We're conflating proper dissent and terrorism
It's both misguided and distracting to direct
our homeland security efforts against protesters.
By COLEEN ROWLEY
Last update: January 15, 2011 - 6:22 PM
A secretive, unaccountable, post-9/11 homeland security apparatus has
increasingly turned inward on American citizens.
The evidence includes everything from controversial airport body scanners
to the
FBI's raids last September on antiwar activists' homes in
Minneapolis and Chicago. A federal grand jury investigation in Chicago
was recently expanded.
Unless the erosion of proper legal safeguards is halted, we risk a return
to Vietnam-era abuses on the part of the FBI and other security
agencies.
Agents are now given a green light, for instance, to check off
"statistical achievements" by sending well-paid, manipulative
informants into mosques and peace groups.
Forgotten are worries about targeting and entrapping people not
predisposed to violence.
Forgotten also are the scandals that came to light just months before
9/11 of decades-long FBI operations involving "top echelon
informants" (high-level violent criminals) such as Boston crime boss
Whitey Bulger.
Even if government officials are well-intentioned, the current tactics
and incentives have opened the floodgates of error and
opportunism.
Most important, what's been forgotten is that the protection of civil
liberties does not weaken our overall security but actually helps to
strengthen it.
When security agencies expend their energy against war protesters and
environmental advocates, they lose effectiveness in preventing real
terrorist violence.
No agency connected the dots before Nidal Malik Hasan allegedly killed 13
and wounded over 40 at Fort Hood, or before airline passenger Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate his "underwear bomb" on
Christmas Day 2009, or before Faisal Shahzad planted his car bomb in
Times Square.
Tragedy was averted in the latter two incidents only because alert people
happened to be on the scene. Yet the perpetrators of these three major
events on U.S. soil were in direct communication with the same Yemeni
cleric who was allegedly connected to three of the 9/11
hijackers.
A good place to begin reform is by challenging the handful of words in
the "Patriot Act" that enlarged the definition of
"material support of terrorism" to encompass "expert
advice and assistance" given to designated "foreign terrorist
organizations."
This phrase essentially makes mere advocacy of peace and humanitarian
issues illegal with respect to groups listed by the State
Department.
The Patriot Act thus condemns a large range of nongovernmental efforts,
which have tended to be more effective than government-backed ones at
furthering education, providing humanitarian assistance, and ensuring
free and fair elections throughout the world.
Such a chilling effect only makes nonviolent conflict resolution and
mediation more difficult and terrorism more likely.
Next, it's necessary to reverse the erosion of attorney general
guidelines governing initiation of domestic investigations, which were
adopted after the Church Committee uncovered abuses in the
1970s.
In one of its last official acts, the Bush administration lowered the
level of necessary suspicion to the point where the FBI needs only deny
that it is targeting a group based solely on its exercise of First
Amendment rights.
Like the Patriot Act provision, this opens the door wide to FBI
harassment of nonviolent activists.
In 2003, a spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center
said, apparently without thinking too hard, that evidence wasn't needed
to issue warnings about war protesters: "You can make an easy kind
of a 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]. ... You can almost argue that a protest
against [the war] is a terrorist act."
In a similar vein, the Department of Defense asked on its annual
mandatory antiterrorism test, "What is an example of low-level
terrorism activity?" The correct answer was
"protest."
But protest and civil disobedience are not terrorism. Until that
distinction is made at every level of the security system, and proper
institutional safeguards are implemented, the "war on terror"
will continue to shred civil liberties while failing to prevent terrorist
outrages.
The massive and largely irrelevant data collection now occurring only
adds hay to the haystack, making it even harder to see patterns and
anticipate events.
"Top Secret America" needs to ask itself who is more guilty of
furnishing "material aid to terrorism" -- its own operatives,
or the activists and protesters it so wrongheadedly targets.
Coleen
Rowley, a former FBI special agent and legal counsel in the
Minneapolis field office, wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May
2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI's pre-9/11
failures. She retired in 2004 and is now a writer and speaker.
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/113637589.html
--
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
