[links included online]

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/022106a.html

Bush's Mysterious 'New Programs'

By Nat Parry
February 21, 2006

Not that George W. Bush needs much encouragement, but
Sen. Lindsey Graham suggested to Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales a new target for the administration’s
domestic operations -- Fifth Columnists, supposedly
disloyal Americans who sympathize and collaborate with
the enemy.

“The administration has not only the right, but the
duty, in my opinion, to pursue Fifth Column
movements,” Graham, R-S.C., told Gonzales during
Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on Feb. 6.

“I stand by this President’s ability, inherent to
being Commander in Chief, to find out about Fifth
Column movements, and I don’t think you need a warrant
to do that,” Graham added, volunteering to work with
the administration to draft guidelines for how best to
neutralize this alleged threat.

“Senator,” a smiling Gonzales responded, “the
President already said we’d be happy to listen to your
ideas.”

In less paranoid times, Graham’s comments might be
viewed by many Americans as a Republican trying to
have it both ways – ingratiating himself to an
administration of his own party while seeking some
credit from Washington centrists for suggesting
Congress should have at least a tiny say in how Bush
runs the War on Terror.

But recent developments suggest that the Bush
administration may already be contemplating what to do
with Americans who are deemed insufficiently loyal or
who disseminate information that may be considered
helpful to the enemy.

Top U.S. officials have cited the need to challenge
news that undercuts Bush’s actions as a key front in
defeating the terrorists, who are aided by “news
informers” in the words of Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com
“Upside-Down Media” or below.]

Detention Centers

Plus, there was that curious development in January
when the Army Corps of Engineers awarded Halliburton
subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root a $385 million
contract to construct detention centers somewhere in
the United States, to deal with “an emergency influx
of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid
development of new programs,” KBR said. [Market Watch,
Jan. 26, 2006]

Later, the New York Times reported that “KBR would
build the centers for the Homeland Security Department
for an unexpected influx of immigrants, to house
people in the event of a natural disaster or for new
programs that require additional detention space.”
[Feb. 4, 2006]

Like most news stories on the KBR contract, the Times
focused on concerns about Halliburton’s reputation for
bilking U.S. taxpayers by overcharging for sub-par
services.

“It’s hard to believe that the administration has
decided to entrust Halliburton with even more taxpayer
dollars,” remarked Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California.

Less attention centered on the phrase “rapid
development of new programs” and what kind of programs
would require a major expansion of detention centers,
each capable of holding 5,000 people. Jamie Zuieback,
a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
declined to elaborate on what these “new programs”
might be.

Only a few independent journalists, such as Peter Dale
Scott and Maureen Farrell, have pursued what the Bush
administration might actually be thinking.

Scott speculated that the “detention centers could be
used to detain American citizens if the Bush
administration were to declare martial law.” He
recalled that during the Reagan administration,
National Security Council aide Oliver North organized
Rex-84 “readiness exercise,” which contemplated the
Federal Emergency Management Agency rounding up and
detaining 400,000 “refugees,” in the event of
“uncontrolled population movements” over the Mexican
border into the United States.

Farrell pointed out that because “another terror
attack is all but certain, it seems far more likely
that the centers would be used for post-911-type
detentions of immigrants rather than a sudden deluge”
of immigrants flooding across the border.

Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said,
“Almost certainly this is preparation for a roundup
after the next 9/11 for Mid-Easterners, Muslims and
possibly dissenters. They’ve already done this on a
smaller scale, with the ‘special registration’
detentions of immigrant men from Muslim countries, and
with Guantanamo.”

Labor Camps

There also was another little-noticed item posted at
the U.S. Army Web site, about the Pentagon’s Civilian
Inmate Labor Program. This program “provides Army
policy and guidance for establishing civilian inmate
labor programs and civilian prison camps on Army
installations.”

The Army document, first drafted in 1997, underwent a
“rapid action revision” on Jan. 14, 2005. The revision
provides a “template for developing agreements”
between the Army and corrections facilities for the
use of civilian inmate labor on Army installations.

On its face, the Army’s labor program refers to
inmates housed in federal, state and local jails. The
Army also cites various federal laws that govern the
use of civilian labor and provide for the
establishment of prison camps in the United States,
including a federal statute that authorizes the
Attorney General to “establish, equip, and maintain
camps upon sites selected by him” and “make available
… the services of United States prisoners” to various
government departments, including the Department of
Defense.

Though the timing of the document’s posting – within
the past few weeks –may just be a coincidence, the
reference to a “rapid action revision” and the KBR
contract’s contemplation of “rapid development of new
programs” have raised eyebrows about why this sudden
need for urgency.

These developments also are drawing more attention now
because of earlier Bush administration policies to
involve the Pentagon in “counter-terrorism” operations
inside the United States.

Pentagon Surveillance

Despite the Posse Comitatus Act’s prohibitions against
U.S. military personnel engaging in domestic law
enforcement, the Pentagon has expanded its operations
beyond previous boundaries, such as its role in
domestic surveillance activities.

The Washington Post has reported that since the Sept.
11, 2001, terror attacks, the Defense Department has
been creating new agencies that gather and analyze
intelligence within the United States. [Washington
Post, Nov. 27, 2005]

The White House also is moving to expand the power of
the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity
(CIFA), created three years ago to consolidate
counterintelligence operations. The White House
proposal would transform CIFA into an office that has
authority to investigate crimes such as treason,
terrorist sabotage or economic espionage.

The Pentagon also has pushed legislation in Congress
that would create an intelligence exception to the
Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share
information about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA
and other intelligence agencies. But some in the
Pentagon don’t seem to think that new laws are even
necessary.

In a 2001 Defense Department memo that surfaced in
January 2006, the U.S. Army’s top intelligence officer
wrote, “Contrary to popular belief, there is no
absolute ban on [military] intelligence components
collecting U.S. person information.”

Drawing a distinction between “collecting” information
and “receiving” information on U.S. citizens, the memo
argued that “MI [military intelligence] may receive
information from anyone, anytime.” [See CQ.com, Jan.
31, 2005]

This receipt of information presumably would include
data from the National Security Agency, which has been
engaging in surveillance of U.S. citizens without
court-approved warrants in apparent violation of the
Foreign Intelligence Security Act. Bush approved the
program of warrantless wiretaps shortly after 9/11.

There also may be an even more extensive surveillance
program. Former NSA employee Russell D. Tice told a
congressional committee on Feb. 14 that such a
top-secret surveillance program existed, but he said
he couldn’t discuss the details without breaking
classification laws.

Tice added that the “special access” surveillance
program may be violating the constitutional rights of
millions of Americans. [UPI, Feb. 14, 2006]

With this expanded surveillance, the government’s list
of terrorist suspects is rapidly swelling.

The Washington Post reported on Feb. 15 that the
National Counterterrorism Center’s central repository
now holds the names of 325,000 terrorist suspects, a
four-fold increase since the fall of 2003.

Asked whether the names in the repository were
collected through the NSA’s domestic surveillance
program, an NCTC official told the Post, “Our database
includes names of known and suspected international
terrorists provided by all intelligence community
organizations, including NSA.”

Homeland Defense

As the administration scoops up more and more names,
members of Congress also have questioned the
elasticity of Bush’s definitions for words like
terrorist “affiliates,” used to justify wiretapping
Americans allegedly in contact with such people or
entities.

During the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the
wiretap program, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California,
complained that the House and Senate Intelligence
Committees “have not been briefed on the scope and
nature of the program.”

Feinstein added that, therefore, the committees “have
not been able to explore what is a link or an
affiliate to al-Qaeda or what minimization procedures
(for purging the names of innocent people) are in
place.”

The combination of the Bush administration’s expansive
reading of its own power and its insistence on
extraordinary secrecy has raised the alarm of civil
libertarians when contemplating how far the Pentagon
might go in involving itself in domestic matters.

A Defense Department document, entitled the “Strategy
for Homeland Defense and Civil Support,” has set out a
military strategy against terrorism that envisions an
“active, layered defense” both inside and outside U.S.
territory. In the document, the Pentagon pledges to
“transform U.S. military forces to execute homeland
defense missions in the … U.S. homeland.”

The Pentagon strategy paper calls for increased
military reconnaissance and surveillance to “defeat
potential challengers before they threaten the United
States.” The plan “maximizes threat awareness and
seizes the initiative from those who would harm us.”

But there are concerns over how the Pentagon judges
“threats” and who falls under the category “those who
would harm us.” A Pentagon official said the
Counterintelligence Field Activity’s TALON program has
amassed files on antiwar protesters.

In December 2005, NBC News revealed the existence of a
secret 400-page Pentagon document listing 1,500
“suspicious incidents” over a 10-month period,
including dozens of small antiwar demonstrations that
were classified as a “threat.”

The Defense Department also might be moving toward
legitimizing the use of propaganda domestically, as
part of its overall war strategy.

A secret Pentagon “Information Operations Roadmap,”
approved by Rumsfeld in October 2003, calls for “full
spectrum” information operations and notes that
“information intended for foreign audiences, including
public diplomacy and PSYOP, increasingly is consumed
by our domestic audience and vice-versa.”

“PSYOPS messages will often be replayed by the news
media for much larger audiences, including the
American public,” the document states. The Pentagon
argues, however, that “the distinction between foreign
and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG
[U.S. government] intent rather than information
dissemination practices.”

It calls for “boundaries” between information
operations abroad and the news media at home, but does
not outline any corresponding limits on PSYOP
campaigns.

Similar to the distinction the Pentagon draws between
“collecting” and “receiving” intelligence on U.S.
citizens, the Information Operations Roadmap argues
that as long as the American public is not
intentionally “targeted,” any PSYOP propaganda
consumed by the American public is acceptable.

The Pentagon plan also includes a strategy for taking
over the Internet and controlling the flow of
information, viewing the Web as a potential military
adversary. The “roadmap” speaks of “fighting the net,”
and implies that the Internet is the equivalent of “an
enemy weapons system.”

In a speech on Feb. 17 to the Council on Foreign
Relations, Rumsfeld elaborated on the administration’s
perception that the battle over information would be a
crucial front in the War on Terror, or as Rumsfeld
calls it, the Long War.

“Let there be no doubt, the longer it takes to put a
strategic communication framework into place, the more
we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by
the enemy and by news informers that most assuredly
will not paint an accurate picture of what is actually
taking place,” Rumsfeld said.

The Department of Homeland Security also has
demonstrated a tendency to deploy military operatives
to deal with domestic crises.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the department
dispatched “heavily armed paramilitary mercenaries
from the Blackwater private security firm, infamous
for their work in Iraq, (and had them) openly
patrolling the streets of New Orleans,” reported
journalists Jeremy Scahill and Daniela Crespo on Sept.
10, 2005.

Noting the reputation of the Blackwater mercenaries as
“some of the most feared professional killers in the
world,” Scahill and Crespo said Blackwater’s presence
in New Orleans “raises alarming questions about why
the government would allow men trained to kill with
impunity in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to
operate here.”

U.S. Battlefield

In the view of some civil libertarians, a form of
martial law already exists in the United States and
has been in place since shortly after the 9/11 attacks
when Bush issued Military Order No. 1 which empowered
him to detain any non-citizen as an international
terrorist or enemy combatant.

“The President decided that he was no longer running
the country as a civilian President,” wrote civil
rights attorney Michael Ratner in the book Guantanamo:
What the World Should Know. “He issued a military
order giving himself the power to run the country as a
general.”

For any American citizen suspected of collaborating
with terrorists, Bush also revealed what’s in store.
In May 2002, the FBI arrested U.S. citizen Jose
Padilla in Chicago on suspicion that he might be an
al-Qaeda operative planning an attack.

Rather than bring criminal charges, Bush designated
Padilla an “enemy combatant” and had him imprisoned
indefinitely without benefit of due process. After
three years, the administration finally brought
charges against Padilla, in order to avoid a Supreme
Court showdown the White House might have lost.

But since the Court was not able to rule on the
Padilla case, the administration’s arguments have not
been formally repudiated. Indeed, despite filing
charges against Padilla, the White House still asserts
the right to detain U.S. citizens without charges as
enemy combatants.

This claimed authority is based on the assertion that
the United States is at war and the American homeland
is part of the battlefield.

“In the war against terrorists of global reach, as the
Nation learned all too well on Sept. 11, 2001, the
territory of the United States is part of the
battlefield,” Bush's lawyers argued in briefs to the
federal courts. [Washington Post, July 19, 2005]

Given Bush’s now open assertions that he is using his
“plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in
Chief for the duration of the indefinite War on
Terror, Americans can no longer trust that their
constitutional rights protect them from government
actions.

As former Vice President Al Gore asked after
recounting a litany of sweeping powers that Bush has
asserted to fight the War on Terror, “Can it be true
that any President really has such powers under our
Constitution? If the answer is ‘yes,’ then under the
theory by which these acts are committed, are there
any acts that can on their face be prohibited?”

In such extraordinary circumstances, the American
people might legitimately ask exactly what the Bush
administration means by the “rapid development of new
programs,” which might require the construction of a
new network of detention camps.

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