Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Editorial: Spying on Americans at home

A secret Defense Department report reveals that officials are collecting information on individual Americans and domestic groups and churches that peacefully and lawfully protest the war in Iraq, military recruitment efforts and other issues.

The confidential 400-page document, obtained by NBC News and featured in a Washington Post story on Thursday, lists a small gathering at a Florida Quaker Meeting House as being among more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" the Defense Department logged in the United States during the past 10 months.

The Florida meeting involved about a dozen activists who were planning a peaceful protest of military recruiting at local high schools.

The document shows how desperate the military has become in its quest for any scrap of intelligence information. NBC News military analyst Bill Arkin added, "Americans should be concerned that the military, in fact, has reached too far."

The report shows that the Defense Department has collected data on at least four dozen anti-war meetings or protests. It lists information on participants' identities, descriptions of vehicles parked at such gatherings and Internet activity associated with the protests, such as organizing e-mails.

A former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Christopher Pyle, told the Post he fears the military is edging precariously close to mistakes it made during the Vietnam War, when it collected and retained information on at least 100,000 Americans involved in anti-war and civil rights protests.

Pyle blew the whistle on the practice, and as a result more than 100 military agents testified they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens. "The military made promises it would not do this again," Pyle said.

Some critics say that in its effort to prevent another Sept. 11-type terrorist attack, the military is collecting more data than it can possibly analyze adequately. And it continues to quietly pull more and more U.S. citizens in to its vast web of "threat" information.

George Lotz, who was the assistant to the secretary of defense for intelligence oversight from 1998 until he retired in May, told the Post that the harm in collecting this information is "that these people ought to be allowed to demonstrate, to hold a banner, to peacefully assemble whether they agree or disagree with the government's policies."

It is frightening to learn that engaging in lively political discourse on a Web log, visiting a satirical political Web site or joining an anti-war rally could be enough to place the average American in a secret Defense Department file.

The military has a right to protect its installations and a duty to protect U.S. citizens. But it has no right to intimidate and investigate Americans practicing their rights to free assembly and free speech.

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