JamesMcMahn
11-27-2006, 08:27 PM
The Pentagon's TALON (Threat and Local Observation Notice) database now contains groups that have staged peaceful protests against military recruitment and the Iraqi war. With the TALON database having the original purpose of cataloguing potential terrorism threats, the inclusion of these protests groups, which include The American Friends Service Committee, a peaceful Quaker organization, reflects a disturbing Pentagon view toward First Amendment rights.
The files contain more evidence that the Pentagon is grouping nonviolent protests against military recruitment into a database supposedly meant to catalogue potential terrorism threats.
The documents reveal that the military is tracking groups through its terrorism-watch database Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON). The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and local police departments have supplied information to the Pentagon to help with the surveillance, the documents show.
This is putting teeth to the "you're either with us or against us". The historical record shows that each time this phrase has been given muscle (Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, Kent State) the U.S. citizen has been suppressed, persecuted, prosecuted, and even killed for speaking their opinion in opposition to the "party line".
An unclassified white paper produced by the DoD on the Air Force-created TALON database and provided by PBS to the public states the original intent of the database was to provide "an effective system for detecting terrorist pre-attack activities". It goes on to say the system was designed to "provide the capability to assemble, process and analyze suspicious activity reports to identify possible terrorist pre-attack activities." When the DoD adopted the TALON database they "further developed" the program to be used as a database for collecting "non-validated domestic threat information", but there was a stipulation included in the white paper concerning the nature of these "non-validated" reports - they were to be "non-validated threat information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrist pre-attack activity". With more specificity the paper goes on to categorize that the "reportable events" to the database would include "non-specific threats to DoD interests; suspected surveillance of DoD facilities and personnel; elicitation; tests of security; unusual repetitive activity; bomb threats; any other suspicious activity."
Since I doubt seriously that the Quakers were planning to bomb anything, the apparent reason they made the list is that their anti-war sentiments are "non-specific threats to DoD interests". This should be of major concern to any pacificists in our midsts - beware, the bell is truly tolling for you.
The files contain more evidence that the Pentagon is grouping nonviolent protests against military recruitment into a database supposedly meant to catalogue potential terrorism threats.
The documents reveal that the military is tracking groups through its terrorism-watch database Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON). The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force and local police departments have supplied information to the Pentagon to help with the surveillance, the documents show.
This is putting teeth to the "you're either with us or against us". The historical record shows that each time this phrase has been given muscle (Japanese internment camps, McCarthyism, Kent State) the U.S. citizen has been suppressed, persecuted, prosecuted, and even killed for speaking their opinion in opposition to the "party line".
An unclassified white paper produced by the DoD on the Air Force-created TALON database and provided by PBS to the public states the original intent of the database was to provide "an effective system for detecting terrorist pre-attack activities". It goes on to say the system was designed to "provide the capability to assemble, process and analyze suspicious activity reports to identify possible terrorist pre-attack activities." When the DoD adopted the TALON database they "further developed" the program to be used as a database for collecting "non-validated domestic threat information", but there was a stipulation included in the white paper concerning the nature of these "non-validated" reports - they were to be "non-validated threat information and security anomalies indicative of possible terrist pre-attack activity". With more specificity the paper goes on to categorize that the "reportable events" to the database would include "non-specific threats to DoD interests; suspected surveillance of DoD facilities and personnel; elicitation; tests of security; unusual repetitive activity; bomb threats; any other suspicious activity."
Since I doubt seriously that the Quakers were planning to bomb anything, the apparent reason they made the list is that their anti-war sentiments are "non-specific threats to DoD interests". This should be of major concern to any pacificists in our midsts - beware, the bell is truly tolling for you.