04.28.06
Red Alert: CIA and NSA to Be Given ‘Warrentless Arrest’ Power
This really is gravely serious. Please act IMMEDIATELY: contact your Congressional Representative and tell them to oppose this terrifying and utterly irresponsible slide into a Gestapo state. Find/contact your Representative via http://www.house.gov/writerep/
The House version of the 2007 intelligence authorization bill — H.R. 5020 — would grant CIA and NSA security personnel the authority to make “warrantless arrests” for “any felony” committed in their presence, no matter how remote from the foreign intelligence mission it might be or where they occurred, the Baltimore Sun reported on April 25, 2006.
Section 432 of the bill grants similar authority to NSA security personnel.
For more info, see:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/04/house_poised_to_grant_arrest_p.html
and
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.spies25apr25,0,5928384.story
For the full bill –HR 5020 — see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.5020:
(Relevant excerpts are also quoted below.)
This legislation would create what can only be characterized as a secret police force controlled directly by the President. This is precisely the American Gestapo that the Republicans themselves warned about when Truman first sought to create the CIA in 1945.
There are two (count ‘em) fig leaves in the legislation, both meaningless. First, the power of warrentless arrest would apply “only” to “personnel designated to carry out protective functions.” A literalist reading of this would equate to security personnel; in practice there is nothing to prevent the Director of Central Intelligence (Porter Goss, a partisan Republican warrior whose leadership had sharply divided the CIA) from “designating” every employee, agent, and asset of the CIA as having a “protective function.” Second (albeit not quoted below), the DCI’s and NSA director’s “policies” must be in line with “policies” promulgated by the Attorney General. But considering that our current Atty. Gen., Alberto Gonzales, signed on to the notion that no law or treaty or Constitutional provison in any way restricts the President from authorizing torture and, jeepers, unilateral secret detention of anyone anywhere, this is obviously a distinction without a difference.
Let us review the basic current situation:
* The President has claimed for himself the power to hold anyone, including any US citizen, in secret detention “exempt” from habeas corpus protection.
* The President claims the courts have no jurisdiction. After the Supreme Court challenged this, Congress recently passed a law (still untested in the courts) specifically declaring that the courts have no jurisdiction over such “detentions”.
* Ever-mounting evidence from multiple independent sources makes it undeniable that A) an unknown but presumably large number of persons have been abducted by US intelligence and military personnel, and B) an extensive “black” network of airplanes is secretly transporting these abductees to third countries for incarceration, interrogation, and torture (otherwise…why do it at all, and why fire CIA analysts for allegedly leaking the info)
* In January 2005, Newsweek reported senior Pentagon counterinsurgency planners were seriously considering what they referred to as “The Salvador Option” for Iraq — meaning creating and controlling death squads just as had been done throughout Latin America during the latter years of the Cold War. Less than a year later, the first press reports began to surface of death squad activity in Iraq, believed to be tied to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
* The Bush Administration has made it abundantly clear that it makes little or no distinction between tactics and strategies that can/should be applied abroad vs. domestically.
* The “warrantless arrest” provision was inserted into the bill at the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte. As US Ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, Negroponte helped facilitate and cover-up, you guessed it, death squad activities in Latin America.
* There have been numerous accurate reports in recent months of sweeping abuses of power in the “war on terror” directly targeting the homeland population.
Now the House wants to grant arrest powers to the CIA and the NSA??!?!?!
SPECIFIC LANGUAGE:
H.R.5020
Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)
SEC. 423. ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS AND AUTHORITIES FOR PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3065. Powers of authorized personnel in the Central Intelligence Agency
`(a) The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Central Intelligence Agency under section 5(a)(4) of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. 403f) to, while engaged in such protective functions, make arrests without a warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…snip…]
SEC. 432. CODIFICATION OF AUTHORITIES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, as amended by section 423 of this Act, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3066. Powers of authorized personnel in the National Security Agency
`(a) The Director of the National Security Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Agency to–
`(1) carry firearms; and
`(2) make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…end quote…]
