![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2012\/10\/goodman1.jpeg\" "\\"goodman\\"")
<\/a>Defense Department paper issued in 2012 exhorts its employees to \u201chammer this fact home\u2026leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Obama administration\u2019s initiative is called the Insider Threat Program and it is not restricted to the national security bureaucracy. The Department of Education has informed its employees that co-workers going through \u201ccertain life experiences,\u201d such as divorce or \u201cfrustrations with co-workers,\u201d could turn a trusted employee into \u201can insider threat.\u201d According to Taylor and Landay, the Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have produced online tutorials titled \u201cTreason 101\u201d to teach employees to recognize the psychological profile of spies. They say that the Peace Corps is implementing such a program.<\/p>\n
The Bush administration initiated similar programs to conduct surveillance against American citizens, not merely federal workers. Vice President Dick Cheney encouraged the Pentagon to create the Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) in 2003 to conduct surveillance against American citizens near U.S. military facilities, particularly against those Americans who attended antiwar meetings. In the summer of 2004, CIFA monitored a small protest in Houston, Texas against Halliburton, the giant military contractor once headed by Cheney. At the same time, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz created a fact-gathering operation called TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) to collect \u201craw information\u201d about \u201csuspicious incidents.\u201d The unauthorized spying of CIFA and the computer collection on innocent people and organizations for TALON were illegal; both organizations were eventually shut down.<\/p>\n
In addition to instituting the Insider Threat Program, the Obama administration has expanded the domestic reach of the intelligence community, perpetuated the culture of secrecy, and instituted a pervasive lack of transparency. Although President Obama has stated that American citizens are not the targets of the NSA\u2019s sweeping electronic collection system, it is possible that Britain\u2019s G.C.H.Q., London\u2019s counterpart to NSA, is collecting intelligence on Americans and sharing the information with Washington. Under a program called Tempora, the British communications intelligence agency has an unequalled capacity to tap high-capacity fiber cables. Britain, moreover, has a weak oversight regime, and G.C.H.Q. has a unique and storied collaboration with NSA and CIA.<\/p>\n
Our congressional intelligence committees have failed in their primary task\u2014providing oversight over this pervasive and secret surveillance system. Oversight and accountability must be part of government, particularly the secret agencies within government, and congressional oversight is needed to correct the collective harm that has been done to the United States and its reputation at home and abroad because of the zealous actions of the past decade.<\/p>\n
Vice President Cheney defended the Iraq War in 2003 on the basis of the infamous \u201cone percent doctrine,\u201d which justified the invasion on the grounds that if there was a one percent chance that something is a threat, it requires that the United States responds as if the threat was 100 percent certain. This logic has been applied in many ways to the problem of terrorism with the Department of Homeland Security and the 16 agencies of the intelligence community assuming that \u201cToday\u2019s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.\u201d As a result, the War on Terror has become a permanent fixture in our national security architecture, and an economic cornucopia for private contractors.<\/p>\n
Last month, President Obama told a high-ranking military audience at the National Defense University that our torture and detention policies \u201cran counter to the rule of law;\u201d that our use of drones will \u201cdefine the type of nation that we leave to our children;\u201d that even legal military tactics are not necessarily \u201cwise or moral in every instance;\u201d and that we must repeal the mandate of the Authorization to Use Military Force to fight terrorism. Referring to Guantanamo, he argued that holding \u201cpeople who have been charged with no crime on a piece of land that is not part of our country\u201d is not \u201cwho we are.\u201d And that \u201cleak investigations [that] may chill investigative journalism that holds government accountable\u201d is not \u201cwho we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
If so, then massive surveillance programs at home and abroad as well as massive informant networks within the entire federal bureaucracy should also not be who we are. It is long past time for President Obama to address these issues with operational policies and not mere rhetoric. The audacity of hope requires that he do so.<\/p>\n
<\/i>Melvin A. Goodman<\/strong><\/i><\/b><\/i>, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy. He is the author of the recently published\u00a0<\/i><\/i>National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism<\/a>\u00a0(City Lights Publishers)and the forthcoming \u201cThe Path to Dissent: The Story of a CIA Whistleblower\u201d (City Lights Publisher). Goodman is a former CIA analyst and a professor of international relations at the National War College.<\/i><\/p>\n