Posted on 01/27/2012 8:36:59 AM PST by IbJensen
Mission Creep: DHS Agency Abandons Fighting Terrorism, Shifts to Hiring Police, Taking Over America
A new white paper presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence carves out an ‘evolving mission’ for Homeland Security that moves away from fighting terrorism and towards growing a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that would expand integration with local/state agencies and private-public partnerships already underway via regional fusion centers.
Crafted by the Aspen Institute Homeland Security Group, co-chaired by former DHS chief Michael Chertoff and composed of a who’s who of national security figures, the report outlines a total mission creep, as the title “Homeland Security and Intelligence: Next Steps in Evolving the Mission” implies.
Significantly, it puts on paper and into the Congressional record a proposed transition from outwardly dealing with the threats posed by terrorism towards intelligence gathering “focused on more specific homeward-focused areas.” That is, the homegrown, domestic threats we’ve heard so much about from Big Sis already.
In short, it confirms the intentions of key insiders– including former NSA/CIA head Michael Hayden, former Rep. Jane Harmon, former Secretary of State Madeline Albright, 9/11 Commissioners Philip Zelikow and Richard Ben-Viniste, former National Security Advisor Samuel Berger and others– to flesh out a plan we have already seen developing from an outside perspective– namely, to build a domestic Stasi-like force to takeover, monitor and control the population.
Moreover, the media has reported on this changed mission– towards the full spectrum domination of the people under a patently-fascist framework– with the same calm as the weekly weather forecast.
LOCALIZED INTELLIGENCE: HIRING POLICE & BOWING TO PRIVATE INTERESTS
Achieving this new aim includes co-opting local law enforcement and other regional agencies.
“As the threat grows more localized,” the report reads, “the federal government’s need to train, and even staff, local agencies, such as major city police departments, will grow.”
That’s right, the feds want to oversee the hiring of your local police.
Fusion Centers, now spread across the nation, have already infected police agencies and local governments with a federalization takeover mentality. A Dec. 2010 Aspen Homeland Security Group report, quoting the Superintendent of the New Orleans Police Department, recommends that “every mayor and governor of a major city in the country should have to attend a DHS-sponsored emergency management course where various scenarios – like hurricanes, levy breaks, and explosions – are exercised.”
But directing local police departments, mayors and governors is only the beginning. Indeed, the Aspen group envisions the ‘foundation for a separate DHS intelligence mission’ by building upon ‘decentralized’ partnerships with the private sector as well.
Homeland Security Should Re-Orient Its Mission, Aspen Panel Says
The bloated umbrella agency aims to lean on its ties with the hospitality (hotel), security and transportation industries, among others, as well. Already, Homeland Security conducts background checks on many security guards working with ‘critical infrastructure,’ and clearly, it aims to expand the use of quasi-government groups like InfraGard and other private snitch networks. Ultimately, all employment would be subject to federal background checks and security clearances.
Private interests should even shape Homeland Security priorities, according to the report: “different private sectors in the United States, from the hospitality industry to transportation, should drive requirements for DHS.”
ABANDONING THE FIGHT AGAINST TERRORISM
As unbelievable as it sounds, DHS says other agencies can handle the all-encompassing threat of terrorism that was used to justify the super-agency’s own existence and powers.
Abandoning specific focus on tracking terrorist cells and organizations, DHS instead plans to shift into broad coverage of border protection, integrating travel data, cyber defense, critical infrastructure protection and other areas.
“There are enough agencies pursuing the terrorist adversary to allow DHS to build a new analytic foundation that emphasizes data, analytic questions, and customer groups that are not the focus for other agencies,” the report states.
And funding should be cut from terrorism-focused areas:
“Analysis that helps private-sector partners better understand how to mitigate threats to infrastructure, for example, should win more resourcing than a focus on all-source analysis of general threats, such as work on assessing the perpetrators of attacks. Conversely, all-source analysis of terrorist groups and general terrorist trends should remain the domain of other intelligence agencies.”
Instead, the “national security experts” who’ve brought us naked body scanners, checkpoints on highways, streets, airports, bus & train stations, and who have projected the homegrown terror threat into the theaters of private hotels, shopping malls and sports stadiums, are again expanding the bureaucratic growth of tyranny by infiltrating areas traditionally spared from federal intrusion.
A promotional article at the Homeland Security News Wire blog highlights the shift: “With a slew of intelligence agencies with similar missions safeguarding the United States, the report posits that DHS should avoid competing with other agencies and overlapping responsibilities, instead focusing on its areas of core strengths – analysis and the dissemination of critical intelligence to local law enforcement agency, the private sector, and critical infrastructure operators.”
“THE NEW, GROWING WORLD OF HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE”
Further the Aspen report recommends “an entirely new enterprise,” stating that “DHS might consider the development of a homeland security training institute.” It hails the security-complex workforce that has been fostered by Homeland Security in the decade since 9/11, now seeking to influence and train its future recruits as well.
The report verifies previous information suggesting that DHS wants to comb the American homeland with private security contractors, trained and overseen by Homeland Security– a giant army of enforcers and snitches, brainwashed by propaganda scaremongering about terrorism, who could respond to crime as a whole with an atmosphere of universal preemptive suspicion that targets anyone who appears out of place.
“Working with state/local/private sector partners to draw their intelligence capabilities into a national picture” is a stated aim of this redirection of Homeland Security’s core mission. Installing and training individual members of these partner groups- from local police departments to the eyes and ears it would tap in the security, transportation and infrastructure industries- would facilitate the kind of over-arching homeland security infrastructure the document aims to construct over society.
DOMESTIC EXTREMISM: TARGETING AMERICAN SOCIETY
Doing so would put greater emphasis on the kind of politically-slanted domestic profiling (read: “intelligence product“) that has already drawn criticism and forced the agency to disavow one of its own reports, which targeted ‘right-wing extremism’:
The numerous federal and other officials familiar with the matter Homeland Security Today interviewed frankly said the April 7, 2009 DHS report that generated so much outrage, Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment, was the most “poorly constructed” analytical “product in DHS history,” and that numerous reports dealing with rightwing extremists have in fact been produced by DHS since it disavowed that one report.
The Department of Homeland Security was sold to public on a wave of fear in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, under the promise of keeping America safe from terrorism. Instead, the Homeland Stasi agency is solidifying its role as a secret police over the United States. Not only have local police agencies been instructed that non-violent protesters, returning veterans and supporters of third party candidates are potential domestic terrorists, but Federal Protective Service (FPS) agents- dispatched with Homeland Security oversight- have been caught arresting photographers and spying on dissenters (in this case during an Occupy Wall Street protest in Portland).
Recent Homeland Security-related documents have already revealed that the American people have been designated as an enemy under emergency plans and that the feds are contracting and activating FEMA relocation centers for use during a crisis or catastrophe.
MISSION CREEP: HANDING OVER UNACCOUNTABLE POWER
Sadly, this warped mission creep is nothing new to the United States’ intelligence agencies.
Former President Harry Truman lamented the CIA’s extreme power grab some 16 years after he signed the bill ushering it– and the entire national security infrastructure– into existence. One month after the JFK assassination in 1963, he stated:
“For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government… I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations.”
Behind the scenes, it was former CIA director Allen Dulles, along with a number of fellow travelers, who crafted the CIA’s transformation under a limited, intelligence gathering mandate into the unaccountable monster it became. During a decade as head of the CIA, Dulles utilized the Jackson-Correa white paper he helped write to usher in black ops and other operational aspects never intended to be, from assassinations, to coups, to revolutions, and more (see Col. Fletcher Prouty’s The Secret Team). Suddenly, the CIA was operating from the shadows, a virtual government-within-government, with no clear path towards reigning in its power.
Will the already-controversial Department of Homeland Security be allowed, too, to creep so far into our lives that we can never look back?
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Thanks for the post. It’s getting hard to keep up.
Did he just witness her rob a bank or steal granny’s purse or something?
I remember that story ,, what ever came of it ... wasn’t the union on the cops side?
Thanks for the link. Very interesting perspective on why 9-11
was used as an excuse to install ever encroaching surveillance and abrogations of freedom in place of securing our borders and halting the flood of entrants, illegal and legal, from countries that hate us.
The growth of our expectations of domestic security, and the evolution of threats away from traditional state actors toward non-state entities -- drug cartels, organized crime, and terrorism are prominent examples -- suggest that the DHS intelligence mission should be threat agnostic. (Everyone is suspect.)
In an age of budget constraints, pressure on DHS to focus on core areas of responsibility and capability -- and to avoid emphasis on areas performed by other entities -- may allow for greater focus on these areas of core competency while the agency sheds intelligence functions less central to the DHS mission. Analysts and managers in Washington’s sprawling intelligence architecture often speak of the value of competitive analysis -- analysts at different agencies, for example, looking at similar problems to ensure that we miss no new perspective, no potentially valuable data source
Well, we certainly would not want that, lets go with a single source of information that is not questioned.
There remains room for this type of analysis, (Well that's mighty big of `em) but there are enough agencies pursuing the terrorist adversary to allow DHS to build a new analytic foundation that emphasizes data, analytic questions, and customer groups that are not the focus for other agencies. Analysis that helps private-sector partners better understand how to mitigate threats to infrastructure, for example, should win more resourcing (MONEY) than a focus on all-source analysis of general threats, such as work on assessing the perpetrators of attacks. Conversely, all-source analysis of terrorist groups and general terrorist trends should remain the domain of other intelligence agencies.
So, the blanket label of "terrorism" is used to justify this power grab. Above, terrorism is referenced as "non-state" i.e. international, to prove there is a gap in intelligence gathering. Below, there is a reversal of this in the "understand overseas terrorist incidents and translate them into analysis for the US."
This new approach to intelligence -- serving local partners’ requirements, providing intelligence in areas (such as infrastructure) not previously served by intelligence agencies, and disseminating information by new means -- reflects a transition in how Americans perceive national security. For this reason, state/local agencies, as clients for DHS intelligence, should also be involved in the development of requirements for what kinds of intelligence on emerging threats would be most helpful, from changing tactics for smuggling aliens into the United States to how to understand overseas terrorist incidents and translate them into analysis for the US.
Throughout the document there is the pervasive intrusion into state and local law enforcement agencies. there are no less that twelve direct references to this.
Local private sector
Local partner
local agency
local police agency
localized
There are eight references to "private" with six as "private sector" and one each to "private partnership" and "private."
And here is the money quote... DHS customers will require information with limited classification; in contrast to most other federal intelligence entities, DHS should focus on products that start at lower classification levels, especially unclassified and FOUO, (For Official Use Only).
And that means ALL unclassified data. Credit cards, phone records, DOT info, school records, medical, commercial business data, E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G that would normally require your permission or a warrant.
Nice huh?
Anyone have the background on this Aspen Institute?
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/sites/default/files/content/docs/pubs/HS-HPSCI-hearing-011812.pdf
. /u
Here’s a start:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.com/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1411
Will be back in a bit.
And more:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.com/printgroupProfile.asp?grpid=7681
Guess whose fingerprints ...
My take on the “tin foil hat” brigade is not that they are completely wrong about conspiracies existing, but that they are not discerning at all when it comes to which conspiracies they will believe in. They have gotten into a mindset where they will accept a conspiracy theory, no matter how ludicrous on its face, with the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.
We live in a world were conspiracies indisputably exist and influence history. Communism was a vast conspiracy, documented extensively, and it shook the whole world. Every country of any significance has operated intelligence agencies for decades that operate in total secrecy, colluding to influence affairs foreign and domestic. Those are, by definition, conspiracies as well. These agencies also routinely concoct false conspiracy theories to spread misinformation and throw people off the trail of their actual activities, and unfortunately, folks like Jones usually fall for the misinformation hook, line, and sinker.
SANDY BERGER! I don't think he is supposed to be part of anything requiring a clearance and this sure looks like an effort where a clearance would be required... But... He is a Democrat so I guess he is just taking one of his guaranteed “do-overs”!
[ My take on the “tin foil hat” brigade is not that they are completely wrong about conspiracies existing, but that they are not discerning at all when it comes to which conspiracies they will believe in. They have gotten into a mindset where they will accept a conspiracy theory, no matter how ludicrous on its face, with the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence.
We live in a world were conspiracies indisputably exist and influence history. Communism was a vast conspiracy, documented extensively, and it shook the whole world. Every country of any significance has operated intelligence agencies for decades that operate in total secrecy, colluding to influence affairs foreign and domestic. Those are, by definition, conspiracies as well. These agencies also routinely concoct false conspiracy theories to spread misinformation and throw people off the trail of their actual activities, and unfortunately, folks like Jones usually fall for the misinformation hook, line, and sinker. ]
NAILED IT!!!
So they are just going to re-establish the Constitution then, and we are to stupid to know it>
Long past time for action! This is a central socialist government clearly out of control and not one of these tepid candidates for president are saying a damned thing!
I am more surprised they did not at least try to disguise it.
Yet 99.9% of the American population does not have a clue about any of this and will munch their hay wondering why TSA and DHS are in every 7-11 and Wal-Mart in town.
Thanks for the links.
.
You are focusing on an Administration when this is an ongoing plan that has taken place for at least ten years, maybe longer, under Both parties. Don’t get your hopes up no matter Who is elected. They may knock down a few programs that actually help people, but they’ll strengthen all the ones that put people in jail for no reason.
We can only hope enough police and military follow the ten principles of the Oath Keepers for defending the Constitution:
OATH KEEPERS: ORDERS WE WILL NOT OBEY
1. We will NOT obey orders to disarm the American people.
2. We will NOT obey orders to conduct warrantless searches of the American people
3. We will NOT obey orders to detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants” or to subject them to military tribunal.
4. We will NOT obey orders to impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
5. We will NOT obey orders to invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
6. We will NOT obey any order to blockade American cities, thus turning them into giant concentration camps.
7. We will NOT obey any order to force American citizens into any form of detention camps under any pretext.
8. We will NOT obey orders to assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil against the American people to “keep the peace” or to “maintain control.”
9. We will NOT obey any orders to confiscate the property of the American people, including food and other essential supplies.
10.We will NOT obey any orders which infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.
Few expected it, but why didn't THIS administration do something about it? The answer is easy. It fits with their plan to sodomize the nation, destroy the economy and get elected for four more years to finish the murder.
We all knew when the Patriot Act was first implemented that it held this very danger within it. There was a sunset. As the wars wind down in Iraq and Afghanastan...this law should expire, but instead the very thing we feared about the law is happening. As silly as it sounds today...we trusted our leaders with this power and that is all that was needed for progressives to abuse it.
The web that has been created is amazing in its scope. There will be a time, soon approaching, that you will not go a day without having to break some law...in order to live.
bfl
My answers to your questions in the order you asked are:
1. When obama was “deemed” passed.
2. It don’t matter if they talk about or not. What matters is what they do about it and my belief is that they will not do anything.
3. They already talked about it. Again, what counts is what they do and again believe that they will not do anything.
4. In my opinion, yes.
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