If this is the information that ASIO used to deport Parkin, some questions will need to be asked.
Firstly, was ASIO acting based on a current profile of Parkin, or outdated infomation it had previously received from TALON
Secondly,
is the Australian Cabinet, from Prime Minister Howard downward, guilty
of acting on inappropriate information simply because it existed ?
Thirdly:
Have ASIO's activities in Australia mirrored the intensity of Paul
Wolfowitz' US program? If so, how many how many profiles of Australian
anti-war activists and writers now exist in ASIO's files.
Fourthly:
Are Australian anti-Halliburton activists considered as being of a
level of security risk that the US Army no longer considers Parkin to
be?
[ Newsweek, cover-date 30/1/2006 ]
The demonstration seemed harmless enough. Late on a June afternoon in
2004, a motley group of about 10 peace activists showed up outside the
Houston headquarters of Halliburton, the giant military contractor once
headed by Vice President Dick Cheney.
They were there to protest the
corporation's supposed "war profiteering." The demonstrators wore
papier-mache masks and handed out free peanut-butter-and-jelly
sandwiches to Halliburton employees as they left work.
The idea,
according to organizer Scott Parkin, was to call attention to
allegations that the company was overcharging on a food contract for
troops in Iraq. "It was tongue-in-street political theater," Parkin
says.
But that's not how the Pentagon saw it. To
U.S. Army analysts at the top-secret Counterintelligence Field Activity
(CIFA), the peanut-butter protest was regarded as a potential threat to
national security. Created three years ago by the Defense Department,
CIFA's role is "force protection"—tracking threats and terrorist plots
against military installations and personnel inside the United States.
In May 2003, Paul Wolfowitz, then deputy Defense secretary, authorized
a fact-gathering operation code-named TALON—short for Threat and Local
Observation Notice—that would collect "raw information" about
"suspicious incidents." The data would be fed to CIFA to help the
Pentagon's "terrorism threat warning process," according to an internal
Pentagon memo.
A
Defense document shows that Army analysts wrote a report on the
Halliburton protest and stored it in CIFA's database. It's not clear
why the Pentagon considered the protest worthy of attention—although
organizer Parkin had previously been arrested while demonstrating at
ExxonMobil headquarters (the charges were dropped).
But there are now
questions about whether CIFA exceeded its authority and conducted
unauthorized spying on innocent people and organizations.
A Pentagon
memo obtained by NEWSWEEK shows that the deputy Defense secretary now
acknowledges that some TALON reports may have contained information on
U.S. citizens and groups that never should have been retained. The
number of reports with names of U.S. persons could be in the thousands,
says a senior Pentagon official who asked not be named because of the
sensitivity of the subject.
I
have no doubt that ASIO, along with Prime Minister Howard and his
Cabinet were acting on an outdated script. With this hindsight, the
ASIO "leak" to The Australian's Greg Sheridan appears farcical.
To
answer a part of my questions.. it's a fair assumption that in the
hysteria immediately followng the September 11 2001, the White House
and the Pentagon implement a level of surveillance thathas not been
rescinded or reduced by the Australian Government and it's authorities.
On
behalf of the civil liberties of the Australian public, an inquiriy
needs to be launched on the level of accuracy and immediacy of
information be ing used by Australia in deciding its actions in the war
on terror!
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