“CIFA’s [Counterintelligence Field Activity] authority is still growing. In a new move to centralize all counterterrorism intelligence collection inside the United States, the Defense Department this month gave CIFA authority to task domestic investigations and operations by the counterintelligence units of the military services,” Pincus continues. “CIFA’s new authority will give the agency the ability to propose missions to Army, Navy and Air Force units, which combined have about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian investigators in the United States and abroad. For example, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) has 1,935 ‘federally credentialed special agents,’ according to its Web site. The military service agents investigate crime and terrorism.”

Crime? Once upon a time, “investigating” crime was the responsibility of local law enforcement and the FBI, but now the cops are soldiers. So much for Posse Comitatus and the belief that the military should be used to protect the nation from foreign threat and invasion and the cops used to catch bank robbers and arrest wife beaters and other violent criminals and never shall the twains meet. Of course, CIFA is not tasked with catching thieves, but preventing “terrorism,” defined above as using “counterintelligence units of the military services” against law-abiding Americans who disagree with the neocon master plan of bombing Muslims into submission so they can be more effectively ruled by the sadistic lords of Greater Israel and fleeced by neolib free traders and various other carpetbaggers.

Keep in mind that Bush—or more accurately, the Straussian-Machiavellians ensconced in the White House and the Pentagon—have offered up a “proposal” to “transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts—including protecting military facilities from attack—to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.” Of course, it is “treason” and “sabotage” to oppose the occupation of Iraq and the neocon master plan to invade Syria and Iran (or rather bomb the hell out of them) and preventing this “terrorism” is now a military task to be conducted by the folks who are trained to kill people and blow things up, as the exigencies of war demand. The CIFA’s busy work will undoubtedly make COINTELPRO and even Operation CHAOS look like the dabbling of grade schoolers by way of comparison.

“The president’s emphatic defense Saturday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program’s dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress,” the Washington Post reported at the weekend. “Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for ‘detecting, identifying and engaging’ internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI’s use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency’s interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States—without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.”

COINTELPRO and Operation CHAOS went beyond wiretapping, bugging, and burglarizing the offices and homes of those opposed to Johnson and Nixon and the Vietnam War. “In 1968, the CIA’s various domestic programs were consolidated and expanded under the name Operation CHAOS. When Richard Nixon became president the following year, his administration drafted the Huston Plan, which called for even greater operations against ’subversives,’ including wiretapping, break-ins, mail-opening, no-knock searches and ’selective assassinations,’” writes Mark Zepezauer. In regard to the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers, the FBI and CIA (and DIA) “conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with death squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala in more recent years,” writes Paul Wolf. As it turns out, the FBI employed reactionary fascists (not much different than those used in Guatemala or El Salvador) to liquidate the opposition. “Despite tens of thousands of pages of documentary evidence, the idea that the Bureau would utilize private right-wing operatives and terrorists is a chilling, alien concept to most Americans. Nevertheless, the FBI has financed, organized, and supplied arms to right-wing groups that carried out fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings.”

Again, the military’s primary role—killing people (100,000 or more so far in Iraq) and destroying things—should be taken into consideration when examining the emergence of CIFA, under the purview of murderous and amoral Straussians in the Pentagon. If the FBI found it necessary to hire fanatical thugs to assassinate oppositional leaders 30 or more years ago, it can be assumed with a fair degree of accuracy the same or worse will occur in the current climate. Of course, the military will enjoy “plausible deniability” as it now does in Iraq and elsewhere as operations are increasingly farmed out to private corporations, as the unconstitutional gun-grabbing was in New Orleans attests, conducted by Blackwater and other “security” corporations staffed with knuckle-dragging former special forces and Israeli, South African, and British mercenaries.

Is it possible Blackwater death squads will be lurking in your neighborhood, assassinating “internal threats” as they confiscate legal firearms?

No doubt we are one “terrorist event” away from finding out.