Andrew Sullivan reminds me today that I forgot to link yesterday to this post from John Cole. Given that the story ran in the Metro section of the Post, even some of you in DC might have missed this:
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.
The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.
FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.
The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.
Similar intelligence-gathering operations have been reported in New York, where a local police intelligence unit tried to infiltrate groups planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and in Colorado, where records surfaced showing that the FBI collected names and license plates of people protesting timber industry practices at a 2002 industry convention.
Here's John Cole's take:
I know my position on anti-war protestors a few years back- they were to be mocked, derided, ignored, out-protested, or countered with “facts” (the facts, in many cases, did not turn out to be on my side, but at least I was arguing from what I thought was an honest position). Nowhere did I even begin to imagine we would arrest people and have them interrogated by secret government units.
But the smelly dirty hippies were expecting it, and once again, this administration has proved them right. Read the whole story- the police just “found” records of this. How convenient.
It is amazing to me how often people dismiss the opinions of others out of hand simply because they don't want to believe that they are true. I mean, sure, I absolutely agree, wanna-be hippies are incredibly annoying; pseduo-anarchists are worse. And the "free Mumia" people that seem to show up at every protest? Don't even get me started about them. Their politics quite literally often make no sense.
But they have rights, and far too often in our history their rights simply have not been protected. In the 1950s and 1960s, for example, the FBI ran a program known as COINTELPRO designed to monitor and track the activities of groups such as the Socialist Party, SDS, the Communist Party, and even MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was, as the Church Committee later showed, a direct outgrowth of activities begun as far back as the 1910s to track, monitor, and suppress political dissent. So yes, the "hippies" may be crazy, and they may be paranoid, but they are also being followed. That's an indisputable fact of our collective history.
For the record, here's how the Church Committee summed up COINTELPRO:
Many of the techniques used would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.
While I'm glad Cole has come around, his conversion was only necessary because he didn't take the time necessary to learn about his own history first. Better late than never I suppose.
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