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 |  Subject: U.S. Intelligence Budget: $75 Billion, 200,000 Operatives. Fusion Centers Will Have Access to Classified Military Intelligence  Sun Sep 27, 2009 8:36 pm | |
| Speaking at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club September 15, Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis C. Blair, disclosed that the current annual budget for the 16 agency U.S. "Intelligence Community" (IC) clocks-in at $75 billion and employs some 200,000 operatives world-wide, including private contractors.
In unveiling an unclassified version of the National Intelligence Strategy (NIS),
Blair asserts he is seeking to break down "this old distinction between
military and nonmilitary intelligence," stating that the "traditional
fault line" separating secretive military programs from overall
intelligence activities "is no longer relevant."
As if to emphasize the sweeping nature of Blair's remarks, Federal Computer Week reported September 17
that "some non-federal officials with the necessary clearances who work
at intelligence fusion centers around the country will soon have
limited access to classified terrorism-related information that resides
in the Defense Department's classified network." According to the
publication:
Under the program, authorized state, local or tribal
officials will be able to access pre-approved data on the Secret
Internet Protocol Router Network. However, they won't have the ability
to upload data or edit existing content, officials said. They also will
not have access to all classified information, only the information
that federal officials make available to them.
The
non-federal officials will get access via the Homeland Security
department's secret-level Homeland Security Data Network. That network
is currently deployed at 27 of the more than 70
fusion centers located around the country, according to DHS. Officials
from different levels of government share homeland security-related
information through the fusion centers. (Ben Bain, "DOD opens some
classified information to non-federal officials," Federal Computer Week, September 17, 2009) Since the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks, the federal government has encouraged the explosive
growth of fusion centers. As envisaged by securocrats, these hybrid
institutions have expanded information collection and sharing practices
from a wide variety of sources, including commercial databases, among
state and local law enforcement agencies, the private sector and
federal security agencies, including military intelligence.
But early on, fusion centers like the notorious "red squads" of the 1960s and '70s,
morphed into national security shopping malls where officials monitor
not only alleged terrorists but also left-wing and environmental
activists deemed threats to the existing corporate order.
It
is currently unknown how many military intelligence analysts are
stationed at fusion centers, what their roles are and whether or not
they are engaged in domestic surveillance.
If past practices are an indication of where current moves by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
will lead, in breaking down the "traditional fault line" that prohibits
the military from engaging in civilian policing, then another troubling
step along the dark road of militarizing American society will have
been taken.
U.S. Northern Command: Feeding the Domestic Surveillance Beast
Since its 2002 stand-up, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and associated military intelligence outfits such as the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
and the now-defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) have
participated in widespread surveillance of antiwar and other activist
groups, tapping into Pentagon and commercial databases in a quixotic
search for "suspicious patterns."
As they currently exist,
fusion centers are largely unaccountable entities that function without
proper oversight and have been involved in egregious civil rights
violations such as the compilation of national security dossiers that
have landed activists on various terrorist watch-lists.
Antifascist Calling reported
last year on the strange case of Marine Gunnery Sgt. Gary Maziarz and
Col. Larry Richards, Marine reservists stationed at Camp Pendleton in
San Diego. Maziarz, Richards, and a group of fellow Marines, including
the cofounder of the Los Angeles County Terrorist Early Warning Center
(LACTEW), stole secret files from the Strategic Technical Operations
Center (STOC).
When they worked at STOC, the private spy ring
absconded with hundreds of classified files, including those marked
"Top Secret, Special Compartmentalized Information," the highest U.S.
Government classification. The files included surveillance dossiers on
the Muslim community and antiwar activists in Southern California.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune which broke the story in 2007,
before being run to ground Maziarz, Richards and reserve Navy Commander
Lauren Martin, a civilian intelligence contractor at USNORTHCOM,
acquired information illegally obtained from the Secret Internet
Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet). This is the same classified system
which fusion centers will have access to under the DoD's new proposal.
Claiming they were acting out of "patriotic motives," the Marine
spies shared this classified counterterrorism information with private
contractors in the hope of obtaining future employment. Although they
failed to land plush private sector counterterrorism jobs, one cannot
rule out that less than scrupulous security firms might be willing to
take in the bait in the future in order to have a leg up on the
competition.
So far, only lower level conspirators have been charged. According to the Union-Tribune
"Marine Cols. Larry Richards and David Litaker, Marine Maj. Mark Lowe
and Navy Cmdr. Lauren Martin also have been mentioned in connection
with the case, but none has been charged." One codefendant's attorney,
Kevin McDermott, told the paper, "This is the classic situation that if
you have more rank, the better your chance of not getting charged."
Sound familiar? Call it standard operating procedure in
post-constitutional America where high-level officials and senior
officers walk away scott-free while grunts bear the burden, and do hard
time, for the crimes of their superiors.
Fusion Centers and Military Intelligence: Best Friends Forever!
Another
case which is emblematic of the close cooperation among fusion centers
and military intelligence is the case of John J. Towery, a Ft. Lewis,
Washington civilian contractor who worked for the Army's Fort Lewis
Force Protection Unit.
In July, The Olympian and Democracy Now! broke the story of how Towery had infiltrated and spied on the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance (OlyPMR), an antiwar group, and shared this information with police.
Since 2006,
the group has staged protests at Washington ports and has sought to
block military cargo from being shipped to Iraq. According to The Olympian:
OlyPMR
member Brendan Maslauskas Dunn said in an interview Monday that he
received a copy of the e-mail from the city of Olympia in response to a
public records request asking for any information the city had about
"anarchists, anarchy, anarchism, SDS (Students for a Democratic
Society), or Industrial Workers of the World." (Jeremy Pawloski, "Fort
Lewis investigates claims employee infiltrated Olympia peace group," The Olympian, July 27, 2009) What
Dunn discovered was highly disturbing to say the least. Towery, who
posed as an anarchist under the name "John Jacob," had infiltrated
OlyPMR and was one of several listserv administrators that had control
over the group's electronic communications.
The civilian
intelligence agent admitted to Dunn that he had spied on the group but
claimed that no one paid him and that he didn't report to the military;
a statement that turned out to be false.
Joseph Piek, a Fort Lewis spokesperson confirmed to The Olympian
that Towery was a contract employee and that the infiltrator "performs
sensitive work within the installation law enforcement community," but
"it would not be appropriate for him to discuss his duties with the
media."
In September, The Olympian
obtained thousands of pages of emails from the City of Olympia in
response to that publication's public-records requests. The newspaper
revealed that the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WJAC), a fusion
center, had copied messages to Towery on the activities of OlyPMR in
the run-up to the group's November 2007 port protests. According to the paper,
The
WJAC is a clearinghouse of sorts of anti-terrorism information and
sensitive intelligence that is gathered and disseminated to law
enforcement agencies across the state. The WJAC receives money from the
federal government.
The substance of nearly all of the WJAC's
e-mails to Olympia police officials had been blacked out in the copies
provided to The Olympian. (Jeremy Pawloski, "Army e-mail sent to police
and accused spy," The Olympian, September 12, 2009) Also in July, the whistleblowing web site Wikileaks published a 1525 page file on WJAC's activities.
Housed
at the Seattle Field Office of the FBI, one document described WJAC as
an agency that "builds on existing intelligence efforts by local,
regional, and federal agencies by organizing and disseminating threat
information and other intelligence efforts to law enforcement agencies,
first responders, and key decision makers throughout the state."
Fusion centers are also lucrative cash cows for enterprising security grifters. Wikileaks investigations editor Julian Assange described
the revolving-door that exists among Pentagon spy agencies and the
private security firms who reap millions by placing interrogators and
analysts inside outfits such as WJAC. Assange wrote,
There
has been extensive political debate in the United States on how safe it
would be to move Guantánamo's detainees to US soil--but what about
their interrogators?
One
intelligence officer, Kia Grapham, is hawked by her contracting company
to the Washington State Patrol. Grapham's confidential resume boasts of
assisting in over 100
interrogations of "high value human intelligence targets" at
Guantánamo. She goes on, saying how she is trained and certified to
employ Restricted Interrogation Technique: Separation as specified by
FM 2-22.3 Appendix M.
Others,
like, Neoma Syke, managed to repeatedly flip between the military and
contractor intelligence work--without even leaving the building.
The
file details the placement of six intelligence contractors inside the
Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) on behalf of the Washington
State Patrol at a cost of around $110,000 per year each.
Such
intelligence "fusion" centers, which combine the military, the FBI,
state police, and others, have been internally promoted by the US Army
as means to avoid restrictions preventing the military from spying on
the domestic population. (Julian Assange, "The spy who billed me
twice," Wikileaks, July 29, 2009) The Wikileaks
documents provide startling details on how firms such as Science
Applications International Corporation (SAIC), The Sytex Group and
Operational Applications Inc. routinely place operatives within
military intelligence and civilian fusion centers at a premium price.
Assange
wonders whether these job placements are not simply evidence of
corruption but rather, are "designed to evade a raft of hard won
oversight laws which apply to the military and the police but not to
contractors? Is it to keep selected personnel out of the Inspector
General's eye?" The available evidence strongly suggests that it is.
As the American Civil Liberties Union documented in their 2007 and 2008 reports on fusion center abuses, one motivation is precisely to subvert oversight laws which do not apply to private mercenary contractors.
The
civil liberties' watchdog characterized the rapid expansion of fusion
centers as a threat to our constitutional rights and cited specific
areas of concern: "their ambiguous lines of authority, the troubling
role of private corporations, the participation of the military, the
use of data mining and their excessive secrecy."
And speaking of
private security contractors outsourced to a gaggle on intelligence
agencies, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his
essential book Spies For Hire, that since 9/11 "the Central Intelligence Agency has been spending 50 to 60 percent of its budget on for-profit contractors, or about $2.5 billion a year, and its number of contract employees now exceeds the agency's full-time workforce of 17,500."
Indeed, Shorrock learned that "no less than 70 percent of the nation's intelligence budget was being spent on contracts."
However, the sharp spike in intelligence outsourcing to well-heeled
security corporations comes with very little in the way of effective
oversight.
The House Intelligence Committee reported in 2007
that the Bush, and now, the Obama administrations have failed to
develop a "clear definition of what functions are 'inherently
governmental';" meaning in practice, that much in the way of systematic
abuses can be concealed behind veils of "proprietary commercial
information."
As we have seen when the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in 2004, and The New York Times belatedly blew the whistle on widespread illegal surveillance of the private electronic communications of Americans in 2005,
cosy government relationships with security contractors, including
those embedded within secretive fusion centers, will continue to serve
as a "safe harbor" for concealing and facilitating state crimes against
the American people.
http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.com/2009/09/us-intelligence-budget-75-billion.html |
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