The private military contractor Blackwater Worldwide has frequently been embroiled in controversy for its activities in Iraq and elsewhere. Last fall, the Iraqi government attempted to revoke Blackwater’s license to work in that country after contractors opened fire at a Baghdad intersection, killing eight civilians.
In an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, Blackwater’s president, Gary Jackson, announced that the firm has already reduced its security contracting and expects to get out of that business almost entirely.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has also raised questions about the use of private contractors to provide training for US forces, asking, “are we comfortable with this practice, and do we fully understand the implications in terms of quality, responsiveness and sustainability?”
However Blackwater founder and CEO Eric Prince doesn’t believe the US government can do without him. In a drive around Blackwater’s training center in Moyock, NC, Prince acknowledged that “we take a lot of grief for the work we’ve done,” but he also boasted to the Associated Press about his firm’s operations, including “the guys that fly into rough, unimproved strips to do tactical airlift support.”
“You know, we did 11,000 missions last year in Afghanistan,” Prince said. “Our total invoice … was less than the air force is spending on one C-27 aircraft. … It’s a benefit to the US government to go to the outside to do that mission.”
Prince does recognize that his firm’s focus will have to change. “The security business is what it is,” he opined. “I don’t see that growing a lot. I mean, Iraq is getting progressively better. … The experience we’ve had would certainly be a disincentive to any other companies that want to step in and put their entire business at risk.”
However, Prince foresees that “whoever takes over in January, whatever party, the US government is still going to need a lot of this kind of work done. Companies like us are going to be necessary to do the work.” He also noted that “at our core, we’ve always been trainers, and that will continue.”
This video is from The Associated Press, broadcast July 21, 2008.
Terrorism liaison officers have been getting a lot of attention in the national press lately. But the bottom line of what they do is basically old-fashioned police work, according to the state police coordinating the effort in Arizona.
The TLOs, as they are called, keep their eyes and ears open for any suspicious activity.
The three-year-old program is part of the Arizona Department of Public Safety and its Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, the state’s intelligence fusion center. The 75 to 80 TLOs are specially trained police officers, firefighters and police crime analysts. They report suspicious behavior they see in the course of their jobs. The reports are put in the state database for further investigation, and could be sent to federal terrorist databases.
DPS Lt. Larry Perry, the man in charge of Arizona’s TLOs, thinks they are necessary. Although he admits their jobs include a concept that all police officers and firefighters should follow, he says TLOs have learned a lot more than that during 40 hours of special training.
“This is situational awareness where people who work in critical infrastructures throughout the state are reporting suspicious activities,” Perry said. “TLOs are not getting information on private citizens in their homes. This is a speciality unit that links TLOs together for the purpose of reporting suspicious activity.”
Perry said TLOs in Arizona have reported theft of military clothing, police or fire uniforms and equipment. He added that TLOs are deployed to large public gatherings of 500 or more people where the potential for terrorism exists so they can assist law enforcement officials.
“If we were to see one person taking a lot of pictures of the power plant at Palo Verde (nuclear plant), that could be a terrorist opportunity,” Perry said.
The program has received four federal and state grants ranging from $200,000 to $500,000, according to Perry. They range from 24 months to 36 months.
Sgt. Brent Olson, a member of the Mesa Police Department emergency services and counter terrorism teams, is a TLO. He believes the program provides an important link between law enforcement and fire protection agencies.
“A lot of it is straight-up crime prevention, but with a twist,” Olson said.
“We’re focused with speciality other units. Something may happen here in Mesa and TLOs can work their counterparts in other cities to check if there’s anything going on there. We can contact each other directly and share information. We don’t have to go through others as we might have had to do. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a good program.”
Perry scoffs at the notion that the program may be likened to snooping.
“It’s not ‘Big Brother’ at all, but I can see that the ACLU might have a problem with it,” he said.
Alessandra Soler Meetze , executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said her concern is the program might give inexperienced or undertrained volunteers the opportunity to target people because of ethnicity or religion.
“What we don’t want is a policy that encourages non-law enforcement personnel to keep tabs on their neighbors,” Meetze said. “This sounds like good police work and smart profiling based on behavior rather than racial or ethnic factors. The policy clearly targets behavior. We just need to keep tabs on DPS to make sure their officers and volunteers in practice don’t cross the line and begin replacing suspicious activity with skin color when targeting individuals.”
Perry said the reporting of suspicious information by TLOs is based upon suspicious activities and incidents, not on race or religious preference.
Suspicious activity is defined in TLO training as behavior that could lead to terrorism, such as taking photos of no apparent aesthetic value, making measurements or notes, espousing extremist beliefs or conversing in code, according to a draft Department of Justice/Major Cities Chiefs Association document.
Back on July 2, Barack Obama read his “public service” address, and it contained this line that hasn’t received much notice:
“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set… We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”
LOL What? Obama’s going to create a civilian national security force as strong as the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — combined? With the same budget? And hardware, apparently? Holy %^&*!
This inconceivably vast proposal is hardly being mentioned by the MSM; just a throwaway line in last week’s speech about voluntarism. But what will this “civilian national security force” do? Obama didn’t say. Where will they get their funding? Didn’t say. Wouldn’t this force be at least extra-constitutional, if not unconstitutional? Who would control them? Would service be mandatory like his other youth “volunteer” initiatives? ::shrug::
At this same speech, he promised to withhold funds from school districts that don’t make their junior high and high schoolers serve 50 hours a year. 100 hours for college students, provided their type of service is deemed acceptable by a sprawling new Federal bureaucracy.
Oh, and Obama’s going to double the size of the Peace Corps while quadrupling AmeriCorps. I’m curious if anyone will be left to fill all the newly vacated private sector jobs. St. Barack concluded his speech with this gem: “Loving your country must mean accepting your responsibility to do your part to change it.”
But what if I love my country the way it is?
Throwing more kerosene on the mob’s torches, Obama is moving his nomination acceptance speech to Denver’s 75,000-seat outdoor stadium. And is thinking about a speech at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Odd that he didn’t choose Nuremberg.
Tomorrow, July 8th, could mark the beginning of official condoning of warrantless surveillance of law-abiding citizens in the US, not to mention foreign nationals. Much of this information has been covered by Glenn Greenwald in the past week.
In the video below, I talk about what every American needs to know — and do in the next 24 hours — about the new FISA (Federal Information and Surveillance Act) amendments. The interview, and below partial transcription, answers questions like…
-I don’t have anything to hide. How does this affect me?
-What if this type of surveillance is what has prevented another 9/11 from happening?
-What are common inaccuracies about FISA reported in the media?
Find below how you can make a real impact in less than 60 seconds. Every person counts — the Senators who will vote are watching the numbers. 41 Senators can block the bill, and it’s not too late.
Please do the following: How I ask you to spend 60 seconds
1. ALL AMERICANS: Go to the EFF website here and put in your zipcode to find your Senator’s phone number. Call them and read the short script on the same page. If no answer, click the link at the bottom of the page to e-mail them.
(Tell others verbally to go to “www.eff.org” and click “take action”)
2. OBAMA SUPPORTERS: Go to My.BarackObama.com here and join the group requesting he oppose (as he did earlier) the amendment. This takes about 30 seconds. I suggest changing “ListServ” in the bottom right to “Do not receive e-mails.” (Tell others verbally to search “obama please vote no” on Google and My.BarackObama.com will be in the top 3 results, currently #1)
1. Why does the vote this Tuesday, July 8th matter to normal people who have nothing to hide?
Ordinary citizens who want to live in a democracy — including those with nothing to hide — should be concerned about the ability of the government to use private, sensitive personal information to blackmail, manipulate, and intimidate their representatives, journalists and their sources, potential whistleblowers, and activists or dissenters of any sort.
2. Couldn’t it be argued that this type of surveillance ability has prevented another 9/11 from happening? Isn’t it possible that this type of legislation has saved American lives?
The administration has claimed that is has, but without presenting a single piece of evidence that this is so, even in closed hearings to Senators with clearances on the Intelligence Committee. The FISA court has granted warrants in virtually every request that’s been made of it that has any color of helping national security. The administration’s decision to bypass that court, illegally, leads to a strong suspicion that they are abusing domestic spying, as some of their predecessors did, in ways that even the secret FISA court would never approve.
3. What are the most important factual inaccuracies about FISA found in the media?
Advocates of the bill take pride that it makes this amended FISA the exclusive basis for overhearing citizens, but that exclusivity is, in fact, in the current 30-year-old FISA bill already. President Bush simply ignored it in bypassing FISA, and there’s not reason that he and his successors would not continue to do the same here.
It’s been inaccurately stated that if this amendments didn’t pass, FISA would expire. This is flatly false. FISA is open-ended and will continue as it already has, adequately for 30 years. What would expire are some blanket surveillance orders authorized last year, which the majority of Democrats, including Senator Obama, voted against.
The current bill does include one useful amendment to FISA, which could be passed with virtually unanimous approval in an afternoon, to allow warrantless interception of foreign-to-foreign communications that happen to pass through the United States. No one opposes this.
Various administration officials have claimed that the requirement of applying for a warrant from the FISA court deprived them of speed and flexibility. This is false. The FISA allows for surveillance to be implemented in an emergency situation before a warrant is sought, and that could undoubtedly be extended with Congressional approval without controversy.
What the administration seeks, and this bill provides, is permanent warrantless surveillance.
4. Let’s consider an analogy: police officers have the legal right to stop you if you’re going 56 mph in a 55-mph zone, but this right isn’t often abused or applied to harass citizens. What makes you think the administration would abuse their surveillance powers if this amendment is approved?
The abuses of surveillance to which governments are drawn are those that keep them in office, used to intimidate and manipulate their rivals, and to avoid debate and dissent on their policies. These are exactly the abuses that the Church Committee discovered in 1975, which had been conducted on a wide-scale by the Johnson and Nixon administrations, and in some cases even earlier, which is what lead to FISA in the first place.
To remove judicial oversight, which this amendment would effectively do, is to invite the same kind of repressive abuse that lead to FISA in the first place.
5. Why would the current administration want this amendment to pass, if not for safety of citizens and prevention of attacks?
Using NSA to spy without judicial oversight or constraint on American citizens provides the infrastructure for dictatorship. George W. Bush has frequently said what other presidents may only have thought: “It would be a heck of a lot easier in a dictatorship, if only I were the dictator.”
Other presidents have violated the law and the Constitution in much the same way as Bush, so long as they could do it secretly, but they haven’t proclaimed that as a right of their office as Bush, Cheney and their legal advisors have done.
The oath of office they took, along with all members of Congress, was to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic. I believe that, in the matters we’ve been discussing, the Founders had it right, not only for their time but for ours.
Exactly one day after George Bush signed the first year of the $1.6 billion Plan Mexico into law–giving Mexican military and police US training, armament, and resources–videos surfaced showing Mexican police undergoing torture training in León, Guanajuato. The torture training is directed by a British man from an unidentified US private security company.
The videos show the English-speaking contractor directing and participating in the torture of members of the Special Tactical Group (GET in its Spanish initials) of the León municipal police force during a 160-hour training over twelve days in April 2006. Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, the Secretary of Public Security in León, says the participants volunteered to be tortured as part of the training.
In one video, the unidentified contractor drags a GET officer through a puddle of his own vomit as punishment for failure to complete a training exercise.
In a second video, GET officers squirt mineral water up the nose of another officer, a torture technique commonly utilized by Mexican police. The man’s head is also shoved into a hole which supposedly contains rats and feces:
Leon city Police Chief Carlos Tornero told the AP that the English-speaking man in the videos is a contractor from a private US security firm. Tornero refused to elaborate on the man’s identity, details about the US company, and who contracted the company.
The government’s response has been to defend the program, attack the media for reporting on the videos, and deny the illegality of torture. León mayor Vicente Guerrero Reynoso said that the training would continue and no public official would be punished for involvement in the torture training. He demanded that the media “be more responsible.” Guerrero is a member of President Felipe Calderón’s right-wing National Action Party.
Alvar Cabeza de Vaca, Secretary of Public Security for León, said torture training for police is necessary: “It is essential to have a special group that responds to certain conditions. More and more we see the clear involvement, not only in León, but in the whole state, of organized crime, and there is a need to have these groups.” Cabeza de Vaca seemed to be most preoccupied with how the videos became public. In response to a reporter’s question about why the municipal government offers illegal training that violates human rights, he responded, “Well, while it is not prohibited…in the end I don’t know how the video arrived [in the hands of the meda]. The trainer makes the recordings to observe and correct the teachings.”
Mexico’s national daily La Jornada was quick to point out that torture is in fact prohibited, contrary to the public security chief’s assertions: “Torture is a crime in Guanajuato: in accordance with Article 264 of the state Penal Code, the public servant who ‘intentionally exercises violence against a person, be it in order to obtain information or constituting an illicit investigation method,’ faces a punishment of 2-10 years in prison.”
The existence of a training led by a US defense contractor to teach Mexican police torture tactics in order to combat organized crime and the local government’s adamant defense of the program is particularly disturbing considering the US government’s recent approval of the $1.6 billion Plan Mexico, also known as the Merida Initiative. Plan Mexico is an aid package specifically designed to support President Felipe Calderón’s deadly battle against organized crime. It will fund more US training for Mexican police and military, in addition to providing them with riot gear, spy equipment, and military aircraft. Plan Mexico allows funds for the deployment of up to fifty US defense contractors to Mexico.
This is not the first time US defense contractors have directed torture in foreign countries. During the 2003-2004 Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq, US soldiers claimed that defense contractors who ran the prison directed them to torture inmates. Four former Abu Ghraib inmates recently filed lawsuits against CACI International Inc. of Arlington, Va., and New York-based L-3 Communications Corp., formerly Titan Corp., for torturing them.
Kristin Bricker is a freelance reporter living and working in Mexico. She is also part of the Rebel Imports collective, which sells fair trade textiles, coffee, and honey from Zapatista cooperatives. She can be reached through her website.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups.
urrently, FBI agents need reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials say, would let agents open terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, are deemed suspicious.
Although President George W. Bush has disavowed targeting suspects based on their race or ethnicity, the new rules would let the FBI consider those factors among traits that could trigger a national security investigation.
Among factors that could make someone subject of an investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person’s race or ethnicity. Law enforcement officials say the policy would help them find terrorists before they strike.
“We don’t know what we don’t know. And the object is to cut down on that,” said one FBI official.
FBI agents wouldn’t be allowed to eavesdrop on phone calls or dig deeply into personal data — such as the content of phone or e-mail records or bank statements — until a full investigation was opened.
More than a half-dozen senior FBI, Justice Department and other U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the new policy agreed to discuss it on condition of anonymity.
The change, expected later this summer, is part of an update of Justice Department policies amid the FBI’s transition from traditional crime fighting to protecting the nation from attacks. Attorney General Michael Mukasey acknowledged the overhaul was under way in early June.
If adopted, the guidelines would be put in place in the final months of a presidential administration that has been dogged by criticism that its counterterrorism programs trample privacy rights and civil liberties.
Critics say the presumption of innocence is lost in the proposal. The FBI could begin investigations simply “by assuming that everyone’s a suspect, and then you weed out the innocent,” said Caroline Fredrickson of the American Civil Liberties Union.
Courts across the country have overturned criminal convictions when defendants showed they were targeted based on race. Racial profiling generally is considered a civil rights violation, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft condemned it in March 2001 as an “unconstitutional deprivation of equal protection under our Constitution.”
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the guidelines wouldn’t give the FBI more authority than it now has.
“Any review and change to the guidelines will reflect our traditional concerns for civil liberties and First Amendment liberties and our traditional investigative emphasis on using the least intrusive means feasible,” he said Wednesday.
This Nation’s Deathbed exposes the SPP Summit and the protests of Montebello Quebec held in summer of 2007. The film offers the best explanation to date of, of what the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement actually is and what it’s grave implications on Canadian Sovereignty would be once fully implemented;
From binding and unfair contracts that would give license to American corporate interests over the annexation of natural resources such as water and lumber.
The merger of the 3 country’s military forces and rise of a police state.
The transformation of the economy and its currency.
The dismantling of health care.
The further erosion of democratic proceedings, checks and balances on government and corporations.
The privatization of Canadian infrastructure such as highways, energy, water, and agriculture.
In short the SPP amounts to the the allowance of private corporations to rule over deciding policies that will inevitably harm the quality of life that many simply take for granted, as corporations would be unaccountable to the well being of Canadian lives, and only interested in profit.
The film tells the story of a building resistance movement; one that began outside the Montebello resort to demonstrate and expose treason as it was committed. And it follows on into the continued protests held nation wide in cities across Canada. It is a movement that has promised that it shall persist until the people’s voices are heard, when the SPP is put to a public referendum.
Featured speakers include patriotic Canadians like Wendy Forrest, Connie Fogal, Diana Nicholson, Vijay Sarma as well as guest appearances from authors such as Jerome Corsi of the Late Great USA and Linda McQuaig, author of Holding the Bullies Coat.
Produced by White Buffalo Films, Steven Davies and Dan Dicks
PRESS FOR TRUTH
The Nation’s Deathbed can be watched on and is sold exclusively by on pressfortruth.ca
In association with
CAP-PAC
THE CANADIAN ACTION PARTY
The Canadian Action Party is the only party that has been opposing the North American Union and is our greatest hope for a free and prosperous Canada.
http://canadianactionparty.ca
WEARECHANGE TORONTO
“We Are Change has arisen from the remnants of our republic to fill the vacancy left by those who swore to preserve, protect and defend The Constitution against all enemies – foreign and domestic. We seek to expose the fraud of the left/right paradigm and reveal that the world truly functions on a top/down hierarchy that threatens to destroy free society as we know it. We Are Change works to educate, motivate, and activate those striving to uncover the truth behind the private banking cartel of the military industrial complex that is directing the majority of U.S. policy, and that is actively seeking to eliminate national sovereignty and replace it with a “one world order.” We will also continue to move in a direction that reconnects “We the People” to our nations founding principles laid out in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”
Mark Klein, the retired AT&T engineer who stepped forward with the technical documents at the heart of the anti-wiretapping case against AT&T, is furious at the Senate’s vote on Wednesday night to hold a vote on a bill intended to put an end to that lawsuit and more than 30 others.
[Wednesday]’s vote by Congress effectively gives retroactive immunity to the telecom companies and endorses an all-powerful president. It’s a Congressional coup against the Constitution.
The Democratic leadership is touting the deal as a “compromise,” but in fact they have endorsed the infamous Nuremberg defense: “Just following orders.” The judge can only check their paperwork. This cynical deal is a Democratic exercise in deceit and cowardice.
Klein saw a network monitoring room being built in AT&T’s internet switching center that only NSA-approved techs had access to. He squirreled away documents and then presented them to the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation after news of the government’s warrantless wiretapping program broke.
Wired.com independently acquired a copy of the documents (.pdf) — which were under court seal — and published the wiring documents in May 2006 so that they could be evaluated.
The lawsuit that resulted from his documents is now waiting on the 9th U.S. Appeals Court to rule on whether it can proceed despite the government saying the whole matter is a state secret. A lower court judge ruled that it could, because the government admitted the program existed and that the courts could handle evidence safely and in secret.
But the appeals court ruling will likely never see the light of day, since the Senate is set to vote on July 8 on the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which also largely legalizes Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program by expanding how the government can wiretap from inside the United States without getting individualized court orders.
Klein continues:
Congress has made the FISA law a dead letter–such a law is useless if the president can break it with impunity. Thus the Democrats have surreptitiously repudiated the main reform of the post-Watergate era and adopted Nixon’s line: “When the president does it that means that it is not illegal.” This is the judicial logic of a dictatorship.
The surveillance system now approved by Congress provides the physical apparatus for the government to collect and store a huge database on virtually the entire population, available for data mining whenever the government wants to target its political opponents at any given moment—all in the hands of an unrestrained executive power. It is the infrastructure for a police state.
Neither the House nor the Senate has had Klein testify, nor have telecom executives testified in open session about their participation.
The bill forces the district court judge handling the consolidated cases against telecoms to dismiss the suits if the Attorney General certifies that a government official sent a written request to a phone or internet provider, saying that the President approved the program and his lawyers deemed it legal. Judge Vaughn Walker of the California Northern District can ask to see the paperwork, but would not be given leeway to decide if the program was legal.
The comments made in the You Tube video are very similar to the death threats made by Michael Reagan to Mark Dice. This individual was arrested while Reagan was not even suspended from his radio show.
It took just a few weeks for Andre Moore to go from YouTube to the slammer.
Members of the state attorney general’s Gun Violence Task Force announced Moore’s abrupt career change yesterday morning by smashing a battering ram through the door of his West Philadelphia apartment.
The 44-year-old was arrested for calling for the murder of 18th District police officers in a video titled “Dissin’ Philly Cops” that he posted on YouTube on June 6, law-enforcement officials said.
Moore, who’s now been suspended from his job as a security guard at Albert Einstein Medical Center, was less than subtle in his performance.
While waving a gun through the air, Moore said, “I rejoice whenever they shoot a cop in Philadelphia because I hate them,” according to a court affidavit containing a transcript of the video.
Later on, he offered instructions on to how to murder cops: “All we need is a Colt .275 to do it. Look, it’s easy. You got the chamber, let it go off . . . anywhere in the head or heart . . . continue killing the 18th District police.”
The officials said that Moore’s 12-year-old son, Andre Jr., filmed the volatile video, and another underage relative held a gun in a second video that Moore posted on YouTube using the screen name “lildre502.”
The videos are no longer available on YouTube.
Moore’s wife, Tamara, expressed outrage over the incident during a phone interview last night.
“I knew nothing about any of this,” she said. “Me, my son and our family are very much humiliated by the act Andre did.
“Whatever happens to him, happens. My job is being jeopardized because of this.”
Investigators said that District Attorney Lynne Abraham and state Attorney General Tom Corbett became aware of the videos about two weeks ago.
They charged Moore with aggravated assault, corruption of minors, terroristic threats and harassment.
“Obviously, the charges could be challenged in court, but that’s out of our hands,” said police spokesman Lt. Frank Vanore. “You have rights, but that doesn’t mean you can say something like this.”
Under the old FISA bill, you could eavesdrop on foreign powers (or agents of foreign powers) who were trying to engage in “sabotage” and “international terrorism.” To that, the new bill adds the practice of trafficking in weapons of mass destruction as being grounds for eavesdropping.
And exactly what are WMDs under the new FISA bill, you ask? Let’s go to Thomas, that very useful government database, and find out. Under title VII, section 110, there is the new definition:
`(1) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas device that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause a mass casualty incident;
`(2) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals or their precursors;
`(3) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as such terms are defined in section 178 of title 18, United States Code) that is designed, intended, or has the capability to cause death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons; or
`(4) any weapon that is designed, intended, or has the capability to release radiation or radioactivity causing death, illness, or serious bodily injury to a significant number of persons.’
Now, two things of interest leap to my attention here. First is the qualifier of “significant number of persons” as the definition of a mass casualty incident. That’s good; many discussions just default to explaining WMDs as “any chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon.” Thus, you get the ridiculous examples of the FBI calling a few grams of ricin or a cylinder of chlorine a “WMD” if someone threatens to use it against the public. They don’t consider quantity to be a factor in prosecuting a case. When the term “WMD” was defined by the United Nations in 1948, they specifically meant “things on the scale of an atomic bomb.” No one has defined what “significant number of persons” is, though. I guess it’s like pornography, you know mass casualties when you see them (100 people? 1,000? 10,000?). Again, at the least, it takes more than a few (or a few dozen) casualties to constitute a mass-casualty event (FBI, take note).
Second, see subparagraph where it says that “any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas device”? Here’s where they screwed up big time, by not asking anyone with a Defense Department background for advice. The military (and arms control community) deliberately excludes incendiary devices from the definition of a chemical weapon (and thus, would exclude incendiaries from the WMD definition). They are conventional weapons with specific guidelines (see Protocol III here). Just because incendiary weapons use chemicals does not make them unconventional weapons, and I don’t think we need to track nations or arms dealers who traffic in napalm, fuel-air explosives and flamethrowers.
I really wish they would leave explosives out, too. They are not on the scale of WMDs — again, by the UN definition, a single explosive device doesn’t come close to the effect of an atomic bomb (although kudos to the Air Force for trying). Oklahoma City was a tragedy, but it was not a WMD event, and the two planes that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 were not WMDs — they were improvised high-explosive devices. If I had to guess, this is the work of some eager beaver who has Justice Department background and he wants to ensure that older (and inaccurate) Title 18 definitions of WMD still apply for the law enforcement community. There continues to be debate within the Defense Department about including high-yield explosives in the definition — a strategy document from the Office of the Secretary of Defense says no, the antiterrorism community says yes.
This is a significant addition, however, and I’d be very curious to find out who sponsored this part of the legislation. It is certainly an expansion of powers for the “combating WMD” community and demonstrates that the government is still afraid of the WMD boogeyman (but not enough to get its definition straight). So, no more nuclear weapons conversations with Iranians or North Koreans on the phone. Big Brother is listening.
