- Wars come home in strange, unnerving ways as Americans
have just discovered at Fort Hood. Even before Major Nidal Malik Hasan
went on his killing spree, that base, a major military embarkation point
for our war zones, was already experiencing the after-effects of eight
years of war and repeated tours of duty. The suicide rate at Fort Hood
was soaring (with 10 on the base in 2009 alone). Divorce rates
were on the rise, as were mental health problems, drug and alcohol
use, domestic abuse (up 75% since 2001), and murders among war-zone
returnees. Even violent crime in Killeen, the town that houses the base,
was up 22% (though it was down, according to the New York Times, "in
towns of similar size in other parts of the country"). In an era in
which our last president urged Americans to support his Global War on Terror
by shopping and visiting Disney World, it often seemed that, except
for soldiers and their families, our wars abroad affected little in this
country.
-
- And yet for an imperial power past its prime, foreign
wars, even ones fought thousands of miles from home, have a way of coming
back to haunt. Alfred W. McCoy tends to be ahead of the curve in his writing.
In the Vietnam era, he had to fight the CIA to get his book, The
Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, published;
in the Bush years, he was perhaps the first person to recognize that the
photos from Abu Ghraib represented no anomaly but the product of a long
history of CIA torture research and published a powerful book, A
Question of Torture, on the subject.
-
- His latest book, Policing America's Empire: The
United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State,
meets counterinsurgency, another topic direct from today's headlines, head
on. It ends on these lines: "...a state, like the United States, that
rules a foreign territory through political repression and pervasive policing
soon finds many of those same coercive methods moving homeward to degrade
its own democracy. Such are the costs of empire." In his latest TomDispatch
post, McCoy lays out just how that impulse for repression and policing,
so vividly and violently expressed abroad in these last years, is now quietly
taking aim at us. ~ Tom
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-
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- Welcome Home, War!
- How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our
Liberties
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- By Alfred W. McCoy
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- 11-19-9
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- In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance,
as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention,
President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive
powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This
bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate
for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment
freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits
from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American
soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already
endless war has taken on our civil liberties.
-
- Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some
future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed
in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and
Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that
nobody told you this could happen at least not if you care to read
on.
-
- Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many
living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home,
a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going
on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized
data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first
protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land the Philippines
from 1898 to 1913 were repatriated to the United States during World
War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus
that persisted for the next half century.
-
- Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on
Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency
campaigns, large and small in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once
again) the Philippines transforming a vast swath of the planet into
an ad hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result?
Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now
slowly migrating homeward.
-
- As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become
one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an
uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
and the atmosphere they created domestically had on the quality
of our democracy?
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- Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting
elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy
abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective
in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away
from creating a domestic surveillance state with omnipresent cameras,
deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft
patrolling "the homeland."
-
- Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington,
the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion
of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA)
whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion
private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad,
after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the
Pentagon began applying biometrics the science of identification
via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns to the
pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts
for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite
imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches
from Africa to South Asia.
-
- In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack,
Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance
techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields,
to create an instant digital surveillance state.
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- The Crucible of Counterinsurgency
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- For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency,
the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency,
forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with
potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification
system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation
Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought
in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing,
artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings
and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside.
Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert
sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's
blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory
checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.
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- The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify
Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when
the New York Timespublished an eerie image of American soldiers
studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption
to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of
a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data
transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult
Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington
Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million
Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also
confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking
Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.
-
- Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day
technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial
images accessibleby portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary
Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West
Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things,"
explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep
him? Or shoot him on the spot?"
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- A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper
could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a
nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized
laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous
feedback, pull the trigger.
-
- Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington
Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's
2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets
in the head and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of
electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American
intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program using
"the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S.
government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill
key individuals in extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency
and renegade Shia militias."
-
- Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War
commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every
tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence"
for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly
claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms."
President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge
details, Woodward himselfcompared it to the Manhattan Project in World
War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill
or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle
East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations
forces.
-
- Another crucial technological development in Washington's
secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial
vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's
global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the
southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an
early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In
June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering
real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine
Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao
(a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").
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- In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of
$1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics
to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full
motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late
2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore
Rooseveltwere using sensors to give American ground forces real-time
images of Taliban targets some so focused that they could catch just
a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.
-
- In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA
Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal
borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic
intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half
of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three
days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its
first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba
borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."
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- Homeland Security
-
- While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were
experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside
Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI
and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly
conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and with White House
help several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back
to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.
-
- "If people see anything suspicious, utility workers,
you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his
April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice
Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information
and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers,
letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and
others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans.
Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing
the Justice Department to quietly bury the president's program.
-
- Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter,
President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in
the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total
Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic
dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret
Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned
the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction
technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to
the NSA.
-
- Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to
monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters,
rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance
at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime
in 2002, President Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to
monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies
and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international
bank clearinghouse.
-
- After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps
in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive
program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil
suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress
widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued
to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New
York Timespolitely termed the systematic "overcollection"
of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example,
thanks to a top-secret NSA database called "Pinwale," analysts
routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic
communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or
domestic sources.
-
- Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative
Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism."
Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records.
This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses,
and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents
and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights
advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to
over a billion documents.
-
- And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United
States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic
surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department,
the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence issued
a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George
W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped
prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific
instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally
played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."
-
- Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress
proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt
offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance,
in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional
representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme
example of this urge. She introduced the Violent Radicalization
and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission,
functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat
the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the
United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to
6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful
of civil liberties.
-
- Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office,
Harman's life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic
surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional
Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering
to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel
lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to
help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by
threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss
of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said,
"This conversation doesn't exist."
-
- How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every
word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI
investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto
Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was
about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps,
and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow
Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's
defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution
for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.
-
- Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House,
the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way
been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist
Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues
to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.
-
- In fact, the Obama administration has even announced
plans for a new military cybercommand staffed by 7,000
Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be
tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks
or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks with scant respect
for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain."
Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not
I repeat will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet
traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright,
has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.
-
- Sending the Future Home
-
- While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq
(and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home
to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland
security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances
here.
-
- Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command
announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as
a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new
mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with
"civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger
Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular
package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous
individuals including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and
beanbag bullets.
-
- That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey
flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness
exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium
floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With
250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its
future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat.
Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited
freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing:
"[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about
this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."
-
- At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories
of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration
plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes.
However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency
warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They
promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms
of Americans.
-
- In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror
rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to
unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects,
and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly,
innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance,
and civil control are now being repatriated as well.
-
- In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could
be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly
routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered
to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one
day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping
the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And
in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking
our borders and peering down on American life.
-
- If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with
countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers
at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers,
mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed
software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or
retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric database
akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit,
sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed
assault.
-
- By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over
in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable or rather
recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are
proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their
name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for
long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that
could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally
the character of American democracy.
-
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- November 19, 2009
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- Tom Engelhardt co-founder of the Nation Institute's
TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project.
His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in
a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best
of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in
the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush
years. Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture,
among other works. His most recent book is Policing America's Empire:
The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University
of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency
operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian
internal security measures here at home.
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