[News] How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

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http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/23138


How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

November 15, 2009 By Alfred W. McCoy
Source: <http://www.tomdispatch.com>TomDispatch


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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02gitmo.html>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 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>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?

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.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

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 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64292-2005Apr18.html>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.

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 Times 
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E5D71F30F937A35757C0A9619C8B63>published 
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 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113002302.html>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 
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/121307.html>accessible by 
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?"

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 
<http://books.google.com/books?id=_Qne27FuHEQC&pg=PA380&lpg=PA380&dq=%22the+most+highly+classified+techniques+and+information+in+the+U.S.+government%22+%22woodward%22&source=bl&ots=T1lBZ07u-w&sig=KCRl0YhWYCfjm0vqCuSLj3X_wlc&hl=en&ei=4PD4Su7zDpTEngeUuq35DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=&f=false>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 himself 
<http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/>compared it 
to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based 
assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary 
Donald Rumsfeld 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washington/10military.html>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 
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200703/bowden-jihad>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").

In July 2008, the Pentagon 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/us/26military.html>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 Roosevelt were 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html>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 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer>escalated 
in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using 
a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, 
and digital imaging 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/world/asia/16pstan.html>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 
<http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/02/16/drones-border.html>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."

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," 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/us/bush-pushes-volunteerism-but-a-senate-seat-shares-the-agenda.html>said 
President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen 
vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had 
<http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-08-06/news/ashcroft-s-master-plan-to-spy-on-us/1>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 
<http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-12-17/news/the-death-of-operation-tips/>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), 
<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-981753.html>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 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IAO-logo.png>eye logo, Congress 
banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key 
data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype 
System, 
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html>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 Times politely 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html>termed the 
systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among 
American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA 
database called "Pinwale," analysts routinely 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17nsa.html>scan countless 
"millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard 
for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.

Starting in 2004, the FBI 
<http://fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/050206mueller.html>launched an 
Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... 
counterterrorism." Within two years, it 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901520.html>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 
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/eff-issues-report-fb>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11nsa.html>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 
<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-1955>introduced 
the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, 
proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber>"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 
<http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000003098436>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21harman.html>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, 
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/31/AR2009103102141.html>continues 
to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175081/frida_berrigan_downloading_disaster>new 
military cybercommand 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01cyberwar.html>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 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html>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 
<http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/>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 <http://www.northcom.mil/News/2008/091508.html>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 
<http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-demands-information-military-deployment-within-us-borders>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 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/police-surveillance-protest-domestic-extremism>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.


Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the 
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>A 
Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>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.

[This article first appeared on 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation 
Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and 
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing, 
co-founder of <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>the American 
Empire Project, author of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The 
End of Victory Culture, and editor of 
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The 
World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.]




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