The Last Roundup: Is the Government Compiling a Secret List of Citizens to Detain Under Martial Law?
by Christopher Ketcham
ARE YOU ON THE LIST?
The federal government has been developing a highly classified plan that will override the Constitution in the event of a major terrorist attack.
In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present.
The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command
at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a
loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years.
Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he
described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush
administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs.
Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't
allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however,
that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to
decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the
certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making
Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the
program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's
men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in
an undisclosed location.
The Continuity of Governance program
encompasses national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of
the country by extra-constitutional forces. In short, it's a road map
for martial lawComey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to
a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's
authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive
care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery.
Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House
tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man,"
sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and thenWhite House counsel Alberto
Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily
doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their
mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his
car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and
"literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there.
Minutes
later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the
requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their
heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's
men. "There" he pointed weakly to Comey "is the attorney general."
Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging
Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified
domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at
the demand of the White House"without a signature from the Department
of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified.
What
was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs
buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the
program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't
help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy
constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back
from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a
token concession?
Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the
New York Times reported a tantalizing detail:
- The program that prompted
him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive
electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It
is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining,
raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded.
ONE
NATION, UNDER SURVEILLANCE James Comey testifies before the Senate
Judiciary Committee
Another clue came from a
rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation
from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's
warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that
the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of
planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."
Few Americansprofessional journalists includedknow anything about
so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise
that the president's passing reference received almost no attention.
COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency
plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by
extra-constitutional forcesand effectively suspend the republic. In
short, it's a road map for martial law.
While Comey, who left
the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment
further on the matter, a number of former government employees and
intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic
surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between
Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who
might be considered potential threats in the event of a national
emergency.
Sources familiar with the program say that the government's
data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation
of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure
guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.
According to a senior
government official who served with high-level security clearances in
five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often
for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly,
and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated.
The database can
identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost
instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is
sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core.
One knowledgeable
source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as
potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people
could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and
tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.
DESPERATE
TIMES Should another 9/11 occur, Continuity of Governance plans
developed during the Cold War go into effect
Of
course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a
"national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three
decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or]
technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense
documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence,
insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder
prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report,
even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a
trigger.
Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated
bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blastsay, a
suitcase nukein New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead.
Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the
president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during
the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect.
Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground
complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and
Pennsylvania.
Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of
scores of secretly pre-selected officials. (As far back as the 1980s,
Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney,
then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions
during a declared emergency.)
The executive branch is the sole and
absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated
to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of
hours, a police state.
In case of a wide-scale attack, the
executive branch becomes the sole and absolute seat of authority. The
country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police stateInterestingly,
plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel
government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal
Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that
recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate
hurricane victims.
The agency's incompetence in tackling natural
disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its
inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the
survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating
nuclear strike.
Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA
and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would
be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of
transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military
commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the
arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as
long as the acting government deems necessary.
From the comfortable
perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem
far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000
Japanese Americanseveryone from infants to the elderlybe held in
detention camps for the duration of World War II.
This is widely
regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a
long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of
large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal
authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a
paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding
up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held
at "assembly centers or relocation camps."
In the late 1980s, the
Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence
of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where
hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic
political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006,
when Kellogg Brown & Rootthen a subsidiary of Halliburtonwas
handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and
processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security.
The
contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be
used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid
development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be
is not specified.
In the days
after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this:
With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake
unprecedented actions in the name of public safety.
Officials at the
Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people
whofor a tremendously broad set of reasonshave been flagged in Main
Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might
receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with
local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find
police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities
might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and
escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained
without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect.
It
is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst.
But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively
unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching
surveillance stateas seems to be the case with Main Coreeven sober
observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the
federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any
outside threat.
Another well-informed sourcea former military
operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence
communitysays this particular program has roots going back at least to
the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence
Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes
predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of
associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence
modeling tools.
- "The more data you have on a particular
target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do,
where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main
Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the
U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets."
An intelligence
expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of
Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but
adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous
other agency databases at the same time."
CROWD
CONTROL New Yorkers walk home on the afternoon of the September 11
attacks (Photo: Getty Images) A host of publicly disclosed programs,
sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA
domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11,
typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping."
In
March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further
light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts:
According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor
"huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as
well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone
records."
Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift
through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the
program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's
notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main
Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection
of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the
Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials.
- "Many of the programs in
various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since
been given greater reach."
- "We're at the edge of a cliff," says
Bruce Fein, a top justice official in the Reagan administration. "To a
national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to
stability"
The following information seems to be fair game for
collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and
receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone
numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the
durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords
in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy;
the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and
services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is
archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also
fed into the Main Core database.
Main Core also allegedly draws
on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and
local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial
records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector
entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the
Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists
from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by
airlines, law enforcement, and border posts.
According to the
Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size
between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's
Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000
persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA
officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes
Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance
program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program
that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and
environmental activists such as Greenpeace.
HERE'S
LOOKING AT YOU From your late-night e-mails and travel plans to phone
records and financial transactions, the government finds you
fascinatingand may consider you a potential enemy of the state
If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any
indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of
various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors,
publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign
nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.
A
veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level
clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the
field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital
room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database
was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted
U.S. citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically
familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of
Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be."
A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community
adds:
- "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to
use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government
database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic
intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core'
database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic
surveillance project."
If Main Core does exist, says Philip
Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic
of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely
home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a
place where there are no legal issues"the CIA and FBI would be
restricted by oversight and accountability laws" so I suspect it is at
DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi
notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists
and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to
domestic security.
- "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling
and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the
criteria for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I
am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would
not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many
reasonsquite likely including the two of us."
UNDER
REAGAN In the 1980s, control of the FBI's "security index" was
reportedly transferred to none other than FEMA
Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar
Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under
Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a
national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these
powers"the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up
detention lists, for example"if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit
it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and
Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to
contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs
in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no
notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if
Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president
says it iseven in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and
invariably rule in his own favor."
Compared to PROMIS, Richard
Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright
crudeThe veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion
that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be
misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National
Intelligence Finding anyway."
But even if we never face a
national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of
concern. "The capacity for future use of this information against the
American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable," the
senior government official says.
In any case, mass watch lists of
domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff
Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining,
contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies.
"Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas
tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions."
The
overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in
postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously
paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities,
and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding
"security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to
the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain
emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention
camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a
congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious
persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union
organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the
mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially
influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who
could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed
"subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly
maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly
transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI
denied this at the time).
FEMA, howeverthen known as the
Federal Preparedness Agencyalready had its own domestic surveillance
system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V.
Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion
Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the
film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic
dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information
gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was
located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near
the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed
in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that
the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of]
information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the
data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"a reference to
other classified facilities.
According to the Progressive, Mount
Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or
regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the
leaders of the House and the Senate." JUST IN CASE The
Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist Oliver North had
spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan"
Ten years later, a new round of government martial law
plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan
loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had
spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"code-named
REX 84which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning
control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of
military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan
also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal
aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10
military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.
North's
program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack
Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra
hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in
Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same
agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks
said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the
area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman
of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his
colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and
classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir."
Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not
allowed to proceed.
Wired magazine turned up additional damaging
information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure
White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called
PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a
strange and controversial history, was designed to track
individualsprisoners, for exampleby pulling together information from
disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using
the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and
potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS,
Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look
downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government
databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still
have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his
programs.
In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs
of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the
intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What
is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have
been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level
official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law
blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they
implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress
has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.
Japanese Americans moved to internment camps in World War II In
July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a
Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security
Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush
administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest
was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known
as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive
branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national
emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found
this unnerving.
But he and other leaders of the Homeland
Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi
Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government
classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been
ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August,
DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of
Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around
the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think
there's a conspiracy out there are right."
None of the leading
presidential candidates have been asked the question, "As president,
will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein
of the Bush administration?"Congress itself has recently widened the
path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and
the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The
Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus
and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an
"enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of
Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed
in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces
in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S.
military units not just to put down domestic insurrectionsas permitted
under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807but also to deal
with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic,
or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or
incident."
More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding
for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to
Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for
emergency military operations in the United States without civilian
supervision or control."
- "We are at the edge of a cliff and
we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan
administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner,
everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that
Congress would have the authority to denounce all thisfor example, to
refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S.
citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is
the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same
old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a
Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship
and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept
certain risks that tyrannies do not.'"
CREDIBLE WITNESS:
James Comey
As of this writing, DeFazio,
Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the
so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the
Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S.
citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom
giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of
Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The
Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be
unconstitutional.
Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's
testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None
of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions
that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As
president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs
in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG
blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed
to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the
U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic
surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and
Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying
technology deployed against every act of political expression, private
or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain,
Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any
responses.)
These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of
Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations
into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms
now being eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence
community has given the government could enable it to impose total
tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to
fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in
resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is
within the reach of the government to know."
UPDATE: Since
this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest
the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these
is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the
extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during
domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John
Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the Fourth
Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." (Yoo, as
most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in
bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture to allow
pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo
refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for Use of
Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United
States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic
military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal
documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security
Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General John Mukasey
last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was
still in force.
Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar
that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to
get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny
Dodge, DeFazio's chief of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a
letter requesting a classified briefing soon," she told Radar this
week.
This article is from the May/June issue of Radar Magazine.
Christopher
Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other
publications. He splits his time between Utah and Brooklyn, NY.
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