<nettime> Spook Schools

[Andrew Orlowski <andrew.orlowski@theregister.co.uk>]

[ Vocational training: "Spook Studies" - a parallel to "Sustainability Studies". Two lines that must converge soon, like strawberries and cream.  - ao] 


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David Price has a major scoop in our latest subscriber-only newsletter.  He describes how, across the past five years, without a word of public debate, let alone concern the CIA, has successfully implanted spy schools on 22  university campuses across the country, many of them labeled “Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence” – ICCAE, pronounced “Icky”.  

It began in 2004,” Price reports,  when “a $250,000 grant was awarded to Trinity Washington University by the Intelligence Community for the establishment of a pilot ‘Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence’ program.  Trinity was in many ways an ideal campus for a pilot program. For a vulnerable, tuition-driven struggling financial institution in the D.C. area the promise of desperately needed funds and a regionally assured potential student base, linked with or seeking connections to the DC intelligence world, made the program financially attractive.”

Price’s timing is impeccable. Last Monday, the day we were preparing to send his story to press, came news that a group  of Fox News’ freelance buggers  - the same who set up ACORN – had been arrested, trying for phone sabotage in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office.  Three of the team were caught inside Landrieu’s  office. A fourth was arrested as he sat in a car a few blocks away with what the police described as “a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. 

Dai is a veteran  of Trinity Washington University’s spook school,. funded by the “Intelligence Community”.  In 2008, Dai served as associate director of ICCAE at Trinity Washington. 

How many wannabe Howard Hunts and G. Gordon Liddys are being turned out by the spook schools? As Price writes, “Even amid the extreme militarization prevailing in America today, the public silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs like ICCAE is extraordinary.  In the last four years ICCAE has gone further in bringing government intelligence organizations openly to multiple American university campuses than any previous intelligence initiative since World War Two.  Yet the program spreads with little public notice, media coverage, or coordinated multi-campus resistance.” 

Did any tenured faculty member at the 22 campuses now hosting spook-schools publicly raise the alarm?  Twenty years ago there would have been furious demonstrations. Not now. Faculty, most notably at the University of Washington, did write anguished, even angry  memos. Price quotes them. But as he writes, 

“it’s far from clear that these private critiques had any measurable effect, precisely because they remained private... 

"Tenured professors on ICCAE campuses, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and speak out, on the record, in public... the split between the public and private reactions to ICCAE has helped usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses. The intelligence community thrives on silence.” 

Alexander Cockburn
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn01292010.html

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