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The Crackdown on Dissent
01/30/01 - by Abby Scher - The Nation
Over the past year, the US government has intensified its crackdown
on
political dissidents opposing corporate globalization, and it is
used 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
spied on protesters' planning meetings, while police restricted who
is
allowed on the parade route and planned 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
64 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
27 of its
56 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 a 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 drew on government monitoring of 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."
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