Thread: As post-9/11 program grew, info on Americans, not terrorists was collected; Price tag

As post-9/11 program grew, info on Americans, not terrorists was collected; Price tag huge


d October 02, 2012

WASHINGTON – A multibillion-dollar information-sharing program created in the aftermath of 9/11 has improperly collected information about innocent Americans and produced little valuable intelligence on terrorism, a Senate report concludes. It portrays an effort that ballooned far beyond anyone's ability to control.

What began as an attempt to put local, state and federal officials in the same room analyzing the same intelligence has instead cost huge amounts of money for data-mining software, flat screen televisions and, in Arizona, two fully equipped Chevrolet Tahoes that are used for commuting, investigators found.

The lengthy, bipartisan report is a scathing evaluation of what the Department of Homeland Security has held up as a crown jewel of its security efforts. The report underscores a reality of post-9/11 Washington: National security programs tend to grow, never shrink, even when their money and manpower far surpass the actual subject of terrorism. Much of this money went for ordinary local crime-fighting.

Disagreeing with the critical conclusions of the report, Homeland Security says it is outdated, inaccurate and too focused on information produced by the program, ignoring benefits to local governments from their involvement with federal intelligence officials.

Because of a convoluted grants process set up by Congress, Homeland Security officials don't know how much they have spent in their decade-long effort to set up so-called fusion centers in every state. Government estimates range from less than $300 million to $1.4 billion in federal money, plus much more invested by state and local governments. Federal funding is pegged at about 20 percent to 30 percent.

Despite that, Congress is unlikely to pull the plug. That's because, whether or not it stops terrorists, the program means politically important money for state and local governments.

A Senate Homeland Security subcommittee reviewed more than 600 unclassified reports over a one-year period and concluded that most had nothing to do with terrorism. The panel's chairman is Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

"The subcommittee investigation could identify no reporting which uncovered a terrorist threat, nor could it identify a contribution such fusion center reporting made to disrupt an active terrorist plot," the report said.

When fusion centers did address terrorism, they sometimes did so in ways that infringed on civil liberties. The centers have made headlines for circulating information about Ron Paul supporters, the ACLU, activists on both sides of the abortion debate, war protesters and advocates of gun rights.

One fusion center cited in the Senate investigation wrote a report about a Muslim community group's list of book recommendations. Others discussed American citizens speaking at mosques or talking to Muslim groups about parenting.

No evidence of criminal activity was contained in those reports. The government did not circulate them, but it kept them on government computers. The federal government is prohibited from storing information about First Amendment activities not related to crimes.

"It was not clear why, if DHS had determined that the reports were improper to disseminate, the reports were proper to store indefinitely," the report said.

Homeland Security Department spokesman Matthew Chandler called the report "out of date, inaccurate and misleading." He said that it focused entirely on information being produced by fusion centers and did not consider the benefit the involved officials got receiving intelligence from the federal government.

The report is as much an indictment of Congress as it is the Homeland Security Department. In setting up the department, lawmakers wanted their states to decide what to spend the money on. Time and again, that setup has meant the federal government has no way to know how its security money is being spent.

Inside Homeland Security, officials have long known there were problems with the reports coming out of fusion centers, the report shows.

"You would have some guys, the information you'd see from them, you'd scratch your head and say, 'What planet are you from?'" an unidentified Homeland Security official told Congress.

Until this year, the federal reports officers received five days of training and were never tested or graded afterward, the report said.

States have had criminal analysis centers for years. But the story of fusion centers began in the frenzied aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The 9/11 Commission urged better collaboration among government agencies. As officials realized that a terrorism tip was as likely to come from a local police officer as the CIA, fusion centers became a hot topic.

But putting people together to share intelligence proved complicated. Special phone and computer lines had to be installed. The people reading the reports needed background checks. Some information could only be read in secure areas, which meant construction projects.

All of that cost money.

Meanwhile, federal intelligence agencies were under orders from Congress to hire more analysts. That meant state and local agencies had to compete for smart counterterrorism thinkers. And federal training for local analysts wasn't an early priority.

Though fusion centers receive money from the federal government, they are operated independently. Counterterrorism money started flowing to states in 2003. But it wasn't until late 2007 that the Bush administration told states how to run the centers.
State officials soon realized there simply wasn't that much local terrorism-related intelligence. Terrorist attacks didn't happen often, but police faced drugs, guns and violent crime every day. Normal criminal information started moving through fusion centers.

Under federal law, that was fine. When lawmakers enacted recommendations of the 9/11 Commission in 2007, they allowed fusion centers to study "criminal or terrorist activity." The law was co-sponsored by Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Lieberman, the driving forces behind the creation of Homeland Security.

Five years later, Senate investigators found, terrorism is often a secondary focus.

"Many fusion centers lacked either the capability or stated objective of contributing meaningfully to the federal counterterrorism mission," the Senate report said. "Many centers didn't consider counterterrorism an explicit part of their mission, and federal officials said some were simply not concerned with doing counterterrorism work."

When Janet Napolitano became Homeland Security secretary in 2009, the former Arizona governor embraced the idea that fusion centers should look beyond terrorism. Testifying before Congress that year, she distinguished fusion centers from the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces that are the leading investigative and analytical arms of the domestic counterterrorism effort.

"A JTTF is really focused on terrorism and terrorism-related investigations," she said. "Fusion centers are almost everything else."

Congress, including the committee that authored the report, supports that notion. And though the report recommends the Senate reconsider the amount of money it spends on fusion centers, that seems unlikely.

"Congress and two administrations have urged DHS to continue or even expand its support of fusion centers, without providing sufficient oversight to ensure the intelligence from fusion centers is commensurate with the level of federal investment," the report said.
And following the release of the report, Homeland Security officials indicated their continued strong support for the program.


Read more: As post-9/11 program grew, info on Americans, not terrorists was collected; Price tag huge | Fox News

By Michael Isikoff
NBC News

The Department of Homeland Security has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a network of 77 so-called “fusion” intelligence centers that have collected personal information on some U.S. citizens — including detailing the “reading habits” of American Muslims — while producing “shoddy” reports and making no contribution to thwarting any terrorist plots, a new Senate report states.

The “ fusion centers,” created under President George W. Bush and expanded under President Barack Obama, consist of special teams of federal , state and local officials collecting and analyzing intelligence on suspicious activities throughout the country. They have been hailed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano as “one of the centerpieces” of the nation’s counterterrorism efforts.

But a bipartisan report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released Tuesday concludes that the centers “often produced irrelevant” and "useless” intelligence reports. “There were times when it was, ‘What a bunch of crap is coming through,’” one senior Homeland Security official is quoted as saying .

A spokesman for Napolitano immediately blasted the report as “out of date, inaccurate and misleading.” Another Homeland Security official, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, said the department has made improvements to the fusion centers and that the skills of officials working in them are “evolving and maturing.”

While dismissing the value of much of the fusion centers’ work, the Senate panel found evidence of what it called “troubling” reports by some centers that may have violated the civil liberties and privacy of U.S. citizens. The evidence cited in the report could fuel a continuing controversy over claims that the FBI and some local police departments, notably New York City’s, have spied on American Muslims without a justifiable law enforcement reason for doing so. Among the examples in the report:

One fusion center drafted a report on a list of reading suggestions prepared by a Muslim community group, titled “Ten Book Recommendations for Every Muslim.” The report noted that four of the authors were listed in a terrorism database, but a Homeland Security reviewer in Washington chastised the fusion center, saying, “We cannot report on books and other writings” simply because the authors are in a terrorism database. “The writings themselves are protected by the First Amendment unless you can establish that something in the writing indicates planning or advocates violent or other criminal activity.”

• A fusion center in California prepared a report about a speaker at a Muslim center in Santa Cruz who was giving a daylong motivational talk—and a lecture on “positive parenting.” No link to terrorism was alleged.
• Another fusion center drafted a report on a U.S. citizen speaking at a local mosque that speculated that -- since the speaker had been listed in a terrorism data base — he may have been attempting “to conduct fundraising and recruiting” for a foreign terrorist group.

“The number of things that scare me about this report are almost too many to write into this (form),” a Homeland Security reviewer wrote after analyzing the report. The reviewer noted that “the nature of this event is constitutionally protected activity (public speaking, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion.)”

The Senate panel found 40 reports -- including the three listed above -- that were drafted at fusion centers by Homeland Security officials, then later “nixed” by officials in Washington after reviewers “raised concerns the documents potentially endangered the civil liberties or legal privacy protections of the U.S. persons they mentioned.” Despite being scrapped, however, the Senate report concluded that “these reports should not have been drafted at all.” It also noted that the reports were stored at Homeland Security headquarters in Washington, D.C., for a year or more after they had been canceled —a potential violation of the U.S. Privacy Act, which prohibits federal agencies from storing information on U.S. citizens’ First Amendment-protected activities if there is no valid reason to do so.

The report said the retention of these reports also appears to contradict Homeland Security’s own guidelines, which state that once a determination is made that a document should not be retained, “The U.S person identifying information is to be destroyed immediately.”


The investigation was led by the Republican staff of the subcommittee but the 107-page report was approved by chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich and ranking minority Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. It stated that much basic information about the fusion centers – including exactly how much they cost the federal government — was difficult to obtain. Although the fusion centers are overseen by Homeland Security, they are funded primarily through grants to local governments by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Although Homeland Security “was unable to provide an accurate tally,” the panel estimated the federal dollars spent on the centers between 2003 and 2011 at between $289 million and $1.4 billion.


The panel’s criticism of the fusion centers was shared in part by Michael Leiter, the former director of the National National Counter-Terrorism Center and now an NBC analyst. “Since 9/11, the growth of state and local fusion centers has been exponential and regrettably in many instances it has produced an ill-planned mishmash rather than a true national system that is well-integrated with existing organizations like the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces,” Leiter wrote in an email when asked about the report.


In its response to the Senate panel , Homeland Security said that the canceled reports could still be retained “for administrative purposes such as audit and oversight.”
The report cited multiple examples of what it called fusion center reports that had little if any value to counterterrorism efforts.
One fusion center report cited described how a certain model car had folding rear seats to the trunk, a feature that it said could be useful to human traffickers. This prompted a Homeland Security reviewer to note that such folding rear seats are “featured on MANY different makes and model of vehicles” and “there is nothing of any intelligence value in this report.”


Another fusion center report, entitled “Possible Drug Smuggling Activity,” recounted the experiences of two state wildlife officials who spotted a pair of men in a bass boat “operating suspiciously” in the body of water off the U.S.-Mexico border. The report noted that the fishermen “avoided eye contact” and that their boat appeared to be low in the water, “as if it were laden with cargo” with high winds and choppy waters.“The fact that some guys were hanging out in a boat where people normally do not fish MIGHT be an indicator of something abnormal, but does not reach the threshold of something we should be reporting,” a Homeland Security reviewer wrote, according to the Senate panel. “I … think that this should never have been nominated for production, nor passed through three reviews.”

In the Homeland Security Department’s response, spokesman Matt Chandler said the Senate subcommittee “refused to review relevant data, including important intelligence information pertinent to their findings.”

The senior Homeland Security official who spoke to NBC News said that, while the Senate panel reviewed fusion center reports from 2009 and 2010, a more recent June 2011 case in Seattle shows that a fusion center played a key role in helping to thwart a terrorist plot against a local U.S. military processing center.

Chandler added: “The (Senate) report fundamentally misunderstands the role of the federal government in supporting fusion centers and overlooks the significant benefits of this relationship to both state and local law enforcement and the federal government. Among other benefits, fusion centers play a key role by receiving classified and unclassified information from the federal government and assessing its local implications, helping law enforcement on the frontlines better protect their communities from all threats, whether it is terrorism or other criminal activities.”

Homeland Security 'fusion' centers spy on citizens, produce 'shoddy' work, report says - Open Channel

EVERYTHING WILL BE UNDER CONTROL - TOTAL CONTROL

That's called an Oligarchy, and it encompasses both democrats and republicans.
They simply legislate themselves more power as the traffic will bear (and citizens will overlook without revolting against it). Hunter: MCA/NDAA supporter.


The Signing of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2007

The above letter was written during Clinton's Presidency.

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001
Bill Clinton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Originally Posted by Newmexican

The above letter was written during Clinton's Presidency.

William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001
Bill Clinton - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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TWO 'ACTS' OF TYRANNY ON THE SAME DAY!
By Daneen G. Peterson, Ph.D.
December 7, 2006
Latest Update September 21, 2008
On October 17, 2006, 'a date which will live in infamy' . . . there were two acts of tyranny committed. The first was a public signing of the 'Military Commissions Act of 2006' which suspended habeas corpus allowing the president to declare you an 'enemy combatant' and end your rights to seek legal or judicial relief from unlawful imprisonment.

The second act of tyranny took place in a private Oval Office ceremony, in which the president signed into law the 'John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2007' which essentially eliminates the protections of the Posse Comitatus Act and re-wrote the Insurrection Act. The NDAA will allow the president to declare a 'public emergency' and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to 'suppress public disorder'!

About The Military Commissions Act of 2006 . . .

"A writ of habeas corpus which is Latin for 'you have the body' [as proof] is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody."(1)

"The writ of habeas corpus serves as an important check on the manner in which state courts pay respect to federal constitutional rights. The writ is 'the fundamental instrument for safeguarding individual freedom against arbitrary and lawless state action'."(1)



The Signing of the Military Commissions Act (MCA) of 2006
Expressing the pessimist's view was law professor Jonathan Turley who wrote: "The Congress just gave the president despotic powers and you could hear a yawn across the country [. . . ] People clearly don't realize what a fundamental change it is about who we are as a country. What happened today changed us. And I'm not too sure we're going to change back anytime soon."(2)

Turley also said that: "What, really, a time of shame this is for the American system. What the Congress did and what the president signed today essentially revokes over 200 years of American principles and values."(3)

You can watch this MSNBC video where Keith Olbermann and guest Jonathon Turley, Constitutional Law professor at George Washington University discuss the Military Commissions Act here.

About the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2007 . . .

The NDAA essentially eliminated the Posse Comitatus Act and re-wrote the Insurrection Act so that the president can declare a 'public emergency' and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to 'suppress public disorder'!

"The historic and ominous re-writing of the Insurrection Act, accomplished in the dead of night, which gives Bush the legal authority to declare martial law, is now an accomplished fact."(4)

"In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States. The Insurrection Act (10 U.S.C.331 -335) has historically, along with the Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C.1385), helped to enforce strict prohibitions on military involvement in domestic law enforcement. With one cloaked swipe of his pen, Bush is seeking to undo those prohibitions."(4)


The Signing of the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) of 2007
What 'Rights' Have Been Taken From You?

"On September 28, by a vote of 65-34, the Senate formally passed S. 3930, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA). The next day, the House of Representatives followed suit, passing the act by a vote of 250-170, . . . [whereby] "alien unlawful enemy combatants ... [to be] subject to trial by military commissions" without the constitutional safeguards American citizens possess against illegal detainment and judicial railroading."(5)

As far as an American citizen is concerned the definition of the term 'unlawful enemy combatant' has ominous import for them. The law states the following:

"(1) UNLAWFUL ENEMY COMBATANT - (A) The term 'unlawful enemy combatant' means--"(6)

• "(i) a person who has engaged in hostilities or who has purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its co-belligerents who is not a lawful enemy combatant (including a person who is part of the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or associated forces); or "(6)
  
  "(ii) a person who, before, on, or after the date of the enactment of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the president or the secretary of defense ."(6)

"Notice that this definition contains no exception for Americans; it throws the blanket over citizen and alien alike by using the word 'person' rather than 'alien'."(5)

All Americans should know that the suspension of the 'writ of habeas corpus' by the 'Military Commissions Act of 2006' is a violation of Article 1, Section 9 of the U. S.Constitution which states: "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

Gonzales: ‘There Is No Express Grant of Habeas Corpus In The Constitution’



Yesterday, [1/18/07] during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales . . . was debating Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) about whether the Supreme Court’s ruling on Guantanamo detainees last year cited the constitutional right to habeas corpus. Gonzales claimed the Court did not cite such a right, [Specter disagreed] then [Gonzales] added, “There is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.”

Specter pushed back. “Wait a minute. The constitution says you can’t take it away, except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Doesn’t that mean you have the right of habeas corpus, unless there is an invasion or rebellion?”



Ominously, the full text of the 'Military Commissions Act of 2006' was published by the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations). The fact that the CFR published the 'Act' would appear to be prima facie evidence of the Shadow Government's support for its genesis!(6)

The Center for Constitutional Rights commented that the: "Congress is now rubber-stamping a bill that was written by the President which gives the President expansive power to detain without judicial oversight. If the Military Commissions Act is passed, it will grant the President the privilege of kings, allowing him to imprison any critics as alleged ‘enemy combatants,’ never to see the inside of a court room or to have the chance to challenge their detention or their treatment. What would we say if another country passed a law making it legal to snatch U.S. citizens and detain them indefinitely?”(7)

Sadly, the American Forces Press Service, propagandized the signing by utilizing the most common form of deception . . . omission. Read how they announced the signing but uttered not one peep about the potentially devastating future it has unleashed.(

TWO 'ACTS' OF TYRANNY ON THE SAME DAY!