Early in the morning of Sept. 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 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, Minn., 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.”
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.
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.
In the Twin Cities, the state has been forced to back off eight 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 law, as terrorists. The prosecution has since dropped all terrorism charges (four 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. This is about basic freedoms at the core of our democracy, the abuse of power and the erosion of civil liberties.
