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
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 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."
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