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from here on April 05, 2009
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm
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The Last Roundup
For decades the federal government has
been developing a highly classified plan that would override the Constitution in
the event of a terrorist attack. Is it also compiling a secret enemies list of
citizens who could face detention under martial law?
By Christopher Ketcham
05/05/08 [EA note: "This article first appeared in"] "Radar Magazine" -- -
28/04/08 --- -
In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official
in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and
ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It
was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a
highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it
included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense
meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat
so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the
Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political
foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly
uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and
spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine
he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however,
that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide
whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification
deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney
general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his
decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his
concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.
Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night
of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At
the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following
emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the
White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man,"
sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales
on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney
general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by
a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the
capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them
there.
Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the
requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their
heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men.
"There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card
were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room.
The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so
disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature
from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.
What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs
buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was
subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering
whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even
average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did
he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's
testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The
program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches
through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact,
however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining,
raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.
Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself.
Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures
of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted
that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of
planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."
Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called
Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the
president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a
nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger
the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively
suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused
to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and
intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance
operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White
House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential
threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program
say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably
conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable
search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
According to a senior government official who served with high-level security
clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who,
often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and
who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and
locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other
sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name
Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now
listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national
emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened
surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national
emergency." Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a
"natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency,"
while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of
violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder
prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even
"national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.
Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American
cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City.
Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is
declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed
during the Cold War and have been aggressively revised since 9/11 go into
effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground
complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power
shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly
preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a
pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were
slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive
branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the
judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a
matter of hours, a police state.
Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this
parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved
themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The
agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one
considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on
planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a
decapitating nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the
Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public
property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could
dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could
order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for
as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable
perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem
farfetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000
Japanese-Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention
camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful
moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents
indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been
abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for
instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for
rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes" who were to be held
at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin
American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention
camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of
people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such
facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a
subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish
"temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland
Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities
would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid
development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not
specified.
In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like
this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake
unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department
of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously
broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic
threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call,
others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a
knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances,
the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested
and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without
counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when
COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress
or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be
the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections
put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America
than any outside threat.
Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by
members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots
going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense
Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that
makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of
associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling
tools.
"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can
predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to
for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal
information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An
intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the
Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists,
but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other
agency databases at the same time."
A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main
Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the
wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless
wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed
further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts:
According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge
volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank
transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities
employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for
"suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private
lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility
of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc
collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the
Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various
agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater
reach."
The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a
warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject
lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to
your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the
keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy;
the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services
you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government
supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull
from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast
media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private
sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the
Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law
enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist
Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about
435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which
listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former
NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program,
also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created
in 2002 to monitor anti-war protestors and environmental activists such as
Greenpeace.
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database
includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax
protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners,
illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average
people.
A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances
and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging
technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey
expressed concern over how this secret database was being used "to accumulate
otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time."
Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was
being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story
would be." A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence
community adds: "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to
use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database
on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had
concluded that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of
the overall NSA domestic surveillance project."
If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would
have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI would be
restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is at DHS,
which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that DHS
already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely
adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. "It's clear
that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is
not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear."
Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main
Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for
many reasons—quite likely, including the two of us."
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce
Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the
question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national emergency, the
executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to collect domestic
intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—" if Congress doesn't
explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest,
and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to
contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court
"when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on
the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the
law will be whatever the president says it is—even in secret. He will be the
judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor."
The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the
offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: "Bush [may
have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway."
But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the
database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this
information against the American people is so great as to be virtually
unfathomable," the senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us
safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world renowned
expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist
conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data,"
Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."
The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war
American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar
Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect
American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to
declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated
that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be
held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By
1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious
persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers
and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field;
lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a
local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish
financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI
"security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it
was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the
FBI denied this at the time).
FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own
domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by
Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing
champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the
film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at
least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging
computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret
underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The
senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive
magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of
pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping
the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to
other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's
databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its
surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the
Senate."
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A
report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra
conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret
contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the
Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the]
appointment of military commanders to run
state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the
detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of
American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential
holding camps.
North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack
Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra
hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami
papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA]
that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply
concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had
worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran,
immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly
sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that,
sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not
allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that
North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software
database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS,
which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track
individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from
disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the
computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential
troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's
enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist looks downright crude." Sources
have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today,
including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days
when North was running his programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded
dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it,
"The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of
still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House.
Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under
Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the
programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?"
Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon
and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to
the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government
program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential
Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the
executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national
emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this
unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman
Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity
of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have
been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio
went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans
are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told
the Oregonian, "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are
right."
Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional
detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a
national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended
habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American
citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill
of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in
2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major
Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not
just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and
the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities,
including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency,
terrorist attack, or incident."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern
Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence
expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United
States without civilian supervision or control."
"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional
lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national
emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt
that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to
refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be
detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch.
They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with
cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you
have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know,
democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.' "
As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House
are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in
the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens;
instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding
with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of
databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that
appear to be unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass
of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been
asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the
country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance
programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG
blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read?
What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked
by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society,"
alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy
thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act
of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to
spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had
yet to receive any responses.)
These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in
the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence
crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The technological
capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable
it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no
way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in
resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the
reach of the government to know."
end
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