• by Tom Siebert , Op-Ed Contributor, January 11, 2007

I knew the writing was on the wall for the GOP and that Democrats had a very good chance of winning Congress two weeks before this year's election. That's when a friend of mine sent me a link to The Baltimore Sun's coverage of this story about a fire that destroyed an old military building in Fort Meade, Maryland.

The reason I'm sending you to the Annapolis Capital link is because the Baltimore Sun story no longer exists online. That story included the following two paragraphs:

"The building, Nathan Hale Hall, at 4554 Llewellyn Ave., is used by the 902nd Military Intelligence Group. The unit conducts counterintelligence, including the search for terrorists," according to the Associated Press.

"The group, the Army's largest counterintelligence unit, was in the news earlier this year when the American Civil Liberties Union sued to obtain records that suggested the unit was keeping records of anti-war protests in the United States," the AP reported.

Nobody ever followed up on this story.

But if we move backward in time to a report from our friends at MSNBC, it discusses one of the operations working out of the 902nd: Operation Talon. Operation Talon spied on ordinary Americans who were against the Iraq War, including Quaker groups. There were also reports that the Total Information Awareness project, another effort to provide surveillance on Americans by our government, had set up shop at Nathan Hale Hall after it was allegedly disbanded.

If you had been spying on Americans, and you thought there was a good chance your carte blanche was going to end with a change in Washington, wouldn't you burn down the building housing the information?

You wouldn't even need to get rid of the information; you could send it digitally elsewhere, but still have the plausible deniability of "The documents were destroyed."

Some of the information I've noted here was obtained from the blog Wonkette. I'm not thrilled with all the links that the snarky political site provides, but the central questions it's asking in this case are solid. And there are enough mainstream media facts to set the mind percolating.

Operation Mockingbird Blowback

I owe an apology to the Center for Media and Democracy. Last week, writing about "Operation Mockingbird," the CIA project to recruit members of the journalism community, I declared the CMD did not respond when I contacted them about the disappearance of Operation Mockingbird from SourceWatch, their online reference pages.

Shortly after I'd filed my story, but long before it was posted, the center wrote back to say that the person responsible for the "Operation Mockingbird" entry was on vacation and would contact me after he returned. I did not update my story, and instead potentially cast doubt on the organization's veracity. They called me on my lazy behavior, and they had every right. I thank them for it and apologize to them.

The CMD person who made the decision to remove the Operation Mockingbird entry is Bob Burton. This is his complete explanation for why the Operation Mockingbird entry was deleted from the CMD's research Web site:

"Despite the numerous Web references to Operation Mockingbird, I couldn't find any reliable source that persuaded me that a project by that name actually existed. I searched Web sites high and low, Nexis, obvious places, such as Covert Action Quarterly etc. and couldn't turn up any indication on where the name originated from, who revealed it etc.

"So I deleted the page on Operation Mockingbird and shifted the most reliable references across to a new page, but haven't yet created an article on the topic."

Although the CMD SourceWatch entry says it cannot find any originating reference for "Operation Mockingbird," several online sources quote Deborah Davis's biography of Katherine Graham, "Katharine The Great." Dig a little deeper into it, and you find out that Davis got sued by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, and 20,000 copies of her book were shredded. Davis sued her publisher for breach of contract, and the case was settled out of court. Davis got a new publisher, with an appendix that buttressed her case against Bradlee. Bradlee did not sue again.