Similarly, listen to the compelling testimony of anti-drilling activist Virginia Cody after she discovered she had been spied on by the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security by authorities who actively worked with industry officials to quash dissent.
Also noteworthy is the fact that Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs) and Fusion Centers combine local and state police jurisdiction with federal jurisdiction. So crowd control, something not usually within federal jurisdiction, becomes a "joint" activity. The CIA has members on these joint task forces and fusion centers, even though the CIA charter bars the organization from operating domestically.
The fix would be to stop equating protest, including acts of civil disobedience, with terrorism. The Patriot Act's definition of domestic terrorism begins with these words: "Acts dangerous to human life...." Protest and dissent - and even acts of civil disobedience involving trespass and minor property damage - do not constitute acts of terrorism. Issues of crowd control, even during large marches and rallies, do not normally threaten national security and should not involve federal authorities.
4) Front-loaded "statistical achievements" are the main way of evaluating job performance inside the FBI and probably the other 3,000 or so agencies and contractors thought to be operating in "Top Secret America." The 854,000 operatives, agents, analysts, private contractors and consultants (believed to average about $90,000 per year in salary) are under more than a little pressure to prove they are earning their generous paychecks and in competition with each other to move up the ranks. So an elaborate grading system is used that checks the initial projection of work in a quantitative, not qualitative way. An FBI agent, for instance, collects "stats" for opening files, disseminating information, adding individuals to a terrorist database or a watch list, serving subpoenas and national security letters for records, recruiting and contacting secret sources and informants, executing searches/seizures, making arrests, and getting people charged and/or convicted. Given the change of emphasis from prosecution to intelligence data collection and analysis, more and more of the "stats" do not involve any judicial oversight. The danger exists that the pressure of producing "stats" would encourage FBI agents and personnel of the other 3,000 entities to open fruitless investigations and try to fit garden-variety crimes into the terrorism category.
Pressure to "pre-empt" plus lack of oversight in managing "top-echelon informants" lead to repeated examples of opportunistic targeting and entrapment of people not predisposed to commit crimes.
Cases that don't pan out or were never justified to begin with, like the "terrorism enterprise investigation" of the students in Iowa City referred to earlier, can fulfill this unending need for "stats." Ultimately, if no quality-over-quantity mechanism is found to evaluate work performance, agencies are likely to return to the Cold War-era "post and float" system of "papering files." McCarthyism and COINTELPRO-type abuses are bound to recur, this time with "terrorist" substituted for the old bogey of "communist."
5) Because the 9-11 Commission was very concerned about the much greater authority being given to the FBI and other agencies in the "war on terror," three of their 41 recommendations concerned the creation of a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). The FBI Director assured the ACLU that civil liberties would be upheld. The PCLOB was statutorily forced on Bush by Congress, but he assured its powerlessness and later dismantled it. Obama has thus far totally ignored the issue by not appointing anyone to the PCLOB.Revise the method of collecting and proving "statistical accomplishments" to favor quality over quantity. At a minimum, ensure that "statistical achievements" are subtracted when actions are found to have unjustifiably targeted advocacy groups or interfered with a person's constitutional rights without proper cause.
Fix the situation by immediately appointing five PCLOB commissioners and empower them to interact with and provide mandated training to all national security agencies, contractors and consultants. In addition, allow PCLOB to directly hear and evaluate whistleblower complaints relating to abuses, and to access reports from Civil Liberties/Privacy Officers in each agency, as is done by the Office of Government Ethics.
6) Intelligence failures as well as abuses are the predictable outcome of massive and irrelevant data collections, which only add hay to the haystack and make it even harder to spot patterns. Abuses and failures result from excessive over-classification (see "WikiLeaks and 9-11: What If?") and improper use of the "State Secrets" privilege, which keeps cases out of the courts and negates government whistleblower protection. The English historian Lord Acton, who observed that power corrupts, also noted that, "Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."
This great cartoon drawn by Ben Sargent says it all but only begins to capture the irony of our current situation. While governmental targeting of domestic advocacy, peace and environmental groups are jaw-dropping revelations, the even worse news is that these same agencies have failed to stop real terrorist violence and attempted violence. No government agency connected the dots before Fort Hood shooter Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded 30, flight passenger Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to ignite his "underwear bomb" in the air over Detroit or Faisal Shahzad planted his car bomb in Times Square. Yet all of these terrorist events involved individuals in direct communication with the very same Yemeni cleric who was also connected to three of the 9-11 hijackers.
The news gets even worse. We now know that the CIA ignored prior warnings regarding a suicide bomber they were hoping to use as a double agent who attacked a CIA outpost in eastern Afghanistan, and that the scout who planned the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 was a former DEA informant who U.S. officials had sent to train in Pakistan. Yet the FBI had been warned years before that the DEA informant worked for Al Qaeda.
Why would joint terrorism task forces go after American students and peace and labor activists while failing to detect and stop genuine acts of terrorism? This combination of misplaced zeal, incompetence and opportunism has consequences for our freedom and our safety. It is time for Top Secret America to ask itself whether its own flawed and contradictory assumptions and strategies are furnishing "material aid to terrorism."
JOIN THE NATIONAL DAY OF ACTION TUESDAY, JANUARY 25, 2011
In December 2010, under the direction of U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, the FBI delivered 9 new subpoenas in Chicago to anti-war and Palestine solidarity activists -- bringing the total number of subpoenaed activists to 23. These nine activists are being ordered to appear before the Grand Jury in Chicago on January 25. In response hundreds of organizations and thousands of people in over 30 cities will be protesting at Federal Buildings (including Minneapolis), FBI offices, and other appropriate places on this date. Everyone who is concerned about the erosion of their security or civil liberties is invited.
(Editing assistance from Hugh Iglarsh, writer/editor/citizen based in Chicago. A shorter version of this piece originally appeared as an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune on January 16 "Coleen Rowley: We're conflating proper dissent and terrorism".)
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