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The Pentagon's Spy on Americans
Program
MNBC/Newsweek
By Michael Isikoff
January 30, 2006 issue
Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a
June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up
outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor
once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They were there to protest the
corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore papier-mache
masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton
employees as they left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was
to call attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food
contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater,"
Parkin says.
But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the
top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest
was regarded as a potential threat to national security. Created three years
ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking
threats and terrorist plots against military installations and personnel inside
the United States. In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary,
authorized a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat
and Local Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about
"suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's
"terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal Pentagon memo.
A Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the
Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear why the
Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although organizer
Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at ExxonMobil
headquarters (the charges were dropped). But there are now questions about
whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted unauthorized spying on
innocent people and organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows
that the deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may
have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never should have
been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the
thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of
the sensitivity of the subject.
CIFA's activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret
government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national security. In
December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had investigated several
activist groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and
Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to discover possible ecoterror connections.
At the same time, the White House has spent weeks in damage-control mode,
defending the controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency
to monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror
links, without obtaining warrants.
Last Thursday, Cheney called the program "vital" to the country's defense
against Al Qaeda. "Either we are serious about fighting this war on terror or
not," he said in a speech to the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think
tank. But as the new information about CIFA shows, the scope of the U.S.
government's spying on Americans may be far more extensive than the public
realizes.
It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's
dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are
classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports
that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had
collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests,
including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students
Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon spokesman declined to say why a private
company like Halliburton would be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the
past, Defense Department officials have said that the "force protection"
mission includes military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work
closely with them and therefore could be in danger.
CIFA researchers apparently cast a wide net and had a number of surveillance
methods—both secretive and mundane—at their disposal. An internal
CIFA PowerPoint slide presentation recently obtained by William Arkin, a former
U.S. Army intelligence analyst who writes widely about military affairs, gives
some idea how the group operated. The presentation, which Arkin provided to
NEWSWEEK, shows that CIFA analysts had access to law-enforcement reports and
sensitive military and U.S. intelligence documents. (The group's motto appears
at the bottom of each PowerPoint slide: "Counterintelligence 'to the Edge'.")
But the organization also gleaned data from "open source Internet monitoring."
In other words, they surfed the Web.
That may have been how the Pentagon came to be so interested in a small
gathering outside Halliburton. On June 23, 2004, a few days before the
Halliburton protest, an ad for the event appeared on houston.indymedia.org, a
Web site for lefty Texas activists. "Stop the war profiteers," read the
posting. "Bring out the kids, relatives, Dick Cheney, and your favorite
corporate pigs at the trough as we will provide food for free."
Four months later, on Oct. 25, the TALON team reported another possible
threat to national security. The source: a Miami antiwar Web page. "Website
advertises protest planned at local military recruitment facility," the
internal report warns. The database entry refers to plans by a south Florida
group called the Broward Anti-War Coalition to protest outside a strip-mall
recruiting office in Lauderhill, Fla. The TALON entry lists the upcoming
protest as a "credible" threat. As it turned out, the entire event consisted of
15 to 20 activists waving a giant BUSH LIED sign. No one was arrested. "It's
very interesting that the U.S. military sees a domestic peace group as a
threat," says Paul Lefrak, a librarian who organized the protest.
Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA documents suggests the agency
may be expanding its Internet monitoring, and wants to be as surreptitious as
possible. CIFA has contracted to buy "identity masking" software that would
allow the agency to create phony Web identities and let them appear to be
located in foreign countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer
Sciences Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)
Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to
the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an
internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some
information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed
to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 days—unless
they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to terrorism, criminal
wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was "improperly
stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program
(but not to give his name). "It was an oversight." In a memo last week,
obtained by NEWSWEEK, Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to
purge such information from its files—and directed that all Defense
Department intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department
policies.
That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the Senate
intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's activities and who
it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box [Pentagon officials] don't
want opened," says Arkin. "What we're looking at is hints of what they're
doing." As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we've already seen too
much.
© 2006 Newsweek, Inc.
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