The Pentagon (and the CIA) have been using national security letters to request financial records. This has been a common tactic of the FBI, but Pentagon use was not widely known. Thankfully, Licthblau and Mazzetti are bringing this to the foreground. The Pentagon's spokesman provides an example of the kind of investigations it has pursued in the US:
While they would not provide details about specific cases, military officials said the military had issued letters to collect financial records regarding a government contractor with unexplained wealth, for example, and retired Army Capt. James Yee, a former Muslim chaplain erroneously suspected of aiding prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Of course, citing the fucking disaster the Yee case has been fills me with reassurance that this program is not a danger to average Americans that pose no threat at all the country.. The military dropped all its charges against him after subjecting him to the-not-quite-Jose-Padilla treatment of 76 days of solitary and sensory deprivation.
Here's where I get concerned:
Some national-security experts and civil-liberties advocates are troubled by the CIA and military taking on domestic-intelligence activities, particularly in light of recent disclosures that the Counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States in violation of military guidelines. Some experts say the Pentagon has adopted an overly expansive view of its domestic role under the guise of "force protection," or efforts to guard military installations.
Some of you know me. You know that I've been strongly anti-Iraq War since before it started and publicly presented myself as that at political gatherings, public demonstrations, and in the pages of the local paper and on local radio. In December, 2005, I did something stupid. Some days, my commute home from work takes me across the Hood Canal Bridge in Washington State. Nuclear submarines armed with nuclear weapons often pass under this bridge on their way to Bangor Sub Base (by the way, this is well known by the public so I'm not posting any sensitive information here). If you've never seen one of these subs close up, its a pretty spectacular site (at least from an engineering perspective). So, like I've done many times before, I stopped on a beach beneath the bridge to watch the sub and its escorts pass by. Within 30 seconds, a tan Jeep Cherokee pulled up behind my car on the beach. I could see in my rearview mirror two uniformed military personnel; the passenger kept looking up at my vehicle then down to his lap like he was writing or typing on a keyboard. I assume they were recording my license plate number. This had never happened to me before, I'd never encountered this kind of reaction when watching the subs. I got out of my vehicle; I wanted to ask them if I should leave and not do this kind of thing anymore. As soon as I touched the ground, they backed up, turned around, and took off to the next vehicle that had come down the beach (I was by no means the only civilian on the beach that day, there were probably ten cars down there). I'm sure these guys were conducting surveillance for force protection activities as described in the blockquote above.
In days past, I would not have given this a second thought. Maybe that was naivete. I just never heard about American citizens held without charge for almost five years, tortured to the point where they may not be mentally stable enough to even participate in their defense until this bunch we have now were in charge. I give this kind of story many second thoughts now.
Update [2007-1-14 12:29:17 by lapin]: Dick Cheney weighs in on this topic on Fox News Sunday. Continues the force protection rationale:
Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday the Pentagon and CIA are not violating people's rights by examining the banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage in the United States.
--
"The Defense Department gets involved because we've got hundreds of bases inside the United States that are potential terrorist targets," Cheney said.
"The Department of Defense has legitimate authority in this area. This is an authority that goes back three or four decades. It was reaffirmed in the Patriot Act," he said. "It's perfectly legitimate activity. There's nothing wrong with it or illegal. It doesn't violate people's civil rights."
The administration went right to Cheney for defense. This smells funny.
Comments are closed on this story.