The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (30 page)

September 29, 2010

FBI Raids and the Criminalization of Dissent

Early in the morning on Friday, September 24, FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota’s Twin Cities kicked in the doors of anti-war activists, brandishing guns, spending hours rifling through their homes. The FBI took away computers, photos, notebooks, and other personal property. Residents were issued subpoenas to appear before a grand jury in Chicago. It was just the latest in the ongoing crackdown on dissent in the U.S., targeting peace organizers as supporters of “foreign terrorist organizations.”

Coleen Rowley knows about the FBI. She was a career special agent with the FBI who blew the whistle on the bureau’s failures in the lead-up to the 9/11 attacks.
Time
magazine named her Person of the Year in 2002. A few days after the raids in her hometown of Minneapolis, she told me, “This is not the first time that you’ve seen this Orwellian turn of the war on terror onto domestic peace groups and social justice groups . . . we had that begin very quickly after 9/11, and there were Office of Legal Counsel opinions that said the First Amendment no longer controls the war on terror.”

Jess Sundin’s home was raided. She was the lead organizer of the St. Paul, Minnesota, anti-war march on Labor Day 2008 that occurred as the Republican National Convention began. She described the raid: “They spent probably about four hours going through all of our personal belongings, every book, paper, our clothes, and filled several boxes and crates with our computers, our phones, my passport . . . with which they left my house.”

They smashed activist Mick Kelly’s fish tank when they barged into his home. The net cast by the FBI that morning included not only anti-war activists, but those who actively support a changed foreign policy toward Israel-Palestine and Colombia. The warrant for Kelly sought all records of his travel, not only to those countries, but also all his domestic U.S. travel since 2000, and all his personal contacts.

No one was arrested. No one was charged with a crime. Days later, hundreds of protesters rallied outside FBI offices nationally.

The raids happened just days after the U.S. Department of Justice’s inspector general released a report, “A Review of the FBI’s Investigations of Certain Domestic Advocacy Groups.” The IG looked at FBI surveillance and investigation of, among others, the environmental group Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, and the Pittsburgh-based Thomas Merton Center.

Founded in 1972 to support opposition to the war in Vietnam, the Merton Center continues to be a hub of anti-war activism in Pittsburgh. In 2002, the FBI spied on a Merton-organized rally, claiming “persons with links to international terrorism would be present.” As the IG reports, this claim was a fabrication, which was then relayed to FBI Director Robert Mueller, who repeated it, under oath, to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The illegal surveillance trickles down, through “Joint Terrorism Task Forces” that bring together federal, state, and local law enforcement; Homeland Security; and military agencies, often under the roof of a “fusion center,” the name given to shadowy trans-jurisdictional intelligence centers. There, it seems, slapping the “domestic terror” tag on activists is standard.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell recently apologized when it was revealed that his state Homeland Security director, James Powers, had contracted with a private company to research and distribute information about citizen groups engaged in legal activity. Groups opposed to the environmentally destructive extraction of natural gas known as “fracking,” for example, were referred to as “environmental extremists.”

Their crime: holding a screening of the Sundance-winning documentary
Gasland
.

Back in the Twin Cities, the state has been forced to back off eight other activists, dubbed the “RNC 8,” who were part of organizing the protests at the Republican National Convention. They all were pre-emptively arrested, before the convention started, and charged, under Minnesota state law, as terrorists. The prosecution has since dropped all terrorism charges (four of them will go to trial on other charges).

This is all happening while the Obama administration uses fear of terrorism to seek expanded authority to spy on Internet users, and as another scandal is brewing: The Justice Department also revealed this week that FBI agents regularly cheated on an exam testing knowledge of proper rules and procedures governing domestic surveillance. This is more than just a cheating scandal. It’s about basic freedoms at the core of our democracy, the abuse of power and the erosion of civil liberties.

December 1, 2010

WikiLeaks and the End of U.S. “Diplomacy”

WikiLeaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. WikiLeaks described the leak as “the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities.”

Critics argue, as they did with earlier leaks of secret documents regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, that lives will be lost as a result. Rather, lives might actually be saved, since the way that the U.S. conducts diplomacy is now getting more exposure than ever—as is the apparent ease with which the U.S. government lives up (or down) to the adage used by pioneering journalist I. F. Stone: “Governments lie.”

Take the case of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri was snatched in Macedonia as part of the CIA’s secret extraordinary rendition program, in which people are taken by the U.S. government and sent to other countries, where they can be subjected to torture. He was held and tortured in a secret prison in Afghanistan for months before being dropped by the CIA on an isolated road in Albania, even though the CIA had long established that it had grabbed the wrong man. El-Masri, a German citizen, sought justice through German courts, and it looked like thirteen CIA agents might be charged. Then the U.S. Embassy in Berlin stepped in, threatening, according to one cable, that “issuance of international arrest warrants would have a negative impact on our bilateral relationship.” No charges were ever filed in Germany, suggesting the diplomatic threat worked. The thirteen agents are, however, still facing charges in Spain, where prosecutors enjoy some freedom from political pressures.

Or so we thought. In fact, Spain figures prominently in the leaked documents as well. Among the cables is one from May 14, 2007, authored by Eduardo Aguirre, a conservative Cuban-American banker appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain by George W. Bush. Aguirre wrote: “For our side, it will be important to continue to raise the Couso case, in which three U.S. servicemen face charges related to the 2003 death of Spanish cameraman Jose Couso during the battle for Baghdad.”

Couso was a young cameraman with the Spanish TV network Telecinco. He was filming from the balcony of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad on April 8, 2003, when a U.S. Army tank fired on the hotel packed with journalists, killing Couso and a Reuters cameraman. Ambassador Aguirre was trying to quash the lawsuit brought by the Couso family in Spain.

The U.S. ambassador was also pressuring the Spanish government to drop a precedent-setting case against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush administration officials. In that same memo, Aguirre writes, “The Deputy Justice Minister also said the GOS [government of Spain] strongly opposes a case brought against former Secretary Rumsfeld and will work to get it dismissed. The judge involved in that case has told us he has already started the process of dismissing the case.”

These revelations are rocking the Spanish government, as the cables clearly show U.S. attempts to disrupt the Spanish justice system.

Ambassador Aguirre told Spain’s
El País
newspaper several years ago, “I am George Bush’s plumber, I will solve all the problems George gives me.”

In another series of cables, the U.S. State Department instructs its staff around the world and at the U.N. to spy on people, and, remarkably, to collect biometric information on diplomats. The cable reads, “Data should include e-mail addresses, telephone and fax numbers, fingerprints, facial images, DNA and iris scans.”

WikiLeaks is continuing its partnership with a global group of media outlets: Britain’s the
Guardian
,
El País
, the
New York Times
, German magazine
Der Spiegel
, and France’s
Le Monde
. David Leigh, investigations editor of the
Guardian
, told me, “We haven’t seen anything yet,” with literally almost a quarter million cables still not publicly revealed.

A renowned political analyst and linguist, MIT professor Noam Chomsky helped Daniel Ellsberg, America’s premier whistle-blower, release the Pentagon Papers forty years ago. I asked Chomsky about the latest cables released by WikiLeaks. “What this reveals,” he reflected, “is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership.”

December 15, 2010

“Assangination”: From Character Assassination to the Real Thing

Despite being granted bail, WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange remains imprisoned in London, awaiting extradition proceedings to answer a prosecutor’s questions in Sweden. He hasn’t been formally charged with any crime. His lawyers have heard that a grand jury in the United States has been secretly empaneled, and that a U.S. federal indictment is most likely forthcoming.

Politicians and commentators, meanwhile, have been repeatedly calling for Assange to be killed.

Take Democratic strategist and commentator Bob Beckel, who said on a Fox Business show: “We’ve got special ops forces. A dead man can’t leak stuff. . . . This guy’s a traitor, he’s treasonous, and he has broken every law of the United States. And I’m not for the death penalty, so . . . there’s only one way to do it: illegally shoot the son of a bitch.” U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., called WikiLeaks a “foreign terrorist organization” and said that the website “posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.” He went on: “This is worse even than a physical attack on Americans; it’s worse than a military attack.”

One of Assange’s lawyers in London, Jennifer Robinson, told me, in response to the flood of threats: “Obviously we take these sorts of very public pronouncements incredibly seriously. And people making these statements ought to be reported to the police for incitement to violence.”

One of Beckel’s co-panelists on Fox said what needed to be done was to “cut the head off the snake,” a phrase which, ironically, gained more significance when it appeared days later in one of the leaked cables. In the cable, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Adel al-Jubeir “recalled the King’s frequent exhortations to the U.S. to attack Iran and so put an end to its nuclear weapons program. ‘He told you to cut off the head of the snake.’”

Assange has found support in some surprising quarters. Conservative Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith blogged: “I find myself agreeing with those who think Assange is being unduly vilified . . . it is not obvious what law he has violated. . . . I do not understand why so much ire is directed at Assange and so little at the
New York Times
.” (WikiLeaks has partnered with several news organizations, including the
New York Times
, in its document releases.)

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff of Secretary of State Colin Powell, joined a group of former government officials in a letter of support for Assange, writing, “WikiLeaks has teased the genie of transparency out of a very opaque bottle, and powerful forces in America, who thrive on secrecy, are trying desperately to stuff the genie back in.”

Likewise from a feminist group in Britain. Since the principal, public reason for Assange’s arrest relates to questions about potential sexual crimes in Sweden, Katrin Axelsson, from the group Women Against Rape, wrote in a letter to the British newspaper the
Guardian
: “Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. . . . Women don’t take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.”

Assange, in an op-ed piece published in
The Australian
newspaper shortlyafter his arrest, wrote there is a chorus in the U.S. State Department of ‘You’ll risk lives! National Security! You’ll endanger troops!’ by releasing information, and then they say there is nothing of importance in what WikiLeaks publishes. It can’t be both.”

In a statement released to Australian television, Assange said: “My convictions are unfaltering. I remain true to the ideals I have expressed. . . . If anything, this process has increased my determination that they are true and correct.”

Extradition proceedings are complex, lengthy affairs. WikiLeaks, for that matter, is not just Julian Assange, but a geographically distributed network of people and servers, and it has promised that the work of facilitating the release of documents from governments and corporations will continue. The U.S. Justice Department, if it pursues a case, will have to answer the question: If WikiLeaks is a criminal organization, what of its media partners, like the
New York Times
?