The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (44 page)

North’s contingency plan was to be part of an executive order or legislative package that Reagan would sign but hold secretly within the NSC until such time as a crisis arose. It was never revealed whether Reagan had signed the plan.

When Bush took office, sealed Reagan’s records from the public, and moved to create the Homeland Security Department, former Nixon counselor John Dean warned that America was sliding into a “constitutional dictatorship” and martial law. Further concerns were voiced by Timothy H. Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. In testimony to various congressional committees, Edgar noted that the Homeland Security Department would have substantial powers and more armed federal agents with arrest authority than any other government agency. He questioned whether the new department would have structural and legal safeguards to keep it open and accountable to the public. “Unfortunately, legislation [to create the Homeland Security Department] not only fails to provide such safeguards, it eviscerates many of the safeguards that are available throughout the government and have worked well to safeguard the public interest,” stated Edgar.

He then enumerated problem areas within the proposed Homeland Security Department, saying it undermines the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by allowing the various agencies to decide on their own which documents should be made public, and it limits citizen input by exempting advisory committees to Homeland Security from the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). Passed in 1972, FACA was designed to ensure openness, accountability, and the balance of viewpoints in government advisory groups. Edgar also argued that, by allowing the secretary of Homeland Security to make his own personnel rules, the Homeland Security Department would silence whistle-blowers protected under the federal Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA). Last, the HSD might threaten personal privacy and constitutional freedoms because the vague wording in the Homeland Security Act does not provide sufficient guarantees.

The ACLU counsel was also hugely concerned by plans to combine the CIA and the FBI under Homeland Security. “The CIA and other agencies that gather foreign intelligence abroad operate in the largely lawless environment,” noted Edgar. “To bring these agencies into the same organization as the FBI risks further damage to Americans’ civil liberties.”

Edgar added, “No one wants a repeat of the J. Edgar Hoover era, when the FBI [under the infamous COINTELPRO] was used to collect information about and disrupt the activities of civil rights leaders and others whose ideas Hoover disdained. Moreover, during the Clinton Administration, the ‘Filegate’ matter involving the improper transfer of sensitive information from FBI background checks of prominent Republicans to the White House generated enormous public concern that private security-related information was being used for political purposes. Congress should not provide a future Administration with the temptation to use information available in Homeland Security Department files to the detriment of its political enemies.”

NO-FLY LIST

I
NFORMATION ABOUT
H
OMELAND
S
ECURITY
’s information databases became public when news spread about its “no-fly” lists of people suspected of terrorist connections. By early 2006, this list included 325,000 names, compiled from more than twenty-six terrorism-related databases from the intelligence and law enforcement communities.

“We have lists that are having baby lists at this point,” commented Timothy Sparapani, a former legislative attorney for privacy rights at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If we have over 300,000 known terrorists who want to do this country harm, we’ve got a bigger problem than deciding which names go on which list. But I highly doubt this is the case.”

In early 2006, Alberto Gonzales, then attorney general, tried to assure members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that “information is collected, information is retained and information is disseminated in a way to protect the privacy interests of all Americans.”

But Gonzales had a hard time convincing the late senator Edward Kennedy, a committee member who was prevented from flying five times in March 2004 because a “T. Kennedy” appeared on the DHS’s no-fly list. In Washington, Boston, and other cities, airline employees refused to issue Kennedy a boarding pass because his name was on the no-fly list. Kennedy was delayed multiple times until supervisors were called and approved his travel. Even after supposedly clearing up the mistake in names, Kennedy was stopped again from flying in 2004, mostly at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Banned from flying, even in his own hometown, prompted a personal telephone apology from Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.

“That a clerical error could lend one of the most powerful people in Washington to the list—it makes one wonder just how many others who are not terrorists are on the list,” commented senior ACLU counsel Reginald T. Shuford. “Someone of Senator Kennedy’s stature can simply call a friend to have his name removed but a regular American citizen does not have that ability. He had to call three times himself.”

Alarmingly, Timothy Edgar’s fears that the lists will be used for political vengeance may already be realized. Arizona state treasurer Dean Martin told a local TV journalist that in 2009 his name suddenly appeared on the government’s no-fly list after former Arizona governor Janet Napolitano became head of the DHS. Martin claims the blacklisting may be based on his past political rivalry with Napolitano. “My staff used to joke after my disagreements with the previous governor that I wouldn’t be able to fly once she got back in D.C.,” Martin said. “I didn’t believe them, but it’s actually happening.”

Another incident involved Dr. Robert Johnson, a heart surgeon in up-state New York and a retired lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve who had served during the time of the first Gulf War. In early 2006 when he arrived at a Syracuse airport for a flight, he was barred and told he was on the federal no-fly list as a possible terror suspect.

“Why would a former lieutenant colonel who swore an oath to defend and protect our country pose a threat of terrorism?” Johnson asked a local newspaper. Johnson speculated that he was placed on the list because in 2004, as a Democrat, he had challenged Republican representative John McHugh for his Twenty-third District congressional seat. The colonel also had been an outspoken critic of the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Like many other citizens who find themselves on the no-fly list, Johnson is demanding answers as to who decides which name goes on the list and how someone like him can get off. By 2010, the TSA’s Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the intelligence community’s central repository of information on known and suspected international terrorists, had grown to more than a half-million persons. But that was not the worst of it.

On Christmas Day 2009, a twenty-three-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, allegedly tried to set off explosive powder hidden in his undergarments aboard Northwest Flight 253, becoming known as “the underwear bomber.” It was big news at the time, but after more facts about the event surfaced, the whole episode began to accrue a nasty smell.

Other passengers told how Abdulmutallab was escorted by a well-dressed man who talked his way past airline employees despite the fact that Abdulmutallab had only carry-on bags and had paid cash for the transatlantic flight to Detroit. Additionally, Abdulmutallab’s father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, former chairman of First Bank Nigeria and a former Nigerian minister, had reported his son’s militant activities to the U.S. embassy and Nigerian security agencies six months before the incident. Then, during a January 2010 session of the House Committee on Homeland Security, it was found that U.S. intelligence agencies had prevented the State Department from revoking Abdulmutallab’s U.S. visa, a move that would have prevented him from boarding the plane. Patrick F. Kennedy, an under secretary for management at the State Department, said intelligence officials asked his agency not to deny a visa to the suspected terrorist because they felt it might have hampered an investigation into al Qaeda. Others saw the action as evidence that elements within intelligence agencies had paved the way for Abdulmutallab. Another problem for this story was that reports stated Abdulmutallab had attempted to ignite pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN), an explosive used by the U.S. military. Persons familiar with PETN said a blasting cap, not simple fire from a match or lighter, is required to detonate PETN. No blasting caps or primers were found on Abdulmutallab, and the chemicals he carried were inadequate to generate an explosion, leading conspiracy researchers to suspect that the whole episode was another false-flag attack, one engineered to cast blame on others rather than the real culprits. But what could have been the purpose?

It is possible that Congress needed the new terrorist scare to coincide with a debate over rescinding some PATRIOT Act measures. After all, the measures were continued. Also, following the terrorist scare, existing plans to equip major airports with full-body scanning devices went into high gear alongside a public relations blitz by former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, cofounder of the Chertoff Group, a security and risk-management firm whose clients include Rapiscan Systems, a manufacturer of the body-imaging screening machines, 150 of which were purchased by the TSA for $25 million in early 2010.

“Mr. Chertoff should not be allowed to abuse the trust the public has placed in him as a former public servant to privately gain from the sale of full-body scanners under the pretense that the scanners would have detected this particular type of explosive [PETN],” said Kate Hanni, a founder of FlyersRights.org, an airport passengers’ rights group opposed to the use of the full-body scanners. In January 2010, about forty body scanners were in use at nineteen U.S. airports. This number was expected to climb to more than three hundred machines by the end of that year, mostly due to the publicity over the Christmas Day incident. Despite Chertoff’s claim that scanners could have detected PETN, Ben Wallace, a member of Parliament who formerly had worked on developing such scanners for airport use, told newsmen that trials had shown such low-density materials as PETN would not show up on scanners anyway. Wallace said scanners picked up shrapnel, heavy wax, and metal, but the scanners missed plastic, chemicals, and liquids.

PEEPING TSA

O
THER CONCERNS OVER THE
full-body scanners involved health and privacy. The terahertz radiation waves used in body scanners penetrate nonconducting material like clothing, but also deposit energy in the human body. Boian Alexandrov, heading a team of researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, announced they found that the terahertz radiation used in the full-body scanners damages human DNA. “Based on our results, we argue that a specific terahertz radiation exposure may significantly affect the natural dynamics of DNA, and thereby influence intricate molecular processes involved in gene expression and DNA replication,” they reported. The team said that while terahertz produces only tiny resonant effects, it nevertheless allows terahertz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that may significantly interfere with normal processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. Such subtle changes may explain why evidence of damage has been so hard to find. According to Alexandrov’s team, ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do this kind of DNA damage but nonlinear resonances can.

Not only is health a concern, but so is privacy. Many privacy advocates claim the TSA was not being truthful when its officials said that scanning machines cannot clearly show an individual’s genitalia and, certainly in all media stories on the machine, one can only see blurry outlines of the body. However, alternative media such as PrisonPlanet.com exposed the TSA statement as untrue when it quoted Melbourne Airport’s Office of Transport Security manager Cheryl Johnson, who admitted, “It is possible to see genitals and breasts while they’re going through the machine…. It will show the private parts of people, but what we’ve decided is that we’re not going to blur those out, because it severely limits the detection capabilities.”

In England, where full-body scanning has been declared mandatory (although it violates U.K. child pornography laws against the depiction of the genitals of underage children), opponents have declared the images so graphic that they amount to “virtual strip-searching.” They called for more safeguards to protect passengers’ privacy.

Paul Joseph Watson, a reporter for PrisonPlanet.com, said examples sent in by the website’s readers confirmed that by simply inverting some of the pictures produced by body scanners, one can create a near-perfect replica of a naked body in full color. The inverting process, available in most image editing software, simply changes an indistinct negative image to a clear positive one. “Airport screeners will have access to huge HIGH DEFINITION [original emphasis] images that, once inverted, will allow them to see every minute detail of your body,” noted Watson.

While TSA officials tried to assure the public that flyers’ naked images will not be saved, printed, or transmitted, government documents obtained by the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) told a different story. The documents showed that the TSA specifies that body scanners must have the ability to store and send images when in “test mode.” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg said such a requirement makes it possible for the machines to be abused by TSA insiders and even hacked by outsiders. “I don’t think the TSA has been forthcoming with the American public about the true capability of these devices,” said Rotenberg. “They’ve done a bunch of very slick promotions where they show people—including journalists—going through the devices. And then they reassure people, based on the images that have been produced, that there’s not any privacy concerns. But if you look at the actual technical specifications and you read the vendor contracts, you come to understand that these machines are capable of doing far more than the TSA has let on.”