From the old counter insurgency campaigns of the 70s:
RIGHTS-LATIN AMERICA: ‘Operation Condor’ Was No Mystery to Washington
By Ángel Páez
Credit:Courtesy of La República
Harry W. Shlaudeman
LIMA, Jan 12 (IPS) - The intelligence services of Peru and Argentina kept Washington informed in real time about a 1980 joint clandestine operation in which four alleged members of Argentina’s Montoneros guerrilla movement were "disappeared," according to documents declassified in the United States.
The incident forms part of the case opened in December by Italian Judge Luisianna Figliola, who issued arrest warrants for those responsible for this and other actions carried out in the framework of Operation Condor, a coordinated plan among the military governments that ruled Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in the 1970s and 1980s, aimed at tracking down, capturing, torturing and eliminating left-wing opponents.
Townsend B. Friedman, political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires, revealed in a secret Aug. 19, 1980 memo to Claus Ruser, the ambassador’s number two man, details about the operation involving the supposed Montoneros in Lima, and the fatal outcome.
In that memo, which has now been declassified thanks to the efforts of the National Security Archive, an independent Washington-based non-governmental research institute, Friedman told his superior that an Argentine intelligence official had provided them with details of the Lima operation on Jun. 16, 1980.
The date is key: the joint action by the Batallón 601, a special Argentine army intelligence unit, and Peru’s Army Intelligence Service (SIE) was recorded four days earlier, and the purported Montoneros were turned over by Peruvian agents on Jun. 17 to Bolivian military personnel, in the presence of agents from Argentina.
The documents show that the U.S. government was fully aware of what was happening, at the time it was occurring, and that it knew ahead of time that the alleged Montoneros would be killed.
"A member of an Argentine intelligence service who has been quite reliable in these matters told the (U.S.) Embassy that the four individuals were apprehended in Peru, that they were still being held there but that they would be expelled to Bolivia from where they would be handed over to Argentina; once in Argentina they would be interrogated and then disappeared," Friedman reported to Ruser.
The capture in Lima and forced disappearance of Noemí Gianetti de Molfino, a member of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Argentine human rights group, María Inés Raverta and Julio César Ramírez was planned by Batallón 601 after the seizure in Argentina of Federico Frías, who was going to take part in Lima in a meeting with high-level members of the Montoneros, the armed branch of the leftist wing of Argentina’s Peronist party.
After he was brutally tortured, Frías was taken by his captors to Peru, where he had agreed to tell them the names and addresses of supposed guerrillas, according to the testimony of a former Peruvian agent who took part in the operation, which appears in the book "Muerte en el Pentagonito" (Death in the Little Pentagon: The Secret Killing Fields of the Peruvian Army) by journalist Ricardo Uceda.
According to the declassified Aug. 19, 1980 memo, the U.S. ambassador to Argentina at the time, Harry W. Shlaudeman, spoke of the case of the supposed "Montoneros" with General Pedro Richter, at the time prime minister, minister of war and commander of the Peruvian army.
"Peruvian Prime Minister Richter Prada told Ambassador Shlaudeman in July (1980, a month after the kidnappings) that the Argentines had been expelled to Bolivia and that he believed the Bolivians had probably handed them over to the Argentines," Friedman told Ruser.
"In addition, (Richter) revealed to Ambassador Shlaudeman that he had been in personal touch with Argentine Army Commander (Leopoldo Fortunato) Galtieri on the matter.
"Galtieri had informed Richter that there could be ‘an interesting development’ in the case early the week of July 14. Richter suggested to Ambassador Shlaudeman that Galtieri’s comment might foreshadow a live appearance of the three Montoneros who the Peruvians claimed they handed over to the Bolivians," the memo adds.
The "interesting development" came to light on Jul. 21, 1980, when the murdered body of Gianetti de Molfino, one of the women kidnapped in Lima, was found in a hotel in Madrid. Nothing was ever heard of again about Raverta, Ramírez or Frías. The general, who is now dead, became the head of Argentina’s military junta in November of the following year.
Shlaudeman had close ties with the Peruvian dictatorship of General Francisco Morales Bermúdez (1975-1980), as confirmed by the declassified documents. When the alleged Montoneros were abducted in Lima, he was already in Buenos Aires.
The path followed by Shlaudeman’s career is particularly interesting. He was U.S. State Department Deputy Chief of Mission in Chile from 1969 to 1973, during which time the coup d’etat that overthrew socialist president Salvador Allende (1970-1973), ushering in a 17-year dictatorship, was being planned.
He then served as State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs, from 1973 to 1975, under President Richard Nixon; in 1977 he was appointed ambassador to Peru; and in 1980 he became ambassador to Argentina, a post he held until 1983, when democracy was restored in that country.
In 1992, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George Bush, the current U.S. president’s father.
The June 1980 operation in Lima was neither the first nor the only one carried out as the result of coordination between the de facto military regimes of Peru and Argentina -- something that Shlaudeman was clearly aware of.
According to another declassified secret document, dated Jul. 11, 1977, Shlaudeman reported the Apr. 12, 1977 kidnapping of Argentine citizen Carlos Alberto Maguid, who had been granted political asylum in Peru, to then U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.
Shlaudeman told Vance that a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) official, Lone Hogel, had informed him that Maguid had been seized by members of the Peruvian military in coordination with agents from Argentina.
The Peruvian government, "in the persons of the minister of the Interior (General Luis Cisneros Vizquerra) and the son of president Morales Bermúdez, has denied that any agency of the (government) was responsible for his disappearance," Shlaudeman wrote, before stating that Hogel had accurate information on the case.
"Hogel said that it was her personal opinion, based on anonymous but apparently well-documented letters, that Maguid was arrested by the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN)," perhaps at the urging of the Argentine government, and that he was being held somewhere in Peru, Shlaudeman wrote to Vance.
The cases of Maguid, as well as those of Gianetti de Molfino, Raverta, Ramírez and Frías, were not isolated ones, but formed part of a coordinated strategy by the military intelligence services of the South American dictatorships. This is made clear by a joint Jun. 25, 1980 report by the U.S. embassies in Argentina and Peru, drafted a week after the kidnapping of Gianetti de Molfino and the others in Lima.
"This incident is not unique. In recent years there have been several similar cases that attest to a high degree of cooperation among the intelligence and security agencies of the southern South American countries and to their tendency to resort to illegal means in treating suspected subversives," says the document.
Nevertheless, U.S. authorities continue to deny that they were aware of the coordinated criminal activities committed under Operation Condor.
In 2005, J. Patrice McSherry, a political science professor at Long Island University in New York, published a revealing document in her book "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America".
The document was a declassified memo by James Blystone, a former regional security officer (RSO) in the U.S. embassy in Argentina, in which he reported to his superiors that an Argentine intelligence source had informed him of the kidnapping of four "Montoneros" in Lima, and had told him that they would be "disappeared."
"Clearly, the RSO (Blystone) had been briefed on a top-secret Condor operation involving the intelligence services of three separate countries (Argentina, Bolivia and Peru); he was accepted as a trusted member of Condor's inner circle," wrote McSherry.
Blystone wasted no time responding. In January 2006, he published his version of the events in the "Foreign Service Journal", in an article titled "The Domino Effect of Improper Declassification".
"During the time that I was in Argentina (1978-1980)…I stumbled onto the fact that the Argentine security services were carrying out some operations in neighbouring countries. But I do not recall ever hearing the term ‘Operation Condor’ used, either there (Buenos Aires) or in Santiago, by any of my contacts or embassy colleagues," the former foreign service officer wrote.
But Blystone could have asked Shlaudeman, who was perfectly well informed of Operation Condor, as shown, for example, by an Aug. 30, 1976 report he sent from Chile to then secretary of state Henry Kissinger on the characteristics and scope of the coordination between intelligence and security agencies in the Southern Cone region.
There is also the Oct. 8, 1976 declassified briefing from Shlaudeman to Kissinger in which he reports on a meeting with Colonel Manuel Contreras, the powerful chief of the now dissolved National Directorate of Intelligence (DINA) -- the Chilean dictatorship’s secret police -- and the true head of Operation Condor.
"As expected, Contreras denied that Operation Condor has any other purpose than the exchange of intelligence," says the cable.
But the U.S. government knew that Contreras was lying. "Operation Condor" had already taken off on its death flight. (END/2008)
Thursday, January 17, 2008
President of MEChA club at Palomar College deported
President of MEChA club at Palomar College deported
By Linda Lou
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
5:48 p.m. January 16, 2008
NORTH COUNTY– The president of the MEChA club at Palomar College has been deported to Mexico, immigration officials said Wednesday. Paola Oropeza, 22, was arrested Jan. 8 by a
fugitive operations team with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Lauren Mack, a
spokeswoman for the department in San Diego.
Oropeza had been ordered to leave the country by an immigration judge, but failed to comply with that order, Mack said. At the time of her arrest, Oropeza was in the country illegally and was taken to Tijuana, Mack said.
Oropeza did not have a criminal record, Mack said, but could not provide details about her
immigration background. Oropeza was arrested along with three other people who are believed to be her family members, Mack said. One is still in deportation proceedings.
When reached on a cell phone Wednesday, Oropeza declined to comment. She said her attorney has advised her not to talk to the media.
MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, is a Latino student group with chapters
in high schools and colleges. It focuses on empowerment through education as well as
political, cultural and social awareness.
A staff assistant in Palomar College's student affairs office who works with student clubs said
Oropeza was president in 2007 and remained in that role this year. She said MEChA is fairly
active on campus, especially in the fall. The group holds a cultural event on campus each
winter called a “Night of Culture” and collects toys for the needy through the event.
Linda Lou: (760) 737-7574;
linda.lou@uniontrib.com
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080116-1748-bn16mecha.html
By Linda Lou
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
5:48 p.m. January 16, 2008
NORTH COUNTY– The president of the MEChA club at Palomar College has been deported to Mexico, immigration officials said Wednesday. Paola Oropeza, 22, was arrested Jan. 8 by a
fugitive operations team with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said Lauren Mack, a
spokeswoman for the department in San Diego.
Oropeza had been ordered to leave the country by an immigration judge, but failed to comply with that order, Mack said. At the time of her arrest, Oropeza was in the country illegally and was taken to Tijuana, Mack said.
Oropeza did not have a criminal record, Mack said, but could not provide details about her
immigration background. Oropeza was arrested along with three other people who are believed to be her family members, Mack said. One is still in deportation proceedings.
When reached on a cell phone Wednesday, Oropeza declined to comment. She said her attorney has advised her not to talk to the media.
MEChA, or Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan, is a Latino student group with chapters
in high schools and colleges. It focuses on empowerment through education as well as
political, cultural and social awareness.
A staff assistant in Palomar College's student affairs office who works with student clubs said
Oropeza was president in 2007 and remained in that role this year. She said MEChA is fairly
active on campus, especially in the fall. The group holds a cultural event on campus each
winter called a “Night of Culture” and collects toys for the needy through the event.
Linda Lou: (760) 737-7574;
linda.lou@uniontrib.com
Find this article at:
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20080116-1748-bn16mecha.html
México: The NAFTA, crude oil and something else
PROGRESO WEEKLY
January 17-23, 2008
México: The NAFTA, crude oil and something else
“Without corn there is no homeland, neither without bean.” And without petroleum?
By Eduardo Dimas
Ordinarily, little is said in the international media about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico, which became effective Jan. 1, 1994.
Recently, more has been printed about the ASPNA (Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America), a monstrosity intended to strengthen the neoliberal model and U.S. domination over the other two partners.
The enactment of the NAFTA coincided with the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas and a major crisis in the Mexican economy, which provoked an urgent intervention by the government of William Clinton, which provided a loan of more than $14 billion so Mexico could get out of its mess.
The consequences of that economic disaster ("the tequila effect") lasted for a long time. Today, 14 years and a few days later, very few people remember those events. The Zapatistas make the headlines once in a while.
Now, the NAFTA has again attracted the attention of the media, as one of the clauses of the treaty takes effect in Mexico. That clause frees from import tariffs several agricultural products from the United States and Mexico, among them corn and beans, two of the main products of Mexican agriculture.
The media attention is directed not so much at the activation of that clause but at the protests it has raised among peasant organizations and agrarian labor unions, which see competition from U.S. and Canadian products as a serious threat to their economies.
To them, it is impossible to compete, because of the differences in technical development and because U.S. agricultural products are subsidized.
In 2006 alone, the U.S. government distributed $18 billion among U.S. farmers.
According to leaders of peasant organizations, since the NAFTA was signed, two million jobs have been lost in Mexican farms, the prices of farm products fell between 40 percent and 70 percent, and Mexico's alimentary dependence on the United States rose by 40 percent in 2006.
So far, the mobilization of farmers throughout Mexico to demand a renegotiation of the NAFTA, including a demonstration in the capital and a human wall in the city of Juárez, on the border with the U.S., have been unsuccessful.
Through its Secretary of Agriculture, the Mexican government has said that the NAFTA has brought more benefits than ills, and that Mexican production and the agricultural industry are doing well. Many analysts and observers counter that that assertion is either wrong or does not match reality.
According to some critics of the Mexican governments (from Salinas de Gortari to this date), it was no coincidence that the signing of the NAFTA was preceded by an amendment to Article 27 of the Constitution, which forbade the sale of the "ejidos," or communal lands.
Those critics say that the objective of Salinas de Gortari, Zedillo, Fox and now Felipe Calderón was -- and is -- to remove the largest possible number of people from the countryside, thus permitting the food transnational corporations to assume control of the Mexican agricultural industry.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but if we analyze how the big U.S. food producers and marketers today control the distribution of food in Mexico, it might be true. Only one of those companies is Mexican-owned.
In an article published in the daily La Jornada, titled "Agriculture and free trade: a fallacy," journalist Luis Hernández Serrano points out that "According to information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agricultural food trade balance between Mexico and the United States clearly represents a deficit for our country. It has been so ever since the start of the NAFTA. Until October 2007, Mexican imports totaled more than $10.487 billion, while exports barely added up to $8.479 billion.
"The same has happened since 1994. National purchases of food products to our neighbor totaled about $10.881 billion in 2006 and sales rose to $9.39 billion. In 2005, we imported $9.429 billion and exported $8.33 billion."
Hernández Serrano adds that what somewhat saves Mexico's food trade balance with the United States is the sale of beer, which in 2006 amounted to $1.3 billion. One might inquire if beer production remains in Mexican hands or if it went to foreign hands, like almost all other industries.
Even before the clause on the most sensitive farm products went into effect, the NAFTA had caused the ruination of 40 percent of Mexican farmers, several million people and a massive exodus from the countryside to the cities. Not to mention an increase in the number of people who want to enter the U.S. illegally.
According to some Mexican media, beginning in 1994, the Mexican authorities permitted the importation of corn and beans from the United States and Canada without charging tariffs, thus violating the rules established in the NAFTA itself. The same happened with rice, cotton and milk, products that Mexico used to export.
So, it is difficult to think that the current Mexican government will renegotiate the NAFTA with the United States and Canada. Rather, it may do everything possible to comply with the accord, no matter what the consequences.
The small and midsize farmer (with less than 100 hectares of land) is sentenced to ruination, because he cannot compete with U.S. farmers, particularly with the big producers and marketers of food, who are investing large sums of money in the Mexican agriculture.
Another issue at hand is the complaint by Mexican farmers about the use of genetically modified seeds, to the detriment of the homegrown seeds, which are beginning to disappear. To utilize those seeds means to depend, from now on, on companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer or BASF, because the resulting product is a hybrid seed, that is, it cannot be planted again.
If you think of a policy designed so that the big transnational corporations may control Mexican agriculture, in collusion with the Mexican oligarchy, you will not be far from the truth. The NAFTA is the best expression of neoliberalism; the ASPNA is its purest application.
"The fields can take no more," says one of the slogans of the peasant protests. The next most used is "without corn, there is no country; without beans, the same." The slogans are accurate. But, what about without crude oil?
For years now, Mexican personalities from all political parties have been denouncing the systematic policy of the government to privatize Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), an endeavor prohibited by the Constitution and something that no government has convinced the Congress to amend.
Nevertheless, the different governments have created the conditions for such a privatization in a not-too-distant future. For example, little by little, they have postponed the necessary repairs and expansions of the industries that carry out the extraction, transportation and refinement of crude oil and natural gas.
They have also plunged PEMEX into debt, with the objective of eventually provoking the "necessary" intervetion of private enterprises. Last year, PEMEX's debt amounted to $107 billion. A paradoxical fact about that policy of privatization is that PEMEX contributes more than 50 percent of the state budget.
On Jan. 9, the Coordinating Commission for the Defense of Petroleum (CCDP) called for a national movement to denounce the delivery of Mexican crude to the foreign transnational corporations, even when the Constitution forbids it.
The reason for the call was the enactment of a contract given to Energy Maintenance to provide security to more than half of PEMEX's oil pipeline. According to the CCDP, the transaction initiated the transfer of PEMEX's strategic zones to private companies -- a concession that violates the Mexican Constitution.
The CCDP also pointed out that, for the past 25 years, the neoliberal governments have been looking for a pretext to privatize crude oil and electricity and that now they are drafting laws to permit a greater private participation in that industry.
The most significant aspect of the complaint is that PEMEX's leadership has kept secret its links to five foreign oil companies. PEMEX directors even made a commitment to those foreign firms not to report those links to the Federal Institute of Access to Information.
According to the CCDP, PEMEX signed the accords and agreed to pay a fine if it broke its pact of silence with Royal Dutch Shell (Anglo-Dutch), Chevron (U.S.), Nexen (Canada) and Statoil (Norway).
I think you will agree with me that PEMEX"s privatization is closer at hand than most people think, unless the Mexican people and progressive organizations form a common front to prevent that event.
The tendency of some sectors of the oligarchy and bourgeoisie to sell their country away is surprising. But let's not forget what happened in Argentina during the military dictatorship and later, during the 10 years of Carlos Menem's administration. They simply sold everything to foreign companies.
Sometimes we forget that neoliberalism is not only an economic model. It is also an ideology that places the free market, business, above any other consideration, be it nationalist or patriotic.
If the alimentary transnationals manage to control the Mexican agriculture and oil is privatized, how much economic and political independence would Mexico retain? It would become practically annexed to the United States, but with a dividing wall that would prevent Mexicans from crossing the border.
The people of Juárez do not deserve that fate.
January 17-23, 2008
México: The NAFTA, crude oil and something else
“Without corn there is no homeland, neither without bean.” And without petroleum?
By Eduardo Dimas
Ordinarily, little is said in the international media about the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Canada and Mexico, which became effective Jan. 1, 1994.
Recently, more has been printed about the ASPNA (Alliance for the Security and Prosperity of North America), a monstrosity intended to strengthen the neoliberal model and U.S. domination over the other two partners.
The enactment of the NAFTA coincided with the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas and a major crisis in the Mexican economy, which provoked an urgent intervention by the government of William Clinton, which provided a loan of more than $14 billion so Mexico could get out of its mess.
The consequences of that economic disaster ("the tequila effect") lasted for a long time. Today, 14 years and a few days later, very few people remember those events. The Zapatistas make the headlines once in a while.
Now, the NAFTA has again attracted the attention of the media, as one of the clauses of the treaty takes effect in Mexico. That clause frees from import tariffs several agricultural products from the United States and Mexico, among them corn and beans, two of the main products of Mexican agriculture.
The media attention is directed not so much at the activation of that clause but at the protests it has raised among peasant organizations and agrarian labor unions, which see competition from U.S. and Canadian products as a serious threat to their economies.
To them, it is impossible to compete, because of the differences in technical development and because U.S. agricultural products are subsidized.
In 2006 alone, the U.S. government distributed $18 billion among U.S. farmers.
According to leaders of peasant organizations, since the NAFTA was signed, two million jobs have been lost in Mexican farms, the prices of farm products fell between 40 percent and 70 percent, and Mexico's alimentary dependence on the United States rose by 40 percent in 2006.
So far, the mobilization of farmers throughout Mexico to demand a renegotiation of the NAFTA, including a demonstration in the capital and a human wall in the city of Juárez, on the border with the U.S., have been unsuccessful.
Through its Secretary of Agriculture, the Mexican government has said that the NAFTA has brought more benefits than ills, and that Mexican production and the agricultural industry are doing well. Many analysts and observers counter that that assertion is either wrong or does not match reality.
According to some critics of the Mexican governments (from Salinas de Gortari to this date), it was no coincidence that the signing of the NAFTA was preceded by an amendment to Article 27 of the Constitution, which forbade the sale of the "ejidos," or communal lands.
Those critics say that the objective of Salinas de Gortari, Zedillo, Fox and now Felipe Calderón was -- and is -- to remove the largest possible number of people from the countryside, thus permitting the food transnational corporations to assume control of the Mexican agricultural industry.
Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but if we analyze how the big U.S. food producers and marketers today control the distribution of food in Mexico, it might be true. Only one of those companies is Mexican-owned.
In an article published in the daily La Jornada, titled "Agriculture and free trade: a fallacy," journalist Luis Hernández Serrano points out that "According to information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the agricultural food trade balance between Mexico and the United States clearly represents a deficit for our country. It has been so ever since the start of the NAFTA. Until October 2007, Mexican imports totaled more than $10.487 billion, while exports barely added up to $8.479 billion.
"The same has happened since 1994. National purchases of food products to our neighbor totaled about $10.881 billion in 2006 and sales rose to $9.39 billion. In 2005, we imported $9.429 billion and exported $8.33 billion."
Hernández Serrano adds that what somewhat saves Mexico's food trade balance with the United States is the sale of beer, which in 2006 amounted to $1.3 billion. One might inquire if beer production remains in Mexican hands or if it went to foreign hands, like almost all other industries.
Even before the clause on the most sensitive farm products went into effect, the NAFTA had caused the ruination of 40 percent of Mexican farmers, several million people and a massive exodus from the countryside to the cities. Not to mention an increase in the number of people who want to enter the U.S. illegally.
According to some Mexican media, beginning in 1994, the Mexican authorities permitted the importation of corn and beans from the United States and Canada without charging tariffs, thus violating the rules established in the NAFTA itself. The same happened with rice, cotton and milk, products that Mexico used to export.
So, it is difficult to think that the current Mexican government will renegotiate the NAFTA with the United States and Canada. Rather, it may do everything possible to comply with the accord, no matter what the consequences.
The small and midsize farmer (with less than 100 hectares of land) is sentenced to ruination, because he cannot compete with U.S. farmers, particularly with the big producers and marketers of food, who are investing large sums of money in the Mexican agriculture.
Another issue at hand is the complaint by Mexican farmers about the use of genetically modified seeds, to the detriment of the homegrown seeds, which are beginning to disappear. To utilize those seeds means to depend, from now on, on companies like Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer or BASF, because the resulting product is a hybrid seed, that is, it cannot be planted again.
If you think of a policy designed so that the big transnational corporations may control Mexican agriculture, in collusion with the Mexican oligarchy, you will not be far from the truth. The NAFTA is the best expression of neoliberalism; the ASPNA is its purest application.
"The fields can take no more," says one of the slogans of the peasant protests. The next most used is "without corn, there is no country; without beans, the same." The slogans are accurate. But, what about without crude oil?
For years now, Mexican personalities from all political parties have been denouncing the systematic policy of the government to privatize Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), an endeavor prohibited by the Constitution and something that no government has convinced the Congress to amend.
Nevertheless, the different governments have created the conditions for such a privatization in a not-too-distant future. For example, little by little, they have postponed the necessary repairs and expansions of the industries that carry out the extraction, transportation and refinement of crude oil and natural gas.
They have also plunged PEMEX into debt, with the objective of eventually provoking the "necessary" intervetion of private enterprises. Last year, PEMEX's debt amounted to $107 billion. A paradoxical fact about that policy of privatization is that PEMEX contributes more than 50 percent of the state budget.
On Jan. 9, the Coordinating Commission for the Defense of Petroleum (CCDP) called for a national movement to denounce the delivery of Mexican crude to the foreign transnational corporations, even when the Constitution forbids it.
The reason for the call was the enactment of a contract given to Energy Maintenance to provide security to more than half of PEMEX's oil pipeline. According to the CCDP, the transaction initiated the transfer of PEMEX's strategic zones to private companies -- a concession that violates the Mexican Constitution.
The CCDP also pointed out that, for the past 25 years, the neoliberal governments have been looking for a pretext to privatize crude oil and electricity and that now they are drafting laws to permit a greater private participation in that industry.
The most significant aspect of the complaint is that PEMEX's leadership has kept secret its links to five foreign oil companies. PEMEX directors even made a commitment to those foreign firms not to report those links to the Federal Institute of Access to Information.
According to the CCDP, PEMEX signed the accords and agreed to pay a fine if it broke its pact of silence with Royal Dutch Shell (Anglo-Dutch), Chevron (U.S.), Nexen (Canada) and Statoil (Norway).
I think you will agree with me that PEMEX"s privatization is closer at hand than most people think, unless the Mexican people and progressive organizations form a common front to prevent that event.
The tendency of some sectors of the oligarchy and bourgeoisie to sell their country away is surprising. But let's not forget what happened in Argentina during the military dictatorship and later, during the 10 years of Carlos Menem's administration. They simply sold everything to foreign companies.
Sometimes we forget that neoliberalism is not only an economic model. It is also an ideology that places the free market, business, above any other consideration, be it nationalist or patriotic.
If the alimentary transnationals manage to control the Mexican agriculture and oil is privatized, how much economic and political independence would Mexico retain? It would become practically annexed to the United States, but with a dividing wall that would prevent Mexicans from crossing the border.
The people of Juárez do not deserve that fate.
Institutionalized Spying on Americans
Institutionalized Spying on Americans - by Stephen Lendman
This article reviews two police state tools (among many in use) in America. One is new, undiscussed and largely unknown to the public. The other was covered in a December article by this writer called Police State America. Here it's updated with new information.\
The National Applications Office (NAO)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established a new domestic spying operation in 2007 called the National Applications Office (NOA) and described it as "the executive agent to facilitate the use of intelligence community technological assets for civil, homeland security and law enforcement purposes within the United States." The office was to begin operating last fall to "build on the long-standing workof the Civil Applications Committee (CAC), which was created in 1974 to facilitate the use of the capabilities of the intelligence community for civil, non-defense uses in the United States."\
\
With or without congressional authorization or oversight, the executive branch is in charge and will let NAO use state-of-the-art technology, including military satellite imagery, to spy on Americans without their knowledge. Implementation is delayed, however, after Committee on Homeland Security Chairman, Bennie Thompson, and other committee members raised questions of "very serious privacy and civil liberties concerns." In response, DHS agreed to delay operating (officially) until all matters are addressed and resolved. \
\
Given its track record post-9/11, expect little more than pro forma posturing before Congress signs off on what Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, calls "Big Brother in the Sky" and a "police state" in the offing.\
\
DHS supplies this background information on NAO. Post-9/11, the Director of National Intelligence appointed an Independent Study Group (ISG) in May, 2005 to "review the current operation and future role of the (1974) Civil Applications Committee and study the current state of Intelligence Community support to homeland security and law enforcement entities." \
\
In September 2005, the Committee produced a "Blue Ribbon Study," now declassified. Its nine members were headed by and included three Booz Allen Hamilton officials because of the company's expertise in spying and intelligence gathering. Its other members have similar experience. They all have a vested interest in domestic spying because the business potential is huge for defense related industries and consultants. \
\
ISG members included:\
\
Keith Hall, Chairman\
Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton\
\
Edward G. Anderson\
LTG US Army (Ret)\
Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton\
\
Thomas W. Conroy\
Vice President\
National Security Programs\
Northrop Grumman/TASC\
\
Patrick M. Hughes\
LTG US Army (Ret)\
Vice President, Homeland Security\
L-3 Communications\
\
Kevin O'Connell\
Director of Defense Group Incorporated (DGI)\
Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis (CIRA)\
\
CIRA is a think tank that calls itself "the premier open source and cultural intelligence exploitation cell for the US intelligence community." Its business is revolutionizing intelligence analysis.\
\
Jeff Baxter\
Independent Defense Consultant with DOD and industry ties\
\
Dr. Paul Gilman\
Director\
Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies\
Oak Ridge National Laboratory\
US Department of Energy\
\
Kemp Lear\
Associate\
Booz Allen Hamilton, and\
\
Joseph D. Whitley, Esq\
Alston & Bird LLP, Government Investigations and Compliance Group, former Acting Associate Attorney General in GHW Bush administration, and former General Counsel for DHS under GW Bush\
\
The ISG's report produced 11 significant findings and 27 recommendations based on its conclusion that there's "an urgent need for action because opportunities to better protect the nation are being missed." It "concluded a new management and process model (is) needed to effectively employ IC (Intelligence Community) capabilities for domestic uses."\
\
In March 2006, DHS unveiled the new agency to implement ISG's recommendations called the National Applications Office. In May, 2007, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Michael McConnell, named DHS as its executive agent and functional manager. At least in principle according to DHS, Congress agreed with this approach and to provide funding for it, beginning in the fall of 2007. \
\
The public knew nothing about this until a feature August 15, 2007 Wall Street Journal story broke the news. It was headlined "US to Expand Use of Spy Satellites." It noted that for the first time the nation's top intelligence official (DNI's McConnell) "greatly expanded the range of federal and local (civilian law enforcement agencies that) can get access to" military spy satellite collected information. Until now, civilian use was restricted to agencies like NASA and the US Geological Survey, and only for scientific and environmental study.\
\
The Journal explained that key objectives under new guidelines will be:\
\
-- border security, \
\
-- securing critical infrastructure and helping emergency responders after natural disasters, \
\
-- working with criminal and civil federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, and \
\
-- unmentioned by the Journal, the ability to spy on anyone, anywhere, anytime domestically for any reason - an unprecedented act using state-of-the-art technology enabling real-time, high-resolution images and data from space. \
\
NAO will also oversee classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other US agencies involved in dealing with all aspects of national security, including "terrorism."\
\
NSA was established in 1952, is super-secret, and for many years was never revealed to exist. Today, its capabilities are awesome and worrisome. It eavesdrops globally, mines a vast amount of data, and does it through a network of spy satellites, listening posts, and surveillance planes to monitor virtually all electronic communications from landline and cell phones, telegrams, emails, faxes, radio and television, data bases of all kinds and the internet. \
\
NGA is new and began operating in 2003. It lets military and intelligence analysts monitor virtually anything or anyone from state-of-the-art spy satellites. Both NSA and NGA coordinate jointly with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that designs, builds and operates military spy satellites. It also analyzes military and CIA-collected aircraft and satellite reconnaissance information. \
\
Combined with warrantless wiretapping, pervasive spying of all kinds, the abandonment of the law and checks and balances, intense secrecy, and an array of repressive post-9/11 legislation, Executive Orders and National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, NAO is another national security police state tool any despot would love. It's now established and may be operating without congressional approval.
Using spy satellites domestically "is largely uncharted territory," as the Wall Street Journal noted. Even its architects admit there's no clarity on this, and the ISG's report stated "There is little if any policy, guidance or procedures regarding the collection, exploitation and dissemination of domestic MASINT (Measurement and Signatures Intelligence)."
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is the main DOD spy agency. It manages MASINT that's ultra-secret and sophisticated. It uses state-of-the-art radar, lasers, infrared sensors, electromagnetic data and other technologies that can detect chemicals, electro-magnetic activity, whether a nuclear power plant produces plutonium, and the type vehicle from its exhaust. It can also see under bridges, through clouds, forest canopies and even concrete to create images and collect data. In addition, it can detect people, activity and weapons that satellites and photo-reconnaissance aircraft miss, so it's an invaluable spy tool but highly intrusive and up to now only for military and foreign intelligence work.
Further, military spy satellites are state-of-the-art and superior to civilian ones. They record in color as well as black and white, use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities and ground movements and can detect chemical weapons traces and people-generated heat in buildings.
This much we know about them. Their full potential is top secret and available only to the military and intelligence community. The Journal quoted an alarmed Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology, that advocates for digital age privacy rights saying: "Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."
Anyone for any reason may be watched at all times (through walls) with no way to know it, but a June 2001 (before 9/11) Supreme Court decision offers hope. In Kyllo v. United States, the Court ruled for petitioner 5 to 4 (with Scalia and Thomas in the majority). It voided a conviction based on police use of thermal imaging to detect heat in his triplex to determine if an illegal drug was being grown, in this case marijuana.
The Court held: "Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant....To withdraw protection of this minimum expectation would be to permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment" protecting against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
In 1981, Ronald Reagan seemed to agree in Executive Order 12333 on United States Intelligence Activities. It bars the intelligence community from most forms of home eavesdropping while providing wide latitude to all government agencies to "provide the President and the National Security Council with the necessary information (needed to) conduct....foreign, defense and economic policy (and protect US) national interests from foreign security threats. (Collecting this information is to be done, however,) consistent with the Constitution and applicable law...."
That was then, and this is now. It's hard imagining congressional concern or DHS meaning that NAO will "prioritize the protection of privacy and civil liberties" and citing the Reagan Executive Order and the 1974 Privacy Act. That law mandates that no government agency "shall disclose any record (or) system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains." The Privacy act requires the US government to maintain an administrative and physical security system to prevent the unauthorized release of personal records.
Post-9/11, the Patriot Act ended that protection, so DHS is shameless saying NAO must comply with civil liberties and privacy laws and be subject to "oversight by the DHS Inspector General, Chief Privacy Officer, and the Officer for Civil Rights and Liberties" plus additional oversight. No longer post-9/11 when the national security state got repressive new tools to erode the constitution, ignore democratic principles, and give the President unrestricted powers in the name of national security. NAO is the latest one watching us as our "Big Brother in the Sky." Orwell would be proud.
Real ID Act Update - Another Intrusive Police State Tool
The Read ID Act of 2005 required states to meet federal ID standards by May, 2008. That's now changed because 29 states passed or introduced laws that refuse to comply. They call the Act costly to administer, a bureaucratic nightmare, and New Hampshire said it's "repugnant" and violates the state and US Constitutions.
The federal law mandates that every US citizen and legal resident have a national ID card that in most cases is a driver's license meeting federal standards. It requires it to contain an individual's personal information and makes one mandatory to open a bank account, board an airplane, be able to vote, get a job, enter a federal building, or conduct virtually all essential business requiring identification.
States balked, and that doomed the original version. On January 11, changes were unveiled when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued binding new rules. Under them, states have until 2011 to comply (instead of 2008), until 2014 to issue "tamper-proof licenses" to drivers born after 1964, and until 2017 for those born before this date. DHS said the original law would cost states $14 billion. The new regulations with an extended phase-in cuts the amount to around $3.9 billion or $8 per license.
These numbers may be bogus, however, the true costs may be far higher, and that's why the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) is lobbying for Real ID's passage. Its members include high-tech card makers like Digimarc and Northrup Grumman and data brokers like Choicepoint and LexisNexis that profit by selling personal information to advertisers and the government.
Under new DHS rules, licenses must include a digital photo taken at the beginning of the application process and a filament or other security device to prevent counterfeiting. They must also have three layers of security that states can select from a DHS menu. In addition, states must begin checking license applicants' Social Security and immigration status over the next year.
As of now, a controversial radio frequency identification (RFID) technology microchip isn't required. It may come later, however, and here's the problem. It'll let cardholder movements and activities be tracked everywhere, at all times - in other words, a police state dream along with other pervasive spying tools.
Even worse would be mandating human RFID chip implants. It's not planned so far (but not ruled out), and three states (California, Wisconsin and North Dakota) preemptively banned the practice without recipients' consent.
Think it can't happen? Consider a January 13 article in the London Independent headlined "Prisoners 'to be chipped like dogs.' " The article states that civil rights groups and probation officers are furious that "hi-tech 'satellite'.... machine-readable (microchip) tagging (is) planned (for thousands of offenders) to create more space in jails." Unlike ankle bracelets now sometimes used, tiny RFID chips would be surgically implanted for monitoring the way they're currently used for dogs, cats, cattle and luggage. They're more reliable, it's believed, as current devices can be tampered with or removed.
Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), was quoted saying: "We have looked at....the practicalities and the ethics (and we concluded) its time has come." The UK currently has the largest prison population per capita in western Europe. It sounds like authorities plan to expand it using fewer cells. It also sounds like a scheme to tag everyone after testing them first on prisoners. And consider the possibilities. RFID technology is advancing, and one company plans deeper implants that can vibrate, emit electroshocks, broadcast a message to the implantee, and/or be a hidden microphone to transmit conversations. It's not science fiction, and what's planned for the UK will likely come to America. In fact, it's already here.
In 2004, the FDA approved a grain-of-rice sized, antenna-containing VeriChip for human implantation that allows vital information to be read when a person's body is scanned. The company states on its web site that it's "the world's first and only patented, FDA-cleared, human-implantable RFID microchip....with skin-sensing capabilities." Reportedly, about 2000 test subjects now have them, but it may signal mandatory implantation ahead. Consider for whom for starters - prisoners, military personnel and possibly anyone seeking employment. After them, maybe everyone in a brave new global surveillance world.
It gets worse. Katherine Albrecht authored a report called "Microchip-Cancer Report - Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs: A Review of the Literature 1990-2006." After reading it, Dr. Robert Benezra, Director Cancer Biology, Genetics Program, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said: "There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members. Given the preliminary animal data, it looks to me that there's definitely cause for concern."
Albrecht's report evaluated 11 previously published toxicology and pathology studies. In six of them, up to 10.2% of rats and mice developed malignant tumors (typically sarcomas) where microchips were implanted. Two others reported the same findings for dogs. These tumors spread fast and "often led to the death of the afflicted animals. In many cases, the tumors metastasized and spread to other parts of the animals. The implants were unequivocally identified as the cause of the cancers."
Report reviews, conclusions and recommendations were to immediately stop further human implantations, inform people with them of the dangers, offer a microchip removal procedure, and reverse all animal microchipping mandates.
Debate Ahead on New DHS ID Rules
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said new ID rules require states to verify each cardholder's personal information (including a person's legal status in the country) by matching it against federal Social Security and passport databases and/or comparable state ones.
States have time to adjust, but Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy wasted no time saying he'll recommend legislation to ban Real ID drivers' license provisions because "so many Americans oppose" them. They're intrusive, burdensome, and federal databases are full of false or out-of-date information that's hard to disprove, but unless it is Americans will be denied their legal right to a driver's license.
The ACLU also strongly opposes Real ID because it violates privacy, lets government agencies share data, and its "tortured remains" represent an "utterly unworkable" system that will "irreparably damage the fabric of American life." An ACLU January 11 press release further states that DHS "dumped the problems of the statute on future presidents like a rotting corpse left on (its) steps (and) whoever is president in 2018." Congress must "recognize the situation and take action." The Real ID Act and new DHS rules must be "repealed and replaced with a clean, simple, and vigorous new driver's license security law that does not create a national ID" or violate Americans' privacy.
Futuristic Hi-Tech Profiling
On January 14, Computerworld online revealed more cause for concern in an article called "Big Brother Really is Watching." It's about DHS "bankrolling futuristic profiling technology...." for its Project Hostile Intent. It, in turn, is part of a broader initiative called the Future Attribute Screening Technologies Mobile Module. It's to be a self-contained, automated screening system that's portable and easy to implement, and DHS hopes to test it at airports in 2010 and deploy it (if it works) by 2012 at airports, border checkpoints, other points of entry and other security-related areas.
Here's the problem. If developed (reliable or not), these devices will use video, audio, laser and infrared sensors to feed real-time data into a computer using "specially developed algorithms" to identify "suspicious people." It would work (in theory) by interpreting gestures, facial expressions and speech variations as well as measure body temperature, heart and respiration rate, blood pressure, skin moisture, and other physiological characteristics.
The idea would be detect deception and identify suspicious people for aggressive interrogation, searches and even arrest. But consider what's coming. If developed, the technology may be used anywhere by government or the private sector for airport or other checkpoint security, buildings, job interviews, employee screening, buying insurance or conducting any other type essential business.
Aside from Fourth Amendment issues, here's the problem according to Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at security consultant BT Counterpane: "It's a good idea fraught with difficulties....don't hold your breath" it will work, and a better idea is to focus on detecting suspicious objects. Schneier further compares the technology to lie detectors that rely on "fake technology" and only work in films. They're used because people want them although it's acknowledged, even when well-administered, their median accuracy percentage is 50% at best.
This technology is worse, it may never be reliable, but may be deployed anyway in the age of "terror." Something to consider next time we blink going through airport security, and ACLU Technology and Liberty Project director Barry Steinhardt states the concern: "We are not going to catch any terrorists (with it), but a lot of innocent people, especially racial and ethnic minorities, are going to be trapped in a web of suspicion." Even so, DHS spent billions on this and other screening tools post-9/11. Expect lots more ahead, and here's the bottom line:
As things now stand, Washington, post-9/11, suspended constitutional protections in the name of national security and suppressed our civil liberties for our own good. This article reviewed their newest tools and wonders what's next. This writer called it Police State America in December that won't change with a new White House occupant in 2009 unless organized resistance stops it. Complacency is unthinkable, and unless we act, we'll deserve Aleksandr Herzen's curse of another era - to be the "disease," not the "doctors."
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
This article reviews two police state tools (among many in use) in America. One is new, undiscussed and largely unknown to the public. The other was covered in a December article by this writer called Police State America. Here it's updated with new information.\
The National Applications Office (NAO)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established a new domestic spying operation in 2007 called the National Applications Office (NOA) and described it as "the executive agent to facilitate the use of intelligence community technological assets for civil, homeland security and law enforcement purposes within the United States." The office was to begin operating last fall to "build on the long-standing workof the Civil Applications Committee (CAC), which was created in 1974 to facilitate the use of the capabilities of the intelligence community for civil, non-defense uses in the United States."\
\
With or without congressional authorization or oversight, the executive branch is in charge and will let NAO use state-of-the-art technology, including military satellite imagery, to spy on Americans without their knowledge. Implementation is delayed, however, after Committee on Homeland Security Chairman, Bennie Thompson, and other committee members raised questions of "very serious privacy and civil liberties concerns." In response, DHS agreed to delay operating (officially) until all matters are addressed and resolved. \
\
Given its track record post-9/11, expect little more than pro forma posturing before Congress signs off on what Kate Martin, the director of the Center for National Security Studies, calls "Big Brother in the Sky" and a "police state" in the offing.\
\
DHS supplies this background information on NAO. Post-9/11, the Director of National Intelligence appointed an Independent Study Group (ISG) in May, 2005 to "review the current operation and future role of the (1974) Civil Applications Committee and study the current state of Intelligence Community support to homeland security and law enforcement entities." \
\
In September 2005, the Committee produced a "Blue Ribbon Study," now declassified. Its nine members were headed by and included three Booz Allen Hamilton officials because of the company's expertise in spying and intelligence gathering. Its other members have similar experience. They all have a vested interest in domestic spying because the business potential is huge for defense related industries and consultants. \
\
ISG members included:\
\
Keith Hall, Chairman\
Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton\
\
Edward G. Anderson\
LTG US Army (Ret)\
Principal, Booz Allen Hamilton\
\
Thomas W. Conroy\
Vice President\
National Security Programs\
Northrop Grumman/TASC\
\
Patrick M. Hughes\
LTG US Army (Ret)\
Vice President, Homeland Security\
L-3 Communications\
\
Kevin O'Connell\
Director of Defense Group Incorporated (DGI)\
Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis (CIRA)\
\
CIRA is a think tank that calls itself "the premier open source and cultural intelligence exploitation cell for the US intelligence community." Its business is revolutionizing intelligence analysis.\
\
Jeff Baxter\
Independent Defense Consultant with DOD and industry ties\
\
Dr. Paul Gilman\
Director\
Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies\
Oak Ridge National Laboratory\
US Department of Energy\
\
Kemp Lear\
Associate\
Booz Allen Hamilton, and\
\
Joseph D. Whitley, Esq\
Alston & Bird LLP, Government Investigations and Compliance Group, former Acting Associate Attorney General in GHW Bush administration, and former General Counsel for DHS under GW Bush\
\
The ISG's report produced 11 significant findings and 27 recommendations based on its conclusion that there's "an urgent need for action because opportunities to better protect the nation are being missed." It "concluded a new management and process model (is) needed to effectively employ IC (Intelligence Community) capabilities for domestic uses."\
\
In March 2006, DHS unveiled the new agency to implement ISG's recommendations called the National Applications Office. In May, 2007, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Michael McConnell, named DHS as its executive agent and functional manager. At least in principle according to DHS, Congress agreed with this approach and to provide funding for it, beginning in the fall of 2007. \
\
The public knew nothing about this until a feature August 15, 2007 Wall Street Journal story broke the news. It was headlined "US to Expand Use of Spy Satellites." It noted that for the first time the nation's top intelligence official (DNI's McConnell) "greatly expanded the range of federal and local (civilian law enforcement agencies that) can get access to" military spy satellite collected information. Until now, civilian use was restricted to agencies like NASA and the US Geological Survey, and only for scientific and environmental study.\
\
The Journal explained that key objectives under new guidelines will be:\
\
-- border security, \
\
-- securing critical infrastructure and helping emergency responders after natural disasters, \
\
-- working with criminal and civil federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, and \
\
-- unmentioned by the Journal, the ability to spy on anyone, anywhere, anytime domestically for any reason - an unprecedented act using state-of-the-art technology enabling real-time, high-resolution images and data from space. \
\
NAO will also oversee classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and other US agencies involved in dealing with all aspects of national security, including "terrorism."\
\
NSA was established in 1952, is super-secret, and for many years was never revealed to exist. Today, its capabilities are awesome and worrisome. It eavesdrops globally, mines a vast amount of data, and does it through a network of spy satellites, listening posts, and surveillance planes to monitor virtually all electronic communications from landline and cell phones, telegrams, emails, faxes, radio and television, data bases of all kinds and the internet. \
\
NGA is new and began operating in 2003. It lets military and intelligence analysts monitor virtually anything or anyone from state-of-the-art spy satellites. Both NSA and NGA coordinate jointly with the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) that designs, builds and operates military spy satellites. It also analyzes military and CIA-collected aircraft and satellite reconnaissance information. \
\
Combined with warrantless wiretapping, pervasive spying of all kinds, the abandonment of the law and checks and balances, intense secrecy, and an array of repressive post-9/11 legislation, Executive Orders and National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, NAO is another national security police state tool any despot would love. It's now established and may be operating without congressional approval.
Using spy satellites domestically "is largely uncharted territory," as the Wall Street Journal noted. Even its architects admit there's no clarity on this, and the ISG's report stated "There is little if any policy, guidance or procedures regarding the collection, exploitation and dissemination of domestic MASINT (Measurement and Signatures Intelligence)."
The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is the main DOD spy agency. It manages MASINT that's ultra-secret and sophisticated. It uses state-of-the-art radar, lasers, infrared sensors, electromagnetic data and other technologies that can detect chemicals, electro-magnetic activity, whether a nuclear power plant produces plutonium, and the type vehicle from its exhaust. It can also see under bridges, through clouds, forest canopies and even concrete to create images and collect data. In addition, it can detect people, activity and weapons that satellites and photo-reconnaissance aircraft miss, so it's an invaluable spy tool but highly intrusive and up to now only for military and foreign intelligence work.
Further, military spy satellites are state-of-the-art and superior to civilian ones. They record in color as well as black and white, use different parts of the light spectrum to track human activities and ground movements and can detect chemical weapons traces and people-generated heat in buildings.
This much we know about them. Their full potential is top secret and available only to the military and intelligence community. The Journal quoted an alarmed Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the Project on Freedom, Security and Technology, that advocates for digital age privacy rights saying: "Not only is the surveillance they are contemplating intrusive and omnipresent, it's also invisible. And that's what makes this so dangerous."
Anyone for any reason may be watched at all times (through walls) with no way to know it, but a June 2001 (before 9/11) Supreme Court decision offers hope. In Kyllo v. United States, the Court ruled for petitioner 5 to 4 (with Scalia and Thomas in the majority). It voided a conviction based on police use of thermal imaging to detect heat in his triplex to determine if an illegal drug was being grown, in this case marijuana.
The Court held: "Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of a private home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a Fourth Amendment 'search," and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant....To withdraw protection of this minimum expectation would be to permit police technology to erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment" protecting against "unreasonable searches and seizures."
In 1981, Ronald Reagan seemed to agree in Executive Order 12333 on United States Intelligence Activities. It bars the intelligence community from most forms of home eavesdropping while providing wide latitude to all government agencies to "provide the President and the National Security Council with the necessary information (needed to) conduct....foreign, defense and economic policy (and protect US) national interests from foreign security threats. (Collecting this information is to be done, however,) consistent with the Constitution and applicable law...."
That was then, and this is now. It's hard imagining congressional concern or DHS meaning that NAO will "prioritize the protection of privacy and civil liberties" and citing the Reagan Executive Order and the 1974 Privacy Act. That law mandates that no government agency "shall disclose any record (or) system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains." The Privacy act requires the US government to maintain an administrative and physical security system to prevent the unauthorized release of personal records.
Post-9/11, the Patriot Act ended that protection, so DHS is shameless saying NAO must comply with civil liberties and privacy laws and be subject to "oversight by the DHS Inspector General, Chief Privacy Officer, and the Officer for Civil Rights and Liberties" plus additional oversight. No longer post-9/11 when the national security state got repressive new tools to erode the constitution, ignore democratic principles, and give the President unrestricted powers in the name of national security. NAO is the latest one watching us as our "Big Brother in the Sky." Orwell would be proud.
Real ID Act Update - Another Intrusive Police State Tool
The Read ID Act of 2005 required states to meet federal ID standards by May, 2008. That's now changed because 29 states passed or introduced laws that refuse to comply. They call the Act costly to administer, a bureaucratic nightmare, and New Hampshire said it's "repugnant" and violates the state and US Constitutions.
The federal law mandates that every US citizen and legal resident have a national ID card that in most cases is a driver's license meeting federal standards. It requires it to contain an individual's personal information and makes one mandatory to open a bank account, board an airplane, be able to vote, get a job, enter a federal building, or conduct virtually all essential business requiring identification.
States balked, and that doomed the original version. On January 11, changes were unveiled when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued binding new rules. Under them, states have until 2011 to comply (instead of 2008), until 2014 to issue "tamper-proof licenses" to drivers born after 1964, and until 2017 for those born before this date. DHS said the original law would cost states $14 billion. The new regulations with an extended phase-in cuts the amount to around $3.9 billion or $8 per license.
These numbers may be bogus, however, the true costs may be far higher, and that's why the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) is lobbying for Real ID's passage. Its members include high-tech card makers like Digimarc and Northrup Grumman and data brokers like Choicepoint and LexisNexis that profit by selling personal information to advertisers and the government.
Under new DHS rules, licenses must include a digital photo taken at the beginning of the application process and a filament or other security device to prevent counterfeiting. They must also have three layers of security that states can select from a DHS menu. In addition, states must begin checking license applicants' Social Security and immigration status over the next year.
As of now, a controversial radio frequency identification (RFID) technology microchip isn't required. It may come later, however, and here's the problem. It'll let cardholder movements and activities be tracked everywhere, at all times - in other words, a police state dream along with other pervasive spying tools.
Even worse would be mandating human RFID chip implants. It's not planned so far (but not ruled out), and three states (California, Wisconsin and North Dakota) preemptively banned the practice without recipients' consent.
Think it can't happen? Consider a January 13 article in the London Independent headlined "Prisoners 'to be chipped like dogs.' " The article states that civil rights groups and probation officers are furious that "hi-tech 'satellite'.... machine-readable (microchip) tagging (is) planned (for thousands of offenders) to create more space in jails." Unlike ankle bracelets now sometimes used, tiny RFID chips would be surgically implanted for monitoring the way they're currently used for dogs, cats, cattle and luggage. They're more reliable, it's believed, as current devices can be tampered with or removed.
Ken Jones, president of the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), was quoted saying: "We have looked at....the practicalities and the ethics (and we concluded) its time has come." The UK currently has the largest prison population per capita in western Europe. It sounds like authorities plan to expand it using fewer cells. It also sounds like a scheme to tag everyone after testing them first on prisoners. And consider the possibilities. RFID technology is advancing, and one company plans deeper implants that can vibrate, emit electroshocks, broadcast a message to the implantee, and/or be a hidden microphone to transmit conversations. It's not science fiction, and what's planned for the UK will likely come to America. In fact, it's already here.
In 2004, the FDA approved a grain-of-rice sized, antenna-containing VeriChip for human implantation that allows vital information to be read when a person's body is scanned. The company states on its web site that it's "the world's first and only patented, FDA-cleared, human-implantable RFID microchip....with skin-sensing capabilities." Reportedly, about 2000 test subjects now have them, but it may signal mandatory implantation ahead. Consider for whom for starters - prisoners, military personnel and possibly anyone seeking employment. After them, maybe everyone in a brave new global surveillance world.
It gets worse. Katherine Albrecht authored a report called "Microchip-Cancer Report - Microchip-Induced Tumors in Laboratory Rodents and Dogs: A Review of the Literature 1990-2006." After reading it, Dr. Robert Benezra, Director Cancer Biology, Genetics Program, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center said: "There's no way in the world, having read this information, that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members. Given the preliminary animal data, it looks to me that there's definitely cause for concern."
Albrecht's report evaluated 11 previously published toxicology and pathology studies. In six of them, up to 10.2% of rats and mice developed malignant tumors (typically sarcomas) where microchips were implanted. Two others reported the same findings for dogs. These tumors spread fast and "often led to the death of the afflicted animals. In many cases, the tumors metastasized and spread to other parts of the animals. The implants were unequivocally identified as the cause of the cancers."
Report reviews, conclusions and recommendations were to immediately stop further human implantations, inform people with them of the dangers, offer a microchip removal procedure, and reverse all animal microchipping mandates.
Debate Ahead on New DHS ID Rules
DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff said new ID rules require states to verify each cardholder's personal information (including a person's legal status in the country) by matching it against federal Social Security and passport databases and/or comparable state ones.
States have time to adjust, but Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy wasted no time saying he'll recommend legislation to ban Real ID drivers' license provisions because "so many Americans oppose" them. They're intrusive, burdensome, and federal databases are full of false or out-of-date information that's hard to disprove, but unless it is Americans will be denied their legal right to a driver's license.
The ACLU also strongly opposes Real ID because it violates privacy, lets government agencies share data, and its "tortured remains" represent an "utterly unworkable" system that will "irreparably damage the fabric of American life." An ACLU January 11 press release further states that DHS "dumped the problems of the statute on future presidents like a rotting corpse left on (its) steps (and) whoever is president in 2018." Congress must "recognize the situation and take action." The Real ID Act and new DHS rules must be "repealed and replaced with a clean, simple, and vigorous new driver's license security law that does not create a national ID" or violate Americans' privacy.
Futuristic Hi-Tech Profiling
On January 14, Computerworld online revealed more cause for concern in an article called "Big Brother Really is Watching." It's about DHS "bankrolling futuristic profiling technology...." for its Project Hostile Intent. It, in turn, is part of a broader initiative called the Future Attribute Screening Technologies Mobile Module. It's to be a self-contained, automated screening system that's portable and easy to implement, and DHS hopes to test it at airports in 2010 and deploy it (if it works) by 2012 at airports, border checkpoints, other points of entry and other security-related areas.
Here's the problem. If developed (reliable or not), these devices will use video, audio, laser and infrared sensors to feed real-time data into a computer using "specially developed algorithms" to identify "suspicious people." It would work (in theory) by interpreting gestures, facial expressions and speech variations as well as measure body temperature, heart and respiration rate, blood pressure, skin moisture, and other physiological characteristics.
The idea would be detect deception and identify suspicious people for aggressive interrogation, searches and even arrest. But consider what's coming. If developed, the technology may be used anywhere by government or the private sector for airport or other checkpoint security, buildings, job interviews, employee screening, buying insurance or conducting any other type essential business.
Aside from Fourth Amendment issues, here's the problem according to Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer at security consultant BT Counterpane: "It's a good idea fraught with difficulties....don't hold your breath" it will work, and a better idea is to focus on detecting suspicious objects. Schneier further compares the technology to lie detectors that rely on "fake technology" and only work in films. They're used because people want them although it's acknowledged, even when well-administered, their median accuracy percentage is 50% at best.
This technology is worse, it may never be reliable, but may be deployed anyway in the age of "terror." Something to consider next time we blink going through airport security, and ACLU Technology and Liberty Project director Barry Steinhardt states the concern: "We are not going to catch any terrorists (with it), but a lot of innocent people, especially racial and ethnic minorities, are going to be trapped in a web of suspicion." Even so, DHS spent billions on this and other screening tools post-9/11. Expect lots more ahead, and here's the bottom line:
As things now stand, Washington, post-9/11, suspended constitutional protections in the name of national security and suppressed our civil liberties for our own good. This article reviewed their newest tools and wonders what's next. This writer called it Police State America in December that won't change with a new White House occupant in 2009 unless organized resistance stops it. Complacency is unthinkable, and unless we act, we'll deserve Aleksandr Herzen's curse of another era - to be the "disease," not the "doctors."
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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