DOMESTIC SPYING: Pentagon Creates CIFA
24 January 2006 9:02 am by Taylor Marsh
DOMESTIC SPYING: Pentagon Creates CIFA
Late on a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of
about 10 peace activists showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton,
the giant military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They
were there to protest the corporation's supposed “war profiteering.”
The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work. The idea, according
to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to allegations that the company
was overcharging on a food contract for troops in Iraq. “It was tongue-in-street
political theater,” Parkin saysTo U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence
Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential
threat to national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department,
CIFA's role is “force protection”—tracking threats and terrorist
plots against military installations and personnel inside the United States.
In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a fact-gathering
operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local Observation Notice—that
would collect “raw information” about “suspicious incidents.”
The data would be fed to CIFA to help the Pentagon's “terrorism threat
warning process,” according to an internal Pentagon memo.
The Other Big Brother
Yesterday, Kevin
Drum talked about the fact that people are now thinking the Bush
administration isn't data mining on the illegal NSA spying program. As Drum
suggests, if they weren't doing this, then the White House obviously had a program
in place that the FISA court could have handled. But Bush didn't go to that
court. Why?
If the Iraq war intel is an indicator of White House actions,
it seems obvious to construe that the White House believed they didn't have
the goods to get FISA to go along, so they just did what they wanted anyway. Considering FISA doesn't refuse requests very often it really makes you wonder. Is Bush going to spy on people
just because he thinks it's important, regardless of whether he is legally within the law?
Michael Isikoff's story about the Pentagon's newly discovered
top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit offers new insight on what the Bush administration thinks they can do in this new world in which we've been plunged.
CIFA spied on a Halliburton protest of a bunch of people handing
out peanut butter sandwiches because the company is a defense contractor, so
it came under scrutiny, getting the attention of this top-secret unit. However,
the real rub, besides the fact that the unit couldn't distinguish between a paper and real threat, is that CIFA evidently kept records of the peanut butter sandwich
protesters in a large database.
This brings us back to TALON, which seems to have
spawned CIFA, the story that broke in December
by Lisa Miers of NBC. Paul Wolfowitz was the mastermind, setting up a picture of a vast domestic spying apparatus, which
also has a stored database component that keeps records on, at least in some
cases, very ordinary, not to mention innocent, American citizens.
But seriously, besides the legal issues, which seem serious to
me, isn't a little discretion required in this whole domestic James Bond world
W. is setting up?
If we can't distinguish terrorists from peanut butter sandwich
protesters, we're in a lot bigger trouble than we think.
Not to mention the reality that beyond the illegal NSA spying
program, we've got some serious top-secret domestic intelligence going on in
the U.S. After all that's gone on so far under this president, makes you wonder,
does Congress know about CIFA? I'd like to hear the answer to that one.
