"... there's this closer and closer relationship and blurring of the lines between the military and police and I mean I participated in this. In the early eighties I was actually involved as an active duty military in training the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team. They were just "Woofo" SWAT, Washington Field Office SWAT, at the time, so we were militarizing them and at the same time they started doing operations with Special Forces and the Marines augmenting the Border Patrol. So there was already in progress this developmental trajectory that was beginning to merge the roles of the police and the military. And I think what we're seeing is worldwide especially under the influence of the United States...I think there is an hallucination, out there, of the Pax Americana, you know, and what they're developing now, is a military and police doctrine for urban civil war. And for us that means in the short term that they are developing a doctrine for severe population control.Stan Goff Interview"

1984, Chapter 8, George Orwell

The blue overalls of the Party could not be a common sight in a street like this. Indeed, it was unwise to be seen in such places, unless you had definite business there. The patrols might stop you if you happened to run into them. 'May I see your papers, comrade? What are you doing here? What time did you leave work? Is this your usual way home?' -- and so on and so forth. Not that there was any rule against walking home by an unusual route: but it was enough to draw attention to you if the Thought Police heard about it.

Dachau's 73rd "Grand Anniversary" Celebrated
Feds Schedule $385 Million Concentration Camp To Be Built By Halliburton Subsidiary
By CLANCY SIGAL
Counterpunch

Local agencies' use of U.S. security aid questioned
Susan Carroll
May. 11, 2006 12:00 AM
The Arizona Republic

Arizona public safety agencies have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal grant money on equipment they are not certified to use or to pay for projects with only a tenuous link to homeland security.

With little initial guidance and flush with money after the Sept. 11 attacks, police and fire departments statewide shored up budget shortfalls and bought things like ATVs, Q-Tips and $50,000 worth of binoculars with nearly $178 million in Homeland Security Department grants.

Despite what one small-town official described as a spending "frenzy," many local officials managed to put the money toward security priorities: shoring up communications, buying better protective gear for police and firefighters and purchasing mobile command centers for emergencies.


But an Arizona Republic review of thousand of pages of records and receipts found that some local governments made many questionable purchases under the guise of homeland security, including $38 leather wallets for all Capitol Police officers and a $47 hat badge for the police chief.

Many small cities and towns that are unlikely targets for a terrorist attack received disproportionate amounts of money, often more per capita than Phoenix, Tucson or Mesa.

Consider:

• Gila County spent $93,000 to rent planes, snowmobiles and a horse to create more accurate assessor maps. Meanwhile, local law enforcement went without protective masks because it was too expensive to certify them.

• The police chief in Holbrook, population 5,100, was approved to spend $40,000 for a video surveillance system to monitor "potential terrorist targets," including a park, a water tower and intersections.

• Apache County bought a dozen 6X6 ATVs at more than $11,500 each, while a local fire department relied on 20-year-old air packs for its firefighters.

State officials responsible for administering the federal funds said personnel shortages led to lax oversight and poor tracking in the initial years. But they also said they followed federal guidelines and approved purchase lists and have made improvements since 2003. They also plan to add more staff.

In response to The Republic's investigation, Gov. Janet Napolitano has ordered a review of the Arizona Department of Emergency Management's handling of the funds. The state also plans to set up a formal site-monitoring program and create an online ordering and approval system.


'Boys with toys'
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Congress allocated billions of dollars for the states to divvy up through the State Homeland Security Grant Program. States received money based on a formula roughly the same model used for transportation funding: Each state would get 0.75 percent of the funds, plus a share based on population.

The Phoenix area was identified as a high-risk city for a terrorist attack and was eligible for millions under another grant program, the Urban Area Security Initiative.

Frank Navarrette, Arizona's emergency management director, acknowledged that the department struggled to oversee the massive infusion of Homeland Security money, as Arizona's share grew from about $3 million in 2001 to more than $61million in 2003.

Each agency wanted "their own red firetruck in their own driveway, and they each wanted their own bomb squad," Navarrette said. "And that's natural, to say, 'I want to take care of my own turf.' "

By 2004, Arizona officials set up regional advisory committees to help cut down on duplication and waste and to ensure local governments bought compatible radio systems and equipment that was up to federal standards.

Nationwide, officials on the federal, state and local levels all tried to rein in the spending sprees, which had become at times chaotic and haphazard. Media reports surfaced about Washington, D.C., police buying leather jackets and a remote Alaskan town installing video surveillance.

"We basically spent money so we could have these first responders running around like boys with toys," said James Carafano, a senior fellow for homeland security at the conservative, Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation."In most cases, these are people spending money just to spend money. They're buying things that they would never buy but (that) are just kind of nice to have."


Oversight
The Homeland Security grants are designed to better equip first responders for a terrorist attack or major natural disaster. The federal government publishes updated guidelines each year that detail what equipment is acceptable but leaves the specifics about purchasing up to the state and local agencies.

In the first few years after Sept. 11, as long as the equipment was on the federal government's approved list, the state generally allowed the orders. Still, the state rejected some purchases, like multiple plasma-screen TVs, even though they were approved under the guidelines.

Four years after the terrorist attacks, Navarrette said the state staff handling the grant programs is still "overwhelmed." Three people administer the program full time, although Navarrette said the department is advertising for another position.

After Sept. 11, the state did not electronically track how much Homeland Security money was spent on specific types of equipment, from protective gear to bomb robots. The state kept thick binders and file folders for grant program receipts during the first few years, but some of those folders were empty.

The state could provide no documentation for site-monitoring visits or formal audits but said a review was launched in April in response to The Republic's investigation and will be finished by August.

Recently, the state required some agencies, including the Capitol Police, which spent $3,100 on wallets, badges and a chief's hat badge, to reimburse the government after inquiries from The Republic.

Navarrette said the state plans to investigate any suspect purchases, but he also cautioned that at times, homeland security is "in the eye of the beholder."

Gila County officials defended their decision to put a chunk of Homeland Security funds toward the mapping project, under way before the grants became available. Mariano Gonzalez, the Gila emergency management director, said the project could provide first responders with more-accurate maps and data when they respond to an emergency in a remote area.

And in Holbrook, the small town that received funds for video surveillance cameras, Chief D. Wayne Hartup said the money would go to monitor "critical government infrastructure."

"We've all been advised that potential (terrorism) targets would be government buildings, major intersections and water towers," he said.

Richard Guinn, deputy sheriff for Apache County, said the ATVs were ordered because "most of our county is extremely rural, and we needed vehicles that could move people in and out of remote areas." The state recently asked Apache County to reallocate the ATVs so they would all be put to use.


Stocking up
When the money first started pouring into the state after Sept. 11, some local governments stocked up on the basics, even though the grant program was not designed to fill gaps in local public safety budgets.

La Paz County stocked up like Y2K was coming again. The county bought 50 rolls of police and sheriff's barricade tape, 200 bottles of antiseptic hand cleanser and 46 traffic vests. Yuma expensed a rake, Q-Tips and a shoe brush.

Some purchases ended up in storage, like dozens of breathing masks bought for law enforcement in Gila County, including the Payson Police Department, which found it was too costly to certify officers with the required training and fit testing.

"This money was never supposed to be an entitlement to states to supplement their public safety needs," Carafano said. "State and local governments need to find a way to pay for the things that they're responsible for, and that's local public safety needs. That's their job."

Graham County bought 100 pairs of Fujinon binoculars worth more than $500 each, at the recommendation of a local planning committee. The binoculars went to every police officer and firefighter, and the highway foreman, the county engineer and a few folks in emergency management. Two pairs were given to Eastern Arizona College, where the two campus security officers have put them to use, but not for terrorism-related activity.

"We've had some problems with vandalism," said Bill Mulleneaux, chief of security for the college. "We've used them from strategic locations to see (suspects) graffitiing."

Apache County in northeastern Arizona bought a dozen 6X6 Polaris ATV Rangers that cost more than $11,500 each for law enforcement, fire agencies and the Public Works Department. One agency, the St. Johns Police Department, lobbied the county to trade their ATV for radio equipment, first-aid kits, GPS, binoculars and trauma kits.

"We hadn't had a use for it (the ATV) in two years," Chief Jim Zieler said. "I figured it was better for me to purchase something my guys could use every day."


Training funds
Money also went to training and education, most of it for hazardous materials and bomb squads. But Santa Cruz County sent a staff member who administers the grants to a "fundamentals of accounting" seminar. Yuma spent $1,000 on Yuma Area Ammonia Awareness Safety Day because some factories on the southern side of the border use ammonia.

Officials in Yavapai County held a drill simulating a terrorist attack in Cottonwood (population roughly 10,000) in March 2004. The mock attack involved a twin-engine plane with anthrax onboard crashing into Mingus Union High School. To make it more realistic, officials paid the school drama teacher $228 to put bloodlike makeup on students in the drill and paid $65 for a substitute teacher.

And the Phoenix Police Department bought hundreds of new Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and had them custom silk-screened with Homeland Security money to read: "I Survived a WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) Drill!" The T-shirts were partly a thank-you to volunteers, officials said, and partly a safety measure to identify participants.


Tightening spending
The 2006 grant guidelines for the State Homeland Security Grant Program require that states follow through on the promise to send funds to more at-risk areas. In some cases, a disproportionate amount of money has gone to rural areas, unlikely to be targeted by terrorists, Homeland Security analysts say.

In 2005, Phoenix received $1.1 million under the program, or roughly 78 cents a person through the program. Springerville, a town of 4,000 southeast of Flagstaff, received $155,000, about $38.75 per person.

"Are we going to have a 9/11 in Springerville, Arizona? No," said Max Sadler, the town's fire chief. "But we do have a major highway, and we still have a lot of other things that go through this town. I'm not asking for a million and half dollars for a hazardous-materials first-responder team.

"Is there waste? Yeah, I'm sure there is somewhere. It's just the American way, I guess. You see it all the time, and it makes it bad for people who are trying to survive."

Arizona is struggling to keep its share of Homeland Security grant funding, which has decreased by roughly one-third in the past two years. Navarrette said the regional advisory committees set up in 2004 are helping to ensure that any new purchases are in line with the state's overall security strategy.

"For this next year, we need to get away from buying gizmos," he said. "We bought a lot of equipment, a lot of good equipment that's been necessary. But I think we're to the point now we need to focus more on sustainability, more on training, more on programmatic goals."

Carafano said the public should decide where it wants money to go in the struggle to protect the country against a terrorist attack and prepare for natural disasters.

"The point is that people need to take a deep breath and figure out what they want their federal government to spend their money on," he said. "The fact is that every dollar that we spend buying a firetruck, or a hose or a TV camera for somebody is a dollar we could have spent on preventing terrorist acts to begin with."

Coulter and the onset of fascism
David Neiwert
Thursday, May 11, 2006


Did you notice how everyone on the right tut-tutted when Ann Coulter called for retaliation against "ragheads" -- but still, she continues to appear on college campuses and cable-TV programs apace. So much for that phony right-wing "outrage" over "extremists in their own ranks."

In reality, Coulter has long been leading the race of right-wing nutcases to move the demarcation line for "beyond the pale," and this week she demonstrated again that there are really no such limits for the right. Every week, they move the line farther to the right, until before you know it, you're staring outright fascism in the face.

Media Matters directs us to the latest Coulter emission, wherein she shrieks like a harpy about conservatives' lack of "manliness":

Democrats have declared war against Republicans, and Republicans are wandering around like a bunch of ninny Neville Chamberlains, congratulating themselves on their excellent behavior. They'll have some terrific stories about their Gandhi-like passivity to share while sitting in cells at Guantanamo after Hillary is elected.

[...]

Patriotic Americans don't have to become dangerous psychotics like liberals, but they could at least act like men.

Why hasn't the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is? According to Hollywood, this nation is a cauldron of ethnic hatreds positively brimming with violent skinheads. Where are the skinheads when you need them? What does a girl have to do to get an angry, club- and torch-wielding mob on its feet?

Let's be clear here: Coulter is not "joking." She is seriously calling for "manly" conservatives to inflict violence on a college student who is in the United States legally. Moreover, she is calling for a similar kind of violence as an appropriate response to "unhinged" and "violent" liberals.

This is, of course, the logical outcome of this whole argument, gaining greater circulation even among ostensible liberals, that the left is becoming dangerously unstable -- because, naturally, the "sensible" response calls for even greater doses of "manly" violence.

Coulter first tested this new variation on an old meme during a college-campus appearance last month in Chicago, as Lauren Patrizi reported:

Ann addressed her supporters in the crowd with this statement. "You're men. You're heterosexuals. Take 'em out." She chided them further when they did not rise. Before you knew it there was about 25 students marching to the balcony to supposedly "take out" the protestors above. I saw a priest holding students back and deans and security warning the students to go back to their seats. Chaos erupted. Ann left after taking one question.

Coulter's vaguely jocular reference in her column to employing skinheads on the right's behalf is also significant, because it is a nod and a wink -- and, combined with insults about one's manhood, a nudge -- in the direction of a historical reality regarding fascists: street thugs, in the early stages of fascism, were an essential element of their rise to power. The SA Brownshirts -- as well, in Italy, of Mussolini's black-shirted squadristi -- were used by supposedly mainstream conservatives as shock troops who could intimidate socialists, communists, and Jews; this was the key factor in the Thyssen-Nazi alliance. Similarly, right-wing thugs like the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s served to intimidate labor organizers and various leftists. (This was also an important subtext of Coulter's quip that her "only regret with Tim McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.")

The tide of right-wing eliminationism has been rising steadily in recent years, led in large part by Coulter and her sycophants. It has now topped the brim and is on the verge of bubbling over into action.

I warned a little while back that one of the real differences between movement conservatism and fascism is that the former "does not yet rely on physical violence and campaigns of gross intimidation to obtain power and suppress opposition."

If Ann Coulter -- who has a predilection for seeing her "outrageous" remarks become standard right-wing talking points -- has her way, that difference will soon disappear. All that will be necessary is for those young, heterosexual, "manly" conservatives to start following her advice, and proving their "manhood" in the only way they know how.

But then, that's what those fellows down in Jamul were doing, isn't it?

Don't worry, though: Coulter could sing the Horst Wessel Song in English and call for a Final Solution to liberalsim, and her friends on the right would smirk and assure us that she's just joking. Oh, and get a sense of humor too, you unhinged, violent moonbats, wouldja?

Then they'd book her for another round of cable talk shows.

How Republicans Think: It Only Took Hitler Four Years to Exterminate 6 Million Jews, So It Should Only Take U.S. Eight Years to Deport 12 Million Mexicans
pensitoreview.com
May. 15, 2006, 1:59 pm

“If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.” Writing in the rightwing “news” site WorldNetDaily, a genius named Vox Day whose bio says he is “a novelist and Christian libertarian. He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and the Southern Baptist church, and has been down with Madden since 1992,” posits that the United States could model the Nazis’ effiency at population control in dealing with the illegal alien crisis:

[President Bush] plans to address the nation tonight, a speech wherein he will almost surely attempt to deceive citizens into believing that he does not wish the mass migration from Mexico to continue unabated. He will likely offer some negligible resources for law enforcement and border security – resources which will never materialize – in return for an amnesty program that will grant American citizenship to the Mexican nationals who have helped lower America’s wage rates by 16 percent over the last 32 years.

And he will be lying, again, just as he lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.”

Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

The Twin Dangers of the National Surveillance State
Balkinization
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
JB

Previously I noted that because of the changing nature of warfare and the digital revolution, the United States is rapidly moving toward a National Surveillance State. Whichever party is in power will work toward the creation of such a state, the only difference is how they will negotiate the risks to civil liberties and the concentration of power in the Executive.

The National Surveillance State poses two distinct dangers. The first is that the executive's power to conduct war will displace the area previously assumed to fall within the criminal justice system. Hence the Executive increasingly has the choice to treat dangers within the United States as matters of war and national security rather than as matters of crime and criminal justice. The latter, but not the former, come with a series of traditional civil liberties protections that constrain and check the Executive. If the government can create a parallel law enforcement structure that routes around the traditional criminal justice system, and which is not subject to the oversight and restrictions of the criminal justice system, it may be increasingly tempted to make use of that parallel system for more and more things. It may argue that the criminal justice system is insufficiently flexible and outmoded for the types of problems it faces. However, the more that it routes around the criminal justice system, the more it institutionalizes the parallel system as the method of choice for the government to pursue.


For example, by going outside of FISA and telecommunications privacy laws, the government ensures that the information gleaned from monitoring phone calls and data mining phone records cannot be used to justify traditional judge-issued warrants, and the evidence produced cannot be introduced in ordinary criminal trials. Similarly, evidence derived from coercive interrogations or interrogations involving cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment cannot be introduced in criminal trials. This means that if the government attempts to use the criminal justice system after having used the parallel system it is put at a significant disadvantage in its ability to prove its case. Faced with this disadvantage, it may choose increasingly to expand and defend the parallel system of intelligence, interdiction, incarceration, interrogation, and punishment.


The Padilla case is an interesting example. My suspicion is that the government tried as long as it could to keep Padilla out of the criminal justice system in part because much of the evidence it had against Padilla was probably illegally obtained from the perspective of the criminal justice system; for example, it may have been elicited through coercive interrogation of or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of persons held by the CIA or other intelligence operations. A second example is the recent revelations of NSA interception of domestic to overseas telephone calls. One of the justifications offered for the legality of the program is that going outside FISA (and other laws) is not by itself illegal, but merely means that the information elicited cannot be used in criminal trials, but can be used in the government's military operations. That justification shows how parallel tracks are produced and reinforced over time. The more that the government depends on NSA-style domestic surveillance, the more it will want to expand the parallel track of enforcement to make use of the information it derives.


As the laws of war encroach on the criminal law, and the needs of national security encroach on domestic criminal law enforcement, the government will be increasingly tempted to take the path of least resistance-- and least accountability-- and choose to treat individuals within the United States as subject to intelligence, interdiction, incarceration, interrogation, and punishment under the aegis of national security rather than criminal procedure.


The second danger of the National Surveillance State is not that the criminal justice system will increasingly be displaced by a parallel track of military and national security enforcement, but that the criminal justice system will become increasingly like the parallel track, that is, that it will lose the civil liberties protections, checks and balances, and oversight by independent actors (e.g., judges) that we normally associate with the criminal process in the United States. Take the FISA example once again. Right now the government may be arguing that going outside FISA means that evidence can't be introduced at criminal trials. If so, then why not simply ask Congress to amend FISA so that the NSA's searches are legal and the evidence can be admitted in criminal trials? (This has, in fact, been suggested as a solution to the problem of illegality). After all, the Supreme Court has given Congress a fairly wide berth to determine how to draw the boundaries of foreign intelligence. A second example is the increasing use of preventive detention, indefinite detention of material witnesses, administrative warrants and National Security Letters. These strategies modify the previous understandings of the criminal justice system and allow the executive to detain and engage in surveillance without the usual civil liberties limitations, checks, and oversight.


A third example drives from the NSA's data mining program. Although the NSA is currently using its datamining operations to locate threats to national security, there is no reason in theory why the same technologies can't be harnessed to aid domestic criminal law enforcement. Once the databases of all phone calls made in the United States are compiled, and combined with consumer data derived from private organizations like ChoicePoint (to take only one well known example), one can produce rich digital dossiers (to use Dan Solove's term) that could be used either by the nation's national security agencies or its criminal law enforcement arm. The information that is useful to one will increasingly be useful to the other. Knowing this, the government will use it for more and more features of everyday law enforcement. As William Arkin wrote recently in his Washington Post column, "tomorrow, there could be an illegal immigrant tax and pay record monitoring tip-off system, a sexual predator and pornography attention algorithm, a drug dealing and buying behavior inconsistency profile." That is to say, if the information gleaned from the government's national security wing is transferred over to its law enforcement wing (and shared with state and local law enforcement authorities) criminal law enforcement will be transformed into increasing surveillance of ordinary Americans to prevent not only the most serious threats to national security, but also everyday crimes, including even misdemeanors and administrative infractions. The government will be tempted to move increasingly from investigation and arrest after crimes occur to surveillance, prevention and interception before crimes occur. After all, if we can keep our citizens safe from Al Qaeda using the most advanced information technologies, which become increasingly inexpensive to use and implement, why not use the same technologies to protect our citizens from crimes, whether major or minor. And if we use the surveillance state to prevent threats to national security from coming to fruition, why not use the same technologies to head off criminals, both dangerous and petty, before they have a chance to act?


The twin dangers of national security displacing the criminal justice system and the criminal justice becoming increasingly like the national security system are consequences of technological change. Although the National Surveillance State arises from the changing nature of war, changes in technology do not stop with the problem of war, as least as traditionally conceived. Rather, the very same changes in technology threaten to transform the ways that democratic governments interact with their citizenry. That is why the debate over the NSA program is so incredibly important. We need to have a national debate on how we will implement a system of information gathering and processing that is quickly becoming the norm and not the exception. If we do not have this debate, the system will be implemented so as to displace the civil liberties and rights of citizenship we hold dear.

Friday, June 02, 2006
Data Retention in the National Surveillance State
Balkinization

The Justice Department has asked Internet companies to keep records of what sites individuals visit on the web and what search terms individuals enter in order to aid law enforcement, the New York Times reports.

The department proposed that the records be retained for as long as two years. Most Internet companies discard such records after a few weeks or months.In its current proposal, the department appears to be trying to determine whether Internet companies will voluntarily agree to keep certain information or if it will need to seek legislation to require them to do so.

Data retention is a crucial element of surveillance. One of the most significant protectors of privacy is amnesia. Ordinarily, much of what we do is forgotten, even if it is done in public or is otherwise easily captured. But if the government or private parities keep records of what we do, they can not only recall it, but trace our behavior over time. Hence if government is really serious about surveillance, it is not surprising that they want as much data retention as possible. One key question is who will bear the cost-- although data retention is increasingly cheap, it is not costless, and the Justice Department's request will put some burden on Internet companies.

Although Attorney General Gonzales initially offered enforcement of child pornography laws as the reason for requiring data retention, it soon became clear that the Justice Department wants to use the records for terrorism and general law enforcement. This is inevitable, and it is one of the risks of systematic data retention. Once Internet companies save data and make it routinely available to government, it is very hard for government to restrain itself from using it for many different purposes, not just simply the worst offenses. It would be like putting a very large and delicious cake in front of a very hungry person and expecting them not to want to take a bite.


It is sometimes said that data collection by computers does not invade privacy as long as no human being is watching. But when data is collected and retained, the fact that no human being is watching is irrelevant. Human beings always have the ability to view the data later on, and, moreover, to collate it, discovering features of our lives that were not obvious from isolated elements. This makes data retention a powerful tool of law enforcement, but also a powerful danger to individual privacy.

Don Goldwater, nephew of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, caused an international stir this week when EFE, a national news agency of Spain, quoted him as saying he wanted to hold undocumented immigrants in camps to use them "as labor in the construction of a wall and to clean the areas of the Arizona desert that they're polluting."

"President O'Reilly" would run Iraq "just like Saddam ran it"
From the June 19 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: So because -- what you have here now is a tipping point in history. A tipping point in history. So you have to win the Iraq situation. Now, to me, they're not fighting it hard enough. See, if I'm president, I've got probably another 50-60,000 with orders to shoot on sight anybody violating curfews. Shoot 'em on sight. That's me. President O'Reilly, curfew in Ramadi, 7 o'clock at night. You're on the street, you're dead. I shoot you right between the eyes. OK?

That's how I'd run that country -- just like Saddam ran it. Saddam didn't have explosions. He didn't have bombers, did he? Because if you got out of line, you're dead.

Now, is that the kind of country I want for Iraq? No. But you have to have that for a few months to stabilize the situation so the Iraqi government can get organized, can get security in place and get the structure going. So, any area that is giving you trouble, you have a 7-to-7 curfew. And you can't come out of your house. That's it. And if you do, we shoot you. That's how you control it. All right?

[...]

CALLER: Hey, not bad. Actually, I had a comment to say about when you -- talking about the curfew.

O'REILLY: Yeah.

CALLER: That actually works.

O'REILLY: I know.

CALLER: We did it up in Tal Afar, Iraq, and it -- and actually works. It takes down all the IEDs, and it really works.

O'REILLY: What was your job in Iraq?

CALLER: I had to clear those IEDs.

O'REILLY: You're in the Marines?

CALLER: I was in the Marines when we invaded, and then I got out and joined the National Guard. When I was up there the second time, that's what I did.

O'REILLY: OK. Well, look, I don't just -- and I appreciate the call, [caller]. You hang on, I'll send you a Radio Factor mug. I don't talk through my hat here, OK, like many other talk show hosts do. We got military analysts over there. We got the best minds in the world. And I talk with them on a daily basis.

So I'm happy [caller] called. I don't know [caller]. But you gotta get serious about this thing over there. The curfews work. You shoot on sight. That's it. And if the Italian press doesn't like it, tough. The New York Times doesn't like it? Too bad. War is a performance business.

The Newbie's Guide to Detecting the NSA
Tuesday, 27 June 2006
wired.com

It's not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group's case against AT&T. But last week's public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents.

An internet pioneer and former FCC advisor who held a Top Secret security clearance, Marcus applies a Sherlock Holmes level of reasoning to his dissection of the evidence in the case: 120-pages of AT&T manuals that EFF filed under seal, and whistleblower Mark Klein's observations inside the company's San Francisco switching center.

If you've been following Wired News' coverage of the EFF case, you won't find many new hard revelations in Marcus' analysis -- at least, not in the censored version made public. But he connects the dots to draw some interesting conclusions:


The AT&T documents are authentic. That AT&T insists they remain under seal is evidence enough of this, but Marcus points out that the writing style is pure Bell System, with the "meticulous attention to detail that is typical of AT&T operations."

There may be dozens of surveillance rooms in AT&T offices around the country. Among other things, Marcus finds that portions of the documents are written to cover a number of different equipment rack configurations, "consistent with a deployment to 15 to 20" secret rooms.


The internet surveillance program covers domestic traffic, not just international traffic. Marcus notes that the AT&T spy rooms are "in far more locations than would be required to catch the majority of international traffic"; the configuration in the San Francisco office promiscuously sends all data into the secret room; and there's no reliable way an analysis could infer a user's physical location from their IP address. This, of course, directly contradicts President Bush's description of the "Terrorist Surveillance Program."

The system is capable of looking at content, not just addresses. The configuration described in the Klein documents -- presumably the Narus software in particular -- "exists primarily to conduct sophisticated rule-based analysis of content", Marcus concludes.
My bullet points don't come close to conveying the painstaking reasoning he lays out to back each of his conclusions.

Perhaps the most interesting -- and, in retrospect, obvious -- point Marcus makes is that AT&T customers aren't the only ones apparently being tapped. "Transit" traffic originating with one ISP and destined for another is also being sniffed if it crosses AT&T's network. Ironically, because the taps are installed at the point at which that network connects to the rest of the world, the safest web surfers are AT&T subscribers visiting websites hosted on AT&T's network. Their traffic doesn't pass through the splitters.

With that in mind, here's the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco's Folsom street.

If you're a Windows user, fire up an MS-DOS command prompt. Now type tracert followed by the domain name of the website, e-mail host, VoIP switch, or whatever destination you're interested in. Watch as the program spits out your route, line by line.

C:\> tracert nsa.gov

1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[...]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net[12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *

In the above example, my traffic is jumping from Level 3 Communications to AT&T's network in San Francisco, presumably over the OC-48 circuit that AT&T tapped on February 20th, 2003, according to the Klein docs.

The magic string you're looking for is sffca.ip.att.net. If it's present immediately above or below a non-att.net entry, then -- by Klein's allegations -- your packets are being copied into room 641A, and from there, illegally, to the NSA.

Of course, if Marcus is correct and AT&T has installed these secret rooms all around the country, then any att.net entry in your route is a bad sign.

POLICE STATE: Interview With Greg Palast
nyinquirer
Friday, July 14, 2006

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His investigative journalism and television reports are frequently seen in the U.K.’s Observer and BBC’s Newsnight. In the U.S. he is virtually banned from the mainstream media, but can be found in Harper’s Magazine and throughout the Internet. Fresh back from his investigations into Mexico’s recent election, Palast just dropped us a line to fill us in on the news that you won’t hear from Anderson Cooper and the rest of the newsroom hairdo gang.

Interviewed by Dustin Glick

NYI: Do you feel that the U.S. has become a police state?

Greg Palast: Well, if you’re in Guantanamo, it’s a police state for you. Whatever happened to the story about the people being held incommunicado in the United States? What was it, 1,100 the ACLU was trying to uncover? The story just disappeared. So whoever was rotting in jail is still rotting. Now as for the war on terror, hey I have no problem going after Saudi Arabian hijackers, but I don’t see any investigation going in that direction. And by the way, that whole checking the checking accounts thing — believe it or not, Bin Laden doesn’t use his ATM card now. He has a feeling that they’re watching the checking accounts. This is bullshit — that’s not how they move their money and they know it. This is not part of the war on terror, it’s part of the war on democracy.

Like this whole stuff with them needing to tap phones without a warrant. There’s a special national security court panel that approves wiretaps and surveillance requests and our information is that the U.S. government has never once in the history of the panel been told, “No you can’t.” So you have a pushover panel that will go along with anything and yet there’s certain surveillance that they won’t even put before them.

That means it’s not about terrorists. If there’s any hint of terrorism or connections to terrorism, they get the warrant. When George Bush says “I want to know about your phone calls with Al Qaeda,” he gets it. But it’s not about that. It’s about this phone call right now. That’s what they want. And I do feel sorry for the poor bastard who has to listen in on this. And by the way, in Houston . . . well I won’t tell you that story. Anyway, they waste a lot of time on me, let’s put it that way. Because I’m an open book.

Click the jump for the rest of the interview . . .

NYI: At the end of Armed Madhouse you challenge the reader to do something, to take action, to get involved. When I finished the book, it kinda made me want to jump off a bridge.

GP: (Laughing) No! What about the stuff on Huey Long? Well, like I say, they had to steal the election, that’s a good sign isn’t it? They had to lie to get us into the war. They have to take away your overtime by subterfuge. They gotta do all this shit in the dark, man. That’s the issue — that all this baloney, all the little games and thievery and skimming off a little bit more for the have-mores has to be done in the dark. The key to the game for them is shutting down the information and shutting out the light. The number one thing I do is turn on the light.

Now what should people do from there? Actually it’s pretty simple. Once people have information it’s simple organizing and we’ve been through it in the U.S. before. In 1927, before the levees in New Orleans broke, you had a Republican Congress, Republican president and Republican courts. Unions were forbidden by law as a conspiracy against business — it was as grim as it could get and people felt it could not change. And then when the levees broke there was somebody who actually put the feeling into words, with Huey Long.

There was no age pension, no minimum wage, no protection for workers, no school, and he said it doesn’t have to be like this, so just sign on. And in 1927, ’28 and ’29 literally millions of people signed on, marched and jumped up and communicated through the Internet of the day, which was the radio at that time. Then suddenly Franklin Roosevelt was saying “Hey, if I want to be president, I better roll to the front of the line and take up the cause,” and he did.

NYI: Do you think it will take that kind of a leader today for any real change to take place? There are organizations like MoveOn.org, but how much can they really do?

GP: I think that the lesson of the drowning of New Orleans and the New Deal was that Franklin Roosevelt stared out as a conservative Al Gore type Democrat and when the public changed, he changed with them. Paul Krugman and I were recently giving a talk together and he said, “We need to find a new Franklin Roosevelt.” I said, “If we build a movement, just like in the ’30s, Franklin Roosevelt will find us.”

I think that’s true and that there are movements right now. MoveOn was interesting, but it has its limited crowd, which is the Technorati, Upper-Middle-Class, West Coast activists, and it was good to get them involved, these Silicon Valley people that considered themselves apolitical in the period of the roaring stock options. You’ve got Operation PUSH bringing in African Americans, just like Martin Luther King built a movement out of the black churches in the south.

How many millions of people were in the streets for the immigration battle? That’s really about Hispanic rights and stopping the theft of the next election. Once people are allowed in and become citizens, doesn’t mean that they’re going to count their votes, because they aren’t.

We’ve had a lot of mass movements in the U.S. that have succeeded and that means joining and taking part in you labor union. The way to fight No Child’s Behind Left is to join your PTA and make it an issue. Here in New York the PTA is one of the most organized, political, militant organizations in the city. We can do it, but my job is to give you the hard information along with some bad jokes so you don’t throw the book against a wall or throw yourselves out the window. I don’t know if it’s much humor or if it’s good humor, but that’s the idea of throwing humor in there — otherwise it would just be too grim.

NYI: Speaking of the tone in your books and some of your stories, it’s very cynical. Do you feel it ever limits who would publish you?

GP: It doesn’t limit who publishes me, although when I write for Harper’s, I have to put on this very solemn tone, (laughing) or should I say the editors put on a very solemn tone for me. That’s one of the reasons I write books. My writing is very British though — I have George Orwell’s old column at the Observer. I come out of that tradition and in Britain if you write in what they call New York Times Stentorian they are really uninterested in following you. There it’s very important that if your material is significant, your writing should have panache to go with it.

Yes, here I can’t do the types of reports I do on British TV with a little smile and some humor. Here serious reporting is stuff like Anderson Cooper or Dateline because they do silly reports but with a very serious, solemn demeanor. The seriousness is in the hairdo and in the deep voice of Anderson Cooper — you know he’s doing an investigative report when he puts on a leather jacket. Then what is the investigation? Angelina Jolie?

His big claim to fame is that when investigating New Orleans he saw poor people. This guy is from the Vanderbuilt family and normally the people that mow his lawn, well here they were in public being treated the way he treats his servants. And everyone knows that’s not just how you treat your servants — you tip them and you don’t drown them, but that’s about it, you still don’t let them into the plantation house — unless they’re waiters. So he’ll never do a report on what really happened in New Orleans. So I do them. But I’m not going to cry for you.

NYI: Why has investigative journalism gone the way of the dinosaur in America?

GP: It’s the money. It’s very costly. Until even Michael Powell and the FCC went berserk we had stations thinking it was just fine to put on as news unannounced video press releases (VPRs). Corporations provided the news — “Here’s the cart, just put it on the air.” This happened with thousands of thousands of reports. And if you think that CBS Evening News does anything different, they simply don’t take the entire cart, but they take the line. They take the story line and they take the information because it’s all cheap. You just need a couple staff reporters, a couple of cameras and a couple of good sets and it’s dirt-ass cheap to do these news reports the way they do them. It’s not risky. No one is going to sue you. You know how much money my stuff costs just to lawyer? My estimate is that just the lawyer review of my book before it goes out is $100,000. If I didn’t have a bestseller I couldn’t even print this stuff.

NYI: Now I’m picturing you getting some great information from a whistleblower. You’ve got the proof, you put out the story, but then it only gets out to people like me who are already looking for it. Is that frustrating?

GP: Well I think you’re the right people. Yes, I’m not getting it out to the Council on Foreign Relations, though you’d be surprised by how many of those people secretly read my stuff. They always hide it in a copy of Hustler so they don’t get caught.

So I’m left out of the cocktail party influence circuit, and I’m left out of the mainstream broadcast — that’s frustrating. Being left out of the influence circle doesn’t bother me. What I am frustrated about is that because they are aware, they deliberately keep me out of the mainstream media. The advantage of broadcasting on television as opposed to the Internet or other outlets — where I do reach millions through Air America or Democracy Now or BuzzFlash — is that I could reach out to people who wouldn’t reach out to me.

If you want to read me now you have to come to me either by watching a BBC broadcast through a videolink or by buying a book. I want to get those guys who are sitting in front of their tube and watching Anderson Cooper giving them this very serious news about what’s in the newest Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. That’s where I’m really frustrated, because I think people would react to the stuff, I think they’d like the stuff. I think I’d even get good ratings.

When Phil Donohue was taken off the air, he was by far the No. 1 rated show on MSNBC. And when I came on I kicked up his ratings another 20 percent every time I appeared. And we got canned, and the reason why was not because we didn’t have the ratings but because we did. Think about it — can you imagine canceling your No. 1 program on the network? That was because of the message.

NYI: What do you think about Al Gore’s recent return to environmentalism?

GP: Okay, vote theft is class war and voting is something we won through a long struggle. The whole point of voting is that it’s the way for the working class to control the privileged class. However, the candidates for the working class tend to come from the owner class because for them, votes are just surfboards on which their ambitions ride. Now, I was just thinking about this coming back from Mexico where we had a candidate — the unGore — named Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who demanded that the votes be counted.

In the case of Al Gore I’m thinking of running a campaign — maybe you can kick it off for me — called Gore-No-More.

I want to remind people that while he said that it would be good for George Bush to apologize for being wrong about the war in Iraq, he’s the one who said that NAFTA would create jobs in America for auto parts workers, who he specifically singled out, and of course 200,000 auto parts workers, about 80 percent of the unionized workforce in auto parts, have lost their jobs since NAFTA directly because of NAFTA.

They’ve been completely replaced by auto parts from Canada and Mexico, not even from China. Of course he was also a big one for the most favored nation status for China. Now I would like to tell Mr. Gore that China is not my most favorite nation. I don’t know how it became his.

So basically here is a guy who declared war on the working class, who pushed very hard for so-called welfare reform — he said that after five years CHILDREN should not be allowed to have food stamps. And now, most importantly, the biggest single blow to the struggle against global warming was the institution of “crud credits” — pollution trading credits. Whose idea was that?

Well the idea came from a guy named Boyden Gray, who was the top lobbyist for the industrial polluters. And who was the No. 1 promoter of that idea within the Clinton Administration? Al Gore. He took the idea straight from the polluters and then polluted the environmental agency with it. So the No. 1 threat of global warming was engineered by Al Gore, and that’s an inconvenient truth that he’s got to deal with.

If the Democratic party wants to keep nominating Republicans who hate the working class, they’re going to have a very difficult time winning the votes of the working class because the Republicans will say, “If you want a Republican, we’ll give you a real one.” And I’ll say one thing for Americans — given the choice between a real Republican and a fake Republican, they’ll take the real one.

NYI: Are there any Democrats you’d stand behind?

GP: We shouldn’t stand behind any politician at all. We should stand in front of them, and I mean that sincerely. The whole point is that we have to create the movement — when we move they follow. When the polls started showing the public was 70 percent against the war, suddenly Democrats came out and said, “This was a mistake.” When the public started screaming that the average working guy is getting shafted, it was Pat Buchanan who came out and said “Let’s raise the minimum wage.” The leaders from both parties will jump behind the voters, never the other way around. Never look for the leader — the leader will look for you.

Marshals: Innocent People Placed On 'Watch List' To Meet Quota
Marshals Say They Must File One Surveillance Detection Report, Or SDR, Per Month
July 21, 2006
thedenverchannel.com

DENVER -- You could be on a secret government database or watch list for simply taking a picture on an airplane. Some federal air marshals say they're reporting your actions to meet a quota, even though some top officials deny it.

The air marshals, whose identities are being concealed, told 7NEWS that they're required to submit at least one report a month. If they don't, there's no raise, no bonus, no awards and no special assignments.

"Innocent passengers are being entered into an international intelligence database as suspicious persons, acting in a suspicious manner on an aircraft ... and they did nothing wrong," said one federal air marshal.


These unknowing passengers who are doing nothing wrong are landing in a secret government document called a Surveillance Detection Report, or SDR. Air marshals told 7NEWS that managers in Las Vegas created and continue to maintain this potentially dangerous quota system.

"Do these reports have real life impacts on the people who are identified as potential terrorists?" 7NEWS Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.

"Absolutely," a federal air marshal replied.

7NEWS obtained an internal Homeland Security document defining an SDR as a report designed to identify terrorist surveillance activity.

"When you see a decision like this, for these reports, who loses here?" Kovaleski asked.

"The people we're supposed to protect -- the American public," an air marshal said.

What kind of impact would it have for a flying individual to be named in an SDR?

"That could have serious impact ... They could be placed on a watch list. They could wind up on databases that identify them as potential terrorists or a threat to an aircraft. It could be very serious," said Don Strange, a former agent in charge of air marshals in Atlanta. He lost his job attempting to change policies inside the agency.

That's why several air marshals object to a July 2004 memo from top management in the Las Vegas office, a memo that reminded air marshals of the SDR requirement.

The body of the memo said, "Each federal air marshal is now expected to generate at least one SDR per month."

"Does that memo read to you that Federal Air Marshal headquarters has set a quota on these reports?" Kovaleski asked.

"Absolutely, no doubt," an air marshal replied.

A second management memo, also dated July 2004, said, "There may come an occasion when you just don't see anything out of the ordinary for a month at a time, but I'm sure that if you are looking for it, you'll see something."

Another federal air marshal said that not only is there a quota in Las Vegas for SDRs, but that "it directly reflects on (their) performance evaluations" and on how much money they make.

The director of the Air Marshal Service, Dana Brown, declined 7NEWS' request for an interview on the quota system. But the agency points to a memo from August 2004 that said there is not a quota for submitting SDRs and which goes on to say, "I do not expect reports that are inaccurate or frivolous."

But, Las Vegas-based air marshals say the quota system remains in force, now more than two years after managers sent the original memos, and that it's a mandate from management that impacts annual raises, bonuses, awards and special assignments.

"To meet this quota, to get their raises, do you think federal air marshals in Las Vegas are making some of this stuff up?" Kovaleski asked.

"I know they are. It's a joke," an air marshal replied.

"Have marshals in the Las Vegas office, I don't want to say fabricated, but 'created' reports?" Kovaleski asked.

"Creative writing -- stretching a long ways the truth, yes," an air marshal replied.

One example, according to air marshals, occurred on one flight leaving Las Vegas, when an unknowing passenger, most likely a tourist, was identified in an SDR for doing nothing more than taking a photo of the Las Vegas skyline as his plane rolled down the runway.

"You're saying that was not an accurate portrayal of a potential terrorist activity?" Kovaleski asked.

"No, it was not," an air marshal said.

"It was a marshal trying to meet a quota ..." Kovaleski said.

"Yes, he was," the air marshal replied.

Strange said he didn't have a quota in the Atlanta office when he was in charge.

"I would never have done that ... You are going to have people reporting every suspicious looking activity they come across, whether they in their heart feel like it's a threat, just to meet the quota," Strange said.

Strange and other air marshals said the quota allows the government to fill a database with bad information.

A Las Vegas air marshal said he didn't write an SDR every month for exactly that reason.

"Well, it's intelligence information, and like any system, if you put garbage in, you get garbage out," the air marshal said.

"I would like to see an investigation -- a real investigation conducted into the ways things are done here," the air marshal in Las Vegas said.

Although the agency strongly denies any presence of a quota system, Las Vegas-based air marshals have produced documents that show their performance review is directly linked to producing SDRs.

Montgomery Police Department's SWAT Team Learns Israeli Tactics
wsfa.com
July 25, 2006

As the fighting continues overseas, some lessons from the Middle East conflict are hitting home right here in Alabama. Members of the Montgomery Police Department SWAT team are in a five day counterterrorism school taught by a former Israeli servicemember.

Out at the practice range, the 12 member team learns that timing is everything. SWAT team member Todd Wheeler notes, "The way the Israelis do it, it's extremely dynamic. It's extremely fast and that's the only way to fight counterterrorism."

That's also why the Montgomery SWAT team is training with Aaron Cohen. He's a veteran of the Israeli counterterrorist unit. Now his four year stint with that team will work for this team. Cohen says he wants, "to be able to help them reduce risk while responding to terrorist threats while in crowded areas." Cohen says these drills and the current situation in the Middle East are a powerful combination for him. He explains,"It's tough. It hits home for me because my unit is working there right now."

Montgomery officers say, if they can absorb the tactics of one of the world's premier counterterrorism teams, they'll learn to move faster and become smaller targets. It's an international lesson racing to the heart of Alabama crime fighters. The Montgomery police say counterterrorism training has become essential for all law enforcement in the wake of 9-11. They say this school fills a real need in their department and the new techniques will be applied to everything they do.

Bush seeks expanded military tribunal role
The White House is seeking legislation that would allow people not affiliated with terrorism to be prosecuted in military commissions -- with far fewer rights than afforded civilians.
Washington Post Service
thestate.com

WASHINGTON - A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such ''commissions'' to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not al Qaeda members or the Taliban and are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism, according to officials familiar with the proposal plan.

The plan, which would replace a military trial system ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in June, also allows the secretary of defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court's jurisdiction. The two provisions would be likely to put more individuals than previously expected before military juries, officials and independent experts said.

The draft proposed legislation, set to be discussed at two Senate hearings today, is controversial inside and outside the administration because defendants would be denied many protections guaranteed by the civilian and traditional military criminal justice systems.

Under the proposed procedures, defendants would lack rights to confront accusers, exclude hearsay accusations, or bar evidence obtained through rough or coercive interrogations. They would not be guaranteed a public or speedy trial and would lack the right to choose their military counsel, who in turn would not be guaranteed equal access to evidence held by prosecutors.

Detainees also would not be guaranteed the right to be present at their own trials, if their absence is deemed necessary to protect national security or individuals.

An early draft of the new law prepared by civilian political appointees and leaked to the media last week has been modified in response to criticism from uniformed military lawyers. But the provisions allowing a future expansion of the courts to cover new crimes and more prisoners were retained, according to government officials who are familiar with the deliberations.

Attorney incensed after viewing FTAA police video. A police training video showed high-ranking Broward deputies laughing about shooting rubber bullets at a Coral Gables attorney at the free- trade summit in Miami.
BY ASHLEY FANTZ
Aug. 09, 2006
Miami.com


CHARLES TRAINOR JR./MIAMI HERALD STAFF
THE WOMAN IN RED: Elizabeth Ritter exercises her First Amendment right during an FTAA protest near police on November of 2003.

As a middle-aged Coral Gables attorney, dressed sharply in a red suit jacket, skirt and black slingback heels, Elizabeth Ritter stood out among the throng of protesters on Nov. 20, 2003.

Frustrated that she couldn't do business because the Miami-Dade County Courthouse was shut down that week during the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit, she hastily made a sign that read ''Fear Totalitarianism'' and decided to stand with the protesters.

The sign, however, became her shield against a barrage of rubber bullets fired at her by a legion of Broward Sheriff's deputies in riot gear. And, in an image captured by a videographer, she is shot in the head as she cowers in the street.

And now another video, recently released, raises questions about the degree to which police, specifically, Broward Sheriff's deputies, were encouraged, -- and even praised -- for using force against Ritter and other protesters.

In the video -- recorded by BSO on Nov. 21, the day after the event -- a BSO top commander gushes over shooting protesters. Another officer refers to them as ``scurrying cockroaches.''

And when it comes to ''the lady in the red dress,'' said a sergeant, referring to Ritter, eliciting hoots and laughter, ``I don't know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head!''

Viewing the video for the first time last month, Ritter was incensed. Until now, she had no plans to sue, even though a long list of people -- labor union workers, a filmmaker, protesters and a local reporter -- filed complaints and lawsuits alleging the agencies in charge of crowd control -- Miami Police, Miami-Dade Police and BSO -- used excessive force and made false arrests.

MINOR OFFENSES

About 220 people were arrested, the majority for minor offenses such as obstructing sidewalks, according to the Miami-Dade state attorney's office. Charges have been dropped in nearly half of those cases. So far, 57 people have been convicted, according to spokesman Edward Griffith.

The Miami Civilian Investigative Panel, a voter-created board that vets complaints against the Miami police, looked into 20 allegations of police misconduct. Six of those complaints have become lawsuits backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. Last week, the panel issued a report criticizing police for profiling and ''unlawfully'' searching protesters, but announced it had found no evidence of excessive force.

THE BSO TAPES

On one of the final days of the summit meant to hash out a trade agreement among 34 Western nations, Ritter had accepted a friend's invitation to attend an FTAA-related law lecture at Bayfront Park.

While leaders from 34 countries negotiated inside Miami's downtown Intercontinental Hotel, TV news showed hundreds of police in riot gear facing protesters, many college-age, who thought a trade pact would hurt developing countries.

OVERKILL

But it wasn't trade issues that brought Ritter and her friends to downtown that day. The attorney thought it was overkill that the police had all but shut down the city.

''My city, my hometown, was becoming a police state,'' she said.

A videographer captured what happened next, showing Ritter walking alone in front of a line of BSO deputies on NE Third Street.

As the deputies advance, Ritter turns around to face them and raises her sign.

A barrage of projectiles is fired. She kneels, holding her sign above her head as a shield.

Ritter is shot five times -- in her legs, upper body, and shoulder. And when she kneels on the ground, the sign above her head, a projectile rips through it and strikes her in the head.

Hard rubber projectiles typically leave welts and bruises, but at close range can pierce the skin, or rarely, kill.

'I turned around and said, `Why did you hit me?' Is a woman in a business suit a threat?'' Ritter recalled in a recent interview.

A MISTAKE?

'But then I thought, `That must have been a mistake.' A police officer isn't going to shoot me on purpose.''

Ritter walked around downtown in a daze, finally getting a ride home. Although her head and body were bruised and she was upset, she decided not to make an issue of what happened.

Then, last month the BSO videotape emerged as a result of a public records request from the Miami Civilian Investigative Panel.

Its existence was first reported by the Daily Business Review.

The tape, recorded for training purposes, shows Major John Brooks -- then a captain -- addressing dozens of deputies in an outdoor BSO tent.

''How about yesterday, huh?'' Brooks says, complimenting the officers for their work during the protests. ``I would go to war with everyone here.''

Brooks continues, ``I went home, I couldn't sleep, I was just so pumped up about how good you guys were . . . Nobody broke ranks. You're the best I've ever been with.''

Sgt. Michael Kallman, a BSO counterterrorism unit officer, addresses the group next. A voice off-camera says, ``What about the lady behind the sign? We have intel on her?''

The officers laugh.

Kallman smiles and says, ``The good news about being able to watch you guys live on TV is that the lady with the red dress, I don't know who got her, but it went right through the sign and hit her smack dab in the middle of the head!''

He raises his forefinger and zooms it toward his forehead.

The cops all laugh.

Another officer asks, off-camera, ``Did I get a piece of her red dress?''

BSO'S RESPONSE

No disciplinary action has been taken against any officers in the video, said BSO spokesman Elliott Cohen.

''There has been no Internal Affairs investigations involving FTAA,'' he said.

Brooks left the Miami Police Department and joined BSO amid controversy over the removal of Elián González from his uncle's Little Havana home in April 2000. Brooks, an assistant chief at the Miami police department at the time, had accompanied agents on the raid to clear police through police barricades.

Then-Mayor Joe Carollo criticized Brooks, saying his presence in the van gave the impression the raid had the city's seal of approval.

In May 2005, Brooks was promoted to major, making him one of Sheriff Ken Jenne's highest ranking deputies.

The Miami Herald left numerous messages for Brooks and Kallman through the sheriff's public information office. Three messages were left with Brooks' assistant and at Kallman's office explaining the story and asking for comment. The Herald also sent certified letters to both men. Neither responded. Jenne also declined to comment for this story.

Miami police was the lead police agency during the FTAA. Miami Police Chief John Timoney declined comment for this article.

Miami investigative panel attorney Charles Mays said the panel's ability to vet complaints was halted by one huge obstacle: While Miami officers wore identifying uniforms, BSO and Miami-Dade officers did not.

''It made it much more difficult to know who did what,'' he said.

''With multi-agencies running around, as an officer you won't know who's who,'' said Eugene O'Donnell, professor of police science at New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former New York City cop.

''It hurts oversight, community and accountability,'' he said.

However, he said it was nevertheless appropriate for law enforcement to prepare for the potential for violence -- like that seen in Seattle in 1999 when protests against the World Trade Organization grew explosive between cops and protesters.

FEW INJURIES

FTAA's injuries hovered around a few dozen and the week was far less violent. Miami police had 16 injuries, spokesman Delrish Moss said.

It's unclear how many Miami-Dade or BSO officers were hurt.

Commander Armando Guzman, a 25-year-old police veteran and leader of the Miami Police Swat Team during FTAA, said officers faced violence that wasn't publicized.

Protesters set fire to freight pallets they placed on the street and fired ball bearings at police using ''wrist rockets,'' sophisticated high-velocity sling-shots, he said.

Demonstrators also flung pieces of brick and rebar at cops, said Guzman.

He was nearly hit in the head with a urine-filled Gatorade bottle.

Guzman witnessed the Ritter shooting.

''Unfortunately there were people between us and them,'' he said.

``If you're in the middle, you're going to get hit.''

O'Donnell added, ''I'm not excusing what they said -- and it probably doesn't sit well with the public,'' he said. ``But it's not unheard of for cops to talk in a kind of locker room way.''

NOT A THREAT

Ritter does not accept that.

''I was not a threat to them,'' she said.

''Referring to people as cockroaches is wrong. Saying they want a piece of my red dress is wrong. The law, I know, will agree with me,'' she added.

Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials
by Ian Urbina
August 13, 2006 by the New York Times
NYTimes

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.

Edward Anthony said his hands swelled after pharamaceutical tests in 1964, “and they’ve never gone back to normal.”

The proposed change includes provisions intended to prevent problems that plagued earlier programs. Nevertheless, it has dredged up a painful history of medical mistreatment and incited debate among prison rights advocates and researchers about whether prisoners can truly make uncoerced decisions, given the environment they live in.

Supporters of such programs cite the possibility of benefit to prison populations, and the potential for contributing to the greater good.

Until the early 1970’s, about 90 percent of all pharmaceutical products were tested on prison inmates, federal officials say. But such research diminished sharply in 1974 after revelations of abuse at prisons like Holmesburg here, where inmates were paid hundreds of dollars a month to test items as varied as dandruff treatments and dioxin, and where they were exposed to radioactive, hallucinogenic and carcinogenic chemicals.

In addition to addressing the abuses at Holmesburg, the regulations were a reaction to revelations in 1972 surrounding what the government called the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, which was begun in the 1930’s and lasted 40 years. In it, several hundred mostly illiterate men with syphilis in rural Alabama were left untreated, even after a cure was discovered, so that researchers could study the disease.

“What happened at Holmesburg was just as gruesome as Tuskegee, but at Holmesburg it happened smack dab in the middle of a major city, not in some backwoods in Alabama,” said Allen M. Hornblum, an urban studies professor at Temple University and the author of “Acres of Skin,” a 1998 book about the Holmesburg research. “It just goes to show how prisons are truly distinct institutions where the walls don’t just serve to keep inmates in, they also serve to keep public eyes out.”

Critics also doubt the merits of pharmaceutical testing on prisoners who often lack basic health care.

Alvin Bronstein, a Washington lawyer who helped found the National Prison Project, an American Civil Liberties Union program, said he did not believe that altering the regulations risked a return to the days of Holmesburg.

“With the help of external review boards that would include a prisoner advocate,” Mr. Bronstein said, “I do believe that the potential benefits of biomedical research outweigh the potential risks.”

Holmesburg closed in 1995 but was partly reopened in July to help ease overcrowding at other prisons.

Under current regulations, passed in 1978, prisoners can participate in federally financed biomedical research if the experiment poses no more than “minimal” risks to the subjects. But a report formally presented to federal officials on Aug. 1 by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences advised that experiments with greater risks be permitted if they had the potential to benefit prisoners. As an added precaution, the report suggested that all studies be subject to an independent review.

“The current regulations are entirely outdated and restrictive, and prisoners are being arbitrarily excluded from research that can help them,” said Ernest D. Prentice, a University of Nebraska genetics professor and the chairman of a Health and Human Services Department committee that requested the study. Mr. Prentice said the regulation revision process would begin at the committee’s next meeting, on Nov. 2.

The discussion comes as the biomedical industry is facing a shortage of testing subjects. In the last two years, several pain medications, including Vioxx and Bextra, have been pulled off the market because early testing did not include large enough numbers of patients to catch dangerous problems.

And the committee’s report comes against the backdrop of a prison population that has more than quadrupled, to about 2.3 million, over the last 30 years and that disproportionately suffers from H.I.V. and hepatitis C, diseases that some researchers say could be better controlled if new research were permitted in prisons.

For Leodus Jones, a former prisoner, the report has opened old wounds. “This moves us back in a very bad direction,” said Mr. Jones, who participated in the experiments at Holmesburg in 1966 and after his release played a pivotal role in lobbying to get the regulations passed.

In one experiment, Mr. Jones’s skin changed color, and he developed rashes on his back and legs where he said lotions had been tested.

“The doctors told me at the time that something was seriously wrong,” said Mr. Jones, who added that he had never signed a consent form. He reached a $40,000 settlement in 1986 with the City of Philadelphia after he sued.

“I never had these rashes before,” he said, “but I’ve had them ever since.”

The Institute of Medicine report was initiated in 2004 when the Health and Human Services Department asked the institute to look into the issue. The report said prisoners should be allowed to take part in federally financed clinical trials so long as the trials were in the later and less dangerous phase of Food and Drug Administration approval. It also recommended that at least half the subjects in such trials be nonprisoners, making it more difficult to test products that might scare off volunteers.

Dr. A. Bernard Ackerman, a New York dermatologist who worked at Holmesburg during the 1960’s trials as a second-year resident from the University of Pennsylvania, said he remained skeptical. “I saw it firsthand,” Dr. Ackerman said. “What started as scientific research became pure business, and no amount of regulations can prevent that from happening again.”

Others cite similar concerns over the financial stake in such research.

“It strikes me as pretty ridiculous to start talking about prisoners getting access to cutting-edge research and medications when they can’t even get penicillin and high-blood-pressure pills,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, an independent monthly review. “I have to imagine there are larger financial motivations here.”

The demand for human test subjects has grown so much that the so-called contract research industry has emerged in the past decade to recruit volunteers for pharmaceutical trials. The Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development, a Boston policy and economic research group at Tufts University, estimated that contract research revenue grew to $7 billion in 2005, up from $1 billion in 1995.

But researchers at the Institute of Medicine said their sole focus was to see if prisoners could benefit by changing the regulations.

The pharmaceutical industry says it was not involved. Jeff Trewitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug industry trade group, said that his organization had no role in prompting the study and that it had not had a chance to review the findings.
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Salvatore C. Dimarco Jr.

Dr. Albert M. Kligman said shutting down the prison experiments was “a big mistake.”

Dr. Albert M. Kligman, who directed the experiments at Holmesburg and is now an emeritus professor of dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, said the regulations should never have been written in the first place.

“My view is that shutting the prison experiments down was a big mistake,” Dr. Kligman said.

While confirming that he used radioactive materials, hallucinogenic drugs and carcinogenic materials on prisoners, Dr. Kligman said that they were always administered in extremely low doses and that the benefits to the public were overwhelming.

He cited breakthroughs like Retin A, a popular anti-acne drug, and ingredients for most of the creams used to treat poison ivy. “I’m on the medical ethics committee at Penn,” he said, “and I still don’t see there having been anything wrong with what we were doing.”

From 1951 to 1974, several federal agencies and more than 30 companies used Holmesburg for experiments, mostly under the auspices of the University of Pennsylvania, which had built laboratories at the prison. After the revelations about Holmesburg, it soon became clear that other universities and prisons in other states were involved in similar abuses.

In October 2000, nearly 300 former inmates sued the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Kligman, Dow Chemical and Johnson & Johnson for injuries they said occurred during the experiments at Holmesburg, but the suit was dismissed because the statute of limitations had expired.

“When they put the chemicals on me, my hands swelled up like eight-ounce boxing gloves, and they’ve never gone back to normal,” said Edward Anthony, 62, a former inmate who took part in Holmesburg experiments in 1964. “We’re still pushing the lawsuit because the medical bills are still coming in for a lot of us.”

Daniel S. Murphy, a professor of criminal justice at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., who was imprisoned for five years in the 1990’s for growing marijuana, said that loosening the regulations would be a mistake.

“Free and informed consent becomes pretty questionable when prisoners don’t hold the keys to their own cells,” Professor Murphy said, “and in many cases they can’t read, yet they are signing a document that it practically takes a law degree to understand.”

During the Holmesburg experiments, inmates could earn up to $1,500 a month by participating. The only other jobs were at the commissary or in the shoe and shirt factory, where wages were usually about 15 cents to 25 cents a day, Professor Hornblum of Temple said.

On the issue of compensation for inmates, the report raised concern about “undue inducements to participate in research in order to gain access to medical care or other benefits they would not normally have.” It called for “adequate protections” to avoid “attempts to coerce or manipulate participation.’’

The report also expressed worry about the absence of regulation over experiments that do not receive federal money. Lawrence O. Gostin, the chairman of the panel that conducted the study and a professor of law and public health at Georgetown University, said he hoped to change that.

Even with current regulations, oversight of such research has been difficult. In 2000, several universities were reprimanded for using federal money and conducting several hundred projects on prisoners without fully reporting the projects to the appropriate authorities.

Professor Gostin said the report called for tightening some existing regulations by advising that all research involving prisoners be subject to uniform federal oversight, even if no federal funds are involved. The report also said protections should extend not just to prisoners behind bars but also to those on parole or on probation.

Professor Murphy, who testified to the panel as the report was being written, praised those proposed precautions before adding, “They’re also the parts of the report that faced the strongest resistance from federal officials, and I fear they’re most likely the parts that will end up getting cut as these recommendations become new regulations.”

Two Strange Deaths in European Wiretapping Scandal
European investigators are tracking the mysterious deaths of two security experts who had uncovered extensive spyware in their telecommunications firms.
By Paolo Pontoniere and Jeffrey Klein, New America Media.
Alternet.org
August 19, 2006

Just after noon on Friday, July 21, Adamo Bove -- head of security at Telecom Italia, the country's largest telecommunications firm -- told his wife he had some errands to run as he left their Naples apartment. Hours later, police found his car parked atop a freeway overpass. Bove's body lay on the pavement some 100 feet below.

Bove was a master at detecting hidden phone networks. Recently, at the direction of Milan prosecutors, he'd used mobile phone records to trace how a "Special Removal Unit" composed of CIA and SISMI (the Italian CIA) agents abducted Abu Omar, an Egyptian cleric, and flew him to Cairo where he was tortured. The Omar kidnapping and the alleged involvement of 26 CIA agents, whom prosecutors seek to arrest and extradite, electrified Italian media. U.S. media noted the story, then dropped it.

The first Italian press reports after Bove's death said the 42-year-old had committed suicide. Bove, according to unnamed sources, was depressed about his imminent indictment by Milan prosecutors. But prosecutors immediately, and uncharacteristically, set the record straight: Bove was not a target; in fact, he was prosecutors' chief source. Bove, prosecutors said, was helping them investigate his own bosses, who were orchestrating an illegal wiretapping bureau and the destruction of incriminating digital evidence. One Telecom executive had already been forced out when he was caught conducting these illicit operations, as well as selling intercepted information to a business intelligence firm.

About 16 months earlier, in March of 2005, Costas Tsalikidis, a 38-year-old software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece had just discovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the company's mobile network. The spyware eavesdropped on the prime minister's and other top officials' cell phone calls; it even monitored the car phone of Greece's secret service chief. Others bugged included civil rights activists, the head of Greece's "Stop the War" coalition, journalists and Arab businessmen based in Athens. All the wiretapping began about two months before the Olympics were hosted by Greece in August 2004, according to a subsequent investigation by the Greek authorities.

Tsalikidis, according to friends and family, was excited about his work and was looking forward to marrying his longtime girlfriend. But on March 9, 2005, his elderly mother found him hanging from a white rope tied to pipes outside of his apartment bathroom. His limp feet dangled a mere three inches above the floor. His death was ruled a suicide; he, like Adamo Bove, left no suicide note.

The next day, Vodaphone's top executive in Greece reported to the prime minister that unknown outsiders had illicitly eavesdropped on top government officials. Before making his report, however, the CEO had the spyware destroyed, even though this destroyed the evidence as well.

Investigations into the alleged suicides of both Adamo Bove and Costas Tsalikidis raise questions about more than the suspicious circumstances of their deaths. They point to politicized, illegal intelligence structures that rely upon cooperative business executives. European prosecutors and journalists probing these spying networks have revealed that:

The Vodaphone eavesdropping was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America's National Security Agency.

According to Ta Nea, a Greek newspaper, Vodaphone's CEO privately told the Greek government that the bugging culprits were "U.S. agents." Because Greece's prime minister feared domestic protests and a diplomatic war with the United States, he ordered the Vodafone CEO to withhold this conclusion from his own authorities investigating the case.

In both the Italian and Greek cases, the spyware was much more deeply embedded and clever than anything either phone company had seen before. Its creation required highly experienced engineers and expensive laboratories where the software could be subjected to the stresses of a national telephone system. Greek investigators concluded that the Vodaphone spyware was created outside of Greece.

Once placed, the spyware could have vast reach since most host companies are merging their Internet, mobile telephone and fixed-line operations onto a single platform.

Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, BND, recently snooped on investigative journalists. According to parliamentary investigations, the spying may have been carried out using the United States's secretive Bad Aibling base in the Bavarian Alps, which houses the American global eavesdropping program dubbed Echelon.


Were the two alleged suicides more than an eerie coincidence? A few media in Italy -- La Stampa, Dagospia and Feltrinelli, among others -- have noted the unsettling parallels. But so far no journalists have been able to overcome the investigative hurdles posed by two entirely different criminal inquiry systems united only by two prime ministers not eager to provoke the White House's wrath. In the United States, where massive eavesdropping programs have operated since 9/11, investigators, reporters and members of Congress have not explored whether those responsible for these spying operations may be using them for partisan purposes or economic gain.

As more troubling revelations come out of Europe, it may become more difficult to ignore how easily spying programs can be hijacked for illegitimate purposes. The brave soul who pursues this line of inquiry, however, should fear for his or her life.

Jeffrey Klein is a founding editor of Mother Jones. Paolo Pontoniere is a New America Media European commentator.

Cops as Provocateurs on the Docks
The Iron Heel Revisited
By JACK HEYMAN
Counterpunchl

April 7, 2003 police attack on peaceful anti-war demonstrators and longshoremen in the port of Oakland in which more than 50 were injured by wooden dowels, concussion grenades, tear gas, motorcycles and rubber bullets.

Spying on grannies in Sacramento who were planning to “mark Mother’s Day urging the Governor and Legislature to support bringing California National Guardsmen home from Iraq by Labor Day”; doing undercover surveillance at a union rally for health care in San Francisco and prompting police to fire “less-than-lethal” weapons at anti-war protesters and longshore workers in the port of Oakland -- this is the veiled face of the “war on terror” exposed in a just-released American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) report.

The report, The State of Surveillance: Government Monitoring of Political Activity in Northern and Central California, written by Mark Schlosberg documents the trampling of constitutional rights by various government agencies, the F.B.I., the Department of Defense, the State Terrorism Threat Assessment Center, the California National Guard, at least one Sheriff’s Department and several Police Departments.

Ominously, the ACLU states, “If history is any guide, the stories documented in this report represent only the tip of the iceberg.” Perhaps these kinds of government interventions explain, in part, why organizing efforts for an end to the wars in the Middle East and for workers’ rights at home have difficulty in achieving a modicum of success.

In the case of the grandmothers’ protest against the war, along with Code Pink and Gold Star Families for Peace, the press office of Governor Schwarzenegger sent an email warning to California National Guard brass, including Robert J. O’Neil, head of a new “intell” unit called the Information Synchronization Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion Program. It’s touted as a “one-stop shop for local, state and national law enforcement to share information.” When the San Jose Mercury News exposed the monitoring of the protest, the Guard tried to nip criticism by inviting the peace groups to tour its facilities.

This PR ploy blew up in their faces when Code Pink members photographed a poster in Guard offices of General “Black Jack” Pershing who, during the U.S. imperialist conquest of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War, quelled a Muslim rebellion in 1911, by slaughtering 49 insurgents with bullets soaked in pigs’ blood. The poster asks: “Maybe it is time for this segment of history to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq? The question is where do we find another Black Jack Pershing?”

After a public outcry, the poster was removed and the Guard’s Fusion program dismantled. However, it was revealed in State Senator Dunn’s investigation of the Guard that similar domestic spying operations exist around the country. And undoubtedly in California other government agencies will continue the Guard’s surveillance.

Workers—Under the Gun

When Safeway employees in Southern California voted to strike over health care issues in 2003, workers across the country organized actions in support the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). In Los Angeles, longshore Local 13 shut down the port and held a solidarity rally with other unions to raise money for the largely Latino strikers. In Northern California a group of religious leaders planned a pilgrimage to the home of Safeway CEO Steve Burd in Contra Costa County to hand deliver postcards supporting the striking workers.

On January 23, 2004, two men identifying themselves as deputies from the Homeland Security Unit of the County Sheriff entered the union offices in Martinez asking about the pilgrimage. The following day UFCW officials at a strike solidarity rally in San Francisco spotted the same sheriff’s deputies in plainclothes at the rally. After continuous prodding by Art Pulaski, Secretary-Treasurer of the California Federation of Labor, the deputies admitted their pernicious undercover role. Said Pulaski, using homeland security justification to monitor union activity “is sending a chilling and intimidating message to all of us.”

“Port Security” in the Imperial State’s Homeland

Nowhere is the bipartisan nature of the “war on terror” more apparent than in the April 7, 2003 police attack on peaceful anti-war demonstrators and longshoremen in the port of Oakland in which more than 50 were injured by wooden dowels, concussion grenades, tear gas, motorcycles and rubber bullets. The California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC), set up immediately after 9/11 by Democrats, Governor Gray Davis and State Attorney General Bill Lockyer, sent a warning before the anti-war demonstration that there could be violence. CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle even equated terrorists with protesters, creating a volatile atmosphere in which cops were armed with riot gear and prodded to shoot.

Even after police videos of the demonstration showed police firing without provocation, refuting the police version that demonstrators threw objects at the police, still, Democrat Mayor Jerry Brown backed the cops as he does today in his quest to be California State Attorney General, the “Top Cop”.

Hypocritically, it was Brown who, in 1997, participated in a picket line in support of fired dockworkers in Liverpool, England which blocked traffic in the port, his ostensible reason for backing the police attack this time. The difference: in 1997 Brown needed labor credentials in his bid for mayor. Now, he needs to portray a “law and order” image and get financial contributions from the global corporations. Earlier this year the City of Oakland settled out-of-court for some $2 million in damages without admitting any wrongdoing.

The ACLU report places much of the blame on the present loss of civil liberties on the government’s overzealous response to fighting terrorism after 9/11 and the bountiful rewards doled out by the Department of Homeland Security. In the nascent days of the “war on terror”, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) bore the brunt of government coercion, first exposed here in the pages of Counterpunch (27 June 2002 Strikers as Terrorists? Ridge Calls Longshoremen’s Chief). Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and then-Homeland Security Czar Ridge telephoned ILWU President Jim Spinosa to warn that any job actions on the West Coast docks during contract negotiations would pose a threat to national security and be met with an ironclad military occupation of the docks.
Such heavy-handed threats clearly played well with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the group representing international shipowners, stevedore companies and terminal operators with whom the union had been negotiating. When the PMA shutdown every port on the Coast 3 months later by locking out longshore workers, the Bush administration saw no such threat to “national security” and eagerly followed the employers lead by invoking the slave labor Taft-Hartley Act at the request of California Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein. ILWU officials called the concessionary contract borne from this double whammy a “victory” simply because the union survived the struggle.

During the employer lockout, some dockworkers carried picket signs reading the “war on terror is a war on workers”. Port security measures are jettisoning civil liberties over the side as surveillance cameras are mounted not only in the dock area, but in some workers’ breakrooms as well. And “port security” has become a euphemism for militarization of the waterfront, where some 750,000 port workers are being required to undergo intrusive background checks, having little to do with “terrorism” and pay $139 for an electronic ID card in order to work.

The union-controlled hiring hall, the power of the union, won after 6 workers were killed by police in the 1934 West Coast maritime strike and founded on the principle of an equal distribution of work, is in jeopardy. Now the government, like Johnny Friendly, the mobster bully in the film “On the Waterfront”, says it will determine who works and who doesn’t. Prison records, past psychological problems or activist politics could mean cement shoes for waterfront workers’ rights.

The planning meeting to march back to the Oakland docks to reassert “free speech” rights one month after the bloody police attack was infiltrated by undercover cops according to Deputy Chief Jordan. Raising the spectre of agents provocateurs, he stated before the OPD’s Board of Review, “…we’d be able to gather information and maybe even direct them to do something that we want them to do”. It is not unreasonable to assume that in a climate of fear generated by the 9/11 attacks and fomented by the “war on terror”-- where repressive legislation like the USA Patriot Act and the Transportation Security Act are rubber stamped by Democrats and Republicans -- that the right to free speech, (demonstrations, rallies, and picket lines) and freedom of association (the right to join a union) could be banned in the ports.

IRON HEEL REDUX

The ILWU played a principled role during the witchhunting McCarthy period, defending workers against waterfront screening and offering workers purged from other maritime unions a safe haven. Although it was targeted by the government and redbaiting union officials in both CIO and AFL unions, the ILWU, to its credit, opposed the U.S. war against Korea, and has taken the same stance on every imperialist war since.

Today, business unionist ILWU officials are cut from a different cloth. While the official position of the ILWU (decided by a delegates’ vote at the 2003 union convention shortly after the military invasion) is opposition to the Iraq war and for immediate withdrawal of troops none of the ILWU’s International officers has implemented that rank-and-file decision by speaking out at anti-war rallies. Moreover, they buy into the “war on terror” and “partnership” with the bosses like the rest of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win union bureaucrats. The mantra they chant, “we’re the first line of defense” in the ports, actually aligns the union with employers and the government, while exposing the union and its hiring hall to attack from the back.

Ironically, the ACLU of Northern California was born in San Francisco during the 1934 maritime strike when waterfront workers were under deadly attack from police, the National Guard and anti-communist vigilantes. This well-researched ACLU report meticulously identifies recent government acts of repression. However, their conclusion reads “inadequate understanding of privacy laws and protections for political activity, and a profound lack of regulation” have led to governmental abuses. The report recommends “reforms for law enforcement surveillance activities”. Its liberal, myopic view blinds readers to the reality that the imperialist state is a racist apparatus of class repression, not changed or controlled by “a few good laws”. FBI’s COINTELPRO program actually killed radicals like the Black Panthers not just “disrupted political organizations”. And while the report lists the FBI’s campaign to “neutralize” Martin Luther King, it is silent on the government’s hand in the murder of Malcolm X. The American road to empire is littered with bodies.

Early on, the ACLU report cites the 1976 Church Committee findings that the U.S. government has “consistently used law enforcement agencies to investigate and stifle political dissent.” That Senate committee found a pattern of abuses dating back to 1936. Actually, state repression of working class radicals is evident with early 1900s anti-syndicalist measures directed against the Wobblies of the Industrial Workers of the World, and through the imprisonment of railroad union leader Eugene V. Debs, opposed to the First World War, Tom Mooney and leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis Teamsters in the run-up to WWII. The report skips over the McCarthy period, perhaps, because the ACLU participated in that political cannibalizing of the workers movement.

No, we don’t need more legislation to control police activities. What’s needed are intransigent defiance of unjust laws and mass mobilizations against the war, racism and repression.

That’s what stopped the war in Vietnam and won civil rights at home. In that vein, ILWU Local 10 submitted a resolution to the union convention in May for a one-day strike against the war calling on the rest of the labor movement to join in. Unfortunately, union bureaucrats scuttled the motion in committee before it could reach the convention floor for debate and a vote.

La lutta continua.

Jack Heyman, a longshoreman who works on the Oakland docks, was one those assaulted by police in their attack on the April 7, 2003 anti-war protest in the port. He has organized dock actions against apartheid and in support of Mumia abu Jamal. For the video documentary of the Oakland police shooting anti-war protesters and longshoremen April 7, 2003 "Shots On The Docks".Send $20.00 check or money order to: Labor Video Project, P.O. Box 720027San Francisco, CA 94172. Jack can be reached at jackheyman@comcast.net.

In 1936, in preparation for the Olympic Games in Berlin, German police "cleaned up" the city, arresting people deemed inappropriate: prostitutes, street people, petty thieves--and forcing hundreds of Gypsies (Sinti and Roma) into makeshift camps. All of these early victims were easy targets, people whom other Germans did little or nothing to protect, and whose disappearance from the public scene they often welcomed.
The Early Targets

Attacks on homeless up, activists say
By BETH RUCKER
Associated Press Writer
Aug 25, 2006

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - Tara Cole, who had been living on the streets of Nashville for more than three years, spent her last night alive sleeping on a boat ramp along the Cumberland River. She was killed in the early hours of Aug. 11, when two males pushed her into the river, according to witnesses. Other homeless people couldn't save her.

"She was one person, but it terrorized the whole homeless population," said Howard Allen, a homeless man who helped organize a nightly vigil for Cole.

Police said a body pulled from the river this week is likely Cole, and two men were arrested Thursday and charged with her homicide in what authorities said was an unprovoked attack.

Homeless advocates say such violence is on the rise across the nation. Often the attackers are teenagers or young adults who are more affluent than their victims, experts say.

A 2005 report by the National Coalition for the Homeless showed 86 violent attacks on homeless people in 2005 compared with 60 in 1999. Those numbers are likely low because they only reflect attacks that have been documented in public records, said Michael Stoops, executive director of the Washington-based coalition.

Stoops said that in the 1980s attacks appeared to plague only big cities on the East Coast and West Coast. Now, the coalition has documented incidents in 165 cities nationwide, 42 states and Puerto Rico.

"I think they do it for thrills. I think they think they can get away with it, that the homeless won't fight back, that no one will care, that the police won't pay any attention to them," Stoops said.

In Fort Lauderdale, Fla., a teenager beat a homeless man to death and pelted his body with paintballs in January. Another homeless man was beat to death in March in Orlando, Fla., and five juveniles have been arrested in the case.

In February, the National Coalition for the Homeless asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to conduct a study of violence against the homeless, though the GAO has not responded, Stoops said.

The increase in violence may be loosely linked to the increasing popularity of so-called "Bumfights" videos and imitation videos which show homeless people fighting one another and performing dangerous stunts, he said.

Four producers of the "Bumfights" videos pleaded guilty in June 2003 to charges of conspiracy to stage an illegal fight for their videos.

And a 20-year-old man in Los Angeles has been convicted for beating two homeless men with a baseball bat in August 2