The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

“Either you are with us, or you are with the people.” That could be a quote from some government spy involved in domestic surveillance in the not-too-distant future.

In 1975, Sen. Frank Church, (D-ID) chaired the Senate committee that investigated illegal intelligence gathering activities by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In theory, prior to 9/11, only the FBI was able to conduct domestic surveillance.

Today, we know about the NSA’s role in domestic spying. In the post-9/11 world, the NSA has made all the new rules. The new rules it brought into existence are simple enough: Whoever you are and wherever you live, you are a potential target. No one is exempt from surveillance.

But the NSA is not alone.

The Pentagon is looking into how to deal with civil unrest in the US. Launched in 2008, the Department of Defense’s (DOD’s) Minerva Research Initiative partners with universities to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US.

The Guardian reports that last year, the Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine ‘Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?’ The report conflates peaceful activists with “supporters of political violence”, who it sees as different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on “armed militancy” themselves. In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

The Guardian also said that independent scholars are critical of the US government’s efforts to militarize social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks “the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research” in a way that involves “rigorous, balanced and objective peer review”. The AAA called for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Dr. David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin’s University in Washington DC, has previously exposed how the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program, which was designed to embed social scientists in military field operations, routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions within the United States. Price reported that the HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN (counterinsurgency) for Afghanistan/Iraq” to domestic situations:

…in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective, as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order

Price identified a war game aimed at environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant in Missouri. Some of the protesters were members of the Sierra Club. War game participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers‘.” Next, they identified the rest of the population who could be the target of propaganda operations designed to move their “Center of Gravity” towards a set of viewpoints which were the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.
Should we be viewing Minerva as a prime example of military ideology? Clearly, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

Here’s more: There is a lawsuit against alleged domestic US military spying, called Panagacos vs. Towery, in the US District Court in Tacoma, WA. It was filed against the Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and local law enforcement agencies in 2010, after it was discovered that an activist called “John Jacob” was actually Army intelligence agent John J. Towery from nearby Fort Lewis. Towery spied on and infiltrated the antiwar group Port Militarization Resistance (PMR), which blocked military shipments en route to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007. It also accuses the cities of Olympia and Tacoma of coordinating with the US military to violate the First and Fourth Amendment rights of activists.

So, our military is engaged in domestic COINTELPRO (COunter INtelligence PROgrams). This also happened during the Vietnam War years. Back then, the CIA’s COINTELPRO used “boots on the ground” to neutralize the millions of anti-Vietnam War activists. Martin Luther King, Jr. was under 24/7 surveillance by the 111th Military Intelligence Group, in 1968.

Maybe we need to be paranoid, since republics can fall when they are undermined by their military establishment. Today, US has a mixture of extreme religiosity, ideological conflict in a polarized society, and a militarist culture in which soldiers (now called “warriors””) are worshiped.

This is a toxic brew. Fusion Centers, NSA spying, militarized police forces, criminalization of poverty, erosion of free speech, and now, war gaming against the American public, these are the actions of a fearful American power elite. We have a huge gap between the rich and poor, many areas are deeply racist, the last civil war still rankles with the descendants of some of the losers, and many citizens are armed to the teeth.

Think about this quote from Frederick Douglass:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.