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.
- [CTRL] The Crackdown on Dissent William Shannon
