Cheney called Rumfeld's private spy unit 'vital'. Snooping on us, 'vital'

[bigtree]

The Other Big Brother

The Pentagon has its own domestic spying program. Even its leaders say the outfit may have gone too far.

By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/


Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. 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 as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin says.

But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. 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. Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about "suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.

A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.

Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S. government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public realizes.

full article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965509/site/newsweek/

[aquart]

1. No human terrifies me more than Cheney except George.

[bigtree]

3. but, see, he's just an old fool. What scares me is that our leaders

that we elect as a check on the Executive refuse to hold them accountable and let this pack of idiots tinker with the most sensitive functions of the institutions we put in place to protect us. Thinking of electing a president now is the fright. With all we all know about the ease in which Bush and his military industrial warriors have hijacked our government and suspended our democracy, there should be a line a mile long of would-be fascists looking to rule us when Bush's term expires.

[aquart]

13. Exactly.

And I have no faith that we could trust a Democrat to close the door on such heady power.

The next president, should we impeach George, has a carte blanche. Impeachment fatigue will keep him safe.

We have such deep, enduring troubles now. And nothing from outside is going to harm us as much as what we are doing to ourselves.

I'm glad I don't have children. And I never was before.

[Swamp Rat]

10. Human?

[ClintonTyree]

2. It's "vital" for their.......

fascist takeover of our country, that the only "vital" thing about it. Peanut butter and Jelly sandwiches, :wow: the "terrorists" are at our doorstep! This sounds like a perfect reason to erode our civil liberties. :eyes:

[bigtree]

4. I'd like to see a story about one of these spy operations muckraking

around the election.

The Rumsfeld intelligence branch is headed by an old crony and Rumsfeld pal, Stephen Cambone, and has had its influence elevated by a change in the order of succession which demoted the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy to place the new Pentagon spy unit within arm's reach of Karl Rove and the White House operators.

[bigtree]

5. linked for reference

[DemInDistress]

6. vital all right to protect their asses from diligent 911

researchers who will no doubt bust their scheme to promote endless wars. I feel the crime family doesn't give a shit about kiddie bumpers (google requests)they want to know how close are we to finding the truth about the sept 11 attacks.

[bigtree]

7. and to control dissent

they just have an obsessive compulsion to control every bit of media that shows any disagreement with their policies or actions. 9-11 was their cover for their military takeover of our democracy. But it's not just what they have done that's outrageous- I would suspect most anyone in that office would covet unlimited power if granted by a weak and compliant Congress as this president has enjoyed- it's the lack of will or interest in our leaders in exercising their responsibility to check the Executive's authority. The real 'enemy' of the state is either one of apathy by our leaders, complicity, or both.

[H2O Man]

8. Nominated !

This is a very important story. I think that there is plenty of reason to conclude that intelligence agencies have to have structured "oversight." This especially includes having oversight that keeps any administration from pushing a political agenda; an obvious example of an administration pushing a political (hence economic) agenda would be the obscene CI policies in Central America in the Reagan-Bush years. More, the Iran-contra scandals (plural) resulted in part from people with no background in or understanding of intelligence operations attempting to promote their "programs," based upon their years of watching James Bond movies and fantasizing that they are heroic figures, rather than seeing Don Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney in the mirror.

[bigtree]

9. you're right. good to see Isikoff elevate it

I do think that it's gone a step beyond just the need for oversight with the creation of the new intelligence unit that Congress kneejerked into existence. There is now so much money unaccounted for that has passed through the Defense legislation, through emergency supplementals as well as regular appropriations, that it will be a task to just get a handle on all of the agencies spying on us.

One that I haven't heard much about lately is the National Reconnaissance Office.

Peter B. Teets, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force, is the former president and chief operating officer of Lockheed Martin who retired from the company in late 1999.

Teets now serves as the director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Undersecretary of the Air Force, and chief procurement officer for all of military space, controlling a budget in excess of $65 billion, a figure that includes $8 billion a year for missile defense and $7 billion annually for NRO spying.

[rodeodance]

11. it is 'vital' that he fall into a bog.

[bigtree]

12. Now I saw in my Dream,

that just as they had ended this talk,
they drew near to a very miry Slough,
that was in the midst of the plain;
and they, being heedless,
did both fall suddenly into the bog.
The name of the slough was Dispond.
Here therefore they wallowed for a time,
being grievously bedaubed with the dirt

-Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

[radfringe]

14. 2-cents on spying

phone calls, internet, e-mail and snail-mail are all being peeked at without warrants...

the justification (aside from getting a legal warrant takes too much time) is basically "we have to know what you are doing so we can catch the bad guys"

ok - so consider this. If you were involved with the "bad guys" planning to blow something up and needed to communicate/coordinate those plans - wouldn't you assume that any form of communication would be susceptible to eavesdropping/bugging/wiretapping/snooping and take steps to avoid detection?