

During the course of the investigation the CIA stonewalled Kerry’s probe, refusing to hand over documents it provided to a U.S. Customs Service inquiry into Khan’s nuclear proliferation network, arms trafficking and BCCI drug money laundering through U.S. banks. While some information on the CIA’s clandestine relationship to Abedi’s criminal enterprise surfaced, the Agency refused to disclose any information on operations using the bank as an intelligence cut-out. Kerry’s public report concluded, “Key questions about the relationship between U.S. intelligence and BCCI cannot be answered at this time, and may never be.”

When Kerry’s report is issued in 1992, it states that the Justice Department went to extraordinary lengths to block the investigation “through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from not making witnesses available, to not returning phone calls, to claiming that every aspect of the case was under investigation in a period when little, if anything was being done.” Once the report is published, official interest in BCCI is allowed to die. For his efforts and those of his staff, Kerry is labeled “a randy conspiracy buff” by Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff.

Meanwhile, Khan’s illicit nuclear proliferation ring is profiting handsomely.

The CIA and the Tinner Family: Best Friends Forever!

Back in June, The New York Times reported that “American and international investigators” had found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to associates of Khan’s network, the Tinners.

According to the report, the designs are for a nuclear device that is half the size of weapons previously believed to be in Pakistan’s arsenal and packed with advanced electronics. When IAEA investigators confronted Pakistani officials with the evidence, they insisted that Khan “did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.” Though less than truthful, Pakistan was again let off the hook by American officials intent on securing Pakistan’s “cooperation” in the oxymoronic “war on terror.”

But perhaps it helped the Tinners’ case when it was revealed by The New York Times last August that the “Swiss Family Proliferation” (my phrase) worked closely with the CIA while simultaneously making millions of dollars illegally selling deadly nuclear technology to any and all comers.

Swiss President Pascal Couchepin announced May 23, that his government destroyed files, including digital copies of advanced nuclear weapons designs in the Tinners’ possession. According to Couchepin, the files were destroyed “so that they would never fall into terrorists hands.” The Times averred,

Behind that official explanation, though, is a far more intriguing tale of spies, moles and the compromises that governments make in the name of national security.

The United States had urged that the files be destroyed, according to interviews with five current and former Bush administration officials. The purpose, the officials said, was less to thwart terrorists than to hide evidence of a clandestine relationship between the Tinners and the C.I.A.

Over four years, several of these officials said, operatives of the C.I.A. paid the Tinners as much as $10 million, some of it delivered in a suitcase stuffed with cash. In return, the Tinners delivered a flow of secret information that helped end Libya’s bomb program, reveal Iran’s atomic labors and, ultimately, undo Dr. Khan’s nuclear black market. (William J. Broad and David E. Sanger, “In Nuclear Net’s Undoing, a Web of Shadowy Deals,” The New York Times, August 25, 2008)

Mendaciously however, the Times fails to reveal just what “compromises” that successive U.S. “governments make” in the interest of “national security.” Perhaps a 30-year history of close collaboration with organized crime, terrorists and nuclear proliferators? While the CIA and Bush administration are keen to claim the Khan network has been rolled-up, the U.S State Department said January 12 that it had “slapped sanctions on 13 individuals and three private companies” because of their involvement in the network, according to Reuters.

The Guardian reported that “two British businessmen,” Peter and Paul Griffin, “a father and a son,” were added to the blacklist and any assets the pair have in the U.S. are now frozen. While denying the charges, The Guardian reports that

Peter Griffin has been named in court cases in South Africa and Germany as being a member of the Khan network. He has repeatedly confirmed he knew Khan, but has denied knowingly being involved in illicit nuclear bomb programmes. A German judge in 2006 named the elder Griffin as one of Khan’s four main associates. (Ian Traynor, “U.S. blacklists father and son over alleged nuclear racket,” The Guardian, January 13, 2008)

Several of the individuals named by the State Department are either behind bars such as Gotthard Lerch, currently serving a 5 1/2 year sentence in Germany, have had charges dropped or like Tahir and A. Q. Khan, remain out of reach. The Tinners do not appear on the State Department’s list of “sanctioned” individuals and firms. No doubt, their well-paid service as CIA assets has much to do with their escaping sanctions.

Although a “senior intelligence official in Washington,” may have been “very happy they were destroyed,” European antiproliferation investigators believe that the Swiss government’s destruction of evidence “obscured the investigative trail.”

According to the Times, the destroyed evidence contained more than frightening electronic blueprints for constructing a compact nuclear weapon, but “decades of records” of the Tinners’ involvement in the Khan network, including bomb and centrifuge designs as well as documents linking the family to the CIA. Broad and Sanger write,

One contract, a European intelligence official said, described a C.I.A. front company’s agreement to pay the smugglers $1 million for black-market secrets. The front company listed an address three blocks from the White House. (New York Times, op. cit. August 25, 2008)

An unnamed “European official” told the Times, “Maybe that labyrinth held clues to another client or another rogue state,” perhaps a new–or old–”best friend forever” of the CIA’s such as Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Indeed, one can plausibly argue this was precisely Washington’s–and the New York Times’ intent: muddy the waters while covering-up participation by U.S. corporate grifters and high government officials.

Sibel Edmonds’ Revelations

While keen to attack official enemies, Washington has aided and abetted nuclear proliferation through key “allies” such as Israel, Pakistan and Turkey as revealed by gagged FBI translator and whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in a series of eye-opening reports last January by The Sunday Times.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan. (Chris Gourlay, Jonathan Calvert, Joe Lauria, “For Sale: West’s Deadly Nuclear Secrets,” The Sunday Times, January 6, 2008)

According to Edmonds and subsequent reporting by The Sunday Times, that investigation “was compromised” by a senior State Department official and eventually led to the roll-up of the CIA corporate cut-out, Brewster Jennings, by Washington neoconservatives embedded in the Pentagon and the Vice President’s office.

While The Sunday Times did not name that official, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi wrote last January that Edmonds told investigators that Marc Grossman, Ambassador to Turkey during the mid-1990s and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs from 2001-2005, was a “person of interest” and had his phone tapped by the FBI during a two year period. Grossman is currently vice chairman of The Cohen Group, a high-powered lobby shop founded by Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen. According to Giraldi,

After 9/11, Grossman reportedly intervened with the FBI to halt the interrogation of four Turkish and Pakistani operatives. According to Edmonds, Grossman was called by a Turkish contact who told him that the men had to be released before they told what they knew. Grossman said that he would take care of it and, per Edmonds, the men were released and allowed to leave the country.

Edmonds states that FBI phone taps from late 2001 reveal that Grossman tipped off his Turkish contact regarding the CIA weapons proliferation cover unit Brewster Jennings, which was being used by Valerie Plame, and that the Turk then informed the Pakistani intelligence service representative in Washington. It is to be assumed that the information was then passed on to the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network. (Philip Giraldi, “Found in Translation: FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds spills her secrets,” The American Conservative, January 28, 2008)

This tracks closely with information revealed by The History Commons that former con man and U.S. government informant Randy Glass told investigators. Glass told MSNBC in 2003 that as part of a sting operation, ISI operative Rajaa Gulum Abbas and arms dealer Diaa Mohsen sought to purchase nuclear material for Osama bin Laden. During a 1999 meeting at a posh New York City restaurant in sight of the Twin Towers, ISI operative Abbas pointed to the Towers and told Glass, “Those towers are coming down.” According to the report,

A group of illegal arms merchants, including an ISI agent with foreknowledge of 9/11, had met in a New York restaurant the month before. This same group meets at this time in a West Palm Beach, Florida, warehouse, and it is shown Stinger missiles as part of a sting operation, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. US intelligence soon discovers connections between two in the group, Rajaa Gulum Abbas and Mohammed Malik, Islamic militant groups in Kashmir (where the ISI assists them in fighting against India), and the Taliban. Mohamed Malik suggests in this meeting that the Stingers will be used in Kashmir or Afghanistan. His colleague Diaa Mohsen also says Abbas has direct connections to “dignitaries” and bin Laden. Abbas also wants heavy water for a “dirty bomb” or other material to make a nuclear weapon. He says he will bring a Pakistani nuclear scientist to the US to inspect the material, MSNBC reported in 2002.

According to Dick Stoltz, a federal undercover agent posing as a black market arms dealer, one of the Pakistanis at the warehouse claims he is working for A. Q. Khan. A Pakistani nuclear scientist, Khan is considered the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program and also the head of an illegal network exporting nuclear technology to rogue nations, MSNBC revealed in 2005.

Government informant Randy Glass passes these warnings on before 9/11, but he claims, “The complaints were ordered sanitized by the highest levels of government.” (”ISI Tried to Buy Nuclear Material for Bin Laden,” The History Commons, no date)

When the Khan network was allegedly run to ground, it exposed a long collaboration amongst nuclear proliferators and terrorists, many of whom were subsequently revealed to have worked closely with the CIA, Britain’s MI6 and Pakistan’s ISI in global destabilization operations across Asia, Europe and the Middle East. While the Cold War Safari Club may have passed into history, the global network linking organized crime, intelligence operations and the capitalist deep state continue to flourish.

That the United States continues to utilize the services of extreme right-wing assets that morphed from BCCI’s Black Network for “unconventional war” against official enemies was reported in 2007 by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

Writing in The New Yorker, Hersh revealed that as part of Washington’s covert program to overthrow Iran’s theocratic regime the Bush administration “has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.”

Talk about inconvenient truths!

A Nuke for Osama? Better Bomb Iran!

Before the 9/11 attacks, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majid were taken into custody for interrorgation by Pakistani police. Mahmood, a nuclear scientist who designed and ran the gas centrifuges at the Khushab reactor, had met with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri in Afghanistan to discuss “scientific matters” with the former CIA-MI6 mujahideen allies.

The founder of a bizarre fundamentalist group, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau (Reconstruction of the Muslim Ummah, or UTN), Mahmood and his associates were not illiterate cannon fodder “trained up fierce” by ISI-linked madrassas, but the crème de’ le’ crème of Pakistan’s military and scientific establishment.

Former ISI Director Hamid Gul, another UTN founder, is reportedly scheduled to be added to a list of names by the UN Security Council as a sponsor of international terrorism, according to a December 2008 report in the Pakistani newspaper The News. Gul, a darling in some circles for claiming “9/11 was an inside job,” continues to play a cynical game and, as alleged by The News, is still linked to the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

When informed of the charges, Gul told The Washington Post, “There seems to be an orchestrated campaign to somehow get me,” dismissing them as an effort to “malign” him. While Gul and other former members claimed UTN was a “charity” formed to provide “humanitarian relief” to Afghanistan, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported in 2003,

A few weeks after September 11, however, Pakistani authorities detained Mahmood, Majeed, and other UTN board members amid charges that their activities in Afghanistan had involved helping Al Qaeda in its quest to acquire nuclear and biological weapons as well. The U.S. government, which pressed for Mahmood’s and Majeed’s arrest, later placed them and their organization on its list of individuals and organizations supporting terrorism. …

Suspicion about Mahmood and others at UTN increased in November 2001. After the fall of the Taliban, coalition forces and the media began to search UTN facilities in Kabul. Some of the records found there revealed that the charity did indeed help Afghanistan with educational material, road building, and flour mills. But other records demonstrated that UTN was very interested in weapons of mass destruction. (David Albright and Holly Higgins, “A Bomb for the Ummah,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March 3, 2003)

But even after these revelations, Khan’s illicit smuggling network continued to operate with impunity. In order to secure Pakistani “cooperation” in Washington’s “war on terror” senior Bush administration officials and U.S. intelligence agencies turned a blind eye to Khan’s global operations and sabotaged efforts to bring the network down.

As in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, evidence of America’s deadly complicity with Sunni-based fundamentalist outfits such as al-Qaeda, organized crime- and intelligence-linked mafia groups such as D-Company or with nuclear proliferators such as the Pakistani Army, one discovers reality turned on its head. When it comes to Iran, American mendacity is boundless!

Despite an embarrassing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that disclosed in December 2007 that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program,” covert action against Iran by the Pentagon and CIA continues while Pakistan and other known and unknown proliferators are given a free pass.

Leading Washington neoconservatives linked to Israel’s far-right Likud party are encouraging Israel–with an assist from the Pentagon–to bomb Tehran’s nuclear research facilities. Chief among them are usual suspects John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. But the incoming Obama administration is replete with its own stable of neocon hawks who have made common cause with the Likudniks. These include Tony Lake, UN Ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle and Dennis Ross.

Indeed, according to Middle East analyst Robert Dreyfuss, Democrats Lake and Rice joined their Republican counterparts last June at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), founded in coordination with the Israel lobby-shop AIPAC, during the group’s “2008 Presidential Task Force” meet-up that vigorously supported “a confrontation with Iran.”

On and on, Washington’s deadly and duplicitous game continues…

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/01/nuclear-proliferation-terrorism-and-deceit-americas-deadly-game/feed/ 1 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/#comments Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:00:31 +0000 Tom Burghardt http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=5642 The Wall Street Journal reported in its December 19 edition, that President-elect Barack Obama is slated to choose retired Vice Admiral Dennis Blair as his Director of National Intelligence (DNI).

Blair’s choice as DNI would further cement Pentagon control over America’s intelligence apparatus. Currently, Air Force Lt. General Michael V. Hayden, a former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) is CIA Director while retired Vice Admiral and former chief at NSA, Mike McConnell is the current Director of the Office of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the chief of America’s 16 spy agencies.

The DNI position was established after Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 (Public Law 108-458), one of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission that “investigated” the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Agencies overseen by the ODNI include: the Central Intelligence Agency; Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency; Army Military Intelligence; Defense Intelligence Agency; Marine Corps Intelligence Activity; National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; National Reconnaissance Office; National Security Agency; Office of Naval Intelligence; the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration; the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

Half of the agencies comprising the “Intelligence Community” over which the ODNI has statutory authority are embedded within the Pentagon. But this doesn’t quite tell the tale. ODNI is headquartered in McClean, Virginia, the capitol of militarist corporate grift. It employs some 1,500 people, largely drawn from the world of private intelligence contractors where top secret and above security clearances are marketable commodities. As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock wrote in his essential study, Spies for Hire:

The bulk of this $50 billion [intelligence budget] is serviced by one hundred companies… The analogy between the intelligence industry and the military-industrial complex famously described by President Eisenhower in 1961 is fitting. By 2006, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 70 percent, or almost three-quarters, of the intelligence budget was spent on contracts. That astounding figure…means that the vast majority of the money spent by the Intelligence Community is not going into building an expert cadre within government but to creating a secret army of analysts and action officers inside the private sector. (Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, pp. 12-13)

Among the firms embedded at ODNI are corporate heavy-hitters such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton and SAIC. A glance at the Project on Government Oversight’s Federal Contractor Misconduct Database (FCMD) find all four firms prominently on display.

Like McConnell, a ten-year veteran of the spooky Booz Allen Hamilton corporation where he served as a senior vice president overseeing the firm’s extensive contracts in the intelligence and national security areas, Blair currently sits on the boards of Tyco International, Iridium Satellite and the Center for New American Security, “a Washington think tank from which several Obama advisers hail,” according to the Journal.

Obama’s choice for ODNI is well-placed to continue the mercenary “tradition” of intelligence outsourcing and what one can only describe as the corporatization of government. According to the Journal, some of the “tougher intelligence issues” the incoming Obama administration seeks to resolve “is weighing whether to propose the creation of a domestic intelligence agency,” modeled after Britain’s MI5.

That’s worked out well in the UK, just ask the Irish! As investigative journalist Neil Mackay has documented in Glasgow’s Sunday Herald, both MI5 and the British Army’s Force Research Unit (FRU) ran Ulster’s neofascist hit-squads during the dirty war period in Northern Ireland,

Our investigations show that far from merely “turning” terrorists to work for the state, British military intelligence actually created loyalist murder gangs to operate as proxy assassins. They even cleared areas in which the gangs were operating of police and army, to allow them to carry out their hits and escape. (”How Britain created Ulster’s murder gangs,” Sunday Herald, 28 January 2007)

Among the more stellar accomplishments of FRU and MI5 were the assassinations of civil rights attorneys Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson. Both were killed under “suspicious” circumstances. Finucane was shot and killed in front of his children in 1989, Nelson was the victim of a brutal car bomb attack a decade later. Responsibility for the murders were claimed respectively, by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVA). Both groups were under the operational control of FRU/MI5 handlers.

More recently, members of the special police unit (SO19) which murdered Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes in the aftermath of al-Qaeda’s July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks in London, were trained by the British Army’s Special Reconnaissance Regiment, comprised of veterans who worked closely with SAS, MI5, FRU and Special Branch hit squads in Northern Ireland.

Like his British counterparts, Admiral Blair had more than a passing acquaintance with brutal counterinsurgency operations. Until his 2002 retirement from the Navy, Blair was the Commander in Chief of U.S. Pacific Command (CINCPAC). His tenure in that post however, was not without controversy.

During the 1999 East Timorese scorched-earth campaign by the Indonesian military (TNI) and rightist militias controlled by the Army, Blair was instructed by President Clinton to demand that Indonesian Armed Forces Commander General Wiranto, shut down the death-squad operation. According to investigative journalist Allan Nairn, “the US military has, behind the scenes and contrary to Congressional intent, been backing the TNI.” Nairn reported that according to a leaked top secret cable, Blair continued the Pentagon’s policy of “constructive engagement” with the murderous Indonesian military.

According to the cable, which was drafted by Col. Joseph Daves, US military attaché in Jakarta, Admiral Blair “told the armed forces chief that he looks forward to the time when [the army will] resume its proper role as a leader in the region. He invited General Wiranto to come to Hawaii as his guest in conjunction with the next round of bilateral defense discussions in the July-August ‘99 time frame. He said Pacific command is prepared to support a subject matter expert exchange for doctrinal development. He expects that approval will be granted to send a small team to provide technical assistance to police and…selected TNI personnel on crowd control measures.”

Admiral Blair at no point told Wiranto to stop the militia operation, going the other way by inviting him to be his personal guest in Hawaii. Blair told Wiranto that the United States would initiate this new riot-control training for the Indonesian armed forces. (”US complicity in Timor,” The Nation, September 9, 1999)

None of this is surprising, however. When the TNI seized power in 1965 in a violent takeover that murdered some 500,000-1,000,000 Indonesians accused of being “communists,” a monstrous purge repeated in 1975 when the TNI invaded East Timor with blessings from Washington, the CIA and the Pentagon were in the thick of it. As national security analyst William Blum documented in Killing Hope,

Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of “Communist” operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over more than 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy’s political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: “It was really a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad. There’s a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment.”

“No one cared, as long as they were Communists, that they were being butchered, said Howard Federspiel, who in 1965 was the Indonesian expert at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. “No one was getting very worked up about it.” (Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995, p. 194)

Nor does it appear anyone is “getting very worked up about it” today.

Blair’s cosy relationship with Indonesia’s murderous generals is referred to delicately in a Washington Post puff piece that claims the retired Admiral “is likely to face Senate questions about his role in maintaining U.S. military ties with Indonesia’s military during a period in which it engaged in human rights violations.”

In the Pacific, he butted heads with the State Department and Congress over his desire to maintain ties with the Indonesian military despite its human rights record and its involvement in East Timor atrocities. “Militaries that are doing something bad at times go into their shell,” he said at the time. “It’s them against the world.” A more fruitful strategy, he insisted, is to make them feel a kinship with professional militaries. (Dana Priest, “Blair Is Steeped in the Ways Intelligence Works,” The Washington Post, December 20, 2008, A04)

Nairn, the only Western journalist remaining in East Timor during the period, described how the TNI was “doing something bad at the time,” and why Blair was instructed to drop a dime on the generals:

The gravity of the meeting was heightened by the fact that two days before, the militias had committed a horrific machete massacre at the Catholic church in Liquiça, Timor. YAYASAN HAK, a Timorese human rights group, estimated that many dozens of civilians were murdered. Some of the victims’ flesh was reportedly stuck to the walls of the church and a pastor’s house. But Admiral Blair, fully briefed on Liquiça, quickly made clear at the meeting with Wiranto that he was there to reassure the TNI chief. According to a classified cable on the meeting, circulating at Pacific Command headquarters in Hawaii, Blair, rather than telling Wiranto to shut the militias down, instead offered him a series of promises of new US assistance. (Nairn, op. cit.)

Given the U.S. military’s atrocious record in Afghanistan and Iraq, one can appreciate how Admiral Blair would have wished that the TNI “feel a kinship with professional militaries.”

Business as Usual

If there’s one inescapable conclusion that can be drawn from the dodgy culture of cronyism and corruption that pervades Washington, journalist Daniel Hopsicker hits the nail on its proverbial head: “Being connected means never having to say your sorry.” Where does Admiral Blair fit in to the mix?

Blair served as the President of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), which describes itself as “a non-profit corporation that administers three federally funded research and development centers to provide objective analyses of national security issues.” However, according to the Journal,

he didn’t recuse himself from involvement in a study of a contract for the F-22 fighter jet. At the time, he was sitting on the board of a subcontractor on that program, EDO Corp. The inspector general found in a 2006 report that Mr. Blair violated the institute’s conflict-of-interest standards but didn’t influence the outcome for the study. Mr. Blair resigned from IDA over the matter, and he also stepped down from the EDO board. (Siobhan Gorman, “Obama Picks Military Man, Blair, as Top Spymaster,” The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2008)

Sounds like more “change” from the “change president” to me! But other conflicts of interest are more troubling.

Iridium Satellite LLC, is a privately held firm based in Bethesda, Maryland and is one of a nexus of companies that have extensive contracts with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the ultra-spooky outfit that designs and flies America’s fleet of military spy satellites. As ODNI, Blair would oversee NRO operations. As Tim Shorrock reported,

With an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC, contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the Intelligence Community (Spies for Hire, op. cit., p. 16)

Iridium, according to its website, maintains a “constellation” of “66 low-earth orbiting (LEO), cross-linked satellites operating as a fully meshed network and supported by multiple in-orbit spares. It is the largest commercial satellite constellation in the world.”

According to the firm, “through its own gateway in Hawaii, the U.S. DoD relies on Iridium for global communications capabilities.” Additionally, its Enhanced Mobile Satellite Services (EMSS) “is a DoD enhancement” that provides “end-to-end encryption” through DoD’s EMSS gateway for improved communications through the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN).

When the company was sold by Motorola after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2000, current CEO Dan Colussy stepped in and rescued the firm from oblivion. Iridium went for a bargain price. Colussy’s group of investors, according to USA Today paid $25 million for a company that cost Motorola some $5 billion to create. Talk about a fire sale!

But what Admiral Blair and other Iridium board members are not likely to trumpet during Senate hearings, USA Today reported in 2003,

In an odd twist, the new Iridium is 24% owned by an investment firm controlled by Prince Khalid bin Abdullah bin Abdulrahman of Saudi Arabia.

The prince used to own a minority chunk of the old Iridium in partnership with the Saudi Binladen Group, the company run by Osama bin Laden’s family. So in a way, some of the money that gave a start to the world’s most notorious terrorist partly funded a communications system helping the U.S. military blast Saddam’s army. Now that’s globalization. (Kevin Maney, “Remember those ‘Iridium’s going to fail’ jokes? Prepare to eat your hat,” USA Today, April 9, 2003)

Depending on one’s point of view there’s nothing odd at all, just business as usual!

The company’s board of directors include, among others, Chairman of Iridium Holdings LLC, Dan Colussy, former CEO of United Nuclear Corporation and Chairman and Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the defunct Pan American World Airlines. According to William Blum’s definitive account, “Pan Am has a long history of collaboration with the CIA.” Dennis Blair. Alvin B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the former Chairman of the Board of the investment banking firm Alex Brown Incorporated and Executive Director of the CIA. Steven Pfeiffer, a senior partner and Chair of the Executive Committee of the high-powered law firm of Fulbright & Jaworski. Tom Ridge, the former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and two-term Governor of Pennsylvania. Lest we forget, amongst Ridge’s other “accomplishments” was his 1999 signing of a death warrant for framed-up journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, while Jamal’s case was on appeal.

Pretty “smart” company Blair keeps! Which just goes to prove, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/dennis-blair-corporatist-candidate-for-director-of-national-intelligence/feed/ 5 http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/caracas-10-years-of-revolution/ http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/caracas-10-years-of-revolution/#comments Sat, 06 Dec 2008 16:00:47 +0000 Ian Swan http://www.dissidentvoice.org/?p=5122 “It still smells of sulphur around here!” Hugo Chavez’s dramatic voice reverberates around our pick-up jeep. Jorge R. is driving but answers his mobile and the rest of us grin. Mr. Chavez’ grand repertoire of sound-bites are very popular here, this ringtone was a rap remix of the wisecrack he made about George W Bush from the UN pulpit. “You can download him singing, giving speeches, almost anything” Jorge assures me as we drive deep into Caracas’ ranchos or barrios (the shantytowns also known as favelas in Brazil) comprising over half the capital’s population and some of the most hazardous neighbourhoods in the world. Or perhaps President Hugo was referring to the acrid aftermath of the gun battles that now plague areas such as these in this vertiginous South American capital.

Jorge looks the part in his red hat and t-shirt, embroidered with the slogan Ahora Venezuela es de Todos (roughly: Now Venezuela is For Everybody). I ask him what if his phone rang while he was in the designer, ultra-posh Centro San Ignacio? He shrugs confidently, “It’s a free country”. With 95% of the media in opposition, Jorge makes his point. “I’m sure they [the opposition] have King Juan Carlos of Spain’s ‘why don’t you just shut up!’” he smiles, and we all laugh at the memory. “People actually ran into the street to celebrate that,” he admits. An amusing anecdote from a city now used to massive demonstrations. Polarization and funny ringtones, Venezuela today could be characterized by this.

With shifting balances of power, ideological evolution in the US and new global rules for finance due to be drawn up, busy months of meetings lie ahead for the G20 states. For many, that Hugo Chavez will not be present is a great pity and to scores more a great relief. In throwing its own alternative into the geopolitical arena, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has become a central figure in Latin American politics but at a cost: it has suffered a bitter domestic “divorce,” the repercussions of which continue to fester. As with any rupture, there are two sides to every story. I have come to hear both.

We pull our jeep up in a cul-de-sac of the San Juan barrio beside a new clinic, the elevation grants us spectacular views of the valley that is Caracas. I’m spending the day with four bright young people from the Corazon Adentro Misión Socialista (Heart Inside Socialist Mission). Their vision is to engage citizens in collective combat against inequality by developing culture as a force for socialist change, also to give the underprivileged an outlet for their creative talents. It is a permanent, ongoing program with cultural events or “happenings” occurring throughout the city 365 days of the year, with a special focus on the ranchos. It is 0930 on Saturday and the barrio is sunny and calm, belying its reputation as one of the “harder” slums. I ask Xiomara C. what does she mean, though “hard” is often self-explanatory.

“We can’t get in up there,” she say’s pointing up to not far from where we stand. I pick out a group of young men watching us from one of the shadowy, serpentine stairs that define the barrio. “It’s ‘controlled’ by gangs, last week one of our team was intercepted by armed youths, they didn’t hurt her but menacingly told her to go away. This red shirt is worth something,” she grins “we do get the respect of some gangs and on occasion they afford us their ‘protection’” She confirms this “protection” is not a pseudonym. On one occasion a spectator was shot dead during an act as he stood amongst the children, but such events are rare. “Many of the youngsters have kids too and appreciate what we’re doing. We’ll get in up there eventually,” she adds with a determined smile. Xiomara works mainly in Petare, situated to the east of the city: it is Latin America’s most populous shanty-town with almost a million inhabitants and made up of over 380 distinct barrios.

“Wake up!” shouts a local volunteer through a megaphone to the breeze-block houses crammed all around us, “come see the clowns and jugglers, there’s a magician coming too, get up before the rains hit,” she bellows out. At the far end of the valley dark clouds are gathering, pushing our way. Under an unforgiving sun we tidy up a disused basketball court and carry chairs down many steps for the audience we hope will show. With weed whackers in hand, others clear a green space and the nurses sweep out an old dressing-room.

“When the mothers bring their kids down for the spectacle, we give vaccinations to those who haven’t yet got them,” says Jorge, and he asks me if I’ve had mine. “The Revolution has reduced infant mortality a great deal in ten years,” he adds proudly (18.2% decrease from 1998-2006). The jabs are for hepatitis, polio and tetanus. There is a respectable turnout of women and kids and thankfully the tropical thunderstorm headed our way defies all logic and veers away. Xiomara winks and says she had a word with the man upstairs. I consider making a joke about the Chavez controlling the weather, but I know better, if he did he have these ranchos too. On our way out, San Juan has woken up and there are groups of young men drinking beer out in the narrow streets, it is noon and Ivan E. makes a comment of concern.

Pressing on, we cross western Caracas’s never-ending expanse of extemporized housing, reaching close to the clouds and passing through a “Colombian” rancho of dire poverty. The shockingly flimsy abodes are surrounded by debris and rubbish, yet the vivid hillside vegetation is stunning, tropical flowers and lush grasses provide another contrast in this city of extremes. There is unusual quiet in the jeep as we roll gently by; the only building of note is an army outpost with the soldiers safely grouped together on the veranda clutching automatic rifles. They recognise the jeep, our team’s red shirts and give us an imperceptible nod.

I almost ask Ivan what makes it Colombian around here but stop short; I know “Colombian” and “illegal” are synonymous here. As if reading my mind, he volunteers, “They have buses coming from Colombia that don’t even mention Caracas anymore on the destination, nowadays they specify the barrios.” Immigration has been an issue here since the 50’s when millions of hopeful workers began to pour in and the ‘Tale of Two Cities’ was born. Ivan reckons the population has grown by two million since 1998; most have landed here in the ranchos.

Crossing the Caracas fault line with its seismically wrinkled topography we finally arrive at the aptly named Barrio Nuevo Horizonte. I am transfixed by some breathtaking views and a rainbow arching the new highway viaduct far below. Only up here in the hills have I seen kids running around being kids, an often perilous luxury (stray bullets often hit children) denied those back in the city. We are given a warm welcome by the locals and the staffers of the tiny community centre. We are served some delicious chupe, though I am not enjoying it. My concern is that there is nothing to stop the six young men eyeing me from the steep alleyway outside from “express” kidnapping me or worse. This is a new phenomenon down in the city, people are grabbed from cars, doorsteps or wherever and then the ransom call comes. 80% of the 450 reported cases since January were resolved though the police generally get informed after the fact. A child pushes a visitor’s book under my nose and suddenly this small act banishes all my fears, I sign and look up. The ‘Revolution” are watching me with a clear and steadfast regard, I can see there is pride here in the barrio. This dramatic change of consciousness is what has shaped the last decade for the people of Venezuela.

The Cuban musicians show up and play to a small crowd of women and children. Many more listen from the windows around and above. The band wraps up with Chan Chan just as dusk beckons and the rancho magically transforms into a coruscating wonderland of lights.

“Such a nice change from the sounds of gunfire,” a mother says, leading her children away. Like most of the Ministry workers with us, Xiomara is from a tough barrio. She explains to me why there are long metal tubes lined up against the houses. “We’re improving the sewage system, until now it’s been largely improvised,” she adds pointing to a stack of cement bags. “A lot of stairs have been repaired.” This barrio retrofit is done in conjunction with the locals who lend a hand with their not inconsiderable DIY expertise. “It’s about generating barrio culture, empowerment and avoiding the handout mentality. We build the future together” she says proudly but her smile quickly vanishes “if all this was to end…” she trails off.

December 6, 2008 will mark a decade since Hugo Chavez swept to power in a landslide democratic victory. Much has since been documented about this socialist icon, the truth no doubt generously interspersed with innuendo, propaganda and hidden agendas. Having lived in Venezuela from ’94-’98 it seemed a logical moment to return to Caracas, take stock and analyse what has happened in the intervening years. History tells us they have been eventful years indeed: 12 elections and one defeat for the Bolivarian Republic, a new constitution, catastrophic mudslides, a failed coup, huge oil revenues to leverage sweeping reforms and an overwhelming tide of immigration into the capital. Externally, China had become a major player in the oil stakes, ready and willing to gain on any trade deal that might be the US’ loss.

Recalling briefly the period ’94, from Chavez’ release from jail (for a failed coup against president C.A. Perez in ‘92) to ’98, we can find a paradise in social, political and economic meltdown. Perez wound up under house arrest (corruption), the incumbent presided over a coalition of 17 parties/independents and the IMF was called in to bail out the banks. Chronic Poverty reached new depths and capital flowed out of the country. Pepsi changed to Coke overnight and homicide stats went from the usual morbid to outright horrific. The oligarchs and expats who managed to reconcile living in this near-anarchy could still have a splendid time in amongst the contrasts. Caracas’ pricey restaurants and chic nightspots rivalled the best in Europe, stunning beaches, pristine jungles, Andean idyll and the ancient Tepuys more than made up for the lack of cultural offerings. Most of these jewels lay beyond the financial reach of the average working Venezuelan. In the cities student riots became so regular that Tuesdays became known as Revolution Day. Fatalism had reached such a nadir that jokes such as to be shot for a pair of Nike’s was considered a natural death, appeared on the front pages of national newspapers. At least the famed Caraqueño sense of humour seemed bulletproof.

The first thing that struck me upon my return to Caracas was the traffic. What was once daunting is now epic: a relentless cacophony of horns, engines and alarms combine to provide a wearying soundtrack to a city that is under siege to the automobile. The gleaming cable car being built into the San Augustine barrio looks impressive but it’s not operational yet. One get’s the feeling that if this urban nightmare is not resolved soon, the tenuous link with normality could be broken altogether. The skyline reflects a building boom with many new commercial centres amongst the high rises, including the posh Centro San Ignacio and Centro Sambil. The leafy Las Mercedes neighbourhood now boasts huge car showrooms along its gridlocked avenues and as ever, cutting edge boutiques and bars down the side streets.

Someone has been spending money.

The temples of consumption bear testament to the near decade long windfall of petrodollars and the increase in variety is significant. However, money spenders will notice tucked in amongst the shops are the ubiquitous Bolivarian labour rights offices, a powerful psychological reminder of change. Government murals with red silhouettes of the president proclaiming the value of unity through hard work can be seen from the ranchos to the city proper. Grand murals from the SENIAT (Integrated Customs Administration and Tax Services) remind citizens of the importance of paying taxes, the function of taxation and employers are reminded of their statutory obligations, unthinkable a decade ago. This major shift away from the US influenced ideology to a more European-like system of free education, health and social services with national insurance is the bedrock of the Bolivarian Republic. Passing a once famous Italian restaurant I remark how it must have fallen by the wayside to Paco, a Galician immigrant from the fifties. “Not at all,” he says, “they were shut down for not respecting workers rights!”

Caracas and politics are inseparable. When canvassing opinions about the Bolivarian government the response is swift; issues uttered first off are corruption and insecurity. To imagine a government without corruption in a continent where it is endemic might be stretching the imagination, but this was one of Chavez’ great promises, tackling graft and delinquency. Left wing pilfering always seems worse than when the right caves into allurement but there is no doubt this matter wounds the president’s reputation deeply. Whilst the party faithful will dispute allegations of venality, there is almost universal agreement about El Hampa (insecurity).

“It’s true there have been big changes in ten years…,” Omar, 35, a taxi driver from Petare tells me with a smile, “…our kids get three meals a day in school, some groceries are subsidised and I can get a local doctor (Cuban) if my boy gets a sore tummy, but it’s not enough. Things have gotten too dangerous, we often block the road with our cars to protest the murders of our colleagues, it’s very bad”. Omar’s sentiments are echoed by many others. In last week’s municipal elections the opposition candidate in Petare scored a win right in the Revolution’s heartland, down in part to frustration with incomplete and unfulfilled promises, but mainly safety. Over the past fifteen years violent crime has become ingrained in the psyche of Caraqueños. In the upmarket enclaves electric fences are now an ugly accessory atop the spiked railings once deemed sufficient and private security is still big business. “It’s a source of deep stress,” says Eduardo P., 45, who fits coffee machines and fridges for cafés and bars. “You get stuck in traffic for hours and worry about getting home too late, before the malandros (thugs) set out, though in reality, you could get hit anywhere, anytime.”

But Eduardo is not all critical. “You have to recognise the good things Chavez has done, he’s had great ideas. Millions have overcome their illiteracy thanks to the Robinson Mission, my brother got a national bank loan for his goat cheese farm down on the coast, he’d never have got that before.” I ask him why he’s anti-Chavista then. “I think he’s lost the plot, you know…,” he winks. “Back in ’98 he had a golden opportunity, he should have engaged the opposition not alienate them, and many of his people are opportunist and corrupt, who do you think goes to all these new shops? I don’t know about him but the others…” Eduardo went on to compare the Chavez entourage to the oligarchs of the past and indulged in some salacious rumours before ending with “when Chavez is gone the positive aspects of his time will have to be continued, we expect that from the opposition, we’ll even improve on them. He’s been a very important phase in this country’s development.”

Adolfo B. who voted “red” in ’98 is a professor of economics at a private university in Caracas, evokes harsh condemnation. “The importance of private institutions has been eroded; unilateral action of fundamental economic matters is being taken with neither expertise nor experience. Most of our capable people have been driven out and inefficiency is rife in the government.” He is clearly exasperated: “He seems more concerned with trivial stuff like changing the shield on the flag because Bolivar’s horse used to veer to the right, now it goes to the left. Now we celebrate Indigenous Resistance Day instead of the 1492 landings (el Día de la Raza). Too much symbolism, he’s only interested in holding onto power.” I ask him if he thinks the president will hang on until 2013 when his mandate expires; he shrugs and admits it’s a long shot. “The people are eating their savings, petroleum infrastructure is failing and oil prices are dropping, inflation is around 35% and we still import most our food. We’re in a pressure cooker.”

Bearing in mind the current global financial crisis bewailing the West, perhaps judging a developing country socialist or not, by its current macroeconomic success might seem unfair. Nevertheless, a quick glance some figures is helpful. Thanks to oil, the Venezuelan GDP rose from 85.8 billion USD ’97 to 184.5 billion USD in 2007. Real income increased by 137% from 2003-07 and though the poor are living better, problems such as housing and social mobility remain.

I did not visit the interior so I cannot speak of any infrastructural progress or agrarian reforms.

The scale of the challenge facing the Bolivarian Revolution back in ’98 left no illusions, a decade later both the opposition and pro-Chavez groups can point to failures and successes. The ramifications of last weekend’s local elections will be critical for Hugo Chavez, whether he can ride the challenge of a reinvigorated and young opposition (or how they will react to his recurring proposal to expand presidential term limits), time will tell. The scourge of drugs threatens to undo the successes in the barrios and Caracas’ urban chaos is a genuine environmental emergency.

Ultimately the most durable legacy of this period will lie in the sweeping social reforms and the eradication of a once blanket indifference towards the neglected majority. That may yet be an example, not just to developing countries but to the crisis-hit wealthier nations of the world at large.

]]> http://dissidentvoice.org/2008/12/caracas-10-years-of-revolution/feed/ 1