[News] Abu Ghraib 101

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Abu Ghraib 101 at BMCC?
http://www.internationalist.org/homelandcuny1004.html
“Fatherland Security” Hits CUNY

By Abram Negrete

A sinister “Homeland Security” course with links to the Guantánamo prison 
camp, death squads, and the Israeli Mossad spy agency is in the works at 
the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College. 
Presented to BMCC’s Faculty Council last May, the course is the keystone of 
a proposed Security Management Certificate Program.

Originally scheduled to begin in Fall 2004, the program will begin soon but 
is still “being developed,” according to officials at the lower Manhattan 
school. Now is the time for militant protests to stop it cold!

The BMCC program, which includes study of “interrogation techniques” and 
“technology for surveillance,” is part of a trend promoted by the Task 
Force on Homeland Security of the American Association of Community 
Colleges. Among the twenty-one members of this task force, CUNY is 
represented by BMCC President Antonio Perez. A look at its activities, as 
well as the BMCC program’s advisory board, exposes a veritable rogue’s 
gallery of repression.

Front and center is the Guantánamo connection:

The task force boasts of the upstate Homeland Security Management Institute 
opened last December: “The institute is directed by Col. John J. Perrone 
Jr., [who] previously served as commander of the Joint Detainee Operations 
Group...in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” (Community College Times special Homeland 
Security issue, 28 September). Perrone was the “first employee” of the 
institute, which is to be “a national model for homeland security 
training,” “extending its reach through the country’s network of 1,100 
community colleges,” proclaims its host campus (Monroe Community College 
News [Rochester, New York], 9 December 2003).

Perrone “can speak to Home Land Security issues from a unique perspective: 
he has been on the front lines,” says a puff piece on the colonel. That’s 
one way of describing the former Camp Commandant at the infamous prison 
camp for “suspected terrorists.”

Then there is the union-busting connection:

The “BMCC Advisory Board – Security Management Committee” for the proposed 
certificate program includes representatives of companies like OCS 
Security, Guard Screen and Hill & Associates, whose activities include 
“confidential investigations and business intelligence.” Also represented 
is the American Society for Industrial Security, whose affiliates include 
firms specializing in strikebreaking and union-busting: one advertises 
“protection of over a hundred businesses during labor disputes and 
organization drives”; another notes that when “a strike is taking place,” 
picketers “can be a true hindrance to company productivity”.

There is the SAS/Northern Ireland and Iraq connection:

William J. Daly, also sits on the Security Management Committee for the 
BMCC course, representing Control Risks Group, Inc., of which he is Senior 
Vice President. The Center for Public Integrity notes that this company was 
a pioneer in “military privatization” in the 1970s, hiring officers from 
Britain’s deadly Special Air Services (SAS). “The SAS is an assassination 
squad, like the South American death squads,” notes Raymond Murray in his 
1998 book State Violence: Northern Island 1969-1997. The agency ran a 
covert war in the 1960s against leftists in North Yemen, and carried out 
innumerable other murderous actions in the service of imperialism. Today, 
Control Risks, like the American Kroll & Associates, carries out “security” 
operations in Iraq (“Ex-SAS Flock to Iraq,” London Telegraph, 12 October 2003).

Most sinister of all is the Mossad/death squad connection:

The BMCC course advisory board includes another company whose name spells 
deadly repression: International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS), an 
Israeli firm represented by its president, Leo Gleser. The ISDS web site 
says the company was “established in 1982 by highly experienced officers, 
former operatives of I.S.A. Israeli Security Agency, the MOSSAD and the 
Defence Forces.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (31 August) says Gleser and 
partner Arye Avnat “met in the early 1970s during their military service in 
the Haruv reconnaissance unit” and later set up ISDS, which recently hired 
“former Mossad department chief Yehiam Meret” and Israel’s former police 
commissioner. Together with the CIA, the Mossad is one of the deadliest, 
dirtiest instruments of state terror in the world.

When Gleser attended a Homeland Security fair in Chile last year, the 
Chilean news magazine Qué Pasa (31 October 2003) ran an article titled 
“Ex-Mossad Men Come to Chile.” It reported that the presence of this 
purportedly retired colonel of Israeli intelligence “captivated the 
attention of military circles.” His company “has become known for its 
services as advisor to the State Department of the U.S.” – godfather of 
former military dictator Pinochet – and “has the authorization and 
sponsorship of the Israeli Defense Ministry for its projects.”

Among Gleser’s “projects,” the article cites the following:

“Leo Gleser has some strong detractors.... One of the harshest criticisms 
is that in the early ’80s Israeli intelligence sent him to train members of 
the military in Central America. During his stay there he trained the 
leaders of the legendary Intelligence Batallion 316, a squad operating with 
the Honduran Army, which human rights organizations blame for disappearing 
191 persons.”

In other words, this death squad – part of the CIA’s reign of terror during 
Reagan’s campaign of exterminating Central American insurgents – used 
techniques of “disappearing” people perfected by Israel’s intelligence 
agencies against Palestinian Arabs (as well as Mordechai Vanunu, who blew 
the whistle on Israel’s huge nuclear bomb factory), and innumerable others 
around the world. Coverage of Gleser’s training of this Honduran death 
squad has also cited the 1991 exposé by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn in their 
book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the US-Israeli Covert Relationship.

In 1997, ISDS went to Mexico to provide “antiterrorist” training to a 
special “urban intervention” unit of the Judicial Police, a force so 
detested for its brutality and corruption that it was later disbanded by 
Mexico’s president.
BMCC and “World War IV”

In the special Homeland Security issue of the AACC’s Community College 
Times (28 September), BMCC President Perez writes that the attacks of 
September 11, 2001 were “the first salvo of what one observer has called 
World War IV.” He goes on: “Community colleges need to be in the vanguard 
of those institutions helping to prepare our nation and its defenders to 
respond to attacks.”

The proposed 30-credit BMCC security management certificate consists of ten 
required courses. Top of the list is the “Homeland Security” course. It 
features a guest speaker from the New York State Department of Homeland 
Security and readings from Tom Ridge’s Big Brother agency. Noting that 
“trends clearly demonstrate increased demand” for “investigative services” 
and “surveillance systems,” the course defines “national security” as 
protecting “national values, interests, and institutions.” This requires 
“understand[ing] current threats against domestic and international 
assets.” Like what, political protests and “Third World” insurgencies? You bet.
<>Next on the list of classes is “Security Management Principles,” which 
includes “Intelligence gathering” and “Interview and interrogation 
techniques.” Readings include an interrogation textbook written by a top 
“lie-detector” expert together with a former FBI agent and member of the 
Philadelphia police. Also on the syllabus: Undercover Investigations in the 
Workplace. That’s the kind of investigation employers carry out against 
union organizing drives.

How about the CIA interrogation handbook for Central American death squads? 
Is that going to be on the reading list as well?

Or will Col. Perrone of Guantánamo come to lecture on interrogation 
techniques? After all, he told Rochester TV (15 December 2003): “The time 
to retrieve...information is generally in the first few days of captivity.” 
He could also lecture on the use of hoods, shackles, prisoners being forced 
to kneel for days at a time, and other ways to “retrieve” information. And 
who will they choose for subjects for interrogation? Members of student 
governments who have lost elections, perhaps?

Then we come to the proposed BMCC course on “Terrorism and 
Counterterrorism.” This part of the certificate program uses the feds’ 
definition of terrorism as any “violent” act “against persons or property 
to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or any 
segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” So a 
militant labor struggle, a march against racist police brutality or protest 
of military recruiters can be branded terrorist. The proposed course 
defines counterterrorism as “any act intended to combat, control, or 
resolve terrorism.” This is the No. 1 pretext for torture in the world 
today, so Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib would fit right in.
Repression Is a Growth Industry

Programs similar to the one BMCC seeks to establish are cited with pride by 
the American Association of Community Colleges. The Homeland Security 
Management Institute is just one, and AACC notes Perrone’s institute is 
“working with” the State University of New York (SUNY) as well as the 
League for Innovation in the Community Colleges and the AACC itself.

Still looking for those weapons of mass destruction? George W. Bush’s 
hand-picked expert now says...guess what, no “WMD” in Iraq – as if the 
world didn’t already know this was a transparent pretext all along. But the 
AACC is not to be deterred. The association did a survey of community 
colleges and says “One in every five colleges had programs or courses in 
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) awareness or WMD preparedness.”

And the threat to corn keeps them up at night. Corn? “The cornfields of 
Iowa may seem an unlikely target of terrorists, but experts believe they 
are,” the association paper reports. Therefore, Iowa’s Kirkwood Community 
College got a $3.2 million grant in August, one of 14 approved by the U.S. 
Department of Homeland Security. Community College Times (28 September) 
notes that Homeland Security “received more than 215 applications for the 
grant.”

The same paper reports that the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a 
program on cyberterrorism at the Community College of Allegheny County in 
Pennsylvania. Cyberterrorism? How about the FBI’s seizure, on October 7, of 
servers used by Indymedia. The feds’ assault affected at least twenty of 
the news collective’s sites around the world. And the American spy agency 
did it in England. The action was reportedly retaliation for someone, 
somewhere having taken pictures of undercover agents photographing 
demonstrators.
For Militant Protest to Stop BMCC “Security” Course!

CUNY is no stranger to repression. The most prominent case is the 
relentless prosecution of Hostos student leader Miguel Malo for holding up 
a sign protesting cuts in Spanish and ESL programs (see box, page 5). Last 
semester Baruch College arrested widely respected CCNY psychology professor 
Bill Crain for the “crime” of entering campus without an appointment.

As for “electronic surveillance,” mentioned in the “Letter of Intent” (14 
November 2003) for the certificate program, CUNY has done plenty of that 
itself. Just ask student activists at CCNY: in 1998 they found out a 
surveillance camera, disguised as a smoke detector, was aimed at their 
offices – a fact the campus paper was shut down for revealing!

Nor is CUNY new to connections with “private” spy companies linked to the 
long and bloody trail of the intelligence agencies. Last year Hunter 
College hired the notorious, CIA-linked Kroll & Associates for a “thorough 
survey” of campus “security” (Hunter Envoy, 2 October 2003). The only 
outcome Hunter students heard about was the decision to lock the main 
entrance of the Thomas Hunter building – a move reversed after students 
kept going through anyway (setting off the alarm each time). CUNY students 
should demand to know the full story of what happened with Kroll.

The sinister course at BMCC is part of the wholesale onslaught against the 
most basic civil liberties and democratic rights carried out through the 
USA Patriot Act, passed and administered by Democrats and Republicans, and 
a vast array of repressive measures. Fighting against this repression is 
part of the struggle for the defeat of U.S. imperialist aggression abroad 
and police terror, racism and exploitation here “at home.”

BMCC’s Repression 101 can and must be stopped. Students, faculty, workers 
and defenders of democratic rights must mobilize to protest and expose it 
massively, now!  n


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