by Tom Burghardt
September 27, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
|
Tom Burghardt is a
researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
In addition to publishing in
Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, his articles can be
read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press,
Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.
He is the editor of Police
State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning,
distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from
Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of
the XXI Century |
In a replay of the Federal Bureau of
Investigation's infamous
COINTELPRO operations targeting the left
during the 1960s and '70s, America's political police launched raids on the
homes of antiwar and solidarity activists.
Heavily-armed SWAT teams smashed down doors and agents armed with search
warrants carried out simultaneous raids in Minneapolis and Chicago early
morning on September 24.
Rummaging through personal belongings, agents carted off boxes of files,
documents, books, letters, photographs, computers and cell phones from
Minneapolis antiwar activists Mick Kelly, Jessica Sundin, Meredith Aby, two
others, as well as the office of that city's Anti-War Committee.
Meanwhile, as federal snoops seized personal property in Minneapolis, FBI
agents raided the Chicago homes of activists Stephanie Weiner and
Joseph Iosbaker.
According to the
Chicago Tribune,
"neighbors saw FBI agents carrying boxes
from the apartment of community activist Hatem Abudayyeh, executive
director of the Arab American Action Network."
"In addition," the Tribune reported, "Chicago activist Thomas Burke said
he was served a grand jury subpoena that requested records of any
payments to Abudayyeh or his group."
Amongst those targeted by the FBI were
individuals who organized peaceful protests against the imperialist invasion
and occupation of Iraq and 2008 protests at the far-right Republican
National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
As Antifascist Calling reported in
2008 and
2009, citing documents published by
...implemented an action plan designed to
monitor and squelch dissent during the convention.
As part of that plan's execution, activists and journalists were
preemptively arrested, and cameras, recording equipment, computers and
reporters' confidential notes were seized. Demonstrations were broken up by
riot cops who wielded batons, pepper spray and tasers and attacked peaceful
protesters who had gathered to denounce the war criminals' conclave in St.
Paul.
With Friday's raids, the federal government under "change" huckster
Barack Obama, has taken their
repressive program to a whole new level, threatening activists with the
specter of being charged with providing "material support of terrorism."
A felony conviction under this draconian federal
law (Title
18, Part I, Chapter 113B, § 2339B) carries a 15 year prison term.
State-Corporate Nexus
The trend by federal, state and corporate securocrats to situate antiwar and
international solidarity activism along a bogus "terrorism continuum," is an
alarming sign that plans for building an American police state are well
underway as I pointed out in my 2008
analysis of the FBI's "Counterterrorism
Analytical Lexicon."
Recently, the secrecy-spilling web site
Public Intelligence posted 137
bulletins produced by the Institute of
Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR),
an American-Israeli company, under terms of a $125,000 contract to the
Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security.
Billing itself as,
"the preeminent Israeli/American security
firm providing training, intelligence and education to clients across
the globe," ITRR is part of a large, but little understood nexus of
"public-private partnerships" fusing state and corporate surveillance
against leftists and environmentalists.
Amongst the targets of ITRR's alarmist screeds
were anti-drilling and environmental activists, permanent quarry for
corporate spies and provocateurs, as the web site Green Is The New Red
(GNR)
amply documents.
Earlier this month,
GNR reported that while ITRR and their
political paymasters have been monitoring non-violent activists,
"including a film screening of
Gasland," Pennsylvania's heimat
security boss James Powers wrote in an email that his office
intended to "continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale
Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups
fomenting dissent against those same companies."
In the bizarre parallel universe inhabited by
Powers and his Israeli cohorts, anti-drilling activists are "ecoterrorists,"
while the mass-murdering neo-Nazi mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma
City bombing that killed 168 people including 19 children, Timothy
McVeigh, was,
"just a person very angry with the U.S.
government."
While corporate polluters and criminals get a
free pass from the federal government and an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab
crusade is in full-swing, stoked by right-wing goons and their media shills,
it is little wonder then, that Friday's raids targeted supporters of the
Palestinian solidarity movement.
Neo-McCarthyite
Witchhunt
With a pretext that the raids were seeking,
"evidence related to an ongoing Joint
Terrorism Task Force investigation," FBI spokesperson Steve Warfield
told The New York Times that repressors
are "looking at activities connected to the material support of
terrorism."
Attorney Ted Dooley who represents
Mick Kelly, a union- and socialist activist targeted by the Bureau told
the Times that the SWAT team broke down Kelly's door at 7 a.m. on Friday and
served a search warrant on his companion.
According to Dooley, the warrant claimed the secret state was searching for
"evidence" that activist groups had provided,
"material support" to "Hezbollah, the
Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia."
Dooley told the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the raids are
nothing less than,
"a probe into the political beliefs of
American citizens and any organization anywhere that opposes the
American imperial design."
The political nature of the raids was blatantly
transparent.
A copy of the
search warrant on Kelly's home obtained by
Twin Cities Independent Media Center (TC-IMC)
revealed that the order, signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Nelson
specified that Kelly's membership in the Freedom Road Socialist
Organization (FRSO)
was a primary motive behind the Bureau's home invasion.
The warrant allowed the FBI to take,
"documents, files, books, photographs,
videos, souvenirs, war relics, notebooks, address books, diaries,
journals, maps, or other evidence, including evidence in electronic form
relating to Kelly's travels to and from and presence and activities in
Minnesota and other foreign countries, to which Kelly has traveled as
part of his work for FRSO."
Reprising the red-hunting frenzy of
the McCarthy period at the height of
the Cold War, the warrant specifies that the Bureau was authorized by
Obama's Justice Department to seize material relating to,
"the recruitment, indoctrination, and
facilitation of other individuals in the United States to join FRSO,
including materials related to the identity and location of recruiters,
facilitators, and recruits, the means by which the recruits were
recruited to join FRSO, the means by which the recruitment was financed
and arranged."
In other words, with a bogus "terrorism
investigation" as a pretext, the
Obama regime is targeting socialist
political groups for destruction in order for Democrats to whip-up "War
on Terror" and anticommunist hysteria prior to November general
elections that may see Congress pass into the hands of the troglodytic
Republican faction of war criminals and corporatists.
Grand Jury
Intimidation
In addition to turning over the homes of antiwar and solidarity activists in
Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, the FBI handed out subpoenas ordering
individuals to appear before a federal grand jury that will convene next
month in Chicago.
While the Bureau cannot compel citizens to answer their questions,
administrative means can be used by the secret state to coerce testimony
against fellow activists: the federal grand jury system.
As civil liberties scholar Frank Donner wrote in his groundbreaking
book,
The Age of Surveillance:
"Federal grand juries, judicial bodies
limited under our legal system to an accusatory role, were in the same
way [as red-hunting congressional committees] taken over by the
executive branch in the Nixon years and converted into intelligence
instruments."
Historically, federal grand juries have targeted
dissident groups and individuals as an harassment and intimidation tactic,
particularly when activists and organizations challenged the government's
imperial adventures abroad and capitalist depredations at home.
Individuals subpoenaed by the state who refuse to answer questions posed by
Star Chamber inquisitors can be receive an indeterminate jail sentence for
failing to do so.
During the Nixon administration according to Donner, some one hundred grand
juries subpoenaed more than one hundred thousand witnesses in a blatant
attempt to silence New Left and antiwar groups; as well, members of the
Catholic left and supporters of the African-American, Native American,
Puerto Rican independence and women's liberation movements were similarly
targeted.
While corporate media insist that the COINTELPRO-era disappeared with Nixon,
FBI snoops throughout the 1980s, '90s down to the present moment have marked
the left for destruction.
Recently, Bay Area Indymedia journalist
Josh Wolf was jailed for 226 days in
2006-2007 by the U.S. District Court in San Francisco after refusing to turn
over his raw, unedited video footage to the FBI in connection with the
Bureau's alleged "arson investigation" against anti-G8 anarchist protests in
2005.
Wolf refused to comply with the subpoena, and National Lawyers Guild
attorneys argued that to do so would have a "chilling effect" on journalists
who covered future protests, effectively transforming reporters into an arm
of the government.
Their arguments failed to sway the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals and Wolf was imprisoned.
When Wolf was released from the Federal Corrections Institution in Dublin,
California in 2007, he had been jailed longer than any other journalist for
refusing to divulge sources or source materials.
Cover-Ups, Terror,
Repression
Today, as the capitalist economic crisis deepens and the "War
on Terror" morphs into a multiyear, multibillion dollar
boondoggle engorging defense and security corporations with taxpayer-funded
boodle, labor, environmental and socialist opponents are in the cross-hairs
of the Obama administration, just as they were during the years of the
criminal Bush regime.
Activists with diverse groups such as,
-
the Palestine Solidarity Group
-
Students for a Democratic Society
-
the Twin-Cities Anti-War Committee
-
the Colombia Action Network
-
the Freedom Road Socialist
Organization
-
the National Committee to Free Ricardo
Palmera, a Colombian political prisoner,
...have now been targeted for "special handling"
by Obama's Justice Department.
As the imperialist occupation project flies off the rails in Afghanistan,
and as governments in Central and South America reject the capitalist "free
trade" paradigm of militarism, hyper-exploitation and resource extraction
that benefit grifting North American multinationals and drug-money
laundering banks, the repressive state is moving to shore-up its crumbling
edifice here at home.
Friday's raids are all the more ironic, given the fact that just last week
the Justice Department's own Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
revealed that the Bureau had used false claims to launch "counter-terror"
investigations to justify covert spying and infiltration operations by
provocateurs against activist groups across the country.
That report was a whitewash and largely exonerated the Bureau, clearing
secret state agents of deliberate violations of their targets' civil rights
and claimed that FBI snoops were motivated by a concern over "potential
violence," not the leftist views expressed by U.S. policy opponents.
Although a cover-up, the OIG report disclosed new details of illegal FBI
spying on an array of antiwar, Muslim, environmental and animal rights
groups.
Filled with mendacious characterizations
designed as an alibi for "overzealous" agents, Inspector General Glenn A.
Fine asserted that people were placed on terrorist watch lists because
of "factually weak" evidence and that investigations were opened and
continued "without adequate basis," not their opposition to imperialism or
destruction of the environment.
The conduct by secret state repressors however, goes far beyond
overzealousness.
In the wake of the provocative
9/11
attacks, materially aided by the FBI's own informant, the
al-Qaeda triple agent
Ali Mohamed, "terrorism" continues to
serve as a pretext - and justification - for a
domestic clampdown against
organizations engaged in legal political activity guaranteed by the U.S.
Constitution and is a key feature of Washington's "War on Terror" policies.
Parenthetically,
Fox News reported Sunday that the Pentagon,
"has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt.
Col. Anthony Shaffer's memoir 'Operation
Dark Heart,' his book about going undercover in Afghanistan."
"The Defense Intelligence Agency," the right-wing news outlet reports,
"attempted to block key portions of the book that claim 'Able Danger'
successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United
States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks."
According to Fox, "the DIA wanted references
to a meeting between Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book's author, and the
executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. In
that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, Shaffer alleges the
commission was told about 'Able Danger' and the identification of Atta
before the attacks. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11
report."
Undercover at the time, Shaffer recounted
that there was "stunned silence" at the meeting after he told the
executive director of the commission and others that Atta was identified
as early as 2000 by 'Able Danger'."
While far-right terrorists are given entrée to
the United States by secret state agencies to murder its own citizens,
organizations targeted by the Bureau's blanket spying according to the
Inspector General included,
-
Greenpeace
-
People for the Ethical Treatment of
Animals
-
Catholic Worker
-
the Thomas Merton Center, a pacifist
group dedicated to nonviolence
In one telling passage, Fine wrote,
"in some cases, the FBI classified some
investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its 'acts
of terrorism' classification."
Given imperial assertions by the Bush and now,
Obama regimes, that the Executive Branch, and it alone, has the authority to
arrest and indefinitely detain anyone it so chooses without trial, on
suspicion of "terrorism," categorizing nonviolent protesters as "terrorists"
could lead to the seizure of individuals so designated and send them on a
one-way trip to a military gulag such as Guantánamo Bay or even a CIA "black
site."
In a statement commenting on the release of
the OIG's report, Michael German, the American Civil Liberties Union
Senior Policy Counsel, and a former FBI whistleblower said:
"The FBI has a long history of abusing its
national security surveillance powers, reaching back to the smear
campaign waged by the American government against Dr. Martin Luther
King. Americans peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights were
able to become targets of FBI surveillance because spying guidelines
that were established after the shameful abuses of the 60s and 70s were
loosened in 2002. Unfortunately, they were loosened again in 2008, even
after this abuse was uncovered.
"Unless the rules regulating the FBI are strengthened to safeguard the
privacy of innocent Americans, we are all in danger of being spied on
and added to terrorist watch lists for doing nothing more than attending
a rally or holding up a sign."
With the recent raids on activist homes, the
Bureau has issued its unambiguous reply to the Inspector General and the
American people.
In response, over 150 people attended a community meeting in Minneapolis
Friday night,
"on less than six hours notice, to begin to
respond to Friday morning's FBI raids and subpoenas to local antiwar and
international solidarity organizers," the Twin Cities Independent
Media Center reported.
"Organizers," according to TC-IMC, "also announced two upcoming events:
a protest outside the Minneapolis FBI office, 111 Washington Ave. S., at
4:30pm on Monday; and a solidarity committee meeting on Thursday at 7pm,
location to be determined.
The subpoenas ask activists to appear before
a grand jury in Chicago, where a solidarity vigil was held last night as
a raid was still ongoing in that city, on or around October 19, reported
a Chicago Indymedia post."
Minnesota civil rights attorney Bruce Nestor
told the
St. Paul Pioneer Press that he was
"profoundly troubled" by the raids.
"Overwhelmingly they're people who are doing
public political organizing, so I think it's shocking to have heavily
armed federal agents show up at their homes... It's all people involved
in anti-war activity, and it appears to be focused largely on opposition
to the U.S. policy in Colombia and Palestine."
Nestor added.
"This is a direct attack on people who are
strong, dedicated advocates of freedom, of the right of people to be
free from US domination. It is an attack upon anybody who organizes
against US imperialism and US militarism abroad."