Pentagon grilled over database on war critics Senator demands information about program first disclosed by NBC News Updated: 7:55 a.m. ET Jan. 13, 2006 Associated Press WASHINGTON - Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday asked for answers on an obscure Pentagon agency that included reports on student anti-war protests and other peaceful civilian demonstrations in a database meant to detect terrorist activities. “Under what circumstances can peaceful protests at universities or by anti-war groups be monitored?” Feinstein, D-Calif., wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “What authorities, and under what regulations, do military counterintelligence units have to conduct investigations on U.S. persons?” she wrote. At issue is a classified database of information about suspicious people and activity inside the United States that’s maintained by a three-year-old Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, whose size and budget also are classified. The database, which a Pentagon fact sheet says is meant to capture information “indicative of possible terrorist pre-attack activity,” came to light a month ago when NBC News obtained details on its contents. The Pentagon acknowledged including information on anti-war activities and other meetings that should have been removed. The Pentagon announced a review of the program, and Feinstein’s office has been told that all inappropriate records have now been removed. Among the reports until recently maintained in the database was one on an April protest at the University of California, Santa Cruz, by UCSC Students Against the War, Feinstein said Pentagon officials have confirmed to her staff. Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Greg Hicks said Thursday the review was ongoing. He said he had not seen Feinstein’s letter but that Rumsfeld would respond to it after reviewing it. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10834915/
A Protest, a Spy Program and a Campus in an Uproar By SARAH KERSHAW SANTA CRUZ, Calif. - The protest was carefully orchestrated, planned for weeks by Students Against War during Friday evening meetings in a small classroom on the University of California campus here. So when the military recruiters arrived for the job fair, held in an old dining hall last April 5 - a now fateful day for a scandalized university - the students had their two-way radios in position, their cyclists checking the traffic as hundreds of demonstrators marched up the hilly roads of this campus on the Central Coast and a dozen moles stationed inside the building, reporting by cellphone to the growing crowd outside. "Racist, sexist, antigay," the demonstrators recalled shouting. "Hey, recruiters, go away!" Things got messy. As the building filled, students storming in were blocked from entering. The recruiters left, some finding that the tires of their vehicles had been slashed. The protesters then occupied the recruiters' table and, in what witnesses described as a minor melee, an intern from the campus career center was injured. Fast forward: The students had left campus for their winter vacation in mid-December when a report by MSNBC said the April protest had appeared on what the network said was a database from a Pentagon surveillance program. The protest was listed as a "credible threat" - to what is not clear to people around here - and was the only campus action among scores of other antimilitary demonstrations to receive the designation. Over the winter break, Josh Sonnenfeld, 20, a member of Students Against War, or SAW, put out the alert. "Urgent: Pentagon's been spying on SAW, and thousands of other groups," said his e-mail message to the 50 or so students in the group. Several members spent the rest of their break in a swirl of strategy sessions by telephone and e-mail, and in interviews with the news media. Since classes began on Jan. 5, they have stepped up their effort to figure out whether they are being spied on and if so, why. Students in the group said they were not entirely surprised to learn that the federal government might be spying on them. "On the one hand, I was surprised that we made the list because generally we don't get the recognition we deserve," Mr. Sonnenfeld said. "On the other hand, it doesn't surprise me because our own university has been spying on us since our group was founded. This nation has a history of spying on political dissenters." The April protest, at the sunny campus long known for surfing, mountain biking and leftist political activity, drew about 300 of the university's 13,000 students, organizers said. (Students surmise that, these days, they are out-agitating their famed anti-establishment peers at the University of California, Berkeley, campus, 65 miles northwest of here.) "This is the war at home," said Jennifer Low, 20, a member of the antiwar group. "So many of us were so discouraged and demoralized by the war, a lot of us said this is the way we can stop it." A Department of Defense spokesman said that while the Pentagon maintained a database of potential threats to military installations, military personnel and national security, he could not confirm that the information released by MSNBC was from the database. The spokesman, who said he was not authorized to be quoted by name, said he could not answer questions about whether the government was or had been spying on Santa Cruz students. California lawmakers have demanded an explanation from the government. Representative Sam Farr, a Democrat whose district includes Santa Cruz, was one of several who sent letters to the Bush administration. "This is a joke," Mr. Farr said in an interview. "There is a protest du jour at Santa Cruz." "Santa Cruz is not a terrorist town," he added. "It's an activist town. It's essentially Berkeley on the coast." The university's chancellor, Denise D. Denton, said, "We would like to know how this information was gathered and understand better what's going on here." "Is this something that happens under the guise of the new Patriot Act?" Ms. Denton asked. As to the students' insistence that the university is monitoring their activities, Ms. Denton said that she had checked with campus police and other university offices and that "there is absolutely no spying going on." The antiwar group is working closely with the California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which plans to file a public records request with the federal government on the students' behalf, A.C.L.U. officials said. Meanwhile, members of the campus's College Republicans, strongly critical of the protesters' tactics last April, are rolling their eyes at all the hubbub. "I think it's worth looking into, but right now I think they are overblowing it," said Chris Rauer, internal vice president of the College Republicans. "I think people are taking their anger over the war out on this." The Defense Department has issued a statement saying that in October the Pentagon began a review of its database to ensure that the reporting system complied with federal laws and to identify information that might have been improperly entered. All department personnel involved in gathering intelligence were receiving "refresher" training on the laws and policies, the statement said. With this happening in academia, there has been a good deal of philosophical contemplation and debate over the socioeconomic and political dynamics underlying the uproar. "I had multiple reactions," said Faye J. Crosby, a professor of social psychology and chairwoman of the Academic Senate. "One reaction was, 'Gosh, I wonder if we're doing something right?' " Professor Crosby said. "Another reaction was it's a waste of taxpayer money. What are we a threat to?" "The real sadness," she added, "is the breakdown in discourse of the marketplace of ideas." January 14, 2006 Santa Cruz Journal http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news2/nyt222.html
Of course, no one was arrested for slashing tires on government vehicles, nor was anyone arrested for injuring the student intern.... Amazing, more and more in this society people obey the laws that they want to. Peaceful protest as guaranteed by our Constitution does not include protection for breaking laws along the way.
That's how you justify a simple law enforcement incident being escalated to the level of national security?
he read the republican manual. if you say anything against the president you support "the terrorists"
The Bushies are trying to fight war(s) against the informed will of the people. They deceived to start the war. They violate the law and get pissed and harassfolks when people try to oppose it. It is well doucmented that the government did this same type of thing during the Vietnam War.
We are in danger of scrapping our checks and balances—not just for a few years (as was done during the Civil War), but for good. A Power Outage On Capitol Hill By Jonathan Alter Newsweek Jan. 23, 2006 issue - What if we faced a constitutional crisis and hardly anyone noticed? As he quietly mastered the tiresome cat-and-mouse game inside the Senate Judiciary Committee last week, Judge Samuel Alito gave few hints of where he stood on a matter that goes to the heart of what it means to live in a republic. With a few exceptions, the media coverage didn't help. It's so much easier to talk about Joe Biden's big mouth or a right-wing Princeton alumni group or Mrs. Alito's tears than to figure out how the country should prevent a president of the United States from castrating the United States Congress. I wasn't expecting Alito to say whether he thought that President Bush broke the law when he admitted authorizing warrantless wiretaps on American citizens, which is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Alito is right not to comment on a specific case that, with any luck, will soon go rocketing toward the Supreme Court. I can even understand why he failed to offer an opinion on why Bush didn't simply seek to amend FISA (which Congress would have eagerly done after 9/11) if he believed his tools for catching terrorists were insufficient. Even so, the nominee's "no person is above the law" platitudes did not suffice. Alito endorsed a famous 1952 concurring opinion from Justice Robert H. Jackson that the president's power is at its "lowest ebb" when he operates without congressional authority (the case involved whether President Truman could seize steel mills during the Korean War). But we never heard whether the brainy New Jersey jurist believes (like Bush) that the Constitution entitles the president to break the law in wartime. Remember, this is not about whether it's right or wrong to wiretap bad guys, though the White House hopes to frame it that way for political purposes. Any rational person wants the president to be able to hunt for Qaeda suspects wherever they lurk. The "momentous" issue (Alito's words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russ Feingold ably raised some of these questions last week; Al Gore is about to weigh in, too. But the Democratic Party as a whole cannot stay focused on the issue. Some activists keep jumping ahead to the remedy for the president's power grab, which they say is impeachment. But that's a pipe dream and a distraction from the task at hand, which is figuring out how to reassert Congress's institutional role. This must by necessity involve Republicans, who control Congress. Unfortunately, most have so far shown little concern about being defenestrated by their president. But "Snoopgate" is already creating new fissures on the right. The NSA story is an acid test of whether one is a traditional Barry Goldwater conservative, who believes in limited government, or a modern Richard Nixon conservative, who believes in authority. Alito is in the latter category. His judicial opinions suggest a deference to executive power, and he once pioneered presidential "signing statements" that are meant to help judges come down on the president's side. Just recently, Bush attached such a statement to John McCain's bill banning torture in which the president reserved the right to ignore the law if he wants to. Alito embodies the inherent contradiction of the conservative movement. The nominee is an "originalist," which means, as he said last week, that "we should look to the meaning that someone would have taken from the text of the Constitution at the time of its adoption." But at that time, the 18th century, the Founders could not have been clearer about the role of Congress in wartime. As James Madison put it, "In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war and peace to the legislative and not to the executive branch." Congress, for its part, is in no shape to assert its constitutional prerogatives. Gabby senators came across poorly in the Alito hearings. And the House side looks like someone just lifted a rock on a colony of slithering worms. The race to succeed Rep. Tom DeLay as majority leader, for instance, is currently between "Tobacco John" Boehner, who once passed out checks from the tobacco industry on the House floor, and "Tobacco Roy" Blunt, who inserted an amendment to favor cigarette makers in, of all things, the homeland-security bill. Fortunately, Sen. Arlen Specter will hold hearings in early February on presidential power. Watch them, please, even if you're tired of this cast of Judiciary Committee characters. Our whole system is on the line. © 2006 Newsweek, Inc. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10854374/site/newsweek/
