TALON and Cunningham

Josh Marshall directs our attention to this piece by Marcy Wheeler on TALON -- Threat and Local Observation Notice -- A Department of Defense database program originally designed to help protect American military bases, but which morphed into a key tool in the effort to snoop on anti-war activists.

That's you and me, folks.

The neocons in the Pentagon set up CIFA, the Counterintelligence Field Activity, which tasked TALON to keep track of anyone working against the war. The program was labeled "law enforcement" instead of "spying" in order to do an end run around the laws against domestic surveillance.

Key CIFA contracts appear to have gone to Mitchell Wade's MZM -- the company that bribed Duke Cunningham. You'll recall that Cunningham later referred to Wade as "the absolute Devil."

This report from the Inspector General of the DOD says that "all TALON reports were deleted from their database in June 2006 with no archives." That is right after the prosecutors in the Cunningham case -- including the since-fired Carol Lam -- started looking into MZM's CIFA contracts.

Odder still: As Marcy notes in an update, at another point the IG report says that the TALON database was deleted in November of 2005. That would be just before the public started to become aware of all this, and just before the Cunningham plea bargain.

Do I really believe that the database was eradicated? Hell no!

I'm sure the database was handed over to a "friendly" foreign agency, outside the reach of any congressional subpoena. Remember, there is another mystery surrounding Cunningham's bribers. From the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence's report on Cunningham:

[W]e are aware of dealings that Cunningham had with certain foreign nationals, which we expect will be given careful scrutiny by appropriate law enforcement and national security agencies" for possible breaches of national security.

I'm also curious as to the possible role played by Porter Goss, the former CIA Director who resigned mysteriously in May of 2006. Goss was close to Wade. Did CIA make ever use of the TALON database? Doing so would be a violation of the Agency's charter.