Israeli Company Hired by State Government to Spy on Pennsylvanians and Other Americans
30 October 2010
By Dave Lindorff
The surprise disclosure that the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, through its state Homeland Security
Agency, along with a number of local police
departments in the state, have been employing a
private Israeli security company with strong links to
Mossad and the Israeli Defense Force grows
increasingly disturbing when the website of the
company, called the Institute of Terrorism Research
and Response, is examined.
ITRR's slick site at www.terrorresponse.org features a
homepage image of an armor-clad soldier or riot
policeman preparing to fire an automatic pistol, while
the company boasts of being "the preeminent Isreal/American
security firm, providing training, intelligence and
education for clients across the globe."
The firm, which offers courses locally at the
University of Philadelphia, notes that all its course
offerings, some of which are taught in Israel, are
"approved by the Israeli Ministry of Defense." The
course titles include such compelling topics as:
"Tactical Advantage in Combat," "Civilian
Battlefield,"
"Undercover/Plainclothes Tactical Operations,"
"Israeli Shooting Techniques," "Arena Combat," "Hard
Entry (Arrest)" and "Principles of Night Operations."
While a number of the titles link to course
descriptions, the links to the undercover class and
the civilian battlefield class were disabled when this
reporter visited the site, which was two days after
the company's role as a state security contractor was
exposed.
The description for the Tactical Advantage course,
which the website says was designed for military, law
enforcement and security personnel, describes the
program as "intense, dirty, aggressive and based on
Israeli Counter-Terror Schools policy." It says "This
course pushes trainees to the physical and mental
edge." American organizations which engage in protests
and rallies, hearing that reference to the Israeli
Counter-Terror Schools policy, might recall the IDF's
handling of the aid flotilla that was boarded on the
high seas by IDF troops as they read these lines. That
assault, in which the Israelis used 9mm semi-automatic
weapons against defenders armed at most with sticks
and light chains, left nine flotilla participants,
including a young Turkish American, dead.
The Institute of Terrorism Research and Response,
which only lists a post-box address in Philadelphia
(though in its report on the scandal the Philadelphia
Inquirer referred to ITRR as a "Philadelphia-based
company with offices in Philadelphia and Jerusalem"),
also advertises a subsidiary operation it calls a
Targeted Action Monitoring Center (TAM-C), which it
claims is "world renowned" and which it says supplies
"factual, actionable intelligence to subscribers." All
information gathered by the firm's staff of "former
law enforcement, military and intelligence
professionals" is sent to the Israeli headquarters of
the TAM-C for processing--a move which effectively
insulates it from discovery by any surveillance
victims who might seek disclosure under federal or
state Freedom of Information laws, or who might sue in
court for violation of their civil liberties.
While ITRR, founded in 2004, doesn't name any of its
clients, it says they range from Fortune 100
companies, including the power industry, maritime
companies, US infrastructure companies, "the company
company charged with protecting oil production
facilities," missionary organizations and
pharmaceutical firms, to law enforcement agencies and
joint terrorism task forces.
A search on Google for references to ITRR doesn't turn
up much, but there is a report in July 2008 by a
Washington-based right-wing site called National
Terror Alert, which attributes a warning of a
"possible large-scale terror attack" to ITRR. Claiming
that it had "intercepted communications from an
organization closely associated with international
terrorists, to include al Qaeda," the National Terror
Alert organization says TIRR reports that, "Available
intelligence and recent events indicate that
terrorists have an established capability and current
intent to mount an attack on the target and there is
some additional information on the nature of the
threat. It is assessed that an attack on the target is
a priority for the terrorists and is likely to be
mounted."
Nothing came of this "alert," but it should be noted
that a year later, the first head of the new federal
Department of Homeland Security, former Republican
governor of Pennsylvania Tom Ridge, admitted that the
color-coded terror alerts issued by his office had
been manipulated to serve Republican political
interests. It should also be recalled that the 2008
TIRR "warning" came during the height of the election
season, just before the two national party
conventions. As the Philadelphia Daily News commented
at the time in a headline, "GOP kicks off fall
campaign with heightened terror alert."
But ITRR does much more than just monitor terrorists.
Indeed, it seems to be far too busy monitoring
legitimate, non-violent and completely legal protest
organizations and other political groups to do much
real anti-terror work. According to news reports on
ITRR's work for the Pennsylvania Homeland Security
Agency and also the Pittsburgh Police Department, it
would appear that ITRR was spying on and providing
Pennsylvania State Police and Homeland Security with
reports on everything from anti-war groups and
anti-oil-shale-fracking groups to gay rights groups,
animal rights groups, environmental organizations and
even Good Schools Pennsylvania, a citizens association
formed to back Gov. Ed Rendell's school reform
initiatives. Even a Harrisburg, PA man who likes to
bring a 25-foot inflatable pig to demonstrations to
symbolize government waste was targeted.
While local news media reports in Philadelphia have
suggested that ITRR is just composed of two people,
Aaron Richman, an Israeli police captain and security
consultant and Michael Perelman, a retired New York
City police commander, the website makes it clear that
the company actually employs a large number of people
in Israel, and may have as many as 15 people working
"in the field" in the US.
Its activities are not limited to Pennsylvania either.
The firm boasts on its website that "Information
provided to clients ranges from issues of global jihad
to Mexican Cartel threats along America's southern
border (maybe that's where Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer got
her weird tale, eventually debunked and retracted, of
beheadings in the border desert?) to providing
guidance of the threat of disorders as a result of
international monetary meetings."
This latter is a reference to the yeoman work ITRR
reportedly did for the Pittsburg Police Department in
advance of the disastrous G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh,
which turned into a police riot after the local
government and police brought in hundreds of
reinforcements from other cities, with cops suited up
as though for war, to lock down the city and prevent
students from demonstrating against the predations of
international capital and international "free trade"
agreements. It appears that ITRR had ingratiated its
way into the confidence of demonstration planners by
having its agents join chat rooms and websites "posing
as G-20 opponents." One wonders whether these same
agents may have also acted as agents provocateur.
As the head of Pennsylvania's Homeland Security
Agency, James Powers, who hired ITRR, put it, "We got
the information to the Pittsburgh Police, and they
were able to cut them off at the pass."
So much for the Constitutional right to protest!
Several calls for comment made to the Homeland
Security Agency and the Pennsylvania Emergency
Management Agency which oversees it went unanswered,
but Perelman has released a statement saying "The
Institute of Terrorism Research and Response tracks
events, givinglaw enforcement a heads-up for the
potential of disorder as our bulletins provided to the
[state] clearly show...[and] does not follow people,
conduct surveillance, photograph, or record
individuals."
Gov. Rendell, after the story about ITRR's activities
for the state under a no-bid, $125,000/year contract,
broke, claimed he was "embarrassed" by the spying on
non-violent civic action organizations, and vowed to
cancel the contract effective this October.
It is not clear, however, that there will be any
information provided about who was spied on over the
time the company has been active. Members of both
political parties in the state legislature are calling
for a General Assembly hearing into ITRR's activities,
but such calls in this closely divided body generally
come to little or nothing. Meanwhile, Rendell, a lame
duck governor headed for the exit, is unlikely to do
anything about the issue beyond saying he's
embarrassed by it. He has said he has no intention of
firing Powers.
I know how damaging this kind of spying by state and
local governments can be. Back in the mid-1970s, when
I and some journalist colleagues owned and ran a small
weekly alternative newspaper in Los Angeles, the LA
Vanguard, we were among the targets of a massive
illegal spying campaign by the paranoid Los Angeles
Police Department's "red squad," the Public Disorder
Intelligence Division.
Our staff was actually penetrated by a young red squad
officer, who pretended to be a student wannabe
journalist in order to try to learn our sources for
reports on the LAPD. But we were only one of about 200
groups, ranging from a local anti-nuclear group to the
Peace & Freedom Party, a well-known third party in
California electoral politics, to the National
Organization for Woman and even the office of then
City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky.
The reason we all learned about what the LAPD red
squad was doing was that one spy was outed, a
class-action suit was filed by the ACLU of Southern
California, there was discovery ordered by the court,
and eventually the city of Los Angeles settled with
the victims of the campaign, to the tune of $1.8
million.
The Pennsylvania ACLU may sue Pennsylvania over this
latest domestic spying outrage, but the times have
changed, and it is hard to be confident that the
courts, no great friend of civil liberties at the
state level, and packed with Reagan and Bush 1 and 2
appointees at the federal level, will mandate
disclosure of the names of groups spied on, much less
of the records that were compiled. Furthermore,
because the state did this spying through an outside
contractor, which is headquartered in Israel,
government and police agencies could claim that the
records are for the most part out of their hands and
beyond the courts' jurisdiction.
At least one man, Gene Stilp, owner of the giant
inflatable pig, already has plans to sue the
government in federal court. "When people's civil
rights are trampled it's a federal issue," says Stilp,
himself a licensed attorney. Stilp says he isn't
satisfied with Rendell's statement that he is
"embarrassed" by the disclosure of ITRR's contract.
"Being embarrassed doesn't cut it," says Stilp, who is
calling for an investigation into ITRR's spying
activities by the attorney general or the federal
government, and full disclosure of which groups and
individuals were spied upon.
Another person who has good reason to believe he was
probably targeted by ITRR is ThisCantBeHappening!'s
own John Grant. Says Grant, "The more I read about
this affair, the more disturbing it seems. I'm a
Vietnam veteran and part of an organization --
Veterans For Peace -- that very publicly opposes the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We meet monthly and we
organize events with other anti-war groups. All
First-Amendment-protected, red-blooded American stuff.
To think that some self-ordained watchdog group of
security freaks is monitoring me and my friends and
reporting our activities to God-knows who in the
context of 'terrorism' -- and probably making tons of
money doing it -- really pisses me off. Governor
Rendell SHOULD be embarrassed. He should come clean
and make public all the groups and people this gang
was spying and reporting on. The fact they are somehow
connected to Israel -- a nation many of us have been
critical of -- is further reason to clear up what's
going on."
Dave Lindorff is a founding member of
ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent,
collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper.
His work, and that of colleagues John Grant, Linn
Washington and Charles Young, can be found at
www.thiscantbehappening.net
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