Pacific Views

The feds step up the war on dissent.

In the last few days, we've done our best to keep you posted on the US Justice Department's recent activities in Iowa, where they attempted to use a federal investigation to intimidate anti-Iraq war activists, Drake University, and the National Lawyers Guild. It was pretty obvious to us that these events were not a stand-alone affair — that they fit into a larger federal attempt to squelch dissent against Washington's foreign and domestic policies.

As if on cue, Salon comes along with a detailed look at the new war on dissent. In the first half of a two-part article, Michelle Goldberg lays out the dramatic increase in surveillance of protesters and activists in the US. If you're not a Salon subscriber, we highly recommend sitting through the mandatory ad view so you can read Walsh's article.

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 ... 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: The second part of the article is here.

Eating crow: In the original version of this post, we for some reason attributed these articles to Joan Walsh. We have no idea why. The attribution has been corrected. [12 Feb]