Outlawing dissent

There's no way to know how often the FBI is actually monitoring protesters. The cases that have come to light so far have involved local police officers, not federal agents, and in most instances it's unclear whether they've been working in concert with the FBI. For example, last year in Fresno, the antiwar group Peace Fresno discovered they'd been infiltrated when an undercover cop who'd been attending their meetings was killed in a motorcycle accident. When his obituary was published, members of Peace Fresno realized that the man they knew as Aaron Stokes was really Aaron Kilner, a member of the Fresno County Sheriff's Department's anti-terrorism unit.

There is a Joint Terrorism Task Force in Fresno, but members of Peace Fresno and their lawyers have not yet been able to find out whether Kilner was spying on them for the FBI, and whether he gave the FBI any information about their activities.

Not that there's much information to give. "This is a group that passes petitions and goes to city council meetings," says Nicholas DeGraff, a Peace Fresno organizer. "When we have a demonstration, we call the police ahead of time." The group, he says, is made up of "retirees, grandparents, schoolteachers and community workers. Your model citizens just participating in democracy."

The group has around 200 people on its membership roster, says DeGraff, with an active core of about 25 people. In early 2003, Kilner paid a $12 membership fee and joined them. He told the group that he didn't work and lived off an inheritance. In the weeks before the war in Iraq, he came to meetings and participated in the weekly demonstrations Peace Fresno held at a local intersection.

He said little, DeGraff recalls, and never volunteered to do anything beyond passing out flyers. Most of the time, says DeGraff, he sat in a corner and took notes. Even after the war, he kept coming, showing up at meetings every few weeks. When the group went to Sacramento to protest at a WTO ministerial meeting in June, he went with them. He died in August.

Peace Fresno has since been assured by the Fresno Sheriff's Department that it is not under investigation and has never been under investigation. That may be true in some bureaucratic sense, but the fact remains that an anti-terrorism agent spent half a year surveilling them. "It's equating dissent with terrorism," says DeGraff. "It's saying if you dissent, you're a terrorist."

In fact, that's exactly what some law enforcement officers have said.

On April 2 of last year, the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, which is under the auspices of the state Justice Department but whose regional task forces include FBI agents, issued a bulletin warning to police about potential violence at an antiwar protest scheduled for the Port of Oakland. An Oakland Tribune investigation found that the Anti-Terrorism Information Center had little substantive information regarding possible violence. "Intelligence records released under open-government laws reveal the thinking of CATIC and Oakland intelligence officials in the days leading up to the protest," said a June 1 story by Ian Hoffman, Sean Holstege and Josh Richman. The agencies, they wrote, "blended solid facts, innuendo and inaccurate information about anti-war protesters expected at the port."

The protest did in fact turn violent, but according to documentary evidence the violence was precipitated by the police, who fired on demonstrators with wooden bullets and beanbags. The Tribune reported that, according to videotapes and transcripts of radio transmissions of the event, there's no evidence of "protesters throwing objects at police or engaging in civil disobedience until 20 minutes after police opened fire."

So why was the warning issued in the first place? In an interview with the Tribune, Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, issued a remarkably broad definition of terrorism. "You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest," he said. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act."

This egregious statement, in which a law enforcement representative takes it upon himself to judge the legitimacy of democratic protest, seems to confirm the worst fears of civil libertarians that Bush's "war against terror" is actually a war against dissent. Of course, whether Van Winkle actually believes that antiwar protesters are as dangerous to the citizens of California as al-Qaida is impossible to say. But it's not just rhetorical excess or fascistic impulses that lead officials to speak of demonstrators as terrorists. They may actually have a bureaucratic and financial incentive to do so.

"This is a good way for police officers to get terrorism points," says Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU . "They have to justify the dollars they're receiving from the federal government for homeland security. We've seen a massive inflation of terrorism statistics on the federal level. Every Arab who has a phony drivers license is now called a terrorist by the Justice Department, so they can say, 'We've arrested thousands of terrorists.'

"This is the perfect example of not learning the lessons of 9/11," he continues. "The FBI was not sufficiently focused on the possibility that a group like al-Qaida would commit a serious terrorist attack. One real failure since 9/11 is that, when they call everything a 'terrorist,' they're still not sufficiently focused on actual terrorists. There's an overbroad definition of domestic terrorism in the PATRIOT Act, and it's had a spillover effect into state and local governments who want to justify their antiterrorism funding and mission."

In a Nation article from May 2002, Robert Dreyfuss wrote of that spillover effect. The Justice Department, he reported, had offered billions of dollars in anti-terror subsidies to local governments, but first they had to show that there were "potential threat elements" in their area.

"Under the Justice Department program each state was asked to conduct a county-by-county assessment of potential terrorist threats in order to qualify for the federal largesse," Dreyfuss wrote. "In each city and county local police were required to identify up to fifteen groups or individuals called potential threat elements (PTEs). The Justice Department helpfully points out that the motivations of the PTEs could be 'political, religious, racial, environmental [or] special interest.' At a stroke, the Justice Department prompted 17,000 state and local police departments to begin monitoring radicals."

Thus even if the FBI isn't working directly with local police to spy on protesters, the messages coming from the Justice Department influence the agencies below, says Edgar. "The Ashcroft Justice Department has set a terrible example," he says. "They're sending the wrong message around the country to the state and local police. Local and state police will follow the FBI's example on a lot of things. On top of that, add big grants for homeland security and you've got a recipe for a lot more political spying."

This is the first of two parts. Read Part Two here.

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