Military

“Army Surveillance of Civilians” (1972)

“Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis” by the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Committee on the Judiciary, United States Senate (1972). Posted online by The Memory Hole. (Thanks to Susan Maret, coeditor of Government Secrecy: Classic and Contemporary Readings.)

Click here to download the report [PDF | 9 meg | 104 pp]

Background info from the report’s preface:

“The following report by the Subcommittee staff analyzes certain computer print-outs and publications generated in the course of the Army’s domestic intelligence program.”

“The overwhelming majority of the reports pertain to the peaceful activites of nonviolent citizens lawfully exercising their constitutional rights of speech, press, religion, association, and petition.”

“These files confirm what we learned first from former intelligence agents – that Army intelligence, in the name of preparedness and security, had developed a massive system for monitoring virtually all political protest in the United States. In doing so, it was not content with observing at arms length; Army agents repeatedly infiltrated civilian groups. Moreover, the information they reported was not confined to acts or plans for violence, but included much private information about peoples’ finances, psychiatric records, and sex lives.”

“The size of these and other data banks confirms that the Army’s domestic intelligence operations did not begin with the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967. The events of that summer only expanded activities which had been going on, in varying degrees of intensity, since 1940, and which has its roots as far back as World War I.”

Introduction by Susan Maret, Ph.D.

Prompted by Capt. Christopher Pyle’s 1970 revelations of U.S. Army surveillance; the Tatum v Laird case,  which petitioned  “the courts to enjoin the army from the collection, distribution, storage of information on lawful political activities of persons unassociated with the armed forces”; and Morton Kondrache’s 1972 Chicago Sun-Times reporting, the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights [1] released U.S. Army Surveillance of Civilians: A Documentary Analysis (1972, 92d Congress, 2d session).

The Subcommittee (1972:44) credits Kondrache  with breaking the story regarding the Continental Army Command’s (CONARC 1955-1973) “computerized and non-computerized files” in which the Subcommittee (1974: v) discovered “enormity in data collection” in the surveillance of professors, students, housewives, civil rights workers, and anti-war and political activists.[2] In its Documentary Analysis, the Subcommittee wrote:

The absence of civilian control over this surveillance prior to 1970 has already been established. This report proves an absence of central military control as well. Each major data bank developed independent of others in a milieu which showed little concern for the values of privacy, freedom, efficiency, or economy (1972:97).

In addition to the Subcommittee’s (1972:44, 97) unearthing of an extensive, decades-long intelligence-collection and information-sharing program conducted by CONARC and its “subordinate continental armies and their constituent elements,” most remarkable are the revelations of the Army’s perceptions of their domestic mission and “vacuum cleaner” approach to intelligence-gathering and surveillance:

[Military officers] drew a false analogy between foreign counterintelligence and counterinsurgency operations and the Army’s role in civil disturbances… [D]emonstrators and rioters were not regarded as American citizens with possibly legitimate grievances, but as “dissident forces” deployed against the established order (1972: v).

[These files] reflect an unfortunate tendency within the government to react to the problem of civil disturbances by conducting widespread and indiscriminate and duplicative surveillance. The result is a great collection of information that gives an illusion of knowledge, but which hampers the ability of responsible officials to make intelligent decisions. Unfortunately, it appears that Army intelligence, uncertain of its stateside-mission, took refuge in surveillance and dossier-building, and thereby deluded itself into thinking it was “doing something.” In fact, it was merely wasting time, money, and manpower, and infringing on the rights of the citizens it was supposed to be safeguarding (1972:97).[3]

[T]he major impression from our long study of these files is their utter uselessness. The collection of this information, and its attendant infringement on the constitutional rights and privacy of American citizens, has sometimes been justified on the grounds of necessity, chiefly that of public safety. Yet it appears that the vacuum-cleaner approach of collecting all possible information resulted in great masses of data on individuals which was valuable for no legitimate (or even illegitimate) military purpose… (1972: 97)

Although available in most federal depository libraries in paper format as a public document, placing the Documentary AnalysisCONARC Incident Files, the Counterintelligence Analysis Branch (CIAB) Compendium, and the Counterintelligence Records Information System (CRIS), as well as the  labyrinthian military-intelligence surveillance bureaucracy, which Joan Jensen (1991:246) characterizes as a situation in which on the Web liberates history from the stacks. The Subcommittee’s report offers researchers, FOIA requesters, and citizens alike the opportunity to investigate recordkeeping systems such as the

antiwar protesters seldom attacked military surveillance. In part this silence occurred because protesters did not know which department agents represented. Most protesters knew little about either the civilian or military bureaucracies they battled in opposing war policies. Sometimes they lumped all agents together as government agents.

Researchers may also extend their investigative activities beyond the Department of the Army, for as the Subcommittee (1972: 20) discovered, many military surveillance files were shared with the CIA, FBI, NASA, Secret Service, and State Department, as well as “eight defense attachés in foreign countries, including the Soviet Union.”

When reading the Documentary Analysis, one is reminded of more recent disclosures of domestic (warrantless) surveillance, with its justifications in national security. But there’s more than meets the eye: the Subcommittee’s (1972: 86) chilling remarks that “what separates military intelligence in the United States from its counterparts in totalitarian states, then is not its capabilities, but its intentions,” demands the public debate of those still-unresolved questions regarding the scope and boundaries of national security and free speech, expression, privacy, transparency, and agency oversight.

Highlights of the report:

p. 8: Is “Individuals Active in Civil Disturbances,” (State of Alabama, Department of Public Safety, Investigative and Identification Division), the same document mentioned as Volume 3 of the Fort Holabird Army Intelligence Command Blacklist, or “mug book”?

p. 51: Volumes 2-6 of the “Personalities edition” contain 2,269 pages of detailed summaries of the political beliefs and activities of nearly 5,000 people, in addition to a 99-page index to persons listed.

p. 72: Details the Fort Hood “computerized storage system for civil disturbance and intelligence.” 

p. 86: The Defense Central Index of Investigations is “…25 million index cards representing files on individuals and 760,000 cards representing files on organizations and incidents. “

Pre-NORTHCOM, information on the domestic activities of the United States Strike Command (USSTRICOM), “established in 1961 to furnish deployable, combat-ready forces as in an emergency situation anywhere within the United States or overseas.  A two service command (Army and Air Force), USSTRICOM is headquartered at McDill Air Force Base and is commanded by an Army general. It has two major components, the U.S. Army Forces Strikes Command (ARSTRIKE) and the U.S. Air Force Strike Command (AFSTRIKE), are headquartered in close proximity.”

p. 89: Directorate for Civil Disturbance Planning and Operations was created in April 1968 when the Army anticipated that it might have to deploy 10,000 troops in each of 25 cities simultaneously.

p. 95: “The secrecy which surrounds all military intelligence operations has also hampered both Executive Branch and Congressional inquiries. The time it has taken to comprehend the structure and modus operandi of the Army’s intelligence units has cut into our capacity to uncover and examine various files.  Similarly, much time has been lost in discussions with Defense Department officials concerning what items may and may not be declassified.”

p.95-96: “ONI (now NIS) and OSI reports were also stored in data banks substantially maintained by the Army, but it is unlikely that we will ever see their contents” [emphasis added].

p. 96: The size of the records centers such as the Fourth Army (Fort Sam Houston) “reported the equivalent of 120,000 file cards on ‘personalities of interest.’  It seems likely the subversive file at Fort Holabird contained even more.”

The Counterintelligence Analysis Branch (CIAB) “reported that the computerized index to it microfilm archive contained 113,250 references to organizations and 152,000 references to individuals.”

Army intelligence “had reasonably current files on the political activities of at least 100,000 civilians unassociated with the Armed Forces.”

p.97: “The size of the files confirms other reports that the surveillance dates back not to the Newark and Detroit riots of 1967, but to the reestablishment of Army counterintelligence on the eve of the Second World War.”

The full text of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, Military Surveillance. Hearings (93rd Congress, second session, on S. 2318. April 9 and 10, 1974) is available via Boston Public Library at the Internet Archive. The Hearings partner with the Documentary Analysis to give an uncomfortable view into the Army’s  indiscriminate surveillance enterprise.

Notes

1. The Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, now known as the Subcommittee on the Constitution, was a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Records of the Committee on the Judiciary and Related Committees, 1816-1968 are fascinating. (Scroll to 13.119, the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights and 13.121 for the Subcommittee’s history). The Subcommittee was established in 1955 to “to survey the ‘extent to which the Constitutional rights of the people of the United States were being respected and enforced.’” Of significance is NARA’s note at 13.120 the Subcommittee “consequently, as the subcommittee’s activities became known, it received thousands of complaints, inquiries, and requests for information and assistance from a variety of sources.”

In addition to investigating military surveillance in its Documentary Analysis, the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, chaired by Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina from 1961-1974, undertook several other significant investigations into infringements of constitutional rights. Of note, the Subcommittee conducted hearings on Wiretapping and Eavesdropping Legislation (Eighty-Seventh Congress, first session, on May 9-12, 1961), Constitutional Rights of the American Indian (Eighty-Seventh Congress, first session, on Aug. 29-31, Sept. 1, 1961 and Nov. 25, 29, Dec. 1, 1961), Withholding of information from the Congress (86th Congress, 2d session, 1961), the “Equal Rights” Amendment (May 5, 6, and 7, 1970), and Federal Data Banks and Constitutional Rights: A Study of Data Systems on Individuals Maintained by Agencies of the United States Government (Ninety-third Congress, second session, 1974).

2. For supplementary material on the history of U.S. military and intelligence agency surveillance and recordkeeping systems, see Morton Halperin et al, The Lawless State: The Crimes of the U.S. Intelligence Agencies (Penguin Books, 1976); Joan M. Jensen’s Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980 (Yale University Press, 1991); Morton Kondrache’s Chicago Sun-Times Alan LeMond and Ron Fry’s No Place to Hide stories, “Civilian Data Banks Continue, Despite Army Disavowal,” (February 27, 1970:22), “Army Has Closed Political Computer But Justice Dept. Maintains Bigger One” (March 9, 1970: 26), and “Army Continuing its Political Intelligence Operation” (March 15, 1970: 8); and (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975).

Check with local libraries for the Lexis Nexis microfilm collection U.S. Army Surveillance of Dissidents 1965-1972: Records of the U.S. Army’s ACSI Task Force; also check NARA’s web version of the Guide to Federal Records in the National Archives of the United States for specific record groups (RG) of federal agencies. Many libraries own microfilm of the collection.

3. It isn’t clear that military surveillance violates the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385); see Jennifer Elsea, “The Posse Comitatus Act and Related Matters: A Sketch,” CRS Report for Congress June 6, 2005, RS20590 http://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS20590.pdf and Eric V. Larson, John E. Peters Preparing the U.S. Army for Homeland Security: Concepts, Issues, and Options, Appendix D. “Overview of the Posse Comitatus Act,” at

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1251/index.html

©Susan L. Maret

Pentagon to allow photos of soldiers’ coffins when families permit

From the New York Times:

In a reversal of an 18-year-old policy that critics said was hiding the ultimate cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the press will now be allowed to photograph the flag-draped coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States — but only if their families agree.

American Forces Press Service article.

No word on whether the military will be taking its own photos of the coffins and, if so, whether they’ll release them.

See also: Photos of Military Coffins

(Thanks, Fred.)

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Obama “reviewing” policy on military coffin photos

in 2004, The Memory Hole obtained and posted 288 photos of the war dead coming into Dover. During the Gulf War, the Pentagon banned the release of such photos taken by the military (and the taking of such photos by the civilian press), and it reiterated this ban soon after the invasion of Iraq.

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I requested these photos from Dover AFB, and they passed the request to the Air Force’s main FOIA Office, which denied it in full. I appealed, and – in a move that I never expected – the Air Force completely reversed itself and sent me all the photos on a CD. I posted them, the media swarmed, and the images have become iconic.

The Pentagon was not pleased, calling the release a “mistake.” Later, professor Ralph Begleiter and the National Security Archive successfully sued the Defense Department under FOIA, resulting in the release of more photos.

Obama was recently asked whether his administration will reverse or uphold the censorial policy, and his answer is um, er, well. The AP reports:

President Barack Obama says his administration is reviewing a policy that bans the media from photographing flag-draped coffins of fallen U.S. soldiers.

The president says his advisers are discussing with the Defense Department the prohibition on pictures of coffins returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Beyond that, Obama wouldn’t say whether he would keep the policy in place. He says he wants to understand all the implications involved before deciding how to proceed.

Agence France-Presse reports:

At the prompting of President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates Tuesday ordered a review of a ban on media coverage of the return of flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“From a personal standpoint, I think, if the needs of the families can be met, and the privacy concerns can be addressed, the more honor we can accord these fallen heroes, the better,” Gates told reporters.

Gates said he ordered the review after Obama said in a White House press conference Monday night that the White House was in the process of reviewing the ban “in conversations with the Department of Defense.” …

Gates said he had ordered a review of the ban over a year ago.

“The answer that I got back — and partly it was the result of contacts with the families — is that if the news media were at Dover, many of the families would feel compelled to be there for those ceremonies for their fallen hero.

“And for these families this would delay the return of the remains home. For others it would be a financial hardship to get to Dover. And there were some privacy concerns,” he said.

“I think that looking at it again makes all kinds of sense,” he said.

The Huffington Post has more.

Psyops: Proposed Leaflets for Iraq

On January 14, 2009, the US Defense Department released 247 pages of documents on the Iraq war, in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. It’s labeled “Document Grouping 3 (released JAN 2009) (12 MB)” and is currently the last link on this page at the Pentagon’s FOIA site. Here’s the direct link to the PDF file. There are numerous interesting pre-war documents – many classified as Secret and Top Secret – concerning how the military proposed handling the invasion and occupation.

Pages 51 through 67 of that file reproduce leaflets, displayed below, that were proposed for dropping on Iraq as part of psychological operations. (They’re in English – had they been approved, they obviously would’ve been translated into Arabic.) Page 50 is a memo introducing these leaflets. It was written by the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, and was sent to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The memo bears two handwritten notes – one saying, “These look very interesting,” the other noting, “We have been sort of underwhelmed by the quality of the leaflets dropped over Iraq.”

For a gallery of leaflets that were dropped on Iraq, check out the Psywarrior website. None of the proposed leaflets are there, so perhaps they were never greenlighted.

All of this was original designated For Official Use Only.

More leaflets after the jump…..

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Recovered History: Black Soldiers Strike During WWII

Memory Hole contributor Susan Maret, Ph.D. stumbled across this bit of forgotten history while thumbing through Dwight MacDonald’s journal Politics. From the October 1944 issue, an article on black soldiers who went on strike. (Keep in mind, WWII was still ongoing at this point, making this action even more radical than it already was.)

“The Tucson Strike.” Politics, Oct 1944, p 285.

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Pentagon Censors Former Torturer’s Book

Defense Department cuts 93 sections, including unclassified, publicly available material.

On Democracy Now!, Amy Goodman says:

Writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, a former special intelligence operations officer, who led an interrogations team in Iraq two years ago, has written a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.” In it, he details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006. He conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than a thousand and was awarded a Bronze Star for his achievements in Iraq.

In his op-ed, he writes:

It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in [Iraq] have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Alexander has also written a book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

In his interview with Goodman, he reveals Pentagon censorship at work:

AG: Why was it so hard to get your book out of the Pentagon? I mean, you’ve got the book. You have to hand it in to be vetted, but they wouldn’t release it.

MA: Yeah, you know, I turned it in in the middle of July, and they’re supposed to do the review within 30 days, and they didn’t do that. I missed the first printing date. When they finally did come back with a review of the book after two months, they had extracted an extraordinary amount of material. There was 93 redactions made. I sued — you know, I sued the Department of Defense first to review the book and then to argue the redactions, because they had redacted obvious unclassified material, things that I had taken straight out of the unclassified field manual and also some items that were directly off the Army’s own Web site. So, eventually they acquiesced on 80 of the 93 redactions. And if you — when you read the book, you’ll see that the redactions within — some of the redactions are still in the book, because we had to go to print before we had the results of the appeal.

Port Study 2002

I found this gigantic PDF file, “Port Study 2002,” on a US military site several months ago. I downloaded it because infrastructure information often gets pulled offline during info-purges. I can no longer find this file, so I’m posting it.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FILE [PDF | 132 meg | 2858 pp]
(Hosted at the Internet Archive)

It looks as though someone merged a whole bunch of separate studies by the military into one insanely huge file – 2,858 pages of detailed information on major seaports in the US (including California, Washington, Alaska, New York/New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, and Louisiana), Panama, the Middle East, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, South Africa, and elsewhere. Photos, maps, charts, graphs – you name it – with the focus on each port’s ability to handle a US military operation.

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Philadelphia

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Pentagon documents on embedded media

On a subpage of their Freedom of Info Act website, the Defense Department today has posted 127 pages of documents concerning embedded media. The file may be downloaded here:

DOD FOIA Reading Room [PDF | 3.3 meg | 127 pp]

Memory Hole mirror

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[exclusive] “Prisoner Boxes” in Iraq

First Published Photographs of Wooden Imprisonment Crates

>>> In Iraq, some prisoners/detainees are kept in wooden crates known as “prisoner boxes,” so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Central Command asking for the following:

“Vanity Fair (Feb 2005 issue) has reported the existence of wood “prisoner boxes” being used by the US military in facilities in and around Baghdad. They are used to hold individual prisoners and detainees.

“I hereby request all photographs of these boxes, including empty boxes as well as boxes holding prisoners and detainees.”

Around nine and a half months later, CentCom responded by sending the three photographs on this page.

You are seeing the photos exactly as they were sent to me – as black and white printouts on standard printer paper, with creases from being folded into thirds. Two of the photos are extremely blurry and pixelated.

Considering that the average summer temperature in Baghdad is 111 F, and that temps can easily go above 120 F [source], it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to be inside these boxes.

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Technical note: These photographs were released as black and white print-outs by the US Central Command on 10 Nov 2005 in fulfillment of FOIA request #2005-085, filed by Russ Kick on 27 Jan 2005.

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Zip file containing high-resolution scans of all three photo print-outs [12 meg]

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Pentagon docs: expenditures in Iraq & elsewhere

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Today in its Freedom of Information Act reading room, the Pentagon has posted 202 pages of documents related to its Iraqi Freedom Fund transfers/expenditures from 2002 to 2006:

DOD reading room [PDF | 9 megs]

Memory Hole mirror

The Government Accountability Office explains the Iraqi Freedom Fund:

“The Iraqi Freedom Fund is a special account providing funds for additional expenses for ongoing military operations in Iraq, and those operations authorized by P.L. 107-40 (Sept. 13,2001), Authorization for Use of Military Force, and other operations and related activities in support of the global war on terrorism.”

Some sample pages from the Pentagon’s FOIA release:

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