FBI Crackdown on Political Dissent in the USA

January 19, 2001
The Crackdown on Dissent
<http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0119-05.htm>
by Abby Scher

Over the past year, the US government has intensified its crackdown on
political dissidents opposing corporate globalization, and it is using
the same intimidating and probably unconstitutional tactics against
demonstrators at the presidential inauguration. With the Secret
Service taking on extraordinary powers designed to combat terrorism,
undercover operatives are spying on protesters' planning meetings,
while police are restricting who is allowed on the parade route and
are planning a massive search effort of visitors.

One activist who has had experience with how the DC police handle
demonstrators is Rob Fish, a cheerful young man with the Student
Environmental Action Coalition profiled in a recent Sierra magazine
cover story on the new generation of environmentalists. If you were
watching CNN during the protests against the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC, in April, you would have seen
Fish, 22, beaten, bloody and bandaged after an attack by an enraged
plainclothes officer who also tried to destroy the camera with which
Fish was documenting police harassment.

Fish is a plaintiff in a class-action suit filed by the American Civil
Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for
Civil Justice against the DC police and a long list of federal
agencies including the FBI. This suit, along with others in
Philadelphia and Los Angeles, where the party conventions were held in
August; in Detroit, which declared a civil emergency during the June
Organization of American States meeting across the border in Windsor,
Ontario; and in Seattle, is exposing a level of surveillance and
disruption of political activities not seen on the left since the FBI
deployed its dirty tricks against the Central American solidarity
movement during the 1980s. Among police agencies themselves this is
something of an open secret.

In the spring the US Attorney's office bestowed an award on members of
the Washington, DC, police department for their "unparalleled"
coordination with other police agencies during the IMF protests. "The
FBI provided valuable background on the individuals who were intent on
committing criminal acts and were able to impart the valuable lessons
learned from Seattle," the US Attorney declared. Civil liberties
lawyers say the level of repression, in the form of unwarranted
searches and surveillance, unprovoked shootings and beatings, and
pre-emptive mass arrests criminalizing peaceful demonstrators,
violates protesters' rights of free-speech and association. "It's
political profiling," said Jim Lafferty, director of the National
Lawyers Guild's Los Angeles office, which is backing lawsuits coming
out of the Los Angeles protests. "They target organizers. It's a new
level of crackdown on dissent."

In Washington in April and at the Republican National Convention
protest in Philadelphia last summer, the police rounded up hundreds of
activists in pre-emptive arrests and targeted and arrested on
trumped-up charges those they had identified as leaders. Once many of
those cases appeared in Philadelphia court, they were dismissed
because the police could offer no reason for the arrests.

In December the courts dismissed all charges against sixty-four
puppet-making activists arrested at a warehouse. A month before,
prosecutors had told the judge they were withdrawing all fourteen
misdemeanor charges against Ruckus Society head John Sellers for lack
of evidence. These were the same charges, including possession of an
instrument of a crime, his cell phone that police leveled against
Sellers to argue for his imprisonment on $1 million bail this past
August.

A major question posed by the lawsuits is whether the federal
government trained local police to violate the free-speech rights of
protesters like Sellers and Fish. The FBI held seminars for local
police in the protest cities on the lessons of the Seattle disorders
to help them prepare for the demonstrations. It has also formed "joint
terrorism task forces" in twenty-seven of its fifty-six divisions,
composed of local, state and federal law-enforcement officers, aimed
at suppressing what it sees as domestic terrorism on the left and on
the right. "We want to be proactive and keep these things from
happening," Gordon Compton, an FBI spokesman, told the Oregonian in
early December after public-interest groups called for the city to
withdraw from that region's task force.

The collaboration of federal and local police harks back to the height
of the municipal Red Squads, renamed "intelligence units" in the
postwar period. During the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover and his illegal
Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), the FBI relied on these
local police units and even private right-wing spy groups for
information about antiwar and other activists. The FBI then used the
information and its own agents provocateurs to disrupt the Black
Panthers, Students for a Democratic Society, Puerto Rican nationalists
and others during the dark days of COINTELPRO and after that program
was exposed in 1971. Local citizen action won curbs on Red Squad
activity throughout the country in the seventies and eighties after
scandals revealed political surveillance of the ACLU, antiwar and
civil rights activists, among others.

While Chicago police recently won court case to resume their spying,
elsewhere police are evading restrictions by having other police
agencies spy for them. In Philadelphia four state police officers who
claimed they were construction workers from Wilkes-Barre infiltrated
the "convergence" space where the activists were making puppets and
otherwise preparing for demonstrations against the Republican
convention. State police (who also monitored activists' Internet
organizing) initially said they were working with the Philadelphia
police department, which was barred in 1987 from political spying
without special permission.

And in New York last spring, police apparently violated a 1985 ban on
sharing intelligence when it helped Philadelphia police monitor and
photograph NYC anarchists at a May Day demonstration. "We have local
Washington, DC, authorities in Philadelphia, I see no role for them
there except fingering people who were in lawful demonstrations in
DC," says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of Partnership for Civil Justice,
who is representing the activists in the DC lawsuit.

Environmental activist Fish ran into a sergeant from the Morristown,
New Jersey, police department at demonstration after demonstration.
The sergeant had helped the neighboring Florham Park, New Jersey,
police handle a small protest against a Brookings Institution session
with the World Bank on April 1, where Fish had assisted in a dramatic
banner hanging. At the May Day protest in New York, "much to my
surprise," he ran into not just the Morristown officer but "the whole
crew" he had seen in DC a few weeks before, including officers from DC
and Philadelphia, and now even someone from the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "They knew all about me being beat up in DC and that
my camera was lost," he said. In DC they had revealed that they knew
he'd been to a Ruckus Society training in Florida during spring break.
They were very open about who they were, some handing Fish their
business cards. Capt. Peter Demitz, the Morristown police officer,
explained in a recent interview that he traveled to demonstrations
using funds from a program set up by the Justice Department after the
anti-WTO protests in Seattle.

Attorney General Janet Reno "felt that civil disorder and
demonstrations would be the most active since the Vietnam War. She
said police officers should learn from each other, so there's more
money for observing," said Demitz. According to Verheyden-Hilliard,
the coordination among police agencies "becomes a problem when it's
being used to chill people's political speech, it's being used in a
way to silence people." Letting activists know they are under
surveillance is also a time-honored tactic of local intelligence units
and the FBI. "I see several different components of COINTELPRO, from
conspicuous surveillance, spreading fear of infiltration, preventive
detention and false stories to the press," says Brian Glick, a Fordham
University law professor and author of War at Home: Covert Action
Against U.S. Activists and What We Can Do About It.

Among the police actions that worry civil libertarians: § Police raids
of demonstrators' gathering spaces. In DC, saying there was a fire
threat, the police, fire department and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms kicked everyone out of the convergence space, arrested the
"leaders" and seized puppets and political materials. The ACLU
prevented a similar raid on the convergence center in Los Angeles
during the Democratic convention by winning an injunction from a
federal judge, who warned the police that they could not even
investigate building or fire-code violations without federal court
approval.

§ False stories to the press. In statements later proved to be false,
police in Washington and Philadelphia said they found the makings of
dangerous weapons in convergence centers. DC police announced they had
found a Molotov cocktail but later admitted it was a plastic soda
bottle stuffed with rags. Similarly, the makings of "pepper spray,"
police admitted later, were actually peppers, onions and other
vegetables found in the kitchen area, while "ammunition" seized in an
activist's home consisted of empty shells on a Mexican ornament.
Philadelphia police also reported "dangerous" items in activists'
puppet-making material. Such false statements were intended to
discredit the protesters and discourage people from supporting them,
civil liberties lawyers argue.

§ Rounding up demonstrators on trumped-up charges. In Philadelphia on
August 1, police arrested seventy activists working in the convergence
space called the puppet warehouse on conspiracy and
obstruction-of-traffic charges. They justified the raid, which the
ACLU called one of the largest instances of preventive detention in US
history, in a warrant that drew on an obscure far-right newsletter
funded by millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife claiming that the young
people were funded by communist groups and therefore dangerous. On
April 15, Washington police rounded up 600 demonstrators marching
against the prison-industrial complex, picking up tourists in the
process. Police held them on buses for sixteen hours.

§ List-making. The BBC reported that the Czech government received
from the FBI a list of activists that it used in stopping Americans
from entering for anti-IMF demonstrations in Prague in September. A
journalist interviewed two such Americans who said they had no
criminal record but had been briefly held and released in Seattle
during the 1999 anti-WTO protests. MacDonald Scott, a Canadian
paralegal doing legal support, estimates from border-crossing records
that Canada turned away about 500 people during the OAS meetings last
June.

§ Political profiling. On May 1 the NYPD rounded up peacefully
demonstrating anarchists with covered faces under a nineteenth-century
anti-Klan law, in addition to a few other barefaced anarchist-looking
activists.

§ Unconstitutional bail amounts. Philadelphia law enforcement sought
what lawyers are calling unconstitutionally high bail, most famously
the $1 million bail against John Sellers of the Ruckus Society (which
a judge lowered to a still-high $100,000).

§ Brutal treatment. In Philadelphia and Washington, activists were
held for excessive lengths of time, not informed of their full rights
or given access to their lawyers, and were hogtied with plastic
handcuffs attaching their wrists to their ankles. Philadelphia
activists in particular reported brutal treatment while in police
custody, but in every city demonstrators suffered from police assault
on the streets.

Whether and how the Justice Department or the FBI plotted strategies
for cracking down on protesters is the type of information that is
often only revealed by chance or long after the fact. COINTELPRO was
famously exposed in 1971 when activists liberated documents from an
FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. The process of uncovering the
government's recent attempts to suppress dissent has just begun.

An FBI agent told the Philadelphia Inquirer the government was
focusing on the antiglobalization activists in much the same way they
pursued Christian antiabortion bombers "after the Atlanta Olympics."
By expressing such urgent concern, federal agencies may provide tacit
permission to local police to use heavy-handed tactics stored in the
institutional memories of police departments from the most active days
of the Red Squads
.
Philadelphia police are notorious for preventively detaining black
activists, illegal raids and the bombing of the MOVE house in 1985.
They spied on some 600 groups well into the 1970s, and with the
collusion of judges, set astronomical bails to detain people on
charges that later proved without warrant. Indeed, the local police
may not need encouragement from the Feds for their use of violence
against largely (though not entirely) nonviolent demonstrators.

"There's a militaristic pattern to policing these days, the increasing
us-versus-them attitude," says Jim Lafferty of the National Lawyers
Guild in LA. The treatment of protesters is an extension of the way
many police treat those in poor neighborhoods, stopping pedestrians
who are young, black and male without probable cause, harassing and
even shooting with little provocation.

"In LA, apparently they decided instead of arresting people and
setting high bail like they did in Philadelphia, they'll just open
fire," said Dan Takadji, the ACLU lawyer who is suing the city for
civil rights violations. When police shot rubber bullets at a concert
and rally of more than a thousand people outside the Democratic
convention center in August, "there were a few people throwing garbage
over the fence," Takadji said. "Instead of dealing with these few
people, the police swept in and fired on a crowd with rubber bullets"
without giving concertgoers time to file out of the small entry the
police kept open. This had shades of the 1968 Democratic convention in
Chicago, when the National Guard blocked the exit of a permitted
demonstration in Grant Park as police charged with tear gas and rifle
butts.

Also reminiscent of '68 is harassment of those calling for police
reform. LA police officers shot rubber bullets into the crowd at an
anti-police-brutality rally on October 22. As in other demonstrations,
police also targeted a videographer who was filming. A few days
earlier the NYPD raided the Bronx apartment of members of the tiny
Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, which was helping to organize a
similar protest. Recent legislation has all but encouraged repressive
police tactics. A 1998 federal law, for example, gave federal
intelligence agencies vast new powers to track suspected terrorists
with "roving wiretaps" and secret court orders that allow covert
tracing of phone calls and obtaining of documents. The Antiterrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, meanwhile, increased the
authority of the FBI to investigate First Amendment activity, like
donations to nonviolent political organizations deemed "terrorist" by
the government. This would have criminalized those who gave money to
the African National Congress during apartheid, says Kit Gage of the
National Committee Against Repressive Legislation.

And Clinton in his last days created the post of counterintelligence
czar, whose mission, the Wall Street Journal reports, includes working
with corporations to maintain "economic security."

It's not only antiglobalization activists who have faced crackdowns on
free-speech and free-association rights. The Immigration and
Naturalization Service is imprisoning and deporting people whose
political views the government considers unacceptable, although its
efforts to use secret evidence have suffered setbacks in the courts,
with some people freed when evidence proved spurious. Still, Muslim
Arab-Americans continue to be called before secret grand juries
investigating ties between US residents and "terrorist" groups like
the Palestinian organization Hamas.

More than fifty years ago President Truman unleashed a crackdown on
the left that was carried on by his Republican successor. We may face
a similar crisis today. "There's been a massive violation of civil
rights and constitutional rights. This decision to suspend the
Constitution is one that has been made now at one event after another.
It's obvious there was a conscious decision to do it," said Bill
Goodman, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "What
lies behind the decision is more disturbing The purpose of it is to
prevent the public from hearing the message of the protesters."