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AFIB No. 714, April 19, 2006 -
Back Issues #703 - 705/ #710 - 713
News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 724, May 24, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
A tradition of nativist xenophobia has from the beginning fueled war on radicalism. Counter-subversive movements have historically singled out the alien as the enemy because of his foreign birth, his espousal of foreign ideas ("isms"), and his asserted allegiance to a foreign country. At the end o the eighteenth century, domestic criticism and unrest were condemned as unwelcome old world discontents, and linked to the French Revolution. In the nineteenth, Socialist thought and ideas were stigmatized as foreign, as were their immigrant adherents. The Haymarket trials and the Palmer Raids flamed with this nativist fury. The foreign radicals had unforgivably rejected a government and society that were man's highest achievements, the treasured fruits of a divinely guided historical experience. Barbarians because they had spurned an opportunity to become Romans, they were not merely political "undesirables" but a threat to civilization itself. -- Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980] pp. 17-18.
Contents: Number 724
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 726/May 31, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 725/May 28, 2006
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Wednesday, 24 May 2006 -
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1. FBI STAGES UNPRECEDENTED RAID ON CONGRESSMAN'S OFFICE
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/fbi-m24.shtml
By Kate Randall
The FBI conducted a search of the office of Louisiana Representative William Jefferson over the weekend in what is the first such intrusion by an agency of the executive branch into the office of a sitting congressman in US history. In a press conference on Monday, Jefferson, a Democrat, denounced the raid as an "outrageous intrusion into the separation of powers."
The raid on Jefferson's office in the Rayburn House Office Building on Saturday night was a politically motivated breach of constitutional boundaries aimed at asserting the power of the executive branch over the legislative. It is yet another political marker in the government's moves towards dictatorial forms of rule.
The action was an unmistakable signal to any congressmen who might be inclined to seriously investigate the myriad illegal and unconstitutional actions of the administration, and hold leading members of the administration accountable.
There were, no doubt, other political calculations as well. The choice of a Democrat as the target of the raid was not accidental, given the welter of bribery and influence-peddling scandals that have beset the Republicans in recent months.
Jefferson is the subject of a bribery investigation. The FBI is probing allegations that he took hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to promote business ventures in Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. His New Orleans and Washington-area homes were search by the FBI last August.
In a search-warrant affidavit unsealed on Sunday, the FBI states it has videotaped evidence of Jefferson taking $100,000 in bribe money and that it found $90,000 of the same cash inside his apartment freezer. Two other individuals have pleaded guilty to bribing Jefferson to promote the Kentucky-based Internet and cable TV company, iGate.
Underscoring the unprecedented and egregious character of the Justice Department operation is the reaction it has provoked from leading Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist stated he was "very concerned" about the incident and said Senate and House counsels would review it.
In a strongly worded statement, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (Republican, Illinois) protested the "overreaching and abuse of power by the executive branch." He continued: "I am very concerned about the necessity of a Saturday night raid on Congressman Jefferson's Capitol Hill Office in pursuit of information that was already under subpoena and at a time when those subpoenas are still pending and all the documents that have been subpoenaed were being preserved."
Hastert added, "The Founding Fathers were very careful to establish in the Constitution a Separation of Powers to protect Americans against the tyranny of any one branch of government. They were particularly concerned about limiting the power of the Executive Branch.
"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress... Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich sent an email to congressional Republicans Sunday night, commenting, "What happened Saturday night... is the most blatant violation of the Constitutional Separation of Powers in my lifetime... I am shaken by this abuse of power."
Representative David Dreier, the California Republican who is chairman of the House Rules Committee, said "I think this is really outrageous."
Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner, speaking with reporters in an off-camera briefing, said he wondered whether people at the Justice Department had looked at the Constitution lately. He predicted that the matter might eventually go to the Supreme Court.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) issued a milder rebuke, stating that "members of Congress must obey the law and cooperate fully with any criminal investigation," but that "Justice Department investigations must be conducted in accordance with constitutional protections and historical precedent."
The search of a congressional office violates the "speech or debate" clause of the US Constitution, contained in Section 6 of Article 1, concerning the legislative branch. This clause was aimed at shielding legislators from intimidation by the executive branch, and has been broadly interpreted by the courts throughout history. It traces its origins back to a clause in the English Bill of Rights of 1689, aimed at protecting the independence of Parliament against the monarchy.
Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor, commented to the Washington Post that the raid on Jefferson's office constituted "an intimidating tactic that has never before been used against the legislative branch." He added, "The framers [of the Constitution] would turn over in their graves."
Donald Ritchie, a historian with the Senate, said his office could find no record of a similar incident, though the homes and business offices of lawmakers had been searched in the past.
Information that has emerged since Saturday night makes clear that Bush administration officials were well aware they were treading on constitutionally protected ground in executing the raid. In seeking a search warrant from a federal district judge in suburban Virginia, the Justice Department outlined special procedures they would follow, including the use of a "filter team" to supposedly ensure that the search did not infringe on privileged legislative material.
This "filter team"--comprised of prosecutors and FBI agents whom the Justice Department contends are unconnected to the investigation--would review any seized items or documents to determine whether they are privileged and therefore immune from the search warrant. It is clear, however, that the members of this team would be answerable to the Justice Department, an executive branch agency ultimately accountable to the White House. As such, this "safeguard" would serve again to establish presidential powers over the legislative branch.
Another sign of the calculated nature of the operation is the fact that FBI officials activated a special command center for the sole purpose of monitoring the raid.
Defending the raid in response to the outcry from members of the Senate and House, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday would only say, "I admit that these were unusual steps that were taken in response to an unusual set of circumstances." On Tuesday he claimed that his office had decided the search of Jefferson's office was "absolutely essential to move forward with that investigation."
This is hardly plausible, given the mass of evidence the government had evidently already assembled against the Democratic congressman. There was, moreover, no legitimate reason for sidestepping the normal procedure of issuing subpoenas.
The Justice Department search of Jefferson's office must be seen in the context of the frontal assault on traditional democratic procedures and constitutional safeguards being carried out by the Bush administration. This is a government that operates in secret and refuses to hold itself accountable either to Congress or to the American people.
Its methods and policies--an illegal war based on lies, the use of torture, secret prisons and kidnappings, the denial of due process and habeas corpus rights, a vast and secret program of warrantless spying on the American people, the repeated refusal to hand over documents to Congress or allow White House officials to testify in congressional investigations, the use of the military for domestic policing operations in violation of the posse comitatus act--constitute preparations for police state forms of rule that are well advanced.
Only three days ago, Gonzales indicated that the government was considering prosecuting journalists for reporting, on the basis of leaks provided by intelligence agency whistle-blowers, information on the National Security Agency data base of the phone records of more than 200 million Americans and the existence of secret CIA prisons abroad where alleged terrorists are being held indefinitely without any access to legal process. He said that the government had the legal authority to prosecute newspapers and journalists for such disclosures.
A week earlier, on May 15, two ABC News reporters revealed that the FBI, at the request of the CIA, had been tracking their phone calls.
To condemn the FBI raid in no way implies political support for Jefferson or suggests he is innocent of the corruption charges. In fact, the rampant corruption in Washington, which involves both parties, with corporate money shamelessly used to buy congressmen and their votes, is itself a manifestation of the same process of political decay. Both parties are complicit in anti-democratic measures whose essential purpose is to defend the rule of a narrow financial elite that is enriching itself by driving down the living standards of the broad mass of working people.
In this case, the Bush administration used allegations of corruption as the pretext for a further assault on the constitutional principle of the separation of powers between co-equal branches of government--executive, legislative and judicial--so as to move further toward the establishment of a presidential dictatorship.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
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THE NEW YORKER
The Talk of the Town
May 29, 2006 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060529ta_talk_hersh
by Seymour M. Hersh
A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings that redefined the relationship between national security and the public's right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. "When I first came in, I heard from all my elders that 'we'll never be able to collect intelligence again,'" the former official said. "They'd whine, 'Why do we have to report to oversight committees?'" But, over the next few years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law. "We built a system that protected national security and left people able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that day was appropriate or legal."
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was clear that the intelligence community needed to get more aggressive and improve its performance. The Administration, deciding on a quick fix, returned to the tactic that got intelligence agencies in trouble thirty years ago: intercepting large numbers of electronic communications made by Americans. The N.S.A.'s carefully constructed rules were set aside.
Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls. A security consultant working with a major telecommunications carrier told me that his client set up a top-secret high-speed circuit between its main computer complex and Quantico, Virginia, the site of a government-intelligence computer center. This link provided direct access to the carrier's network core--the critical area of its system, where all its data are stored. "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records," the consultant said. "They're providing total access to all the data."
"This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order," a former senior intelligence official said. The Administration's goal after September 11th was to find suspected terrorists and target them for capture or, in some cases, air strikes. "The N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence," the former official said.
The N.S.A. also programmed computers to map the connections between telephone numbers in the United States and suspect numbers abroad, sometimes focussing on a geographic area, rather than on a specific person--for example, a region of Pakistan. Such calls often triggered a process, known as "chaining," in which subsequent calls to and from the American number were monitored and linked. The way it worked, one high-level Bush Administration intelligence official told me, was for the agency "to take the first number out to two, three, or more levels of separation, and see if one of them comes back"--if, say, someone down the chain was also calling the original, suspect number. As the chain grew longer, more and more Americans inevitably were drawn in.
FISA requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans. (It is generally legal for the government to wiretap a call if it is purely foreign.) The legal implications of chaining are less clear. Two people who worked on the N.S.A. call-tracking program told me they believed that, in its early stages, it did not violate the law. "We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. â·We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others." Similarly, the Administration intelligence official said that no warrant was needed, because "there's no personal identifier involved, other than the metadata from a call being placed."
But the point, obviously, was to identify terrorists. "After you hit something, you have to figure out what to do with it," the Administration intelligence official told me. The next step, theoretically, could have been to get a suspect's name and go to the FISA court for a warrant to listen in. One problem, however, was the volume and the ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. ("There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world," the former senior intelligence official said.) The agency would also have had to reveal how far it had gone, and how many Americans were involved. And there was a risk that the court could shut down the program.
Instead, the N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other. "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.
The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out. "There's a lot that needs to be looked at," he said. "We are in a technology age. We need to tweak FISA, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues."
Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, believes that if the White House had gone to Congress after September 11th and asked for the necessary changes in FISA "it would have got them." He told me, "The N.S.A. had a lot of latitude under FISA to get the data it needed. I think the White House purposefully ignored the law, because the President did not want to do the monitoring under FISA. There is a strong commitment inside the intelligence community to obey the law, and the community is getting dragged into the mud on this."
General Hayden, who as the head of the N.S.A. supervised the intercept program, is seen by many as a competent professional who was too quick to follow orders without asking enough questions. As one senior congressional staff aide said, "The concern is that the Administration says, 'We're going to do this,' and he does it--even if he knows better." Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, who was a member of the 9/11 Commission, had a harsher assessment. Kerrey criticized Hayden for his suggestion, after the Times expose, that the N.S.A.'s wiretap program could have prevented the attacks of 9/11. "That's patently false and an indication that he's willing to politicize intelligence and use false information to help the President," Kerrey said.
Hayden's public confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Intelligence Committee was unlike the tough-minded House and Senate investigations of three decades ago, and added little to what is known about the wiretap program. One unexamined issue was the effectiveness of the N.S.A. program. "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focussed and not productive," a Pentagon consultant told me. "It's intelligence in real time, but you have to know where you're looking and what you're after."
On May 11th, President Bush, responding to the USA Today story, said, "If Al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States, or out of the United States, we want to know what they are saying." That is valid, and a well-conceived, properly supervised intercept program would be an important asset. "Nobody disputes the value of the tool," the former senior intelligence official told me. "It's the unresolved tension between the operators saying, 'Here's what we can build,' and the legal people saying, 'Just because you can build it doesn't mean you can use it.'" It's a tension that the President and his advisers have not even begun to come to terms with.
Copyright 2006 CondeNet. All rights reserved.
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3. WHISTLE-BLOWER'S EVIDENCE, UNCUT
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WIRED NEWS
Technology
May, 22, 2006
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,70944-0.html
Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.
In a public statement Klein issued last month, he described the NSA's visit to an AT&T office. In an older, less-public statement recently acquired by Wired News, Klein goes into additional details of his discovery of an alleged surveillance operation in an AT&T building in San Francisco.
Klein supports his claim by attaching excerpts of three internal company documents: a Dec. 10, 2002, manual titled "Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco," a Jan. 13, 2003, document titled "SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure" and a second "Cut-In and Test Procedure" dated Jan. 24, 2003.
Here we present Klein's statement in its entirety, with inline links to all of the document excerpts where he cited them. You can also download the complete file here, http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/att_klein_wired.pdf. The full AT&T documents are filed under seal in federal court in San Francisco.
AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens
31 December 2005
I wrote the following document in 2004 when it became clear to me that AT&T, at the behest of the National Security Agency, had illegally installed secret computer gear designed to spy on internet traffic. At the time I thought this was an outgrowth of the notorious Total Information Awareness program, which was attacked by defenders of civil liberties. But now it's been revealed by The New York Times that the spying program is vastly bigger and was directly authorized by President Bush, as he himself has now admitted, in flagrant violation of specific statutes and constitutional protections for civil liberties. I am presenting this information to facilitate the dismantling of this dangerous Orwellian project.
AT&T Deploys Government Spy Gear on WorldNet Network
16 January, 2004
In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.
The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:
"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002
To mollify critics, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) spokesmen have repeatedly asserted that they are only conducting "research" using "artificial synthetic data" or information from "normal DOD intelligence channels" and hence there are "no U.S. citizen privacy implications" (Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General report on TIA, December 12, 2003). They also changed the name of the program to "Terrorism Information Awareness" to make it more politically palatable. But feeling the heat, Congress made a big show of allegedly cutting off funding for TIA in late 2003, and the political fallout resulted in Adm. Poindexter's abrupt resignation last August. However, the fine print reveals that Congress eliminated funding only for "the majority of the TIA components," allowing several "components" to continue (DOD, ibid). The essential hardware elements of a TIA-type spy program are being surreptitiously slipped into "real world" telecommunications offices.
In San Francisco the "secret room" is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T's WorldNet service, part of the latter's vital "Common Backbone." In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the "secret room" on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The "secret room" itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
The normal work force of unionized technicians in the office are forbidden to enter the "secret room," which has a special combination lock on the main door. The telltale sign of an illicit government spy operation is the fact that only people with security clearance from the National Security Agency can enter this room. In practice this has meant that only one management-level technician works in there. Ironically, the one who set up the room was laid off in late 2003 in one of the company's endless "downsizings," but he was quickly replaced by another.
Plans for the "secret room" were fully drawn up by December 2002, curiously only four months after Darpa started awarding contracts for TIA. One 60-page document, identified as coming from "AT&T Labs Connectivity & Net Services" and authored by the labs' consultant Mathew F. Casamassima, is titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco and dated 12/10/02. This document addresses the special problem of trying to spy on fiber-optic circuits. Unlike copper wire circuits which emit electromagnetic fields that can be tapped into without disturbing the circuits, fiber-optic circuits do not "leak" their light signals. In order to monitor such communications, one has to physically cut into the fiber somehow and divert a portion of the light signal to see the information.
This problem is solved with "splitters" which literally split off a percentage of the light signal so it can be examined. This is the purpose of the special cabinet referred to above: Circuits are connected into it, the light signal is split into two signals, one of which is diverted to the "secret room." The cabinet is totally unnecessary for the circuit to perform -- in fact it introduces problems since the signal level is reduced by the splitter -- its only purpose is to enable a third party to examine the data flowing between sender and recipient on the internet.
The above-referenced document includes a diagram showing the splitting of the light signal, a portion of which is diverted to "SG3 Secure Room," i.e., the so-called "Study Group" spy room. Another page headlined "Cabinet Naming" lists not only the "splitter" cabinet but also the equipment installed in the "SG3" room, including various Sun devices, and Juniper M40e and M160 "backbone" routers. PDF file 4 shows one of many tables detailing the connections between the "splitter" cabinet on the 7th floor (location 070177.04) and a cabinet in the "secret room" on the 6th floor (location 060903.01). Since the San Francisco "secret room" is numbered 3, the implication is that there are at least several more in other cities (Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego are some of the rumored locations), which likely are spread across the United States.
One of the devices in the "Cabinet Naming" list is particularly revealing as to the purpose of the "secret room": a Narus STA 6400. Narus is a 7-year-old company which, because of its particular niche, appeals not only to businessmen (it is backed by AT&T, JP Morgan and Intel, among others) but also to police, military and intelligence officials. Last November 13-14, for instance, Narus was the "Lead Sponsor" for a technical conference held in McLean, Virginia, titled "Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance." Police officials, FBI and DEA agents, and major telecommunications companies eager to cash in on the "war on terror" had gathered in the hometown of the CIA to discuss their special problems. Among the attendees were AT&T, BellSouth, MCI, Sprint and Verizon. Narus founder, Dr. Ori Cohen, gave a keynote speech. So what does the Narus STA 6400 do?
"The (Narus) STA Platform consists of standalone traffic analyzers that collect network and customer usage information in real time directly from the message.... These analyzers sit on the message pipe into the ISP (internet service provider) cloud rather than tap into each router or ISP device" (Telecommunications magazine, April 2000). A Narus press release (1 Dec., 1999) also boasts that its Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) technology "captures comprehensive customer usage data ... and transforms it into actionable information.... (It) is the only technology that provides complete visibility for all internet applications."
To implement this scheme, WorldNet's high-speed data circuits already in service had to be rerouted to go through the special "splitter" cabinet. This was addressed in another document of 44 pages from AT&T Labs, titled SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure, dated 01/13/03. "SIMS" is an unexplained reference to the secret room. Part of this reads as follows:
"A WMS (work) Ticket will be issued by the AT&T Bridgeton Network Operation Center (NOC) to charge time for performing the work described in this procedure document...."This procedure covers the steps required to insert optical splitters into select live Common Backbone (CBB) OC3, OC12 and OC48 optical circuits."
The NOC referred to is in Bridgeton, Missouri, and controls WorldNet operations. (As a sign that government spying goes hand-in-hand with union-busting, the entire (Communication Workers of America) Local 6377 which had jurisdiction over the Bridgeton NOC was wiped out in early 2002 when AT&T fired the union work force and later rehired them as nonunion "management" employees.) The cut-in work was performed in 2003, and since then new circuits are connected through the "splitter" cabinet.
Another Cut-In and Test Procedure document dated January 24, 2003, provides diagrams of how AT&T Core Network circuits were to be run through the "splitter" cabinet. One page lists the circuit IDs of key Peering Links which were "cut-in" in February 2003, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West. By the way, Mae West is one of two key internet nodal points in the United States (the other, Mae East, is in Vienna, Virginia). It's not just WorldNet customers who are being spied on -- it's the entire internet.
The next logical question is, what central command is collecting the data sent by the various "secret rooms"? One can only make educated guesses, but perhaps the answer was inadvertently given in the DOD Inspector General's report (cited above):
"For testing TIA capabilities, Darpa and the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) created an operational research and development environment that uses real-time feedback. The main node of TIA is located at INSCOM (in Fort Belvoir, Virginia)...."
Among the agencies participating or planning to participate in the INSCOM "testing" are the "National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Special Operations Command, the Joint Forces Command and the Joint Warfare Analysis Center." There are also "discussions" going on to bring in "non-DOD federal agencies" such as the FBI.
This is the infrastructure for an Orwellian police state. It must be shut down!
Copyright 2006, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
*****
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4. IRAN DEPLOYS ITS WAR MACHINE
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
Middle East
May 24, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HE24Ak05.html
By Iason Athanasiadis
TEHRAN - For Hossein Shariatzadeh, a veteran of the eight-year Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, now navigating Tehran's traffic-choked streets as a taxi driver, the issue of whether the United States will strike Iraq is hardly a frightening prospect.
"This is Iran," he roared. "It is fire. It is a nuclear bomb. Don't look at my sitting behind the wheel of this car. I would get up in a second and head off to the front to fight."
During his 18 months of service at the front, Shariatzadeh claims to have fought in several flashpoint events. Before being evacuated to Tehran after taking a bullet in the stomach, he participated in the 18th Mah, Fath-ul Mubin and Fajrs 1, 2 and 4 offensives, some of the most horrific campaigns of a drawn-out war characterized by trench warfare and tens of thousands of dead in return for minuscule advances.
Despite Shariatzadeh's lust to head to the front and defend his homeland, Iran's strategic planners are acutely aware that a military confrontation with the technologically more advanced US Army would be as rapid and multi-fronted as the Iran-Iraq War was static and slow-paced. Quite simply, there would not be a single front.
Neither the US nor Israel has ruled out taking military action against nuclear-related targets in Iran if ongoing diplomatic efforts to freeze Tehran's nuclear program do not prove successful.
Accordingly, Iran has been quietly restructuring its military, while carrying out a series of military exercises testing its new military dogma. In December, more than 15,000 members of the regular armed forces participated in war games in northwestern Iran's strategically sensitive East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan border provinces that focused on irregular warfare carried out by highly mobile and speedy army units.
In another telling development, a second exercise was launched in the majority-Arab province of Khuzestan, reportedly aimed at quelling insurgencies in areas subject to ethnic unrest and prone to foreign influence. Involving 100,000 troops, the exercise provided a taste of how the Islamic Republic would respond to further disturbances in the strategic, oil-rich province.
The exercise came on the heels of news that the irregular Basij forces that led Iran's offensives against Iraq were being bolstered by so-called Ashura battalions with riot-control training.
It is all part of a fundamental transition that Iran's Revolutionary Guard (RG) is undergoing as it moves away from focusing on waging its defense of the country on the borders - unrealistic in view of the vast territory that requires securing and the gulf separating Iranian and US military capabilities - and toward drawing the enemy into the heartland and defeating it with asymmetrical tactics.
At the same time, the RG is moving away from a joint command with the ordinary army and taking a more prominent role in controlling Iran's often porous borders, even as it makes each of Iran's border provinces autonomous in the event of war. Iranian military planners know that the first step taken by an invading force would be to occupy oil-rich Khuzestan province, secure the sensitive Strait of Hormuz and cut off the Iranian military's oil supply, forcing it to depend on its limited stocks.
Foreign diplomats who monitor Iran's army make it clear that Iran's leadership has acknowledged it stands little chance of defeating the US Army with conventional military doctrine. The shift in focus to guerrilla warfare against an occupying army in the aftermath of a successful invasion mirrors developments in Iraq, where a triumphant US campaign has been followed by three years of slow hemorrhaging at the hands of insurgents.
Tehran argues that it is at a high level of preparedness and points to a number of war games carried out in recent months along its coastal zones, from Bandar Abbas and the Strait of Hormuz in January to the Persian Gulf theater in April and the Khorramshahr naval base and the northwestern parts of the Persian Gulf as of Sunday.
From several interviews with Iranian officials, researchers and foreign diplomats, it is clear that the Iranian army considers itself ready to repel a US land offensive and increasingly sees itself as the main regional power.
In line with the new feeling of invulnerability sweeping through Iran's military elite, RG commander-in-chief Yehya Rahim Safavi warned last month that "the Americans should accept Iran as a great regional power, and they should know that sanctions and military threats are not going to benefit them but are going to be against their interests and against the interests of some European countries".
Iran's new asymmetrical-warfare plan appears to be aimed at neutralizing possible US-led offensives across the Mandali-Ilam (central Iraq-central Iran) axis. The Iranian Zagros mountain range offers a natural first line of defense. It has been reported that the RG is constructing new bases at Khorramabad, Pessyan, Borujerd, Zagheh and Malayer in the province of Lorestan, which would assure the logistics of a quarter of a million troops and provide temporary shelter for half a million refugees from the border. These bases are supposedly complementing older ones further west at Sahneh and Kangavar.
"We know for a fact that no two Western wars are similar," said Hossein, a member of the RG, "and we know there are at least three possible scenarios of attacking these [nuclear] sites, including using their submarines in the Persian Gulf, commandos from the sea, or Mujahideen-e-Khalq trained in Israel and Azerbaijan to destroy the Bushehr nuclear power plant from the inside."
Even while Iran's military is choosing to go low-tech, the country's leadership is continuing to apply advanced technology to military uses. Tehran is continuing with development of its long-range missiles and is forging ahead on its indigenous satellite program that centers on Russian-supplied technology.
In addition, Tehran's aging air-defense system will be boosted by Russian-supplied land-to-air rockets. Also, Iran has aging Chinese missiles that it upgraded and could deploy on coastal batteries, fast attack boats or even warplanes. Finally, were Iran to possess the fearsome Russian-made 3M-82 Moskit anti-ship missiles, it could turn the Persian Gulf into a death trap for the US fleet.
"While Iranian air power is somewhat limited, it has much in terms of land-to-air weaponry and has improvised much as well," Abdurrahman Shayyal, a Saudi Middle East and North Africa analyst, told Asia Times Online. "Furthermore, Iran has proved rather hard to infiltrate, and its military installations and bases are very well protected."
With the confrontation between Washington and Tehran escalating, a new, US-inspired plan to establish an anti-Iranian security regime has further raised tension in the Persian Gulf region. Aside from running covert operations inside Iran's ethnically mixed border provinces, the US administration is marshaling an alliance of Iran's Arab neighbors in the intensifying face-off.
The US media reported last weekend that the United States was trying to create a regional missile-defense system for the Gulf that would be integrated with real-time intelligence using sophisticated US Navy Aegis cruisers.
"Any security regime for the Persian Gulf that doesn't include Iran will not succeed," said Muhammad Reza Saedabadi, an assistant professor at the Institute of North American and European Studies at the University of Tehran. "It's splitting the region. It's good for the arms race and for arms sales to Persian Gulf states, but not for regional security."
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continued ratcheting up the tension by refusing to offer Iran a guarantee that the United States would not attack it. "Iran is a troublemaker in the international system, a central banker of terrorism. Security assurances are not on the table," she said.
While seen as potentially threatening by several Gulf Arab governments, Iran commands significant popularity among indigenous Shi'ite Arab populations in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. To a lesser extend, Sunni Arabs in the Gulf region and the wider Middle East applaud Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad for his strident anti-Western rhetoric, which emphasizes his country's independence and echoes the anti-imperialist liberation ideology of 1960s pan-Arabism.
Reflecting this mood, the English-language Gulf News published an editorial on Tuesday titled "An American offer we must refuse". It said, "As if the region was not volatile enough, the US now wants to install an advanced missile system in GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council ] states.
"Gulf countries have enough problems trying to walk a narrow path between the various positions ... so there is no need to exacerbate things further by introducing into the region such controversial measures as heightened security controls and advanced missile systems," the newspaper said.
At a "consultative summit" in Riyadh on May 6, the GCC countries indicated that they did not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon, but were also opposed to the use of force against it. Their position with regard to Iran, so far, bears greater similarity with the stance taken by Russia and China than the one adopted by the US and its European allies.
The GCC is a regional organization comprising the six Persian Gulf Arab states. Created on May 25, 1981, the council's members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
"The US is being completely ridiculous. While it wishes to police the region, it is dealing with a country that is significantly more powerful than Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Vietnam, and every other country bar Germany that it has ever fought," said Abdurrahman Shayyal.
Iason Athanasiadis is an Iran-based correspondent.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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5. Classified French DGSE intelligence report
AL QAEDA TRAINING CAMP PASSED FROM CONTROL OF CIA TO BIN LADEN IN 1995
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WAYNE MADSEN REPORT
"From Deep Inside the Washington Beltway"
May 23, 2006
http://www.waynemadsenreport.com
By Wayne Madsen
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- WMR has obtained a confidential "France Only" report of the French intelligence service, Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), that states that the CIA and Britain's MI-6 maintained effective control of an important Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan as late as 1995, fully two years after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, an attack that was launched with the help of Sudanese intelligence officers loyal to Osama Bin Laden. The CIA and MI6 permitted control of training operations at Darunta, an "Arab Afghan" base located near the camp of Osama Bin Laden and used to manufacture explosives and chemical weapons and train in their use, to pass to the control of Ibn Cheikh, a Libyan leader of Al Qaeda.
The DGSE report, dated January 9, 2001, is classified "Defense Confidential" and "National (French) Use Only" states, "Besides the Maghreb enclave, the training at Darunta, which, for approximately 2 months, mainly involved the manufacture and the use of the explosives by terrorists. This training, initially provided at the camp of Khalden, in Paktia, was transferred during 1995, on the order of Ibn Cheikh, to Darunta, in order to slide [the training] from the control of the security services of certain countries, in particular the United States and the United Kingdom."
The report continues by stating that in 1998, the training was expanded to include the use of C-4 plastic explosives and different types of detonators (electric, acid, etc.). Training also included the use of homemade explosives (like improvised explosive devices killing so many in Iraq today) and poisons such as arsenic, cyanide, gas, diamond powder, nicotine, and ricin. After Al Qaeda took control of Darunta from the CIA and MI6, the camp was used to train Al Qaeda operatives to launch a series of deadly attacks, including the November 19, 1995 attack on the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, the 1998 attacks on the US embassy in Nairobi, the abortive Dec. 31, 1999 "Millennium" attack on Los Angeles International Airport by Algerian Ahmed Ressam, and the attack on the USS Cole.
In 1995, James Woolsey left as CIA Director and was replaced by John Deutch. Deutch's deputy was George Tenet, who previously served in Bill Clinton's National Security Council. The National Security Adviser was Tony Lake. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) was chaired by Larry Combest of Lubbock, Texas and 1995 was the year Porter Goss joined the CIA oversight committee. On November 12, 2002, only a week after winning his 10th term, Combest suddenly announced his resignation from the House. Goss took over the HPSCI gavel from Combest in 1997, after serving only two years on the committee. In 1995, the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was Arlen Specter, a person whose fingerprints, like those of Goss, have been all over shady intelligence operations since the early 1960s. CIA intelligence analyst Michael Scheuer formed the CIA's Bin Laden Unit in 1996.
Two significant items emerge from the DGSE report. One is the fact that the CIA and MI6 were dealing with a Libyan Al Qaeda member at the same time Libyan leader Muammar el Qaddafi had declared war on Al Qaeda. Unlike the United States, Libya issued an Interpol arrest warrant for Bin Laden on March 16, 1998. With this treasure trove of proof of U.S. (and British) support for Al Qaeda, Qaddafi had the U.S. and the neo-cons over the barrel. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Bush administration now considers Qaddafi (once branded as terrorist number one) to be a good friend.
The other item is the training of Ahmed Ressam at Darunta. Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser Sandy Berger was charged with removing classified documents from the National Archives concerning the Ressam bombing plot. The question remains -- what were in these documents and did they have anything to do with the CIA's fingerprints on the Darunta camp?
Copyright 2006 Wayne Madsen Report. All rights reserved.
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6. U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS UNDERWAY IN SOMALIA;
RESOURCE CONFLICT ESCALATES OVER HORN OF AFRICA
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ONLINE JOURNAL
Special Reports
May 22, 2006
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_822.shtml
By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
According to a May 16 report in the Washington Post, US analysts of Africa policy and officials of Somalia's interim government say that the Bush administration is secretly supporting secular Somali warlords, whose groups are battling Islamic groups for control of Mogadishu.
While the Bush administration has continued to dodge questions about what appear to be "classic" covert operations (similar to those taking place in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Colombia, etc.), Somali government spokesman Abdirahman Dinari has unequivocally declared "the US government funded the warlords in the recent battle in Mogadishu, there is no doubt about that. This cooperation . . . only fuels further civil war."
Somalia is considered a "terrorist haven," as well as a potential "hotbed of al Qaeda activity." It is no surprise that in recent press conferences, new White House spokesman and propaganda mouthpiece (former Fox News pundit) Tony Snow repeatedly referred to "al Qaeda terrorists."
A senior US intelligence official quoted in the Washington Post article (who asked not to be named) says that Somalia presents "a classic 'enemy of our enemy' situation" (but "not an al Qaeda safe haven yet"), while former Clinton administration Africa specialist John Prendergast (now a senior advisor for the George Soros-funded International Crisis Group think tank) notes that "the US relies on buying intelligence from warlords and other participants in the Somali conflict, and hoping that the strongest of the warlords can snatch a live suspect or two" [for interrogation or rendition-LC].
Competing Geostrategic and Energy Interests in Somalia
Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001. This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia's resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, Somalia currently has no proven oil reserves, and only 200 billion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, and no hydrocarbon production. But this has not dimmed continuing interest in Somalia's untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of an energy bonanza following any resolution of the country's "internal security problems." The Somalian regime currently welcomes oil interests. Conoco, Agip, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips held concessions in the area. Of more immediate logistical and military interest, Somalia is situated on a key corridor between the Middle East and Africa, strategically located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, a short distance from Yemen.
As laid bare in the January 1993 report by Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, "The Oil Factor in Somalia," US oil companies, including Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips were positioned to exploit Somalia's rich oil reserves during the reign of pro-US President Mohammed Siad Barre. These companies had secured billion-dollar concessions to explore and drill in large portions of the Somali countryside prior to the coup led by warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid that toppled Barre. The US Somalia envoy at the time was CIA operative Robert Oakley, a chief "counter-terrorism" officer during the George H.W. Bush presidency, and veteran of the Afghanistan and Iran-Contra operations of the 1980s. Conoco's Mogadishu office housed the US embassy and military headquarters.
The infamous Somalia military operation of 1993, popularly depicted in the Philadelphia Inquirer series (and subsequent Hollywood film) "Blackhawk Down," was not a humanitarian mission, but an undeclared UN/US war launched by the George H.W. Bush adminstration, and inherited by the Clinton presidency. The operation was spearheaded by Deputy National Security Adviser Jonathan Howe (who remained in charge of the UN operation after Clinton took office), and approved by Colin Powell, then head of the Joint Chiefs.
The current Bush administration's escalation in Somalia is a trip "back to the future." As noted by William Engdahl, "Yemen fits nicely as an 'emerging target' with the other target nearby, Somalia," both of which are important geostrategic "choke points":
"Washington's choice of Somalia and Yemen is a matched pair, as a look at a Middle East/Horn of Africa map will confirm. Yemen sits at the oil transit chokepoint of Bab el-Mandap, the narrow point controlling oil flow connecting the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean. Yemen also has oil, although no one yet knows just how much. It could be huge. A US firm, Hunt Oil Co. is pumping 200,000 barrels a day from there but that is likely only the tip of the find.
"A new US cleansing of Somalian 'tyranny' would open the door for these US oil companies to map and develop the possibly huge oil potential in Somalia. Yemen and Somalia are two flanks of the same geological configuration, which holds large potential petroleum deposits, as well as being the flanks of the oil chokepoint from the Red Sea."
The US, and US-affiliated oil interests, must, at the very least, find ways to head off the aggressive oil and gas-related operations on the part of China and its oil companies throughout the Horn of Africa region, Kenya, and Ethiopia, and West Africa.
The intense uproar over genocide in Darfur, and shrill calls for military intervention, masks intense geostrategic resource conflict being waged between competing superpowers.
As Engdahl notes, "Sudan, as noted, has become a major oil supplier to China whose national oil company has invested more than $3 billion since 1999, building oil pipelines from the south to the Red Sea port. The coincidence of this fact with the escalating concern in Washington about genocide and humanitarian disaster in oil-rich Darfur in southern Sudan, is not lost on Beijing. China threatened a UN veto against any intervention against Sudan. The first act of a re-elected [sic] Dick Cheney late last year was to fill his vice presidential jet with UN Security Council members to fly to Nairobi to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Darfur, an eerie reminder of Defense Secretary Cheney's 'humanitarian' concern over Somalia in 1991."
Recently, exploration teams from Australia have been hunting for oil in Somalia's Puntland. Canadian lawyer Jay Park, "one of the world's top oil and gas lawyers," is working with the Somalian government to create a "credible petroleum regime". According to Park, "(Somalia) is one of the poorest countries in the world, but it may be sitting on some of the greatest oil and gas treasures."
With the world facing Peak Oil and Gas, the world's superpowers are racing to secure every last drop of oil and natural gas from every remaining inch of the planet, with the African continent quickly becoming the stage for new violence and warfare. It is no surprise that Anglo-American oil interests, and the Bush administration's covert operatives, are working Somalia, and the region, for all it is worth.
Copyright 1998-2006 Online Journal
*****
REVOLUTION ONLINE
Box 3486, Merchandise Mart
Chicago, IL 60654
Tel: 773-227-4066
Fax: 773-227-4497
Web: http://www.rwor.org
- No. 48, May 28, 2006 -
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by Sunsara Taylor
http://rwor.org/a/048/luce-holy-war.html
"Do you care more about the pigs around you or God?" BattleCry leader Ron Luce asked the crowd of more than 17,000 youth gathered at Wachovia Spectrum Stadium in Philadelphia on Friday, May 12. No, this wasn't a metaphor. After reading a passage from Luke 15 that mentions pigs, he actually had a bunch of those big, oinking, pink, farm animals on stage with him! Get it, you either get with Luce's hateful, hyperpatriotic, woman-bashing, racist god, or you're a... pig?
And it became clear during the BattleCry rally, all the talk of battles, warriors and war is not metaphor either.
White Man's Burden
Early on the second day, a tribal drumbeat filled the stadium and a voice boomed out "the most violent people in human history."
Grainy images appeared on the stadium screens of indigenous Ecuadorians running and throwing spears. Proof of their "barbarism"? Never mind that their land was destroyed by oil development and their way of life undermined, these "savages" had killed five missionaries who came to destroy their belief systems decades ago. One of the supposed killers is brought on stage. He's been "civilized" by the Bible and calls on the youth to sign up for mission trips to go and convert others like him.
News flash to Luce's audience: These indigenous people, whose very existence is hanging by a thread--threatened by the encroachment of the "modern world" of exploitation, racism, environmental destruction and cultural genocide--are at least a hundred million people short of being "the most violent people in human history," even if they did what he accused them of.
The reality is that over a hundred million indigenous people were killed by the Europeans who followed Columbus to the "new world." And let's not forget that the genocide against Native Peoples was blessed by people carrying Ron Luce's Bible.
Finally, after being programmed with these racist lies, Luce's flock flooded down to the floor of the stadium to sign up for missions this summer--to Africa, Latin America, the urban U.S., Australia, the Mideast and beyond. As they went, Ron Luce offered odd encouragement, "You guys are freaks of a whole different breed...You guys are a bunch of wild animals. Man!"
Ignorance and Patriarchy
Next up on the agenda--woman bashing. If you think the world needs an alternative to the worst misogynist heavy metal or hip-hop, but you still want to see women degraded, insulted, and dehumanized, Luce has got just the thing for you.
Lakita Wright, self-proclaimed "sexpert" who has spoken to nations, Congress, and more than half a million young people this past year, stepped up to preach the "naked truth" (get it?) about abstinence and purity. Her specialty seemed to be shamelessly promoting racist and sexist stereotypes that only a Black woman trying to outdo Bill Cosby might be able to get away with.
She began with a parable that portrays "Lies" as female and "Truth" as male, then launched an attack on all the established truths about safe sex and resurrected all the oldest stigmas against those, especially women, who would engage in sex outside patriarchal marriages.
She reserved special derision for the "stupid" young women whose lives are disrupted because they have a baby. "Don't blame him [the baby]. It's your fault. You should have zipped it up. Locked it down. Clank. Clank." She drew chuckles from many men when she "slipped" and called women "flea-males," saying, "Did I say that? Well, if you lie down with dogs..."
Wright led a call-and-response about hundreds of sexually transmitted diseases and listed, with great drama, all the pain and disfigurement they can cause. Then, while claiming to care about these diseases, she went on to assail one thing that is proven to prevent them: "Condoms don't work."
Wright bemoaned the fact that judges in the U.S. today aren't required to study the Mosaic books of the Bible. These are the parts of the Bible that celebrate taking your enemies as slaves, killing their babies, and forcing women to be concubines (sex slaves), traded and controlled as possessions, and subject to the most horrific of abuses.
Reality check: Condoms save lives. Preaching "abstinence" as a way to prevent STDs kills people. Luce and his klan don't give a fuck about young people's lives--this war on condoms is driven by their literalist Biblical message: death by stoning for those who engage in sex outside of wedlock.
Holy War--For Real
After what amounted to a celebration of genocide against Native Americans, and a pep rally for death by STDs, things got really gory.
A featured speaker, Franklin Graham, who is credited with converting George W. Bush, was introduced. He implied that HIV/AIDS is a punishment from God. "We get outside of marriage and there are consequences."
He went on to assert that God sees marriage as a "relation between a man and a woman. Not a man and a man or a woman and a woman." This drew him his loudest applause of the day, never mind that the Bible celebrates many instances of marriage between one man and many women. Maybe next time I go to one of Luce's conventions, I'll bring a bunch of bumper stickers that have a stick figure of a man plus stick figures of 1,000 women with an equals sign and then the word "Marriage." People can put them on their cars to promote a model of marriage in the Bible--where King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines (and for some reason God never gave him AIDS as a punishment).
The "heart" of Graham's speech was a call for holy war. He preached about the "battle for souls of men and women from North to South, East to West, over the entire earth." There is, he declared, "No way to God but through Jesus Christ."
Now, I actually don't believe that religion is the root cause of war--that's more driven by economic and political forces. But how long must we put up with a world where people are whipped up to kill people because--as Christian fascist general Jerry Boykin (whose troops got their asses kicked in Somalia) said: My god is bigger than your god.
Graham told the biblical story of Daniel "taming the Babylonians." After celebrating the U.S. troops who are killing in Iraq right now, he preached that there is "no difference between the Iraqis today and Babylon 1,000 years ago." In the Bible Babylon is the epitome of evil and decadence. All manner of bloodlust and plunder against it is not just condoned but celebrated. As Psalm 137:9 spells out, even the babies are to be dashed to death against the rocks!
While calling on the youth present to engage in this "battle for the souls of men," he exhorts them, "No souls can be saved without the shedding of blood. Blood must be shed!"
Then, a group of Navy SEALs are projected on the large screen above the stadium as they make their way from backstage. Dressed in camouflage, carrying automatic weapons, kicking down doors and firing blanks into empty rooms along their way, they looked like the house-to-house raids and indiscriminate killing seen in rare footage out of Iraq.
Fireworks exploded and flames billowed as Ron Luce greeted, bragging that all of these men have been involved in real battles. They are part of FORCE Ministries, which conducts Bible studies at military bases around the world and is made up of current and retired SEALs, law enforcement, and other military who preach the Gospel. Among those on stage, one is a SEAL just back from Afghanistan and another was a member of a police SWAT team. All of them are trained to kill and do so believing God is sanctioning them.
One of the SEALs told about boot camp and being forced to surrender his entire will to the demands of his instructor. Luce stepped in to tell the audience, "That is your youth pastor. He's going to make you a SEAL for Christ." Of course, the great Commander of this religious army is God who issues his foot-soldiers armor--"a shield of faith, a belt of truth, and boots of preparedness"--as well as "offensive weapons" like the "sword of the spirit" and the "word of God."
This merging of "God's Army" and the U.S. military returns full circle to the event's opening when a letter of greeting and blessings from George W. Bush was read. After that, a minister had led thousands to bow their heads and thank the lord for giving them George Bush, who coincidentally is the U.S.'s Commander-in-Chief.
The Two Faces of Christian Fascism
BattleCry keeps this bloodthirsty holy war madness in the closet. You won't find it on their website and you wonâ·t hear it in their major media appearances. For all his on-stage bluster, and his stacks of books laced with militarism, when Ron Luce debated me on the O'Reilly Factor, he sounded more like a wilting flower, "Well, there are young people all over America and they are realizing that they are caught in the middle of this culture war... They are saying, you know what? We want our voices to be heard. We love the lord and we're not mean."
How many of the moms and dads and youth gravitating to the Christian fascists looking for life with a purpose have any idea that the agenda of their leaders is as gruesome, bloodthirsty, and horrible as the hell myth that they are being scared into submission with.
But whether or not you realize what you are signing onto, when you make your pact with Luce and his bunch, you're not only signing onto a brain-deadening fantasy that robs you of your ability to understand and change the world, you end up being led to fight--and shed blood--in a "holy war" for Bush and all he concentrates.
Sunsara Taylor writes for Revolution Newspaper and sits on the Advisory Board of The World Can't Wait Drive Out the Bush Regime. Click here, http://worldcantwait.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1295&Itemid=184, to watch Taylor debate Ron Luce on the O'Reilly Factor. She can be reached at: sunsarasworld@yahoo.com
Copyright 2006 Revolution Online
*****
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By Mumia Abu-Jamal
[Col. Writ. 5/14/06]
Source: Afrikan Frontline Network, nattyreb@comcast.net
- Sunday, 21 May 2006 -
The recent report that the nation's largest phone companies turned over data on millions of Americans is less surprising than the somewhat muted response it has evoked.
If polls are to be believed, nearly 70% of those polled find nothing objectionable with the secret tracking of phone calls by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Without directly challenging the accuracy of such polls, the simple facts that folks aren't up in arms, marching on the White House like angry cinematic villagers, torches in hand, on the tracks of a Frankenstein monster, is stunning.
The relative silence of Americans -- not pundits, who are paid to have an opinion -- but of average folks on this earth-shattering issue, suggests that it may be true.
What does this say about Americans?
It suggests that people have incredible faith in the government, or are so immobilized by fear that they welcome virtually anything the State advances, as long as it promises safety.
Some will say this is a natural response after 9-11.
Yet, this didn't begin on 9-11.
Illegal government spying on Americans has a long history in this country, occasioned by the fears unleashed during the Cold War. However, even when in the 1970s' such spying was uncovered, it didn't result in any end to such practices, but a transfer to another file, under another pretext. One need only read Frank Donner's 1981 book "The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System". This documented history is long, clear and undeniable.
Yet most Americans neither know, nor seem to want to know about what happened then, or what's happening now.
That great French observer of America, Alexis de Tocqueville, saw these qualities in Americans over 150 years ago, writing in his 1835 classic, "Democracy in America":
"A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart -- the slave of its own well-being, awaiting but the hand that will bind it. By such a nation the despotism of faction is not less to be dreaded than the despotism of an individual. When the bulk of the community is engrossed by private concerns, the smallest parties need not despair of getting the upper hand in public affairs. At such times it is not rare to see upon the great stages of the world, as we see at our theaters, a multitude represented by a few players, who alone speak in the name of an absent or inattentive crowd: they alone are in action whilst all are stationary; they regulate everything by their own caprice; they change the laws, and tyrannize at will over the manners of the country; and then wonder to see into how small a number of weak and worthless hands a great people may fall." [From: de Tocqueville, Alexis, "Democracy in America" [2 vols.] (New York: Bantam Classic, 2004)[orig. publ. 1835] ].
As the White House and its lapdog press peddle the potion of fear, and beats the drum for more war, the alleged 'guarantees' of the Constitution are shredded like tissue-paper, daily. Wars based on lies; US torture chambers in Guantanamo, in Iraq, in Afghanistan; secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, North Africa, and beyond; and now the tracking of millions of calls of Americans ...
Something is broken in Babylon; yet all we hear today is the silence of the lambs.
Copyright 2006 Mumia Abu-Jamal. All rights reserved.
Mr. Jamal's new work, WE WANT FREEDOM: A Life in the Black Panther Party, is now available from South End Press, Cambridge, MA. (http://www.southendpress.org).
Check out Mumia's NEW book: "Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People": http://www.africanworld.com.
These are VERY SERIOUS TIMES for political activists in this country and around the world. Get full details and keep updated by reading ACTION ALERTS!! at http://www.mumia.org and http://www.movenet.org.
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The Power of Truth is Final -- Free Mumia!
CHECK http://www.mumia.org FOR IMPORTANT ACTION ALERTS!
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END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
At the height of the opium trade during the Taliban regime, roughly 70 percent of the global supply of heroin originated from Afghanistan. In the wake of the US-led invasion, Afghanistan accounts for more than 85 percent of the global heroin market. In turn, the latter represents a sizeable fraction of the global narcotics market, estimated by the UN to be on the order of $400-500 billion a year. ... Intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates, which are allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks, together with their affiliates in the off-shore banking havens, launder large amounts of narco-dollars. ... Behind the trade in narcotics, there are powerful financial interests. The productive system underlying the Golden Crescent heroin market is protected by a US-sponsored regime in Kabul. US foreign policy serves these interests. Geopolitical and military control over the multibillion dollar drug routes constitutes a (hidden) strategic objective, comparable, in some regards, to the militarization of oil pipeline routes out of Central Asia. -- Michel Chossudovsky, America's "War On Terrorism" [Pincourt, QC: Global Research, 2005] pp. 228-229.
Contents: Number 723
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 725/May 28, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 724/May 24, 2006
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1. TALIBAN'S NEW COMMANDER READY FOR A FIGHT
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ASIA TIMES ONLINE
South Asia
May 20, 2006
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HE20Df02.html
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - The Taliban's military offensive has begun in earnest in southern Afghanistan, with many key districts already captured by the militia that retreated from power in 2001 after the US-led invasion.
The scale and frequency of the Taliban's revitalized insurgency can be attributed directly to the recent appointment by Taliban leader Mullah Omar of legendary mujahideen leader Jalaluddin Haqqani as overall military field commander.
In the latest action - the biggest since the Taliban's ousting - in Helmand province, between 300 and 400 heavily armed Taliban fighters stormed a remote village. At least 100 people were killed, including 15 or more Afghan police and a female Canadian soldier.
Haqqani, a cleric, rose to fame during the decade of opposition to the Soviets in the 1980s. Coincidentally, at that time he was an ally of the United States.
Mullah Omar has provided Haqqani with major powers, funds and huge stockpiles of arms and ammunition and, most important, hundreds of youths who have been trained by the Iraqi resistance in urban guerrilla warfare.
Mullah Omar has demarcated specific areas of Afghanistan to different commanders, but now Haqqani is commander-at-large. He has also been charged with coordinating suicide attackers throughout the country. He is authorized to wage battles anywhere he chooses in Afghanistan.
Haqqani was not part of the Taliban movement when it first emerged from Zabul, but he was the first and most powerful commander of the Afghan resistance to surrender to the Taliban, unconditionally, in 1995. The defection paved the way for the Taliban to secure territorial advantage and finally victory in 1996.
Haqqani, in his 50s, had stunningly captured the first major city since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 - Khost - in 1991, from the puppet communist government of president Mohammad Najibullah.
Afghan parents still tell their children about the hero Haqqani, a thin man of small stature, who refused to stay in Peshawar in Pakistan, preferring the mountains, from where he kidnapped Soviet soldiers and ambushed their convoys. Haqqani stood out from other mujahideen as he was never blamed for warlordism, and he appeared to be truly dedicated to the cause of peace in Afghanistan.
Haqqani held relatively low-key positions throughout the Taliban's tenure, but remained loyal to Mullah Omar. During this time he is said to have run several al-Qaeda training camps for Osama bin Laden, with whom he was friendly.
After the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States and soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Haqqani was invited to Islamabad, where the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), with which he had close ties, offered him the presidency of Afghanistan, but on the condition that he break all ties with Mullah Omar and carve out a "moderate Taliban" faction. (In declassified US State Department documents, Haqqani is described as the tribal leader "most exploited by the ISI [and US] during the Soviet-Afghan war to facilitate the introduction of Arab mercenaries". [1])
Haqqani refused the offer and went back to the Ghulam Khan mountains between Khost and Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal area and began his campaign of pitched battles against US-led forces. He then became a prime US target, with a number of attacks aimed specifically at eliminating him.
But although Haqqani still commanded great respect all over Afghanistan and especially among the tribal elders of Khost, Paktia, Paktika and Gardez, he still did not belong to the Taliban core - Mullah Omar's "kitchen cabinet".
He thus was not given a central role in the Taliban resistance, although he continued to mount random attacks in his area.
Mullah Akhtar Osamani and Mullah Dadullah were the central commanders, but they were not able to make any significant military breakthroughs when the Taliban's spring offensive was launched last month. Thus Haqqani's elevation.
Fresh funds, arms and human resources, and Haqqani's unquestioned military acumen honed in years fighting the Soviets, have revitalized the insurgency. An immediate spinoff was that veteran Afghan resistance figures, such as Saifullah Masoor, the commander of the renowned resistance leader Nasrullah Mansoor, who were previously sitting on the fence in Gardez and other areas, are now hand in hand with Haqqani.
The regions that the Taliban have targeted and the patterns of mobilization are similar to those used in the mid-1990s when the student militia emerged as a force to fill the chaotic political vacuum created after the withdrawal of Soviet troops and seize Kabul.
There are, though, two main distinctions today: the Taliban do not have the support of Pakistan, as they did to a large extent in the 1990s, and many independent groups have now gathered under the Taliban umbrella.
Thus the Taliban-led movement has converted into an organized revolt, concentrated in the southern provinces of Zabul, Helmand and Kandahar. Strengthened by loyal tribes, the targets are US-led coalition forces, as well as the Afghan National Army (ANA).
According to Asia Times Online contacts in Afghanistan, intense and constant battles have virtually paralyzed the ANA's ability to retaliate, and many villages and districts in the three key southern provinces are now under Taliban control. The ANA is therefore concentrating on keeping the major Afghan cities under the writ of the Kabul administration of President Hamid Karzai.
"Once again we are facing a mid-1990s-like situation when bloodshed was everywhere and the situation went from bad to worse and these circumstances allowed the Taliban movement to emerge and boot our government out," said former Afghan prime minister Ahmad Shah Ahmadzaid in a telephone conversation with Asia Times Online. Ahmad Shah was the acting premier before the Taliban took power in 1996.
"The Karzai administration writ is nowhere, and the Afghan nation is once again in limbo," Ahmad Shah maintained.
Solid spadework
While Haqqani has provided the spark for the resistance, he could not have succeeded had thorough groundwork not been laid over the past year or so.
The Taliban launched a major recruitment drive last year. This coincided with the government of Pakistan clamping down on jihad activities in Indian-administered Kashmir.
This played right into the Taliban's hands as many former members of Pakistani jihadi organizations, including from the banned Laskhar-i-Toiba and the banned Jaish-i-Mohamed, gathered in North and South Waziristan, where the Taliban have established a virtual Islamic state along the lines of the former uncompromising fundamentalist religious Taliban regime in Afghanistan. All have pledged their allegiance to Mullah Omar.
According to authoritative estimates obtained by Asia Times Online, about 27,000 fighters are gathered in North Waziristan alone. More than 13,000 are believed to be in South Waziristan. The Taliban leadership there had formed about 100 suicide squads by February, assembled under the motto "fight until the last man and the last bullet".
Partners, not followers
Now that the spring offensive has gained sustainable momentum, some of the old guard of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets have jumped into the fray, but as partners of the Taliban rather than followers of Mullah Omar.
One such is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, who operates in the Kunar Valley and Nooristan province on the border with Pakistan. According to reports from the area, his commanders and their men are grouping to pitch battle before the Taliban mobilize cadres in eastern Afghanistan.
In the Khugiani district in eastern Nangarhar province, Moulvi Yunus Khalis, the chief of his own faction of the Hizb-i-Islami Afghanistan, and his two sons, especially Anwarul Haq Mujahid, have started up activities and are instigating all tribes to revolt against the Kabul administration, as well as against foreign forces in Afghanistan.
Sporadic information coming out of the country also suggests revolts by many small warlords in the southern Pashtun heartland against the Karzai administration. However, at present they lack effective coordination among themselves, and with the Taliban.
Should they get organized, say people with close knowledge of the insurgency, a military mobilization all the way to Kabul could be only a few weeks away.
Note
1. Asia Times Online, Pakistan through the US looking glass, September 20, 2003.
Syed Saleem Shahzad is Bureau Chief, Pakistan, Asia Times Online. He can be reached at saleem_shahzad2002@yahoo.com.
Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
*****
ANOTHER DAY IN THE EMPIRE
Life in Neoconservative America
- Friday, May 19, 2006 -
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2. DRUG ADDICTION LUCRATIVE FOR NEOLIB BANKSTERS, CIA
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By Kurt Nimmo
"An American counternarcotics official was killed and two other Americans wounded in a suicide bombing in western Afghanistan today, while heavy fighting between Taliban insurgents and Afghan police continued in two southern provinces, officials said," reports the New York Times. "We confirm that a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement, working for the police training program in Herat was killed in a vehicle-borne I.E.D. attack," Chris Harris, an American Embassy spokesman, told the newspaper. After this mention, the Times moves on to detail the increasing violence between Afghan puppet police and "militants," that is to say Afghans fighting against the occupation of their country, an entirely natural occurrence.
Of course, the Times does not bother to mention that the Afghan opium trade--in fact much of the opium trade in the so-called "Golden Crescent" (Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan)--was cultivated and nurtured by the United States government and the CIA, leading to countless cases of miserable heroin addiction in America and Europe. Reading the Times, we get the impression the Taliban--at one time sponsored by the CIA and Pakistan's intelligence services, so long as they were kicking Russian hindquarter--are responsible for the opium trade all on their lonesome. As usual, the Times twists the story through omission.
"ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels ... engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government," writes historian William Blum. "The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies," and also because selling heroin and spreading misery is highly profitable. In fact, the Soviets attempted to impose an opium ban on the country and this resulted in a revolt by tribal groups eventually exploited by the CIA and Pakistan.
"Reports issued by the UN and Drug Enforcement Administration in the early 1980s stated that by 1981 Afghan heroin producers may have captured 60 per cent of the heroin market in Western Europe and the United States. In New York City in 1979 alone, the year the CIA-organized flow of arms to the mujahiddeen began) heroin-related deaths increased by 77 per cent. There were no Superbowl ads that year about doing drugs and aiding terror. You could say that those dead addicts had given their lives in the fight to drive back Communism," write Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
Making sure heroin addiction continues unabated is such a lucrative business for the CIA and Wall Street investors, Bush decided "not to destroy the opium crop in Afghanistan. President Bush, who previously linked the Afghan drug trade directly to terrorism, has now decided not to destroy the Afghan opium crop," Charles R. Smith reported for NewsMax on March 28, 2002, as Bush's illegal invasion of the country was well underway. "Several sources inside Capitol Hill noted that the CIA opposes the destruction of the Afghan opium supply because to do so might destabilize the Pakistani government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. ... The threat to overthrow Musharraf is motivated in part by Islamic radical groups linked to the Pakistani intelligence service, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The radical groups reportedly obtain their primary funding through opium production and trade." In fact, destroying the opium crop would have put a terrible financial squeeze on the agency and angered financiers who routinely trade in misery and death.
Naturally, the Times did not bother to mention the fact the Taliban attempted to eradicate opium production and this was likely one of the reasons Bush the Junior invaded Afghanistan. "Although the Taliban had virtually stamped out poppy production, the country now accounts for two-third of the world's heroin. As hard as it may be to believe, there is compelling evidence that the US (via the CIA) may be directly involved in narco-trafficing," notes Mike Whitney, who cites the following from Portland Independent Media:
Before 1980, Afghanistan produced 0% of the world's opium. But then the CIA moved in, and by 1986 they were producing 40% of the world's heroin supply. By 1999, they were churning out 3,200 TONS of heroin a year--nearly 80% of the total market supply. But then something unexpected happened. The Taliban rose to power, and by 2000 they had destroyed nearly all of the opium fields. Production dropped from 3,000+ tons to only 185 tons, a 94% reduction! This enormous drop in revenue subsequently hurt not only the CIA's Black Budget projects, but also the free-flow of laundered money in and out of the Controller's banks.
It also put a pinch on the criminals and gangsters in Pakistan. "The Taliban's actions ... (destroying the opium crop) severed the ruling military junta in Pakistan from its primary source of foreign revenues and made bin Laden and the Taliban completely expendable in the eyes of the Pakistani government. It also cut off billions of dollars in revenues that had been previously laundered through western banks and Russian financial institutions connected to them," explains From the Wilderness. "Prior to the WTC attacks, credible sources, including the U.S. government, the IMF, Le Monde and the U.S. Senate placed the amount of drug cash flowing into Wall Street and U.S. banks at around $250-$300 billion a year," not exactly small potatoes.
In 2004, according to research conducted by the Democratic Policy Committee, after "decreasing dramatically under the Taliban regime, Afghanistan now [2004] produces nearly 3/4 of the world's opium. CIC [Center for International Cooperation] found that 'opium production, processing, and trafficking have surged, with revenues equaling roughly half of the legal economy of Afghanistan.' It is estimated that 1.7 million people, or 7 percent of the total population now grow poppies," all of this under the United States installed government of Hamid Karzai, the ex-Unocal employee.
But then none of this should be surprising--the CIA and neolib financiers and moneymen have long dabbled in drug dealing and drug addiction profiteering.
In addition to turning immense profits for societal parasites and other cockroach infestations on Wall Street, drug dealing is a great way for the government to intervene in the business of other nations, as Oliver North well understands (as the Contra was funded by the smuggling of cocaine). "The CIA functionally gains influence and control in governments corrupted by criminal narco-trafficking. Politically, the CIA exerts influence by leveraging narco-militarists and corrupted politicians... This is really NEO-narco-colonialism, whereby local criminal proxies do the bidding of the patron government seeking expanded influence. But because of the quid-pro-quo of protecting the criminal proxies' illicit pipelines, the result is still a functional narco-colonialism, involving a narcotics commodity in the actual practical execution of policy, with the very different twist of covert action," summarizes the CIA & Drugs website, http://ciadrugs.homestead.com/files/index.html.
So it is not surprising, as the New York Times puts it, there is a "Sudden Rise of Violence in Afghanistan" and the predictable murder of "a U.S. citizen contractor for the State Department Bureau of International Narcotic and Law Enforcement." In Afghanistan, the Hegelian dialect is working overtime--the U.S. government engineers the Afghan opium trade, thus resulting in social problems and violence associated with illicit drug distribution and consumption, and then turns around and organizes police training programs to combat the scourge it has spawned.
As well, for the Fabian socialist globalists, it is a great way to break down borders and implement "free trade zones," that is to say unhindered thievery zones. Call it a "war on drugs" or the endless war against "terrorism" (yet another Hegelian contrivance), it is all engineered to turn the world into a large slave plantation ruled by a decadent and debased elite cadre of neoliberal criminals.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair'anchor232499s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, with an introduction by Jeffrey St. Clair is now available through Dandelion Books: $17.95 trade paperback. He can be reached at: nimmo@nimmo.com.
Copyright 2006 Another Day in the Empire. All rights reserved.
*****
WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Friday, 19 May 2006 -
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3. SENATE HEARING ON CIA NOMINEE:
DEMOCRATS RUBBERSTAMP BUSH POLICE-STATE SPYING
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/hayd-m19.shtml
By Patrick Martin
The Senate hearing Thursday on the nomination of General Michael Hayden to head the Central Intelligence Agency demonstrates the bipartisan congressional support for the Bush administration's assault on the democratic rights of the American people.
While there were scattered criticisms of the methods of the Bush administration, particularly its failure to consult with Congress, every senator on the Intelligence Committee accepted the premise that the United States is engaged in a "war on terror" and that the Bush administration's escalation of domestic surveillance and wiretapping is a product of that war.
There was no challenge to the Orwellian label, "terrorist surveillance program," which the Bush administration has chosen to apply to a program which actually involves the surveillance of the telephone calls and Internet messaging of nearly the entire American population--an estimated 225 million people. It would be far more accurate to describe the electronic monitoring and data-mining by the National Security Agency (NSA) as the "universal surveillance program"--or as the Pentagon once labeled its own version of the program, "Total Information Awareness."
Not one senator, on the Intelligence Committee or off it, will acknowledge the basic truth that the Bush administration is a far greater threat to the democratic rights of the American people than all the terrorists in the world. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda may be capable of terrible crimes, but they cannot impose a totalitarian dictatorship in the United States. That threat comes solely from the American ruling elite and its military-intelligence apparatus.
General Michael Hayden is a sworn enemy of the democratic rights of the American people. In his six years as head of the NSA, from 1999 to 2005, he was responsible for both the program of interception and eavesdropping on international phone calls, revealed by the New York Times in December, and the creation of an enormous database of the telephone calling records of 225 million Americans, made public by USA Today May 11.
While some press reports in the past week have suggested that the domestic telephone monitoring was less sweeping than reported by USA Today, perhaps limited to long distance phone calls, about 20 percent of the total, the New York Times quoted an unnamed "senior government official, granted anonymity to speak for publication about the classified program" confirming that "the security agency had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States."
A lawsuit brought by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), a group opposed to Internet censorship and spying, has produced evidence of widespread interception of traffic on the web by the same telecommunications companies that turned over phone records to the NSA. EFF legal director Cindy Cohn told Bloomberg News Wednesday that AT&T had carried out "real-time diversion of customer Internet data" as part of its collaboration with the NSA.
In his appearance before the Senate committee, Hayden adamantly defended both the legality and the necessity of telecommunications spying, while refusing to discuss any aspect of the program except in a closed session, where members of the Senate panel were sworn to secrecy. This was combined with a denunciation of leaks to the press which exposed both the illegal domestic surveillance and the CIA's network of secret prisons overseas, where selected prisoners are interrogated and tortured outside of any legal process. CIA officers "deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed, and criticized on the front pages of the newspapers," he said.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, a Kansas Republican, sounded the same note in his opening remarks, when he rejected concerns that domestic spying was a violation of democratic rights, declaring, "You have no civil liberties if you are dead." This is a particularly moronic version of the bullying threats by the Bush White House that anyone who criticizes its repressive measures is opening the way for new 9/11-style attacks.
Roberts also denounces critics of the NSA spying as ill-informed, saying they were talking about a subject "about which they know little or nothing." This was a curious line of argument, given that the intelligence agencies, the Bush administration and its congressional apologists like Roberts have done their best to keep the American people in the dark about these abuses. Presumably only those who know quite a lot about the spying--i.e., the wiretappers themselves, and their political overseers--should be permitted to discuss the subject, and then only behind closed doors.
The chief spokesmen for the Democrats on the committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, accepted the framework put forward by Roberts, only in more restrained language. "The war on terrorism not only requires objective, independent intelligence analysis," Levin said, "it also requires us to strike a thoughtful balance between our liberty and our security."
The truth behind this soporific cliche, however, is that the liberty of the American people is being sacrificed to provide greater security for the US ruling class, the privileged class of multimillionaires and corporate CEOs who use both the Democratic and the Republican parties as their political instruments. The ruling elite is far more fearful of the intensifying opposition to the Iraq war and of a mass political upheaval provoked by the growing socioeconomic polarization within the United States than it is of any possible action by small bands of terrorists.
In selecting Hayden as the nominee to head the CIA, Bush is signaling an escalation of this war against the democratic rights of the American people. Hayden headed a top-secret spy agency, the NSA, which is supposedly focused entirely on foreign signals intelligence and legally prohibited from targeting Americans. Under his leadership, the NSA was refocused on the American population, accumulating what USA Today described as "the biggest database in the history of the world," consisting of the personal telephone records of nearly every person in the country.
There is every reason to believe that Hayden will play the same role at the CIA, another top-secret spy agency supposedly focused entirely on foreign intelligence and legally prohibited from targeting Americans. He is tasked by the Bush administration to intensify domestic operations of the CIA which are no doubt already under way on a large scale.
In that context, one should note the fact reported by the New York Times Thursday: by next year the number of trained CIA case officers will have tripled since 2001. Who are these agents and where are they at work? Few of these new recruits are likely to speak Arabic, Farsi, Pashtun, Chinese or other languages necessary for assignment as intelligence operatives in the countries on the Pentagon's current target list. They don't know the cultures of those countries, but these recruits do speak English and could operate undetected within the United States. Many of them are likely already deployed in domestic spy operations, despite the legal prohibitions.
Hayden gave a hint of this in his opening statement, when he declared, "I would reaffirm the CIA's proud culture of risk-taking." He was using political code words to reassure right-wing critics of the CIA, who have complained that the agency became too timid after the exposure in the 1970s of CIA involvement in assassination plots, fomenting military coups overseas and other criminal activities, including illegal domestic spying. The "old firm" is back in business, Hayden was suggesting, and once again, anything goes.
The public hearing, which began Thursday morning, took on the character of a stage-managed farce, in which the participants were going through the motions by rote. One Republican after another voiced praise for the nominee and for President Bush. One Democrat after another raised questions, only to be told by Hayden that he could not discuss the issue in open session but would respond fully in the closed session, scheduled for the afternoon.
Among the questions he declined to answer were those related to NSA wiretapping, his attitude to torture techniques such as "waterboarding," and his opinion on whether the US government could hold a prisoner without trial indefinitely, even for life.
The ritual of the hearing was preceded by a secret briefing Wednesday of the full Intelligence Committee, conducted by the current head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, who provided details of the eavesdropping program directed at international phone calls placed by or to telephone numbers in the United States. This is the program first made public by the New York Times last December.
The Bush administration had refused to brief the full membership of the committee, limiting the information to a selected subcommittee of only seven of the 15 members. It became impossible to sustain this arrangement given that Hayden would have to testify before the entire committee in closed session.
The briefing satisfied one of the principal demands of both the Democrats and some "moderate" Republicans on the Intelligence Committee, which was that all the members from both parties should have access to information on the eavesdropping program so they could exercise "oversight." As an unacknowledged quid pro quo, the Democrats will rubberstamp the nomination of Hayden to head the CIA.
No member of either party has suggested that the illegal program be shut down. Instead, they have debated whether the program should be retroactively legalized through new legislation or simply allowed to continue on the basis of Bush's assertion of executive authority.
The complicity of both parties in Congress with the illegal program of domestic surveillance was underscored by the administration's release Wednesday of a list of 30 briefings on the program that it conducted with Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate since the September 11 terrorist attacks. A total of 31 members of Congress attended at least one such briefing, far more than the eight previously reported, including five briefings for House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.
The list includes seven Senate Democrats: two former senators, former Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and former Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham; and five currently in the Senate, John D. Rockefeller IV, Carl Levin, Demo