By Michelle Goldberg Salon.com Full text: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/11/cointelpro/index_np.html
Feb. 11, 2004 | The undercover cop introduced herself to the activists from the Colorado Coalition Against the War in Iraq as Chris Hoffman, but her real name was Chris Hurley. Last March, she arrived at a nonviolence training session in Denver, along with another undercover officer, Brad Wanchisen, whom she introduced as her boyfriend. The session, held at the Escuela Tlatelolco, a Denver private school, was organized to prepare activists for a sit-in at the Buckley Air National Guard Base the next day, March 15. Hurley said she wanted to participate. She said she was willing to get arrested for the cause of peace. In fact, she did get arrested. She was just never charged. The activists she protested with wouldn't find out why for months.
Chris Hurley was just one of many cops all over the country who went undercover to spy on antiwar protesters last year. Nonviolent antiwar groups in Fresno, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albuquerque, N.M., have all been infiltrated or surveilled by undercover police officers. Shortly after the Buckley protest, the Boulder group was infiltrated a second time, by another pair of police posing as an activist couple.
Meanwhile, protesters arrested at antiwar demonstrations in New York last spring were extensively questioned about their political associations, and their answers were entered into databases. And last week, a federal prosecutor in Des Moines, Iowa, obtained a subpoena demanding that Drake University turn over records from an antiwar conference called "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" that the school's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a civil libertarian legal group, hosted on Nov. 15 of last year, the day before a protest at the Iowa National Guard headquarters. Among the information the government sought was the names of the leaders of the Drake University Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, its records dating back to January of 2002, and the names of everyone who attended the "Stop the Occupation!" conference. Four antiwar activists also received subpoenas in the investigation.
On Tuesday, after a national outcry, the U.S. Attorney's Office canceled the subpoenas. Still, says Bruce Nestor, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild who is serving as the Drake chapter's attorney, "We're concerned that some type of investigation is ongoing."
In the early 1970s, after the exposure of COINTELPRO, a program of widespread FBI surveillance and sabotage of political dissidents, reforms were put in place to prevent the government from spying on political groups when there was no suspicion of criminal activity. But once again, protesters throughout America are being watched, often by police who are supposed to be investigating terrorism. Civil disobedience, seen during peaceful times as the honorable legacy of heroes like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., is being treated as terrorism's cousin, and the government claims to be justified in infiltrating any meeting where it's even discussed. It's too early to tell if America is entering a repeat of the COINTELPRO era. But Jeffrey Fogel, legal director of the Center for Constitutional Law in Manhattan, says, "There are certainly enough warning signs out there that we may be."
As a new round of protests approaches -- including worldwide antiwar demonstrations on March 20 and massive anti-Bush actions during the Republican National Convention in August and September -- experts say the surveillance is likely to increase. "The government is taking an increasingly hostile stance toward protesters," says Michael Avery, president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor of constitutional law at Suffolk University. In the run-up to the Republican Convention, he says, "I'm sure the government will be attempting to infiltrate political groups. They may send agent provocateurs into political groups. They're no doubt compiling reports on people. We have to stand up against that."
No one knows the extent of the political spying and profiling currently being carried out against critics of the Bush administration and American foreign policy -- which may be the most disturbing thing about the entire phenomenon. "Presumably if they're doing their jobs well, we'll never know," says Fogel. Activists have also been unsuccessful at finding out why they're being watched, and under whose authority.
What we do know, though, is that several of the police departments that have been accused of spying on protesters -- including the Aurora, Colo., Police Department, where Hurley works -- are part of Joint Terrorism Task Forces. These are programs in which local police are assigned to work full-time with FBI agents and other federal agents "to investigate and prevent acts of terrorism," as the FBI's Web site says. According to the FBI, such JTTFs have been around since 1980, but the total number has almost doubled since Sept. 11, 2001, to 66.
more: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/02/11/cointelpro/index_np.html -- --------------------------- IMPEACHMENT: BRING IT ON! ----------------------------------------------
Purge the White House of mad cowboy disease.
--------------------------------------------------
END OF THE TRAIL SALOON Alternate Sundays 6-8am GMT (10pm-midnight PDT) http://www.kvmr.org
--------------------------------
"I uke, therefore I am." -- Cool Hand Uke "I log on, therefore I seem to be." -- Rodd Gnawkin "I claim, therefore you believe." -- Dan Ratherthan
Visit Cool Hand Uke's Lava Tube: http://www.coolhanduke.com
