Reply #122: CIFA-Gate: CIFA collected info on peace activists and anti-Bush protesters.

[L. Coyote]

Pentagon: Taking a Hard Look at CIFA
Newsweek - Mark Hosenball - April 2, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17771371/site/newsweek/


The Pentagon is reviewing the charter of a controversial counterspy agency set up by former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld after 9/11. The Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) was supposed to "coordinate" counterintel and antiterrorist reporting by myriad Pentagon spy outfits—including intel divisions maintained by all four military services. But CIFA seemed to overreach. .... CIFA also collected info on peace activists and anti-Bush protesters. .... more than 90 percent of the people employed at CIFA HQ worked for defense contractors ....

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http://www.taylormarsh.com/archives_view.php?id=1767
01.24.2006
DOMESTIC SPYING: Pentagon Creates CIFA

Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees .... To U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security. ....

... the Pentagon's newly discovered top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit offers new insight on what the Bush administration thinks they can do .... spied on a Halliburton protest of a bunch of people handing out peanut butter sandwiches ... CIFA evidently kept records of the peanut butter sandwich protesters in a large database.

... TALON ...seems to have spawned CIFA ...Paul Wolfowitz was the mastermind, setting up a picture of a vast domestic spying apparatus, which also has a stored database component that keeps records on, at least in some cases, very ordinary, not to mention innocent, American citizens....

If we can't distinguish terrorists from peanut butter sandwich protesters, we're in a lot bigger trouble than we think ... does Congress know about CIFA? I'd like to hear the answer to that one.