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Hmm.....I wonder if I made this list.....
Category: News
and Politics
This article found online at: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm
The Last Roundup
For decades the federal government has been developing a highly
classified plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist
attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face
detention under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham
05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- - 28/04/08 --- -In the spring of 2007, a retired
senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a
story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp
political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect
his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife
with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington,
D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen
made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's
second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey
had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years.
Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he
had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various
domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an
operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it
did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in
March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes.
Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis,
making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the
program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told
him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed
location.
Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head
on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization
was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington
Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President
Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a
very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel
Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily
doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey,
accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the
streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital
stairs to beat them there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled
with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their
heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men.
"There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card
were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room.
The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so
disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature
from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.
What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey?
Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that
the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help
wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional
experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the
White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months
after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a
tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation
involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger
mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the
databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article
conceded.
Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President
Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first
disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush
insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as
part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."
Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything
about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise
that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides
in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would
trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and
effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has
steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former
government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of
domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between
Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be
considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources
familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been
overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the
protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth
Amendment.
According to a senior government official who served with
high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database
of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are
considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The
database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost
instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is
sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source
claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially
suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to
everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and
possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague
as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over
the last three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or]
technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include
eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful
obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and
order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military
invasion abroad" could be a trigger.
Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in
several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New
York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of
emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were
developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go
into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected
underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and
Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of
secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then
CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from
Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.)
The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress
and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes,
within a matter of hours, a police state.
Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration
suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that
recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane
victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less
surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of
its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the
wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent
organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize
private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The
agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments,
and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them
without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the
comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may
seem farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000
Japanese-Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention
camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful
moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents
indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been
abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for
instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for
rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes" who were to be held
at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin
American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10
detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of
thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval.
More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown &
Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to
establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department
of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the
facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support
the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be
is not specified.
In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might
play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities
undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the
Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a
tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential
domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone
call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might
hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some
instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might
be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be
detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the
worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively
unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching
surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers
must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are
becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.
Another well-informed source—a former
military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence
community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the
1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been
told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of
targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network
analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools.
"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the
software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it
will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the
illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific
targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in
the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort
exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous
other agency databases at the same time."
A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply
data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs,
initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as
"warrantless wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street
Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the
NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now
electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet
searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and
telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift
through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is
a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the
article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort
also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose
existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials.
"Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks
but have since been given greater reach."
The following information seems to be fair game for collection
without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the
subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that
dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you
visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline
tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the
goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is
archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into
the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that,
in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and
broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified
"private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as
the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law
enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the
Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to
include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border
crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000
names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury
Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds
transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a
Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and
environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any
indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various
stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and
journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many
other harmless, average people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active
high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in
the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004
hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database
was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S.
citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the
name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal approval
was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly briefed by
people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had discovered that
President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and
compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized
searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that
'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic
surveillance project."
If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA
counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department
of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being
compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the
CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I
suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints."
Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists
and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic
security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master
lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list
are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a
master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be
many names on it for many reasons—quite likely, including the two of
us."
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional
scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald
Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national
emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to
collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—" if
Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these
things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually
impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy
programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no
notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress
remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is—even in
secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own
favor."
The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's
suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be
misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence
Finding anyway."
But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere
existence of the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use
of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually
unfathomable," the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do
nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a
world renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent
terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event
data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise
predictions."
The overzealous compilation of a
domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the
FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the
names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly
expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to
the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency
situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by
"the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation
later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors,
teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers,
newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists;
other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and]
individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed
"subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained
and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of
none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).
FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness
Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a
1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of
heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's
character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained
electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information
gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in
the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of
Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976
investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount
Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the
personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96
Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities.
According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without
any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret
even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans
came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan
loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the
development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for
suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to
FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run
state and local
governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards
of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at
least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.
North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas
Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987
Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in
Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency
[FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply
concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had
worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran,
immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly
sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that,
sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not
allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional
damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure
White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS
(ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and
controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for
example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single
record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center,
North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States.
Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's
blacklist looks downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that
government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still
have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts
expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community
puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of
still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House.
Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under
Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the
programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?"
Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
In July 2007 and again last August, Rep.
Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland
Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush
administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was
prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51),
issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority
to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the
emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee,
including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review
of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for
disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last
August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of
Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same
time, he told the Oregonian, "Maybe the people who think there's a
conspiracy out there are right."
Congress itself has recently widened the path for both
extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of
military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to
designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges
accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense
Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use
of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment
of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted
under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a
wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other
serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the
U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post
military intelligence
expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency
military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or
control."
"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off,"
says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein.
"To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability.
There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for
example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S.
citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the
invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you
associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic
administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to
stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do
not.' "
As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson,
and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect
America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the
act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from
litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the
surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core.
The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be
unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has
disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading
presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly
pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue
aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush
administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio
and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of
the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an
"endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and
Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology
deployed against every act of political expression, private or public?
(Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and
Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.)
These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank
Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic
intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government
could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there
would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine
together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done,
is within the reach of the government to know." |
