Federal agencies spy for corporate America

The United States is always awash with conspiracy theories, some more outlandish than others. But their source does not lie simply within the imagination of those who develop them. In fact, real, actual conspiracies by the American state constantly fuel people’s deep suspicions about their government. 

For the latest example, you have to look no further than the FBI’s secret war on the Occupy movement, whose activists were classed as “terrorists” and a threat to “homeland security”. Documents obtained by Partnership for Civil Justice Fund reveal the FBI collaborating with the Department for Homeland Security and using local branches of the Federal Reserve Bank in their illegal surveillance.

As to the fanciful notion that the FBI is there to protect its citizens against violent death, forget it. The FBI allowed a plot to murder Occupy activists in Texas with sniper rifles remain a secret until the heavily-redacted files were made public through a Freedom of Information request.

Even the right-wing John Birch Society is alarmed by the Obama administration-sponsored war on its own citizens. An article in its magazine notes: “According to analysts, in addition to exposing numerous violations of the Constitution, the newly released documents also offer a great deal of insight into the emerging ‘police state’ apparatus.”

Pullitizer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges is of a similar mind, although quite rightly he links the FBI-Homeland Security activities to a plot to silence critics of big business, which Occupy placed at the top of its agenda. Hedges says the FBI documents show how widespread surveillance is and amount to an “explicit warning by the security services to all who consider dissent”, adding: “Anyone who defies corporate power, even if he or she is nonviolent and acting within constitutional rights, is a suspect.”  

Government security services began monitoring Occupy activists before the high-profile camp in Zuccotti Park, New York. Documents obtained by the PCJF show, for example, that they were in attendance when activists met in Daytona Beach, Florida.

The 9.11 attacks spurred the Bush administration into creating a threatening security framework which the Obama White House has not only embraced but developed in new ways. The imminent appointment of John Brennan as head of the Central Intelligence Agency is a case in point.

Brennan, Obama’s principal counter-terrorism and security advisor, has made the use of targeted assassinations by drone attacks virtually an everyday event. They are considered illegal in international law. Brennan is a supporter of forms of torture and “extraordinary rendition”, by which suspects are kidnapped by US agents and flown to secret camps. No doubt Brennan will bring the CIA into closer focus with the FBI in the hunt for domestic opponents of the government.

At the heart of the Obama authoritarian state is a network of 77 “fusion centres” set up over the past decade. They were supposed to co-ordinate the “war on terror”. Instead, according to a recent according to a recent Senate report,  the centres pose a threat to civil liberties as well as producing a series of half-baked reports which were worse than useless.

So as Obama starts his second term, the illusions many held in his administration four years ago have all but disappeared. The state is there to protect capitalist corporations and big finance. And Obama is there to co-ordinate the work of the state, putting together an apparatus that resembles those of a police state.

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, said in a statement: “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

As the struggles against massive inequality, unemployment and low wages gather pace, America’s capitalist state is tooling up for mass confrontation. The rights enshrined in the US constitution will have to be renewed through the creation of a more developed, revolutionary democracy. That much is clear.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Obama's Disposition Matrix decides who lives or dies

Lest anyone thinks that when the US and Britain withdraw troops from Afghanistan, that will end their military involvement, think again. The United States has a new doctrine of permanent war, using hi-tech remote weaponry like the dreaded drone.

The Obama administration has institutionalised the use of targeted killing by armed drones. In fact, the drone is Obama’s weapon of choice. Under his presidency, drones are killing people at seven times the rate under the previous Bush administration.

In the Matrix films, humans struggled against the machine. In the Disposition Matrix, the US government deploys machines to assassinate people on a hit list that is added to daily. And, deciding who will live and die is the man in the Oval Office himself, president Obama.

Except for those on the hit list in Pakistan. Here, life-and-death decisions are taken by the Central Intelligence Agency, which has abandoned spying to become a subsidiary of Murder Inc, whose headquarters is located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, Washington, DC 20500, tel (202) 456-2121.

The Disposition Matrix is a database that officials describe as a "next-generation capture/kill list". But it is more than that, creating a blueprint for tracking, capturing, rendering and especially killing terrorism suspects. Thus the use of the term “disposition”.

Paul R. Pillar, the former deputy director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism centre, has stated that "we are looking at something that is potentially indefinite". And certainly illegal, within the framework of both the US constitution and international law.

There is no “due process”, no opportunity to answer charges. The last thing a victim hears is the sound of a missile arriving, shortly after being fired by an unmanned drone. The trigger is pulled in a US military base somewhere else.

A computer game this is not, however. Some estimates suggest that more people have been killed by US drones than the 3,000 plus who perished when the Twin Towers were brought down in 2001. Many of the victims are bystanders, family members or just people at a gathering wrongly identified as would-be terrorists.

According to Daniel Klaidman in his book, Kill or Capture, “the inability to detain terror suspects was creating perverse incentives that favoured killing or releasing suspected terrorists over capturing them."  That is why Osama bin Laden was executed as he was.

At the heart of the Disposition Matrix is Obama adviser John Brennan, who came to the job from the CIA. He is, the New York Times reported, the "priest whose blessing has become indispensable" to Obama. Last April, he publicly defended the policy of targeted killing. 

Under George W.Bush, Brennan served as top aide to CIA director George Tenet, where he defended the administration's use of extraordinary rendition and “enhanced interrogation”, aka torture.

Brennan is said to wield enormous power in shaping decisions on “kill” lists and the allocation of armed drones. The review process also allows the killing of individuals whose identities are unknown. Americans may also be listed as targets Indeed, one of the victims was US citizen Anwar al-Aulaqi.  

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has condemned the Disposition Matrix database, stating that "anyone who thought US targeted killing outside of armed conflict was a narrow, emergency-based exception to the requirement of due process before a death sentence is being proven conclusively wrong.” It has launched a legal challenge, claiming that the policy is unconstitutional.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter terrorism, Ben Emmerson and Christof Heyns, UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, have described some American drone attacks as "war crimes".

That they certainly are. Calling for an end to policy of permanent war, Washington Post columnist  Fareed Zakaria cited a warning from James Madison, father of the US constitution:

 “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

Over two centuries years later, Madison’s words should come home to haunt Obama as he presides over the death of the very same US constitution. 

Paul Feldman

Communications editor