-Caveat Lector- http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript310_full.html
MOYERS: Welcome to NOW. While all eyes were on Super Tuesday, we were thinking about the eyes that may be on you when you least suspect it. This goes beyond President Bush's call this week to renew the Patriot Act giving the government broad powers to wiretap and investigate suspected terrorists. Going after suspected terrorists is not our subject tonight. Going after people exercising their right of free speech, is. BRANCACCIO: We all love a spy novel. But who knew that you could be plunged into the real world of espionage just by gathering to talk about a protest march? It's one thing to carry out a war on terror. But few realize that Justice Department rules now let FBI agents go undercover to monitor citizen gatherings...whether or not there is evidence or suspicion of criminal activity. And local police are doing the same thing. Our report was prepared by producer Brenda Breslauer. -- BRANCACCIO: March 2003, five days before the invasion of Iraq, outside Buckley Air Force Base in Colorado, what appears to be a garden variety antiwar protest is underway. But something in this picture is not what it appears to be. It's that woman in yellow. She looks like a protester, but she's not. PETERS: She sat with us, she chanted and sang with us. BRANCACCIO: Nancy Peters was one of the organizers of that protest- she and 18 others from the Colorado Coalition Against the War in Iraq were arrested that day. Including that woman in yellow. She'd first shown up at the group's planning meeting the night before. PETERS: We were taken away in handcuffs one by one. She was arrested, she was even given a summons just like the rest of us. But there was a mystery. Our attorneys couldn't find any police record of any arrest. There were 19 of us, they could only find 18. She was indeed an infiltrator. BRANCACCIO: The police would later confirm she was one of theirs. Call her what you want: infiltrator or undercover investigator. Government spying at peaceful protests was big during the sixties, waned during the intervening years, but now the practice is back. The Colorado protesters were disturbed by the government's use of its extraordinary powers to monitor their activities. But a month later, when it happened a second time, there were even more serious implications. Nancy Peters' group had notified police they'd be presenting a peace resolution at the Colorado offices of US Senator Wayne Allard. But take a look at this man. He's said his name was Chris, and he had joined up with the group the night before. The nonviolent group didn't know who he was, and Peters says they were taken aback by what he had to say. PETERS: Chris at one point, said, "Well, I don't see why we don't just form a line of the people who are going to do this protest and just kind of march on past the police. Kind of like storm them." It was ridiculous. I mean, people said "No, come on, you know, are you crazy?" BRANCACCIO: He too was an undercover officer, and despite his apparent provocation, the protest stayed peaceful. As the others were being taken away, "Chris" was caught on camera chatting with his fellow officers. Nancy Peters put two and two together when she arrived to post bail and ran into him leaving the county jail. PETERS: I said "Chris, you're out. Wow. What happened?" And he said "Well yeah, I've been, you know, I've been charged and I'm released." And I, "Can I see your summons?" He said, "Oh, my summons." And he starts fumbling around in all his pockets. Then he said, "Oh, you know, they didn't even give me one." BRANCACCIO: His real name was Darren Christensen, of the Arapahoe County Sheriff's department. In court testimony, he admitted he was working undercover but denied trying to provoke the group into violence. PETERS: It was surprising that we… that one among us that we trusted and shared solidarity with was actually not one of us at all. But was spying on us. BRANCACCIO: And it's not just Colorado. Last September, members of the California antiwar group Peace Fresno, got a similar shock when the local paper printed the details of a tragic motorcycle accident. It turned out that a man who had been attending their meetings and protests for the past six months was in fact a local deputy sheriff. He had been "assigned to the anti-terrorist team under the vice-intelligence unit." Police in Fresno and Colorado say it's all a matter of protecting the public from potential violence. But why are police or Anti-Terror Units infiltrating protest groups without evidence they plan to do anything more sinister than peaceful civil disobedience? Civil Rights attorney and activist Mara Verheyden-Hilliard says she knows. VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: This is an effort to criminalize dissent. It's an effort from the Ashcroft Justice department specifically since September 11th, really, to intimidate people in the United States and to try and stifle dissent. BRANCACCIO: Verheyden-Hilliard and her husband Carl Messineo run the Partnership for Civil Justice, a public interest law firm in Washington, D.C. They have four major lawsuits against the District of Columbia police and federal government for what they say are example after example of law enforcement infiltrating, monitoring, and disrupting protest groups exercising their rights to free speech. VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: They're targeting people purely based on people standing up and saying they oppose government policy. That's the trigger. BRANCACCIO: She says evidence of what is now a four-year pattern of abuse was caught on tape the first day of the Bush Administration, with this incident in a group of protestors along the route of the Inaugural parade. VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: You see two undercover plain clothes police officers. One of them is wearing a camouflage jacket with the hat pulled down low. The other is wearing a red jacket and he's a full black face mask on. You can see in the hand of the police officer wearing the red jacket a canister of pepper spray. You can actually see him shaking it. You can see that police officer as he stalks through the crowd, pepper spraying peaceful protestors in that crowd. BRANCACCIO: Verheyden-Hilliard says it took a lawsuit on behalf of the protestors for the DC police to even admit the two were plainclothes officers. And while both the D.C. police and the Justice Department's reviews of the incident conclude there was no use of excessive force, Verheyden-Hillard says the case led to an even greater revelation. VERHEYDEN-HILLIARD: They currently have police department officers, who are assigned on long-term assignments to pretend to be political activists. To pretend to be part of protest groups. And to carry out these actions, in acknowledgment from the police, is that this is being done in the absence of allegations of criminal activity. BRANCACCIO: "Done in the absence of allegations of criminal activity." That's an important point. Authorities wouldn't get much complaint for gathering intelligence on groups with histories of violence or violent aims. Al Qaeda or the Ku Klux Klan come to mind. But that is not the case here. Here's what the judge wrote in an opinion in the protestor's lawsuit: "The District of Columbia,...seems to be admitting that it maintains widespread, extensive spying operations on the activities and operations of political advocacy organizations...on the basis of their political philosophies and conduct protected under the First Amendment." (US District Judge Gladys Kessler) PATTERSON: I think the public would be very surprised to know that if they go to any meetings at all, they are at some risk of infiltration. BRANCACCIO: D.C. Council Member Kathy Patterson pressed the issue of police surveillance in hearings last December. The police contend they don't infiltrate protest groups. They just attend meetings undercover to prevent both terrorism and violent incidents like the ones in Seattle in 1999. But even with the police in the witness seat, Patterson had a hard time getting them to be specific about who they were monitoring or how. BROADBENT: They don't go in there wearing there uniform. Again, these are individuals who… PATTERSON: No, no, you said that they attend as members of the Metropolitan Police Department. I'm just trying to understand. BROADBENT: Well, well, let me just explain the language then. They are a member of the Metropolitan Police Department. When they go in there they do not say "I'm a member of the Metropolitan Police Department." PATTERSON: So they are in fact undercover? BROADBENT: Yes, they are. BRANCACCIO: DC, Denver, Fresno…All examples of local law enforcement infiltrating peaceful protest groups. But what happens when federal agents are involved? In fact, for the past two years the FBI has been allowed to do exactly the same thing and they've done it before. Remember the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover? HOOVER: All work in the future best can be judged by the events of the past. BRANCACCIO: From the 1950s to the 1970s, in a secret program called COINTELPRO, the Bureau conducted no fewer than 2000 operations of domestic spying, many aimed at disrupting civil rights and antiwar groups. MONDALE: A lot of people were intimidated. BRANCACCIO: In 1975, then Senator Walter Mondale sat on the committee which investigated the abuses, chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church. MONDALE: The fact of it is, that thousands and thousand of people during this time were investigated, pursued, and some of them hurt by these secret policies of investigation and sometimes just plain abuse. BRANCACCIO: After the program was exposed, Attorney General Edward Levi issued a series of guidelines to prevent domestic spying by the FBI. LEVI: In our effort to seek such an accommodation the department has adopted standards and procedures designed to ensure the reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment of electronic surveillance. And to minimize, to the extent practical, the intrusion into individual interest. BRANCACCIO: Levi's Guidelines said that investigations should be limited to exposing criminal conduct and should not involve simple monitoring of political views. MONDALE: The idea was to keep some accountability within the bureau so that they didn't go beyond the law. BRANCACCIO: And that's generally how things stood for almost three decades, with occasional abuses of policy, like in the 1980s when the FBI was caught improperly investigating Americans who opposed U.S. policy in El Salvador. But in the spring following September 11th, the rules against domestic spying were gutted. Attorney General John Ashcroft said that his agents were too restricted in their investigative powers. ASHCROFT: Today I am announcing a comprehensive revision to the department's investigative guidelines. BRANCACCIO: To fight the war on terror the Attorney General argued his agents needed aggressive techniques to investigate before crimes were committed. And under Ashcroft's new guidelines, the FBI could attend public meetings like this even if there was no suspicion of criminal activity. ASHCROFT: For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the FBI is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally. BRANCACCIO: That legalese meant the FBI could now go undercover — in effect, pretend they were the public. There was an immediate outcry. Even members of the president's own party went on television to voice their concern over the new rules. James Sensenbrenner is the powerful chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. SENSENBRENNER: I believe that the Justice Department has gone too far in changing the domestic spying regulations that have been on the books for 25 years. BRANCACCIO: Sensenbrenner said the old guidelines seemed to be doing just fine balancing the needs for public safety with those of public expression. SENSENBRENNER: I get very, very queasy when federal law enforcement is effectively saying, going back to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on people like Martin Luther King. BRANCACCIO: It's a concern shared by Former Vice President Mondale. MONDALE: The new Attorney-General almost flaunts his contempt for rules that protect citizens' constitutional rights. BRANCACCIO: Infiltration isn't the only way the federal government monitors groups engaged in peaceful political dissent. Take the federal Grand Jury which investigates crimes in secret. It's not often that a grand jury subpoena shows up at a university. MAXWELL: I've been in higher education for 32 years. I have never experienced anything like this in my professional career. BRANCACCIO: Dr. David Maxwell is the President of Drake University. Drake is a liberal arts school in Iowa. A quiet center of learning in the heartland. So imagine his surprise last month when a grand jury subpoena showed up for documents from an antiwar conference that had been held on campus. MAXWELL: I think the most unsettling thing was that it seemed to be focused on a legitimate activity of the university. BRANCACCIO: The subpoena ordered the university to turn over "all records and documents" from the conference "hosted by 'the Drake chapter of the National Lawyers Guild,'" an activist student organization. Not just records of the November antiwar conference the group had sponsored, but names of "participants in the meeting," agendas and other documents going back to 2002. MAXWELL: We're being asked to do something that makes a basic activity of the university look as if it's illegal. BRANCACCIO: Here's one meeting at that campus anti-war conference last November, taped by a local news crew. Students and activists planning peaceful civil disobedience at the Iowa National Guard Base the next day. A dozen protesters were arrested for trespassing. Three months later, organizer Brian Terrell of the Catholic Peace Ministry received a subpoena commanding him to testify before the federal grand jury. An experience he found intimidating because of the business card that came with it. TERRELL: The person who delivered the subpoenas left a card identifying himself with the FBI Joint Terror Task Force. BRANCACCIO: The U.S. Attorney later denied the subpoenas were part of any investigation by the Joint Terrorism Task Force. But Terrell says he was surprised to get that subpoena to begin with because the police had been invited to the conference. TERRELL: The agenda was public and the agenda and program was sent to the Des Moines Police Department. And we told them they were welcome to come. BRANCACCIO: It turns out that two Sheriff's deputies did come. But undercover, according to documents unearthed by an attorney defending the protestors. The undercover officers' confidential report included the names of seven individuals who'd discussed strategy during the planning meeting. TERRELL: I think what was going was they were trying to find some way to pin the label of terrorist on us. BRANCACCIO: After making national headlines last month, the subpoenas were withdrawn. But the names of those seven people — and likely many more — remain in government files. TERRELL: Word gets out. The FBI Terror Task Force is looking at a meeting that happened at Drake University. Would you go to that meeting? Would you go to the next one? Are people gonna want to come to that? MONDALE: We have a right and a duty in these agencies to protect America. But one of the things that ought to be protected is this crucial and sacred right of Americans to protest. BRANCACCIO: How widespread is government infiltration and monitoring of citizens? The experience of the city of Denver offers a clue. Two years ago, the Denver police were forced to reveal that the department had collected surveillance and intelligence files for decades… files with information on more than three thousand individuals and close to a thousand organizations. The files included groups the police labeled "criminal extremists." One was The American Friends Service Committee. That's a pacifist group. And it's run by the Quakers. www.ctrl.org DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
