The DefenseDepartment hasbegun looking intothe lives of ordinaryAmericans.
Military Spying On U.S. CitizensBy Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 18th, 2007The Defense Department has been exploiting a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, according to the New York Times. It is part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic spying.Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving “non-compulsory” letters seeking private information usually cooperate with the Pentagon, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American civilians and military personnel, officials say.Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials told the Times. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands though, as a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions.While many know that Bush‘s F.B.I. has issued thousands of national security letters since 9/11, it was not previously known–even to some top counterterrorism officials–that the Pentagon has been issuing “non-compulsory” versions of the letters for its own investigations.Since 2001, Congress has rejected several attempts by both the Pentagon and the C.I.A. to obtain the authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns in expanding their domestic spying role.The military has traditionally been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and is barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work.Pentagon officials insist the letters are valuable tools and say they are part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics–a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” claimed Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman, to the Times.Government lawyers further claim the legal authority for the Pentagon to use national security letters in gathering domestic records dates back nearly three decades and, by their reading, was strengthened by the Anti-Patriot Act.But the Bush Administration has become notorious for saying what it wishes was true, rather than what is actually true.“There’s a strong tradition of not using our military for domestic law enforcement,” Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, a former general counsel at both the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. and current dean of McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific, countered in an interview with the Times.“They’re moving into territory where historically they have not been authorized or presumed to be operating,” she added as an apparent correction of the Pentagon’s legal opinions.While Pentagon spokespeople rarely provide details about specific cases, knowledgeable military intelligence officials have told the New York Times that the military had issued the letters to collect financial records regarding such people as a government contractor with unexplained wealth, and a chaplain at Guantánamo Bay suspected of aiding prisoners at the facility.Perhaps tellingly, such spying usually proves to be unfounded, with the individuals later discovered innocent of their suspected crimes.Military officials admit the financial documents collected through the letters rarely reveal any links to espionage or terrorism, and have seldom led to criminal charges. Instead, they say, the letters often help eliminate suspects.“We may find out this person has unexplained wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with being a spy, in which casewe’re out of it,” said Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official.But this puts justice on its head, since the Pentagon treats suspects as guilty until proven innocent. By their own admission, they rarely find evidence of guilt; they simply investigate anyone they deem “suspicious” until that person proves their innocence. And that is a bad precedent.As national security experts and civil liberties advocates point out, the basis for who the Defense Department considers “suspicious” is not always sound. They are troubled by the military taking on domestic intelligence activities in the wake of recent disclosures that the Pentagon’s counterintelligence Field Activity office had maintained files on Iraq war protesters in the United States, in direct violation of the military’s own guidelines.There was apparently no word on how many of these Americans the Pentagon has investigated, due to the “suspicious activity” of speaking their mind.
