Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on
a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists
showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant
military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They
were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering."
The demonstrators wore papier-mache masks and handed out free
peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they
left work. The idea, according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call
attention to allegations that the company was overcharging on a food
contract for troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political
theater," Parkin says.
But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To U.S. Army analysts at the
top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the peanut-butter
protest was regarded as a potential threat to national security.
Created three years ago by the Defense Department, CIFA's role is
"force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots against
military installations and personnel inside the United States. In May
2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized a
fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local
Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about
"suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the
Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal
Pentagon memo.
A Defense document shows that Army analysts
wrote a report on the Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's
database. It's not clear why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy
of attention—although organizer Parkin had previously been arrested
while demonstrating at ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were
dropped). But there are now questions about whether CIFA exceeded its
authority and conducted unauthorized spying on innocent people and
organizations. A Pentagon memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the
deputy Defense secretary now acknowledges that some TALON reports may
have contained information on U.S. citizens and groups that never
should have been retained. The number of reports with names of U.S.
persons could be in the thousands, says a senior Pentagon official who
asked not be named because of the sensitivity of the subject.
CIFA's
activities are the latest in a series of disclosures about secret
government programs that spy on Americans in the name of national
security. In December, the ACLU obtained documents showing the FBI had
investigated several activist groups, including People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals and Greenpeace, supposedly in an effort to
discover possible ecoterror connections. At the same time, the White
House has spent weeks in damage-control mode, defending the
controversial program that allowed the National Security Agency to
monitor the telephone conversations of U.S. persons suspected of terror
links, without obtaining warrants.
It isn't clear how many groups and individuals were snagged by CIFA's
dragnet. Details about the program, including its size and budget, are
classified. In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of
reports that detailed a portion of TALON's surveillance efforts. It
showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar
meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake
Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military
recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A Pentagon
spokesman declined to say why a private company like Halliburton would
be deserving of CIFA's protection. But in the past, Defense Department
officials have said that the "force protection" mission includes
military contractors since soldiers and Defense employees work closely
with them and therefore could be in danger.
Arkin says a close reading of internal CIFA
documents suggests the agency may be expanding its Internet monitoring,
and wants to be as surreptitious as possible. CIFA has contracted to
buy "identity masking" software that would allow the agency to create
phony Web identities and let them appear to be located in foreign
countries, according to a copy of the contract with Computer Sciences
Corp. (The firm declined to comment.)
Pentagon
officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the
domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an
internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA's database contained some
information that may have violated regulations. The department is not
allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90
days—unless they are "reasonably believed" to have some link to
terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was
information that was "improperly stored," says a Pentagon spokesman who
was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name).
"It was an oversight." In a memo last week, obtained by NEWSWEEK,
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England ordered CIFA to purge such
information from its files—and directed that all Defense Department
intelligence personnel receive "refresher training" on department
policies.
That's not likely to stop the questions. Last week Democrats on the
Senate intelligence committee pushed for an inquiry into CIFA's
activities and who it's watching. "This is a significant Pandora's box
[Pentagon officials] don't want opened," says Arkin. "What we're
looking at is hints of what they're doing." As far as the Pentagon is
concerned, that means we've already seen too much.
Jan. 30, 2006 issue - The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on
a June afternoon in 2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists
showed up outside the Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant
military contractor once headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. They
were there to protest the corporation's supposed "war profiteering."
