- The Washington Post reports today:
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- The White House is considering expanding the power of
a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity,
or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential
commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon
security efforts-including protecting military facilities from attack-to
one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States
such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.
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- The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition, defines treason as follows:
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- Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign,
especially the betrayal of one's country by waging war against it or by
consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.
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- If we are to believe this news item, the freshly minted
and tasked CIFA will investigate people with questionable "allegiance"
to the Bush administration. Princeton University's WordNet defines allegiance
as "the loyalty that citizens owe to their country (or subjects to
their sovereign)" and a synonym is fealty, defined as fidelity owed
by a vassal to a feudal lord.
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- Of course, we long ago issued a Declaration of Independence,
Constitution, and Bill of Rights precisely to throw off a tyrannical monarch.
Now we have another one.
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- CIFA's abilities would increase considerably under the
proposal being reviewed by the White House, which was made by a presidential
commission on intelligence chaired by retired appellate court judge Laurence
H. Silberman and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.). The commission
urged that CIFA be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations
and clandestine operations against potential threats inside the United
States.
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- Be afraid. Laurence H. Silberman "is a long-time,
right wing political activist closely tied to the neo-conservative network
that led the pro-war propaganda campaign," according to Jim Lobe.
"In 1980, when he served as part of former Republican president Ronald
Reagan's senior campaign staff, he played a key role in setting up secret
contacts between the Reagan-Bush campaign and the Islamic government in
Tehran, in what became known as the 'October Surprise' controversy."
In other words, Silberman is a criminal co-conspirator who helped Reagan
fix the 1980 election by entering in an agreement with the Iranians (who
were supposedly enemies of the United States) to not release the hostages
(mostly CIA agents) until after the election. Silberman also served as
deputy attorney general under Nixon. It should be remembered the Nixon
White House targeted the civil rights and antiwar movements for disruption,
using on-campus informants to infiltrate and in many cases to disrupt legal
protests and activism (under the FBI's COINTELRPO, members of the Black
Panthers and the American Indian Movement were victims of targeted assassination;
see COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story).
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- CIFA is little more than an excuse to get the military
back in the business of "investigating" (subverting the Constitutional
rights) of Americans. "The [Bush stacked] commission urged that CIFA
be given authority to carry out domestic criminal investigations and clandestine
operations against potential threats inside the United States," including
the threat of "treason" (not paying fealty to our feudal lord,
George Bush, and criticizing his policies-note the accusation Dubya wanted
to bomb Doha-based al-Jazeera for not censoring news and you get a pretty
good idea what our ill-tempered monarch thinks of people who disagree with
him).
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- Our new COINTELPRO, run by military intelligence and
probably the CIA, will make the old COINTELPRO pale in comparison.
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- Addendum
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- It should be noted that the U.S. military is no stranger
to domestic snooping and subversion of constitutional rights. "By
the late 1960s, the direct political nature of military intelligence operations
was quite explicit," write Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage,
and Christine Marwick (The Lawless State: The crimes of the U.S. Intelligence
Agencies, Penguin Books, 1976).
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- A telling indication of this was the February 1968 annex
to the army's Civil Disturbance Plan, where "dissident elements"
and "subversives" were clearly identified as primary targets
of surveillance. The activities of the peace movement were judged "detrimental"
to the United States, and American antiwar activists were viewed as possible
conspirators manipulated by foreign agents.
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- The Army created "master plan" operations code-named
Cable Splicer and Operation Garden Plot. As for the latter, Harry Helms
(Inside the Shadow Government: National Emergencies and the Cult of Secrecy,
Feral House, 2003) writes
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- plans produced by the [Directorate of Military Support,
established at the Pentagon under the Department of the Army] acquired
the name "Operation Garden Plot," first publicly uttered in 1971
when Senator Sam Ervin (D-North Carolina), chair of the Senate Subcommittee
on Constitutional Rights, held hearings about allegations of Army spying
on U.S. civilians. The hearings revealed that the Army had indeed been
keeping records on hundreds of thousands of American citizens connected
with antiwar and radical politics, and that such activities were part of
Operation Garden Plot. The Subcommittee also found that the Army had trained
civilian law enforcement workers with simulated battles against rioters
and large groups of protesters. It also found that Army units went on alert
in May 1970 for possible response to campus demonstrations in the wake
of the Kent State shootings.
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- Cable Splicer "was developed in a series of California
meetings from 1968 to 1972, involving Sixth Army, Pentagon, and National
Guard generals, police chiefs and sheriffs, military intelligence officers,
defense contractors, and executives from the telephone company and utility
companies. One meeting was kicked off by Governor Ronald Reagan,"
writes Ron Ridenhour.
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- The participants played war games using scenarios that
began with racial, student, or labor unrest, and ended with the Army being
called in to bail out the National Guard, usually by sweeping the area
to confiscate private weapons and round up likely troublemakers. These
games were conducted in secrecy, with military personnel dressed in civvies,
and using non-military transportation. Although the documents on Cable
Splicer covered only four Western states, Brig. Gen. J. L. Jelinek, senior
Army officer in the Pentagon's National Guard Bureau, knew of "no
state that didn't have some form of this [civil disturbance control] exercise
within the last year" under different code names.
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- It appears the military never actually stopped spying
on Americans. "Several months ago the Army's inspector general and
the California State Senate launched investigations of a California National
Guard intelligence unit that had 'monitored' an antiwar demonstration at
the state capitol this past Mother's Day, partly organized by Cindy Sheehan's
Gold Star Families for Peace," John S. Friedman reported in September.
"A report not yet publicly released by the inspector general found
that there were other cases of domestic intelligence activity by the California
Guard. Democratic State Senator Joseph Dunn, whose budget subcommittee
oversees funding for the California Guard and who is conducting the state
investigation, said financial improprieties may have occurred, as state
and federal laws forbid such activities. Dunn told The Nation that he is
looking into reports that the Guard in some ten other states, including
New York, Colorado, Arizona and Pennsylvania, may have set up its own intelligence
units and conducted similar monitoring of antiwar groups. Such controversial
directives could be coming from the Pentagon, he speculated."
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- Last month, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved
a request from the Pentagon to snoop on Americans (and of course subvert
and possibly assassinate-as COINTELPRO did previously-those deemed a threat
to the neocon master plan for world domination). According to the Christian
Science Monitor, "the committee included two controversial amendments
in the [2006 intelligence spending authorization bill]: one that would
allow intelligence agencies greater access to databases on US citizens,
and one that would grant the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency the
right not to disclose 'operational files' under the Freedom of Information
Act." In other words, the DIA does not want to be answerable to the
American people, the same way Stalin or Stasi were not answerable to the
people.
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- According to the Pentagon, it does not want to spy on
"innocent" Americans, according to the Christian Science Monitor.
Of course, this depends on the Pentagon's definition of "innocent."
If the Pentagon's past (and recent, in relation to Cindy Sheehan) activities
are any indication, "innocent" Americans are those who do not
criticize the government, who dutifully wave little plastic American flags
made in China, and encourage their kids to become cannon fodder for the
neocons.
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- _____
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- Kurt Nimmo is the author of Another Day in the Empire:
Life in Neoconservative America.
- Visit his web log at www.kurtnimmo.com
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