Terrorism Rhetoric: 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
~~

According to the MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base, between 1968 and today there were 554 incidents of terrorism perpetuated against the United States domestically and internationally.

Last week's FBI report tells us, in the year 2006 alone, with only 12,600 of the nation’s more than 17,000 local, county, state and federal police agencies reporting, there were around 7,500 hate crime incidents.

I've never been a big fan of the "hate crime" designation because of worries about the potential for anti-Bushisms to become "hate speech" for example. But one thing seems clear: intolerance is a much greater threat to America than "terrorism."