The Terrorist Watchlist: One Watchlist Among a Collection of Databases and Watchlists

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Timothy Healy, the Director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, has a telling comment at the end of Charlie Savage’s story on documents revealing new details about the terrorist watch list.

But Mr. Healy said the government could not reveal who was on the list, or why, because that would risk revealing intelligence sources. He also defended the idea of the watch list, saying the government would be blamed if, after a terrorist attack, it turned out the perpetrator had attracted the suspicions of one agency but it had not warned other agencies to scrutinize the person.

Mr. Healy also suggested that fears of the watch list were exaggerated, in part because there are many other reasons that people are subjected to extra screening at airports. He said more than 200,000 people have complained to the Department of Homeland Security about their belief that they were wrongly on the list, but fewer than 1 percent of them were actually on it.

It’s a neat boast–that just 1 percent of the people who have reason to believe the government has them in a big database turn out to be in the database (the terrorist watch list, formally the Terrorist Screening Database or TSDB) at issue.

But given that the documents reveal an interlocking set of multiple databases, that ought to be little comfort. The Known and Suspected Terrorist list was, somewhat disturbingly, actually the Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File until August 2009 (see PDF 17), suggesting that the Bush Administration kept all scary brown people together in one database, but also making clear that there is now a Gang File that is very similar to the KST file. The TSDB is separate from the No Fly and Selectee lists; hypothetically the latter two lists are a subset of the former (people from the TSDB have to be submitted and approved to be put on the TSA lists), but it is not absolutely clear that is the case for the less stringent Selectee list (PDF 100 makes it clear the No Fly list is). There are the Consular Lookout and Support System and the Interagency Border Inspection System; while inclusion in the TSDB should automatically include someone in these databases, it is not clear that these databases only include those in the TSDB (PDF 55 and 59 suggest they were in 2004, though it’s not clear that that is still the case). The Terrorist Screening Center also provides access to other databases–the Automated Case Support System, the Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force database, and TSA’s Office of Transportation Threat Assessment database (PDF 26), all of which are distinct from the KST, and PDF 59 seems to make clear that the latter TSA list is not included in the TSDB. PDF 89 makes it clear there are other Department of Homeland Security and DOJ terrorist watch lists that are not the same as the TSDB. There is a Customs and Border Patrol database that includes additional information (see PDF 95) that will not be included in the TSDB.

In short, when Healy says there are many other reasons why people are subject to screening at airports, he is not saying that people aren’t in a database somewhere, only that they are not in his database.

Then there’s the possibility of a false positive–of someone being stopped because he had the same name as someone in the TSDB. The documents describe how to put someone in the database with just a name and approximate age, and there at least used to be a Handling Code dedicated to people with limited biographical data (see PDF 45). And Healy himself admitted (PDF 101) that 60-70% of the people reported to the Terrorist Screening Center, some via stops and some via other bureaucratic means, are not positive matches to the list, which says some people are being stopped for no reason. Further, PDF 103 makes it clear that almost half the people who complain about being on the watchlists (that less than 1 percent Healy referred to) were either a false positive or were not appropriately on the watchlist.

So sure. The TSDB isn’t necessarily the reason everyone is being stopped. But that doesn’t mean the country’s vast array of databases and watchlists are working properly.

Our Counterterrorism Policies Will Make Impact of Climate Change Worse

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What place does this sound like?

Ruling elites … do not see climate change as an immediate threat to their authority. They therefore feel free to take an opportunistic attitude toward climate change, supporting climate change mitigation policies that have collateral economic or political benefits to their particular interests.

Though it could be, it is not an indictment of our own country’s refusal to do anything about climate change. Rather, it’s one of a series of climate change studies and conferences the National Intelligence Council contracted to have done. This one describes the self-serving actions of the pre-Arab Spring authoritarian elite of North Africa.

As Steven Aftergood reported, the CIA is hiding the climate change analysis they’re doing. They just rejected a FOIA for their climate change reports based on a claim that everything they have done is classified. So these reports, prominently labeled, “This paper does not represent US Government views,” are one of the only public reads about what the intelligence community is doing with climate change.

Those contractor studies are interesting for several reasons. First, check out how they define their regions:

  • China
  • India
  • Russia
  • Southeast Asia and Pacific Islands
  • North Africa
  • Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America

The impact of climate change on the US, Europe, much of the Middle East, and most of Africa are all missing (or, at least, not public).

Shouldn’t someone (not the CIA, which can’t, but perhaps DOE) start thinking about how climate change will affect security in the US? How do you rationalize not including the Middle East (where water is already is source of conflict between Israel and its neighbors) or the Horn of Africa (where climate-related issues discussed in the North Africa studies have presented predictably catastrophic problems in countries that already pose other national security challenges to the US)? Why study India rather than South Asia as a whole, particularly given that Bangladesh will be one of the most impacted countries and (as reflected in the India report) will present India with a serious refugee problem. In short, there are real, critical gaps in the way the intelligence community at least publicly thinks of the potential impact of climate change.

I checked out the North Africa reports (commissioned report, conference report) to see how the intelligence community viewed the region two years before the Arab Spring. True, these reports analyze the impact of things like drought on agriculture and the impact of that on stability, but such analysis largely parallels the impact of neoliberal economic policies on agriculture and therefore on stability. Here’s what the NIC was hearing about climate change and Ag and stability two years before the Arab Spring (these quotes come from the conference report):

An acute state failure to address climate change that results in intolerable conditions for significant segments of the population may constitute a sociopolitical tipping point, in essence a breaking of the social compact between North African states and civil society. At that point, civil actors may determine that fundamental systemic change is necessary. The results of such a situation will depend on the specific reactions by state elites and by the public; reform, repression, or revolution are all possibilities. A combination of climatic stress and inadequate state responses over the next two decades could prove the catalyst for a major sociopolitical shift in North Africa. On the other hand, North Africans tend to hold a religiously based view that “what will be, will be.” Owing to this fatalistic mindset, North Africans are unlikely to blame the state for climate related stresses, making it more difficult to attain the aforementioned tipping point.

Much later, the report predicts that the ancillary effects of climate change will be the cause of social stress.

The implications of climate change in North Africa—notably migration, stress on both rural and urban areas, unemployment, and increased resource competition—are likely to generate volatile sociopolitical conditions that will pose significant threats to the existing political structure. The responses of North African states to these threats may be more decisive for the fate of the region than their direct responses to climate change impacts. North African states have robust capacity to maintain social control in the face of domestic challenges and destabilization. Regimes depend on a combination of entrenched patronage systems, robust mukhabarat (security) apparatuses, and the support of external allies—a combination that has proven highly effective at maintaining political control. They have a track record of effectively suppressing dissent and unrest or remaining resilient where unrest has persisted, such as the civil conflict in Algeria.

States in the region may seek to suppress or distort information on climate change-related challenges. They seek to control access to any information that could provide a basis for opposition to the state, even information as seemingly innocuous as census data. The proliferation of new media and alternative information sources, however, will make it difficult to maintain such censorship. [my emphasis]

Particularly given our own IC’s failure to take the warnings of unrest expressed via social media social media seriously, I find the warning that North African regimes would find it hard to censor this social unrest prescient.

And I find it richly ironic that the IC notes other countries would “seek to suppress or distort information on climate change-related challenges” when the CIA is doing just that in the US.

But I also find the description of these regimes’ reliance on their allies chilling. This report always describes these regimes, several of them key allies of ours, as badly repressive regimes.

Although the level of repression varies between states, with Tunisia and Libya the most extreme, and has varied cyclically over time, authoritarian regimes are well entrenched in every state in the region.

The conference report acknowledges that the US focus on terrorism has narrowed its diplomatic focus with these countries, which in turn has strengthened the security apparatuses in the region–precisely the source of the repressive strength of the countries.

Security issues are the primary focus of US relations with North African states. The predominance of security and military concerns has led to disproportionate US engagement with security apparatuses in the region, strengthening regimes in ways that may damage long-term prospects to meet the challenges of climate change. US policy in the region has become even more security-centric as a result of the continuing struggle against radical Islamic terrorism. While terrorism has deepened US security ties with states in the region, it has also narrowed the scope of US engagement, which may not be in the long-term interests of either party.

And then the report incorrectly suggests that the only likely challenge to these regimes if they fail to respond adequately to climate change would be Islamists.

Islamist groups have emerged as the only viable opposition force because they have resisted state cooptation and because the state has blocked other avenues for social mobilization. In addition, they have established a track record of effective humanitarian responses to mudslides, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, often providing immediate medical, shelter, and food aid that are normally the responsibilities of the state. In many cases Islamist groups may fill the void left by inadequate state responses or the weakness of other types of potential civil responders. Moderate Islamist groups could play a constructive role, providing highly visible humanitarian assistance that empowers autonomous civil actors and contrasts with ineffectual state responses, thus pressuring state actors to respond more effectively. Moderate Islamists could use the climate change mitigation issue to bolster their argument that existing North African governments are illegitimate and exploitative, creating momentum for political reform.

On the other hand, Islamic extremists across the region may exploit climate change’s destabilizing impacts and ineffective state responses to promote the spread of militancy and anti-regime violence. Indeed, Islamist militants could point to climate-induced catastrophes as evidence of God’s wrath against “apostate regimes” whose un-Islamic behavior has plunged the region into desperate circumstances.

In other words, while the report doesn’t lay out the the logical case it makes explicitly, it nevertheless argues that:

  • The repressive nature of these regimes may make them less likely to respond adequately to climate change
  • Our single-minded focus on terrorism tends to make these countries even more repressive
  • If these countries don’t respond to climate change, it may provide an opportunity for precisely the Islamists our single-minded counter-terrorism focus is designed to combat

In other words, this conference report suggests (though does not say so explicitly, perhaps because it was written by contractors intent on getting paid) that in the presence of a stress like climate change, our counter-terrorism approach may be self-defeating.

Now, again, this report wasn’t written by our spooks and it “does not represent US Government views.” Our policy makers may not agree with this report’s analysis, or they may be ignoring it (seeing no “collateral political or economic benefits to their particular interests”). And if you buy my premise that the stress of climate change is similar to the stress caused by an embrace of neoliberalism, then the report badly underestimated both the success of those challenging these regimes and the centrality of Islamists in these countries.

There’s a lot else that could be said about these reports (such as their too-narrow focus on the Ag in each particular country, when recent food price shocks make it clear such stress will play out at broader levels).

But more generally, the report suggests that our counterterrorism policies are making countries around the world less resilient to climate change (and so presumably to a range of other stresses as well).

The Name of NYPD Brutality: Anthony Bologna

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The Lieutenant Deputy Inspector who pepper-sprayed a kettled, defenseless woman has been identified as Anthony Bologna. He was IDed, in part, by a lawyer representing one of the people Bologna improperly arrested during the 2004 RNC.

The Guardian has learned that the officer, named by activists as deputy inspector Anthony Bologna, stands accused of false arrest and civil rights violations in a claim brought by a protester involved in the 2004 demonstrations at the Republican national convention.

[snip]

Alan Levine, a civil rights lawyer representing Post A Posr, a protester at the 2004 event, told the Guardian that he filed an action against Bologna and another officer, Tulio Camejo, in 2007. The case, filed at the New York Southern District Court, is expected to be heard next year.

[snip]

The lawyer said Posr was arrested on 31 August 2004, after he approached the driver of a Volkswagen festooned with anti-abortion slogans.

[snip]

Levine said: “Police contend that Posr hit the man with a rolled-up newspaper. He said he was just talking to the guy. Bologna ordered another officer, Camejo, to arrest Posr.”

Posr was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct and one count of second degree harassment, and held until September 2. On November 8, all charges against him were dropped.

Levine said that, in a departure from normal police procedure, his client was held in a special detention facility, at Pier 57, where he and others arrested were held until the protests were over.

It sounds like this guy is using his badge to legally and physically abuse people whose politics he disagrees with–someone politically debating choice in 2004 and a woman opposing MOTU power this weekend.

I don’t expect Ray Kelly to do anything about such an abusive officer on his staff (in any case, the union would presumably defend Bologna if Kelly tried to fire him). But so long as he remains on the force, we have a name and a face to personify the NYPD’s brutality: Anthony Bologna.

Update: Bologna’s rank fixed. One of the women who got partly sprayed by him apparently incorrectly used that rank. h/t Cynthia Kouril.

If the NYPD Maces the First Amendment, What Will They Do with Anti-Aircraft Weapons?

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The NYPD made the news yesterday twice.

First, for their over-reaction to the Occupy Wall Street protests. In the video above, street cops corral some women with orange mesh, so another cop–in the white shirt–could mace them.

As the NYPD was bullying people for exercising their First Amendment rights, Commissioner Ray Kelly was on 60 Minutes. He started by confirming he was the boss of all 50,000 people the NYPD had working for it (more than the FBI, 60 Minutes helpfully notes).

Pelley: You call it a hierarchical kind of organization. In other words, you’re the boss.

Kelly: That’s correct. That’s the way it works here.

Pelley: And you’ve got 50,000 people working for you.

Kelly: 35,000 uniformed police officers, 15,000 civilian employees. That’s correct.

Kelly went on to boast that the NYPD had the ability to take down a plane.

Pelley: Are you satisfied that you’ve dealt with threats from aircraft, even light planes, model planes, that kind of thing?

Kelly: Well, it’s something that’s on our radar screen. I mean in an extreme situation, you would have some means to take down a plane.

Pelley: Do you mean to say that the NYPD has the means to take down an aircraft?

Kelly: Yes, I prefer not to get into the details but obviously this would be in a very extreme situation.

Pelley: You have the equipment and the training.

Kelly: Yes.

Since Ray Kelly is “the boss” here, I assume he owns the over-reaction to Occupy Wall Street as much as he owns missing Najibullah Zazi and his Imam, who was an NYPD informant. Presumably, too, that means the guys trained to use anti-aircraft weapons have the same itchy trigger finger as the cop shooting mace in the video above.

The visible face of the NYPD–cops macing women in pens–offers reason enough to question the discipline and judgment of at least the supervisors running the department. Yet there’s a secret face of the NYPD, one that spies on Americans and, apparently, trains to shoot down planes, too. Given what we see in the visible face of the NYPD, how can we trust the invisible face to have anti-aircraft weapons?

How Does the CIA-on-the-Hudson Program Interact with Secure Communities?

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The AP has another installment of their series on the NYPD intelligence department’s mapping of ethnic neighborhoods in New York. As always, you should read the whole thing, as well as the documents showing the spooks’ data collection on innocent Moroccans and Moroccan-Americans.

One question I came away with, though, was how this program interacted with Department of Homeland Security’s Secure Communities program.

Secure Communities, recall, involves information sharing from local law enforcement to the FBI to DHS.

When state and local law enforcement arrest and book someone into a jail for a violation of a state criminal offense, they generally fingerprint the person. After fingerprints are taken at the jail, the state and local authorities electronically submit the fingerprints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This data is then stored in the FBI’s criminal databases. After running the fingerprints against those databases, the FBI sends the state and local authorities a record of the person’s criminal history.

With the Secure Communities program, once the FBI checks the fingerprints, the FBI automatically sends them to DHS, so that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if that person is also subject to removal (deportation). This change, whereby the fingerprints are sent to DHS in addition to the FBI, fulfills a 2002 Congressional mandate for the FBI to share information with ICE, and is consistent with a 2008 federal law that instructs ICE to identify criminal aliens for removal. Secure Communities does not require any changes in the procedures of local law enforcement agencies or jails.

By that process, DHS identifies people it can deport so as to meet the quota set for them by Congress.

As DDay has written repeatedly, this process has led to the deportation of low-level undocumented people, not the hardened felons the program was designed for. And this, in turn, makes local law enforcement less effective, because it makes immigrant communities less willing to cooperate with the cops because doing so might get them deported.

As the documents made available by AP make clear, when the NYPD’s spooks case out businesses, they note whether they are owned by citizens of ethnic (even Italian!) descent, or (as with the Eastern Nights Cafe profile, above) non-citizens. This effectively means NYPD’s spooks are, among other things, creating a database of the statuses of key members of ethnic communities throughout the city. Also, since the NYPD had a set of questions to ask anyone arrested or on parole from the Moroccan community, it also means the normal law enforcement process was being used to collect a database of information on immigration statuses and habits.

The AP story seems to suggest that NYPD keeps this information in a database separate from their other database system.

The information was recorded in NYPD computers, officials said, so that if police ever received a specific tip about a Moroccan terrorist, officers looking for him would have details about the entire community at their fingertips.

[snip]

Current and former officials said the information collected by the Demographics Unit was kept on a computer inside the squad’s offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. It was not connected to the department’s central intelligence database, they said.

The first installment of this series reported that the NYPD had shredded some of its documents to keep aspects of the program–including the fact that they were “building dossiers on innocent people, as these latest documents show they were–secret.

Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy.

That’s why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers.

But they did pass some of the information to the CIA via back channels.

Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean this information was shared with DHS’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement, leading to deportations.

But given information sharing laws included within the PATRIOT Act, this intelligence might well be legally available to the Federal government (but possibly illegal for them to keep, given that it is potentially illegal domestic intelligence).

All of which leads me to wonder: has the CIA-on-the-Hudson make NYC less safe, because it has turned the local cops into officers combining law enforcement, intelligence, and immigration mapping?

Once Again, US Ratchets Up Rhetoric Against Pakistan

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The pattern by now is all too familiar.  Once again, the US is ratcheting up its rhetoric against Pakistan.  Earlier instances included the “crisis” when the US killed three Pakistani soldiers and Pakistan responded by closing strategic border crossings.  This was followed by the Raymond Davis fiasco. Then came exchanges of bluster over the US unilateral action that took out Osama bin Laden.  Now, the target of US ire is the cozy relationship between the Haqqani network and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI.

Reporting for Reuters, Mark Hosenball and Susan Cornwell tell us this morning that some in the US intelligence community are now assigning a direct role for ISI in the Haqqani network attack on the US embassy in Kabul:

Some U.S. intelligence reporting alleges that Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI) specifically directed, or urged, the Haqqani network to carry out an attack last week on the U.S. Embassy and a NATO headquarters in Kabul, according to two U.S. officials and a source familiar with recent U.S.-Pakistan official contacts.

The article informs us that the Senate Appropriations Committee has added to the pressure on Pakistan:

The Senate committee approved $1 billion in aid to support counter-insurgency operations by Pakistan’s military, but voted to make this and any economic aid conditional on Islamabad cooperating with Washington against militant groups including the Haqqanis.

A series of high-level meetings between US and Pakistani officials also has taken place over the last week to hammer home these allegations against Pakistan, despite this warning in the Reuters article:

However, U.S. officials cautioned that the information that Pakistan’s spy agency was encouraging the militants was uncorroborated.

A series of articles on the website for Pakistan’s Dawn news agency provides some perspective on the coverage of the issue in Pakistan.  One article provides a forum for Interior Minister Rehman Malik after his meeting with FBI Director Robert Mueller yesterday: Read more →

The Cost of $100 Million Prison Expansions and Other “Civilian-Led” Blowback

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In addition to green-lighting debt collection calls to cell phones, another of the deficit plans Obama rolled out today is basically claiming credit for military withdrawals.

The plan also realizes more than $1 trillion in savings over the next 10 years from our drawdowns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As DDay notes, these “cuts” are scheduled to happen anyway. It’s just funny accounting, particularly since the foreverwar hawks will fight some of these changes in any case.

But there’s another reason I think this is funny accounting. We’re not withdrawing, we’re switching to “civilian-led” efforts in these places. And Obama is not measuring the costs of these civilian-led efforts.

Such as the $100 million expansion we’re making to habeas-free Parwan prison in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineer (USACE) Middle East District intends to solicit names of construction firms or joint ventures experienced in working in the Middle East region who are interested in submitting a firm-fixed price offer for this project. To be considered a construction firm, the firm must perform construction as a significant portion of its business. This announcement is for the construction of Detention Facility in Parwan (DFIP), Bagram, Afghanistan. The contractor shall comply with all base security requirements. Defense Base Act Insurance and Construction surety will be required. The estimated cost of the project is between $25,000,000 to $100,000,000.

PROJECT SCOPE: The scope of the Project includes construct detainee housing capability for approximately 2000 detainees. [my emphasis]

Glenn Greenwald hits much of what needs to be said about this expansion:

Budgetary madness to the side, this is going to be yet another addition to what Human Rights First recently documented is the oppressive, due-process-free prison regime the U.S. continues to maintain around the world:

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, few Americans realize that the United States is still imprisoning more than 2800 men outside the United States without charge or trial. Sprawling U.S. military prisons have become part of the post-9/11 landscape, and the concept of “indefinite detention” — previously foreign to our system of government — has meant that such prisons, and their captives, could remain a legacy of the 9/11 attacks and the “war on terror” for the indefinite future. . . . .

The secrecy surrounding the U.S. prison in Afghanistan makes it impossible for the public to judge whether those imprisoned there deserve to be there. What’s more, because much of the military’s evidence against them is classified, the detainees themselves have no right to see it. So although detainees at Bagram are now entitled to hearings at the prison every six months, they’re often not allowed to confront the evidence against them. As a result, they have no real opportunity to contest it.

In one of the first moves signalling just how closely the Obama administration intended to track its predecessor in these areas, it won the right to hold Bagram prisoners without any habeas corpus rights, successfully arguing that the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision — which candidate Obama cheered because it guaranteed habeas rights to Guantanamo detainees — was inapplicable to Bagram.  Numerous groups doing field work in Afghanistan have documented that the maintenance of these prisons is a leading recruitment tool for the Taliban and a prime source of anti-American hatred.  Despite that fact — or, more accurately (as usual), because of it — the U.S. is now going to build a brand new, enormous prison there.

And then there’s the expansion we’re doing to the “Embassy” in Baghdad. Dan Froomkin lays this out.

U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other officials are planning to fall back to the gargantuan embassy in Baghdad — a heavily fortified, self-contained compound the size of Vatican City.

The embassy compound is by far the largest the world has ever seen, at one and a half square miles, big enough for 94 football fields. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to build (coming in about $150 million over budget). Inside its high walls, guard towers and machine-gun emplacements lie not just the embassy itself, but more than 20 other buildings, including residential quarters, a gym and swimming pool, commercial facilities, a power station and a water-treatment plant.

[snip]

The number of personnel under the authority of the U.S. ambassador to Iraq will swell from 8,000 to about 16,000 as the troop presence is drawn down, a State Department official told The Huffington Post. “About 10 percent would be core programmatic staff, 10 percent management and aviation, 30 percent life support contractors — and 50 percent security,” he said.

[snip]

As the Department of Defense pulls out and its spending drops, the State Department is expecting its costs to skyrocket. State asked Congress for $2.7 billion for its Iraqi operations in fiscal year 2011, and got $2.1 billion. It wants $6.2 billion for next year. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee estimates that State’s plans will cost $25 to $30 billion over the next five years.

I use scarequotes for the word “Embassy” because I think it’s time we set aside the fiction that this is a State Department operation. Froomkin notes, for example, that the $6 billion a year State will be spending on this “Embassy” adds to the only $14 billion State spends, in total, right now.

It’s not just the actual spending I’m objecting to–the $100 million here, the $30 billion there–though Glenn’s point, that we refuse to spend a fraction of $100 million to fix CA’s prison overcrowding, is an important one.

It’s that in one of our colonies we’re doubling the size of our replacement Gitmo, right there in plain view of the people it will antagonize (though the expansion does raise questions about whether we’ll fill the prison with detainees from other countries, too).

And in another of our colonies we’re expanding our giant concrete intelligence bunker (I am open to suggestions for better names for this monstrosity), replete with numbers equal to the numbers of troops Nuri al-Maliki can’t publicly approve. Will the fact that intelligence and contractor personnel are watching over our colony be any less incendiary to the Moqtada al-Sadrs of Iraq than men and women we explicitly called troops? Isn’t this stupid fiction–with the legal fiction it exploits–be in a number of ways worse?

Call it a crazy suspicion. But our non-withdrawal withdrawals from our colonies seems ripe for blowback in a very very big (and expensive) way.

Of course that’s precisely the kind of cost even the deficit hawks refuse to count, so we’ll never see it accounted for in any budget.

The CIA Hates Us for Our Freedom

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As I’ve noted a couple of times, there’s the suggestion that the CIA likes the NYPD’s CIA-on-the-Hudson because the NYPD, unlike the CIA, is diverse enough to have people with the linguistic and cultural background to infiltrate Muslim communities.

So how stupid is this?

Three weeks ago, The Arab American News published a story written by The Associated Press about the CIA and the NYPD cooperating in a massive spying operation on the entire Muslim community in the New York/New Jersey area.

The following week, we published an article detailing the CIA’s denial of that activity.

As we went to press last week, Thursday, September 8, 2011, we received an email from the advertising agency which handles the CIA’s account. “The government agency for the CIA has just contacted us and wants us to remove the banners from your website for undisclosed reasons,” the agency said in its email. A representative from the advertising agency haunted our advertising director all afternoon, repeatedly asking to immediately remove the four ads that the agency just orderedeight days ago. Another email three hours later from the same agency: “Sorry to keep bothering you but the client is giving me a headache.” The CIA has canceled all advertising in The Arab American News.

Not only was this outlet a place the CIA advertised to the Arab community (presumably including recruitment ads), but the paper, as it describes, served as an entree into the community.

This newspaper was instrumental in inviting the CIA into the community, introducing its employees to community leaders and helping to forge good relations between the force and local organizations. The CIA has sponsored many events in the community and generally been welcomed with open arms.

So now the newspaper is drawing one of the most obvious conclusions: that the CIA hates us–rather, a newspaper serving the Arab American community–for our freedoms.

But the evidence shows that perhaps that was a mistake. We treated the CIA like an American institution that believes in American values, like freedom of speech, freedom of worship and the freedom to peaceably assemble. At least in America.

However, if displeasure with one story the newspaper publishes causes a government agency to pull all its ads in retribution, then we assume everyone should be afraid of the CIA — and maybe the whole government — because it’s obviously “my way or the highway” with them. For us they can pull advertising and satisfy their thirst for revenge.

There is, though, one other (not mutually exclusive) possibility. Presumably the CIA wants Arab-Americans it recruits to imagine that they will be targeting actual terrorists if they go to work for the CIA. But the AP series shows that, in the CIA-assisted NYPD program, Arab-Americans will be spying on the innocent activities of their own community. Arab-Americans who read the AP series in this newspaper, then, might be less pliable recruits for the CIA.

So, instead, they’ll just have to rely even more on the NYPD to infiltrate these communities, I guess, having pissed off key figures in the community it needs to reach out to to do its job.

John Brennan, the Intelligence Community’s One Man Justice Department

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Matt Apuzzo has a story describing three different responses to growing concerns about the CIA-on-the-Hudson.

There’s Rush Holt, who unfortunately is no longer on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore has limited ability to look into this:

“I believe that these serious and significant allegations warrant an immediate investigation,” Holt wrote.

[snip]

Holt, who previously served on the House Intelligence Committee, said he never remembers being told about the CIA partnership or the programs the NYPD was running.

[snip]

Holt asked for a special prosecutor because he wanted both the civil rights issues and the NYPD-CIA collaboration to be investigated, his office said.

So Holt, who suggests he should have been informed of the NYPD spook program but wasn’t, suggests one means of oversight never happened.

There’s Mike Bloomberg, who has been Mayor for almost the entire post-9/11 period and therefore ought to have exercised some oversight over this program:

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked Thursday about the CIA’s investigation and whether he thought the partnership violated any laws.

“How would I know?” Bloomberg replied. “They’re doing an investigation. That’s what — if I knew, I’d be happy to tell them. But my guess is no.”

Surprisingly, Bloomberg hasn’t thought of consulting one of NY’s own lawyers, or one of the thousands of lawyers inhabiting NY, to find out whether the partnership was legal. A smart guy like Mayor Mike and he claims not to even know how he might find out if the program were legal. Rather than finding out, though, he’s just gonna guess.

And then, finally, there’s John Brennan, the guy who apparently did the targeting for Cheney’s illegal wiretap program and also was personally involved in one of the whistleblower cases the Obama Justice Department is prosecuting, who cites his intimate knowledge of the program as his basis for being sure there’s no problem.

President Barack Obama’s homeland security adviser, John Brennan, who was the deputy executive director the CIA when the NYPD intelligence programs began, said he was intimately familiar with the CIA-NYPD partnership. He said that agency knew what the rules were and did not cross any lines.

Call me crazy. But I think there’s a third reason to support Holt’s call for an independent prosecutor. Not only is Obama’s DOJ personally involved, but his top Homeland Security advisor was involved in this mess, too. Given the White House’s past involvement in shutting down DOJ investigations pertaining to the Brennan-era CIA, I’d say we need someone free of that chain of authority.

Another Secret Self-Investigation of Counter-Terrorism Abuses

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At a hearing on the 9/11 anniversary yesterday, David Petraeus revealed that the CIA’s Inspector General had launched an investigation into its role in the NYPD’s spy program.

During his first Congressional testimony as the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus said Tuesday that the agency’s inspector general had begun to investigate its work with the Police Department “to make sure we are doing the right thing.” Mr. Petraeus said the inquiry began last month, but gave few details about its scope.

There are several things of note here.

First, the wrong agency appears to be doing the investigation. The NYPD program is, by all appearances, a massive ethnic profiling operation that hasn’t been all that effective at finding potential terrorists. DOJ ought to be conducting this investigation as a potential civil rights violation.

But instead, CIA will conduct the investigation, meaning the chances the public will know the result are slimmer even than if DOJ conducted it.

Consider, too, the timing. Petraeus says this investigation started last month. The initial AP story was published on August 24th, with a follow-up on August 31. That basically means the story came out and the CIA launched an investigation within days–pretty impressive turnaround.

So is CIA particularly worried? Both James Clapper and the CIA flack appear to be narrowly parsing the potential problem: whether or not there are CIA officers on the streets of NY, whether they are investigating domestically as opposed to overseas (remember, the NYPD is sticking its nose into overseas investigations, too).

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said during the same Congressional hearing on Tuesday that while there were no C.I.A. officers out on the streets of New York collecting intelligence, he thought it was “not a good optic to have C.I.A. involved in any city-level police department.”

[snip]

Marie E. Harf, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that its cooperation with American police forces in the past decade “should not be a surprise to anyone,” and that its work with the department in New York “is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11.”

“The agency’s operational focus, however, is overseas and none of the support we have provided to N.Y.P.D. can be rightly characterized as ‘domestic spying’ by the C.I.A.,” Ms. Harf said. [my emphasis]

(Note, given that the CIA has its own office in NYC, I find Clapper’s construction particularly amusing.)

Which is why it might be worth looking more closely at what the AP described the CIA’s role to be.

There was the way retired CIA officer, David Cohen, set up the organization and perhaps more notably, the way he and Tenet dual-hatted Larry Sanchez to set up the organization.

Among Cohen’s earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn’t have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.

CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll.

When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA’s station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said.

There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that’s supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.

Then there was the reverse move–a NYPD detective, Steve Pinkall, going through CIA training at the Farm–though given the mention of Robert Mueller making a stink, I presume this was high on everyone’s radar at the time.

The CIA just sent another, high level dual hat to the NYPD, but again, that seems to have gotten enough attention that it would not surprise anyone.

And perhaps most damning is the report that NYPD and CIA were sharing information collected by the former using unofficial channels.

Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.

Notably, the FBI has refused to share some of the information NYPD has been collecting (this reminds me of FBI refusing to participate in CIA’s torture sessions).

“If you’re sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that’s a very high-risk thing to do,” Caproni said. “You’re running right up against core constitutional rights. You’re talking about freedom of religion.”

That’s why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD’s mosque crawlers, two retired agents said.

As I noted in my first post on this, one of the most interesting characteristics of the program is that its officers have diversity the CIA lacks.

Particularly given the persistent dual-hatting and the back channel exchange of information that even the FBI refuses to accept, it is conceivable that the CIA has been so cooperative with the NYPD because it gives it back door access–both culturally and bureaucratically–into the NYC community.

I’m just interested whether CIA’s Inspector General will find that dual-hatting so as to better share information collected in ways the FBI, much less the CIA, wouldn’t be able to use does, in fact, amount to domestic spying.