Outlawing dissent

Spying on peace meetings, cracking down on protesters, keeping secret files on innocent people -- how Bush's war on terror has become a war on freedom.

By Michelle Goldberg

Feb. 11, 2004 | The undercover cop introduced herself to the activists from the Colorado Coalition Against the War in Iraq as Chris Hoffman, but her real name was Chris Hurley. Last March, she arrived at a nonviolence training session in Denver, along with another undercover officer, Brad Wanchisen, whom she introduced as her boyfriend. The session, held at the Escuela Tlatelolco, a Denver private school, was organized to prepare activists for a sit-in at the Buckley Air National Guard Base the next day, March 15. Hurley said she wanted to participate. She said she was willing to get arrested for the cause of peace. In fact, she did get arrested. She was just never charged. The activists she protested with wouldn't find out why for months.

Chris Hurley was just one of many cops all over the country who went undercover to spy on antiwar protesters last year. Nonviolent antiwar groups in Fresno, Calif., Grand Rapids, Mich., and Albuquerque, N.M., have all been infiltrated or surveilled by undercover police officers. Shortly after the Buckley protest, the Boulder group was infiltrated a second time, by another pair of police posing as an activist couple.

Meanwhile, protesters arrested at antiwar demonstrations in New York last spring were extensively questioned about their political associations, and their answers were entered into databases. And last week, a federal prosecutor in Des Moines, Iowa, obtained a subpoena demanding that Drake University turn over records from an antiwar conference called "Stop the Occupation! Bring the Iowa Guard Home!" that the school's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a civil libertarian legal group, hosted on Nov. 15 of last year, the day before a protest at the Iowa National Guard headquarters. Among the information the government sought was the names of the leaders of the Drake University Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, its records dating back to January of 2002, and the names of everyone who attended the "Stop the Occupation!" conference. Four antiwar activists also received subpoenas in the investigation.

On Tuesday, after a national outcry, the U.S. Attorney's Office canceled the subpoenas. Still, says Bruce Nestor, a former president of the National Lawyers Guild who is serving as the Drake chapter's attorney, "We're concerned that some type of investigation is ongoing."

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 -- including the Aurora, Colo., Police Department, where Hurley works -- 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.

A Polk County deputy sheriff assigned to a Joint Terrorism Task Force served the subpoenas in Iowa. According to Nestor, the deputy sheriff even handed out business cards that identified him as part of the JTTF. On Monday, though, after what Nestor describes as a "tremendous public reaction" following news reports of the JTTF's involvement, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Des Moines issued a written statement denying that the investigation was being conducted by the task force.

The U.S. Attorney's Office confirms that the investigation is a collaboration between the FBI, the Polk County Sheriff's Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office -- all of whom, Nestor notes, serve on the JTTF. It focuses on a case of misdemeanor trespassing on government property that took place on Nov. 16, near the antiwar protest. According to Nestor, the case involves someone who "walked up to a closed gate" outside the National Guard's armory, "had a conversation with the guards and got charged with trespassing." The police and FBI are now investigating whether people at the antiwar conference entered into some kind of conspiracy to break the law -- in other words, whether they planned acts of civil disobedience.

"They appear to be taking the stance that if any individual, as part of or in relation to a protest, commits an act that might be a violation of federal law, that they can subpoena and investigate any records of any meeting that person may have gone to in the days or even months proceeding," says Nestor.

Avery suggests that such investigations will have a chilling effect on the planning for future protests. "The risk is that if there's some kind of demonstration or protest activity that involves trespassing, [the JTTF] is saying they can ask people what political meetings have you been to lately, who was there, what did you talk about," says Avery. "People are allowed to meet and talk and debate political issues without being spied on by the government." At least, they used to be.

Whether or not a Joint Terrorism Task Force was behind the Iowa investigation, JTTFs have already been implicated in political spying. In a three-ring binder from the Denver Police Department Intelligence Unit obtained by the Colorado ACLU, a section labeled "Colorado and Local Links: JTTF Active Case List" contained printouts made in April 2002 from the Web sites of the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, American Friends Service Committee, Denver Justice and Peace Committee and the Rocky Mountain Independent Media Center. One of the printouts, a copy of which is available on the ACLU's Web site, is the American Friends Service Committee's calendar of upcoming antiwar events.

Last November, the New York Times revealed a leaked FBI memo asking local police to report protest activity to their local Joint Terrorism Task Force. The bulletin, sent to law enforcement agencies on Oct. 15, 2003, warned about antiwar protests planned for Oct. 25, saying, "While the FBI possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests, the possibility exists that elements of the activist community may attempt to engage in violent, destructive, or dangerous acts."

The bulletin went on to list common protest methods including marches and sit-ins, as well as "aggressive tactics" used by "extremist elements," including vandalism, trespassing, physical harassment, formation of human chains and the use of weapons.

"Even the more peaceful techniques can create a climate of disorder, block access to a site, draw large numbers of police officers to a specific location in order to weaken security at other locations, obstruct traffic, and possibly intimidate people from attending the events being protested," it warned.

It ended by saying, "Law enforcement agencies should be alert to these possible indications of protest activity and report any potentially illegal acts to the nearest FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force."

The Colorado activists who attended nonviolence training with Chris Hurley remember her as shy and timid. She didn't arouse suspicion at either the training session, where people practiced staying calm even when confronted by aggressive police, or the next day, when she showed up at the demonstration.

On March 15, around 300 people protested near the Buckley base, but only 18 (not including Hurley) engaged in civil disobedience by sitting in the road and blocking the base's entrance. The action was no secret -- the Colorado Coalition Against the War had informed police of what it intended to do in advance. "We always have a police liaison when we have a civil disobedience," says participant Terry Leichner, a 54-year-old psychiatric social worker and veteran activist. "We always work with police so there's no violence."

The Aurora Police Department doesn't deny that the activists told them exactly what they planned to do. Indeed, they use that fact as a rationale for infiltrating the group. "Prior to the actual protest, this group came to the police department and told us they were going to conduct criminal acts in our city," says Kathleen Walsh, the Aurora Police Department's public information officer. "We have a responsibility to the citizens of Aurora to investigate." Walsh insists that the activists' willingness to tell the police their plans didn't mitigate the need to spy on the group. "Can you guarantee me that people don't lie to police?" she said. Walsh asked that further questions -- including those about Hurley's connection to counterterrorism investigations -- be submitted in writing. She has yet to answer them.

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