Union Leader – Laura K. Donohue: Beware the long arm of. . . the Pentagon? – Saturday, May. 20, 2006

For the first time since the Civil War, the United States has been designated a military theater of operations. The Department of Defense — which includes the NSA — is focusing its vast resources on the homeland. And it is taking an unprecedented role in domestic spying.

It may be legal. But it circumvents three decades of efforts by Congress to restrict government surveillance of Americans under the guise of national security. And it represents a profound shift in the role of the military operating inside the United States. What’s at stake here is the erosion of the principle, embedded in the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, that the U.S. military not be used for domestic law enforcement.

When the administration declared the United States to be a theater of military operations in 2002, it created a U.S. Northern Command, which set up intelligence centers in Colorado and Texas to analyze the domestic threat. But these are not the military’s only domestic intelligence efforts. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Pentagon controls “a substantial portion” of U.S. national intelligence assets, the traditional turf of the FBI and CIA. [mjh: Specifically, at least 80% of money spent on spying is in the Pentagon’s budget. Rumsfeld is our new J. Edgar Hoover.] …

These misguided military forays into domestic surveillance harken back to Vietnam War-era abuses. This time, they are the result of a much broader intelligence-gathering effort by the military on U.S. soil. President Bush said last week, ”We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans.“ But a 2004 survey by the General Accounting Office found 199 data-mining operations that collect information ranging from credit-card statements to medical records. The Defense Department had five programs on intelligence and counterterrorism. …

In 2002, the Defense Department launched the granddaddy of all data-mining efforts, Total Information Awareness, to trawl through all government and commercial databases available worldwide. In 2003, concerned about privacy implications, Congress cut its funding. But many of the projects simply transferred to other Defense Department agencies. Two of the most important, the Information Awareness Prototype System and Genoa II, moved to NSA headquarters.

The Pentagon argues that its monitoring of U.S. citizens is legal. “Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on intelligence” agencies collecting information on Americans or disseminating it, says a memo by Robert Noonan, deputy chief of staff for intelligence. Military intelligence agents can receive any information “from anyone, any time,” Noonan wrote.

Throughout U.S. history, we have struggled to balance security concerns with the protection of individual rights, and a thick body of law regulates domestic law-enforcement agencies’ behavior. Congress should think twice before it lets the behemoth Defense Department into domestic law enforcement.

America the Fearful by Bob Herbert, New York Times

In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public’s fear is this president’s most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.

Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear – so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.

If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known. …

The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.

Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.

There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.

ABQjournal: Letters to the Editor

No U.S. Safeguards for Detainees

RE: “GITMO Visits Reveal Policy Gone Bad” commentary

The article is a travesty. Mahvish Khan is an absolute dupe of the Taliban and al-Qaida. The Guantanamo detainees are trained by al-Qaida to lie through their teeth to elicit sympathy for them and their cause.

The writer doesn’t show a shred of evidence about the veracity of their statements, yet she believes them implicitly, thereby damning the honorable soldiers who captured these terrorists or terrorist sympathizers, and the soldiers and sailors who treat these despicable people with respect and excellent treatment.

The American writer of this op-ed went in with a built-in bias and an agenda. There is absolutely no objectivity in the article. The detainees were captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and should be tried by military tribunals.

They are not U.S. citizens and are not entitled to the protections of the U.S. Constitution.

JACK MAHER
Albuquerque

Let us remember that we don’t necessarily know the truth about every single person we’ve imprisoned. It has to be conceivable that one in 400 is neither a liar nor guilty. These are not simply soldiers rounded up in the middle of battle. These are suspects and we all know how trustworthy our intelligence has been in larger matters.

Perhaps we have no obligation to treat these people as we would hope we would treat American citizens with the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair, speedy and open trial. But, they are where they are in part to be certain they can’t be touched by our judicial system. And, if our own standards of justice are so flexible, why should any American citizen expect any better treatment. Mr Maher could be declared an enemy combatant tonight and disappear. Surely he knows that.

Maher has the right to object to Mahvish Khan’s story, but he is very willing to accept the sketchy claims of an administration that seems incompetent and untrustworthy in many matters. mjh

mjh’s blog — I felt that my own country had taken a wrong turn

Guantanamo’s innocuous men By Mahvish Khan, Special to The Washington Post

Budget Cut Would Shutter EPA Libraries By Christopher Lee, Washington Post Staff Writer

Proposed budget cuts could cripple a nationwide system of Environmental Protection Agency libraries that government researchers and others depend on for hard-to-find technical information, library advocates say.

The $2 million cut sought by the White House would reduce the 35-year-old EPA Library Network’s budget by 80 percent and force many of its 10 regional libraries to close, according to the advocates and internal agency documents.

That, in turn, would dramatically reduce access to certain EPA reports, guidance and technical documents that are used by the agency’s scientific and enforcement staff as well as private businesses and citizens, they say. …

The public has a lot at stake in the future of these libraries, said Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group that obtained internal EPA documents on the proposed cuts.

“We view this as another example of the Bush administration marginalizing EPA research so that the agency scientists and other specialists can’t do their jobs,” Ruch said. “And then in the absence of information, plans by industries and others that have environmental implications go forward.”