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Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic
groups
By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella
12/13/05 "MSNBC"
-- -- WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting
House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a
protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they
didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the
U.S. military.
A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News
lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than
1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent
10-month period.
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is
incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called
The Truth Project.
“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It's an example
of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We're not doing anything
illegal.”
The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the
U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this
country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful
anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.
“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact,
has reached too far,” says NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin.
The Department of Defense declined repeated requests by NBC News for
an interview. A spokesman said that all domestic intelligence
information is “properly collected” and involves “protection of
Defense Department installations, interests and personnel.” The
military has always had a legitimate “force protection” mission
inside the U.S. to protect its personnel and facilities from
potential violence. But the Pentagon now collects domestic
intelligence that goes beyond legitimate concerns about terrorism or
protecting U.S. military installations, say critics.
Four dozen anti-war meetings
The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen
anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place
far from any military installation, post or recruitment center. One
“incident” included in the database is a large anti-war protest at
Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles last March that included effigies
of President Bush and anti-war protest banners. Another incident
mentions a planned protest against military recruiters last December
in Boston and a planned protest last April at McDonald’s National
Salute to America’s Heroes — a military air and sea show in Fort
Lauderdale, Fla.
The Fort Lauderdale protest was deemed not to be a credible threat
and a column in the database concludes: “US group exercising
constitutional rights.” Two-hundred and forty-three other incidents
in the database were discounted because they had no connection to
the Department of Defense — yet they all remained in the database.
The DOD has strict guidelines (.PDF link), adopted in December 1982,
that limit the extent to which they can collect and retain
information on U.S. citizens.
Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S.
citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show
that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic
monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret”
concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and
encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no
“significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring
instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”
The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.
“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s
at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,”
says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says.
“I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous
mischief for the military.”
Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern.
George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force
colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May.
Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and
educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their
collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has
been collecting is not justified.
Make sure they are not just going crazy
“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not
going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind
of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin
Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t
want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any
threat to the government,” he adds.
The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is
disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army
intelligence officer.
“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle
blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and
infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an
article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.
The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation
followed that revealed that the military had conducted
investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more
than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to
spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil
rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped
Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside
the U.S.
But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts,
says some of the information in the database suggests the military
may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.
“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting
investigations and maintaining records on civilian political
activity. The military made promises that it would not do this
again,” he says.
Too much data?
Some Pentagon observers worry that in the effort to thwart the next
9/11, the U.S. military is now collecting too much data, both
undermining its own analysis efforts by forcing analysts to wade
through a mountain of rubble in order to obtain potentially key
nuggets of intelligence and entangling U.S. citizens in the U.S.
military’s expanding and quiet collection of domestic threat data.
Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known
agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish
and “maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes
information related to potential terrorist threats directed against
the Department of Defense.” Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a
TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now
provide “non-validated domestic threat information” from military
units throughout the United States that are collected and retained
in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential
surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and
planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency
received more than 5,000 TALON reports. The database obtained by NBC
News is generated by Counterintelligence Field Activity.
CIFA is becoming the superpower of data mining within the U.S.
national security community. Its “operational and analytical
records” include “reports of investigation, collection reports,
statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other
documentation pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by
the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and
other threats. Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33
million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys
Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to
develop databases that comb through classified and unclassified
government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help
sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies.
One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop
Grumman and dubbed “Person Search,” is designed “to provide
comprehensive information about people of interest.” It will include
the ability to search government as well as commercial databases.
Another project, “The Insider Threat Initiative,” intends to
“develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider
threats,” as well as the ability to “identify and document normal
and abnormal activities and ‘behaviors,’” according to the Computer
Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small
Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methods “to track
and monitor activities of suspect individuals.”
“The military has the right to protect its installations, and to
protect its recruiting services,” says Pyle. “It does not have the
right to maintain extensive files on lawful protests of their
recruiting activities, or of their base activities,” he argues.
Lotz agrees.
“The harm in my view is that these people ought to be allowed to
demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they
agree or disagree with the government’s policies,” the former DOD
intelligence official says.
'Slippery slope'
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at
the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is very
little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by
the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery
slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to
see again,” he says.
Some of the targets of the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts
say they have already gone too far.
“It's absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,”
says Hersh of The Truth Project.
“I mean, we're based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth
Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are Quakers.”
The Defense Department refused to comment on how it obtained
information on the Lake Worth meeting or why it considers a dozen or
so anti-war activists a “threat.”
© 2005 MSNBC.com
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