March 2005  
 

The following is an updated version of an article that originally appeared in Revolution No. 2 (October 2004), publication of the Internationalist Clubs and the Revolutionary Reconstruction Club at CUNY.

Students protest against planned “Homeland Security” course at BMCC, 12 December 2004. (Internationalist photos)

A sinister “Homeland Security” course with links to the Guantánamo prison camp, death squads, and the Israeli Mossad spy agency is in the works at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College. Presented to BMCC’s Faculty Council last May, the course is the keystone of a proposed Security Management Certificate Program.

The program will begin soon but is still “being developed,” according to officials at the lower Manhattan school. Now is the time for militant protests to stop it cold!

The BMCC program, which includes study of “interrogation techniques” and “technology for surveillance,” is part of a trend promoted by the Task Force on Homeland Security of the American Association of Community Colleges. Among the twenty-one members of this task force, CUNY is represented by BMCC President Antonio Perez. A look at its activities, as well as the BMCC program’s advisory board, exposes a veritable rogue’s gallery of repression.

Front and center is the Guantánamo connection:

The task force boasts of the upstate Homeland Security Management Institute opened in December 2003: “The institute is directed by Col. John J. Perrone Jr., [who] previously served as commander of the Joint Detainee Operations Group...in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” (Community College Times special Homeland Security issue, 28 September). Perrone was the “first employee” of the institute, which is to be “a national model for homeland security training,” “extending its reach through the country’s network of 1,100 community colleges,” proclaims its host campus (Monroe Community College News [Rochester, New York], 9 December 2003).

Perrone “can speak to Home Land Security issues from a unique perspective: he has been on the front lines,” says a puff piece on the colonel. That’s one way of describing the former Camp Commandant at the infamous prison torture camp for “suspected terrorists.”

Then there is the union-busting connection:

The “BMCC Advisory Board – Security Management Committee” for the proposed certificate program includes representatives of companies like OCS Security, Guard Screen and Hill & Associates, whose activities include “confidential investigations and business intelligence.” Also represented is the American Society for Industrial Security (ASIS), whose affiliates include firms specializing in strikebreaking and union-busting. One advertises “protection of over a hundred businesses during labor disputes and organization drives”; another notes that when “a strike is taking place,” picketers “can be a true hindrance to company productivity.”

The ASIS Annual Seminar, held this year in Dallas, featured sessions on “Private Policing on Public Streets,” “Security Planning for Large Scale Downsizing” (“while maintaining secrecy”), and “the national strategy and roadmap...for achieving closer and more productive cooperation between private security and law enforcement to improve homeland security.”

There is the SAS/Northern Ireland, Colombia and Iraq connection:

William J. Daly also sits on the Security Management Committee for the BMCC course, representing Control Risks Group, Inc., of which he is Senior Vice President. In Colombia, Control Risks advises foreign corporations on “prospects for victory” in the dirty counterinsurgency war against leftist rebels (Control Risks Group report on Colombia, June 2004).

The Center for Public Integrity notes that Control Risks has been a pioneer in “military privatization,” getting off the ground in the 1970s by hiring officers from Britain’s deadly Special Air Services (SAS). SAS reserve regiments “have frequently served as a formal and informal recruiting center for mercenary operations,” the center notes.

“The SAS is an assassination squad, like the South American death squads,” notes Raymond Murray in his 1998 book State Violence: Northern Ireland 1969-1997. Among its other murderous actions in the service of imperialism, the agency ran a covert war in the 1960s against leftists in North Yemen. Control Risks also employees former FBI men and other specialists in repression.

The Iraq war is connected to the BMCC program not only through government links but through “privatized” mercenary services. As the U.S. and British imperialists commit one war crime after another, Control Risks, like the American Kroll & Associates, carries out “security” operations in Iraq (“Ex-SAS Flock to Iraq,” London Telegraph, 12 October 2003).

Most sinister of all is the Mossad/death squad connection:

The BMCC course advisory board includes another company whose name spells deadly repression: International Security and Defense Systems (ISDS), an Israeli firm represented by its president, Leo Gleser. The ISDS web site says the company was “established in 1982 by highly experienced officers, former operatives of I.S.A. Israeli Security Agency, the Mossad and the Defence Forces.” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz (31 August) says Gleser and partner Arye Avnat “met in the early 1970s during their military service in the Haruv reconnaissance unit” and later set up ISDS, which recently hired “former Mossad department chief Yehiam Meret” and Israel’s former police commissioner. Together with the CIA, the Mossad is one of the deadliest, dirtiest instruments of state terror in the world.

When Gleser attended a Homeland Security fair in Chile last year, the Chilean news magazine Qué Pasa (31 October 2003) ran an article titled “Ex-Mossad Men Come to Chile.” It reported that the presence of this purportedly retired colonel of Israeli intelligence “captivated the attention of military circles.” His company “has become known for its services as advisor to the State Department of the U.S.” – godfather of former military dictator Pinochet – and “has the authorization and sponsorship of the Israeli Defense Ministry for its projects.”

Among Gleser’s “projects,” the article cites the following:

“Leo Gleser has some strong detractors.... One of the harshest criticisms is that in the early ’80s Israeli intelligence sent him to train members of the military in Central America. During his stay there he trained the leaders of the legendary Intelligence Batallion 316, a squad operating with the Honduran Army, which human rights organizations blame for disappearing 191 persons.”

In other words, this death squad – part of the CIA’s reign of terror during Reagan’s campaign of exterminating Central American insurgents – used techniques of “disappearing” people perfected by Israel’s intelligence agencies against Palestinian Arabs (as well as Mordechai Vanunu, who blew the whistle on Israel’s huge nuclear bomb factory), and innumerable others around the world. Coverage of Gleser’s training of this Honduran death squad has also cited the 1991 exposé by Andrew and Leslie Cockburn in their book Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship.

In 1997, ISDS went to Mexico to provide “antiterrorist” training to a special “urban intervention” unit of the Judicial Police, a force so detested for its brutality and corruption that it was later disbanded by Mexico’s president.

In the special Homeland Security issue of the AACC’s Community College Times (28 September), BMCC President Perez writes that the attacks of September 11, 2001 were “the first salvo of what one observer has called World War IV.” He goes on: “Community colleges need to be in the vanguard of those institutions helping to prepare our nation and its defenders to respond to attacks.”

The proposed 30-credit BMCC security management certificate consists of ten required courses. Top of the list is the “Homeland Security” course. It features a guest speaker from the New York State Department of Homeland Security and readings from Tom Ridge’s Big Brother agency. Noting that “trends clearly demonstrate increased demand” for “investigative services” and “surveillance systems,” the course defines “national security” as protecting “national values, interests, and institutions.” This requires “understand[ing] current threats against domestic and international assets.” Like what, political protests and “Third World” insurgencies? You bet.

Next on the list of classes is “Security Management Principles,” which includes “Intelligence gathering” and “Interview and interrogation techniques.” Readings include an interrogation textbook written by a top “lie-detector” expert together with a former FBI agent and member of the Philadelphia police. Also on the syllabus: Undercover Investigations in the Workplace. That’s the kind of investigation employers carry out against union organizing drives.

How about the CIA interrogation handbook for Central American death squads? Is that going to be on the reading list as well?

Or will Col. Perrone of Guantánamo come to lecture on interrogation techniques? After all, he told Rochester TV (15 December 2003): “The time to retrieve...information is generally in the first few days of captivity.” He could also lecture on the use of hoods, shackles, prisoners being forced to kneel for days at a time, and other ways to “retrieve” information. And who will they choose as subjects for interrogation? Members of student governments who have lost elections, perhaps?

Then we come to the proposed BMCC course on “Terrorism and Counterterrorism.” This part of the certificate program uses the feds’ definition of terrorism as any “violent” act “against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian populations, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” So a militant labor struggle, a march against racist police brutality or protest of military recruiters can be branded terrorist. The proposed course defines counterterrorism as “any act intended to combat, control, or resolve terrorism.” This is the No. 1 pretext for torture in the world today, so Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib would fit right in.

Programs similar to the one BMCC seeks to establish are cited with pride by the American Association of Community Colleges. The Homeland Security Management Institute is just one, and AACC notes Perrone’s institute is “working with” the State University of New York (SUNY) as well as the League for Innovation in the Community Colleges and the AACC itself.

Still looking for those weapons of mass destruction? George W. Bush’s hand-picked expert now says...guess what, no “WMD” in Iraq – as if the world didn’t already know this was a transparent pretext all along. But the AACC is not to be deterred. The association did a survey of community colleges and says “One in every five colleges had programs or courses in weapons of mass destruction (WMD) awareness or WMD preparedness.”

And the threat to corn keeps them up at night. Corn? “The cornfields of Iowa may seem an unlikely target of terrorists, but experts believe they are,” the association paper reports. Therefore, Iowa’s Kirkwood Community College got a $3.2 million grant in August, one of 14 approved by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Community College Times (28 September) notes Homeland Security “received more than 215 applications for the grant.”

The same paper reports that the U.S. Department of Defense has funded a program on cyberterrorism at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania. Cyberterrorism? How about the FBI’s seizure, on October 7, of servers used by Indymedia. The feds’ assault affected at least twenty of the news collective’s sites around the world. And the American spy agency did it in England. The action was reportedly retaliation for someone, somewhere having taken pictures of undercover agents photographing demonstrators.

Connections between CUNY and leading arms manufacturers were revealed at a Professional Staff Congress Teach-In held December 17. In a presentation on “Globalization, Privatization, War – At CUNY,” PSC activist Renate Bridenthal noted that “Automatic Target Recognition” was the topic of a conference two years ago where a City College researcher joined representatives of the Army Aviation and Missile Command, the Naval Air Warfare Center, NASA and Lockheed Martin. CCNY is planning a $198 million Advanced Science Research Center that will focus on biosensing (“identification, monitoring, and/or control of biologic phenomena”). The center is receiving support from Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, according to CUNY’s Master Plan for 2004-2008. Huge weapons firms like these are always looking for new and profitable ways to “control” targeted “biological phenomena” (people), by killing them.

Weapons contractors like these are infamous from the slaughter in Iraq to the Vietnam War, when death merchants were driven off campus by student protestors horrified by the carpet-bombing, anti-personnel devices, Agent Orange and white phosphorus made by U.S. weapons firms and dropped from their planes. Images of children with their skin burned off by napalm were seared into the consciousness of millions – one reason the U.S. military does all it can today (with the kept media’s cooperation) to stop us from seeing pictures of its crimes in Iraq.

 What are Raytheon, Northrup and Lockheed manufacturing now? Raytheon makes “bunker buster” 5000-pound bombs and Tomahawk cruise missiles. Northrup makes the B-2 bomber dropping those 5000-pound bombs on Iraq. War crimes in the name of the “Homeland” are big business, and getting bigger by the day, as Northrup boasts that it meets “current and emerging national defense needs, including anti-terrorism and homeland security” (Common Dreams, “The War Profiteers,” December 2001).

As for Lockheed Martin, it is making a killing in Iraq:

“This Bethesda, Maryland-based company is the world’s #1 military contractor as well as the world’s largest arms exporter. Lockheed Martin built the U-2 and the SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Today they make F-16, F/A-22 jet fighter, Hellfire and Javelin missiles, as well as designing nuclear weapons. Its F-117 stealth attack fighters were used to ‘shock and awe’ the population of Iraq at the start of the US invasion, while since the start of that war the Air Force has increased production of Lockheed’s PAC-3 Patriot missile” (Corp Watch report, “War Profiteers: Lockheed Martin”).

CUNY is no stranger to repression. The most prominent case is the relentless prosecution of Hostos student leader Miguel Malo for holding up a sign protesting cuts in Spanish and ESL programs. Last semester Baruch College arrested respected CCNY psychology professor Bill Crain for the “crime” of entering campus without an appointment.

As for “electronic surveillance,” mentioned in the “Letter of Intent” (14 November 2003) for the certificate program, CUNY has done plenty of that itself. Just ask student activists at CCNY: in 1998 they found out a surveillance camera, disguised as a smoke detector, was aimed at their offices – a fact the campus paper was shut down for revealing!

Nor is CUNY new to connections with “private” spy companies linked to the long and bloody trail of the intelligence agencies. Hunter College hired the notorious, CIA-linked Kroll & Associates for a “thorough survey” of campus “security” (Hunter Envoy, 2 October 2003). The only outcome Hunter students heard about was the decision to lock the main entrance of the Thomas Hunter building – a move reversed after students kept going through anyway (setting off the alarm each time). CUNY students should demand to know the full story of what happened with Kroll.

The sinister course at BMCC is part of the wholesale onslaught against the most basic civil liberties and democratic rights carried out through the USA Patriot Act, passed and administered by Democrats and Republicans, and a vast array of repressive measures.

“BMCC students have already been victims of repression carried out in the name of ‘Home­land Security’,” notes a Fact Sheet published on campus as part of the campaign against the security program: “We remember our classmates and friends who were taken away by the FBI, INS or other agencies after 9/11. Some were deported, others we never heard about again. On campus last semester, Haitian American student Elder Bertrand was harassed and assaulted by BMCC ‘security’.”

BMCC’s large immigrant student population “stand to be adversely affected by a Homeland Security program” which would target them as “potential terrorists” to be “investigated, possibly imprisoned and/or deported as local subject matter for the curriculum,” as noted in a report to the Student Government Association. The SGA voted to “steadfastly condemn any college program or curriculum that would teach, train, endorse or otherwise support ‘Homeland Security’ at BMCC.”

Faculty members have warned against the intimidation of students that would result if BMCC becomes “Homeland Security U.” As the Fact Sheet points out, “professors, librarians and campus workers are also targeted by the atmosphere of fear and intimidation tied in with ‘Homeland Security’ and ‘USA Patriot’ repression, reminiscent of the McCarthy era.”

Fighting against this repression is part of the struggle for the defeat of U.S. imperialist aggression abroad and police terror, racism and exploitation here “at home.”

BMCC’s Repression 101 can and must be stopped. Students, faculty, workers and defenders of democratic rights must mobilize to protest and expose it massively, now! n