SIGN to Stop FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW

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SIGN to Stop FBI Repression of Anti-War Activists NOW

Condemn the FBI Raids and Harassment of Anti-War and International Solidarity Activists!

Tell President Obama, Attorney General Holder, DOJ Inspector General Fine, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders, U.N. Secy Gen Ban, and members of the media to STOP THE FBI CAMPAIGN OF REPRESSION AGAINST ANTI-WAR AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY ACTIVISTS NOW!

Sign the Petition Now: iacenter.org/stopfbi

**Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.

**Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.

**End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

Be part of the united opposition to this FBI campaign of harassment and intimidation. Make your voice heard!

The Committee to Stop FBI Repression ( stopfbi.net ) and the International Action Center urge you to sign the petition at iacenter.org/stopfbi demanding justice. Over a dozen activists across the country have already been raided. Only our united opposition will stop this harassment.

Your message will go to President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Attorney General Eric Holder, DOJ Inspector General Fine, Congressional leaders, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, U.N. Secretary General Ban, along with Major media representatives.

We denounce the Federal Bureau of Investigation harassment of anti-war and solidarity activists. The FBI raided seven houses and an office in Chicago and Minneapolis on Friday, September 24, 2010. The FBI served subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to 13 activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The FBI also attempted to intimidate activists in Wisconsin, California and North Carolina.

The FBI confiscated computers, email and mailing lists, cell phones , cameras, videos, books, and passports. This is a dangerous attack on the constitutional rights of free speech of every social justice, antiwar and human rights activist and organization in the U.S. today. The right to speak, meet and write opinions is guaranteed under the constitution.

This suppression of civil rights is aimed at those who dedicate their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. Grand Jury subpoenas investigating material support of terrorism are being used to silence highly respected and well known human rights activists. This is dangerous national effort to shut down growing opposition to U.S. wars. It cannot be allowed.



The FBI and the Grand Jury are threatening courageous individuals who have written and spoken publicly to broaden understanding of social justice issues of war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, Students for a Democratic Society, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These activists came together with many others to organize the 2008 anti-war marches on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

We ask people of conscience to join us in fighting this political repression, as we continue working to build the movements against US war and occupation.

Sign the Petition Now: iacenter.org/stopfbi

Petition text:

To: President Barack Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder

cc: Vice President Biden, DOJ Inspector General Fine, the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, Congressional Leaders, the Congressional Black Caucus, U.N. Secy Gen Ban, and members of the media

** Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.

** Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.

** End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

I am writing to demand justice and an end to the FBI's continued harassment of antiwar and international solidarity activists, activists who are guilty of no crime but opposition to U.S. foreign policy. On Friday, September 24, 2010 the FBI raided seven houses and an office in Chicago and Minneapolis. The FBI served subpoenas to testify before a federal grand jury to eleven activists in Illinois, Minnesota, and Michigan. The FBI also attempted to intimidate activists in California, Wisconsin and North Carolina. This is not the action of a lone prosecutor. The raids were coordinated nationally, spanned several cities, and many other activists have been visited and personally threatened by the FBI.

The FBI confiscated computers, email and mailing lists, cell phones , cameras, videos, books, and passports. This is a dangerous attack on the constitutional rights of free speech of every social justice, antiwar and human rights activist and organization in the U.S. today. The right to speak, meet and write opinions is guaranteed under the constitution.

This suppression of civil rights is aimed at those who dedicate their time and energy to supporting the struggles of the Palestinian and Colombian peoples against U.S. funded occupation and war. Grand Jury subpoenas investigating material support of terrorism are being used to silence highly respected and well known human rights activists. This is a dangerous national effort to shut down growing opposition to U.S. wars. It cannot be allowed.

The FBI and the Grand Jury are threatening courageous individuals who have written and spoken publicly to broaden understanding of social justice issues of war and occupation. The activists are involved with many groups, including: the Twin Cities Anti-War Committee, the Palestine Solidarity Group, the Colombia Action Network, Students for a Democratic Society, and Freedom Road Socialist Organization. These activists came together with many others to organize the 2008 anti-war marches on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

The FBI and the U.S. government must end this campaign of intimidation against anti-war and international solidarity activists. I am outraged at this disrespect of democratic rights. I ask that you intervene immediately to:

** Stop the repression against anti-war and international solidarity activists.

** Immediately return all confiscated materials: computers, cell phones, papers, documents, etc.

** End the grand jury proceedings against anti-war activists.

Sincerely
(your signature here)

Sign the Petition Now: iacenter.org/stopfbi

You can also call the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder at 202-353l-1555 or write an email to: AskDOJ@usdoj.gov demanding an end to the FBI raids, return of all confiscated materials and an end to the Grand Jury witchhunt.

Contact the Committee to Stop FBI Repression
at stopfbi.net

Outraged by FBI raids: U.S. activists call emergency actions

Download PDF flyer: Stop FBI Repression

Click here for YouTube: RT America News Interview with IAC Co-Director Sara Flounders on FBI Raids just before Tuesday's Rallies

By Kris Hamel
Detroit

Sep 29, 2010

The day after the Sept. 24 multistate raids and grand jury subpoenas, a broad range of progressive activists and community members denounced the FBI at a rally at the federal building in downtown Milwaukee.

New York, Sept. 28. photo: Greg Butterfield " border="0"> New York, Sept. 28. photo: Greg Butterfield photo: Greg Butterfield

Progressive activists and organizations across the U.S. began immediately to galvanize a struggle upon learning of the outrageous attacks carried out against solidarity activists by federal agents and the Obama administration. Demonstrations have been called in at least 32 cities and towns from coast to coast.

“The FBI is trying to round people up and scare activists from doing solidarity work with people in other nations, oppressed nations around the world. They’re trying to scare us into silence,” said Natasha Morgan of the Colombia Action Network and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization.

Rally in Washington, DC

The national headquarters of the FBI in Washington, D.C., was the scene of a spirited picket line and rally Sept. 28 to protest the FBI raids. Almost every progressive group in the area was represented, including Bailout the People Movement, International Action Center, Black is Back Coalition, Rev. Graylan Hagler, National Lawyers Guild, Code Pink, Students for a Democratic Society, Answer Coalition, Veterans for Peace, Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, International Socialist Organization, Green Party, Students for Justice in Palestine, and Workers World Party. Participants attempted to enter the FBI building to deliver a list of demands. Police and FBI agents quickly locked the doors to stop activists from getting inside. Groups vowed to continue with protests. photo: Sharon Black

Morgan and another Milwaukee activist in Students for a Democratic Society were contacted by the FBI via phone on Sept. 24. They told the FBI that legal counsel was being retained and immediately ended the calls.

The rally was sponsored by SDS Milwaukee and was attended by representatives of the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants Association-American Federation of Teachers Local 2169; American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 82; the Latin America Solidarity Committee; Workers World Party; and other organizations.

On Sept. 27 in Minneapolis, more than 500 demonstrators gathered at the FBI headquarters. They chanted, “From Colombia to Palestine, solidarity is not a crime!” and spoke out against the raids.

Speakers included activists whose homes were raided, as well as representatives of the labor, anti-war and social justice movements. Speaker after speaker expressed support and solidarity with their fellow activists who had been targeted.

Minneapolis Photo: Fight Back! News " border="0"> Minneapolis Photo: Fight Back! News

“This is an attack on our ideas,” stated Jess Sundin of the Anti-War Committee, whose home was raided. “These actions by the FBI will not intimidate us nor will they silence us. ... Standing up for truth and justice is not a crime!”

Clyde Bellecourt, founder and national director of the American Indian Movement, urged support for those facing the grand jury. He recalled the brutal FBI repression suffered by Native Americans in the 1970s during the occupation of Wounded Knee.

In Detroit, the Sept. 27 weekly meeting of the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War and Injustice heard from Tom Burke of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, one of the subpoenaed activists who now lives in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Detroit/Tom Burke, FRSO, speaks. " border="0"> Detroit/Tom Burke, FRSO, speaks. photo: Bryan G. Pfeifer

“What this centers around is our international solidarity work and the fact that we are all deeply internationalist,” said Burke. “The FBI agents told us directly that their goal is to find evidence to support charges of terrorism. They won’t find it.” Burke said he attended a demonstration against the raids earlier that day in Kalamazoo, Mich.

In downtown Durham, N.C., more than 50 community members and activists rallied Sept. 27 in support of Kosta Harlan, a Durham anti-war activist with the Colombia Action Network and Students for a Democratic Society, and to oppose the FBI’s targeting of other activists across the country.

Durham, N.C./Kosta Harlan, a target of FBI, at protest." border="0"> Durham, N.C./Kosta Harlan, a target of FBI, at protest. Photo: Raleigh FIST

Four FBI agents visited Harlan on the morning of Sept. 24 and attempted to intimidate him.

“I believe that I am being targeted for my anti-war activism,” said Harlan. “Everyone who believes in ... basic democratic freedoms should be concerned by the FBI’s disgraceful actions. All of my organizing work is public and perfectly legal. I call on all people of conscience to speak out against these violations of our fundamental rights.”

Black Workers for Justice; the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation; NC Peace Action; Raleigh Fight Imperialism, Stand Together (FIST); members of UE Local 150, NC Public Sector Workers Union; and people from other progressive organizations attended the rally, which was followed by a “Know Your Rights” training session provided by the National Lawyers Guild.

In Raleigh, N.C., dozens of social justice, anti-war, and immigrant rights activists gathered the morning of Sept. 28 in front of the New Bern Avenue Federal Building to denounce the raids and harassment. The protest included members of FIST, SDS, MASFF, NLG and Black Workers for Justice.

A rally was held in Atlanta in front of the Richard Russell building Sept. 28. Activists represented the IAC, ACLU, SEIU, UNITE HERE and Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition.

A spirited demonstration in Boston picketed and chanted outside the JFK Federal Building the afternoon of Sept. 27. The protest was co-sponsored by the Boston Mayday Committee and the International Action Center.

Boston " border="0"> Boston photo: Steve Kirschbaum

Activists from many organizations in the anti-war movement participated, as well as civil liberties and immigrant rights activists. Chants and slogans demanded an end to the raids, and that all confiscated materials be returned. Immigration raids were linked to the FBI raids on activists.

Buffalo, N.Y." border="0"> Buffalo, N.Y. photo: Ellie Dorritie

Speakers brought up the history of state repression going back to the Palmer Raids and emphasized the importance of standing up in solidarity, uniting and fighting back.

Ellie Dorritie, Leslie Feinberg, Peter Gilbert, Bryan G. Pfeifer, Dianne Mathiowetz, Frank Neisser and Scott Williams contributed to this article. Information on the Minnesota action was taken from www.fightbacknews.org.

Get involved! Become part of the Committee to Stop FBI Repression! go to stopfbi.net

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Video: History of BP Includes Role in 1953 Iran Coup After Nationalization of Oil

As tens of thousands of gallons of oil continue to spew into the Gulf of Mexico from the BP oil spill we continue our series on BP. Sixty years ago, BP was called the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. We look at the story of the company’s role in the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s popular progressive Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh.

Democracy Now! - The War & Peace Report

Who's in Big Brother's Database?

By James Bamford, The New York Review Of Books, Nov. 5, 2009 issue

The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency
by Matthew M. Aid
Bloomsbury, 423 pp., $30.00

On a remote edge of Utah's dry and arid high desert, where temperatures often zoom past 100 degrees, hard-hatted construction workers with top-secret clearances are preparing to build what may become America's equivalent of Jorge Luis Borges's "Library of Babel," a place where the collection of information is both infinite and at the same time monstrous, where the entire world's knowledge is stored, but not a single word is understood. At a million square feet, the mammoth $2 billion structure will be one-third larger than the US Capitol and will use the same amount of energy as every house in Salt Lake City combined.

Unlike Borges's "labyrinth of letters," this library expects few visitors. It's being built by the ultra-secret National Security Agency—which is primarily responsible for "signals intelligence," the collection and analysis of various forms of communication—to house trillions of phone calls, e-mail messages, and data trails: Web searches, parking receipts, bookstore visits, and other digital "pocket litter." Lacking adequate space and power at its city-sized Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters, the NSA is also completing work on another data archive, this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the Alamodome.

Just how much information will be stored in these windowless cybertemples? A clue comes from a recent report prepared by the MITRE Corporation, a Pentagon think tank. "As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve," says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, "the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (1024 Bytes) by 2015."[1] Roughly equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, numbers beyond Yottabytes haven't yet been named. Once vacuumed up and stored in these near-infinite "libraries," the data are then analyzed by powerful infoweapons, supercomputers running complex algorithmic programs, to determine who among us may be—or may one day become—a terrorist. In the NSA's world of automated surveillance on steroids, every bit has a history and every keystroke tells a story.

In the near decade since September 11, the tectonic plates beneath the American intelligence community have undergone a seismic shift, knocking the director of the CIA from the top of the organizational chart and replacing him with the new director of national intelligence, a desk-bound espiocrat with a large staff but little else. Not only surviving the earthquake but emerging as the most powerful chief the spy world has ever known was the director of the NSA. He is in charge of an organization three times the size of the CIA and empowered in 2008 by Congress to spy on Americans to an unprecedented degree, despite public criticism of the Bush administration's use of the agency to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance as part of the "war on terror." The legislation also largely freed him of the nettlesome Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). And in another significant move, he was recently named to head the new Cyber Command, which also places him in charge of the nation's growing force of cyber warriors.

Wasting no time, the agency has launched a building boom, doubling the size of its headquarters, expanding its listening posts, and constructing enormous data factories. One clue to the possible purpose of the highly secret megacenters comes from the agency's British partner, Government Communications Headquarters. Last year, the British government proposed the creation of an enormous government-run central database to store details on every phone call, e-mail, and Internet search made in the United Kingdom. Click a "send" key or push an "answer" button and the details of the communication end up, perhaps forever, in the government's data warehouse to be scrutinized and analyzed.

But when the plans were released by the UK government, there was an immediate outcry from both the press and the public, leading to the scrapping of the "big brother database," as it was called. In its place, however, the government came up with a new plan. Instead of one vast, centralized database, the telecom companies and Internet service providers would be required to maintain records of all details about people's phone, e-mail, and Web-browsing habits for a year and to permit the government access to them when asked. That has led again to public anger and to a protest by the London Internet Exchange, which represents more than 330 telecommunications firms. "We view...the volume of data the government now proposes [we] should collect and retain will be unprecedented, as is the overall level of intrusion into the privacy of citizenry," the group said in August.[2]

Unlike the British government, which, to its great credit, allowed public debate on the idea of a central data bank, the NSA obtained the full cooperation of much of the American telecom industry in utmost secrecy after September 11. For example, the agency built secret rooms in AT&T's major switching facilities where duplicate copies of all data are diverted, screened for key names and words by computers, and then transmitted on to the agency for analysis. Thus, these new centers in Utah, Texas, and possibly elsewhere will likely become the centralized repositories for the data intercepted by the NSA in America's version of the "big brother database" rejected by the British.

Matthew M. Aid has been after the NSA's secrets for a very long time. As a sergeant and Russian linguist in the NSA's Air Force branch, he was arrested and convicted in a court-martial, thrown into prison, and slapped with a bad conduct discharge for impersonating an officer and making off with a stash of NSA documents stamped Top Secret Codeword. He now prefers to obtain the NSA's secrets legally, through the front door of the National Archives. The result is The Secret Sentry: The Untold History of the National Security Agency , a footnote-heavy history told largely through declassified but heavily redacted NSA reports that have been slowly trickling out of the agency over the years. They are most informative in the World War II period but quickly taper off in substance during the cold war.

Aid begins his study on the eve of Pearl Harbor, a time when the entire American cryptologic force could fit into a small, half-empty community theater. But by war's end, it would take a football stadium to seat the 37,000 military and civilian "crippies." On August 14, 1945, as the ink dried on Japan's instruments of surrender, the linguists and codebreakers manning the thirty-seven key listening posts around the world were reading more than three hundred diplomatic code and cipher systems belonging to sixty countries. "The American signals intelligence empire stood at the zenith of its power and prestige," notes Aid. But within days, the cryptanalysts put away their well-sharpened pencils and the intercept operators hung up their earphones. By the end of December 1945, America's crypto world had shrunk to 7,500 men and women.

Despite the drastic layoffs, the small cadre of US and British codebreakers excelled against the new "main enemy," as Russia became known. The joint US-British effort deciphered tens of thousands of Russian army and navy messages during the mid-to-late 1940s. But on October 29, 1948, as President Truman was about to deliver a campaign speech in New York, the party was over. In what became known within the crypto world as "Black Friday," the Russian government and military flipped a switch and instantly converted to new, virtually unbreakable encryption systems and from vulnerable radio signals to buried cables. In the war between spies and machines, the spies won. The Soviets had managed to recruit William Weisband, a forty-year-old Russian linguist working for the US Army, who informed them of key cryptologic weaknesses the Americans were successfully exploiting. It was a blow from which the codebreakers would never recover. NSA historians called it "perhaps the most significant intelligence loss in US history."

In the 1970s, when some modest gains were made in penetrating the Russian systems, history would repeat itself and another American turncoat, this time Ronald Pelton, would again give away the US secrets. Since then, it has largely been a codemaker's market not only with regard to high-level Russian ciphers, but also those of other key countries, such as China and North Korea. On the other hand, the NSA has made significant progress against less cryptologically sophisticated countries and, from them, gained insight into plans and intentions of countries about which the US has greater concerns. Thus, when a Chinese diplomat at the United Nations discusses some new African venture with a colleague from Sudan, the eavesdroppers at the NSA may be deaf to the Chinese communications links but they may be able to get that same information by exploiting weaknesses in Sudan's communications and cipher systems when the diplomat reports the meeting to Khartoum. But even third-world cryptography can be daunting. During the entire war in Vietnam, writes Aid, the agency was never able to break the high-level encryption systems of either the North Vietnamese or the Vietcong. It is a revelation that leads him to conclude "that everything we thought we knew about the role of NSA in the Vietnam War needs to be reconsidered."

Because the book is structured chronologically, it is somewhat difficult to decipher the agency's overall record. But one sees troubling trends. One weakness that seems to recur is that the agency, set up in the wake of World War II to prevent another surprise attack, is itself frequently surprised by attacks and other serious threats. In the 1950s, as over 100,000 heavily armed North Korean troops surged across the 38th parallel into South Korea, the codebreakers were among the last to know. "The North Korean target was ignored," says a declassified NSA report quoted by Aid. "North Korea got lost in the shuffle and nobody told us that they were interested in what was going on north of the 38th parallel," exclaimed one intelligence officer. At the time, astonishingly, the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA), the NSA's predecessor, didn't even have a Korean-language dictionary.

Unfortunately for General Douglas MacArthur, the codebreakers were able to read the communications of Spain's ambassador to Tokyo and other diplomats, who noted that in their discussions with the general, he made clear his secret hope for all-out war with China and Russia, including the use of nuclear weapons if necessary. In a rare instance of secret NSA intercepts playing a major part in US politics, once the messages were shown to President Truman, MacArthur's career abruptly ended.

Another major surprise came in the 1960s when the Soviet Union was able to move large numbers of personnel, large amounts of equipment, and many ballistic missiles to Cuba without the NSA hearing a peep. Still unable to break into the high-level Soviet cipher systems, the agency was unaware that the 51st Rocket Division had packed up and was encamped in Cuba. Nor did it detect the move of five complete medium-range and intermediate-range missile regiments from their Russian bases to Cuba. And it had no knowledge that Russian ballistic missiles were on Cuban soil, being positioned in launchers. "Soviet communications security was almost perfect," according to an NSA historian.

The first clues that something unusual was happening had come in mid-July 1962, when NSA analysts noticed record numbers of Soviet cargo and passenger ships heading for Cuba. Analysis of their unencrypted shipping manifests led the NSA to suspect that the ships were delivering weapons. But the nuclear-armed ballistic missiles were not detected until mid-October, a month after their arrival, and not by the NSA; it was the CIA, acting on information from its sources in Cuba and Florida, that ordered the U-2 reconnaisance flight that photographed them at launch sites on the island. "The crisis," Aid concludes, "was in fact anything but an intelligence success story." This is a view shared by the agency itself in a candid internal history, which noted that the harrowing events "marked the most significant failure of SIGINT [signals intelligence] to warn national leaders since World War II."

More recently, the NSA was unaware of India's impending nuclear test in 1998, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, and the 1998 bombing of two of America's East African embassies. The agency first learned of the September 11 attacks on $300 television sets tuned to CNN, not its billion-dollar eavesdropping satellites tuned to al-Qaeda.

Then there is the pattern by which the NSA was actually right about a warning, but those in power chose to ignore it. During the Korean War, the AFSA picked up numerous indications from low-level unencrypted Chinese intercepts that the Chinese were shifting hundreds of thousands of combat troops to Manchuria by rail, an obvious signal that China might enter the war. But those in charge of Army intelligence simply refused to believe it; it didn't fit in with their plans.

Then, by reading the dispatches between India's well-connected ambassador to Beijing and his Foreign Office, it became clear that China would intervene if UN forces crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. But again, says Aid, the warning "was either discounted or ignored completely by policymakers in Washington," and as the UN troops began crossing the divide, Chinese troops crossed the Yalu River into North Korea. Even when intercepts indicated that the Chinese were well entrenched in the North, officials in Washington and Seoul remained in a state of disbelief, until both South Korean and US forces there were attacked by the Chinese forces.

The pattern was repeated in Vietnam when NSA reporting warned on January 25, 1968, that a major coordinated attack would occur "in the near future in several areas of South Vietnam." But neither the White House, the CIA, nor General William Westmoreland at US military headquarters in Saigon believed it, until over 100,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops launched their Tet offensive in the South five days later on January 30. "The [NSA] reports failed to shake the commands in Washington and Saigon from their perception," says an NSA history. Tragically, Aid notes, at the end of the war, all of the heroic Vietnamese cryptologic personnel who greatly helped the NSA were left behind. "Many," the NSA report reveals, "undoubtedly perished." It added, "Their story is yet untold." Then again in 1973, as in Korea and Vietnam, the NSA warned that Egypt and Syria were planning "a major offensive" against Israel. But, as Aid quotes an official NSA history, the CIA refused to believe that an attack was imminent "because [they thought] the Arabs wouldn't be 'stupid enough' to attack Israel." They were, they did, and they won.

Everything seemed to go right for the NSA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which the agency had accurately forecast. "NSA predicted on December 22 [1979], three full days before the first Soviet troops crossed the Soviet–Afghan border, that the Russians would invade Afghanistan within the next seventy-two hours," writes Aid, adding, "Afghanistan may have been the 'high water mark' for NSA."

The agency also recorded the words of the Russian fighter pilot and his ground controllers as he shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007 in 1983. Although the agency knew that the Russians had accidently mistaken the plane for a potentially hostile US military aircraft, the Reagan administration nevertheless deliberately spun the intercepts to make it seem that the fighter pilot knew all along that it was a passenger jet, infuriating NSA officials. "The White House's selective release of the most salacious of the NSA material concerning the shootdown set off a firestorm of criticism inside NSA," writes Aid. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the NSA's product was used for political purposes.

The most troubling pattern, however, is that the NSA, through gross incompetence, bad intelligence, or deliberate deception through the selective release of information, has helped to push the US into tragic wars. A prime example took place in 1964 when the Johnson administration claimed that two US Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, one on an eavesdropping mission for the NSA, were twice attacked by North Vietnamese torpedo boats. Those attacks were then used to justify the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War. But Aid cites a top-secret NSA analysis of the incident, completed in 2000, which concluded that the second attack, the one used to justify the war, never took place. Instead, NSA officials deliberately withheld 90 percent of the intelligence on the attacks and told the White House only what it wanted to hear. According to the analysis, only intelligence "that supported the claim that the communists had attacked the two destroyers was given to administration officials."

Not having learned its lesson, in the lead-up to the war in Iraq the NSA again told the administration only what it wanted to hear, despite the clearly ambiguous nature of the evidence. For years beforehand, the agency's coverage of Iraq was disastrous. In the late 1990s, the Iraqis began shifting much of their high-level military communications from radio to buried fiber optic networks, and at the same time, Saddam Hussein banned the use of cell phones. That left only occasional low-level troop communications. According to a later review, Aid writes, NSA had "virtually no useful signals intelligence on a target that was one of the United States' top intelligence priorities." And the little intelligence it did have pointed away from Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction. "We looked long and hard for any signs," said one retired NSA official. "We just never found a 'smoking gun' that Saddam was trying to build nukes or anything else." That, however, did not prevent the NSA director, Lieutenant Gen. Michael V. Hayden, from stamping his approval on the CIA's 2002 National Intelligence Estimate arguing that Iraq's WMDs posed a grave danger, which helped prepare the way for the devastating war.

While much of the terrain Aid covers has been explored before, the most original areas in The Secret Sentry deal with the ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the NSA was forced to marry, largely unsuccessfully, its super-high-tech strategic capabilities in space with its tactical forces on the ground. Before the September 11 attacks, the agency's coverage of Afghanistan was even worse than that of Iraq. At the start of the war, the NSA's principal listening post for the region did not have a single linguist proficient in Pashto or Dari, Afghanistan's two principal languages. Agency recruiters descended on Fremont, California, home of the country's largest population of Afghan expatriates, to build up a cadre of translators—only to have most candidates rejected by the agency's overparanoid security experts. On the plus side, because of the collapse of the Taliban regime's rudimentary communications system, its leaders were forced to communicate only by satellite phones, which were very susceptible to NSA monitoring.

Other NSA tactical teams, Aid explains, collaborated on the ground with Special Forces units, including in the mountains of Tora Bora. But it was a new type of war, one the NSA was not prepared for, and both Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar easily slipped through its electronic net. Eight years later, despite billions of dollars spent by the agency and dozens of tapes released by bin Laden, the NSA is no closer to capturing him or Mullah Omar than it was at Tora Bora in 2001.

Disappointingly, the weakest section of the book, mostly summaries of old news clips, deals with what may be the most important subject: the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping and its targeting of American communications. There is no discussion, for example, of the agency's huge data-mining centers, mentioned above, currently being built in Utah and Texas, or to what extent the agency, which has long been confined to foreign and international communications, is now engaged in domestic eavesdropping.

It is a key question and we have no precise answer. By installing its intercept rooms in such locations as AT&T's main switching station in downtown San Francisco, the agency has physical access to domestic as well as international communications. Thus it is possible that the agency scans all the e-mail of both and it may also eavesdrop on the telephone calls of both for targets on its ever-growing watch lists. According to a recent Justice Department report, "As of December 31, 2008, the consolidated terrorist watchlist contained more than 1.1 million known or suspected terrorist identities."[3]

Aid's history becomes thin as it gets closer to the present day and the archival documents dwindle, especially since he has no substantial first-person, on-the-record interviews. Beyond a brief mention, he also leaves other important aspects of the NSA's history unaddressed, including the tumultuous years in the mid-1970s when it was investigated by the Senate's Church Committee for decades of illegal spying; Trailblazer, the nearly decade-long failure to modernize the agency; and the NSA's increasingly important role in cyberwarfare and its implications in future wars.

Where does all this leave us? Aid concludes that the biggest problem facing the agency is not the fact that it's drowning in untranslated, indecipherable, and mostly unusable data, problems that the troubled new modernization plan, Turbulence, is supposed to eventually fix. "These problems may, in fact, be the tip of the iceberg," he writes. Instead, what the agency needs most, Aid says, is more power. But the type of power to which he is referring is the kind that comes from electrical substations, not statutes. "As strange as it may sound," he writes, "one of the most urgent problems facing NSA is a severe shortage of electrical power." With supercomputers measured by the acre and estimated $70 million annual electricity bills for its headquarters, the agency has begun browning out, which is the reason for locating its new data centers in Utah and Texas. And as it pleads for more money to construct newer and bigger power generators, Aid notes, Congress is balking.

The issue is critical because at the NSA, electrical power is political power. In its top-secret world, the coin of the realm is the kilowatt. More electrical power ensures bigger data centers. Bigger data centers, in turn, generate a need for more access to phone calls and e-mail and, conversely, less privacy. The more data that comes in, the more reports flow out. And the more reports that flow out, the more political power for the agency.

Rather than give the NSA more money for more power—electrical and political—some have instead suggested just pulling the plug. "NSA can point to things they have obtained that have been useful," Aid quotes former senior State Department official Herbert Levin, a longtime customer of the agency, "but whether they're worth the billions that are spent, is a genuine question in my mind."

Based on the NSA's history of often being on the wrong end of a surprise and a tendency to mistakenly get the country into, rather than out of, wars, it seems to have a rather disastrous cost-benefit ratio. Were it a corporation, it would likely have gone belly-up years ago. The September 11 attacks are a case in point. For more than a year and a half the NSA was eavesdropping on two of the lead hijackers, knowing they had been sent by bin Laden, while they were in the US preparing for the attacks. The terrorists even chose as their command center a motel in Laurel, Maryland, almost within eyesight of the director's office. Yet the agency never once sought an easy-to-obtain FISA warrant to pinpoint their locations, or even informed the CIA or FBI of their presence.

But pulling the plug, or even allowing the lights to dim, seems unlikely given President Obama's hawkish policies in Afghanistan. However, if the war there turns out to be the train wreck many predict, then Obama may decide to take a much closer look at the spy world's most lavish spender. It is a prospect that has some in the Library of Babel very nervous. "It was a great ride while it lasted," said one.
Notes

[1] The MITRE Corporation, "Data Analysis Challenges" (December 2008), p. 13.

[2] David Leppard, "Internet Firms Resist Ministers' Plan to Spy on Every E-mail," The Sunday Times , August 2, 2009.

[3] "The Federal Bureau of Investigation's Terrorist Watchlist Nomination Practices," US Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, Audit Report 09-25, May 2009.

FREE DR. AAFIA SIDDIQUI, RELEASE THE SECRET U.S. DOCUMENTS ON HER TORTURE

International Action Center, Press Release, Sept. 5, 2009

Sara Flounders, the Co-Director of the International Action Center released the following statement to the media on Friday, September 5, 2009, following the September 3 court appearance of Dr Aafia Siddiqui in U.S. District Court in New York City.

Now that the documents recording the systematic torture of thousands of prisoners in secret U.S. prisons has been released to the world media in U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s report, the secret documents on the imprisonment and torture of Dr Aafia Siddiqui must also be released to the courts and to the world.

Days before Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a small woman weighing less than 90 pounds, was again forcibly brought into United States District Court on wild and contradictory charges of trying to murder FBI agents in Afghanistan, the latest documentary evidence of what the FBI and CIA is really doing in Afghanistan and in secret prisons around the world was confirmed in major news stories for all to read.

Tens of thousands of pages of newly de-classified government documents released by U.S. Attorney Holder confirm in the most graphic details that CIA interrogators threatened to kill the children of detainees, threatened sexual assaults on another’s mother, threatened bound prisoners with guns and an electric drill. Used water boarding against one prisoner 183 times, used chocking into unconsciousness, brutal strip searches and mock executions, confinement in a tiny box, continued slamming of the head.

The release of these documents and U.S. Attorney General Holder’s appointment of a special federal prosecutor to investigate interrogation practices of the CIA was announced on August 28, 2009. Monday's documents represent the largest release of information about the Bush Administration's once-secret system of capturing terrorism suspects and interrogating them in undisclosed locations around the world.

An ACLU law suit compelled the release of the CIA’s own 2004 Inspector General’s internal report on stomach turning interrogations. These released documents of "enhanced interrogation" tactics were heavily ‘redacted’ or censored with whole pages blocked out for “security reasons”.

This 2004 Inspector General’s report shows that the CIA kept detailed observational records on thousands of prisoners and the impact of their torture techniques on the human psyche. They made systematic measurements of the prisoners’ reaction to torture. From the censured documents it is clear that medical doctors and psychologists betrayed their profession by monitoring calibrated, incremental increases of torture to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation and shame. The documents make it clear that all tortures were designed to create a systematic emotional and psychological breakdown in the prisoners being interrogated.

At a court appearance on September 3, 2009 the date for the start of Dr Aafia Siddiqui’s trial was set for Monday, November 2. The court room was full of Pakistani and other Muslim supporters. Supporters of the Pakistan USA Freedom Forum and other organizations have mobilized on days when Dr Siddiqui is brought into court. But this is a case that must be taken up in full solidarity by the entire progressive movement in the U.S., including the women’s movement, the movement for immigrant rights and the broad movement against U.S. racism and war.

The demand for Aafia Siddiqui’s freedom and return to her family in Pakistan must be combined with the demand to release all the secret documents on Dr Siddiqui’s long imprisonment. The 130,000 pages of documents released by U.S. Attorney General Holder last week confirms that the most detailed records were kept with, Nazi-like meticulousness, on the wrenching torture and abuse of countless prisoners held in U.S. secret prisons.

The case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui exposes the whole sordid torturous role of U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and widening war in Pakistan. Support for freedom and return to her family in Pakistan is a basic demand for human rights and justice for a woman who has been horrendously abused.

A rally to support Dr Siddiqui is planned for the opening day of her trial, Monday, November 2 in front of U.S. District Court, 500 Pearl Street.

For more info:

International Action Center
55 West 17th St, Suite 5C
New York, NY 10011
www.iacenter.org 212-633-6646
Founded by Ramsey Clark

Obama’s Secret Police

Government Spies Infiltrate Antiwar Movement
By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, July 31, 2009

Well, we can relax, because the bad old days of the Bush administration, when government agencies routinely spied on the antiwar movement and other dissidents, are over — right?

Wrong – very wrong.

The indispensable Amy Goodman has the scoop: The Seattle Port Militarization Resistance (SPMR) group in Washington state thought their listserv coordinator, who went by the name "John Jacob," was one of them: a dedicated antiwar activist and self-described anarchist. They trusted him, they put him in a key position, they befriended him – and then they found out that he was a government informant.

His real name: John Towery (here’s his myspace page, and here is a photo). He claimed to be a civilian employee at Washington state’s Ft. Lewis: in reality, he was and is a functionary of the force protection unit, i.e. military personnel. His job: spying on the antiwar movement.

Towery was "outed" when one of SPMR’s members filed a public records request in the city of Olympia for any documents, including emails, in the city’s possession that referenced communications between the city police and the military regarding "anything on anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, Students for a Democratic Society or the Industrial Workers of the World," as local antiwar activist Brendan Maslauskas Dunn described it to Amy Goodman on her "Democracy Now" program. The results were startling: "I got back hundreds of documents from the city."

It was in going through this material that he and his fellow activists discovered the truth about "John Jacob": that he was a spy sent in to keep track of antiwar activity in the area, and a member of the Force Protection Service at Ft. Lewis. His fellow activists confronted him, and, as Dunn stated:

"He admitted to several things. He admitted that, yes, he did in fact spy on us. He did in fact infiltrate us. He admitted that he did pass on information to an intelligence network, which … was composed of dozens of law enforcement agencies, ranging from municipal to county to state to regional, and several federal agencies, including Immigration Customs Enforcement, Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, Homeland Security, the Army in Fort Lewis. … He admitted to other things, too. He admitted that the police had placed a camera, surveillance camera, across the street from a community center in Tacoma that anarchists ran called the Pitch Pipe Infoshop. He admitted that there were police that did put a camera up there to spy on anarchists, on activists going there."

Oh, but he had a story: it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, he hadn’t completely betrayed his friends and associates, who had known him since 2007, when he first insinuated himself into local activist circles: because, you see, the Olympia and Tacoma cops had been planning to raid the Pitch Pipe Infoshop, as well as a house in Olympia where many activists lived, and they wanted their informant to tell them about all the guns, and drugs, and bombs that they imagined – hoped – were stockpiled there. Because, as everyone knows, no self-respecting anarchist is ever without a bomb to throw. "And, of course," says Dunn, "John told them, no, we didn’t have any of that stuff. He told them the truth."

"Of course" is maybe giving Towery too much of the benefit of a doubt: after all, if his friends were arrested, and the anarchist "conspiracy" broken up, his intelligence-gathering activities would be rendered more difficult. Perhaps Dunn is allowing his residual feelings for someone he describes as a former "close friend" get in the way of a more realistic assessment. Towery did his job all too well.

Be that as it may, this incident throws the spotlight on a shadowy national network of domestic spies – in effect, Obama’s political police, who infiltrate dissident groups of whatever sort and send the information back to what are called "fusion centers," part of the new "integrated" approach to fighting our eternal "war on terrorism" — a war that isn’t only being fought on the battlefields of Afghanistan.

The enemy is not just the Taliban – it’s Americans, too. And we aren’t just talking about the various weirdos and would-be mini-Osama bin Ladens, like John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo. The national hysteria over the alleged threat of "homegrown" terrorism is being stoked to a fever pitch by the latest FBI "catch," a rural North Carolina "terrorist cell" supposedly headed by the proprietor of the local drywall contractor — a former "soldier of fortune" who allegedly fought in Afghanistan against the Soviets by the name of Daniel Patrick Boyd ("also known as Mohammed"), and a good old boy if there ever was one.

The next logical stage in our carefully-stoked national hysteria is to cast the "anti-terrorist" net wider – to include antiwar organizations like SPMR, and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which Towery took a particular interest in. The antiwar movement is not a collection of "terrorist cells," and yet that is precisely how the US government is dealing with them: infiltrating and spying on our organizations, planning "raids" on activist gathering places and homes, and no doubt engaging in further disruptive activities yet to be revealed. How is this possible in the land of the free?

It’s possible – and, indeed, inevitable – due to the post-9/11 national security industry that grew up in the wake of 9/11. A vast bureaucracy sprang up around the stream – nay, river – of tax dollars that flowed out of Washington in the wake of the worst terrorist attack on American soil in our history. No expense was spared, no contractor was left behind – and the money spigot has only been opened wider now that Obama and his Keynesian advisors have decreed we must spend our way out of the economic recession. All these people, busily compiling "intelligence" on anything deemed "suspicious," are a police state waiting to be born.

The "fusion centers" are the product of a supposedly "wholistic" theory of intelligence-gathering adopted by the burgeoning Homeland Security bureaucracy in the post-9/11 era, an approach that integrates the personnel and facilities of various government agencies and pools them in designated "fusion centers." Fusing the civilian and the military, the local cop on the beat and the national security bureaucracy, the new apparatus of surveillance and repression is the virtual embodiment of government "work." Unable to get anywhere near Al Qaeda, they have to produce something to justify their funding, and naturally began to broaden the definitional limits of the "terrorist" label to include an ever-widening array of "suspicious" activities. The antiwar movement soon came into their purview, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Towery apparently worked for one such "fusion center," located at Ft. Lewis, where he routinely transmitted information about local antiwar organizations to federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, including military intelligence, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the immigration authorities. With his intimate knowledge of the politics and personal activities of every key member of the local "radical" scene – quite aside from having the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personal information of every person on the local antiwar listserv – he was a valuable asset to anyone who wanted to throw a monkey wrench into the works. What every local activist, and anyone who’s ever signed their name to an antiwar petition or attended a meeting, needs to ask themselves is: how many other "John Jacob"s are hanging around – and to what purpose?

It can’t happen here? It has happened here.

You won’t hear or read about this in the "mainstream" media: Amy Goodman’s "Democracy Now" broke the story, and it hasn’t gone much further than that. The reason: the media is in the tank for Obama, and they don’t want to further tarnish his "progressive" credentials. After all, it’s bad enough he’s following the Bushian path on government secrecy, detainee policy, and the unprecedented expansion of presidential power.

Now that the Democrats are in power, they’re for all these things – because, after all, the Good Guys hold the reins. I can hear the Obama cultists now: They would never spy on the antiwar movement – why, for goodness sakes, most of those antiwar types voted for Obama! And now he’s sent his spies to disrupt their organizations? I don’t believe it!

Yet that, in effect, is what happened: not that the President personally ordered "Agent Orange" – as Towery was known on the listserv – to infiltrate and spy on the Washington antiwar movement. It wasn’t necessary: the "fusion centers" that dot the American landscape are merely doing what spy agencies are supposed to do, and they’re doing the same thing under President Obama that they did under George W. Bush. Obama hasn’t put a stop to it because he’s fighting an expanded version of the same war, and is loath to let a bunch of left-wing hippies stand in his way.

We have been through this before: go back and read Seymour Hersh’s exposés of government "cointelpro" operations conducted on antiwar activists and other dissidents during the 1970s. The Socialist Workers Party, at one point, had something close to a majority of police agents in its ranks, and the SWP case is a particularly egregious example of what was a widespread phenomenon during that tumultuous era.

It looks to me like we are going back in time, rather than progressing – an odd phenomenon when you consider that there’s an alleged "progressive" in the White House. To get a handle on what’s happening, consider the thoroughly reactionary Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of "eternal recurrence" – with the added fillip that each time some infamous chapter in our history repeats itself, the brazen hypocrisy of the miscreants grows worse.

At least with people like Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, we had some kind of ideological consistency and honesty: those guys thought they had the right – and the duty — to carry out their crimes against the Constitution, and didn’t make any bones about it. It’s the "progressives," who claim fealty to civil libertarian values, and yet countenance the Obama administration’s continuation and expansion of the surveillance state, that are the real danger. Because they manage to fool an awful lot of people – the very same people who wrote to me in anger and puzzlement when I first began to take on the Obama-ites. Give him a chance, they whined. He’s only just gotten into office.

Okay, well, he’s had his chance, and he hasn’t taken it. President Obama is presiding over an even wider war than George W. Bush ever dreamed of, and because of that the antiwar movement is a natural target for his spy agencies, whose reach continues to grow. Why any of this is surprising to anyone is beyond me, but then again I’ve not been inducted into the Obama cult.

One wonders what it will take for what passes for the "left" these days to wake up. If I were them, I would heed the words of Murray Rothbard, the great libertarian theorist and onetime ally of the New Left, and apply it to their own movement:

"For the libertarian, the main task of the present epoch is to … discover who his friends and natural allies are, and above all, perhaps, who his enemies are."

*******************
Also see:

Concept of Operations (CONOPS)
for
Police Intelligence Operations (PIO)

Army manual for spying at home & abroad.

click here for pdf of the manuel

Obama’s Military Is Spying on U.S. Peace Groups

By Amy Goodman, Truthdig, July 28, 2009

Anti-war activists in Olympia, Wash., have exposed Army spying and infiltration of their groups, as well as intelligence gathering by the Air Force, the federal Capitol Police and the Coast Guard.

The infiltration appears to be in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act preventing U.S. military deployment for domestic law enforcement and may strengthen congressional demands for a full-scale investigation of U.S. intelligence activities, like the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s.

Brendan Maslauskas Dunn asked the city of Olympia for documents or e-mails about communications between the Olympia police and the military relating to anarchists, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or the Industrial Workers of the World (Dunn’s union). Dunn received hundreds of documents. One e-mail contained reference to a “John J. Towery II,” who activists discovered was the same person as their fellow activist “John Jacob.”

Dunn told me: “John Jacob was actually a close friend of mine, so this week has been pretty difficult for me. He said he was an anarchist. He was really interested in SDS. He got involved with Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), with Iraq Vets Against the War. He was a kind person. He was a generous person. So it was really just a shock for me.”

“Jacob” told the activists he was a civilian employed at Fort Lewis Army Base and would share information about base activities that could help the PMR organize rallies and protests against public ports being used for troop and Stryker military vehicle deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. Since 2006, PMR activists have occasionally engaged in civil disobedience, blocking access to the port.

Larry Hildes, an attorney representing Washington activists, says the U.S. attorney prosecuting the cases against them, Brian Kipnis, specifically instructed the Army not to hand over any information about its intelligence-gathering activities, despite a court order to do so.

Which is why Dunn’s request to Olympia and the documents he obtained are so important.

The military is supposed to be barred from deploying on U.S. soil, or from spying on citizens. Christopher Pyle, now a professor of politics at Mount Holyoke College, was a military intelligence officer. He recalled: “In the 1960s, Army intelligence had 1,500 plainclothes agents [and some would watch] every demonstration of 20 people or more. They had a giant warehouse in Baltimore full of information on the law-abiding activities of American citizens, mainly protest politics.” Pyle later investigated the spying for two congressional committees: “As a result of those investigations, the entire U.S. Army Intelligence Command was abolished, and all of its files were burned. Then the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to stop the warrantless surveillance of electronic communications.”

Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Rush Holt, D-N.J., and others are pushing for a new, comprehensive investigation of all U.S. intelligence activities, of the scale of the Church Committee hearings, which exposed widespread spying on and disruption of legal domestic groups, attempts at assassination of foreign heads of state, and more.

Demands mount for information on and accountability for Vice President Dick Cheney’s alleged secret assassination squad, President George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, and the CIA’s alleged misleading of Congress. But the spying in Olympia occurred well into the Obama administration (and may continue today). President Barack Obama supports retroactive immunity for telecom companies involved in the wiretapping, and has maintained Bush-era reliance on the state secrets privilege. Lee and Holt should take the information uncovered by Brendan Dunn and the Olympia activists and get the investigations started now.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 750 stations in North America. She is the co-author of “Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times,” recently released in paperback.

The CIA and a long history of assassinations

The official denial of a kill squad is disingenuous, says Alexander Cockburn, given what we know about the agency’s history of killing
By Alexander Cockburn, The First Post, July 24, 2009

Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which surfaced in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the agency's victim.

Bill's friend - internal evidence suggests he was a doctor - offered practical advice: "Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present." Another possibility was "the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray." (In fact these two methods were already being inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test programme in Nevada.)

"There are two other techniques," Bill's friend concluded bluffly, which "require no special equipment beside a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel."

Regular as congressmen being outed for adultery or taking cash bribes, the Central Intelligence Agency has to go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question: does it, did it ever, have in-house assassins - a 'licensed to kill' Double-O team?

It just happened again. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks Vice President Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the agency not to disclose the programme even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As soon as CIA officials disclosed the programme to CIA director Norman Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.

And regular as adulterous congressmen seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar response that yes, such a programme had been mooted, but there had been practical impediments. "It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy," one former intelligence official told the New York Times. "Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?" The CIA insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.

Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation programme post-2001 surfaced, the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the agency would surface - a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the 'Contra' war against central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan's years - and the agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as "an old story".

In fact the agency took a keen practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953, the agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer's training manual (made public in 1997) full of practical tips:

"The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75ft or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve... The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the 'horrified witness', no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

"...in all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

"If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing-out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism."

What about assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou en Lai's life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately he'd switched flights.

Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo's Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the agency's in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison.

The agency made many efforts to kill General Kassem in Iraq. The first such attempt, on October 7, 1959, was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.

The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well attested efforts by the agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. Reagan's first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House's effort to bomb Muammar Gadaffi to death in his encampment in 1986, though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force.

Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shia leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.

In his book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, Kim Il Sung, Mossadegh, Nehru, Nasser, Sihanouk, Jose Figueres, 'Papa Doc' Duvalier, Gen Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic...

And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only player in the assassination game. The military have their own teams. A friend of mine had a gardener – "a very scary looking guy" - who remarked that he'd been part of a secret unit in the US Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has been an arm of domestic policy as well. This is true before and after the issuing in 1976 of Executive Order 11905 by President Gerald Ford, banning assassinations. "No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination," it states.

One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his crew and kill them. They cheered stories - now resurfacing - of containers filled with Taliban prisoners of war being left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, until their occupants - hundreds, maybe thousands of them - roasted and suffocated.

Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was "shocked and saddened" after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general's report on the torture of detainees at CIA "black sites." Shocked and saddened, after what we know already? It must be pretty bad.

The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed many, many people and most certainly there was extensive 'collateral damage' - meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by President George Bush: "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies."

The CIA's former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked: "There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavoury things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA. There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it's going to handicap future activities."

Just because Vice President Dick Cheney may have been running a Murder Inc doesn't mean that CIA officers won't be legally vulnerable. At the moment, President Obama is trying to keep the lid on what outrages were committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.

Independent’s Day

Obama doesn't want to look back, but Attorney General Eric Holder may probe Bush-era torture anyway.
Daniel Klaidman, Newsweek.com, July 11, 2009

It's the morning after Independence Day, and Eric Holder Jr. is feeling the weight of history. The night before, he'd stood on the roof of the White House alongside the president of the United States, leaning over a railing to watch fireworks burst over the Mall, the monuments to Lincoln and Washington aglow at either end. "I was so struck by the fact that for the first time in history an African-American was presiding over this celebration of what our nation is all about," he says. Now, sitting at his kitchen table in jeans and a gray polo shirt, as his 11-year-old son, Buddy, dashes in and out of the room, Holder is reflecting on his own role. He doesn't dwell on the fact that he's the country's first black attorney general. He is focused instead on the tension that the best of his predecessors have confronted: how does one faithfully serve both the law and the president?

Alone among cabinet officers, attorneys general are partisan appointees expected to rise above partisanship. All struggle to find a happy medium between loyalty and independence. Few succeed. At one extreme looms Alberto Gonzales, who allowed the Justice Department to be run like Tammany Hall. At the other is Janet Reno, whose righteousness and folksy eccentricities marginalized her within the Clinton administration. Lean too far one way and you corrupt the office, too far the other way and you render yourself impotent. Mindful of history, Holder is trying to get the balance right. "You have the responsibility of enforcing the nation's laws, and you have to be seen as neutral, detached, and nonpartisan in that effort," Holder says. "But the reality of being A.G. is that I'm also part of the president's team. I want the president to succeed; I campaigned for him. I share his world view and values."

These are not just the philosophical musings of a new attorney general. Holder, 58, may be on the verge of asserting his independence in a profound way. Four knowledgeable sources tell NEWSWEEK that he is now leaning toward appointing a prosecutor to investigate the Bush administration's brutal interrogation practices, something the president has been reluctant to do. While no final decision has been made, an announcement could come in a matter of weeks, say these sources, who decline to be identified discussing a sensitive law-enforcement matter. Such a decision would roil the country, would likely plunge Washington into a new round of partisan warfare, and could even imperil Obama's domestic priorities, including health care and energy reform. Holder knows all this, and he has been wrestling with the question for months. "I hope that whatever decision I make would not have a negative impact on the president's agenda," he says. "But that can't be a part of my decision."

Holder is not a natural renegade. His first instinct is to shy away from confrontation, to search for common ground. If he disagrees with you, he's likely to compliment you first before staking out an opposing position. "Now, you see, that's interesting," he'll begin, gently. As a trial judge in Washington, D.C., in the late 1980s and early '90s, he was known as a tough sentencer ("Hold-'em Holder"). But he even managed to win over convicts he was putting behind bars. "As a judge, he had a natural grace," recalls Reid Weingarten, a former Justice Department colleague and a close friend. "He was so sensitive when he sent someone off to prison, the guy would thank him." Holder acknowledges that he struggles against a tendency to please, that he's had to learn to be more assertive over the years. "The thing I have to watch out for is the desire to be a team player," he says, well aware that he's on the verge of becoming something else entirely.

When Holder and his wife, Sharon Malone, glide into a dinner party they change the atmosphere. In a town famous for its drabness, they're an attractive, poised, and uncommonly elegant pair—not unlike the new first couple. But they're also a study in contrasts. Holder is disarmingly grounded, with none of the false humility that usually signals vanity in a Washington player. He plunges into conversation with a smile, utterly comfortable in his skin. His wife, at first, is more guarded. She grew up in the Deep South under Jim Crow—her sister, Vivian Malone Jones, integrated the University of Alabama—and has a fierce sense of right and wrong. At a recent dinner in a leafy corner of Bethesda, Malone drew a direct line from the sins of America's racial past to the abuses of the Guantánamo Bay detention center. Both are examples of "what we have not done in the face of injustice," she said at one point, her Southern accent becoming more discernible as her voice rose with indignation. At the same party, Holder praised the Bush administration for setting up an "effective antiterror infrastructure."

Malone traces many of their differences to their divergent upbringings. "His parents are from the West Indies..he experienced a kinder, gentler version of the black experience," she says. Holder grew up in East Elmhurst, Queens, a lower-middle-class neighborhood in the shadow of New York's La Guardia Airport. The neighborhood has long been a steppingstone for immigrants, but also attracted blacks moving north during the Great Migration. When Holder was growing up in the 1950s, there were fewer houses—mostly semi-detached clapboard and brick homes, like the one his family owned on the corner of 101st Street and 24th Avenue—and more trees. Today the neighborhood is dominated by Mexican, Dominican and South Asian families, with a diminishing number of West Indians and African-Americans.

As we walk up 24th on a recent Saturday, Holder describes for me a happy and largely drama-free childhood. The family was comfortable enough. His father, Eric Sr., was in real estate and owned a few small buildings in Harlem. His mother, Miriam, stayed at home and doted on her two sons. Little Ricky, as he was known, was bright, athletic, and good-natured. As we walk past the baseball diamond where Holder played center field, he recalls how he used to occasionally catch glimpses of Willie Mays leaving or entering his mansion on nearby Ditmas Boulevard. Arriving at the basketball courts of PS 127, Holder bumps into a couple of old schoolyard buddies, greets them with a soul handshake and falls into an easy banter, reminiscing about "back in the day" when they dominated the hardcourt. "Ancient history," says Jeff Aubry, now a state assemblyman. "When gods walked the earth," responds Holder, who dunked for the first time on these courts at age 16.

Holder doesn't dispute the idea that his happy upbringing has led to a generally sunny view of the world. "I grew up in a stable neighborhood in a stable, two-parent family, and I never really saw the reality of racism or felt the insecurity that comes with it," he says. "That edge that Sharon's got—I don't have it. She's more suspicious of people. I am more trusting." There's a pause, and then, with a weary chuckle, one signaling gravity rather than levity, Holder says, "Lesson learned." And then adds, under his breath: "Marc Rich."

The name of the fugitive financier pardoned—with Holder's blessing—at the tail end of the Clinton administration still gnaws at him. It isn't hard to see why. As a Justice Department lawyer, Holder made a name for himself prosecuting corrupt politicians and judges. He began his career in 1976, straight out of Columbia Law School, in the Justice Department's Public Integrity Section, where prosecutors are imbued with a sense of rectitude and learn to fend off political interference. And though Holder has bluntly acknowledged that he "blew it," the Rich decision haunts him. Given his professional roots, he says, "the notion that you would take actions based on political considerations runs counter to everything in my DNA." Aides say that his recent confirmation hearings, which aired the details of the Rich pardon, were in a way liberating; he aspires to no higher office and is now free to be his own man. But his wife says that part of what drives him today is a continuing hunger for redemption.

When I ask Malone the inevitable questions about Rich, she looks pained. "It was awful; it was a terrible time," she says. But she also casts the episode as a lesson about character, arguing that her husband's trusting nature was exploited by Rich's conniving lawyers. "Eric sees himself as the nice guy. In a lot of ways that's a good thing. He's always saying, 'You get more out of people with kindness than meanness.' But when he leaves the 'nice guy' behind, that's when he's strongest."

Any White House tests an attorney general's strength. But one run by Rahm Emanuel requires a particular brand of fortitude. A legendary enforcer of presidential will, Emanuel relentlessly tries to anticipate political threats that could harm his boss. He hates surprises. That makes the Justice Department, with its independent mandate, an inherently nervous-making place for Emanuel. During the first Clinton administration, he was famous for blitzing Justice officials with phone calls, obsessively trying to gather intelligence, plant policy ideas, and generally keep tabs on the department.

One of his main interlocutors back then was Holder. With Reno marginalized by the Clintonites, Holder, then serving as deputy attorney general, became the White House's main channel to Justice. A mutual respect developed between the two men, and an affection endures to this day. (Malone, a well-regarded ob-gyn, delivered one of Emanuel's kids.) "Rahm's style is often misunderstood," says Holder. "He brings a rigor and a discipline that is a net plus to this administration." For his part, Emanuel calls Holder a "strong, independent attorney general." But Emanuel's agitated presence hangs over the building—"the wrath of Rahm," one Justice lawyer calls it—and he is clearly on the minds of Holder and his aides as they weigh whether to launch a probe into the Bush administration's interrogation policies.

Holder began to review those policies in April. As he pored over reports and listened to briefings, he became increasingly troubled. There were startling indications that some interrogators had gone far beyond what had been authorized in the legal opinions issued by the Justice Department, which were themselves controversial. He told one intimate that what he saw "turned my stomach."

It was soon clear to Holder that he might have to launch an investigation to determine whether crimes were committed under the Bush administration and prosecutions warranted. The obstacles were obvious. For a new administration to reach back and investigate its predecessor is rare, if not unprecedented. After having been deeply involved in the decision to authorize Ken Starr to investigate Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, Holder well knew how politicized things could get. He worried about the impact on the CIA, whose operatives would be at the center of any probe. And he could clearly read the signals coming out of the White House. President Obama had already deflected the left wing of his party and human-rights organizations by saying, "We should be looking forward and not backwards" when it came to Bush-era abuses.

Still, Holder couldn't shake what he had learned in reports about the treatment of prisoners at the CIA's "black sites." If the public knew the details, he and his aides figured, there would be a groundswell of support for an independent probe. He raised with his staff the possibility of appointing a prosecutor. According to three sources familiar with the process, they discussed several potential choices and the criteria for such a sensitive investigation. Holder was looking for someone with "gravitas and grit," according to one of these sources, all of whom declined to be named. At one point, an aide joked that Holder might need to clone Patrick Fitzgerald, the hard-charging, independent-minded U.S. attorney who had prosecuted Scooter Libby in the Plamegate affair. In the end, Holder asked for a list of 10 candidates, five from within the Justice Department and five from outside.

On April 15 the attorney general traveled to West Point, where he had been invited to give a speech dedicating the military academy's new Center for the Rule of Law. As he mingled with cadets before his speech, Holder's aides furiously worked their BlackBerrys, trying to find out what was happening back in Washington. For weeks Holder had participated in a contentious internal debate over whether the Obama administration should release the Bush-era legal opinions that had authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods. He had argued to administration officials that "if you don't release the memos, you'll own the policy." CIA Director Leon Panetta, a shrewd political operator, countered that full disclosure would damage the government's ability to recruit spies and harm national security; he pushed to release only heavily redacted versions.

Holder and his aides thought they'd been losing the internal battle. What they didn't know was that, at that very moment, Obama was staging a mock debate in Emanuel's office in order to come to a final decision. In his address to the cadets, Holder cited George Washington's admonition at the Battle of Trenton, Christmas 1776, that "captive British soldiers were to be treated with humanity, regardless of how Colonial soldiers captured in battle might be treated." As Holder flew back to Washington on the FBI's Cessna Citation, Obama reached his decision. The memos would be released in full.

Holder and his team celebrated quietly, and waited for national outrage to build. But they'd miscalculated. The memos had already received such public notoriety that the new details in them did not shock many people. (Even the revelation, a few days later, that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and another detainee had been waterboarded hundreds of times did not drastically alter the contours of the story.) And the White House certainly did its part to head off further controversy. On the Sunday after the memos were revealed, Emanuel appeared on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and declared that there would be no prosecutions of CIA operatives who had acted in good faith with the guidance they were given. In his statement announcing the release of the memos, Obama said, "This is a time for reflection, not retribution." (Throughout, however, he has been careful to say that the final decision is the attorney general's to make.)

Emanuel and other administration officials could see that the politics of national security was turning against them. When I interviewed a senior White House official in early April, he remarked that Republicans had figured out that they could attack Obama on these issues essentially free of cost. "The genius of the Obama presidency so far has been an ability to keep social issues off the docket," he said. "But now the Republicans have found their dream…issue and they have nothing to lose."

Emanuel's response to the torture memos should not have surprised Holder. In the months since the inauguration, the relationship between the Justice Department and the White House had been marred by surprising tension and acrimony. A certain amount of friction is inherent in the relationship, even healthy. But in the Obama administration the bad blood between the camps has at times been striking. The first detonation occurred in only the third week of the administration, soon after a Justice lawyer walked into a courtroom in California and argued that a lawsuit, brought by a British detainee who was alleging torture, should have been thrown out on national-security grounds. By invoking the "state secrets" privilege, the lawyer was reaffirming a position staked out by the Bush administration. The move provoked an uproar among liberals and human-rights groups. It also infuriated Obama, who learned about it from the front page of The New York Times. "This is not the way I like to make decisions," he icily told aides, according to two administration officials, who declined to be identified discussing the president's private reactions. White House officials were livid and accused the Justice Department of sandbagging the president. Justice officials countered that they'd notified the White House counsel's office about the position they had planned to take.

Other missteps were made directly by Holder. Early on, he gave a speech on race relations in honor of Black History Month. He used the infelicitous phrase "nation of cowards" to describe the hair trigger that Americans are on when it comes to race. The quote churned through the cable conversation for a couple of news cycles and caused significant heartburn at the White House; Holder had not vetted the language with his staff. A few weeks later, he told reporters he planned to push for reinstating the ban on assault weapons, which had expired in 2004. He was simply repeating a position that Obama had taken on numerous occasions during the campaign, but at a time when the White House was desperate to win over pro-gun moderate Democrats in Congress. "It's not what we wanted to talk about," said one annoyed White House official, who declined to be identified criticizing the attorney general.

The miscues began to reinforce a narrative that Justice has had a hard time shaking. White House officials have complained that Holder and his staff are not sufficiently attuned to their political needs. Holder is well liked inside the department. His relaxed, unpretentious style—on a flight to Rome in May for a meeting of justice ministers, he popped out of his cabin with his iPod on, mimicking Bobby Darin performing "Beyond the Sea"—has bred tremendous loyalty among his personal staff. But that staff is largely made up of veteran prosecutors and lawyers whom Holder has known and worked with for years. They do not see the president's political fortunes as their primary concern. Among some White House officials there is a not-too-subtle undertone suggesting that Holder has "overlearned the lessons of Marc Rich," as one administration official said to me.

The tensions came to a head in June. By then, Congress was in full revolt over the prospect of Gitmo detainees being transferred to the United States, and the Senate had already voted to block funding to shut down Guantánamo. On the afternoon of June 3, a White House official called Holder's office to let him know that a compromise had been reached with Senate Democrats. The deal had been cut without input from Justice, according to three department officials who did not want to be identified discussing internal matters, and it imposed onerous restrictions that would make it harder to move detainees from Cuba to the United States.

Especially galling was the fact that the White House then asked Holder to go up to the Hill that evening to meet with Senate Democrats and bless the deal. Holder declined—a snub in the delicate dance of Washington politics—and in-stead dispatched the deputy attorney general in his place. Ultimately the measure passed, despite Justice's objections. Obama aides deny that they left Holder out of the loop. "There was no decision to cut them out, and they were not cut out," says one White House official. "That's a misunderstanding."

Holder is clearly not looking to have a contentious relationship with the White House. It's not his nature, and he knows it's not smart politics. His desire to get along has proved useful in his career before, and may now. Emanuel attributes any early problems to the fact that "everyone was getting their sea legs," and insists things have been patched up. "It's not like we're all sitting around singing 'Kumbaya,' " he says, but he insists that Obama got in Holder exactly what he wanted: "a strong, independent leader."

There's an obvious affinity between Holder and the man who appointed him to be the first black attorney general of the United States. They are both black men raised outside the conventional African-American tradition who worked their way to the top of the meritocracy. They are lawyers committed to translating the law into justice. Having spent most of their adult lives in the public arena, both know intimately the tug of war between principle and pragmatism. Obama, Holder says confidently, "understands the nature of what we do at the Justice Department in a way no recent president has. He's a damn good lawyer, and he understands the value of having an independent attorney general."

The next few weeks, though, could test Holder's confidence. After the prospect of torture investigations seemed to lose momentum in April, the attorney general and his aides turned to other pressing issues. They were preoccupied with Gitmo, developing a hugely complex new set of detention and prosecution policies, and putting out the daily fires that go along with running a 110,000-person department. The regular meetings Holder's team had been having on the torture question died down. Some aides began to wonder whether the idea of appointing a prosecutor was off the table.

But in late June Holder asked an aide for a copy of the CIA inspector general's thick classified report on interrogation abuses. He cleared his schedule and, over two days, holed up alone in his Justice Depart ment office, immersed himself in what Dick Cheney once referred to as "the dark side." He read the report twice, the first time as a lawyer, looking for evidence and instances of transgressions that might call for prosecution. The second time, he started to absorb what he was reading at a more emotional level. He was "shocked and saddened," he told a friend, by what government servants were alleged to have done in America's name. When he was done he stood at his window for a long time, staring at Constitution Avenue.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/206300
From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009