Antiwar.com Blog

The State of Missouri Information Analysis Center recently issued a no-longer-secret report on domestic terrorism.

The Feb. 20 report called “The Modern Militia Movement” specifically identifies people who “display Campaign for Liberty, Constitution Party, or Libertarian material. These members are usually supporters of former Presidential candidate: Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin, and Bob Barr.”

The report identifies red flags that can identify potential domestic terrorists:

• Bumper stickers for third-party candiates like Ron Paul
• Talk of “New World Order” conspiracy theories
• Opposition to the Federal Reserve and support of the gold standard
• Opposition to US Army takeover of Homeland Security
• Opposition to the North American Union
• Opposition to universal military service
• Tax resistance
• Possession of subversive literature: “pictures, cartoons, bumper stickers that contain anti-government rhetoric. Most of this material will depict the FRS, IRS, FBI, ATF, CIA, UN, Law Enforcement, and ‘New World Order’ in a derogatory manner.”

One of the examples shown is the Gadsden Flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”).

Lt. John Hotz of the Missouri State Highway Patrol said the report comes from publicly available, trend data on militias. It was compiled by the Missouri Information Analysis Center, a “fusion center” in Jefferson City that combines resources from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies. “All this is an educational thing,” Hotz said of the report. “Troopers have been shot by members of groups, so it’s our job to let law enforcement officers know what the trends are in the modern militia movement.”

This was not meant to be a public report (although it was not technically classified). Since it is partially compiled from the federal Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, it would be reasonable to assume that other states and localities are preparing similar reports, and is an indication that these federal agencies have similar perspectives.

Like for example, if some lone nut shoots less than a dozen others and then himself yesterday… Then call out the U.S. Army today.

Update: An investigation has begun as to who ordered the troops outside of their base in direct violation of the posse comitatus and insurrection acts.

Our friends at Just Foreign Policy have an easy way to tell your representative in Congress that you don’t want Obama to escalate US intervention in Afghanistan. You could add that we should get out completely!

Do it today!

It’s quite clear that a major battle has erupted over the appointment of Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), which, among other things, is charged with putting together the consensus judgments, called National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs) on key issues of the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). Today, in what was described as upping the ante, the seven Republican members of the Senate Intelligence Committee expressed their “surprise” at the appointment in a letter to the man who appointed Freeman, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Adm. Dennis Blair, and threatening to “devote even more oversight scrutiny to the activities of the NIC under (Freeman’s) leadership.” (The wording — and the fact that the seven didn’t mention the alleged conflict of interest regarding Freeman’s ties to Saudi Arabia, but only his “highly controversial statements about China and Israel” — suggested to me that they believe that Blair has no intention of seeking Freeman’s withdrawal, which is perhaps an overly hopeful interpretation on my part.)

In any event, as readers of this blog know, I am a big fan of Chris Nelson, who puts out the highly regarded insider newsletter, The Nelson Report. Well, Monday’s edition of the Report reports that Freeman’s controversial statement about the repression of the pro-democracy movement in Beijing in 1989 — which was apparently leaked to Freeman’s critics from a subscriber to a private listserv — has been taken completely out of context. Here is what Nelson wrote this evening:

“Unscrupulous opponents have given sections of the memo to gullible commentators with the lie…no other word for it…that it is Freeman talking for himself, with his personal views and analysis of Chinese government actions in 1989.”

Read the rest of Jim’s post and comment on his blog.

When I blogged and posted a copy of The Baghdad Mosquito yesterday I had no idea I was spreading classified material.

The Baghdad Mosquito is a daily newsletter produced under the auspices of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq. It is distributed via e-mail to an elite group of military officers and policy planners and is posted on the military’s classified Web server.

The March 5 edition contains a reprint of Scott Horton’s article from Antiwar.com, “Finding Ways to Stay in Iraq.” (It is reprinted without the copyright note and The Baghdad Mosquito was not given reprint permission). It was run to show that an Iraq newspaper, Al Nour, had reprinted it in full, to the surprise of the editors of The Mosquito. The Mosquito editors commented:

Summary: A US Political analyst believes that the policies of the Bush administration are being repeated in Iraq; however, the administration is trying to ‘beautify’ the policies in an attempt to fool the world. The analyst claims that Obama is ‘playing with slogans’.

[Mosquito Note: The rest of the article was taken from another website and translated into Arabic. The author at Al Nour removed the names (other than Scott Horton) from the original article. The rest of the content remained the same. The following is the text of the article written by Mr. Scott Horton that was published on Antiwar.com. It is unusual for Al Nour to publish this type of article. The article is written from a very left-wing liberal point of view. Al Nour is usually a non-biased newspaper that publishes news stories rather than extremely biased editorials.]

The staff at The Baghdad Mosquito have become aware of the fact that we obtained a copy of their publication. They have made the following “request”:

Please delete the copy of the product that you have, and I would appreciate if you would ask Mr. Horton to do the same. Additionally, please do not distribute the product further.

The email is signed: V/R, Baghdad Mosquito Staff.

Since this is only a request, and not an order from any governmental body, we have no intention of removing the post at this time (but you might want to grab a copy of the pdf, just in case…)

The Baghdad Mosquito has been published daily since late 2003. I was unable to find another copy anywhere on the web via a Google search, although copies are clearly distributed to non-military people like Daniel Pipes.