USA

US Gov Targetting Activists For Computer-Searchs
Sat, 07 Dec 2002 04:02:27 -0800

Issue Number 18 - November 28, 2002

They have begun pulling mildly leftist white people off of airplanes.
It's time for the rest of us to get very worried.

The evidence is rolling in, and it is unmistakable: the Bush people are
assembling purely political lists of individuals and groups to be
targeted during some future crisis, real or manufactured. The list makers
probably do not yet know what they plan to do to the people on their
enemies lists, which are still fragmented among various agencies.
However, once such lists are compiled, eventual government action becomes
all but inevitable. It is already clear that the list will be a very long
one, reaching into broad categories of what the current rulers consider
to be dangerous dissenters.

Civil rights lawyers, Green Party activists and even the Catholic
advocacy group Peace Action are on the lists, as are, it appears, Amnesty
International and various environmental activist organizations.
In an article titled "Grounded," the mainstream Salon.com related the
experience of Center for Constitutional Rights assistant legal director
Barbara Olshansky, who was forced to pull down her pants in view of other
travelers at Newark International Airport. When the lawyer protested the
indignity, a security agent replied, "The computer spit you out. I don't
know why, and I don't have time to talk to you about it."

Six other employees of the center had been pulled out of an airport
boarding line a month earlier. Since all had purchased their tickets
separately under their own names, it was plain that the Center for
Constitutional Rights staff were on some kind of list. Readers familiar
with the workings of bureaucracies will immediately recognize the clanks,
squeaks and grinds of cumbersome government machinery getting into gear.
Olshansky and her colleagues are, apparently, not alone. For months,
rumors and anecdotes have circulated among leftwing and other activist
groups about people who have been barred from flying or delayed at
security gates because they are "on a list."

But now, a spokesman for the new Transportation Security Administration
has acknowledged for the first time that the government has a list of
about 1,000 people who are deemed "threats to aviation" and not allowed
on airplanes under any circumstances. And in an interview with Salon, the
official suggested that Olshansky and other political activists may be on
a separate list that subjects them to strict scrutiny but allows them to
fly.

"We have a list of about 1,000 people," said David Steigman, the TSA
spokesman. The agency was created a year ago by Congress to handle
transportation safety during the war on terror. "This list is composed of
names that are provided to us by various government organizations like
the FBI, CIA and INS.... We don't ask how they decide who to list. Each
agency decides on its own who is a 'threat to aviation.'"
The agency has no guidelines to determine who gets on the list, Steigman
says, and no procedures for getting off the list if someone is wrongfully
on it.

The Salon.com article details the harrassment of other political
travelers, including people from conservative organizations that
apparently wound up in the computer by mistake or through haste. Writer
Dave Lindorff notes that the federal Transportation Security Agency's
unpredictable actions "seem to be netting mostly priests, elderly nuns,
Green Party campaign operatives, left-wing journalists, right-wing
activists and people affiliated with Arab or Arab-American groups."
The 1,000-name "no fly" list referred to by the TSA spokesman is
certainly not the larger, political list. If that were the case, none of
the individuals interviewed by Salon.com would have ever left the ground.
The article's subjects are on a different set of lists. It is clear that
the airport agents became confused because of a proliferation of lists -
data in temporary disarray.

Bring me more names!

What is obvious is that names are being generated and dumped into an
embryonic but evolving apparatus of wide-ranging political scope. The
Bush men simply haven't fine-tuned the procedure. They have not yet
differentiated between the "somewhat dangerous," the "immediately
dangerous" or the "might become dangerous" - or whatever color-coded
formulas ultimately emerge.

They want names, lots of them. The scatter-shot, eclectic character of
the listings indicates that a furious demand is emanating from the
highest levels of the bureaucracy for as many names as possible, as soon
as possible. Collation and categorization will come later.

The exhortations from on-high were especially shrill in the corridors and
field offices of the FBI. The New York Times headlined their November 21
article, "F.B.I. Officials Say Some Agents Lack a Focus on Terror," but
any low-GS clerk could understand what the bureau's number two official,
Bruce J. Gebhardt, was actually demanding when he sent out a memo to 56
field office agents-in-charge: names, names and more names.

"You need to instill a sense of urgency" in field agents, Mr. Gebhardt
wrote. "They need to get out on the street and develop sources.

"You need to demand that information is being sent" to the bureau's
headquarters in Washington, he continued, adding: "You are the leaders of
the F.B.I. You cannot fail at this mission. Too many people are depending
on us...."

Among their complaints, senior bureau officials have said they are
unhappy that some field offices are not moving aggressively enough to use
secret terrorism warrants, are not developing enough intelligence sources
to penetrate possible terrorist cells and are not loading all the
terrorism-related information they receive into the F.B.I.'s central
computer system.

Officials said that senior bureau leaders in recent weeks have directed
field supervisors to demand weekly written briefings from their
counter-terrorism squads, ask more questions about investigations and
push for greater use of warrants and surveillance against suspects.
The New York Times is unwilling or incapable of interpreting Gebhardt's
memo, but every agent in the field understands perfectly what is
demanded: names for the computers. Not the names of "sleeper" terrorists,
who by definition cannot be identified. Not the names of criminals and
fugitives, the people the existing system is designed to track. And only
a fool could believe that, with all the flack the FBI has gotten over its
pre-September 11 failures, field agents are slacking in their pursuit of
persons who have even the remotest reason for being on watch lists for
actual bombers, skyjackers and poisoners of water. That's not what the
computers in Washington crave.

The FBI is focused on "preventing attacks," says the NYT article. In the
bureau's lexicon, "preventative measures" is a euphemism for surveillance
of persons and infiltration of groups that have committed no crime for
which they can be arrested. There can be but one result that satisfies
headquarters' demand: more names and thicker dossiers. And there is only
one way for the agents in the field to produce these items in sufficient
quantity; the "anti-terror squads" must revert to their roles as Red
Squads, Black Militant Squads and Agitator Squads - under new
nomenclature, of course.

This should have been expected since the morning the Twin Towers fell, a
reflexive reaction by an agency molded from its beginnings as a political
police force. However, the sheer size of the net being cast - to include
blond, Catholic, Wisconsin schoolgirls attempting to board a flight to
Washington to lobby their congressman against the U.S. war in Columbia -
indicates that the "usual suspects," the historical targets of
repression, will have unaccustomed, white middle class company.

The Bush regime, it is becoming apparent, is as serious about smashing
domestic opposition to its agenda as it is about Saddam Hussein. As Bush
told Bob Woodward, "I will seize the opportunity to achieve big goals."
Islam is the FBI's open portal to the African American community at
large. The Nation of Islam has a long history of relationships with
Middle Eastern and Arab nations, and non-NOI African American Muslims
often worship with foreign co-religionists. FBI mumbo-jumbo can fill in
the rest of the justifications for the most intensive, general
surveillance of Black American Muslims and their associates. Since these
Muslims are indigenous, comprising probably 5 percent of African American
citizens, their relatives and "associates" include virtually the entire
Black population.

The chosen ones

Contragate criminal John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness
project, under construction in the bowels of the Pentagon with the
capability to keep track of an individual's every electronic move, is not
designed to screen the behavior of 285 million Americans. Too much data,
few practical uses. But tens or a few hundreds of thousands of
politically marked targets - that's a potentially doable mission. The
logic of world events and the zeal of the Bush men will create the
domestic emergency long before Poindexter's machine is ready but, by its
very existence, the project telegraphs the regime's intentions.
Here's how Poindexter's Information Awareness Office describes his
project:

The TIA program objective is to create a counter-terrorism information
system that: (1) increases information coverage by an order of magnitude,
and affords easy future scaling; (2) provides focused warnings within an
hour after a triggering event occurs or an evidence threshold is passed;
(3) can automatically queue analysts based on partial pattern matches and
has patterns that cover 90% of all previously known foreign terrorist
attacks; and, (4) supports collaboration, analytical reasoning and
information sharing so that analysts can hypothesize, test and propose
theories and mitigating strategies about possible futures, so
decision-makers can effectively evaluate the impact of current or future
policies and prospective courses of action.

Domestic translation: Round up the people in categories X and Y.

If it appears that we are painting a picture of inevitable, massive
detentions and restrictions of American citizens, it is because the daily
sweep of administration activity points in that direction. There will be
serious if not catastrophic terror attacks on U.S. soil - Bush's foreign
policy guarantees it. When the attacks come, the regime in Washington
will declare some kind of state of emergency; only the particulars are
unknown, probably to the Bush men, themselves. And they are not compiling
lists of public activists and left-leaners, in urgent and sloppy haste,
just for the fun of it.

Measures will be taken against the names on the lists of those designated
as domestic threats. An action plan will inexorably shape itself around
the database. That's how bureaucracies of repression work. Discreet
categories of threat require specific measures of response. It will take
a while for the various agencies to work out the details. There can be no
doubt, however, that the people closest to George Bush are impatient to
move the task along.

There is no precedent for the things in store in the days ahead: not
McCarthyism, not Cointelpro, not a combination of the two. Technology
plus the new, corporate-style methods of a ruthless, social
monopoly-minded, mass media manipulating, coldly corrupt and absolutely
cynical politic class has created and is feeding upon an environment of
permanent crisis. These men have plans to reorganize American society and
the world, they know they will be opposed by larger and deeper sectors of
the population over time, and they are preparing to act decisively
against the opposition. First, they take names.

Nothing but a mass movement, comprised of many "targets," can stop the
machine that is clanking rather noisily into place. However, the
machinery, itself, may become the engine of mass mobilization. The Bush
men, supremely arrogant and flush with power, are making a mistake in
advertising their intentions against the persons of white lawyers and
other left-liberals. Bush and Cheney forget the duality of American
society; some people can be abused with impunity; others, connected to
significant sectors of opinion and resources by profession, family wealth
and background and, most importantly, by race - cannot be so cavalierly
stripped of their citizenship rights.

The duality of American life and death

December 4 marks the 33rd anniversary of the assassination of Black
Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, set up for execution in Chicago by
an FBI contract agent. Hampton was barely 21 years old, a brilliant,
one-time pre-law student and Youth Leader of the West Suburban (Chicago)
branch of the NAACP, where he organized 500 members. Hampton then founded
the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party and rose swiftly to
national prominence. Police riddled Hampton's body with bullets while he
lay helpless, drugged by the FBI's employee.

The people who haul white lawyers and Catholic nuns off of airplanes will
kill a Black activist in his bed the very same night. This is what passes
for equivalence in a racist society.

White folks are being put on some serious lists. Under the perverse
duality of America, that means the canaries are already dying.