The Agonist - USA: Homeland Security

Minnesota notes: Punk the tea party, then a grand jury detains people without trial

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:33:58 -0800

Strange days up here in Minnesota. A guy by the pseudonym Robert Erickson spoke to an anti-immigrant Tea Party rally at the State Capitol on Saturday. Turns out he punk'd them and demanded "Columbus Go Home" and the deportation of all these European immigrants. The videos were hits on YouTube. I got the reverse angle of the crowd in HD, now we've got a bit of a viral event unfolding!

Far from this prank, meanwhile, a much darker story is happening in town. A couple days later, two Twin Cities activists refuse to testify at a grand jury in Davenport, Iowa. A little over a month ago I was walking around south Minneapolis & I saw Carrie Feldman who has done a lot of prisoner support at the RNC and for the Green Scare (the feds' so-called eco-terrorist thing). She said she'd just been pulled over by a black SUV with FBI agents from Iowa. They gave her a subpoena to appear in a couple days. She went there and told them she wouldn't comply. They told her to come back in a month. Another subpoena came for Scott DeMuth a few weeks later.

DeMuth and Feldman had a rally in Iowa today. After defying the grand jury (which can demand information about anything), they had a contempt hearing. A prosecutor demanded to know from Feldman's dad if she was an anarchist, which the judge allowed upon objection. The prosecution brandished a photo of Feldman wearing a shirt with "LF" visible and said it must have been ELF or ALF. And Feldman even had a white pet rat -- thusly somehow implying she supported the 'terrorism' ALF vandalism incident at the University of Iowa when Feldman was 15, living in Minneapolis. The federal judge threw Feldman and DeMuth in jail yesterday without a trial, for up to 11 months.

That's all it takes, folks. There is a nationwide network of grand juries running in parallel, fishing around radical communities across America. An Indiana grand jury demanded all of Indymedia.US' server logs in January. A New York 'complex and multi-state' grand jury is after anarchists who Twitter, Iowa is pursuing vandalism. At least one more is happening out west.

Bankers and powerful people don't get these subpoenas. On CSPAN I just saw a presser from that day: cynical journalists ask Attorney General Eric Holder why they haven't shut down more financial criminals, after he and Geithner just propped up a new task force... Who cares about billions in bank fraud when there's anarchists a-twittering, doing prisoner support and in DeMuth's case, confidential sociology research?

Gates Bars Torture Photos' Release

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:11:19 -0800

Nick Baumann | Washington | November 13

Mother Jones - Defense Secretary Robert Gates has used powers granted to him by a controversial new law to block the court-ordered release of numerous photos of detainee abuse, government lawyers revealed in a court filing [PDF] Friday evening.

Gates' new authority comes from a law, signed by President Barack Obama last month, that gives the Secretary of Defense the power to rule that photos of detainees are exempt from release under the Freedom of Information Act. Gates' action on Friday was the first use of the new FOIA exemption since it passed Congress last month. The photos in question are the subject of a years-long legal fight by the American Civil Liberties Union, which first filed a FOIA request for records pertaining to detainee treatment, rendition, and death in May of 2005. The case is currently being reviewed by the Supreme Court.

The administration first sought to change FOIA in June, shortly after deciding to contest a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals that ordered the photos' release. The resulting bill, championed by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), was specifically designed to nullify the effect of the appeals court's ruling. Since the court had ruled that the photos couldn't be withheld under an existing FOIA exemption, the Obama administration simply asked Congress to carve out a new exemption. Despite objections from liberal members of the House, Congress obliged.

TSA is secretly watching you

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:11:58 -0800

Ken Kaye | Fort Lauderdale, FL | November 15

LAT - You might not see them. But they're watching you.

To identify dangerous people, the Transportation Security Administration stations behavior-detection officers at 161 U.S. airports, including ones in Miami, Fort Lauderdale and Los Angeles. The officers can be anywhere, from the parking garage to the gate, looking for passengers who seem highly nervous or stressed.

They don't focus on nationality, race, ethnicity or gender, said TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz.

"We're not looking for a type of person, but at behaviors," she said.

Under the program, which started in Boston in 2003, a suspicious passenger might be given a secondary security screening or referred to police. Detection officers don't have the power to arrest someone.

Watchdog slams ‘bogus’ Justice Dept. demand for news site’s visitor logs

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:21:56 -0800

Daniel Tencer | Nov 10

Raw Story - A Justice Department subpoena requesting all available information on all visitors to an independent news site is raising serious privacy concerns, and questions about how much information the US government is storing about its citizens' news reading habits.

Privacy watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation has released an extensive report on a "bogus" attempt by a US attorney in Indiana to get Indymedia.us, an independent left-leaning news site, to hand over all the data it had about all the users who visited the site on a particular day.

Further adding to civil libertarians' and privacy watchdogs' concerns is the fact that the Justice Department ordered Indymedia to keep silent about the request.

"This overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated [Indymedia's] First Amendment rights, by ordering [it] not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a US attorney’s permission," the EFF's Kevin Bankston wrote.

And while Indymedia is an unabashedly left-wing news site, advocating causes such as gay rights and anti-globalization, some of the site's defenders in the wake of the subpoena controversy are right-wing pundits who are drawing a parallel between the Indymedia case and the war of words between the White House and Fox News.

Fox News host Glenn Beck sent out a Twitter message on Tuesday drawing attention to the Indymedia story. Though the Tweet was non-committal -- "Interesting times we live in. Can't wait to see what this story is about." -- it did raise the unusual prospect of a prominent right-wing commentator championing the rights of a left-wing news site.

Who is seeing the real Afghanistan?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:20:48 -0800

Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan that came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.

First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,

I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war…. The United States presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.

Matthew Hoh has served his country bravely in combat and he has responded to a policy with which he disagreed by making the honorable choice to resign. His observations about the situation in Zabul province merit serious consideration. I wish that many others in the previous administration who had serious misgivings about policy but waited to reveal them until after leaving office had, instead, followed Hoh’s example.

Several days later, a letter to the editor appeared in the Washington Post from Benjamin Joseloff, an American serving as a fellow at the Afghanistan Legal Education Project. This initiative, started by Stanford Law students, is devoted to a helping Afghan universities improve the quality of their legal education. Joseloff writes....

continue reading Brian Vogt's post at http://blog.psaonline.org/2009/11/03/who-is-seeing-the-real-afghanistan/

Obama Signs Largest Military Budget since World War II

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:23:22 -0800

Earlier this week, President Obama signed into law the $680 billion FY 2010 Defense Authorization Bill, the largest such budget since the end of World War II. If you missed that aspect of the story, you weren’t alone. Many news stories chose instead to focus on the hate crime provisions tacked onto the bill.

I’ve often quarreled with the inclusion of superfluous legislative riders, and the hate crime provision is more superfluous than most. (Indeed, as my Cato colleague David Rittgers has pointed out, it might be worse than superfluous.)

But I want to focus on the president’s failure to halt the inexorable growth in military spending. His capitulation on a number of spending programs — even as he complains of rampant waste and abuse within the Pentagon — signals to American taxpayers that they should expect more of the same. It sends an equally harmful message to our friends and allies around the world: stand back, we’ll take care of it.

You see, most of the money we spend on our military is not geared to defending the United States. Rather, it encourages other countries to free-ride on the U.S. military instead of taking prudent steps to defend themselves.

The massive defense bill represents only part of our military spending. The appropriations bill moving through Congress governing veterans affairs, military construction and other agencies totals $133 billion, while the massive Department of Homeland Security budget weighs in at $42.8 billion. This comprises the visible balance of what Americans spend on our national security, loosely defined. Then there is the approximately $16 billion tucked away in the Energy Department’s budget, money dedicated to the care and maintenance of the country’s huge nuclear arsenal.

All told, every man, woman and child in the United States will spend more than $2,700 on these programs and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the average Japanese spends less than $330; the average German about $520; China’s per capita spending is less than $100.

The massive imbalance between what Americans spend on our military, and what others spend, flows directly from our foreign policy. Several decades ago, Washington opted to be the world’s policeman, and has ever since discouraged other countries from spending more on their own defense. President Obama has tacitly questioned this approach in the past, and has called on other countries to step forward and do more. But by signing this monstrosity, his actions drown out his words.

The president has defended his support for continued bloated military spending, with additional monies going especially to a larger conventional army, as a way to reduce the strains on our troops and their families. This is a noble impulse. But a far better way to relieve the burdens on our overstretched force is to rethink all of our global military commitments, and align our strategy to our means. A new grand strategy, predicated on self-reliance and restraint, would relieve the burdens from the backs of our troops and from taxpayers. That new strategy would compel other countries to finally assume their rightful responsibilities in defending themselves and their respective regions.

The governing class in Washington has consistently resisted such a change. It is enamored of its ability to manage not just the rest of the country, but indeed the rest of the world, and sees no reason to change. Neither, it would seem, does President Obama. By embracing a military budget explicitly geared toward sustaining the status quo, the president virtually ensures that other countries will not share in the costs of keeping the world relatively prosperous and at peace.

I’ll be discussing our massive military spending and other aspects of U.S. national security policy next Friday with Daniel Wirls, a professor at UC Santa Cruz, and the author of a forthcoming book on U.S. military spending that looks terrific. The event is sponsored by the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and will be held at the UC’s Washington Center from 10:00 to 11:30. To learn more and to register, visit their web site.

By Christopher Preble. To read more, visit http://blog.psaonline.org

The US-Russia-Ukraine Triangle

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:10:48 -0700

With the possible exception of Georgia-US-Russia, no US relationship in the former Soviet region is more fraught today than the US-Russia-Ukraine triangle. At a time when Washington and Moscow have variously committed to a relationship reset, a new operating system, and a rerun of the Clinton-Yeltsin strategic partnership, it is disappointing how little substance has followed rhetoric. Meanwhile, Central and Eastern Europe are still reeling from the US Administration’s abrupt and ill-timed reversal on missile defense deployment, and Team Obama is eager for opportunities to demonstrate its commitment to the new Europe, which received no shortage of love from the Bush Administration.

Enter the prospect of US-Ukraine cooperation on missile defense. According to Ukraine’s Ambassador to the US, the two countries have begun working discussions on sharing data from Ukrainian radar for use with a revised US-led missile defense system in Southeastern Europe. The Ukrainians may be overreaching here, trying to manufacture a moment of decision that the US Administration prefers to avoid, however there is no doubt that missile defense cooperation with Central and Eastern Europe remains very much on the table, even after the Bush plan was scrapped last month. And while the Obama Administration insists any radar-interceptor system is still intended primarily to defend against a rogue missile launch by Iran, Moscow has renewed its objection that missile defense based in former Warsaw Pact territory is a threat to its nuclear deterrent, an absolute red line for an ex-superpower whose conventional forces are not up to the task of defending its sprawling borders.

All of this makes perfect sense in the context of an increasingly zero sum US-Russian relationship: If the possibility of US-Ukraine missile defense cooperation reassures Kiev (and Warsaw and Prague) that the US is still fully engaged in the region, it should be no surprise that Russia is as upset over this as it was over the Bush Administration’s plans for a Polish and the Czech system–perhaps more so because some of the radars at issue are in Crimea, a Russian majority region of Ukraine where Moscow could exploit ethnic tension to empower a pro-Russian separatist movement. Ironically, during the month between Obama’s cancellation of the original missile defense plan and now, Moscow had refused to acknowledge the importance of the US concession, latching onto the system’s technical shortcomings to dismiss it as destined for failure from the outset. In turn, Congressional hawks have argued that Russia’s offer to cut its deployed nuclear arsenal by about a quarter is hollow, since most of those weapons are unreliable antiques.

The bigger picture: If it can’t have close ties with both Russia and the West, Ukraine’s best bet is security through NATO membership, and prosperity through EU membership. Both are threatened by Russia’s plans to build the Nord Stream pipeline, which will cut Ukraine out of the gas trade, and Moscow’s ambition to control a sphere of influence, which will, at a minimum, extend to borderlands with large Russian populations. The Ukrainian Presidential election in January will reshuffle Kiev’s cast of players, but is unlikely to effect a permanent reorientation toward Moscow over Brussels and Washington. For the US, opening a dialogue on potential cooperation with Ukraine signals that the missile defense reversal in September was not the beginning of the end of US engagement in the region.

By Matthew Rojansky. To see more articles by Matthew, go to http://blog.psaonline.org/

Supreme Court to hear Uighurs' case

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:21:57 -0700

Robert Barnes | Washington | October 21

WaPo - Justices to consider whether judges can release them into U.S.

The Supreme Court set aside the objections of the Obama administration and said Tuesday that it will consider whether judges have the power to release Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United States if they have been deemed not to be "enemy combatants."

The case, involving a group of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, again thrusts the court into the jangle of policy decisions and constitutional principles involving the approximately 220 men still held at the base in Cuba. And the court's decision to hear it could further complicate plans to close the military prison in January, a deadline the Obama administration recently said it might be unable to meet.

Last year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that a Guantanamo detainee had the right to prove to a federal judge that he was being unlawfully held as an enemy combatant. The current case is a logical next step, determining what powers a judge has to release such a person, especially when sending him back to his home country is not an option.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, says decisions about releasing detainees are reserved for the executive branch. And both the executive branch and Congress have said that decisions about whether detainees may be shipped to the United States, if there is no other place for them, are reserved for the political branches.

But lawyers for the Uighurs said restricting what judges may do to release those who have won their freedom would make the court's 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush meaningless.

"It would be hard to overstate the importance of the question presented in this case -- to the rule of law and to the public," the lawyers wrote in a brief to the court.

Also:
NYT: Justices to Decide on U.S. Release of Detainees
NYT: Leader of China’s Uighur Minority Builds a Stage Across the Globe
AP: China Secretly Detained 43 Uighur Men, Group Says

Top scientist charged with espionage

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:25:20 -0700

October 20

AFP/BBC - Leading American scientist Stewart Nozette has been arrested and charged with attempted espionage.

The US Justice Department says he tried to pass on top secret information to a person he thought was an Israeli intelligence officer.

But the officer turned out to be an FBI agent involved in a sting.

The 52-year-old scientist had worked at the Department of Energy, the Pentagon and NASA, where he was the principal investigator in the team that found water on the moon.

He is accused of trying to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information relating to American national security.

Court papers say the scientist handed over classified information in return for cash before he was arrested.

US officials have stressed the Israeli government was not involved in any wrongdoing.

Danger Room What’s Next in National Security Rush Delivery for Mother of All Bunker Busters

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:08:20 -0700

Nathan Hodge | Washington | October 13

Wired - For several years, the U.S. military has been working on a 30,000-pound superbomb that can penetrate and destroy what the military calls “hardened targets“: Command bunkers or WMD facilities shielded by concrete and buried deep underground.

Now it looks as if the Pentagon is speeding delivery of the bomb, formally known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, or MOP. The Associated Press’ Anne Gearan reports today that the Defense Department awarded a contract worth around $52 million to speed up integration of the bomb aboard the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. According to the story, the MOP could be ready for B-2 delivery as early as next summer.

So why the rush? Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell offered a bland statement about the world being a dangerous place, but it’s tempting to see this as a response to Iran’s newly revealed nuclear site, buried deep inside a mountain near Qom. Gearan described the MOP “Plan B for dealing with Iran” if the diplomatic approach fails.

In fact, the Defense Department actually wanted the thing to be ready for delivery last year. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency began testing the MOP capability in 2007, But as Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told AP, development of the bomb was slowed by about two years because of budgetary issues.

Fox News: Meet the MOP: The Massive Ordnance Penetrator
AP: U.S. speeds up delivery of big bomb

The 13.6-tonne behemoth — called the “massive ordnance penetrator,” or MOP — will be the largest non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. arsenal and carry 2,400 kilograms of explosives. The bomb is about 10 times more powerful than the weapon it is designed to replace.

VOA: US Advances Deployment of 'Bunker Buster' Bomb
CBC: U.S. boosts spending on bunker-buster bomb

Victims’ families continue fight for new 9/11 probe

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:54:13 -0700

New York | October 15

RT - Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks will continue to push for a new probe into the tragedy, despite a recent court decision not to put the issue on a referendum.

Around 80,000 campaigners in New York have called for a referendum on a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks back in September 2001, but the New York State Supreme Court has ruled it out.

The NYC Coalition For Accountability Now, which include victims’ relatives, survivors, and rescue workers lead the referendum campaign for the initiative to appear on November’s mayoral ballot.

The group accuses the 9/11 commission of failing to answer 70% of questions proposed by family members.

[...]

NYC CAN won’t appeal the courts decision, but plans to take its campaign nationwide, launching a PR blitz aimed at gathering American support.

“Our next challenge is to reshape the public’s views about 9/11, because the bottom line is that the only way that politicians will do anything relating to getting accountability, whether it’s 9/11 or another issue, is if there’s public outcry, widespread public outrage,” Ted Walter said.

The Coalition is disappointed, but not surprised, by the judge’s decision. After all, in the past 25 years, only one referendum has made it to the New York City ballot. That was back in 1993, when New Yorkers voted on how long their politicians served.

Homeland Security Reports on Revamped Immigration Enforcement

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 12:42:54 -0700

Spencer S. Hsu | Washington | October 16

WaPo - A controversial federal program that deputizes state and local law enforcement agents to catch illegal immigrants is expanding under the Obama administration, despite changes announced this summer intended to curb alleged racial profiling and other police abuses.

The Department of Homeland Security reported Friday that only four of 66 participating agencies have dropped out because of the new federal requirements. And those losses are offset by the addition of five police, sheriff's and corrections departments, while six more are nearing approval, according to the department.

In the Washington area, sheriff's offices in Frederick, Loudoun and Prince William counties continue to participate.

Nationwide, the program identified about 60,000 illegal immigrants for deportation over the past year, the highest number since the program was expanded nationwide in 2006. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano in July said agencies that receive federal grants and training under the program would have 90 days to agree to new terms aimed at ending controversial police practices identified by congressional auditors and civil rights groups. Critics cited cases in which police conducted roadside stops and neighborhood sweeps aimed at Latinos and other ethnic groups, often arresting minorities for traffic and other minor offenses in pursuit of illegal immigrants.

Instead of scaling back the program, as its critics wanted, DHS has reshaped it. The agency has reined in local police units that target illegal immigrants at large, directing the units instead to focus on those who commit major drug offenses or violent crimes, especially those already incarcerated. Most prominently, the agency cut back authority it had given to Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. His operations in the Phoenix metropolitan area had led to charges of racial profiling and three federal investigations.

[...]

Arpaio, whose, 4,000-employee department has caught more illegal immigrants under the program than any other agency -- more than 20 percent of the nationwide total -- vowed to defy the new rules and continue arrests in the community. He said deputies will conduct another "crime suppression" raid Friday and turn over illegal immigrants found violating traffic laws or other civil offenses to federal authorities. If ICE refuses to take them, Arpaio said, he will take them to the next closest federal agency, probably the U.S. Border Patrol at the Mexican border.

"I can't understand why they are bullying this law enforcement agency for political reasons when we've been so successful," Arpaio said in an interview. "We're going to go out again [Friday] -- the same way we've been doing it."

Immigrants Riot in For Profit Prison

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:22:44 -0700

The Texas Observer has an excellent, in-depth account of two massive prison riots in a private, for-profit facility housing immigrants swept up for border crossing violations. Here's the context in which the riots occurred:

...the Bush administration piloted a “zero-tolerance” policy in Texas that eventually spread across the border: All illegal border crossers would be arrested, detained and, if possible, prosecuted in federal court. Prosecutions surged, as did the need for detention centers, jails and prisons to hold the tens of thousands of newly minted criminals. The Obama administration has more than embraced the policy. The number of prosecutions for immigration crimes—almost 68,000—during the first nine months of 2009 is on track for a 14 percent increase over 2008. More than half of those prosecutions took place in Texas.

The result has been a system swamped with low-level immigration cases and prisons bursting at the seams with illegal immigrants. Rather than build and run the facilities themselves, federal agencies have turned in large part to private prison companies, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group. In 2008, GEO reported more than $1 billion in revenue, an 80 percent increase over 2005.

On a related note, TPM has been investigating the many scams run by private prisons as well and how they implant themselves inside local communities like parasitic wasps:

...a well-organized consortium of private companies headquartered around the country, which specializes in pitching speculative and risky prison projects to local governments desperate for jobs.

The projects have generated multi-million dollar profits for the companies involved, but often haven't created the anticipated payoff for the communities, and have left a string of failed or failing prisons in their wake.

The whole concept of a private for-profit prison makes my skin crawl, especially in our current political environment where money buys legislation. It's very much America Eats Its Own.

Report: US considers phone companies ‘arm of government’

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 21:17:28 -0700

Daniel Tencer | Oct 10

Raw Story - The US government doesn't have to reveal information about phone companies that may have spied illegally on Americans because those phone companies are an "arm of the government," the US Justice Department argued in a recent court case.

In a lawsuit over the Bush administration's decision to give immunity to telecom companies over its warrantless wiretapping program, the Justice Department argued that it doesn't have to publicly reveal what it discussed with the phone companies because those discussions were "inter-agency communications," explains Ryan Singel at Wired.

He cites a passage from a court document in which the department argues that "the communications between the agencies and telecommunications companies regarding the immunity provisions of the proposed legislation have been regarded as intra-agency...."

Singel was reporting on privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation's two-year-long legal battle with the DoJ over access to those communications. In 2008, the Bush administration passed a law granting reotroactive immunity to phone companies that had participated in the administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

After news reports in 2007 suggested that the phone companies had lobbied the government to have those protections put in place, the EFF launched a freedom-of-information request to have discussions between the Justice Department and the phone companies made public. When the government refused, the EFF took the matter to court.

On September 24, a US District Court judge sided with the EFF and ordered the government to "release more records about the lobbying campaign to provide immunity to the telecommunications giants that participated in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program," the EFF stated.

The judge gave the Justice Department until last Friday to hand over the documents. But, late on Thursday, the government appealed for a 30-day stay of the judge's order. That order was refused, but the judge has delayed any further decisions on the case for another week.

CONGRESS 'A MERE APPENDAGE' OF EXECUTIVE BRANCH?

Blogger Marcy Wheeler at FireDogLake says there are more interesting revelations about the government's attitude towards constitutional powers in the delay request it filed last week.

Gun Show Undercover

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:13:18 -0700

Great video showing illegal sales that take place at gun shows, due to the gun-show loophole. Watch as one gun seller laughs when told the buyer couldn't pass a background check, and offers that he couldn't either. And you wonder how criminals get their hands on guns....

Full Disclosure: I have consulted on this issue & am passionate about gun safety