Vol. 72/No. 35      September 8, 2008

The measures are “breaking down a wall erected after congressional hearings in 1976 to rein in such activity,” the Washington Post said August 16. It was referring to restrictions imposed after the exposure of covert programs by the FBI, the CIA, and other cop agencies in the 1960s and ’70s.

The Defense Intelligence Agency announced August 5 the formation of the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. The purpose of the office is to carry out “strategic offensive counterintelligence operations,” against non-U.S. citizens, Mike Pick, director of the office, told the Post.

The agency admits that its goal is not to arrest and bring criminal charges against alleged spies or terrorists. The operations are “tightly controlled,” said the Pentagon’s chief spook Toby Sullivan, and that their main tasks are “to gather information, to make something happen … to thwart what the opposition is trying to do to us.”

The clandestine program has already been functioning for the last two years on a trial basis and has “performed admirably,” Sullivan said. He refused to give any details.

The Army, Air Force, and Navy all have similar programs.

The Department of Homeland Security recently set up its own spy division. The department is “vulnerable to adversaries who seek information about our nation’s homeland defense programs, classified or unclassified,” director Michael Chertoff claimed in an August 4 memo.

Homeland Security, formed in 2003 from 22 different cop agencies, has 216,000 employees and agents around the world. All its employees must now inform the agency every time they plan to travel outside the country and report back anytime anyone asks for “sensitive” information.

Sometime in August the Justice Department gave congressional staff members a glimpse of new guidelines that would allow the FBI to open an investigation on U.S. citizens, spy on them, and pry into their private records without even the pretense of investigating illegal activity or plans. According to the New York Times, the rules authorize the FBI to use “pretext interviews, in which agents do not honestly represent themselves while questioning a subject’s neighbors and work colleagues.”

Last year the FBI announced that it is overhauling its database so it can manage records from “more than 15,000 informants.” It is not clear if the snitches are all U.S. residents, or recruited by FBI agents in other countries.

An FBI document obtained by ABCNews.com in June 2007 admits an increase in “black bag” jobs carried out in recent years.

“The execution of covert entry/search operations usually requires the [FBI] to physically deploy a team of approximately 11 agent personnel full time over a period of time (usually at least 3 days) to the target location,” the document states. In 2006 each of the black bag unit’s 18 agents spent an average of 97 days on the road for the government-sanctioned breaking and entering.

In July, the Justice Department proposed revising the federal government’s domestic spying rules for 18,000 state and local cop agencies for the first time since 1993. The changes would give legal cover to cop espionage on groups and individuals, encourage investigations based on “suspicion” of aiding “terrorists,” and promote passing on files to federal agencies.

U.S. government spy agencies have a long history of infiltrating labor, Black, and other working-class organizations at home and around the world; assassinating government officials and leaders who are not to the liking of Washington; spreading false information; writing poison pen letters; and using every trick in the book to disrupt any individual or group who stands in the way of the economic and political interests of the ruling class.  
 
 
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