Hightower Lowdown

Should the mighty U.S. military be concerning itself with a small group of Quakers in Lake Worth, Florida? The answer, of course, is no…but they're doing it anyway. Two years ago, top Pentagon officials (including "Howling Paul"Wolfowitz, then the number-two honcho) directed a little-known agency called Counter- Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA) to create a new database for snooping on U.S.

citizens. The database was to include "information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense." Whether or not CIFA's database has snared any Al Qaeda plotters, it has snared the Lake Worth Quakers. Indeed, a 400- page Pentagon report lists a meeting of a dozen or so of these antiwar Quakers as a terrorist "threat." What were these fiendish Quakers doing? Planning a peaceful protest against military recruitment at local high schools.

The database, obtained by NBC News, shows that some four dozen antiwar meetings were under military surveillance on the grounds that they posed a terrorist threat to the Pentagon. Also, CIFA has doled out over $33 million in contracts to Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Computer Sciences Corporation, and others to search the private records of Americans to detect "threats." CSC, for example, got Pentagon money for its computer-based "Insider Threat Initiative" to search, detect, and investigate "abnormal activities and 'behaviors' " of people of interest.

This takes America back to the dark days of the Vietnam War, when a paranoid Pentagon was infiltrating and spying on groups of U.S. citizens involved in antiwar and civil-rights protests. Like then, today's Pentagon spokesman refuses to comment, except to say that all domestic intelligence information is "properly collected."