Books: November 2007 Archives

From Joe Conason's It Can Happen Here:

The Pentagon had established a secret domestic counterintelligence program, known as TALON, to gather 'non-validated threat information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity.' What that bit of jargon meant in practice, according to documents obtained by NBC and Newsweek, was monitoring peace groups and other political groups deemed hostile to the administration. In TALON's database files were thousands of pages of dossiers devoted to antiwar meetings and protests.

The pretext for compiling this database of dissenters was that they might pose a threat to the Defense Department's installations and personnel, although there was no evidence that the protest groups had contemplated any violent or illegal action. As part of the 'terrorism threat warning process,' the TALON investigators filed reports on peaceful protests, including an antiwar rally at Hollywood and Vine streets in Los Angeles, a gathering at a Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida, and an anticorruption demonstration at the headquarters of the Haliburton Corporation in Houston, Texas.

Events such as these were labeled "suspicious incidents" and possible national security threats.

TALON was instituted in May 2003 at the behest of Paul Wolfowitz after the Iraq invasion was "completed," with operations housed in the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Office (CIFA). The program was closed September 17, 2007 due to controversy. Reports are now funneled through an FBI database known as Guardian.

It Can Happen Here, pgs 192 - 193.
Pentagon Shutting Down Domestic Spying Database - Wired
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No major patriotic accomplishments this week -- unless you consider losing sleep productive. Finding out that there are Guantanamo-like no-man's lands on U.S. soil scared the shit out of me.

Australian-born U.S. citizen Anne Summers recently had trouble entering and leaving the U.S.:

Summers was detained by armed agents for FIVE HOURS each way in LAX on her way to and from the annual meeting of the board of Greenpeace International in Mexico, and her green card was taken away from her. `I want to call a lawyer', she told TSA agents. `Ma'am, you do not have a right to call an attorney,' they replied. `You have not entered the United States.'

Apparently a section of LAX just beyond the security line is asserted to be `not in the United States' -- though it is squarely inside the airport -- so the laws of the US do not apply.

What?? Who approved this? Is there a list of regions in the U.S. where the law doesn't apply so, you know, we can avoid them if we want to?

Imagine if you were one of the hundreds of thousands of U.S. residents who has done little more than exercise constitutionally protected rights of free speech and assembly but have found yourself "on the list." Until I started reading David Cunningham's sociological analysis There's Something Happening Here: The New Left, The Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence, I didn't understand the logic behind endlessly investigating people who had broken no laws and only wanted to prevent senseless killing. But I think his detached study of the ways the FBI used counterintelligence against the New Left and the Klan can tell us a lot about what many Americans are enduring now at the hands of our politically saturated intelligence agencies:

"At times [The FBI's] intelligence activities have have been reactive, responding to illegal or politically extreme actions or rhetoric, but more often agents have monitored targets for their perceived potential to engage in such dissident activity. In this way, the Bureau has fashioned a mission that stresses agents' ability to anticipate future threats, often indiscriminately targeting suspects for their ostensible hidden activities. From the FBI's perspective, certain political groupings - including "anarchists," "communists," and "terrorists" - are subversive and are therefore legitimate intelligence targets, even in the absence of visible challenges to the state, precisely because they represent a broader, invisible conspiracy. The logic of conspiracy is insidious and self-reinforcing: the continued investigation of targets is justified whether or not agents uncover evidence of actual insurrectionary activities, as a lack of such evidence merely signals a deeper conspiracy that an be exposed only through still more intensive investigation" (pgs. 8-9).

What would it be like to be on the other side of such a wild goose chase? Are these the sort of intelligence expenditures that will shield us from people who actually want to harm us?

~~ There's Something Happening Here