The Homeland Security Protection Racket: Music: Race to Knowhere From Guitar Reflections, Vol. 1 by Eric Karlstrom(10:46)
From The CIA As Organized Crime; How Covert Operations Corrupt America and the World (2017) by Douglas Valentine
With 800 military bases round the world, its own legal system, and a budget that devours the highest percentage of federal taxpayer dollars, the military is the elephant in the room. Apart from a mutiny by the lower ranks, as happened in Vietnam, the military and its arms industry sidekicks will continue to be the driving force behind US aggression abroad and mass surveillance at home. The military’s Northcom component is the backbone o the homeland security apparatus, alternately intimidating, assisting, and spying on its civilian counterparts.
The National Security Agency (NSA) is the apparat’s eyes and ears. Instituted by Bush after 9/11, the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was ruled unconstitutional in 2006, but the lawsuit was dismissed on appeal and a similar program called PRISM now exists in its place. As revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, PRISM collects communications from major US internet companies.
The DOJ operates its back-channel through the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). Based in over 100 cities and at 56 FBI field offices, these Phoenix-style coordination centers focus on “upper tier” targets that cross state lines. The FBI defines the task forces on its website as “small cells of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT experts, and other specialists from dozens of US law enforcement and intelligence agencies.”
The FBI has had “internal security” as its mandate since its inception, and in 1996 it launched its InfraGard program in Cleveland. InfraGard is a “nonprofit” organiztion serving as a public-private partnership between businesses and the FBI. It’s a private sector Phoenix in which business people, college presidents, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other civil guardians funnel tips to the FBI to prevent hostile acts against America’s “critical infrastructure.” It operates in secret and has over 50,000 members. The ACLU described InfraGard as a “corporate TIPS program” and “surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.”
It is interesting to note that the FBI has no jurisdiction over the CIA, which, like the military, exists above and beyond the laws the rest of us must obey. But while the military is the an elephant trampling on everyone, the CIA is the serpent in the garden.
The CIA’ backchannel is its Counterterrorism Center (CTC) network. Formed in 1986, it is a direct descendant of Operation Chaos (the illegal domestic surveillance and sabotage programs that targeted American citizens in the 1960’s and 1970’s). The CTC network operates globally through Phoenix-style Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers, in collaboration with the suborned military, police, and intelligence services of infected nations. The unilateral CTC network has its own communications system and is used to bypass the DOJ, State Department, and Pentagon, as well as the regular CIA bureaucracy. It has its own paramilitary Special Operations Unit that functions like a global PRU team.
Phoenix is the conceptual model for the DHS. Both are based on the principle that governments can manage societies through implicit and explicit terror. The strategic goal is to widen the gap between the elites and the mass of the citizenry, while expunging anyone who cannot be ideologically assimilated.
DHS has over 250,000 employees, including detectives it deploys within its own departments, every agency it coordinates, and every branch of the military.
DHS has fusion centers which operate in every state and major city, just like the Phoenix intelligence and operations coordinating centers were set up in Vietnam. There is even a fusion center in Mexico City.
Fusion center employees occupy themselves by playing video war games and fantasizing about being armor-clad super heroes. When bored, they target political activists and despised minorities. The Missouri fusion center targeted supporters of Ron Paul, pro-life activists, and so-called conspiracy theorists. Anti-war activists and Islamic lobby groups were targeted in Texas. The Maryland state police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in the FBI’s database; and in 2009, the Virginia fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment identifying historically black colleges as potential hubs for terror related activity.
Along with the FBI’s task forces, fusion centers serve as cover for domestic CIA operations. This is nothing new, as the CIA has always placed officers inside state police forces and the Special Services (aka “Red Squad”) units of police forces in major cities. CIA Chaos-style officers specialize in recruitment of American citizens who travel abroad, as well as foreign students, diplomats, scientists, and business people willing to sell out their countries for an SUV or a pat on the back.
The billions of dollars pouring from your paychecks into the DHS “internal security” boondoogle are smothering America in corruption too.
Given the dearth of actual terrorist attacks in America, the Homeland Security Enterprise exists primarily to protect critical infrastructure assets in the private sector from disenfranchised citizens seeking justice and accountability from government and corporations.
Given that your chance of being killed by a terrorist is less than dying from a bee sting, this joint business venture has achieved nothing in terms of saving lives. Instead fusion centers and their DHS managers function as the political police enforcing the ultra-conservative, free wheeling capitalist ideology that drives corporate America.
The key stakeholders in the Enterprise are the owners of the private businesses that comprise the critical infrastructure of the National Security Establishment; Anything related to war and law enforcement. Their intellectual partners occupy vastly overpaid management positions in elite law firms, hospitals, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofit groups looking to advance their careers while eliminating the competition.
What CIA officer Lucian Conein said to me about Phoenix applies to Homeland Security: “it’s a great blackmail scheme for the central government: “If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC (Viet Cong.).’
This is what Homeland security has become: a protection racket.
Homeland Security cadres, through the DHS and the various parallel mechanisms, are identifying and targeting the National Security Establishment’s “political and administrative” opponents in America for neutralization. For upper tier dissidents it means being the target of “compromise and discreditation” campaigns launched by the Ultras, often through deniable assets like the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and other swift Boat-style organizations.
Since the creation of the Homeland Security protection racket, over eight trillion taxpayer dollars has been moved from social programs into “internal security” programs that have provided the National Security Establishment with over 250,000 cadres to pacify the flag-waving American public. For the average American, this means eternal debt and subservience, as their tax dollars are given to the “protectors.”
The psychological warfare aspect of the pacification program is handled by network news and Hollywood, which erase historical memory and with it, any moral imperative on the part of average Americans to pretend they don’t live in segregated communities; all that matters is dominance over some Other and anyone can dominate others by becoming a spy for homeland security.
For a glimpse into the future look at Israel, which has had a leading role in teaching Americans “how to do it.” There, administrative detention makes it okay to round up civilians, detain and torture them indefinitely, destroy their homes with bulldozers, cast them into the four winds, and steal everything they own simply because they are Palestinians.
The business party’s strategic goal is the political control of people at home and abroad- and the subsequent acquisition of their property, wealth and resources- through centralization of power in multinational corporations and giant financial institutions exempt from anyone’s laws, as well as through psychological operations.