Spying and lying about the left: surveillance now being done by private spies

[Hannah Bell]

THE U.S. peace group "Peace of the Action" (Cindy Sheehan's group) has discovered documents showing that it and many other organizations have been under surveillance for many months by a private agency called the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR)...

According to the ITRR's Web site:

"The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR) is an American and Israeli nonprofit corporation created to help organizations succeed and prosper in a world threatened by terrorism. ITRR's Israeli and American experts provide counter-terrorism training, seminars and security specialization in dealing with threats such as weapons of mass destruction (WMD), suicide bombers and other forms of international terror striking both the public and private sector."

The revelations about the Philadelphia-based ITRR emerged as part of a scandal involving the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, an office of the Department of Homeland Security, which gave a no-bid $103,000 contract to ITRR to gather information on various community groups. Why? Because the organizations supposedly posed a threat to Pennsylvania infrastructure.

As Bill Quigley and Rachel Meeropol, attorneys with the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote:

"Our friends at MoveOn.org, the Ruckus Society, Immokalee Workers, the new SDS, Jobs with Justice, the Brandywine Peace Community, ANSWER, PETA, Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty, MOVE, The Yes Men, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Climate Ground Zero, the Rainforest Action Network, pro-Palestinian Groups, Puerto Rican nationalists, prisoners' rights organizations, citizen conservation groups and immigration activists opposing Arizona's crazy attempts to criminalize all non-citizens should know--Pennsylvania has been monitoring you."

http://socialistworker.org/2010/10/08/spying-and-lying-about-left


(btw, rachel meerpool = granddaughter of julius & ethel rosenberg)




The best-known Meeropol may be Abel, a lyricist who (under a pseudonym) wrote "Strange Fruit" and "The House I Live In." But the child he adopted, a young boy named Robert, holds a special place in Cold War history. When he was 6, the boy's birth parents, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were executed at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, for conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/nyregion/05rachel.html

[Catherina]

1. Rec'd. Strangely enough, still 0 but recommended. n/t

[JohnnyLib2]

2. Rec. I remember the J. Edgar Hoover days all too well.

x(

[old mark]

3. Well, I ilve in PA, and I regularly donate to Moveon.org , so...Hi, guys...

You folks at ITRR ar the real anti-Americans here and you should be ashamed of your selves, if you have the capacity.


mark:patriot:

[annabanana]

4. Who owns ITRR??

It would not shock me to find Blackwater fingerprints on it....

[TBF]

5. Probably the Bush family - sounds like the type of

stuff they invest in ...

[blindpig]

6. k&r

[starroute]

7. Private spying on the left is far from new

The American Security Council was formed in the 1950's and staffed by former FBI agents to compile blacklists of suspected leftists for use by corporations. It got out of the private spying business as it became more established but it had any number of successors, which were particularly active during the Reagan administration. Here's something that I guess was written in the early 90's.

http://www.publiceye.org/huntred/Hunt_For_Red_Menace-10.html

The main right-wing domestic intelligence-gathering networks that operated during the Reagan/Bush Administrations were the John Rees Information Digest network, and a more amorphous network of New Right groups around the Council for Inter-American Security, Young American's for Freedom, and the American Sentinel newsletter. Two other domestic intelligence operations were run by two cult leaders, the neo-fascist Lyndon LaRouche, and the theocratic authoritarian Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Dozens of smaller private right-wing spy operations operated freely during the 1980's. . . .

The most influential private domestic spying operation during the 1980's was run by John Rees, a veritable right-wing spymaster who has published Information Digest, a gossipy newsletter, for over twenty years.

Rees spent the early years of the Reagan administration as the spymaster for the right-wing Western Goals Foundation. The Foundation was the brainchild of the late Rep. Larry McDonald, former leader of the John Birch Society. Western Goals published several small books warning of the growing domestic red menace, and solicitated funds to create a computer database on American subversives. . . .

The Council for Inter-American Security, (CIS) is proud of its role in monitoring the activities of American progressives, and in one direct mail solicitation it told its members, "Our files on the organized left are the most extensive in the nation," and in another boasted about Waller's infiltration of a meeting in Europe. An ad for its newsletter West Watch carried the headline "Keep track of the revolution lobby."

The Israeli component wasn't as prominent in the private spying biz during the 80's as it is now, but the connections were starting to be put in place as the focus shifted from anti-communism to counter-terrorism. In the late 80's, for example, John Rees headed a group called Mid-Atlantic Research -- along with British "counter-terrorism" expert Robert Moss, who had ties to the Neocon/ex-CIA/Israeli axis that had invented the war on terror at the end of the 70's -- and one of their employees was long-time Israeli propagandist Yossef Bodansky.

It's a long, complicated history, but many of the same names keep surfacing in it -- and elements of the US government have never hesitated to draw on these groups' frequently-dubious data.

[Dyedinthewoolliberal]

8. Wow

Just last night I watched an old 'Rockford Files' rerun episode, "The House on Willis Avenue".
Bottom line? It was about a company that had a series of computer backs collecting all the information it could on people, AND being able to manipulate things like police records and credit ratings.
At the end they ran a little thing that said (more or less) 'private companies are currently engaged in collecting information on American citizens and no agency is overseeing this work. It would prove to be dangerous to your rights' or something like that.
That program aired in 1978.....

[Starry Messenger]

9. k & r

[RagAss]

10. I'm pretty certain they won't venture into my hood.

[maryf]

11. K&R

Think they were checking out some anti-frackers of late, but can't find the article, if I do I'll send it your way...thanks.

[CoffeeCat]

13. Anti-frackers?

Wow, so these people who do the spying are for fracking and they enjoy when our
tape water implodes?

Geez.

It there any doubt that the corporations are using government resources to intimidate
those would dare to speak out against their evil actions?

Freaks.

[Uncle Joe]

12. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Hannah Bell.

[inna]

14. wow. just saw this, too late to rec, but thanks for posting this.