[THS] The Last Roundup

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19871.htm

The Last Roundup

For decades the federal government has been developing a highly classified
plan that would override the Constitution in the event of a terrorist attack. Is
it also compiling a secret enemies list of citizens who could face detention
under martial law?

By Christopher Ketcham

05/05/08 "Radar Magazine" -- - 28/04/08 --- -In the spring of 2007, a
retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress
and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages
of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to
protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister
implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the
streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House,
where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he
demanded a neutral witness be present.

The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at
the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal
political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his
testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had
grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various
domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered
on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even
describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had
discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal
under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell
ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey
opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to
the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his
concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location.

Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the
cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was
to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington
Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of
President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take
advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and
then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's
sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his
deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security
detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights
blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.

Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the
requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-
handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men.
"There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales
and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's
presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying
program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of
the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice
attesting as to its legality," he testified.

What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political
blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the
program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't
help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy
constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from
his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token
concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New
York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him
"to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive
electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is
not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised
such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.

Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush
himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first
disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public,
Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45
days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our
government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-
called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the
president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a
nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would
trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and
effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly
refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government
employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of
domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap
between Comey and the White House was related to a database of
Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a
national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the
government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted
in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and
seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level
security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of
Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are
considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated.
The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state'
almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database
is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable
source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as
potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people
could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to
direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a
"national emergency." Executive orders issued over the last three decades
define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other
emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities
like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or
assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According
to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion
abroad" could be a trigger.

Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several
American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New
York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state
of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans
that were developed during the Cold War and have been aggressively
revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled
to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland,
Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that
consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s,
Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick
Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key
positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole
and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to
advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a
police state.

Interestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest
this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to
the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless
bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to
desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural
disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the
1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the
federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike.

Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization,
the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize
private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies.
The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local
governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant,
holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems
necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such
behavior by the government may seem farfetched. But it was not so very
long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese-Americans—everyone from
infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World
War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a
lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the
possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by
federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a
paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding
up millions of "militants" and "American negroes" who were to be held at
"assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin
American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10
detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of
thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political
upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg
Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million
contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for
the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details,
stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of
immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just
what those "new programs" might be is not specified.

In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like
this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake
unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the
Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people
who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main
Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive
a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities.
Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers
outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions.
Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities,
where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency
is no longer in effect.

It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But
when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated
by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance
state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must
weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are
becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.

Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed
by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program
has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from
the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes
software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks
their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial
intelligence modeling tools.

"The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software]
can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn
to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal
information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets."
An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the
Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort
exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search
numerous other agency databases at the same time."

A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main
Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in
the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless
wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed
further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts:
According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor
"huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as
well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone
records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift
through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the
program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable
that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The
[NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black
programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting
unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years
before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach."

The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a
warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the
subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers
that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you
visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline
tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and
the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information
is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also
fed into the Main Core database.

Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull
from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast
media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private
sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the
Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law
enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the
Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to
include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border
crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000
names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury
Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-
funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as
does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor anti-war
protestors and environmental activists such as Greenpeace.

If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database
includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax
protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners,
illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average
people.

A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level
clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the
field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room
drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was
being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S.
citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the
name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal
approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly
briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had
discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified
and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in
computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded
that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the
overall NSA domestic surveillance project."

If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism
officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would
have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI
would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is
at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi
notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and
has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic
security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning
master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on
the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of
such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there
would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely, including the
two of us."

Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce
Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald
Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national
emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the
powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for
example—" if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress
to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it
is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection
and spy programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and
[there is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means
if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president
says it is—even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and
invariably rule in his own favor."

The veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the
offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading:
"Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence
Finding anyway."

But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the
database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this
information against the American people is so great as to be virtually
unfathomable," the senior government official says.

In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make
us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world renowned
expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist
conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas
tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-
war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J.
Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities"
of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index,"
according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White
House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations,
suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the
National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later
revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers,
and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers,
newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and
scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level;
[and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to
unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was
allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly
transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied
this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already
had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975
investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of
heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert
Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency
maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which
contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance.
The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount
Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were
confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found
that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of]
information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data
stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other
classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases
were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance
program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the
Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to
light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-
Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development
of a "secret contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for
suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to
FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run
state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the
detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number
of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential
holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman
Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-
Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in
Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same
agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said.
"I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in
which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the
Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying,
"That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I
request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an
answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in
1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly
employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part
of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial
history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by
pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record.
According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North
tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States.
Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe
McCarthy's blacklist looks downright crude." Sources have suggested to
Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main
Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North
was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded
dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts
it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of
still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White
House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice
under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme
were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the
lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

In July 2007 and again last August, Rep. Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from
Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee,
sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's
Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by
Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51),
issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole
authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine
when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving.

But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including
Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review
of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls
for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release
issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51
Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or
unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian, "Maybe
the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right."

Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional
detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force
during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to
designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all
privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National
Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider
titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which
allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic
insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act
of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural
disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist
attack, or incident."

More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern
Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military
intelligence
expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United
States without civilian supervision or control."

"We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional
lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national
emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no
doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for
example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S.
citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the
invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap
you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic
administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage
to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that
tyrannies do not.' "

As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the
House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill
passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S.
citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for
colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the
hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would
legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the
morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential
candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent
to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive
domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will
you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson
were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the
nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an
"endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China
and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of
spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private
or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain,
Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any
responses.)

These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who
in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence
crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The
technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the
government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in
1975. "And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful
effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how
privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know."