Subject: Fwd: Grannies make Rolling Stone!

From: "Thomas Atwood" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 23:59:13 -0700

Well! The Raging Grannies made it to the pages of the Rolling Stone!
(At least the online version - cross your fingers for the hard copy.)

Congratulations to Ruth Robertson and the Grannies for getting on the
radar screen of the intrepid domestic surveillance network of the
Department of Homeland Security, along with Quakers and Unitarians and
the Veterans for Peace! Who's next - the Barbershop Harmony Society?

This would be funnier if it weren't tragic.

Thomas

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Raging Grannies of the Peninsula <[email-masked]>
Date: Apr 19, 2006 11:45 PM
Subject: Grannies make Rolling Stone
To: [email-masked], [email-masked]

>From RollingStone.com
Haven't checked to see if it's in the hard copy version yet.  Fingers
crossed, cuz if it is we'll be singing the oldie but goodie Dire
Straits song "Cover of the Rolling Stone" with some new words...here
it is below in full, with Granny part highlighted.
PS to Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane...Arnie is gonna be
at Bush rally on Friday, can you haul out the old "We can't Catch
Osama but can spy on your Grandma" sign?
Grannies: We are greeting Bush in San Jose end of this week, when he
makes a visit to California and our arch enemy Gov. Schwarzenegger
will be there too!
Granny Ruth R.
The Pentagon's New Spies
The military has built a vast domestic-intelligence network to fight
terrorism -- but it's using it to track students, grandmothers and
others protesting the war

Last October, before the public learned that president Bush had
secretly ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on
Americans without a court order, the Pentagon approached the Senate
intelligence committee with an unprecedented request. Military
officials wanted the authority to spy on U.S. citizens on American
soil, without identifying themselves, in order to collect intelligence
about about terrorist threats. The plan was so sweeping, according to
congressional sources who reviewed it, that it would have permitted
operatives from the Defense Intelligence Agency to spy on dissidents
by posing as peace activists and infiltrating anti-war meetings.
Senators on both sides of the aisle refused to go along with the plan.
"The Department of Defense should not be in the business of spying on
law-abiding Americans -- period," said Sen. Ron Wyden, a Democrat from
Oregon. In closed-door deliberations, the intelligence committee
blocked the request.
In fact, however, the Pentagon has already assembled a nationwide
domestic spying machine that goes far beyond the National Security
Agency's warrantless surveillance of telephone and e-mail traffic.
Operating in secret, the Defense Department is systematically
gathering and analyzing intelligence on American citizens at home --
and a new Pentagon agency called Counterintelligence Field Activity
(CIFA) is helping to coordinate the military's covert efforts with
federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Those responsible for the military's new spy network insist that it is
aimed at preventing another attack by Al Qaeda. "The premise is that
there needs to be a nexus to foreign terrorism," says David Burtt,
CIFA's director. "In the wake of 9/11, there was a lot of criticism
about the ability to collect dots and connect dots."
So far, the military's efforts at domestic spying have caught few, if
any, terrorists. But the Pentagon has tracked the activities of
anti-war activists across the country who have staged peaceful
demonstrations against military bases and defense contractors such as
Halliburton. Traditionally restricted to action overseas, America's
armed forces -- including the National Guard -- are now linked in a
growing domestic spying apparatus which, thanks to technology, has far
greater power than the Army units that conducted a massive operation
to infiltrate, disrupt and destabilize Vietnam and civil rights
protests during the 1960s and '70s. "We are deputizing the military to
spy on law-abiding Americans in America," said Wyden. "This is a huge
leap without even a congressional hearing."
* * * *
Intelligence gathered by the military runs into and out of the U.S.
Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here, beneath the
snow-covered summit of Pike's Peak, the Defense Department has set up
its first command dedicated to homeland security in a gleaming new $90
million facility. Before Northcom was established in 2002, the
facility was best known as the home of the North American Aerospace
Defense Command, the ultra-high-tech war room depicted in the movie
WarGames, where sharp-eyed military personnel spent the Cold War
watching for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union.
Nowadays, the place is more like a real-life version of the
counterterrorism unit on 24. Judging from the bustle of activity at
Northcom, anti-terrorism is good for business. The corridors are
filled with dust from construction and the smell of paint, and a
brand-new wing is nearly ready to open. Over the past four years,
Northcom has doubled in size and now boasts a staff of 1,200 and an
annual budget of $93 million.
At the center of the operation is a core group of 300 intelligence
analysts and staff who inhabit Northcom and its state-of-the-art
facility, called the Combined Intelligence Fusion Center.
"Intelligence fusion" is a spy master's term of art that refers to
melding together data from all points -- including intelligence
agencies, the armed forces, law enforcement and other sources -- and
analyzing all the seemingly disparate information for patterns. "The
fusion and analysis that these kids do is different than anything I've
seen in forty years," says Adm. Timothy Keating, the commander of
Northcom.
The intelligence streaming into the center can be anything from highly
polished analyses from the CIA and FBI to the military's own alerts
and warnings. At the bottom are Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs)
filed by many government agencies, which are often little more than
rumors based on unfounded information -- a financial officer who notes
an odd money transfer or a military spouse who spots a suspect
individual near a base. More official are Threat and Local Observation
Notices (TALONs), part of a surveillance program started by the
Pentagon in 2003. More than 15,000 TALONs have been collected so far,
from sources such as soldiers manning gates outside military bases,
law-enforcement agencies, local businesses and the media. The SARs and
TALONs -- along with intelligence from the armed forces, such as the
U.S. Air Force program known as Eagle Eyes -- are eventually
integrated into a single intelligence database called JPEN, for the
Joint Protection Enterprise Network.
In its homeland-security role, Northcom has mobilized troops for
hundreds of events since 2002, including the Super Bowl, the Daytona
500, Boy Scout jamborees and the presidential inauguration. The
sixty-four members of its instant command center, including an
intelligence team that can be mobilized in hours, have been sent into
action at special events nine times in the past two years. In
addition, scores of federal agencies -- from the CIA and FBI to the
Coast Guard and FEMA -- have officials based at Northcom to coordinate
their work. "We're fully integrated with the Special Operations
Command," says Maj. Gen. Richard Rowe, Northcom's director of
operations. "We have people who've done operations from a Special Ops
perspective."
Inside Northcom's operations center, where wall-size screens flank
rows of computer terminals linked to federal agencies, military
analysts monitor everything from the president's travels to routine
air traffic. A placard in the war room lists fourteen events that
merit immediate attention -- "we call them 'wake me up in the middle
of the night' stuff," says Col. Bob Felderman of Northcom operations.
Adds another Northcom official, "We get reports if somebody's pounding
on a cockpit door in flight, or there's a drunk passenger, or
somebody's taped a note in an airplane restroom." But the list also
includes a category for "civil disturbances of more than 1,000
persons" -- a directive broad enough to include an anti-war
demonstration or anti-globalization protest.
Keating, a gray-haired commander who led the U.S. Fifth Fleet, insists
that Northcom does not spy on Americans. "We are not allowed to gather
intelligence on U.S. persons unless there is a clearly defined,
well-understood terrorist nexus," he says.
Ever since 1878, when the Posse Comitatus Act barred the U.S. military
from taking part in law enforcement, the responsibility for domestic
security has traditionally resided with the police and the FBI. The
Defense Department, for the most part, has been confined to protecting
U.S. military bases. But shortly after September 11th, the Pentagon
began muscling in on the FBI's turf. In 2002, in a move that received
little public attention, the Bush administration created
Counterintelligence Field Activity and charged the new agency with
consolidating all Pentagon intelligence to "protect DOD and the nation
against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage,
assassinations and terrorist activities."
The agency got another boost last year when a commission appointed by
Bush urged that CIFA be empowered to collect and analyze intelligence
"both inside and outside the United States." Three of the commission's
consultants, it turns out, were employees of MZM -- one of CIFA's
primary contractors -- and federal prosecutors are now looking into
whether Pentagon personnel have committed crimes in steering CIFA
contracts to MZM. Nevertheless, the president agreed last October to
significantly broaden the agency's mission, giving it the authority to
actually direct military intelligence operations. From a small unit
designed as a clearinghouse for reports, CIFA was transformed
overnight into a major arm of domestic intelligence. Both its budget
and its staff, thought to be in excess of 1,000 people, are
classified.
According to a Defense Department strategy paper, military spying
encompasses not only "defense critical infrastructure" -- highways,
bridges, communications facilities, chemical plants and nuclear
reactors -- but also the "defense industrial base," which the paper
describes as "a worldwide industrial complex with capabilities to
perform research and development and design, produce, and maintain
military weapons systems, subsystems, components or parts to meet
military requirements." In other words, the Pentagon sees itself as
defending the entire military-industrial complex -- a mission broad
enough to include intelligence on virtually any conceivable threat.
* * * *
It didn't take long for the pentagon to begin using its new powers to
collect intelligence on anti-war groups. In December, NBC News
reported that CIFA had collected dozens of incident and threat reports
on peace activists and other nonviolent organizations that have
nothing to do with terrorism. By matching the unnamed groups in the
news reports to specific activities of activists nationwide, the
American Civil Liberties Union discovered that the military's spying
effort had ensnared the American Friends Service Committee, United for
Peace and Justice, and Veterans for Peace, as well as local anti-war
groups from Florida to California.
A group at University of California Santa Cruz called Students Against
the War was included in CIFA's terrorism database in April 2005, when
it staged a protest against military recruiters on campus. Although
the protest was peaceful, a TALON report called the demonstration a
"threat," an assessment that CIFA deemed "credible." A Florida group
called the Truth Project ended up in the database in November 2004,
when they gathered at a Quaker meetinghouse to plan a protest against
high school recruiting by the military. Five months earlier, ten peace
activists in Texas merited a TALON report for donning papier-m?ch?
masks and handing out peanut-butter sandwiches to highlight "war
profiteering" outside the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney's
former firm, the defense contractor Halliburton.
In May 2005, a California group called the Raging Grannies ran afoul
of military spies when it helped organize a peaceful Mother's Day
demonstration to protest the war in Iraq. Unbeknownst to them, their
action was brought to the attention of a new intelligence unit at the
California National Guard -- a program that went by the cumbersome
title of Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management, and
Intelligence Fusion. According to internal e-mails, the Guard
forwarded information about the protest "to our Intell folks who
continue to monitor."
Asked why the Guard was spying on the Grannies, a spokesman suggested
that terrorists might try to take advantage of the activists. "Who
knows who could infiltrate that type of group and try to stir
something up?" Lt. Col. Stan Zezotarski told reporters. "After all, we
live in an age of terrorism, so who knows?"
Joe Dunn, a California state senator, was having none of it. He
launched an investigation and helped force the Guard to shut down its
intelligence center. "What got us to the point of the National Guard
setting up units in which, at least in California, they start down the
path of domestic spying?" he asks. "Our fear is that this was part of
a federally sponsored effort to set up domestic surveillance programs
in a way that would circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act."
The ACLU, which is demanding more information about CIFA's activities,
cites a "broad and disturbing pattern" in the military's intelligence
gathering, saying the efforts are being used to target legitimate
protesters. "The chilling effect of this may be the most significant,"
says ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner. "There is a real danger when the
military is seen as being used as part of the administration's
political goals."
According to Denice Denton, the chancellor at Santa Cruz, the
military's covert intelligence operation is already deterring dissent.
"It has intimidated people," she says. "I spoke to one of the students
involved, and she feels intimidated about speaking openly because she
is being watched. Students wonder, 'How was this information being
collected? Were people standing behind a tree?' "
Some of the military intelligence, in fact, appears to be based on
very little intelligence. "These reports are nothing more than a
gossip and rumor index," says Christopher Pyle, a former Army
intelligence officer who exposed some of the abuses by military spy
agencies in the 1960s. "A lot of them are filed by paranoid housewives
and rabid, retired colonels with nothing better to do than spy on the
people around them."
With the military spying on peace groups, some activists say they are
on the lookout for moles within their own ranks. Ray Del Papa, who
attended the Truth Project meeting in Florida, told reporters that he
believes government agents infiltrated the organization. "You could
pretty much pick out who are the infiltrators," he said. "It gets you
mad. It is wrong for anyone from the government to have to spy on U.S.
citizens."
No one disputes that the Pentagon has a responsibility to protect its
facilities and personnel. But its broad definition of "terrorism"
could easily lead it back into the business of targeting legitimate
protesters. In the late 1960s, more than 1,500 Army personnel tracked
a wide range of dissident groups and monitored every demonstration
involving more than twenty people, amassing files on more than 100,000
Americans.
The Pentagon has apologized for the latest abuses and pledged to clean
up its act. Robert Rogalski, acting deputy undersecretary of defense
for counterintelligence and security, says a complete review of CIFA's
database is under way, adding that any data on dissidents was included
by mistake. "We've laid our dirty laundry on the table, we recognize
that mistakes were made, and we've done the right thing," he says. "It
did cause us to realize that we have to sharpen the focus."
But it may be hard to undo the damage. By law, TALON reports that do
not warrant further investigation are supposed to be purged from all
databases after ninety days. Yet the information is shared with so
many agencies, there is simply no way for citizens to know that their
names have been cleared. "It's impossible to know how many databases
there are," says Jim Harper, an information-policy specialist at the
conservative Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. "And every other week,
databases are being combined."
The broader threat is that military spies will gradually expand their
anti-terrorist mission to include more and more ordinary citizens.
"The danger is that we create an apparatus for spying -- and that
becomes the essential apparatus of a police state," says Pyle, the
former intelligence officer. "It goes from clipping articles to
sending people out to watch protesters to taking video and sending it
back to the Pentagon. If some kids knock down a power line somewhere,
soon they'll be looking at every member of Earth First! and the Earth
Liberation Front." The military's intelligence gathering got out of
hand thirty-five years ago, Pyle observes. "And my sense is," he says,
"the bureaucracy forgets stuff like that."
ROBERT DREYFUSS
Posted Apr 18, 2006 8:18 PM

--
_________________
Thomas Atwood
2824 Louis Road
Palo Alto CA 94303
650-759-5060

"Remembering the future by our actions every day."