The banks don’t like paying taxes, but they know how to buy the protection they need, as this page from JPMorgan Chase’s website makes clear.

It boasts that the company has bought the police a bunch of toys for their squad cars, and that is has financed spying software (they call it “security monitoring software”) for the NYPD’s main data center.

Given what we know about the NYPD’s links to CIA domestic spying, and to its record of spying on and infiltrating legitimate, peaceful protest organizations, both in the run-up to the 2004 Republican National Convention, and to the current Occupation of Wall Street, it seems clear that all this is being done with Wall Street cash.

This kind of behavior is just like a doughnut shop or restaurant letting cops eat free, only at $4.6 million, it’s a much bigger bribe that’s being paid. Whether a doughnut shop or a bank, it’s a kind of corruption designed to win better protection from the police than the rest of us get, and in this case, it appears to be aimed at protection from us.

Visit ThisCantBeHappening.net for additional coverage on the OccupyWallStreet protests and other recent hot-button issues.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Americans are still blissfully unaware that their “heroes” in uniform are guilty of this obscene massacre. The ovine US corporate media has been reporting on this story based upon a gutless press release from the Pentagon which attributes the “mistake” to “NATO” helicopters.

The thing is, this terrible incident occurred in the Pech Valley in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, where US forces have for several years been battling Taliban forces, and from which region they are now in the process of withdrawing. Clearly then, it is US, and not “NATO” helicopters which have been responding to calls to attack “suspected Taliban forces.”

So why can’t the Pentagon say that? And if they won’t say that, why won’t American reporters either demand that they clearly state the nationality of whatever troops commit an atrocity, or exercise due diligence themselves and figure it out?

There is a second issue too. Most publications appear to have followed the lead of the highly compromised New York Times, and are going with the Pentagon line that the boys who were killed were aged 9-15. That’s bad enough. It’s hard to see how helicopter pilots with their high-resolution imaging equipment, cannot tell a 9-year-old boy when they see one, from a bearded Taliban fighter. But at least one news organization, the McClachy chain, is reporting that the ages of the boys who were murdered from the air were 7-13. If that latter range of ages is correct, then it is all the more outrageous that they were picked off one by one by helicopter gunners. No way could they have mistaken a 7-year-old for an adult.

Click here to read the rest of this story at ThisCantBeHappening.net.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Raymond Davis is accused of murdering two Pakistanis.

Talk about getting caught in a Big Lie. So desperate has been the US effort to get the killer Raymond Davis sprung from police custody in Lahore, Pakistan following his execution-style slaughter of two Pakistani intelligence operatives in broad daylight in a crowded commercial area, that the government trotted out President Obama to declare that Pakistan was violating the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations by holding “our diplomat,” whom he insisted had only been defending himself, and should in any case be entitled to absolute immunity.

Now both the Guardian newspaper in the UK over the weekend, and the Associated Press today are reporting that sources in both the Pakistani and American governments are confirming that Davis works for the CIA. The AP is reporting that he is a “CIA security contractor,” which is something less and a little more amorphous than a CIA employee, and still leaves open the question of who he actually is and who he actually works for, but more on that later.

The Guardian noted in its article that Davis’s wife had provided information numbers for him to a local TV station and that those numbers turned out to be the CIA. Meanwhile, Agence France Press reported over the weekend that Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC), a loose-tongued member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also apparently inadvertently slipped up and disclosed on the Senate floor that Davis is an “agent”, saying, “We can’t throw this agent over.”

America’s and the President’s reputations lie in tatters as a result of the handling of this bloody incident. Not only did the US dispatch to Islamabad members of Congress, including the oleaginous Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), as well as the reprehensible Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to press for Davis’s release, threatening the withholding of aid to Pakistan (our ostensible ally in the Afghanistan War!). It provided a patently false document to the Pakistani foreign office claiming Davis to be an employee of the US Embassy in Islamabad (which would have meant he’d have immunity from arrest and detention), when he was actually working out of the Lahore Consulate, where he would not be entitled to any immunity for his actions). It also tried to exchange his regular passport for a diplomatic one a day after his arrest, again retroactively trying to get him immunity from prosecution for his murderous acts.

Furthermore, the US government, according to the Guardian, induced major US news organizations to hide what they knew about Davis’s real role from the American public. The paper reported that several US news organizations had also learned on their own that Davis is a spy, but then voluntarily withhheld the information from the American public “at the request of the Obama administration,” which preferred to stick to the fictional story line that Pakistan is holding an American “diplomat” in “violation of the Vienna Convention” on diplomatic immunity …

Click here to read the rest of this report at ThisCantBeHappening.net.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Raymond Davis is accused of murdering two Pakistanis.

The mystery of American Raymond A. Davis, currently imprisoned in the custody of local police in Lahore, Pakistan and charged with the Jan. 27 murder of two young men, whom he allegedly shot eight times with pinpoint accuracy through his car windshield, is growing increasingly murky. Also growing is the anger among Pakistanis that the US is trying to spring him from a Punjab jail by claiming diplomatic immunity. On Feb. 4, there were massive demonstrations, especially in Lahore, demanding that Davis be held for trial, an indication of the level of public anger at talk of granting him immunity.

Davis (whose identity was first denied and later confirmed by the US Embassy in Islamabad), and the embassy have claimed that he was hired as an employee of a US security company called Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, which was said to be located at 5100 North Lane in Orlando, Florida. Business cards for Hyperion were found on Davis by arresting officers.

However CounterPunch has investigated and discovered the following information:

First, there is not and never has been any such company located at the 5100 North Lane address. It is only an empty storefront, with empty shelves along one wall and an empty counter on the opposite wall, with just a lone used Coke cup sitting on it. A leasing agency sign is on the window.  A receptionist at the IB Green & Associates rental agency located in Leesburg, Florida, said that her agency, which handles the property, part of a desolate-looking strip mall of mostly empty storefronts, has never leased to a Hyperion Protective Consultants. She added, “In fact, until recently, we had for several years occupied that address ourselves.”

The Florida Secretary of State’s office, meanwhile, which requires all Florida companies, including LLSs  (limited liability partnerships), to register, has no record, current or lapsed, of a Hyperion Protective Consultants, LLC, and there is only one company with the name Hyperion registered at all in the state. It is Hyperion Communications, a company based in W. Palm Beach, that has no connection with Davis or with security-related activities.

Click here to read the rest of this story.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Photo: Flickr/LongDivision

There is, it cannot be denied, a tendency on the part of many Americans to grab for their guns, if not actually, then figuratively.

And let’s face it, we also have an awful lot of guns to reach for. The FBI estimates that it’s 200 million, not counting the guns owned by the military, and the National Rifle Assn. says that’s a number that rises by close to five million a year.

And we sure do use ‘em. NY Times columnist Bob Herbert reports that 150,000 people have been killed by guns in the US just in the first decade of this new century. Clearly it’s not just Tucson, a city in the state that’s also famous for the old gunslinger town of Tombstone, that is the Wild West. This whole country is gun-crazy.

Back in the 1970s, when I was a journalist in Los Angeles, I witnessed police officers there drawing their guns on people being arrested for jaywalking. One poor guy was shot dead by accident because a cop who had made a traffic stop had his gun out and tripped as he approached the driver’s window. Honest. I reported on a case where a young man, Ron Burkholder, apparently burned badly while making some PCP in his basement so that he had torn off his clothes and run out onto the street naked, was shot dead by a cop. The thing was, Burkholder was a small skinny guy, and he was naked and clearly in pain. The cop, an experienced sergeant, well over six feet tall and powerfully built, blew Burkholder away with, if I remember right, five shots from his service revolver. Not one. Five.

His excuse: He “felt threatened” by the naked, and clearly unarmed, Burkholder.

No charges were filed.

When Julian Assange’s Wikileaks, in conjunction with several large media organizations including the New York Times, the UK Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel, released leaked cables that embarrassingly exposed both the pettiness and the bullying of the US State Department, there were immediate howls from members of Congress and from the right-wing talk radio and TV crowd for his summary execution. The more sedate called for his arrest, trial and then his execution. Now his lawyer in the UK has quite properly made the argument, at a hearing on a Swedish government extradition request on possible sex offense charges, that Assange faces the very real possibility of execution if extradited to Sweden because he could end up being snatched from that country by the US, and brought back to face a death penalty for his exposés, which the US would like to call “espionage.”

None of this bothers a lot of Americans, who seem to think summary execution without even a trial for just about anything is quite okay. Many Americans even say they think the death penalty is not only a good thing, but that we should be executing more people, and doing it faster. This despite recent solid evidence from Texas that innocent people have been executed, and despite fact that some 140 people have, thanks to DNA tests, been absolved of capital crimes for which they spent years on death row, sometimes coming within hours of execution.

That may explain why so many politicians these days, and self-proclaimed pundits like the corpulent druggie Rush Limbaugh and the Vicks addict Glenn Beck, call for the killing of those whose politics they don’t agree with.

It also, sadly, explains why so many young people respond positively to the lures of military recruiters, like the young friend I wrote about in this space just recently.

It was simply shocking for me to hear a 17-year-old kid from a family of two professionals, neither of whom has any military background, talking excitedly about wanting to be a machine gunner in a Marine helicopter, and anxious to be sent to fight in Afghanistan. What kind of attraction can there be to firing waves of 30mm rounds at people down on the ground who have never done anything to you, who pose no threat to your family or your country, and who may not even be fighters at all?

It’s as bizarre and alien to me as the people who thrill at the idea of shooting wild wolves from the air–a popular sport in Alaska fondly characterized as wholesome entertainment by America’s rabid sweetheart, Sarah Palin.

I brought my son and a friend last year to the notorious Army Experience Center, a multi-million state-of-the-art virtual war recruiting wonderland located in a mall in working-class Northeast Philadelphia. Filled with an array of very fast computers and video screens on which kids as young as 14 could blast away in realistic war scenarios, and featuring two darkened rooms that had the real bodies of an armored Humvee and a Blackhawk helicopter where kids could man the guns and operate in a 3-D video environment with surround sound so that you felt like you were moving through hostile territory and had to “take out” the “bad guys” while quickly identifying innocent civilians and avoiding shooting them. My son, his friend and I tried the Humvee out, and at the end of our “mission,” the recruiter, an Iraq vet, congratulated us, saying we were “the best gunners all day!” and that our error rate had been “only 30%.”

I asked him what “error rate” meant, and he said, “Collateral damage–civilians killed.”

“Thirty percent of the peope we just killed were civilians?” I asked, aghast.

“Oh yeah,” he said matter-of-factly. “Don’t feel bad. That’s not a bad percentage.” Indeed, in real war American style these days, it’s a lot higher. Depending on whom you ask, the US in Iraq killed between 150,000 and 1.1 million Iraqis, and according the the Pentagon only 20,000 of them at most were enemy fighters. That means our “heroes” in Iraq killed civilians at a ratio of between 13 % and 98% of the time! That explains the latest news that American troops have over the last 10 years been expending 250,000 to 300,000 rounds of ammunition to kill each enemy fighter in Iraq and Afghanistan–a rate so prodigious that the domestic armaments industry can’t supply enough shells, forcing the US to buy half its bullets from an Israeli manufacturer. Just imagine where most of those missed shots went. A lot clearly hit the wrong people, including many very little ones.

And yet at every indignity, every international disagreement, every terror act by some foreign nutcase or angry jihadi, Americans are quick to call for massive military retaliation. “Bomb them back into the stone age!” is a common refrain, even when nobody knows who “them” is (or, given the general geographic illiteracy of most Americans, even where “them” is). “Kill them all and let God sort them out!” is a popular line, too. In other words, many Americans don’t care at all that their favored military response will kill countless innocent civilians. “Collateral damage” is as irrelevant to them as it ws to Jarod Lee Loughner.

No wonder a certifiable whackjob like Loughner, when his twisted and fevered mind got angry at whatever demons were tormenting him, turned to a gun and headed out to kill him a congresswoman, and then just blast away emptying his magazine at old people, women and even a nine-year-old girl, shot square in the chest. He may have been nuts, but he was acting out a very popular American fantasy, at the very least: Kill the bastards and let God sort ‘em out!

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not for banning guns. I had a gun when I was 12, and I loved shooting it. If I hadn’t sold it when we were low on money shortly after I got married, I’d still have the thing.

But nobody needs an assault weapon. And nobody should be able to carry a concealed weapon around town, crazy or not.

More importantly, though, this obsession with killing and war has to stop.

We need to recognize that the people who call for ever higher military budgets, who justify blasting the shit out of a poor country like Afghanistan, the people who argue for bombing Iran, and the police departments that send cops to demonstrations armed with assault weapons, as well as the politicians and the fascist radio and TV pundits who call for killing political opponents, are all every bit as sick and twisted as a lone gunman who goes to a Safeway parking lot and shoots a Congresswoman in the head.

Originally published at ThisCantBeHappening.net

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jeffrey Alexander

At the local YMCA today, I ran into a boy who was a childhood friend of my son’s. As my kid goes to a public arts high school in Philadelphia outside of our local school district, I don’t see much of his old grade-school friends any more. This boy, who used to be over at our house years ago at least once a week, recognized me right away though, and said, “Hey Mr. Lindorff, I haven’t seen you in years. How’s Jed!”

I was impressed by how he’d grown up, tall and strong looking. He was headed for the basketball court. I asked him, since both he and my son are seniors this year, where he was applying for college, and he stunned me by saying he had signed up for the Marines. “I’m going to be going in after graduation,” he said proudly. “The recruiter came to school, and he convinced me it’s a good move.”

I asked him what he planned to do, and he said, “Helicopter gunner! I’m really excited and proud!”

This was really shocking. This kid doesn’t own a gun. I doubt if he’s ever shot at anything except maybe a target with a .22 rifle at Boy Scout Camp, and now he’s all excited about manning a machine gun in a helicopter, where he’ll be shooting down at Afghan fighters–and inevitably at civilians, too–in a matter of months.

I really didn’t know what to say. I awkwardly told him “congratulations,” because I could see he was proud of his “accomplishment” and because I didn’t want to have him cut me off as a possible confidante. Then I added, “You know of course that I’m not really in favor of what the Marines are doing?”

He smiled and said, “Yeah, I know.”

“Well, good luck and stay safe,” I said, again not knowing what else to say. How could I, standing in the hall there, tell him that he was simply signing on to be another expendable tool in the American Empire’s effort to subdue an impoverished people on the far side of the world who pose absolutely no threat to America? And while I don’t want to see him killing people in Afghanistan, I also want him to come home safely.

Unaware of my conflicted state of mind, and of how upset I was at his news, he ran off to play his game, at least for now still just another kid on a basketball court.
Recruiters in high schools want to put our kids in helmets

I had finished my run, so I headed for the exit to get my car and go home, when I ran into the boy’s mother and older sister, both just coming into the building. I hadn’t seen either of them in at least a year either.

They both greeted me and asked how my family was, and what my son’s college plans were. After I had caught them up, I said, a bit hesitantly, “I ran into your son. He told me he’s joining the Marines.”

His mother looked upset and said, “Yes. I don’t know. We were going over colleges with him, and getting ready to work on his applications, and then he told us he wanted to enlist.”

“I hear he’s going to be a helicopter gunner,” I said.

The mother stiffened and looked at her daughter, a senior in college who looked surprised, too. “He said he was going to be a helicopter mechanic!” she said.

“Oops,” I told them. “I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to have to talk with him. But the trouble is, if that’s what he says he’s going to do, there’s nothing we can do to stop him.”

Well, maybe, and maybe not. I’d certainly try if it were my son, starting with showing him that horrifying footage of a bloodthirsty US helicopter crew’s joke-filled slaughter of a bunch of innocent civilians in Baghdad, including two employers of Reuters. I’d also have him read the letter of apology to the Iraqi victims’ families, written by two soldiers, former Army Specialists Josh Stieber and Ethan McCord, who had appeared in that video because they came on the scene of slaughter at the end, and realized what had been done was an atrocity.

But while it may tragically be too late for my son’s childhood friend, who has already signed on the dotted line, there is something we can do to stop more of this kind of thing from happening, and that is to protest the actions of Marine recruiters and recruiters from the other branches of the military in our public high schools.

The schools have been told, thanks to a law passed by Congress, that they must allow recruiters into high schools to speak with students and to try to lure them into signing up. Parents have a right to have their children’s names removed from recruiting lists so they won’t be personally invited to meet with a recruiter, or get recruiting literature sent to them, but they are still free when roaming the halls, to go see a recruiter on their own.

The only answer to this effort to suck our kids into service of the Empire as more cannon-fodder is to demand, and to provide, an alternative. Contact your local Veterans for Peace chapter or nearest Iraq Veterans Against the War Chapter, and urge them to send a representative to talk sense and reality to the kids at your high school. If you’re a veteran, volunteer to go yourself, and tell kids why signing up is a bad idea. If you’re not a veteran, or relative of a veteran, get people with experience to go and tell what war is really about, and about why it’s not what America should be doing. (Colleague John Grant, who is with VfP, says don’t expect getting a counter-recruitment presence in your high school to be easy. Most schools only allow such speakers to go to a specific teacher’s classroom, not to an assembly session, whereas the most appropriate thing would be to have access to match whatever the recruiters are offered. That doesn’t mean VFP or IVAW activists aren’t anxious to get access, so contact them and try to get them to the kids.)

If you want a good argument, check out the little film at the bottom of our home page, which quotes Marine Brigadier General Smedley Butler, and is addressed to parents, and particularly mothers of young children.

Stop the propagandizing of our kids into becoming soldiers for Empire. We’ve had enough death and killing!

Originally published at ThisCantBeHappening.net.

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president’s daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government’s Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.

No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital’s local daily, the Washington Post, which apparently didn’t even think it was a local story worth publishing.

Making the media cover-up of the protest all the more outrageous was the fact that most news media did report on Friday, the day after the protest, the results of the latest poll of American attitudes towards the Afghanistan War, an ABC/Washington Post Poll which found that 60 percent of Americans now feel that war has “not been worth it.” That’s a big increase from the 53 percent who said they opposed the war in July.

Clearly, any honest and professional journalist and editor would see a news link between such a poll result and an anti-war protest at the White House led, for the first time in recent memory, by a veterans organization, the group Veterans for Peace, in which veterans of the nation’s wars actually put themselves on the line to be arrested to protest a current war.

Friday was also the day that most news organizations were reporting on the much-touted, but also much over-rated Pentagon report on the “progress” of the American war in Afghanistan–a report prepared for the White House that claimed there was progress, but which was immediately contradicted by a CIA report that said the opposite. Again, any honest and professional journalist and editor would immediately see the publication of such a report as an appropriate occasion to mention the unusual opposition to the war by a group of veterans right outside the president’s office.

And yet, the protest event was completely blacked out by the corporate news media. (Maybe the servile and over-paid White House press corps, ensconced in the press room inside the White House, didn’t want to go out and brave the elements to cover the protest.)

If you wanted to know about this protest, you had to go to the internet and read the Huffington Post or to the Socialist Worker, OpEd News, or to this publication (okay, we’re a day late, but I was stuck in traffic yesterday), or else to Democracy Now! on the alternative airways.

My old employer, the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia, showed how it’s supposed to be done. In an article published Friday about the latest ABC/Washington Post Poll, reporter Simon Mann, after explaining that opposition to the war in the US was rising, then wrote:

The publication of the review coincided with anti-war protests held across the US, including one in Washington in which people chained themselves to the White House fence, leading to about 100 arrests.

That’s the way journalism is supposed to be done. Relevant information that puts the day’s news in some kind of useful context is supposed to be provided to readers, not hidden from them.

Clearly, in the US the corporate media perform a different function. It’s called propaganda. And the handling of this dramatic protest by American veterans against the nation’s current war provides a dramatic illustration of how far the news industry and the journalism profession has converted itself from a Fourth Estate to a handmaiden to power.

Originally published at ThisCantBeHappening.net

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

In a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been seeking to force the Pentagon to provide information about all captives it is holding at its huge prison facility at Bagram Airbase outside Kabul in Afghanistan, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones of the Southern District of New York has issued a summary judgment saying that the government may keep that information secret.

The lingering question is: Why does the US government so adamantly want to hide information about where captives were first taken into military custody, their citizenship, the length of their captivity, and the circumstances under which they were captured?

Says Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, “The military says that they can’t release the information because it would be a threat to national security, but they provided that information for the prisoners at Guantanamo.”

And of course, as our leaders informed us repeatedly, those captives at Guantanamo, who hailed from all over the globe, including Afghanistan, were allegedly “the worse of the worst”–at least until it turned out that many of them were wholly innocent of anything. had been framed and turned in for a bounty, or were mere children when picked up, like Omar Khadr, the 24-year old Canadian man who just copped a guilty plea to avoid a sham tribunal before 7 officers and potential life imprisonment, after being captured at 15, tortured at Bagram, and held for nine years at Guantanamo (on a charge of killing an American soldier in battle).

The court ruling keeping the information about the thousands of prisoners held at Bagram secret may be a victory for the government, but it is hardly a victory for America’s image in the world, or for the troops battling in Afghanistan, who will be attacked all the harder by people induced to fight to the death to avoid capture and consignment to the hellhole in Bagram (now known as Parwan Prison), which has become Afghanistan’s Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo rolled into one.

One of the things that concerns the ACLU is that by not even making public the circumstances under which Bagram detainees were brought into the prison, it appears likely that the administration is hiding the reality that many “probably don’t deserve to be there,” says the ACLU’s Goodman. She explains, “There could be plenty of people sitting there who were just caught up in house sweeps in Kabul, for instance.”

To read the rest of this report, please visit ThisCantBeHappening.net

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

No opt-out for the latest in anti-terror technology though, with reports published in Forbes magazine and the Christian Science Monitor that the Homeland Security Department has purchased 500 mobil X-ray vans called ZBVs that can scan cars, trucks and homes without the drivers or residents even knowing that they’re being zapped.

These vans, made by a Massachusetts company called American Science & Engineering, are fitted out with what are called Z Backscatter X-ray devices, which aim a powerful X-ray beam that reportedly has the capability of penetrating 14 inches of steel.

In theory, the device is supposed to be safe for human targets, because it is operated at a distance, and because the beam is weakened by penetrating the metal of a vehicle before it reaches a person. But the flaws in this kind of reassuring safety calculus are readily apparent in a photo of a small truck carrying contraband that accompanies the Christian Science Monitor story. The X-ray image, after penetrating the truck cab’s metal body, clearly shows the contraband behind the driver’s seat, but it also just as clearly shows the shadowy outline of the driver of the pickup. Worse yet, even his window is half-way down, so there is no shielding at all of the X-rays hitting his head. The company also features a promotional video of one of its vans cruising a NY City street, scanning the parked vehicles while unknowing pedestrians walk along the sidewalk, getting zapped along with the cars and trucks being targeted.

We can expect these mobil X-ray vans to be proliferating around the country soon, if they’re not out there already, but they may be hard to spot. As American Science & Engineering says in a note to investors on the company’s website:

A breakthrough in X-ray detection technology, AS&E’s Z Backscatter Van is the number one selling non-intrusive mobile inspection system on the market. The ZBV system is a low-cost, highly mobile screening system built into a commercially available delivery van.

Prof. Peter Rez, a physicist a Arizona State University who specializes in X-ray technology, and who has been doing research on backscatter X-ray dosages, says that if used properly, the radiation doses received by targeted persons would be very minute, but then he notes that if the government begins a major campaign of surreptitious X-raying on highways and at locations of security concern (the machines are already being used at major sporting events like the Superbowl), there have to be concerns about whether the machines are being maintained in proper working condition (driving them around on America’s run-down highways is subjecting the machines to quite a beating), and about whether the operators are using them properly.

This is even the case with airport X-ray machines, he says, where the doses are very low, but the actual beam is quite powerful. Since X-ray beams cannot be focussed, two moving mechanical parts are used, including a spinning wheel with a small series of holes in it, so that what reaches the targeted individual is just short bursts of X-rays. If either of those moving mechanical parts broke down while a person was being zapped, though, Rez says the person would be “fried” by a major X-ray exposure. “I was assured by the government that the machines have a fail-safe system so they shut down instantly if the moving parts fail,” he says, “but BP had a fail-safe system too, and we saw how well that worked. For my part, I wouldn’t go through an X-ray scanner unless they could show me a very low documented failure rate!”

Arjun Makhijani, an engineer and physicist with the Institute of Energy and Environmental Research in Maryland, also points out that any safety studies for the backscatter machines are referring to their effect on average adults. But if the government is scanning moving vehicles on a highway, or looking inside trailers, for example to spot smuggled immigrants (the metal-piercing backscatter machines are being installed at border crossings on the Mexican border), there is no way to know when they are exposing children or the fetuses of pregnant women, both of which populations are far more vulnerable to damage from ionizing radiation than an average adult.

X-raying trucks to spot human smuggling could subject pregnant women or children to dangerous radiation

Americans in Atlanta got a taste of this latest government intrusion into their lives when Homeland Security last Tuesday ran what it called a “counterterrorism operation” not prompted by any specific threat. The agency set up one of its ZBV vans on I-20 and snarled traffic for hours while all trailer trucks were stopped and scanned by Homeland Security personnel.

ThisCantBeHappening! has also learned that the US military has been operating backscanner X-ray machines on the streets of New York, where it has been aiming the devices even at pedestrians. One location where this was done was outside the United Nations building on 1st Avenue in Manhattan.

If you want to see how outrageous this is getting, check out this promotional video produced by AS&E, which shows their vans cruising the streets of New York, X-raying parked cars and trucks along the curb. Imagine what happens as this mobil X-ray device inadvertently zaps pedestrians walking on the sidewalk. In fact, in the video, you can actually see people walking on the pavement as the vehicle goes by scanning the parked cars. (Since the operator is busy monitoring the screen, there’s no way he is turning it off to spare the pedestrians.)

The mobil X-ray vans are only the latest step in a steady march by the American government towards a total national security state, where citizens can expect to be monitored in everything they do. Cities are installing video cameras all over the place, allegedly to fight crime and catch drivers who speed or run red lights. And just last week, the Obama administration announced that it was seeking to expand monitoring of communications to include non-phone systems like Skype and Google Phone, and that it would require internet communications providers to provide it with customer messages, even encrypted ones.

What makes the new mobile X-ray campaign even worse is that, like the airport X-ray machines, they are unlikely to work as advertized. For example, as Prof. Rez notes, the one thing that the airport X-ray devices cannot detect is liquid or semi-liquid explosives–the very thing they were installed to try and keep off of planes! He notes for example, that plastic explosive, like C-4, can easily be molded to look like a roll of fat on the body in an X-ray. Similarly, once criminals or would-be terrorists know that the government has mobile X-ray vans on the highways, they can just stay to secondary roads, or disguise their bomb materials to look like something ordinary, like a bag of groceries.

In other words, we all get zapped for nothing.

Says IEER’s Makhijani, “I know there can be a legitimate concern about security, but all this is happening in secret. We really need to open things up, so we know how these things work, what the dosages are, how they are being used and maintained, and we especially need to have a thoughtful public discussion about whether we really want this kind of thing to be done.”

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.

Image taken from the website of Institute of Terrorism Research and Response.

The surprise disclosure that the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, through its state Homeland Security Agency, along with a number of local police departments in the state, have been employing a private Israeli security company with strong links to Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force to spy on law-abiding citizens, grows increasingly disturbing when the website of the company, called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, is examined.

ITRR’s slick site at TerrorResponse.org features a homepage image of an armor-clad soldier or riot policeman preparing to fire an automatic pistol, while the company boasts of being “the preeminent Isreal/American security firm, providing training, intelligence and education for clients across the globe.”

The firm, which offers courses locally at the University of Philadelphia, notes that all its course offerings, some of which are taught in Israel, are “approved by the Israeli Ministry of Defense.” The course titles include such compelling topics as: “Tactical Advantage in Combat,” “Civilian Battlefield,” “Undercover/Plainclothes Tactical Operations,” “Israeli Shooting Techniques,” “Arena Combat,” “Hard Entry (Arrest)” and “Principles of Night Operations.” While a number of the titles link to course descriptions, the links to the undercover class and the civilian battlefield class were disabled when this reporter visited the site, which was two days after the company’s role as a state security contractor was exposed.

The description for the Tactical Advantage course, which the website says was designed for military, law enforcement and security personnel, describes the program as “intense, dirty, aggressive and based on Israeli Counter-Terror Schools policy.” It says “This course pushes trainees to the physical and mental edge.”

American organizations which engage in protests and rallies, hearing that reference to the Israeli Counter-Terror Schools policy, might recall the IDF’s handling of the aid flotilla that was boarded on the high seas by IDF troops as they read these lines. That assault, in which the Israelis used 9mm semi-automatic weapons against defenders armed at most with sticks and light chains, left nine flotilla participants, including a young Turkish American, dead.

The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, which only lists a post-box address in Philadelphia (though in its report on the scandal the Philadelphia Inquirer referred to ITRR as a “Philadelphia-based company with offices in Philadelphia and Jerusalem”), also advertises a subsidiary operation it calls a Targeted Action Monitoring Center (TAM-C), which it claims is “world renowned” and which it says supplies “factual, actionable intelligence to subscribers.” All information gathered by the firm’s staff of “former law enforcement, military and intelligence professionals” is sent to the Israeli headquarters of the TAM-C for processing–a move which effectively insulates it from discovery by any surveillance victims who might seek disclosure under federal or state Freedom of Information laws, or who might sue in court for violation of their civil liberties.

While ITRR, founded in 2004, doesn’t name any of its clients, it says they range from Fortune 100 companies, including the power industry, maritime companies, US infrastructure companies, “the company company charged with protecting oil production facilities,” missionary organizations and pharmaceutical firms, to law enforcement agencies and joint terrorism task forces.

A search on Google for references to ITRR doesn’t turn up much, but there is a report in July 2008 by a Washington-based right-wing site called National Terror Alert, which attributes a warning of a “possible large-scale terror attack” to ITRR. Claiming that it had “intercepted communications from an organization closely associated with international terrorists, to include al Qaeda,” the National Terror Alert organization says TIRR reports that, “Available intelligence and recent events indicate that terrorists have an established capability and current intent to mount an attack on the target and there is some additional information on the nature of the threat. It is assessed that an attack on the target is a priority for the terrorists and is likely to be mounted.”

Nothing came of this “alert,” but it should be noted that a year later, the first head of the new federal Department of Homeland Security, former Republican governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge, admitted that the color-coded terror alerts issued by his office had been manipulated to serve Republican political interests. It should also be recalled that the 2008 TIRR “warning” came during the height of the election season, just before the two national party conventions. As the Philadelphia Daily News commented at the time in a headline, “GOP kicks off fall campaign with heightened terror alert.”

But ITRR does much more than just monitor terrorists. Indeed, it seems to be far too busy monitoring legitimate, non-violent and completely legal protest organizations and other political groups to do much real anti-terror work. According to news reports on ITRR’s work for the Pennsylvania Homeland Security Agency and also the Pittsburgh Police Department, it would appear that ITRR was spying on and providing Pennsylvania State Police and Homeland Security with reports on everything from anti-war groups and anti-oil-shale-fracking groups to gay rights groups, animal rights groups, environmental organizations and even Good Schools Pennsylvania, a citizens association formed to back Gov. Ed Rendell’s school reform initiatives. Even a Harrisburg, PA man who likes to bring a 25-foot inflatable pig to demonstrations to symbolize government waste was targeted.

While local news media reports in Philadelphia have suggested that ITRR is just composed of two people, Aaron Richman, an Israeli police captain and security consultant and Michael Perelman, a retired New York City police commander, the website makes it clear that the company actually employs a large number of people in Israel, and may have as many as 15 people working “in the field” in the US.

Its activities are not limited to Pennsylvania either. The firm boasts on its website that “Information provided to clients ranges from issues of global jihad to Mexican Cartel threats along America’s southern border (maybe that’s where Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer got her weird tale, eventually debunked and retracted, of beheadings in the border desert?) to providing guidance of the threat of disorders as a result of international monetary meetings.”

This latter is a reference to the yeoman work ITRR reportedly did for the Pittsburg Police Department in advance of the disastrous G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh, which turned into a police riot after the local government and police brought in hundreds of reinforcements from other cities, with cops suited up as though for war, to lock down the city and prevent students from demonstrating against the predations of international capital and international “free trade” agreements. It appears that ITRR had ingratiated its way into the confidence of demonstration planners by having its agents join chat rooms and websites “posing as G-20 opponents.” One wonders whether these same agents may have also acted as agents provocateur.

As the head of Pennsylvania’s Homeland Security Agency, James Powers, who hired ITRR, put it, “We got the information to the Pittsburgh Police, and they were able to cut them off at the pass.”

So much for the Constitutional right to protest!

Several calls for comment made to the Homeland Security Agency and the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency which oversees it went unanswered, but Perelman has released a statement saying “The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response tracks events, givinglaw enforcement a heads-up for the potential of disorder as our bulletins provided to the [state] clearly show…[and] does not follow people, conduct surveillance, photograph, or record individuals.”

This claim is undermined by the details in some of its reports (a select bunch of ITRR weekly “terror” alert report released by the state government after the scandal broke included one on the Brandywine Peace Community, which regularly runs a protest at the Lockheed Martin military contractor plant just northwest of Philadelphia. The report says, “When their focus is not directed at Lockheed itself, protesters will likely gather at the traffic light on the corner of Mall and Goddard to wave signs at cars.” Less this report not sound terrifying enough, the report adds ominously (with no supporting evidence to back its claim) that even so, the event could attract “radical protesters from the ranks of local communist and/or anarchist movements.”

Gov. Rendell, after the story about ITRR’s activities for the state under a no-bid, $125,000/year contract, broke, claimed he was “embarrassed” by the spying on non-violent civic action organizations, and vowed to cancel the contract effective this October.

It is not clear, however, that there will be any information provided about who was spied on over the time the company has been active. Members of both political parties in the state legislature are calling for a General Assembly hearing into ITRR’s activities, but such calls in this closely divided body generally come to little or nothing. Meanwhile, Rendell, a lame duck governor headed for the exit, is unlikely to do anything about the issue beyond saying he’s embarrassed by it. He has said he has no intention of firing Powers.

I know how damaging this kind of spying by state and local governments can be. Back in the mid-1970s, when I and some journalist colleagues owned and ran a small weekly alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, the LA Vanguard, we were among the targets of a massive illegal spying campaign by the paranoid Los Angeles Police Department’s “red squad,” the Public Disorder Intelligence Division. Our staff was actually penetrated by a young red squad officer, who pretended to be a student wannabe journalist in order to try to learn our sources for reports on the LAPD. But we were only one of about 200 groups, ranging from a local anti-nuclear group to the Peace & Freedom Party, a well-known third party in California electoral politics, to the National Organization for Woman and even the office of then City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.

The reason we all learned about what the LAPD red squad was doing was that one spy was outed, a class-action suit was filed by the ACLU of Southern California, there was discovery ordered by the court, and eventually the city of Los Angeles settled with the victims of the campaign, to the tune of $1.8 million.

The Pennsylvania ACLU may eventually sue Pennsylvania over this latest domestic spying outrage, but the times have changed, and it is hard to be confident that the courts, no great friend of civil liberties at the state level, and packed with Reagan and Bush 1 and 2 appointees at the federal level, will mandate disclosure of the names of groups spied on, much less of the records that were compiled. Furthermore, because the state did this spying through an outside contractor, which is headquartered in Israel, government and police agencies could claim that the records are for the most part out of their hands and beyond the courts’ jurisdiction.

At least one man, Gene Stilp, owner of the giant inflatable pig, already has plans to sue the government in federal court. “When people’s civil rights are trampled it’s a federal issue,” says Stilp, himself a licensed attorney. Stilp says he isn’t satisfied with Rendell’s statement that he is “embarrassed” by the disclosure of ITRR’s contract. “Being embarrassed doesn’t cut it,” says Stilp, who is calling for an investigation into ITRR’s spying activities by the attorney general or the federal government, and full disclosure of which groups and individuals were spied upon.

Another person who has good reason to believe he was probably targeted by ITRR is ThisCantBeHappening!’s own John Grant. Says Grant, “The more I read about this affair, the more disturbing it seems. I’m a Vietnam veteran and part of an organization — Veterans For Peace — that very publicly opposes the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We meet monthly and we organize events with other anti-war groups. All First-Amendment-protected, red-blooded American stuff. To think that some self-ordained watchdog group of security freaks is monitoring me and my friends and reporting our activities to God-knows who in the context of ‘terrorism’ — and probably making tons of money doing it — really pisses me off. Governor Rendell should be embarrassed. He should come clean and make public all the groups and people this gang was spying and reporting on. The fact they are somehow connected to Israel — a nation many of us have been critical of — is further reason to clear up what’s going on.”

Dave Lindorff is the founder of the news site ThisCantBeHappening.net, now a news collective consisting of journalists Lindorff, John Grant, Linn Washington and Charles M. Young.