Aftermath News: Militarizing the “Homeland”: NORTHCOM’s Joint Task Force-Civil Support

Blacklisted News | Oct 12, 2008
By Tom Burghardt
Antifascist Calling reported October 6 that nine months prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Donald Rumsfeld signed off on revisions for the Pentagon’s secretive Continuity of Operations Program (COOP).
Based on a document (AR 500-3) published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, it described “all hazards COOP planning” as the mechanism by which “the Army remains capable of continuing mission-essential operations during any situation, including military attack, terrorist activities, and natural or man-made disasters.”
The Wikileaks document is all the more relevant since a September report in Army Times described how the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) would be deployed October 1 “under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North,” the “service component” of NORTHCOM.
Since that article appeared September 8, Army Times has done a partial climb-down and now claims that the “non-lethal crowd control package” described earlier for operations in the heimat, “is intended for use on deployments to the war zone, not in the U.S., as previously stated.”
But this mendacious claim by Army Times is belied by current political trends in the U.S. Under cover of the “war on terror,” driftnet surveillance and moves toward suppressing dissent, most recently on display when protests during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were criminalized and organizers were charged with “domestic terrorism” under the Patriot Act, are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Wholesale spying on activists by the Pentagon’s now defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), as well as revelations that State police agencies in Maryland routinely spied on antiwar organizers, shared this information with the National Security Agency and classified them as “terrorists” in government-run databases, are viewed as exemplary means to “keep the rabble in line”–and under wraps, if necessary.
A highly-disturbing report by Christopher Ketchum in the May/June 2008 issue of Radar Magazine, outlined how the top secret Main Core database linked to Continuity of Government contingency planning, “includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.”
Reporting in July for Salon, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock was told by a source that Main Core is “‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name … is derived from the fact that it contains ‘copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community’.”
As the historic economic and political crisis gripping capitalism deepens and intensifies, and as stop-gap measures deployed by the U.S. Treasury Department intended to shore-up the crumbling financial sector crash, one by one, “forward thinking” ruling class factions are openly preparing a “Pinochet option” for the American people.
In this context, the militarization of domestic law enforcement is now coupled with the military’s own rapid development and deployment of “non-lethal weapons” systems which inevitably, will be “shared” with civilian police for “crowd control.” As with data mining, DHS spy-satellite surveillance, blanket CCTV coverage of American cities, illegal FBI deployment of infiltrators and provocateurs, “mission creep” by the Pentagon into civil affairs are signs that stronger measures to blunt the crisis may be in the offing. (For more on the Pentagon’s development of NLW’s, see: Antifascist Calling, “‘Non-Lethal’ Weapons: Where Science and Technology Service Repression,” July 8, 2008; and, Antifascist Calling, “The Calmative Before the Storm,” July 12, 2008)
During the recent Vibrant Response exercise at Fort Stewart, Georgia, three units of NORTHCOM’s Consequence Management Response Force (CCMRF, pronounced “sea-smurfs”), including two combat units from the 1st Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Army Division and the elite 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade participated in mock drills designed to “coordinate with local governments and interagency organizations such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” according to a report on U.S. Northern Command News.
Interestingly enough, Fort Stewart is also the site of a top secret NSA listening post that routinely “intercepted and transcribed satellite phone calls of American civilians in the Middle East for the NSA,” according to a whistleblower and former Arab linguist attached to the illegal NSA project, Wired reports.
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