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Myths of Mideast Arms Sales

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

The Bush administration’s proposal to send $20 billion worth of arms and $43 billion in military aid to U.S. allies in the Middle East has been promoted by repeating a series of time-worn myths that should have long since been abandoned. With a shooting war in Iraq and a war of words with Iran well under way, the last thing the region needs is a new influx of high tech weaponry.

The suggestions of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that this flood of armaments will be “stabilizing” in the short term while underscoring the U.S. commitment to “moderates” in the region over the longer term is a prime example of this historical amnesia.

Take Saudi Arabia, which continues to pursue policies that are moderate in name only. Not only is Riyadh one of the most undemocratic regimes in the world, but it has more often than not used its financial resources to promote extremism and repression elsewhere. From financing fundamentalist madrassahs in Pakistan to supporting Sunni insurgents in Iraq, the regime has a long track record of opposing the values of democracy and moderation that the Bush administration claims are the overarching principles of its foreign policy. It’s hard to see how selling Saudi Arabia more military equipment will change this pattern, any more than arming the Shah of Iran in the 1970s and the Afghan rebels in the 1980s promoted stability in those countries.

Some elements of the proposed package are particularly disturbing. Satellite guided bombs are not “defensive weapons”,” as the administration claims. Using them would be ill-advised, if not disastrous.

This raises the question of who exactly would Riyadh use these weapons against. Iran? Iraq? Israel? Internal opponents?

Iran has no intention of invading Saudi Arabia; if it wants to undermine Saudi security it is far more likely to work via proxy, a tactic that the Saudis are well-equipped to counter in kind.

An attack on Iraq in the context of a civil war would only exacerbate tensions and help savage any remnants of stability that remain there.

Attacking Israel would be a suicide mission, given Tel Aviv’s substantial military superiority. The only plausible scenarios - and the ones most feared by Israeli officials - would be if a rogue pilot attempted to strike without authorization or an even more extremist regime were to overthrow the current Saudi government.
Last but not least, using satellite guided bombs against armed extremists within Saudi Arabia would be the wrong tool for the job, like trying to kill a swarm of mosquitoes with a sledge hammer. Good intelligence would be a far more effective tool. What if the Bush administration tried to foster greater intelligence cooperation instead of casting its two top cabinet officials in the role of second-rate arms brokers?

In the short-term, these scenarios may not be high probability events, but as the U.S. experiences with arming the Shah of Iran and the Afghan rebels demonstrate, weapons supplied now can be used against U.S . interests down the road as political conditions change.

If a symbol of U.S. commitment to Saudi Arabia is needed, there are plenty of other tools at Washington’s disposal, in the realms of diplomacy, economic cooperation, and coordinated law enforcement efforts, among others. Not to mention the fact that the funds the Saudis expend for this proposed deal would be far more productive - and stabilizing - if they were invested in economic and social programs within the kingdom.

For all of these reasons, the U.S. Congress must take preemptive action to try to derail or reshape the Middle East arms package. Since Congress was granted the right to stop major arms deals via a joint resolution of disapproval under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976, it has never successfully done so via a formal vote. But there have been instances where the threat of Congressional action has led to the restructuring or delaying of specific deals.

A successful effort to block or reshape the Mideast arms package must begin with detailed hearings as soon as Congress starts its fall term. Waiting for a formal notification from the executive branch, as skeptics like Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Joseph Biden and House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Tom Lantos have pledged to do, will be too little too late. Given the inherent problems with this arms package, it is unlikely to withstand public scrutiny. It is up to Congress to take the lead in promoting a real debate on this critical issue.

William D. Hartung is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the New America Foundation

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Iraqi government on brink of collapse following cabinet walkouts

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

By James Cogan

The political survival of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is in doubt following the withdrawal from his cabinet of two political blocs that derive the bulk of their support from Iraq’s Sunni Arab population. A variety of sectarian and ethnic cliques in Baghdad are reportedly involved in discussion with the Bush administration over ousting Maliki and forming a new government when the Iraqi parliament resumes in September.

Five ministers from to the Iraqi Accordance Front (IAF) resigned their positions last Wednesday. On July 25, the IAF gave Maliki seven days to announce a major purge of Shiite militia members within the new Iraqi army and police, increased funding for government services in Sunni areas and the release of thousands of Sunnis detained in US and government prisons on suspicion of involvement in the anti-occupation insurgency. In their resignation statement, the Sunni ministers accused Maliki of “arrogance” and having “led Iraq to a level of misery it had not seen in modern history”.

The IAF functions as the political wing of the powerful Association of Muslim Scholars (AMS), an organisation of several thousand clerics who bitterly resent the loss of Sunni influence following the US overthrow of the largely Sunni-based Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Since 2003, Shiite fundamentalist opponents of Baath Party rule have dominated the various US puppet governments in Baghdad. The AMS regularly accuses the Shiite-led government of infiltrating Shiite militias into the security forces to murder Sunni opponents. It also alleges the government deliberately restricts services and reconstruction work in Sunni areas.

The walkout by the Sunni ministers had one primary aim: to end Maliki’s ability to claim he heads a “national unity” government that represents all Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic groups—one of the Bush administration’s so-called benchmarks. On Monday, they were joined by four ministers from the Iraqi National List of Iyad Allawi, who announced they will boycott all cabinet meetings until Maliki ends his “marginalisation” of Sunnis.

A total of 17 ministers have now left or are boycotting his cabinet. A member of Allawi’s list resigned earlier this year while six ministers from the Sadrist Shiite movement walked out in April. The Sadrists, who posture as opponents of the US occupation, resigned after Maliki rejected the demand of their leader, cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, for a timetable specifying when all foreign troops would leave Iraq. The latest defections reduce the cabinet to a barely functioning rump.

There is no doubt that the Bush administration is behind the effort to bring down Maliki’s government. Iyad Allawi is little more than a US stooge. In the lead-up to the war, he had a hand in fabricating the lies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraqi people would welcome a US invasion. He was rewarded in 2004, when the occupation installed him as the country’s unelected interim prime minister. He undoubtedly harbours ambitions to retake the position and would have sought Washington’s blessing before announcing his List’s boycott of the cabinet.

Speaking from a luxury villa in Jordan where he spends much of his time, Allawi summed up the US attitude toward Maliki in the New York Times this week: “The national unity government is a myth, not a reality. The political process is going nowhere.”

US frustrations with Maliki have been growing since he was named by the ruling United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) as its candidate for prime minister in May 2006. He has been repeatedly accused by the US military of thwarting its attempts to destroy the powerful Sadrist militia—the Mahdi Army. While no longer in the cabinet, the Sadrists still provide the main base of support for Maliki within the Shiite UIA, along with his own Da’wa Party. The other major party in the coalition, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), wants one of its leaders, current vice-president Adel Abdul Mahdi, to be prime minister.

This year, Maliki has failed to even secure the necessary support within his own coalition, let alone other factions, for Washington’s “benchmarks”. Among the main US demands are legislation that would open Iraq’s oil industry to foreign investment and an end to the policy of “de-Baathification” that prevents thousands of predominantly Sunni ex-members of Hussein’s party from holding government or military positions. In US circles, the marginalisation of former Baathists is held responsible for a large part of the insurgency in Iraq.

Fueling US antagonism toward not only Maliki but all the Shiite factions in Iraq are their political and religious relations with Iran. Under conditions of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran, many Shiite politicians still consider Iran the natural ally of a Shiite-dominated Iraqi state. Maliki again caused outrage in Washington by meeting on Wednesday with Iranian leaders and declaring Iran was playing a “constructive role” in stabilising Iraq. A major element of US propaganda against Tehran is the accusation that Iranian special forces are supplying rogue Sadrist militiamen with explosives to attack US troops.

Throughout this year, the US military has been shifting away from a Shiite-led government in Baghdad. It has sought to develop an alternative base of support for the US occupation in Sunni areas. Millions of dollars have been handed out to secure alliances with Sunni tribal leaders and insurgent groups across Baghdad and western and central Iraq. In the main, these new Sunni allies are utterly hostile to Maliki’s government, which they denounce as a puppet of Iran rather than Washington.

The 25,000 Sunni militiamen who have been recruited are viewed by Maliki as a threat to Shiite power. His objections, however, have been ignored by the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and dismissed by the Bush administration.

The abandonment of Maliki’s government by the Sunni IAF and Allawi’s List is bringing these simmering tensions to a head. With just 21 ministers still loyal to the prime minister out of the original 38, there is tremendous pressure even within the Shiite UIA to propose an alternative leader rather than risk being excluded from power altogether.

Intense manoeuvring is underway. Saleh al-Mutlaq, the leader of the small Sunni Iraqi National Dialogue Front, told the New York Times this week that he was seeking talks with the IAF, Allawi’s group and the anti-UIA Shiite Fadhila Party over forming a rival coalition. If such a grouping were able to get the support of the 55-strong Kurdistan Alliance (KA) in the parliament, it would have an outright majority and could govern without any of the Shiite fundamentalist parties. Allawi would be the most likely candidate for prime minister.

According to the Egypt-based Al-Ahram, the Bush administration is working on another option. Bush has reportedly held phone conversations over the past two weeks with SIIC’s leading candidate for prime minister, Adel Abdul Mahdi, as well as the party’s leader, cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. He has also spoken with Kurdish president Jalal Talabani and Sunni vice-president Tariq Hashemi.

The US is apparently backing the creation of a new coalition consisting of SIIC, factions of Da’wa prepared to abandon Maliki, Allawi’s List, Hashemi’s faction of the Iraqi Accordance Front and the Kurdish parties. Allawi or Mahdi would head such a government. It would exclude Maliki and the Sadrists, as well as Fadhila and Sunni groupings such as Mutlaq’s which are antagonistic toward US demands for the sell-off of Iraq’s oil.

The price being demanded by the Kurdish parties is clear. They would want Kurdish control over the northern city of Kirkuk and the oilfields that surround it. Hinting at their willingness to be bought, Talabani pointedly declared last week that the Sunni criticisms of Maliki were “mostly fair”. Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish legislator, told the Al-Ahram Weekly that the Kurdish parties wanted to enhance “reconciliation by including Allawi in the political process”.

SIIC’s collaboration in a move against Maliki has a similar price. It has been pushing for the creation of an autonomous region in its southern Iraqi stronghold that would control the country’s southern oilfields. SIIC’s regionalism is bitterly opposed and would be resisted by the Baghdad-centred Sadrist movement. If SIIC and the Kurdish parties have their way, Iraq will be effectively partitioned along ethnic and sectarian lines—a move that can only accelerate large-scale ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence and instability, not only in Iraq but throughout the region.

The Bush administration’s barely disguised efforts to oust Maliki once again make a mockery of its claims to have created a sovereign, democratic government in Baghdad. Whatever the final outcome of its political manipulations, the White House is seeking a new regime that will more effectively implement US demands, particularly for the opening up of Iraqi oilfields to US corporations, and ruthlessly suppress ongoing opposition to the occupation. Moreover, by eliminating or at least diluting Shiite influence in the Baghdad government, the US is clearing the decks for a sharp escalation of its confrontation with Iran, including the use of military force.

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Database of top-secret police phone taps stolen

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

By Ruth Elkins

Police chiefs have launched a major investigation after the theft of a computer database containing thousands of top-secret mobile phone records from terrorism and organised crime investigations.

Scotland Yard is concerned that crucial evidence from undercover investigations could be lost forever or has found its way into “the wrong hands” after the computer and other IT equipment disappeared from a private firm in Sevenoaks, Kent, last Monday night after a break-in.

Forensic Telecommunications Services, whose clients include Scotland Yard, The Police Service of Northern Ireland, HM Revenue and Customs and the Crown Prosecution Service, specialises in tapping mobile phone calls made by criminal suspects. The stolen security-protected server contained the minutiae of phone calls it had screened, including the identity of the person who had made the call, as well as the exact time and location of the suspect when the call was made.

In a statement released to The Mail on Sunday, Forensic Telecommunications Services confirmed that the equipment had been stolen from its offices but denied that its disappearance would impact negatively on current police cases.

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ID cards ‘could be a Big Brother tax trap’

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

By Christopher Hope

Identity cards could provide a back door for the taxman to snoop on people’s affairs using a database of National Insurance numbers.

The card system will use an existing NI database to log details, potentially making it easier for tax inspectors to keep tabs. Officials had hoped to base ID cards on a National Identity Register but will instead use the Customer Information System run by the Department of Work and Pensions.

This holds the records of everyone with a NI number, sparking concerns that HM Revenue & Customs could track a person’s personal life through their ID card, which must be produced whenever a proof of identity is required.

Guy Herbert, spokesman for the NO 2 ID campaign, said people would create an “audit trail” when they used their cards. This would be linked to their NI numbers.

“Of course ID cards are a tax-gathering tool,” he said. “When the Home Office talks about ‘preventing illegal working’ it is getting you to think of illegal immigrants, but an employer ‘verifying your status’ with the National Identity Register will create an audit trail of precisely who employs whom.”

Gareth Crossman, policy director at Liberty, added: “The Government sold us the ID card scheme under the guise of terror and crime protection, but the reality is that it has the potential for massive, unanticipated state access into our private lives.”

Damian Green, the Conservatives’ shadow immigration minister, said: “The public will be alarmed at this sinister Big Brother development.”

The Government denied that the database would be used for tax enforcement. A spokesman said: “It is not connected to any plans for improved tax enforcement and the information held on NI records will not include any tax records whatsoever.”

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Court Says Travelers Can’t Avoid Airport Searches

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

By David Kravets

U.S. airline passengers near the security checkpoint can be searched any time and no longer can refuse consent by leaving the airport, the nation’s largest federal appeals court ruled Friday.

The decision (.pdf) by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the circuit’s 34-year-old precedent that over time was evolving toward limiting when passengers could refuse a search and leave the airport after they had checked their bags or placed items on the security screening X-ray machine. Citing threats of terrorism, the court ruled passengers give up all rights to be free of warrantless searches once a “passenger places hand luggage on a conveyor belt for inspection” or “passes though a magnetometer.”

“…Requiring that a potential passenger be allowed to revoke consent to an ongoing airport security search makes little sense in a post-9/11 world,” Judge Carlos Bea wrote for the unanimous 15-judge panel. “Such a rule would afford terrorists multiple opportunities to attempt to penetrate airport security by ‘electing not to fly’ on the cusp of detection until a vulnerable portal is found.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has never squarely addressed the limits of the Fourth Amendment in the context of airport searches. The attorney representing a man imprisoned for drug possession who tried to leave the airport rather than be searched is weighing whether to petition the justices to review the decision.

The case concerns Daniel Aukai, a Hawaiian man arrested with 50 grams of methamphetamine at the Honolulu International Airport in 2003. After he passed the initial screening station to board a flight to Kona, Hawaii, he was placed in a secondary search, as required by government protocol, because he did not have identification. He refused the search and asked to leave. Transportation Security Officials searched him and discovered the drugs and a glass pipe.

He was handed 70 months. (See Ryan’s story from last year.) The sentence was upheld by the San Francisco appeals court.

“This is a post-9/11-bunker mentality,” said Aukai’s attorney, Pamela O’Leary Tower of Honolulu. “He said ‘I want to leave.’ The purpose of an airport search is to keep people off planes with bombs. The opinion seems to gut that.”

In 1973, the circuit court ruled that airport searches were valid “only if they recognize the right of a person to avoid search by electing not to board the aircraft.” In later rulings, the court began backing off, ruling passengers could not opt out of searches if they had checked luggage or if carry-on items were flagged during the initial screening to enter the terminal area.

The case is United States v. Aukai, 04-10226.

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America under surveillance

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Granted new power to spy inside the U.S., the Bush administration may be doing more than eavesdropping on phone calls — it could be watching suspects’ every move.

By Tim ShorrockIn the pre-dawn hours of Sept. 1, 2005, a U-2 surveillance aircraft known as the Dragon Lady lifted off the runway at Beale Air Force Base in California, the home of the U.S. Air Force 9th Reconnaissance Wing and one of the most important outposts in the U.S. intelligence world. Originally built in secret by Lockheed Corp. for the Central Intelligence Agency, the U-2 has provided some of the most sensitive intelligence available to the U.S. government, including thousands of photographs of Soviet and Chinese military bases, North Korean nuclear sites, and war zones from Afghanistan to Iraq.

But the aircraft that took off that September morning wasn’t headed overseas to spy on America’s enemies. Instead, for the next six hours it flew directly over the U.S. Gulf Coast, capturing hundreds of high-resolution images as Hurricane Katrina, one of the largest storms of the past century, slammed into New Orleans and the surrounding region.

The U-2 photos were matched against satellite imagery captured during and after the disaster by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. Relatively unknown to the public, the NGA was first organized in 1996 from the imagery and mapping divisions of the CIA, the Department of Defense and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that builds and maintains the nation’s fleet of spy satellites. In 2003, the NGA was formally inaugurated as a combat support agency of the Pentagon. It is responsible for supplying overhead imagery and mapping tools to the military, the CIA and other intelligence agencies — including the National Security Agency, whose wide-reaching, extrajudicial spying inside the United States under the Bush administration has been a heated political issue since first coming to light in the media nearly two years ago.

The NGA’s role in Hurricane Katrina has received little attention outside of a few military and space industry publications. But the agency’s close working relationship with the NSA — whose powers to spy domestically were just expanded with new legislation from Congress — raises the distinct possibility that the U.S. government could be doing far more than secretly listening in on phone calls as it targets and tracks individuals inside the United States. With the additional capabilities of the NGA and the use of other cutting-edge technologies, the government could also conceivably be following the movements of those individuals minute by minute, watching a person depart from a mosque in, say, Lodi, Calif., or drive a car from Chicago to Detroit.

Prior to Katrina, the NGA had been used sporadically during domestic crises. Its first baptism of fire came after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when the agency collected imagery to help in the recovery efforts at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the storm of 2005 triggered NGA activity on a scale never before seen inside the borders of the United States. “Hurricane Katrina changed everything with what we do with disasters,” John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA’s Office of Americas, told Salon. In New York after 9/11, the NGA had only a handful of people on the ground, but “with Katrina, we put a lot of people down in the theater,” he said, using a term usually reserved for overseas military battlegrounds. The agency now deploys its staff on a regular basis to hurricane zones and also provides assistance to law enforcement agencies during events such as the Super Bowl, the baseball All-Star Game and political conventions.

On one level, the engagement of the NGA and the U-2 flights over the Gulf Coast during Katrina were commendable efforts to use America’s vast surveillance powers for the safety and support of its citizens. But at the same time, the incident apparently marked the first time in history that U.S. intelligence agencies created to spy on foreign countries were deployed to collect extensive information on the U.S. “homeland.” Their role during Katrina is just one aspect of an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure put in place by the Bush administration ever since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks sparked a radical restructuring and expansion of America’s intelligence system. Although the full scope of domestic surveillance under Bush remains elusive, we now know from press accounts, lawsuits, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and other top Bush officials’ descriptions and denials that the NSA has been involved in multiple domestic surveillance programs — in apparent violation of federal law — including spying on Americans’ telecommunications and Internet traffic, as well as data mining.

In December 2004, the NSA and the NGA announced the signing of an agreement to share resources and staff and to link their “sources, data holdings, information infrastructure, and exploitation techniques.” The document spelling out the agreement itself is classified. But in a press release the NGA explained that the pact allows “horizontal integration” between the two agencies, defined as “working together from start to finish, using NGA’s ‘eyes’ and NSA ‘ears.’”

The collaboration makes it possible for the agencies to create hybrid intelligence tools that enhance the ability of U.S. forces in combat. By combining intercepts of cellphone calls with overhead imagery gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), for example, intelligence analysts can track suspected terrorists or insurgents in Iraq in real time. Last November, NGA director Robert B. Murrett disclosed that it was through such technology that the U.S. military was able to locate and bomb the safe house where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, was staying in June 2006. “Eventually, it all comes down to physical location,” he told reporters. When NSA and NGA data are combined, he added, “the multiplier effect is dramatic.”

Nine months prior, during Hurricane Katrina, the NGA’s sophisticated surveillance tools, which can create three-dimensional maps, helped first responders identify hospitals, schools and areas where hazardous materials were stored in the Gulf Coast region. And in an unprecedented move, the NGA distributed thousands of unclassified images of stricken areas, via the Internet, to the public. “People could actually see their houses,” said retired Air Force Gen. James R. Clapper, the NGA director at the time of Katrina. In an interview with Salon before his appointment in April as undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Clapper said that the NGA’s work during the hurricane was “the most graphic example in my 40 years of intelligence of coming to the direct aid of people in extreme circumstances.”

The purpose and utility of such intelligence tools in a disaster area, or in a war zone, are clear. But given the Bush administration’s highly secretive, aggressive policies in the war on terror, what’s to stop the NGA and the NSA from collaborating on other types of real-time surveillance at home?

This past Saturday, Congress approved legislation expanding the ability of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop, without warrants, on telephone calls, e-mail and faxes passing through telecommunications hubs in the United States when the government suspects terrorists may be involved. The legislation, which expands the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was negotiated between the White House and lawmakers in response to a federal court ruling this summer determining that the NSA’s past eavesdropping had violated the law. Mike McConnell, the retired Navy admiral who was appointed last January as the nation’s second director of national intelligence, told Congress that the ruling drastically reduced the ability of the NSA to track terrorists, while Bush warned that, because of the ruling, the government was “missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country.”

The fear of Democratic leaders that their party might be further accused of being soft on terrorism apparently prompted them to vote for the new FISA legislation — handing new unilateral surveillance powers to the executive branch while significantly diminishing judicial oversight. Civil liberties groups and lawmakers opposed to the legislation believe the changes will make it easier for the government to spy on U.S. citizens, because the more loosely defined FISA statute now allows warrantless surveillance of people communicating with others who are “reasonably believed to be outside the United States.” During the House debate last Saturday night, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., described the bill as an enormous loophole that will grant the attorney general the ability to “wiretap anybody, any place, any time without court review, without any checks and balances.”

President Bush signed the measure into law on Sunday.

The NGA, which has a staff of 14,000 and an estimated budget of about $2.5 billion (the actual amount is classified), buys most of its imagery from commercial satellite vendors, but it also relies on highly classified overhead photography captured by the National Reconnaissance Office’s fleet of military satellites. According to David H. Burpee, the NGA’s director of public affairs, the agency operates under strict oversight rules that ban it from collecting imagery over the United States without a formal request from a “lead” domestic agency coordinating efforts during a disaster. In the case of Katrina, the NGA’s assistance was requested by the Federal Emergency Management Administration. In a statement to Salon, Burpee said that the NGA collects intelligence “in accordance with Constitutional law, federal law, and executive policies such as Executive Order 12333.” (That order, signed in 1981 by President Reagan, includes a mandate for federal agencies to cooperate with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.) Any questions involving domestic operations would have to be directed to the lead agency requesting NGA support, Burpee added.

It is unclear how the latest changes to FISA might affect other intelligence agencies besides the NSA. But the zeal with which McConnell and Bush pursued the new legislation unbridling the NSA — which could presumably tap the NGA for assistance with operations at home, just as it does in the war zones — raises stark questions about the administration’s intentions with domestic intelligence.

A close look at the NSA programs suggests that the Bush administration is casting the widest net possible. To date, President Bush and administration officials have acknowledged only a narrow aspect of domestic spying — referred to as the Terrorist Surveillance Program — which they admitted, in the wake of media reports, included the warrantless wiretapping of phone calls. But in May 2006, USA Today reported on a program that involved the NSA’s gaining access to huge customer databases maintained by AT&T and other telecommunications providers. In another alleged program, discovered by AT&T technician Mark Klein and disclosed in a lawsuit against the telecom provider filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the NSA attached what amounts to an electronic hose to AT&T Internet data lines in San Francisco and other cities and diverted global Internet traffic and phone calls to a special room, where calls and messages were analyzed with powerful computers to find clues to terrorist cells. A Salon report in June 2006 uncovered what appeared to be a nexus for such activity in a secret room at an AT&T facility in St. Louis.

Then, last month, the New York Times disclosed that a dispute in 2003 between the White House and the Justice Department over NSA operations involved a potential fourth program using “computer searches through massive electronic databases” that contained the records of tens of thousands of domestic phone calls and e-mails. McConnell acknowledged multiple programs, albeit without specifics, in a July 31 letter to Arlen Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “A number of these intelligence activities were authorized in one order” by Bush shortly after 9/11, McConnell wrote. With regard to the administration’s Terrorist Surveillance Program, he added: “This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged.” Many FISA experts, such as James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology, have concluded that the NSA was running at least three domestic surveillance programs, including data mining. “I think the TSP was an after-the-fact name given to an activity, or a set of activities, or a whole subset of activities” by the NSA, Dempsey said.

After 9/11, the paradigm for domestic law enforcement shifted radically, by making it the duty of the government to use its intelligence resources to help law enforcement agencies preempt attacks before they happened, beyond the traditional practice of gathering evidence to prove that a crime had already occurred. The idea that the U.S. homeland was now a battleground (or a “theater”) first took hold in 2002, when the Pentagon established the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado to provide command and control of military efforts within U.S. borders. Northcom was given two primary responsibilities: providing military security during national emergencies, including terrorist attacks and natural disasters; and protecting important U.S. military bases in the 50 states. As part of the Pentagon’s domestic security mission, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2002. But CIFA soon became a weapon against anyone suspected of harboring ill-will against the Bush administration and its policies. CIFA was caught spying on antiwar groups, Quakers and other organizations. Even though Clapper and his boss, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates, have expressed concerns about CIFA’s reach, the agency remains an integral part of the Pentagon’s counterterrorism efforts.

The link between Pentagon-driven intelligence operations and the homeland was underscored during the Katrina crisis by the NGA’s deployment to New Orleans of a special vehicle called a Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System, or MIGS, which is loaded with equipment that allows NGA analysts to download intelligence from U-2s and U.S. military satellites. The vehicles were first deployed by the NGA in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later to the Gulf Coast. “They’re pretty much the NGA in a Humvee — very military,” said Goolgasian, the NGA official. “But it kind of sticks out like a sore thumb if you’re driving into an urban area” in the United States. As a result, the NGA has painted its domestic vehicles blue and renamed them Domestic MIGS, or DMIGS.

Military, intelligence agency and police work is also coming together in numerous “fusion centers” around the country in a joint program run by the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security that has received little public attention. At present, there are 43 current and planned fusion centers in the United States where information from intelligence agencies, the FBI, local police, private sector databases and anonymous tipsters is combined and analyzed by counterterrorism analysts. DHS hopes to create a wide network of such centers that would be tied into the agency’s day-to-day activities, according to the Electronic Privacy Information Center. The project, according to EPIC, “inculcates DHS with enormous domestic surveillance powers and evokes comparisons with the publicly condemned domestic surveillance program of COINTELPRO,” the 1960s program by the FBI aimed at destroying groups on the American political left.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how powerful technologies, when combined with secretive, growing interagency collaboration, could be misused in a domestic context. In recent years many U.S. cities have deployed sophisticated video cameras throughout their downtown areas that track activity 24 hours a day. And U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies now have at their disposal facial recognition software that can identify one person among thousands in a large crowd. Combine that with the awesome eavesdropping power of the NSA and the ability of the NGA to capture live imagery from satellites and UAVs, and the result could be an ability to track any individual, in real time, as he or she moves around.

John Pike, the director of GlobalSecurity.org, said the NGA is unlikely to be called upon for surveillance of an individual inside the United States. “NGA imagery is not what you would use to track people,” he said. But as the intelligence infrastructure, including the kinds of local camera-surveillance systems that proved so useful in identifying the perpetrators of the London subway bombings, expands in the United States, it raises the specter of a nationwide surveillance web. “These networks are going to get denser and going to cover more area over time,” Pike said. “At some point in time somebody’s going to drop in an automated face-print recognizer, and then they’re off to the races. Anybody who is currently wanted by the authorities, well, there’s just going to be parts of the country where such a person could not enter.”

The expanding role of U.S. intelligence agencies on the home front raises serious issues, according to Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, the commanding general on the scene in the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Katrina. Last fall, during a national conference on geospatial intelligence, he said, “Most of our capability [in the military] is kept on the classified side because that’s the best way to fight the enemy.” But the situation in the Gulf Coast, as the lines blurred, was complicated by conflicting policy directives. There were some people in government saying, “You’re not going to use the intel stuff on us,” Honoré recalled, while others were saying just the opposite: “Why aren’t you using that intel stuff to tell us what’s going on down there?” And then, there were people sitting back, saying, “They can’t do that inside the United States,” he said, adding, “This is one of the things government has to work out.”

In light of the mounting revelations about the Bush administration’s domestic spying, civil libertarians no doubt strongly agree.

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Bush’s war adviser says a return to the military draft is worth considering

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President George W. Bush’s new war adviser said Friday.

“I think it makes sense to certainly consider it,” Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute said in an interview with National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.”

“And I can tell you, this has always been an option on the table. But ultimately, this is a policy matter between meeting the demands for the nation’s security by one means or another,” Lute added in his first interview since he was confirmed by the Senate in June.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a “major policy shift” and Bush has made it clear that he does not think it is necessary.

“The president’s position is that the all volunteer military meets the needs of the country and there is no discussion of a draft. General Lute made that point as well,” National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

In the interview, Lute also said that “Today, the current means of the all-volunteer force is serving us exceptionally well.”

Still, he said, the repeated deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan affect not only the troops but their families, who can influence whether a service member decides to stay in the military.

“There’s both a personal dimension of this, where this kind of stress plays out across dinner tables and in living room conversations within these families,” he said. “And ultimately, the health of the all-volunteer force is going to rest on those sorts of personal family decisions.”

The military conducted a draft during the Civil War and both world wars and between 1948 and 1973. The Selective Service System, re-established in 1980, maintains a registry of 18-year-old men.

U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel has called for reinstating the draft as a way to end the Iraq war.

Bush picked Lute in mid-May as a deputy national security adviser with responsibility for ensuring efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are coordinated with policymakers in Washington. Lute, an active-duty general, was chosen after several retired generals turned down the job.

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