How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

November 15, 2009 By Alfred W. McCoy
Source: <http://www.tomdispatch.com>TomDispatch


In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as
CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention,
President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded
executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George
W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/us/02gitmo.html>could "reverberate
for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment
freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early
fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has
planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware
of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future
crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed
in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja,
and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever
claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you
care to read on.

Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living
laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a
process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going
on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like
centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed
during the Army's
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>first
protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land -- the Philippines
from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during
World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security
apparatus that persisted for the next half century.

Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged
the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns,
large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again)
the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad
hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech
security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.

As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's
longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable
question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and
the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our
democracy?

Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to
defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad,
largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably
effective in building a technological template that could be just a
few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with
omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric
identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."

Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing
Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of
domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency
(NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up
several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified
data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts
in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the
science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal
or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as
the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the
split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination
campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.

In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington
could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance
techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant
battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S.
occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of
counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and
digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications.
This new biometric identification system first
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64292-2005Apr18.html>appeared
in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal,
nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture
the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and
mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent
most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding
countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless
hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris
scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear
identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.

The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far
larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New
York Times
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E5D71F30F937A35757C0A9619C8B63>published

an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an
Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still
infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in
Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to
a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi
eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington
Post
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/30/AR2007113002302.html>reported

that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and
iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's
population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi
identities by satellite link to a biometric database.

Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology
can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images
<http://www.consortiumnews.com/Print/2007/121307.html>accessible by
portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities,
linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war
fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of
this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"

A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a
bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond
to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized
laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after
instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.

Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007
troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to
bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret
fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in
May 2006, American intelligence agencies
<http://books.google.com/books?id=_Qne27FuHEQC&pg=PA380&lpg=PA380&dq=%22the+most+highly+classified+techniques+and+information+in+the+U.S.+government%22+%22woodward%22&source=bl&ots=T1lBZ07u-w&sig=KCRl0YhWYCfjm0vqCuSLj3X_wlc&hl=en&ei=4PD4Su7zDpTEngeUuq35DA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CBMQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=&f=false>launched

a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques
and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to
locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as
al-Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."

Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the
Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool
available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human
intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer
reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him
"orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to
divulge details, Woodward himself
<http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/09/09/iraq.secret/>compared it
to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based
assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washington/10military.html>granted
JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture al-Qaeda terrorists" in 20
countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes
by airborne Special Operations forces.

Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war
of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial
vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of
Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away
from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special
Operations Forces
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200703/bowden-jihad>conducted an
early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination.
In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling
overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a
tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush
of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").

In July 2008, the Pentagon
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/us/26military.html>proposed an
expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded
with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan
and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to
the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the
deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/24/world/asia/24carrier.html>using
sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban
targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm
bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.

In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone
strikes have
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer>escalated
in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using
a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission,
and digital imaging
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/world/asia/16pstan.html>to kill
half of the Agency's 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region.
Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland
Security
<http://www.cbc.ca/canada/manitoba/story/2009/02/16/drones-border.html>launched
its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North
Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called
America's "weakest link."

Homeland Security

While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were
experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics,
inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at
the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance
through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal,
and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a
tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on
suspected subversives.

"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to
report it,"
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/us/bush-pushes-volunteerism-but-a-senate-seat-shares-the-agenda.html>said

President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen
vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had
<http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-08-06/news/ashcroft-s-master-plan-to-spy-on-us/1>launched

Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with
plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train
conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the
government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen
surveillance
<http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-12-17/news/the-death-of-operation-tips/>sparked
strong protests, however, forcing the Justice Department to quietly
bury the president's program.

Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter,
President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up
in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era),
<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-981753.html>was developing a Total
Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed
electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about
this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IAO-logo.png>eye logo, Congress
banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key
data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype
System,
<http://www.nationaljournal.com/about/njweekly/stories/2006/0223nj1.htm>migrated
quietly to the NSA.

Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring
citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters,
rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional
surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil
liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bush
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html>gave the
NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through
the nation's telephone companies and its private financial
transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.

After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress
quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program
and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil
suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after
Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008,
the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging
in what the New York Times politely
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/16nsa.html>termed the
systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among
American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA
database called "Pinwale," analysts routinely
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/us/17nsa.html>scan countless
"millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard
for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.

Starting in 2004, the FBI
<http://fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/050206mueller.html>launched an
Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for...
counterterrorism." Within two years, it
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/29/AR2006082901520.html>contained

659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence,
social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private
finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts
making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights
advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already
<http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/04/eff-issues-report-fb>grown to
over a billion documents.

And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a
safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic
surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense
Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office
of National Intelligence
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/11/us/11nsa.html>issued a report
sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's
claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent
attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of
this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited
role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."

Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all
too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering
on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a
bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps,
Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a
particularly extreme example of this urge. She
<http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-1955>introduced
the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act,
proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Chamber>"star chamber," to "combat
the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within
the United States." The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404
to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more
mindful of civil liberties.

Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman's life
itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic
surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional
Quarterly, in early 2005 an NSA wiretap
<http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=hsnews-000003098436>caught
Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced
charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In
exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the
chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House
Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major
campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/21/us/politics/21harman.html>said,
"This conversation doesn't exist."

How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon
crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI
investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel
Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New
York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the
NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for
damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of
intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's
illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security
breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.

Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot
expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been
interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist
Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries,
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/31/AR2009103102141.html>continues

to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175081/frida_berrigan_downloading_disaster>new
military cybercommand
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/us/01cyberwar.html>staffed by
7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command
will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile
cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks --
with scant respect for what the Pentagon
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/13/us/politics/13cyber.html>calls
"sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances
that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring
private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top
cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such
intrusions are inevitable.

Sending the Future Home

While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in
Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply
their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland
security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil
disturbances here.

Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that
one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be
<http://www.armytimes.com/news/2008/09/army_homeland_090708w/>reassigned
as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its
new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need
help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel
Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new
modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly
or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks,
shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to
Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness
exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a
gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian
Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the
military <http://www.northcom.mil/News/2008/091508.html>war-gamed its
future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management
Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist
attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union
<http://www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-demands-information-military-deployment-within-us-borders>filed

an expedited freedom of information request for details of these
deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people
know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the
military in domestic affairs."

At the outset of the Global War on Terror in 2001, memories of early
Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans
to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes.
However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for
counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less
public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further
jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric,
presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to
unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror
suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat
more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification,
aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.

In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to
omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine
monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered
to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also
one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and
FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign
of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and
cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on
American life.

If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless
thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at
airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM
customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One
day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon
millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives
inside a biometric database akin to England's current
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/oct/25/police-surveillance-protest-domestic-extremism>National

Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams
scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.

By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if
then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather
recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we
are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being
fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays
far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new
security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance
state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.


Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082484/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>A
Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/0299234142/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>Policing
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of
the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores
the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the
twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security
measures here at home.

[This article first appeared on
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/>Tomdispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation
Institute, which offers a steady flow of alternate sources, news, and
opinion from Tom Engelhardt, long time editor in publishing,
co-founder of <http://www.americanempireproject.com/>the American
Empire Project, author of
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/155849586X/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The
End of Victory Culture, and editor of
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/1844672573/ref=nosim/?tag=nationbooks08-20>The
World According to Tomdispatch: America in the New Age of Empire.]