Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Pentagon Multiple Choice: Dissenting Americans are Terrorists



Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
June 15, 2009
Last week the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California issued a press release demanding the Department of Defense stop teaching employees that dissent is a form of low-level terrorism. “Teaching employees that dissent on issues of public concern is something to be feared, rather than encouraged, is a dangerously counterproductive use of scarce security resources, making us less safe as a democracy,” Northern California ACLU Staff Attorney Ann Brick and ACLU Washington National Security Policy Council Michael German wrote in a letter to Gail McGinn, Acting Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness.

In the 1970s, the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, the National Guard, and various state and local police agencies worked in unison to snoop on and subvert the antiwar and civil rights movements.

A multiple choice question included on a Level 1 Antiterrorism Awareness training course required for all DoD personnel asks the following question: “Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorist activity?” The correct answer is “protests.” The ACLU wants the question removed.

“For the DoD to instruct its employees that lawful protest activities should be treated as ‘low-level terrorism’ is deeply disturbing in and of itself,” write Brick and German of the ACLU in the letter to Gail McGinn. “It is an even more egregious insult to constitutional values, however, when viewed in the context of a long-term pattern of domestic security initiatives that have attempted to equate lawful dissent with terrorism.”

Brick and German underscore documented military snooping on hundreds of legal anti-war and military protests, the FBI’s surveillance of protests at the RNC, and state police and sheriff departments covert surveillance of peace groups. “Policing ideas, rather than criminal activities, runs counter to our nation’s core principles, undermining the very foundations of the free society that the Department of Defense is dedicated to preserving.”

In fact, the Department of Defense is dedicated to preserving the criminal activity of the banksters and undermining the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

“I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism,” wrote the most decorated Marine in U.S. history, Smedley Butler, in his 1935 book, War Is a Racket. “Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints.”

Since Butler’s days, the Pentagon has vastly upgraded its Mafia techniques and has expanded its war to include the American people.
As Episcopal priest and activist Frank Morales notes, the Pentagon has declared war on America:

The “domestic war on terrorism” hinges upon the Pentagon’s doctrine of homeland defense. Mountains of repressive legislation are being enacted in the name of internal security. So called “homeland security”, originally set within the Pentagon’s “operations other than war”, is actually a case in which the Pentagon has declared war on America. Shaping up as the new battleground, this proliferating military “doctrine” seeks to justify new roles and missions for the Pentagon within America. Vast “legal” authority and funds to spy on the dissenting public, reconfigured as terrorist threats, is being lavished upon the defense, intelligence and law enforcement “community.”

“Here in America, all distinction between the military and police functions is about to be forever expunged with the looming repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act,” continues Morales. It is a “New World Law and Order” based on the repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act that requires a system of domestic and global counterinsurgency led by the Pentagon. “The objective is to centralize all intelligence gathering under one roof, the Department of Homeland Security and to widely cast the net over all of us, making certain that we all fall in line with the Pentagon Inc. agenda.”

In the 1970s, the Pentagon, the CIA and the FBI, the National Guard, and various state and local police agencies worked in unison to snoop on and subvert the antiwar and civil rights movements. “Back in the late 1960s and early ’70s the FBI, the military, local police and campus police had their own bailiwicks and limited powers” says Christopher Pyle, a former investigator for Senator Frank Church’s Select Committee on Intelligence in the 1970s. “But operating today through the JTTFs and the combined intelligence and fusion centers, which join military analysts with law enforcement specialists, they are all part of one big club, effectively destroying the Fourth Amendment against unlimited search and seizure.”

The “Big Club” and “Pentagon Inc” has sharpened its treasonous tools immeasurably since the day in 1969 when it opened a new war room in the basement of the Pentagon and created the headquarters of the Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations. “In the fall of 1968, there were more Army Counter-lntelligence Analysis Branch personnel assigned to monitor domestic citizen protests than were assigned to any other counter-intelligence operation in the world, including Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War,” write Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick in their study on the crimes of U.S. intelligence agencies.

With the exception of the FBI, the military intelligence services collected more information on American politics in the sixties than any other federal agency. The army conducted a full-scale Pentagon operation within the United States, and the figures and attitudes reflect this approach. Where a civilian agency might have opened a hundred files, the military created a thousand; the army established CONUS and CONARC intelligence commands, and then reorganized and reinitiated them as USAINTC, the Directorate of Civil Disturbance Planning, and the Division of Military Support. They ran operations with such code names as GARDEN PLOT, ROSE BUSH, PUNCH BLOCK, STEEP HILL, LANTERN SPIKE, QUIET TOWN, GRAM METRIC, and CABLE SPLICER; and they developed intelligence “compendiums,” a “mug book,” daily, weekly and monthly intelligence summaries, special reports, “city packets,” contingency and alternative contingency plans, computerized filing systems, and crossover index files to information. All were based on agent spot reports, radio intercepts, incident and personality files, newspaper clippings and data from numerous civilian sources. Each level of the military hierarchy tried to placate its superiors by collecting as much or more information than the task required, whether it was of any importance or not. The attitude pervading these army operations was best stated by Robert E. Jordan III, general counsel to the army: “the people on the other side were essentially the enemy. The army conducted a de facto war against all citizen protest, legitimate and illegitimate, violent and peaceful, white and black.

Jordan’s remark is as pertinent today as it was 30 some odd years ago — the American people are the enemy and the de facto war is to be waged against all citizen protest. Index files have been replaced by quasi-supercomputing and DARPA’s Total Information Awareness, now deemed Terrorist Information Awareness.

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