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News :: Civil & Human Rights : Government Secrecy : Protest Activity : Regime |
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Big Brother Wants You to Know... F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers |
Current rating: 0 |
by Eric Lichtblau
(No verified email address) |
15 Aug 2004
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"This kind of pressure has a real chilling effect on perfectly legitimate political activity," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, where two groups of political activists in Denver and a third in Fort Collins were visited by the F.B.I. "People are going to be afraid to go to a demonstration or even sign a petition if they justifiably believe that will result in your having an F.B.I. file opened on you." |
WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York.
F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence. They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes, not dissent, at major political events.
But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.
"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' ''
The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I like urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations.
In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that bulletins that relayed that request for help improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity by suggesting suspicious activity included everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.
The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion - since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional.
The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible 'chilling' effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations."
Those same concerns are now central to the vigorous efforts by the F.B.I. to identify possible disruptions by anarchists, violent demonstrators and others at the Republican National Convention, which begins Aug. 30 and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of protesters.
In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic convention, F.B.I. counterterrorism agents and other federal and local officers have sought to interview dozens of people in at least six states, including past protesters and their friends and family members, about possible violence at the two conventions. In addition, three young men in Missouri said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury last month, forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a protest there that same day.
Interrogations have generally covered the same three questions, according to some of those questioned and their lawyers: were demonstrators planning violence or other disruptions, did they know anyone who was, and did they realize it was a crime to withhold such information.
A handful of protesters at the Boston convention were arrested but there were no major disruptions. Concerns have risen for the Republican convention, however, because of antiwar demonstrations directed at President Bush and because of New York City's global prominence.
With the F.B.I. given more authority after the Sept. 11 attacks to monitor public events, the tensions over the convention protests, coupled with the Justice Department's own legal analysis of that monitoring, reflect the fine line between protecting national security in an age of terrorism and discouraging political expression.
F.B.I. officials, mindful of the bureau's abuses in the 1960's and 1970's monitoring political dissidents like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., say they are confident their agents have not crossed that line in the lead-up to the conventions.
"The F.B.I. isn't in the business of chilling anyone's First Amendment rights," said Joe Parris, a bureau spokesman in Washington. "But criminal behavior isn't covered by the First Amendment. What we're concerned about are injuries to convention participants, injuries to citizens, injuries to police and first responders."
F.B.I. officials would not say how many people had been interviewed in recent weeks, how they were identified, or what spurred the bureau's interest.
They said the initiative was part of a broader, nationwide effort to follow any leads pointing to possible violence or illegal disruptions in connection with the political conventions, presidential debates or the November election, which come at a time of heightened concern about a possible terrorist attack.
F.B.I. officials in Washington have urged field offices around the country in recent weeks to redouble their efforts to interview sources and gather information that might help to detect criminal plots. The only lead to emerge publicly resulted in a warning to authorities before the Boston convention that anarchists or other domestic groups might bomb news vans there. It is not clear whether the lead was founded.
The individuals visited in recent weeks "are people that we identified that could reasonably be expected to have knowledge of such plans and plots if they existed," Mr. Parris said.
"We vetted down a list and went out and knocked on doors and had a laundry list of questions to ask about possible criminal behavior," he added. "No one was dragged from their homes and put under bright lights. The interviewees were free to talk to us or close the door in our faces."
But civil rights advocates argued that the visits amounted to harassment. They said they saw the interrogations as part of a pattern of increasingly aggressive tactics by federal investigators in combating domestic terrorism. In an episode in February in Iowa, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Drake University for records on the sponsor of a campus antiwar forum. The demand was dropped after a community outcry.
Protest leaders and civil rights advocates who have monitored the recent interrogations said they believed at least 40 or 50 people, and perhaps many more, had been contacted by federal agents about demonstration plans and possible violence surrounding the conventions and other political events.
"This kind of pressure has a real chilling effect on perfectly legitimate political activity," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, where two groups of political activists in Denver and a third in Fort Collins were visited by the F.B.I. "People are going to be afraid to go to a demonstration or even sign a petition if they justifiably believe that will result in your having an F.B.I. file opened on you."
The issue is a particularly sensitive one in Denver, where the police agreed last year to restrictions on local intelligence-gathering operations after it was disclosed that the police had kept files on some 3,000 people and 200 groups involved in protests.
But the inquiries have stirred opposition elsewhere as well.
In New York, federal agents recently questioned a man whose neighbor reported he had made threatening comments against the president. He and a lawyer, Jeffrey Fogel, agreed to talk to the Secret Service, denying the accusation and blaming it on a feud with the neighbor. But when agents started to question the man about his political affiliations and whether he planned to attend convention protests, "that's when I said no, no, no, we're not going to answer those kinds of questions," said Mr. Fogel, who is legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.
In the case of the three young men subpoenaed in Missouri, Denise Lieberman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in St. Louis, which is representing them, said they scrapped plans to attend both the Boston and the New York conventions after they were questioned about possible violence.
The men are all in their early 20's, Ms. Lieberman said, but she would not identify them.
All three have taken part in past protests over American foreign policy and in planning meetings for convention demonstrations. She said two of them were arrested before on misdemeanor charges for what she described as minor civil disobedience at protests.
Prosecutors have now informed the men that they are targets of a domestic terrorism investigation, Ms. Lieberman said, but not disclosed the basis for their suspicions. "They won't tell me," she said.
Federal officials in St. Louis and Washington declined to comment on the case. Ms. Lieberman insisted that the men "didn't have any plans to participate in the violence, but what's so disturbing about all this is the pre-emptive nature -stopping them from participating in a protest before anything even happened."
The three men "were really shaken and frightened by all this," she said, "and they got the message loud and clear that if you make plans to go to a protest, you could be subject to arrest or a visit from the F.B.I."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Squelching Protest: The Great American Hush-Up |
by Minneapolis Star Tribune
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Aug 2004
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Editorial
The Bill of Rights, we like to imagine, is much like a razor-wire fence. It shields the sacred ground of U.S. liberty from profane government intrusion -- giving citizens ample room to live and speak as they wish without worrying about incurring official wrath. So Americans like to think, but the fence metaphor isn't as apt as they might prefer.
To law enforcement, the Constitution's promises aren't regarded as constraints to be honored as much as challenges to be circumvented. How else to explain the FBI's many recent visits to citizens it thinks may show up to protest at the upcoming Republican National Convention in New York?
Protest is an American tradition -- as old and as esteemed as the Boston Tea Party. The practice offers citizens an open avenue for expression -- one that has often worked to alter the course of history. Protest has been known to end wars, topple administrations and hound heedless leaders to yield to popular will.
Indeed, it's hard to think of anything bad to say about the strategy -- except that it asks a lot of those who undertake it, and can occasionally inject disorder into public gatherings. That's why police are obliged to ensure that the right to protest doesn't unduly interfere with the right to assemble. Their tricky task is to see that both public meetings and public protests can coexist -- even if the result is just a bit sloppy.
But assuring that protests don't turn violent doesn't grant law-enforcers unlimited authority to dictate the terms of protest -- and plainly doesn't entitle them to bully would-be protesters into skipping a protest event altogether. Yet this sort of tactic has become commonplace of late -- most recently at the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Protesters there indeed did encounter a razor-wire fence -- but found that police had erected it to pen them in, not to safeguard their rights. As has often occurred during public appearances of President Bush during his term, protesters found themselves confined beyond the hearing of participants in the event they came to comment upon.
There's no doubt that police have some latitude to dictate where and how protesters can express themselves. Sometimes setting such rules is the only way to assure that important public business can be conducted without ceaseless disruption. But though protesters can't claim an absolute right to protest whenever and wherever they wish, they are entitled to be heard by their desired audience. Penning them up beyond the sight and hearing of the people they seek to influence is much like letting them speak their piece in a locked boxcar miles from the action.
But as Monday's New York Times notes, law enforcement is no longer limiting itself to such crude protest-containment measures. A surer strategy is to scare would-be protesters from showing up at a political event in the first place. This seems to be the idea behind a recent rash of FBI visits to citizens who may be planning to participate in protests at the GOP convention starting Aug. 30.
FBI investigators deny any wish to silence lawful dissent. Their sole purpose, they insist, is to avert possible violence by protesters in New York. But their door-knocking campaign has worked well to intimidate Bush opponents who had been inclined to join convention protests. As one woman visited by six FBI agents a few weeks back told the Times, the agents were trying "to let us know that 'hey, we're watching you.' "
What's wrong with being watched? Nothing, unless you believe the Constitution's free-expression guarantee means what it says. The assurance conveys no mere suggestion to government, but an absolute obligation: It must bow to citizens' rights to say what they wish, to whom they wish, where they wish. Anything that dampens, muffles or muzzles such protest flouts the most fundamental of American promises.
© 2004 Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/ |
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Inquiry Into F.B.I. Questioning Is Sought |
by Eric Lichtblau
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Aug 2004
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WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - Several Democratic lawmakers called on Tuesday for a Justice Department investigation into the Federal Bureau of Investigation's questioning of would-be demonstrators about possible violence at the political conventions, saying the questioning may have violated the First Amendment.
In a letter to the department's inspector general seeking an investigation, the three lawmakers said the F.B.I. inquiries appeared to represent "systematic political harassment and intimidation of legitimate antiwar protesters."
Signing the letter, which was prompted by an article on Monday in The New York Times, were Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, and two other Democrats on the panel, Jerrold Nadler of New York and Robert C. Scott of Virginia.
Officials at the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation said they had not seen the letter and could not comment on its specific points. They defended the recent efforts by the bureau to question potential demonstrators around the country, saying the inquiries have been aimed solely at detecting and preventing violence at the Republican convention in New York and other major political events.
"The F.B.I. is not monitoring groups or interviewing individuals unless we receive intelligence that such individuals or groups may be planning violent and disruptive criminal activity or have knowledge of such activity," Cassandra M. Chandler, an assistant director of the bureau, said in a statement released late Monday.
After having received reports of possible violence, Ms. Chandler said, "the F.B.I. conducted interviews, within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution, in order to determine the validity of the threat information.''
"Violent acts,'' she added, "are not protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the F.B.I. has a duty to prevent such acts and to identify and bring to justice those who commit them."
In recent weeks, beginning last month before the Democratic National Convention in Boston, F.B.I. agents have contacted a number of people who have been active in political demonstrations in at least six states: Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri and New York. Many of those contacted have been active in past demonstrations, and agents have asked whether they planned acts of violence at upcoming protests, whether they knew of anyone who did and whether they realized it was a crime to withhold such information.
Three young men in Missouri were also trailed by federal agents and subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury last month to tell what they knew of protest plans, forcing them to cancel a planned trip to Boston to participate in a demonstration there.
Officials of the F.B.I. would not say how many interviews the bureau had conducted. Civil rights advocates who have monitored the process estimated that at least several dozen people had received visits from agents at their homes and elsewhere in recent weeks. They said they were continuing to collect anecdotal information from demonstrators who had been approached by federal agents.
In a newly disclosed episode in Colorado, two college students said that an F.B.I. agent approached the faculty adviser for their campus group late last month and that the agent showed photographs of the students, Mark Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, said. The students did not want their names or college disclosed, Mr. Silverstein said, because "they're really scared out of their minds."
The inquiries were made after a legal opinion in April by the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department endorsed the constitutionality of past efforts by F.B.I. counterterrorism agents to solicit help from local police forces to gather intelligence on antiwar and political demonstrations. The opinion said any chilling of First Amendment rights was "quite minimal" and was "substantially outweighed" by concerns for public safety at big demonstrations.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said on Tuesday that he was troubled by the pre-emptive nature of the inquiries, which he said had deterred some demonstrators from protesting.
"This looks like it's much more about intimidation and coercion than about criminal conduct," Mr. Romero said. "It's not enough for the F.B.I. to say that there's the potential for criminal activity. That's not the legal threshold, and if that were really the case, they could investigate anybody."
Representative Conyers and his colleagues raised similar concerns in their letter. They asked the inspector general to examine internal documents at the Justice Department and F.B.I. on political protests and to determine if the inquiries "focused on actual threats of violence or merely involved legitimate political and antiwar activity."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com |
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