Inspector General Criticism Doesn't Faze FBI Raids on Midwestern Anti-war Activists

[ensho]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/coleen-rowley/inspector-general-critici_b_738932.html


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Obviously the scathing review of post 9-11 FBI "terrorism investigations" targeting various peace and social justice groups completed by the Department of Justice Inspector General (IG) and just issued four days ago gave no pause to the FBI to reflect before continuing to do more of the same. Nor did accompanying media revelations about the FBI having improperly conducted surveillances of an antiwar rally in Pittsburgh; the Catholic Worker peace magazine; a Quaker activist, the Thomas Merton Center in Pittsburgh, of members of the environmental group Greenpeace and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and of a small student group of anti-war activists in Iowa City, Iowa who were targeted for 9 months in 2008.

National news stories revealed that in one of the investigations, FBI Director Robert Mueller inadvertently providing a fabricated justification for the surveillance of an antiwar rally. From The Boston Globe's article "Red-Baiting, Circa 2002 - 2006":

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But perhaps what is more important here than a "let's make work on a slow day" is the perverse career incentives that serve to pressure FBI counter-terrorism agents to produce "stats" (statistics). An agent gains "stats" for serving subpoenas, national security letters for records, executing search warrants, contacting confidential sources, etc., whether or not any relevant evidence is obtained via this "work" and whether or not it leads to prosecution or preventing a crime. It is a well known fact that nearly 1,000 people were rounded up and detained (mostly in New York City) immediately after 9-11. None of those detained were ever identified as "terrorists" but that's when these career enhancing "stats" began to be awarded for each detention, arrest, subpoena, search warrant, etc.

(cripe)

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Friday's raids in Minneapolis occurred after the prior Attorney General Guidelines were erased that used to require a level of factual justification before domestic groups could be spied on. Additionally, the Patriot Act and an earlier 1996 law broadly prohibiting "material support to terrorism" were allowed to stand even though these laws make speech advocating human rights a terrorist crime. The final problem is the law enforcement mindset first seen back in 2003 from a spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) who was forced to defend his agency's unjustified targeting of anti-war protesters without any factual evidence. CATIC Spokesman Van Winkle, apparently without thinking too hard, reasoned that evidence wasn't needed to issue warnings on war protesters. "You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, "You can almost argue that a protest against (the "war on terror") is a terrorist act."

(erased?)

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