Protest = "Domestic terrorism" (Plus: more on von Brunn)

If you haven't seen it yet, you must read this story, which Corrente first brought to my attention.

This week, President Obama said -- vis-a-vis Iran -- that "Peaceful dissent should never be subject to violence."

Meanwhile, a Pentagon training manual describes protest rallies as "low-level terrorist activity."

So. All those protests and rallies and such that attended the downfall of the Soviet bloc: That was terrorism, right?

Our friend Antifascist has written a brilliant column about the Pentagon's stance.

Pretty ironic coming from a sprawling bureaucracy currently engaged in two aggressive wars of conquest for whom dropping a proverbial dime on unsuspecting goat herders or wedding parties is a walk in the park! Not to mention Joint Special Operations Command's "executive assassination ring" operating out of the former Vice President's office, who without so much as a by-your-leave, bumped-off official regime enemies.

The "terrorism" label is not just a matter of semantics. The Pentagon really does treat American dissenters as Enemy #1. Here's something most folks don't know:

As Antifascist Calling revealed in previous reports, the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team is now deployed inside the United States "under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North, the "service component" of U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM).

AFC also reported that since NORTHCOM's launch in 2002, it has been mired in controversy. Among its more dubious accomplishments were illegal domestic spying operations in conjunction with the Pentagon's shadowy Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA). Before being run to ground, like many Defense Department intelligence operations, CIFA was heavily outsourced to security corporations. More than 900 employees out of a total work force of 1,300 were high-paid contractors.

Hey, but that was then. CIFA has been shut down. So everything is better now, right?

Despite CIFA's shut-down last year, its TALON database (Threat and Local Observation Notices), which contained hundreds of files on antiwar activists, was shunted over to the FBI for safekeeping in its Guardian database, one component of the Bureau's massive Investigative Data Warehouse.

Its a safe bet however, that the illegal collection of intelligence on domestic dissidents continues.

Oh.

Antifascist goes on to identify a number of anti-terrorism "institutes" which define terrorism with an elasticity worthy of Plastic Man. These organizations include The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response, a joint American-Israeli venture; Henley Putnam University, an online university staffed by a lot of former spooks; The Performance Institute, a think tank which has has new ideas about tracking sex offenders; and St. Petersburg College's Florida Regional Community Policing Institute, which teaches law enforcement personnel "identify the electronic tools and media which international and domestic terrorists use and the best practices identified for properly seizing computer hardware and peripherals."

Speaking of the sex offender thing: Am I the only person suspicious of the report that kiddie porn was found on a computer belonging to James von Brunn, the aged neo-fascist accused of committing murder at the Holocaust Museum?

Please don't misunderstand: The man is contemptible. Sexual oddity in such individuals comes as no surprise. (Adolf himself made women defecate on him.) And it hardly seems likely that the cops would feel any need to "salt" the evidence against von Brunn.

But.

Evil as he is (and old as he is), von Brunn is not stupid, and he seems to have some sense of himself as the representative of a movement. As he set off for the Museum, he must have known that, before the day was out, the authorities would grab hold of his computer. Why would anyone leave pedo porn on a hard drive knowing that the feds would soon examine it? Why not just trash the drive?

It doesn't make sense.