Alleen Brown — Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”

A shadowy international mercenary and security firm known as TigerSwan targeted the movement opposed to the Dakota Access Pipeline with military-style counterterrorism measures, collaborating closely with police in at least five states, according to internal documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first detailed picture of how TigerSwan, which originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror, worked at the behest of its client Energy Transfer Partners, the company building the Dakota Access Pipeline, to respond to the indigenous-led movement that sought to stop the project.

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as “an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component” and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters.

"It can't happen here," morphs into "It can't be happening here, can it?"

Warning: SCARY.

The Intercept
Leaked Documents Reveal Counterterrorism Tactics Used at Standing Rock to “Defeat Pipeline Insurgencies”
Alleen Brown

James Petras — Imperialism and the Politics of Torture

Torture is not publicized domestically even as it is ‘understood’ by ‘knowing’ Congressional committees. But among the colonized, occupied people, through word and experience, CIAand military torture and violence against suspects, seized in neighborhood round-ups, is aweapon to intimidate a hostile population. The torture of a family member spreads fear (and loathing) among relatives, acquaintances, neighbors and colleagues. Torture is an integral element in spreading mass intimidation – an attempt to minimize co-operation between an active minority of resistance fighters and a majority of passive sympathizers.

People often think of torture as applying exclusively or predominantly to interrogation. However, this is not the case. It is also used institutionally for control and also retribution.

In addition to the torture practiced by the US clandestine service documented in the Senate Intelligence Committee report, another "secret" that is seeping out is how torture has been and is used rather prevasively as a tool of control within the United States, especially in the "corrections" system but also in "ordinary" policing. For example, search on "torture" and "solitary confinement," and consult the 2014 United Nations Committee Against Torture that cites the United States.

Why is this significant economically? Because economies are based on law and law is based on enforcement, that is, the use of force for controlling individuals and populations. Certain populations are more susceptible to this than others and realize it through their shared experience. Another class of people does want is in its interests with impunity. The leads not only to inequality and gross inequity but also to fraying the social fabric and periodic social unrest that is a drag on the society socially, politically and also economically.

Where there is no voluntary reciprocity, there is some form of control and therefore the implicit use of force. The question is when force becomes excessive and applied unjustly.

Popular sovereignty and self-determination are supposed to address this on the basis not of the majority view in any case, but rather one the basis of human rights and civil liberties. In a liberal democracy, the basis of this is a constitution establishing the rule of law, equality before the law, and and impartial justice system.

However, modern liberal democracies are republics, that is, representational democracies. Representatives are subject to elite capture, and this has been the history of most republics. When that happens the real seldom matches up with the ideal.

Indeed, I have noticed over the past few days that attention is being called to the similarity between torture of individuals and terrorism of populations through a policy of austerity that undermines the social fabric and benefits only a few. When people are driven to suicide owing to the dire straits in which they find themselves not due to their own fault but government policy that benefits an elite, is this not tantamount to torture?

The James Petras Website
Imperialism and the Politics of Torture
James Petras | Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University

Nafeez Ahmed — Defense Dept. studying protesters to prepare for ‘mass civil breakdown’

Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme – designed to embed social scientists in military field operations – routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions “within the United States.”

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios “adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq” to domestic situations “in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order.”

One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club. Participants were tasked to “identify those who were ‘problem-solvers’ and those who were ‘problem-causers,’ and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the ‘desired end-state’ of the military’s strategy.”

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price’s concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the “study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements,” he said, including how “to counteract grassroots movements.”

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists.

 Where conspiracy theory turns into reality.

The Guardian (UK)
Defense Dept. studying protesters to prepare for ‘mass civil breakdown’
Nafeez Ahmed, The Guardian

Tom Engelhardt — The Making of a Global Security State

The five uncontrollable urges of a secrecy-surveillance world.

The Nation
The Making of a Global Security State
Tom Engelhardt

The totalitarianism of information? "Orwellian" is an understatment. Even George Orwell never imagined this level of technological totalitarianism. And the worst part of all, it's corporate and transnational, at the service of the global elite, ensuring their unbreakable lock on power. Fascism at its most dangerous. Soft now, other than at the margin, but what's happening at the margin says it all. Anyone stepping out of line is defined as a "terrorist."

Steven Rosenfeld — 10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State

There are two relevant questions. The first is what is the optimal way to keep American safe while also protecting human, civl, and constitutional rights. The second is, what has the government been doing, what is it doing now and what does it plan to do — which are being guarded as state secrets known only to those "with a need to know."

What is the tradeoff between liberty and security? Is it possible to have both, or must one suffer. If the later, which one is most important? On what decision criteria?

AlterNet

10 Things Americans Underestimate About Our Massive Surveillance State

Steven Rosenfeld

Ron Paul on the security state

Ron Paul joins the voices being raised against the security state and the use of fear to justify suppression of rights in the name of "safety."

...School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.

Do we really believe government can provide total security? Do we want to involuntarily commit every disaffected, disturbed, or alienated person who fantasizes about violence? Or can we accept that liberty is more important than the illusion of state-provided security? Government cannot create a world without risks, nor would we really wish to live in such a fictional place. Only a totalitarian society would even claim absolute safety as a worthy ideal, because it would require total state control over its citizens’ lives. We shouldn’t settle for substituting one type of violence for another. Government role is to protect liberty, not to pursue unobtainable safety.

Rep. Ron Paul, 14th District of Texas
Government Security is Just Another Kind of Violence
Ron Paul
(h/t Zero Hedge)

Credit where credit it due.

However, there is a jump in logic in the argument:

Furthermore, do we really want to live in a world of police checkpoints, surveillance cameras, metal detectors, X-ray scanners, and warrantless physical searches?  We see this culture in our airports: witness the shabby spectacle of once proud, happy Americans shuffling through long lines while uniformed TSA agents bark orders.  This is the world of government provided "security," a world far too many Americans now seem to accept or even endorse.  School shootings, no matter how horrific, do not justify creating an Orwellian surveillance state in America.

Here's were the reasoning goes off the rails. The rationale for the security state and the surveillance state is combatting terrorism by waging a "global war on terror," not preventing school shootings or domestic crime, even the "war on drugs."

OK, Dr. Paul is objecting to the NRA plan to increase security here, but we already have a massive intrusion of government into civil liberties based on "terrorists." Then we learn that domestic security was monitoring Occupy protests closely to identify potential terrorists. This is the outrage that lovers of liberty need to be raising out voices in unison over.