Pentagon spying on Americans - WTF???

[Serial Mom]

It's not like we don't have enough agencies scrutinizing us (Homeland Security, FBI, DOJ, IRS, ATF, DEA, State Police/Officials, Local Police/Officials and I am sure, others), but this is crazy! Why are they using their dollars funded by the American people to spy on the American people - they should be spending it on the TROOPS - to give them good boots (instead of cheap ones so that the families or soliders have to spend their own money on better quality boots)or more importantly, body armour?

This just blew me away!

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/
Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?
Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks ‘suspicious’ domestic groups
the U.S. military is collecting information on American peace activists and monitoring Iraq war protests. NBC's Lisa Myers reports.

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

<snip>
Some former senior DOD intelligence officials share his concern. George Lotz, a 30-year career DOD official and former U.S. Air Force colonel, held the post of Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Oversight from 1998 until his retirement last May. Lotz, who recently began a consulting business to help train and educate intelligence agencies and improve oversight of their collection process, believes some of the information the DOD has been collecting is not justified.

“Somebody needs to be monitoring to make sure they are just not going crazy and reporting things on U.S. citizens without any kind of reasoning or rationale,” says Lotz. “I demonstrated with Martin Luther King in 1963 in Washington,” he says, “and I certainly didn’t want anybody putting my name on any kind of list. I wasn’t any threat to the government,” he adds.

<snip>
“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

<snip>

HOLY CRAP!

[China_cat]

1. Quakers were FBI targets during Vietnam, too.

So this is only to be expected.

[rman]

2. Only thing surprising is that it's in the MSM

Seems to be a trend as of lately; we've had publications on Watergate-sized scandals for a couple of days in a row now. I'm waiting to see what comes of those - if anything.

[Serial Mom]

3. But military spying in the U.S.?

Why? Are we a threat to their recruiting?

[pocket]

4. .

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