Dont Worry Be Happy...

[metroman]

Dont worry

America...we dont live in a soviet style police

state...

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/16/po...ign/16fbi.html

[nbnbtc]

can't view the article, can you

copy and paste it?

[metroman]

F.B.I. Goes Knocking for

Political Troublemakers


Carmel Zucker for The New York Times
F.B.I. agents and Denver police officers

visited Sarah Bardwell, right, and a housemate, Sarah Graves, and two neighbors, Christopher Riederer, second from

right, and Blake, who would not give his last name, at their homes to ask them about political and antiwar protest

activities.

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: August 16, 2004


WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - The

Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases

even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive

protests at the Republican National Convention in New York.

F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass

their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political

events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible

violence. They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused

solely on possible crimes, not on dissent, at major political events.

But some people contacted by the

F.B.I. say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans.



"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited

by six investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and

to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' ''

The unusual initiative comes after the Justice

Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by

the F.B.I in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations

to counterterrorism squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for help detailed tactics used by

demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment.

In an internal

complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected

speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a five-page internal analysis

obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.

The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion -

since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any

First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and

constitutional.

The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public monitoring, any possible

'chilling' effect caused by the bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed by the public

interest in maintaining safety and order during large-scale demonstrations."

Those same concerns are now

central to the vigorous efforts by the F.B.I. to identify possible disruptions by anarchists, violent demonstrators

and others at the Republican National Convention, which begins Aug. 30 and is expected to draw hundreds of thousands

of protesters.

In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic convention, F.B.I. counterterrorism

agents and other federal and local officers have sought to interview dozens of people in at least six states,

including past protesters and their friends and family members, about possible violence at the two conventions. In

addition, three young men in Missouri said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and subpoenaed to

testify before a federal grand jury last month, forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a

protest there that same day.

Interrogations have generally covered the same three questions, according to

some of those questioned and their lawyers: were demonstrators planning violence or other disruptions, did they know

anyone who was, and did they realize it was a crime to withhold such information.

A handful of protesters at

the Boston convention were arrested but there were no major disruptions. Concerns have risen for the Republican

convention, however, because of antiwar demonstrations directed at President Bush and because of New York City's

global prominence.

With the F.B.I. given more authority after the Sept. 11 attacks to monitor public events,

the tensions over the convention protests, coupled with the Justice Department's own legal analysis of such

monitoring, reflect the fine line between protecting national security in an age of terrorism and discouraging

political expression.

(Page 2 of 2)



F.B.I. officials, mindful of the bureau's abuses in the

1960's and 1970's monitoring political dissidents like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., say they are confident

their agents have not crossed that line in the lead-up to the conventions.

"The F.B.I. isn't in the

business of chilling anyone's First Amendment rights," said Joe Parris, a bureau spokesman in Washington. "But

criminal behavior isn't covered by the First Amendment. What we're concerned about are injuries to convention

participants, injuries to citizens, injuries to police and first responders."

F.B.I. officials would not say

how many people had been interviewed in recent weeks, how they were identified or what spurred the bureau's

interest.

They said the initiative was part of a broader, nationwide effort to follow any leads pointing to

possible violence or illegal disruptions in connection with the political conventions, presidential debates or the

November election, which come at a time of heightened concern about a possible terrorist attack.

F.B.I.

officials in Washington have urged field offices around the country in recent weeks to redouble their efforts to

interview sources and gather information that might help to detect criminal plots. The only lead to emerge publicly

resulted in a warning to authorities before the Boston convention that anarchists or other domestic groups might

bomb news vans there. It is not clear whether there was an actual plot.

The individuals visited in recent

weeks "are people that we identified that could reasonably be expected to have knowledge of such plans and plots if

they existed," Mr. Parris said.

"We vetted down a list and went out and knocked on doors and had a laundry

list of questions to ask about possible criminal behavior," he added. "No one was dragged from their homes and put

under bright lights. The interviewees were free to talk to us or close the door in our faces."

But civil

rights advocates argued that the visits amounted to harassment. They said they saw the interrogations as part of a

pattern of increasingly aggressive tactics by federal investigators in combating domestic terrorism. In an episode

in February in Iowa, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Drake University for records on the sponsor of a campus antiwar

forum. The demand was dropped after a community outcry.

Protest leaders and civil rights advocates who have

monitored the recent interrogations said they believed at least 40 or 50 people, and perhaps many more, had been

contacted by federal agents about demonstration plans and possible violence surrounding the conventions and other

political events.

"This kind of pressure has a real chilling effect on perfectly legitimate political

activity," said Mark Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, where two

groups of political activists in Denver and a third in Fort Collins were visited by the F.B.I. "People are going to

be afraid to go to a demonstration or even sign a petition if they justifiably believe that will result in your

having an F.B.I. file opened on you."

The issue is a particularly sensitive one in Denver, where the police

agreed last year to restrictions on local intelligence-gathering operations after it was disclosed that the police

had kept files on some 3,000 people and 200 groups involved in protests.

But the inquiries have stirred

opposition elsewhere as well.

In New York, federal agents recently questioned a man whose neighbor reported

he had made threatening comments against the president. He and a lawyer, Jeffrey Fogel, agreed to talk to the Secret

Service, denying the accusation and blaming it on a feud with the neighbor. But when agents started to question the

man about his political affiliations and whether he planned to attend convention protests, "that's when I said no,

no, no, we're not going to answer those kinds of questions," said Mr. Fogel, who is legal director for the Center

for Constitutional Rights in New York.

In the case of the three young men subpoenaed in Missouri, Denise

Lieberman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in St. Louis, which is representing them, said they

scrapped plans to attend both the Boston and the New York conventions after they were questioned about possible

violence.

The men are all in their early 20's, Ms. Lieberman said, but she would not identify

them.

All three have taken part in past protests over American foreign policy and in planning meetings for

convention demonstrations. She said two of them were arrested before on misdemeanor charges for what she described

as minor civil disobedience at protests.

Prosecutors have now informed the men that they are targets of a

domestic terrorism investigation, Ms. Lieberman said, but have not disclosed the basis for their suspicions. "They

won't tell me," she said.

Federal officials in St. Louis and Washington declined to comment on the case. Ms.

Lieberman insisted that the men "didn't have any plans to participate in the violence, but what's so disturbing

about all this is the pre-emptive nature - stopping them from participating in a protest before anything even

happened."

The three men "were really shaken and frightened by all this," she said, "and they got the

message loud and clear that if you make plans to go to a protest, you could be subject to arrest or a visit from the

F.B.I."


A front-page article yesterday about efforts by the F.B.I. to interview prospective political

demonstrators in advance of the Republican National Convention in New York misidentified the Justice Department

office that found the bureau's monitoring of previous protests to be constitutional. It is the Office of Legal

Counsel, not of Legal Policy. A caption with a picture of four Denver residents who were questioned in the effort

referred incorrectly to two of them in some copies. Sarah Graves, not Christopher Riederer, is the housemate of

Sarah Bardwell.

[nbnbtc]

Thanks for posting. I'd heard

about that on the radio before, scary stuff when your rights can be violated that easily.

[DrSmellThis]

Definitely scary. It threatens the heart of what America is about. The so called "free speech zones"

(as opposed to free speech country) are another example of eroding civil liberties in the US.

But check

this out:

The latest cross-country FBI initiative against citizens attempting to participate in their own

political process is not just three benign, friendly questions asked in a polite, professional manner!



The FBI intimidated and harassed some environmental activist-artist friends of mine right here in Portland three

weeks ago. The agents jiggled doorknobs, tried to get in to their locked gallery well after hours on a weekend,

(without warrant) and flashed their guns. Then they said some mysterious things, feined drawing a gun out of a

breast pocket; and laughed loudly in a sinister manner. They told a gallery neighbor, a non-political artist, that

they knew this was an envorinmental art gallery, and "knew who he was too". They asked him a lot of questions about

when the gallery director was around, and how to get in touch with him. They flashed their badges quickly from a

distance so that no one could actually read anything on them. They refused to leave a business card. The two large

men drove a huge, black SUV.

In other words, they were very obviously trying to intimidate as many folks as

they could. It worked on me. I recently skipped an independent film competition event at their gallery, to avoid

getting hassled. In the past I have helped judged the competition. But I thought there was a significant possibility

they would record my tags and open a file on me.

These guys are politically oriented artists, not

eco-terrorists. Their "suspicious activity" is having a different political opinion than the president! WTF?? The

FBI has done a number of other notorious things here recently in Oregon, such as jailing an innocent lawyer who

defends Muslims, without charges, as I've written elsewhere. We live in a different country than we did four years

ago.

It is so sad.

[koolking1]

folks, if the incumbent

wins, you aint seen nothing yet!!

[DrSmellThis]

From CNN.com today:

Last

month, Charleston City Council apologized to two protesters arrested for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts to the

president's July 4 rally. The pair were taken from the event in restraints after revealing T-shirts with Bush's

name crossed out on the front and the words "Love America, Hate Bush" on the back. Trespassing charges were

ultimately dismissed.

[DrSmellThis]

Here's an

interesting story about the lawyer I mentioned earlier that the FBI harassed. It's in the national news today due

to a huge lawsuit. I guess we'll be reading about it a lot.



http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/27/spai

n.bombing.lawyer.ap/index.html

[metroman]

Okay I guess I did hear that

story before. Good that he's got Gerry Spence defending him. These are scary times were living in. Last night I

watched "Power & Terror: Noam Chomsky in our Times" Basically Chomsky contends that these acts of terrorism are

really just an excuse for the governments of the so called free world, to clamp down on their populations.