Barack, go f*** yourself...

i put up a post about talon, the defense department's domestic spying operation under george bush, all the way back in 2005... now, like a vampire rising from the coffin, it's back under our hopey-changey president obama...

The Pentagon's spy unit has quietly begun to rebuild a database for tracking potential terrorist threats that was shut down after it emerged that it had been collecting information on American anti-war activists.

The Defense Intelligence Agency filed notice this week that it plans to create a new section called Foreign Intelligence and Counterintelligence Operation Records, whose purpose will be to "document intelligence, counterintelligence, counterterrorism and counternarcotic operations relating to the protection of national security."

But while the unit's name refers to "foreign intelligence," civil liberties advocates and the Pentagon's own description of the program suggest that Americans will likely be included in the new database.

FICOR replaces a program called Talon, which the DIA created in 2002 under then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as part of the counterterrorism efforts following the 9/11 attacks. It was disbanded in 2007 after it emerged that Talon had retained information on anti-war protesters, including Quakers, even after it was determined they posed no threat to national security.

DIA spokesman Donald Black told Newsweek that the new database would not include the more controversial elements of the old Talon program. But Jeff Stein at the Washington Post reports that the new program will evidently inherit the old Talon database.

"Why the new depository would want such records while its parent agency no longer has a law enforcement function could not be learned," Stein reports. "Nor could it be learned whether the repository will include intelligence reports on protest groups gathered by its predecessor."

The Pentagon's notice states that the database will collect "identifying information such as name, Social Security Number (SSN), address, citizenship documentation, biometric data, passport number, vehicle identification number and vehicle/vessel license data." As only US residents have Social Security Numbers, it appears the program is being designed at least partly to contain domestic information.

Newsweek cites two unnamed US officials as suggesting that the new program essentially echoes the old one. When CIFA, the DIA division running Talon, was disbanded in 2008, "many of its personnel and some of its functions were transferred" to the new DIA unit running the new database program. The new program will be housed "in the same office space that CIFA once occupied, in a complex near suburban Washington’s Reagan National Airport."

now, 17 months into obama's term of office, i can now say without hesitation, "barack, you can go f*** yourself"...

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More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002 and EVERY ONE WAS VIDEOTAPED

let's see if THIS grows legs...

INTERROGATION AND VIDEOTAPING
OF DETAINEES IN GUANTÁNAMO
By
Mark Denbeaux
Professor, Seton Hall University School of Law
Director, Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research
Joshua Denbeaux,* and R. David Gratz,*
Denbeaux & Denbeaux
Counsel to two Guantánamo Detainees
Jennifer Ellick ’09
Michael Ricciardelli ’08
Matthew Darby ’08
Research Fellows
Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research

[...]

[P]ublicly available Government documents demonstrate the following:

• More than 24,000 interrogations have been conducted at Guantánamo since 2002

• Every interrogation conducted at Guantánamo was videotaped.

The Central Intelligence Agency is just one of many entities that interrogated detainees at Guantánamo.

The agencies or bureaus that interrogated at Guantánamo include: the Central Intelligence Agency and its Counterterrorism Center; the Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) of the FBI; Defense Intelligence Analysis (DIA); Defense Human Intelligence (HUMINT); Army Criminal Investigative Division (ACID); the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (OSI); and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Private contractors also interrogated detainees.

Each of these entities has identical motives to destroy taped investigations as has the Central Intelligence Agency. As one former senior Central Intelligence Agency official put it: “It’s a qualitatively different thing—seeing it versus reading about it.”

One Government document, for instance, reports detainee treatment so violent as to “shake the camera in the interrogation room” and “cause severe internal injury.” Another describes an interrogator positioning herself between a detainee and the camera, in order to block her actions from view.

The Government kept meticulous logs of information related to interrogations. Thus, it is ascertainable which videotapes documenting interrogations still exist, and which videotapes have been destroyed.

in a parallel universe somewhere, a report like this would result in the resignation of the president, the vice president, and the entire cabinet...

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