You’re not actually
surprised that domestic spying will prove extremely profitable to a few large corporations, are you? mjh
Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
By
Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
Updated: 6:18 p.m. ET Dec. 14, 2005
A year ago, at
a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high
schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.
A secret
400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more
than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.
“This peaceful, educationally oriented group
being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project. …
The DOD database
obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far
from any military installation, post or recruitment center. …
Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense
Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. …
“I think Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far,” says NBC
News military analyst Bill Arkin. …
“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the
descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the
beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.” …
Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) is becoming
the superpower of data mining within the U.S. national security community. Its “operational and analytical records”
include “reports of investigation, collection reports, statements of individuals, affidavits, correspondence, and other documentation
pertaining to investigative or analytical efforts” by the DOD and other U.S. government agencies to identify terrorist and other threats.
Since March 2004, CIFA has awarded at least $33 million in contracts to corporate giants Lockheed Martin, Unisys
Corporation, Computer Sciences Corporation and Northrop Grumman to develop databases that comb through classified and
unclassified government data, commercial information and Internet chatter to help sniff out terrorists, saboteurs and spies. …
Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says “there is
very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this
slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again,” he says.
Some of the targets of
the U.S. military’s recent collection efforts say they have already gone too far.
“It’s absolute paranoia — at the highest levels of our government,” says Hersh of The Truth
Project.
“I mean, we’re based here at the Quaker Meeting House,” says Truth Project member Marie Zwicker, “and several of us are
Quakers.”