War/Protest/Counter Recruiting - Department of Defense Database

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/Pentagon accused of spying on Americans/Christian Science Monitor/Boston/MA/USA/15-Dec-05/…. Lisa Stewart, a Quaker who attended the Truth Project meeting, said the Quakers investigated the group before allowing them to use the meetinghouse. She said she shares the group's concern that a draft might be instituted during the Iraq war and wanted to find ways to deter students from enlisting. "I just wanted to make sure this group was on the up and up and they weren't a bunch of hotheads," said Stewart, 68, a member of The Truth Project. "They were very much in keeping with (Quaker) principles."

NBC military analyst Bill Arkin says all Americans should be concerned by the Pentagon's actions.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it's the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

Columnist Arianna Huffington, writing in the Los Angeles Times, notes that it's not just the Pentagon that's been watching antiwar demonstrations, as "documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force has been recording the names and license plate numbers of peaceful antiwar protesters."

It wasn't that long ago that [former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's] notorious COINTELPRO program was illegally infiltrating Students for a Democratic Society and setting out to destroy the reputations and lives of "Negro radicals" such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Our government lied, cheated, harassed, intimidated, burglarized, vandalized, framed and spread false rumors — to say nothing of keeping voluminous files on everyone from John Lennon to Lucille Ball — in an effort to quash legitimate dissent against the Vietnam War and the racist practices of the South. We can't let it happen again.

The Associated Press reports that in a statement announcing the review of 'Talon,' the Pentagon stopped short of acknowledging any fault, but hinted that some information had been mishandled.

The Pentagon said Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, ordered a full review of the system for handling such information to ensure that it complies with Pentagon policies and federal law. Cambone also ordered a review of whether Pentagon polices are being applied properly with respect to reporting and storing information about "US persons" - people, not necessarily US citizens, inside the United States. And he ordered the database to be reviewed "to identify any other information that is improperly in the database," according to the Pentagon statement. ….

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/US military monitoring local anti-war activists/Sun-Sentinel.com/Ft. Lauderdale/FL/USA/15-Dec-05/… The Defense Department monitored a protest last April during the Air & Sea Show in Fort Lauderdale, the NBC report said, but labeled the 15 or so protesters as a "US group exercising constitutional rights."

One of that rally's organizers, Peter Ackerman, a Fort Lauderdale Quaker, was saddened to learn of the military surveillance. "We become the enemy, we become the suspicious, we become the guilty," he said. "This is a good indication that the government cannot be trusted with the powers that the Patriot Act grants." ….

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/Pentagon calls Lake Worth peace meeting a 'threat'/Palm Beach Post/Palm Beach/FL/USA/15-Dec-05/… LAKE WORTH — When a group of about 20 activists met in Lake Worth last year to talk about how to keep young men and women from joining the military, their ranks included five Quakers, a disabled Boca Raton man and a 79-year-old grandmother.

Members of that group, which now calls itself The Truth Project, consider themselves a harmless band of idealists and peaceniks. ….

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/Pentagon Acknowledges Use of Civilian Info. To Protect Bases/DefenseNews.com/Springfield/VA/USA/14-Dec-05/…. The Pentagon said Dec. 14 it uses information gathered by U.S. law enforcement agencies on U.S. civilians to protect military installations but would not say whether it spies on anti-war groups in the United States.

NBC News reported Tuesday that the Pentagon has compiled a secret database of suspicious incidents that includes four dozen anti-war meetings or protests in the United States.

Pentagon spokesmen would not say whether the military is keeping an eye on anti-war activists but insisted it could legally use information gathered by U.S. law enforcement agencies on U.S. civilians to protect U.S. forces and installations.

”The Defense Department has a legitimate interest in protecting its installations, protecting its people,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

”And to the extent that they use information collected by law enforcement agencies to do that, that’s an appropriate activity of the United States military,” he said.

The 400-page database obtained by NBC News listed 1,500 suspicious incidents over a 10-month period.

One example cited in the report was a small gathering of activists at a Quaker meeting house in Florida to plan protests of military recruiting in high schools.

A briefing document stamped “Secret” noted “increased communication between protest groups using the Internet” but not a “significant connection between incidents,” such as “reoccurring instigators” or “vehicle descriptions,” NBC said.

The report indicates that information is being gathered about people who attended the meetings and the vehicles they used, a military analyst told NBC. ….

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/Pentagon Domestic Spying/Washington Post/Washington/DC/USA/14-Dec-05/… on one such report, the monitoring of an anti-war Quaker meeting in Lake Worth, Florida by the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group (that, according to the database). The database categorizes the meeting, which was to plan a protest at a military recruitment station, as a "threat." ...

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/MILITARY RECRUITING PROCESS/Willimantic Chronicle/Willmantic/CT/USA/14-Dec-05/The Peace Center of the Storrs Friends Meeting (Quaker) sponsors an information session about the military recruitment process at the Friends Meeting House ...

War/Protest/Civil Rights/Anti-war rally on threat list/Fayetteville Online/Fayetteville/AR/USA/14-Dec-05/… Chuck Fager, head of the Quaker House in Fayetteville, said the report is reminiscent of the government’s surveillance of the group’s anti-war efforts during Vietnam. Agents infiltrated the Quaker House meetings and kept track of who came and went. During that period, the Quaker House was destroyed in an unexplained fire.

“Having the military doing police work domestically is a major step away from civilian rule and anything we think of as a free society,” Fager said. ...

War/Protest/Counter Recruiting/Civil Rights/Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?/MSNBC/Washington/DC/USA/13-Dec-05/…. WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project. ….