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Today's
Stories
January 3 / 4, 2004
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
January 3 / 4, 2004
Watch Out for Organic
Farmers!
Ashcroft
Goes After the Left
By KURT NIMMO
In an apparently ludicrous turn of events, the
FBI warned local law enforcement across the country to be on
the lookout for the latest al-Qaeda manual -- the Farmer's Almanac.
"The FBI is warning police nationwide
to be alert for people carrying almanacs, cautioning that the
popular reference books covering everything from abbreviations
to weather trends could be used for terrorist planning,"
reports the Bush Ministry of Disinformation, Fox News Division.
"It urged officers to watch during searches, traffic stops
and other investigations for anyone carrying almanacs, especially
if the books are annotated in suspicious ways."
"The practice of researching potential
targets is consistent with known methods of Al Qaeda and other
terrorist organizations that seek to maximize the likelihood
of operational success through careful planning," added
the FBI.
If the police discover anything "suspicious,"
they are to report it immediately to their local Joint Terrorism
Task Force (JTTF), according to the FBI bulletin released on
Christmas Eve.
JTTFs are new and relatively unknown.
They are essentially the FBI's vanguard -- a crucial and emerging
link between the FBI, various federal agencies, state law enforcement,
and local police departments.
The JTTF concept originally "began
with 11 members from the NYPD and 11 FBI investigators,"
explains the Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network. "Today's
task force, 1 of 16 nationwide, includes more than 140 members
representing numerous federal and local agencies, such as the
U.S.  Marshals
Service, the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service,
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service, the New York State Police, the NewYork/New
Jersey Port Authority Police Department, and the U.S. Secret
Service."
In other words, the connecting tissue
of the evolving surveillance state.
"All agencies participating in the
JTTF sign a formal memorandum of understanding that clearly states
the task force's two objectives... reactive: to respond to and
investigate terrorist incidents or terrorist-related criminal
activity and... proactive: to investigate domestic and foreign
terrorist groups and individuals targeting or operating within
the New York metropolitan area for the purpose of detecting,
preventing, and prosecuting their criminal activity."
JTTFs soon sprouted up all over the country.
"The joint terrorism tasks forces
are chaired in 56 regions of the country by the FBI, and those
task forces include members of other federal agencies, such as
INS, Customs, AFT, and CIA, as well as state and local law enforcement.
Homeland security would be included as well," noted FBI
Director Robert S. Mueller III last month. "The importance
of these task forces is that they have transformed a federal
counter-terrorism effort into a national effort, creating a force
multiplier effect, and indeed providing effective realtime information
sharing among the participants."
In other words, a federally coordinated
police force integrating elements of the military, the CIA, numerous
federal agencies, and nearly every police department in the nation.
On March 4, Mueller told the Senate's
Committee on the Judiciary that eventually 27,000 federal, state,
and local law enforcement personnel would receive "specialized
counterterrorism training," presumably with the help of
the CIA.
A few weeks after Mueller was talking
up JTTFs before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, a
bill (HR 3439) was introduced in Congress designed to "promote
the sharing of personnel between Federal law enforcement agencies
and other public law enforcement agencies, and for other purposes."
Section 4 of this legislation will "detail
any employee within the Central Intelligence Agency" to
state and local law enforcement. In other words, your local police
department may not only be working in tandem with the CIA, individual
officers will also be "deputized" and answerable directly
to the CIA. In order to do this, the bill will amend the Central
Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 and its long regretted (and often
violated) restriction on domestic activities.
"We have increased the operational
integration between the CIA and FBI since 9/11," noted Mueller
in an FBI press release. "From my daily morning briefings
with CIA officers and George Tenet to the widespread assignment
of executives, Agents, and analysts between the two agencies
since 9/11, the FBI and the CIA have become integrated at virtually
every level of our operations."
All of this follows the CIA's installation
of analysts and covert action operatives in "each of the
56 FBI field offices in the United States" last year, according
to the AP. The CIA claimed their agents would only serve only
as "conduits of information," providing law enforcement
with "distilled intelligence" from the CIA.
But a spokesman also indicated members
of the CIA's "operational branch" were among those
being assigned to the domestic FBI offices -- in other words,
"operatives responsible for carrying out dirty tricks ranging
from election rigging to assassinations," as the AP characterized
it.
HR 3439 is so important it was immediately
referred to the House committees on intelligence and the judiciary.
One of the two sponsors of the bill is Rep. Martin Frost (D-TX).
Frost represents a district in Dallas-Forth Worth and is the
ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee. He served previously
on the House Select Committee on Homeland Security and is tight
with major defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed
Martin.
In Portland, the American Civil Liberties
Union of Oregon was so concerned about the COINTELPRO-like aspects
of JTTF operations they urged the Portland city council to enact
"safeguards and insist that they apply to FBI agents, Portland
Police and other members of the Task Force," according to
the ACLU's Oregon web page. In essence, "Portland police
officers are under the sole control and instruction of federal
agents," apparently now including the CIA's operational
branch.
Meanwhile, on October 15, the ACLU filed
suit against Denver, Colorado, seeking disclosure of a document
that sets out the terms of the Denver Police Department's participation
in the FBI's JTTF. Back in May the FBI admitted tapping into
the Denver Police Department's surveillance files and also confirmed
it had sought information on activists attending a protest rally
in Colorado Springs.
"None of the files contained reports
of violence, disruptiveness or lawlessness," reported Mike
McPhee of the Denver Post. "In some cases, names were recorded
of people who merely testified in support of legislation, or
of African-American citizens who gathered to demand that more
black professional athletes, particularly Denver Broncos, get
more involved in community issues... In other cases, police recorded
license plate numbers of people outside a mosque during a worship
ceremony."
"An FBI anti-terrorism agent asked
Springs police to provide him with the vehicle license-plate
numbers of environmentalists who were picketing a timber-industry
gathering at The Broadmoor hotel," reports the Colorado
Springs Independent. "For civil libertarians, the incident
and other recently surfaced evidence conjure up memories of the
days when the FBI routinely spied on political dissidents [COINTELPRO]
-- a practice that was condemned and officially ended following
congressional hearings in 1976."
The Denver police also provided the FBI
with files from the Multi-Agency Group Intelligence Conferences,
or MAGIC, a confab of federal and state agencies as well as approximately
20 law enforcement agencies from four states. According to the
Denver Post, the MAGIC agenda list includes discussions of "extremist
groups," such as the American Indian Movement, environmentalists,
animal rights groups, and other organizations presumptuous enough
to actually exercise their rights as guaranteed by the Constitution.
"Last Spring, Denver settled the
Spy Files lawsuit and agreed it would stop collecting information
about peaceful protesters who have no connection to criminal
activity," said ACLU Legal Director Mark Silverstein. "The
FBI, however, is not bound by the same restrictions, especially
now that recently-relaxed FBI guidelines make it even easier
for the agency to gather information on peaceful political activity.
This raises the question whether Denver intelligence officers
assigned to work full time for the JTTF must abide by Denver's
new intelligence policy, or whether they are permitted to operate
under the FBI rules that are much less protective of civil liberties."
The FBI and its associated JTTFs are
in the process of analyzing the information they receive from
local law enforcement -- and much of it has nothing to do with
al-Qaeda or Muslim miscreants.
In fact, the FBI ignored leads and stymied
investigations of al-Qaeda.
Case in point: Zacarias Moussaoui.
Even though French intelligence warned
the FBI that Moussaoui was possibly connected to al-Qaeda, the
agency did not take action or bother to question him. After the
WTC and Pentagon lay in smoldering ruins, FBI agent Coleen Rowley
wrote a thirteen page letter to Robert Mueller chastising the
agency for not arresting Moussaoui prior to 9/11.
John O'Neill, director of counterterrorism
at the FBI office in New York, was so frustrated by the FBI's
obstructing any serious al-Qaeda investigation that he consented
to several interviews with Jean-Charles Brisardand and Guillaume
Dasquié, authors of the controversial book "Ben Laden:
La Vérité interdite" (Bin Laden: the Forbidden
Truth). O'Neill accuses the Bushites and the FBI of implementing
a high-level intelligence block in order to protect business
relationships between the Saudi royal family, the Taliban, and
the Bush family.
And then there's FBI agent Robert Wright.
According to an LA Weekly story published in August 2002, Wright
informed his superiors of the existence of alleged terrorist
training camps in Chicago and Kansas City connected to the bombing
of the federal building in Oklahoma City. Instead of taking action,
the FBI silenced Wright.
The FBI is attempting to squelch the
publication of a book manuscript authored by Wright. "The
FBI continues to illegally refuse the release of ... Wright's
500 page manuscript, 'Fatal Betrayals of the Intelligence Mission,'
that... Wright submitted for prepublication review in October
2001," writes Judicial Watch in a press release. "In
fact, the FBI refused to turn the manuscript over to Sen. Richard
C. Shelby, Vice Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee,
charged with investigating the FBI's intelligence failures."
No such hesitation exists when the FBI
investigates progressives.
"The FBI puts far more resources
and energy into neutralizing political opponents, activists and
whistle blowers than it does into stopping real terrorism,"
writes Charles Amsellem for LA's IndyMedia.
On November 23, Eric Lichtblau of the
New York Times revealed a classified FBI memo advising "local
law enforcement officials to report any suspicious activity at
protests to its counterterrorism squads," in other words
the JTTFs.
The FBI collected information on the
tactics, training, and organization of antiwar demonstrators,
ostensibly to control "extremist elements" plotting
violence. It stressed the snooping was not for the purpose of
monitoring the political speech of lawful protesters.
"Routine spying on dissidents is
a sign of a police state, and unless we stop this administration's
cavalier attitude towards fundamental rights we face a serious
threat to our democracy," warned Michael Ratner, president
of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Routine spying on political enemies is
the FBI's raison d'être.
In fact, the FBI's predecessor, the Department
of Investigation, spent much of its time rounding up draft resisters
during World War I and conducting illegal dragnet arrests of
tens of thousands of anarchists, socialists, and labor activists.
Nothing much has changed over the years, even though Hollywood
likes to portray the FBI as an agency concerned with protecting
Americans from the likes Al Capone, John Dillinger, and John
Gotti.
"Even before September 11, the government
was running COINTELPRO-style operations against a coalition of
radical labor, environmental, and human rights organizations
opposed to corporate control of the global economy," writes
Jim Redden, author of Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned
into the Eyes and Ears of the State. "The truth is, there's
a long and sordid history of government operatives committing
the very crimes they are supposed to prevent and setting up dissidents
with phony charges."
On May 30, 2002, AG Ashcroft effectively
abolished restrictions on FBI surveillance, gutting guidelines
created by the Ford Administration after the Church Committee,
led by Idaho senator Frank Church, discovered widespread constitutional
abuses under COINTELPRO. "The American people need to be
reassured that never again will an agency of the government be
permitted to conduct a secret war against those citizens it considers
a threat to the established order," Sen. Church declared
at the time.
Ashcroft and the Bushites have effectively
trashed the idea that people exercising First Amendment rights
of freedom of speech, press, religion, and assembly should not
investigated without probable cause. Indeed, the Bushites are
conducting "a secret war against those citizens [the Bushites
consider] a threat to the established order."
David Cohen, a former chief of the CIA's
covert operations division, was hired in the wake of 9/11 to
run New York City's intelligence unit. He immediately set out
to eviscerate the Handschu agreement, a set of guidelines established
in 1985 as a result of a 1971 class-action lawsuit filed by political
activists who accused NYC's notorious Red Squad and BOSS --
the NYPD's Bureau of Strategic Services -- of using dossiers
and undercover cops against constitutionally protected dissent.
On February 13, 2003, a federal judge overturned the agreement.
Cohen went after Handschu in the wake
of an earlier ruling by a federal court that had weakened similar
guidelines in Chicago. Guidelines were put in place after revelations
detailing more than 500 FBI black bag jobs and aggressive police
surveillance and harassment of political opponents of the mayor.
"Police went to our fundraisers and recorded license plate
numbers," Harvey Grossman, director of the ACLU's Illinois
office, told the Washington Post last year. "They kept voluminous
files on the NAACP and the League of Women Voters. This is a
history we ought not to forget."
Resurgent Red Squads and police intelligence
units all across the country are now working directly with the
FBI, the JTTFs, the Ministry of Homeland Security, and the neighborly
folks over at the CIA.
As author Jonathan Vankin notes, in the
1960s the CIA infiltrated police departments around the country
and trained officers in clandestine methods. According to Verne
Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative, the CIA "used its
contacts with local police departments and their intelligence
units to pick up its 'police skills' and began in earnest to
pull off burglaries, illegal entries, use of explosives, criminal
frame-ups, shared interrogations, and disinformation [against
domestic political groups]. CIA teams purchased sophisticated
equipment for many starved police departments and in return got
to see arrest records, suspect lists, and intelligence reports.
Many large police departments, in conjunction with the CIA, carried
out illegal, warrantless searches of private properties."
The FBI, on the other hand, worked mostly
above board with police departments to neutralize political enemies.
"A striking feature of Hoover's approach to political spying
was the close coordination between the FBI and local police departments,"
explains Earl Ofari Hutchinson of Pacific News Service. "This
was apparent when the FBI launched deadly search and destroy
missions jointly with local police in several cities in 1969
against the Black Panther Party."
Since 9/11 the CIA, the FBI, the Justice
Department, the Internal Revenue Service, postal, customs, and
immigration inspectors, and the Ministry of Homeland Security
work together as an integrated national police force. As well,
the Pentagon's Northern Command and the Ministry of Homeland
Security have created domestic intelligence departments.
Look no further than COINTELPRO and Operation
CHAOS to understand the preferred modus operandi.
Particularly worrisome is the unchecked
participation of the CIA, notorious for its organizational elan
in regard to coups, death squads, and studious compilation of
"subversive" hit and disappearance lists for use by
sadistic thugs and dictators in such far-flung places as Chile,
Turkey, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, El Salvador, and elsewhere.
In 1983 the CIA published the "Human Resource Exploitation
Training Manual," Orwellian doublespeak for a torture how-to
book spelling out methods used in Honduras against labor organizers
and indigenous rights activists.
Like the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo,
in Nazi Germany, the Bush organized national police and military
force will eventually predominate all aspects of law enforcement
and federal regulation. It will not answer to the people and
will not be subject to public oversight. Its abuses and constitutional
violations may never again face the light of day before a Church
Committee.
As absurd as the latest FBI mandate sent
to 18,000 police organizations to be on the lookout for "terrorists"
bearing copies of the Farmer's Almanac may seem, it is an example
how the Bushites are working hand-in-glove with local law enforcement
(and state and federal agencies) in a coordinated effort to manufacture
a police state of truly monumental and technologically sophisticated
proportions.
The Bush police state target is nominally
al-Qaeda, a largely mythical organization created by the CIA
now serving as a convenient bogeyman for both domestic and international
purposes. It is mostly an Emmanuel Goldstein scheme designed
to anger and spook the public and allow the Bushites to push
agenda of military expansion abroad and police state repression
at home.
It's not a cardboard and stage managed
al-Qaeda the Bushites have in their sights trained on, but rather
the progressive movements of America, traditional adversaries
of the reactionary police state and the ruling elite it represents.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html
. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's,
The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another
Day in the Empire, will soon be published by Dandelion
Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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