The Advocate

Abu Ghraib 101 at BMCC?
“Fatherland Security” Hits CUNY

Abram Negrete
A sinister “Homeland Security” course with links to the Guantánamo prison camp, death squads, and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad is being planned at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). Presented to BMCC’s Faculty Council last May, the course is the keystone of a proposed Security Management Certificate Program. Originally scheduled to begin in Fall 2004, the program will begin soon but is still “being developed,” according to officials at the lower Manhattan school.

The BMCC program, which includes study of “interrogation techniques” and “technology for surveillance,” is part of an educational program promoted by the Task Force on Homeland Security of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). 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 connections to a veritable rogue’s gallery of repressive groups.”

Front and Center: The Guantánamo Connection
The task force boasts of the upstate Homeland Security Management Institute opened last December: “The institute is directed by Colonel 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 (sic) 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 commandant at the infamous prison camp for “suspected terrorists.”

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, 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 SAS/Northern Ireland 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. The Center for Public Integrity notes that this company was a pioneer in “military privatization” in the 1970s, hiring officers from Britain’s deadly Special Air Services (SAS). “The SAS is an assassination squad, like the South American death squads,” notes Raymond Murray in his 1998 book State Violence: Northern Island 1969-1997. The agency ran a covert war in the 1960s against leftists in North Yemen, and carried out innumerable other murderous actions in the service of imperialism. Today, Control Risks, like the American Kroll & Associates, carries out “security” operations in Iraq (“Ex-SAS Flock to Iraq,” London Telegraph, 12 October 2003).

Finally, the Mossad/Death Squad Connection
The BMCC course advisory board includes another company associated with 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 US”—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 states that “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 US-Israeli Covert Relationship.

BMCC and “World War IV”
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, with the “Homeland Security” course at the top of the list. It features a guest speaker from the New York State Department of Homeland Security and readings from Tom Ridge’s 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.” Could political protests and “Third World” insurgencies be targeted? 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.

For Militant Protest to Stop BMCC “Security” Course!
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 the respected CCNY psychology professor and activist 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. Last year 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. 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!

Abram Negrete is grad student, adjunct professor and a member of the Hunter Internationalist Club.