Horn of Africa nation has denied hosting secret prison facilities for US, but classified document may undermine claim

The legal case of a former CIA detainee suing the government of Djibouti for hosting the facility where he says he was detained could be helped by the contents of a still-classified Senate report. Djibouti, a key U.S. ally, has denied for years that its territory has been used to keep suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in secret captivity. But the Senate investigation into the agency’s “detention and interrogation program” concluded that several people had been secretly detained in the tiny Horn of Africa state, two U.S. officials who read an early draft of the report told Al Jazeera.

Official confirmation of Djibouti’s role in hosting “black sites” used in the CIA’s rendition program would be welcomed by Mohammad al-Asad, a Yemeni arrested at his home in Tanzania on Dec. 27, 2003, blindfolded and flown to a location he insists was Djibouti. Two U.S. officials who read an early draft of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation — and who requested anonymity because the report remains classified — were unaware of whether al-Asad’s case was specifically cited in the document. But they confirmed that the report found that several detainees had been held in Djibouti, and that at least two of them had been wrongfully detained.

Djibouti’s Ambassador to the U.S., Roble Olhaye, told Al Jazeera his country was not a “knowing participant” in the CIA’s rendition program and he rejected claims by al-Asad that he was temporarily imprisoned there.

However, Olhaye said, “If something was done in the context of the American base there how would we know?” But, he said, Djibouti’s agreement with the U.S. precluded the base from being used to house prisoners.

Al-Asad said that after his arrival in the country he alleges was Djibouti, he was held in a prison cell and tortured. He said he was interrogated by an American woman about his connections to the now-defunct Saudi charity Al-Haramain. The group, later accused by the U.S. Treasury of supporting terrorism, had in 1994 rented apartment space from al-Asad in a building he owned in Tanzania.

Asad
Yemeni citizen Mohammad al-Asad
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, al-Asad, now 54 years old, said he was detained for about two weeks in Djibouti and then rendered to Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured at various points over the course of more than a year at several CIA black site prisons.

Before he was released in 2005 and sent back to Yemen, he said, he received a visitor from Washington.

“What I remember through the interpreter was that he said, ‘I am the head of the prison, and you will be the first one at the top of the list of the people we are going to release because we have nothing on you,’” al-Asad told Al Jazeera. “The interpreter said that he was the director of all the prisons.”

Al-Asad was never charged with terrorism or related crimes, but he pleaded guilty in Yemen to making false statements and using forged documents to obtain his Tanzanian travel papers.

Al-Asad, who still lives in Yemen, has been trying since his release to hold Djibouti officials accountable for his detention. In 2009, he sought redress from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, a quasi-judicial body that has jurisdiction over Djibouti and other countries that approved the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In the coming days, that commission, which is based in Gambia, is expected to decide whether it will take up al-Asad’s case.

Olhaye called al-Asad a “liar”, adding, “Everything about his case relies on hearsay and conjecture. There were no flights that came to Djibouti on that day he said he was brought to my country from Tanzania. That was checked by our lawyers.”

But John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, who has spent more than a decade investigating the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program testified before the commission last year and said “the fact that the flight records of CIA aircraft that are public do not include a flight that matches Mr. al-Asad’s trajectory is not indicative of anything in and of itself.”

Sifton said the CIA could “easily circumvent data collection” and “aircraft used by the CIA could easily be rendered untraceable while flying in and around Djibouti.”

Al-Asad has based his legal case on flight records, collected by Human Rights Watch and the U.K.-based human rights charity Reprieve, demonstrating CIA-linked aircraft flying in and out of Djibouti (PDF).

His lawyers have also obtained documents from Tanzanian immigration officials stating that al-Asad was sent to Djibouti on a Tanzanair aircraft after his 2003 arrest.

“This is one of the most direct pieces of evidence we have showing that Djibouti is where our client was held before being handed to the rendition team on the tarmac,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, al-Asad’s attorney and a professor at New York University’s Global Justice Clinic.

Al-Asad, who still lives in Yemen, has been trying since his release to hold Djibouti officials accountable for his detention.
If the case proceeds, it will mark the first such investigation into the workings of the rendition program in Africa, and could open the door to additional legal challenges by former “war on terror” captives.

A handful of similar cases are already pending before the European Court of Human Rights. However, U.S. courts — citing state secrecy — have rejected attempts by detainees to hold their former captors accountable.

Al Jazeera’s sources noted that in addition to 6 million pages of CIA records, Senate committee investigators obtained some information about the wrongful detentions from people they characterized as “whistleblowers.” The U.S. officials declined to elaborate.

Djibouti, a former French colony, has been one of the key U.S. counterterrorism partners for more than a decade, hosting the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa at Camp Lemonnier. The U.S. Air Force also reportedly uses Djibouti as a base for a fleet of drones to strike at Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabab suspects in Yemen and Somalia.

According to human rights researchers, after 9/11 dozens of suspects captured by the U.S. were secretly detained, interrogated and tortured in Djibouti.

The Obama administration, as recently as August 2012, reportedly continued to render suspects to Djibouti for short-term detention. Although President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning the CIA’s use of black-site prisons, the order states that it does “not apply to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

Confirmation by the Senate Intelligence Committee of Djibouti’s role in the rendition program would be a “critical” development, said Satterthwaite.

“The cooperation of countries all over the world — including Djibouti — was central to the operation of the U.S. rendition, secret detention, and torture program,” Satterthwaite said. “While the role of European partners such as Poland and Romania has been the subject of much reporting and investigation, the assistance of countries such as Djibouti has yet to be scrutinized. Further, as the home of a fleet of U.S. drones, Djibouti is an enormously important partner but has not received adequate scrutiny for its role in facilitating U.S. abuses.”

The cooperation of countries all over the world — including Djibouti — was central to the operation of the U.S. rendition, secret detention, and torture program.
Margaret Satterthwaite
Al-Asad’s attorney
Jonathan Horowitz, who works on national security and legal issues at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said al-Asad’s case provides the African human rights commission with an opportunity “to state that African governments can’t collude with other governments to abuse human rights, and they can’t use the fight against terrorism to justify violating people’s rights.”

Last year, Open Society issued a report, Globalizing Torture, which found that 54 countries, including Djibouti, were complicit in the extraordinary rendition of 136 CIA prisoners. The nonpartisan Constitution Project also produced a Detainee Task Force report identifying Djibouti as a CIA rendition partner and focused heavily on al-Asad’s case to support its conclusions.

“One of the things that is really important to recognize here is that the CIA torture and rendition program couldn’t have gone global without the assistance from other countries,” Horowitz said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to work on strengthening its counterterrorism relationship with Djibouti. Next week, Djibouti’s president, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, will travel to the U.S. to meet with President Obama at the White House. Ambassador Olhaye does not believe the Senate’s report, if it is ever released, will identify his country as a rendition partner.

“I don’t believe the Senate report will say anything about my government,” he said. “Maybe about the American base. Our prisons have not been participating in that kind of thing.” Olhaye said neither he nor anyone from his country has had any discussions with U.S. officials about the Senate’s report.

May 2, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold

Find this story at 2 May 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

Senate investigators want public reckoning of torture tactics under Bush admin., despite CIA attempts to obstruct

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted 11-3 Thursday to declassify parts of a secret report on Bush-era interrogations of terrorism suspects.
“The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking. The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement. “This is not what Americans do.”
Now that the 15-member panel votes has approved the declassification of a 400-page summary and the key findings of its report, the onus is on the Central Intelligence Agency and a reluctant White House to speed the release of one of the most definitive accounts about the government’s actions after the 9/11 attacks.

The CIA will now start scanning the report’s contents for any passages that compromise national security.

That has led to fears that the CIA, already accused of illegally monitoring the Senate’s investigation and deleting files, could sanitize key elements of what Senate investigators aim to be the fullest public reckoning of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on Al-Qaeda suspects in CIA-run prisons abroad. Feinstein has urged the White House to get involved.
Thumbnail image for Senate CIA torture report could throw Gitmo hearings into chaos
Senate CIA torture report could throw Gitmo hearings into chaos
Release of study on detention program might further disrupt military commissions for terrorist suspects at Guantánamo

Congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the document say it is highly critical of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, and concludes among other things that such practices provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The CIA disputes many of the conclusions in the report.

“It’s important to tell the world, ‘Yes, we made a mistake and we’re not going to do it again,'” said Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who planned to vote for the summary’s release.

Human rights groups and advocates too believe the release of the report crucial to ensuring that similar tactics are never adopted again and that the debate over torture is settled once and for all.
“This information has been kept secret from the American people and from policymakers for years and keeping it secret just perpetuates the false impression that torture is effective and works,” said Laura Pitter, senior national security researcher at Human Rights Watch. “In fact, is is immoral, illegal and ineffective and never should be employed, and was a terrible mistake that the U.S. needs to reckon with on so m any levels.”

But some in the intelligence community said the Senate report, which was written by the committee’s Democratic staff, was missing a key element: the voices of key CIA officials.

Those missing include former Bush administration officials involved in authorizing the use of waterboarding and other harsh questioning methods, or managing their use in secret “black site” prisons overseas.

“Neither I or anyone else at the agency who had knowledge was interviewed,” said Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s chief clandestine officer in the mid-2000s, who had operational oversight over the detention and interrogation program. “They don’t want to hear anyone else’s narrative,” he said of the Senate investigation. “It’s an attempt to rewrite history.”

Rodriguez himself is a key figure in the Senate report, not least for his order in 2005 to destroy 92 videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects and other harsh techniques.

Rodriguez said the Senate’s report would be a “travesty” without input from him and officials such as former CIA directors Michael Hayden and Porter Goss. Congressional aides said the CIA’s own field reports, internal correspondence, cables and other documents described day-to-day handling of interrogations and the decision-making and actions of Rodriguez and others.

Senate investigators have griped for years about what they contend is the CIA’s failure to be held accountable for the harsh methods used during the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror.

Bad blood between Senate aides and the CIA ruptured into the open last month when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the agency of improperly monitoring the computer use of Senate staffers and deleting files, undermining the Constitution’s separation of powers. The CIA alleges the Senate panel illegally accessed certain documents. The Justice Department is reviewing criminal complaints against each side.

Feinstein said this week she had “no idea” how long a declassification process would take, but expressed hope that it could be resolved in a matter of weeks.

Amid all the distrust, Senate Democrats are pressing for President Barack Obama to step into the fray.

Obama, who outlawed waterboarding after taking office, sought closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and released long-secret, Bush-era legal documents on harsh interrogations. He has publicly supported declassification of at least the findings of the Senate committee’s report “so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.”

Still, the president has so far declined to weigh in publicly on Congress’ dispute with the CIA.

April 3, 2014 12:19PM ET Updated 3:26PM ET
Al Jazeera and The Associated Press

Find this story at 3 April 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

Human rights group representing Gaddafi opponent rendered to Libya via Diego Garcia says Britain must ‘come clean’ over role
Jamie Doward

The government is under mounting pressure to “come clean” about the role of an overseas UK territory leased to the US and allegedly used as a secret “black site” detention centre.

An opponent of Colonel Gaddafi who was rendered in a joint MI6-CIA operation, and a leading human rights group representing him, have demanded that the foreign secretary, William Hague, clarify the UK’s position on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased to the US until 2016. The Senate’s intelligence security committee is preparing to declassify a file that reportedly confirms that the CIA detained “high-value suspects on Diego Garcia” and that “the black site arrangement on the atoll was made with the ‘full cooperation’ of the British government”.

The revelations are hugely troubling for the government and threaten to raise awkward questions about the UK’s relationship with the US, its closest security ally. They strengthen claims made by Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a rebel military commander and opponent of Gaddafi, who was arrested in Malaysia and rendered with his pregnant wife to Libya, allegedly via Diego Garcia, in a joint US-UK intelligence operation.

Papers discovered in Tripoli in 2011 show that the British security services were instrumental in helping Libya to seize Belhaj, who says he was tortured during his rendition and during his subsequent four-and-a-half-year incarceration by the Gaddafi regime. A flight plan confirmed the CIA had intended to render him via Diego Garcia.

Belhaj, who unsuccessfully tried to bring a case against former foreign secretary Jack Straw, former senior MI6 official Sir Mark Allen, the security services and the Foreign Office, told the Observer that the Senate report raised new questions about the role played by the British overseas territory in facilitating the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme.

“The first time I heard that I had gone through a place called Diego Garcia was when I was told by the head of the Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, during my first interrogation session in a prison outside Tripoli,” Belhaj said.

“He was running the interrogation and was angry that it had taken a long time for me to arrive in Libya. I told him that the plane had stopped somewhere on the way from Bangkok. He told me that he knew, and that the plane had landed on an island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia.

“Perhaps he was showing off, or perhaps he had been given wrong information, I don’t know. I just know that the flight stopped somewhere. I was chained up in a very painful position and had no means to know where I was, or even whether my pregnant wife – who had been kidnapped at the same time – was with me.”

Although the British government admitted in 2008 that two rendition flights carrying detainees had stopped for refuelling on Diego Garcia in 2002, it has consistently denied that detainees were held on it.

“Each year the US government reaffirms to us during our official political-military discussions that all previous assurances since 2008 on this subject remain correct,” Mark Simmonds, the minister for overseas territories, wrote in a letter last month to Richard Ottaway, the chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs select committee. “Namely that, apart from two instances in Diego Garcia during 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, UK overseas territories or crown dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Polly Rossdale, deputy director at human rights group Reprieve, which has acted for Belhaj, said: “The government must come clean about the UK’s role in this dirty affair.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office declined to add any comment to what ministers had already told parliament.

The Observer, Sunday 13 April 2014

Find this story at 13 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

When U.S. Special Operations forces raided several houses in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in March 2006, two Army Rangers were killed when gunfire erupted on the ground floor of one home. A third member of the team was knocked unconscious and shredded by ball bearings when a teenage insurgent detonated a suicide vest.

In a review of the nighttime strike for a relative of one of the dead Rangers, military officials sketched out the sequence of events using small dots to chart the soldiers’ movements. Who, the relative asked, was this man — the one represented by a blue dot and nearly killed by the suicide bomber?

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After some hesi­ta­tion, the military briefers answered with three letters: FBI.

The FBI’s transformation from a crime-fighting agency to a counterterrorism organization in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has been well documented. Less widely known has been the bureau’s role in secret operations against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Iraq and Afghanistan, among other locations around the world.

With the war in Afghanistan ending, FBI officials have become more willing to discuss a little-known alliance between the bureau and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that allowed agents to participate in hundreds of raids in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The relationship benefited both sides. JSOC used the FBI’s expertise in exploiting digital media and other materials to locate insurgents and detect plots, including any against the United States. The bureau’s agents, in turn, could preserve evidence and maintain a chain of custody should any suspect be transferred to the United States for trial.

The FBI’s presence on the far edge of military operations was not universally embraced, according to current and former officials familiar with the bureau’s role. As agents found themselves in firefights, some in the bureau expressed uneasiness about a domestic law enforcement agency stationing its personnel on battlefields.

The wounded agent in Iraq was Jay Tabb, a longtime member of the bureau’s Hostage and Rescue Team (HRT) who was embedded with the Rangers when they descended on Ramadi in Black Hawks and Chinooks. Tabb, who now leads the HRT, also had been wounded just months earlier in another high-risk operation.

James Davis, the FBI’s legal attache in Baghdad in 2007 and 2008, said people “questioned whether this was our mission. The concern was somebody was going to get killed.”

Davis said FBI agents were regularly involved in shootings — sometimes fighting side by side with the military to hold off insurgent assaults.

“It wasn’t weekly but it wouldn’t be uncommon to see one a month,” he said. “It’s amazing that never happened, that we never lost anybody.”

Others considered it a natural evolution for the FBI — and one consistent with its mission.

“There were definitely some voices that felt we shouldn’t be doing this — period,” said former FBI deputy director Sean Joyce, one of a host of current and former officials who are reflecting on the shift as U.S. forces wind down their combat mission in Afghanistan. “That wasn’t the director’s or my feeling on it. We thought prevention begins outside of the U.S.”

‘Not commandos’

In 1972, Palestinian terrorists killed 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, exposing the woeful inadequacy of the German police when faced with committed hostage-takers. The attack jolted other countries into examining their counterterrorism capabilities. The FBI realized its response would have been little better than that of the Germans.

It took more than a decade for the United States to stand up an elite anti-terrorism unit. The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team was created in 1983, just before the Los Angeles Olympics.

At Fort Bragg, N.C., home to the Army’s Special Operations Command, Delta Force operators trained the agents, teaching them how to breach buildings and engage in close-quarter fighting, said Danny Coulson, who commanded the first HRT.

The team’s mission was largely domestic, although it did participate in select operations to arrest fugitives overseas, known in FBI slang as a “habeas grab.” In 1987, for instance, along with the CIA, agents lured a man suspected in an airline hijacking to a yacht off the coast of Lebanon and arrested him.

In 1989, a large HRT flew to St. Croix, Virgin Islands, to reestablish order after Hurricane Hugo. That same year, at the military’s request, it briefly deployed to Panama before the U.S. invasion.

The bureau continued to deepen its ties with the military, training with the Navy SEALs at the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, based in Dam Neck, Va., and agents completed the diving phase of SEAL training in Coronado, Calif.

Sometimes lines blurred between the HRT and the military. During the 1993 botched assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., three Delta Force operators were on hand to advise. Waco, along with a fiasco the prior year at a white separatist compound at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, put the FBI on the defensive.

“The members of HRT are not commandos,” then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh told lawmakers in 1995. “They are special agents of the FBI. Their goal has always been to save lives.”

After Sept. 11, the bureau took on a more aggressive posture.

In early 2003, two senior FBI counterterrorism officials traveled to Afghanistan to meet with the Joint Special Operations Command’s deputy commander at Bagram air base. The commander wanted agents with experience hunting fugitives and HRT training so they could easily integrate with JSOC forces.

“What JSOC realized was their networks were similar to the way the FBI went after organized crime,” said James Yacone, an assistant FBI director who joined the HRT in 1997 and later commanded it.

The pace of activity in Afghanistan was slow at first. An FBI official said there was less than a handful of HRT deployments to Afghanistan in those early months; the units primarily worked with the SEALs as they hunted top al-Qaeda targets.

“There was a lot of sitting around,” the official said.

The tempo quickened with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. At first, the HRT’s mission was mainly to protect other FBI agents when they left the Green Zone, former FBI officials said.

Then-Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal gradually pushed the agency to help the military collect evidence and conduct interviews during raids.

“As our effort expanded and . . . became faster and more complex, we felt the FBI’s expertise in both sensitive site exploitation and interrogations would be helpful — and they were,” a former U.S. military official said.

In 2005, all of the HRT members in Iraq began to work under JSOC. At one point, up to 12 agents were operating in the country, nearly a tenth of the unit’s shooters.

The FBI’s role raised thorny questions about the bureau’s rules of engagement and whether its deadly-force policy should be modified for agents in war zones.

“There was hand-wringing,” Yacone said. “These were absolutely appropriate legal questions to be asked and answered.”

Ultimately, the FBI decided that no change was necessary. Team members “were not there to be door kickers. They didn’t need to be in the stack,” Yacone said.

But the FBI’s alliance with JSOC continued to deepen. HRT members didn’t have to get approval to go on raids, and FBI agents saw combat night after night in the hunt for targets.

In 2008, with the FBI involved in frequent firefights, the bureau began taking a harder look at these engagements, seeking input from the military to make sure, in police terms, that each time an agent fired it was a “good shoot,” former FBI officials said.

‘Mission had changed’

Members of the FBI’s HRT unit left Iraq as the United States pulled out its forces. The bureau also began to reconsider its involvement in Afghanistan after nearly a dozen firefights involving agents embedded with the military and the wounding of an agent in Logar province in June 2010.

JSOC had shifted priorities, Joyce said, targeting Taliban and other local insurgents who were not necessarily plotting against the United States. Moreover, the number of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan had plummeted to fewer than 100, and many of its operatives were across the border, in Pakistan, where the military could not operate.

The FBI drew down in 2010 despite pleas from JSOC to stay.

“Our focus was al-Qaeda and threats to the homeland,” Joyce said. “The mission had changed.”

FBI-JSOC operations continue in other parts of the world. When Navy SEALs raided a yacht in the Gulf of Aden that Somali pirates had hijacked in 2011, an HRT agent followed behind them. After a brief shootout, the SEALs managed to take control of the yacht.

Two years later, in October 2013, an FBI agent with the HRT was with the SEALs when they stormed a beachfront compound in Somalia in pursuit of a suspect in the Nairobi mall attack that had killed dozens.

That same weekend, U.S. commandos sneaked into Tripoli, Libya, and apprehended a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist named Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai as he returned home in his car after morning prayers. He was whisked to a Navy ship in the Mediterranean and eventually to New York City for prosecution in federal court.

Word quickly leaked that Delta Force had conducted the operation. But the six Delta operators had help. Two FBI agents were part of the team that morning on the streets of Tripoli.

By Adam Goldman and Julie Tate, Published: April 10 E-mail the writers

Find this story at 10 April 2014

© 1996-2014 The Washington Post

The hyper-selective retelling of events mirrors the popular narrative of Occupy Wall Street – and how one woman may serve seven years while the NYPD goes free

The violence against Occupy protestors was widespread and well-photographed. So why is one non-violent protestor now convicted of police brutality? Photograph: Ramin Talaie / EPA
The verdict in the biggest Occupy related criminal case in New York City, that of Cecily McMillan, came down Monday afternoon. As disturbing as it is that she was found guilty of felony assault against Officer Grantley Bovell, the circumstances of her trial reflect an even more disturbing reality – that of normalized police violence, disproportionately punitive sentences (McMillan faces seven years in prison), and a criminal penal system based on anything but justice. While this is nothing new for the over-policed communities of New York City, what happened to McMillan reveals just how powerful and unrestrained a massive police force can be in fighting back against the very people with whom it is charged to protect.

McMillan was one of roughly 70 protesters arrested on March 17, 2012. She and hundreds of other activists, along with journalists like me, had gathered in Zuccotti Park to mark the six-month anniversary of the start of Occupy Wall Street. It was four months after the New York Police Department had evicted the Occupy encampment from the park in a mass of violent arrests.

When the police moved in to the park that night, in formation and with batons, to arrest a massive number of nonviolent protesters, the chaos was terrifying. Bovell claimed that McMillan elbowed him in the face as he attempted to arrest her, and McMillan and her defense team claim that Bovell grabbed her right breast from behind, causing her to instinctively react.

But the jury didn’t hear anything about the police violence that took place in Zuccotti Park that night. They didn’t hear about what happened there on November 15, 2011, when the park was first cleared. The violence experienced by Occupy protesters throughout its entirety was excluded from the courtroom. The narrative that the jury did hear was tightly controlled by what the judge allowed – and Judge Ronald Zweibel consistently ruled that any larger context of what was happening around McMillan at the time of the arrest (let alone Bovell’s own history of violence) was irrelevant to the scope of the trial.

MORE ON THE CECILY MCMILLAN VERDICT:

• Cecily McMillan and this homeless woman faced the same NYPD charge. Guess which one got a trial

• Juror speaks: ‘Most just wanted her to do probation, maybe some community service. But now what I’m hearing is seven years in jail? That’s ludicrous.

In the trial, physical evidence was considered suspect but the testimony of the police was cast as infallible. Despite photographs of her bruised body, including her right breast, the prosecution cast doubt upon McMillan’s allegations of being injured by the police – all while Officer Bovell repeatedly identified the wrong eye when testifying as to how McMillan injured him. And not only was Officer Bovell’s documented history of violent behavior deemed irrelevant by the judge, but so were the allegations of his violent behavior that very same night.

Maybe we should ask #CecilyMcMillan about her #myNYPD moment. http://t.co/zle2kOHvDf pic.twitter.com/lDVFsWhOZN

— Ⓐ ‏#GrumpyCuntSec Ⓐ (@brazenqueer) April 22, 2014
To the jury, the hundreds of police batons, helmets, fists, and flex cuffs out on March 17 were invisible – rendering McMillan’s elbow the most powerful weapon on display in Zuccotti that night, at least insofar as the jury was concerned.

That hyper-selective retelling of events to the jury mirrored the broader popular narrative of OWS. The breathtaking violence displayed by the NYPD throughout Occupy Wall Street has not only been normalized, but entirely justified – so much so that it doesn’t even bear mentioning.

After the police cleared the park that night, many of the remaining protesters went on a spontaneous march, during which a group of officers slammed a street medic’s head into a glass door so hard the glass splintered. It is the only instance of which I know throughout New York City’s Occupy movement where a window was broken.

Still, it is the protesters who are remembered as destructive and chaotic. It is Cecily McMillan who went on trial for assault but not Bovell or any of his colleagues – despite the thousands of photographs and videos providing irrefutable evidence that protesters, journalists and legal observers alike were shoved, punched, kicked, tackled, and beaten over the head. That mindset was on display during the jury selection process at McMillan’s trial, when juror after juror had to be dismissed because of outright bias against the Occupy movement and any of its participants.

It’s impossible to understand the whole story by just looking at it one picture, even if it’s McMillan’s of her injuries. But that is exactly what the jury in McMillan’s case was asked to do. They were presented a close up of Cecily McMillan’s elbow, but not of Bovell, and asked to determine who was violent. The prosecutors and the judge prohibited them from zooming out.

This is, of course, how police brutality is presented to the public every day, if it is presented it at all: an angry cop here, a controversial protester here, a police commissioner who says the violence of the NYPD is “old news”. It’s why #myNYPD shocked enough people to make the papers – because it wasn’t one bruised or broken civilian body or one cop with a documented history of violence. Instead, it was one after another after another, a collage that presented a more comprehensive picture – one of exceptionally unexceptional violence that most of America has already accepted.

Molly Knefel
theguardian.com, Monday 5 May 2014 20.17 BST

Find this story at 5 May 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

• Cecily McMillan faces up to seven years in prison
• Occupy protesters shouting ‘shame’ led out of courtroom

An Occupy Wall Street activist is facing up to seven years in prison after being convicted by a jury in Manhattan of assaulting a New York police officer as he led her out of a protest.

Cecily McMillan was on Monday afternoon found guilty of deliberately elbowing Officer Grantley Bovell in the face in March 2012. After a trial lasting more than four weeks, the jury of eight women and four men reached their verdict in about three hours.

Judge Ronald Zweibel ordered that McMillan, 25, a graduate student at the New School, be detained. He rejected a request from her lawyers for bail.

“I see absolutely no reason why a remand would be appropriate here,” Martin Stolar, her lead attorney, told the judge. “She is not likely to be somebody to cut and run.” Zweibel replied: “Remanded pending sentencing.”

Supporters of McMillan in the courtroom reacted furiously, shouting “shame” and screaming at the more than 30 police officers lining room 1116 at Manhattan criminal court. After half a dozen refused to leave the court, two were carried out by police officers.

Wearing a white dress and a beige jacket, McMillan sat still and silent as the verdict was read on her charge of second-degree assault, a felony. McMillan was placed in handcuffs by police and led out of the courtroom as supporters went on shouting. “Corruption is the fuel, the court is the tool,” one chanted. Sentencing was scheduled for 19 May. Her lawyers said she was being taken to the women’s facility at the Riker’s Island jail.

Speaking outside, Stolar described the verdict as “a terrible mistake” and criticised Zweibel’s decision to detain McMillan, a first-time convict, before sentencing. “She never missed a court appearance, she has always been here, and is fully cognisant of what the consequences of a guilty verdict are,” he said.

Claiming that Zweibel had made “numerous errors” during the trial, Stolar said: “Those will be the subject of an appeal. We have optimistic thoughts about what an appeal might do, such as send it back for a new trial.”

McMillan was found guilty of intentionally assaulting Bovell in order to “prevent him from performing his lawful duty”. Her conviction is the most serious of the dozens against members of the protest movement, which sprang up in the autumn of 2011. Hers is believed to be the last of more than 2,600 prosecutions brought against members of the movement, most of which were dismissed or dropped.

Prosecutors accused McMillan of attacking Bovell, 35, as he walked her out of Zuccotti Park, in lower Manhattan, where activists had gathered on the night of 17 March 2012 to mark six months of the Occupy movement. Bovell had found her screaming at a female officer, who had asked her to leave the park so that it could be cleaned, prosecutors said.

Assistant district attorney Erin Choi told the court last month that Bovell was walking behind McMillan with his hand on her shoulder. McMillan asked people around her “Are you filming this?”, said Choi, and then “crouched down, then bent her knees, and then aimed her elbow at the officer and then jumped up to strike”.

“Officer Bovell was completely horrified,” said Choi. “This was the last thing he was expecting to happen that day.” Photographs showed that Bovell suffered a black eye. He said that he went on to experience headaches and sensitivity to light.

Prosecutors showed the jury grainy video clips of the incident, downloaded from YouTube, which they said proved McMillan deliberately struck Bovell before attempting to run away. Less than two hours into their deliberations, the jury asked if they could re-watch the video footage. They were given a laptop on which to view it in the jury room.

Stolar, who argued in court that the clips were not clear enough to prove anything, told the Guardian that he thought they were responsible for the conviction. “I think that is the only piece of evidence that a jury could hang its hat on,” he said. “On a quick glance without analysis, it looks like an assault. But it does not show what happened to Cecily.”

McMillan claimed that she swung her arm back instinctively only after having one of her breasts grabbed from behind while she was walking out of the park. Her lawyers showed photographs of bruising to her chest to support this. They said McMillan did not know that Bovell was a police officer, and did not intend to hurt him.

Stolar told the jury that on a “day off from protest”, McMillan became caught up in the chaotic scenes at Zuccotti Park, after she stopped by to collect a friend to continue St Patrick’s Day celebrations with a friend visiting from out of town, which saw her dressed in bright green.

Testifying, McMillan said that she had “no memory” of the moment her elbow struck Bovell. “I’m really sorry that officer got hurt,” she said. She has said that she suffered a seizure or anxiety attack after being arrested, a claim supported by activists who say they saw her convulsing on the pavement, and subsequently received treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Choi, however, described McMillan’s account as “so utterly ridiculous and unbelievable that she might as well have said that aliens came down that night and assaulted her”. She said the bruising was not detected during two hospital checks on the night of the incident and suggested that McMillan caused it herself.

In his own testimony, Bovell, a Barbados-born US navy veteran who typically patrols the 40th precinct in the Bronx, said: “I remember the defendant crouching down and, all of a sudden, she lunged her elbow back and hit me in the face.”

McMillan rejected an earlier offer from prosecutors for her to plead guilty to a charge of second-degree assault of a police officer, which would have still resulted in her being classed as a felon, in exchange for a recommendation to the judge that she should not receive a prison sentence.

Her lawyers stressed throughout the trial that she was a moderate left-wing political activist who had urged her fellow Occupy members to pursue a path of non-violent engagement with the state. The prosecutors, however, were unmoved, accusing McMillan of using the movement as a shield.

“It is time for the defendant to answer for her own criminal actions,” Choi said in her closing arguments last week. “Our founding fathers did not create a right to free assembly so people could commit crimes and hide behind their right to protest. This is a sacred right that should be preserved and protected.”

A loyal group of McMillan supporters, which calls itself Justice4Cecily, said in a statement that it was “devastated by the jury’s verdict”. It criticised Zweibel for blocking McMillan’s lawyers from citing past allegations of violent conduct against Bovell, and for banning them from speaking to the media early on in the trial. “He is rightly known as ‘a prosecutor in robes’,” the group said.

Asked to elaborate on his complaints about Zweibel’s handling of the trial, Stolar said: “I have a lot of opinions about this judge, but I still have to appear before him, so … I am not going to be too glib.”

Jon Swaine in New York
theguardian.com, Monday 5 May 2014 20.17 BST

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© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

I didn’t know Cecily McMillan two years ago, when I glimpsed her convulsing on the street, obscured from view by a cluster of NYPD officers and a confusion of Occupy protesters. Word spread swiftly through the downtown Manhattan intersection: The young woman had been assaulted by the cops; her body went into seizure, her brain unconscious, her ribs cracked.

That was March 17, 2012. Protesters were marking six months since Occupy Wall Street first inserted itself into an unremarkable concrete park in the financial district, breathing a gust of ephemeral insurrectionary momentum into Manhattan’s grid and beyond. The six-month anniversary was marked by raucous street marches and multiple arrests. It culminated in McMillan, a student at the New School, lying on the street by Zuccotti Park surrounded by police as onlookers shrieked for an ambulance to be called.

Two years later, the commercial flows of downtown Manhattan glide untouched by the enraged encampment and attendant marches that once had defiantly but fleetingly claimed that space. Many if not most occupiers returned to schools and jobs and semblances of normalcy under the vagaries of late capitalism. The system did not crumble. Occupy’s lasting imprint at times feels too faint to trace. But a return to normalcy was not available for McMillan.

I met McMillan numerous times during and since Occupy’s heyday. We agreed on very little. We disagreed on how a brief occupation of New School student center should play out, we disagreed on whether Occupy should crystallize into a formal political movement with elected representatives (McMillan even worked on the well-meaning congressional campaign of “Occupy Candidate” George Martinez, while I condemned [1] such mainstreaming); where she wanted organization and party-building, I wanted some more chaotic not-this. Our dissensus was representative of the multitudinous constellation that constituted Occupy; we didn’t all just get along.

Along with every sometime occupier I know, though, I believe that McMillan’s current predicament is a vile indictment (or a sad example) of the criminal justice system at work. While the NYPD’s predilection for mass arrests during Occupy’s height clogged up the district courts with hundreds of misdemeanor and infraction cases, McMillan’s assault heaped a far more terrifying and arduous fate on the 25-year-old. Monday marks the beginning of a trial in which she faces felony charges for second-degree assault on officer Grantley Bovell, who had grabbed the activist’s chest from behind and prompted her seizure. McMillan’s breast was visibly bruised, as photographs evidenced; she had instinctively swung backward having been grabbed from behind by the cop. Accidentally knocking Bovell’s temple as he dragged her backward, McMillan earned herself charges that carry up to a seven-year prison sentence.

For the first time in some time, I saw McMillan last month. The weight of a potential prison sentence and exhaustion from two years of trial delays weighed heavily on the 25-year-old. Her eyes were quick to well up; “It’s been hell,” she intimated. As writer and artist Molly Crabapple observed [2] listening to McMillan address supporters after a pretrial hearing, “Cecily tried to hide the tremor in her voice.”

It was during that same hearing that McMillan learned that officer Bovell’s fecund history of misconduct — particularly against protesters — would not be considered admissible in her case. Bovell had been subject to at least two inquiries by the police force’s internal affairs bureau. Bovell also currently faces assault charges [3] brought by another March 17 Occupy participant, Austin Guest, who alleges that following his arrest, Bovell dragged him down the aisle of a police bus while “intentionally banging his head on each seat.” Earlier accusations levied against Bovell include an incident in which a young boy on a bike was run down by an unmarked cop car, left with broken teeth and in need of stitches. Bovell had also been caught on a surveillance camera kicking a man on the floor while arresting him in a Bronx bodega in 2009. It is McMillan, however, who faces censure by the criminal justice system.

There are weeks of hearings ahead for McMillan. Even if she is found innocent — a basic but necessary deliverance of justice — she has already suffered too much. Speaking briefly in front of the state Supreme Court in downtown Manhattan Monday, McMillan, demurely clad in a pink shirt and beige blazer, briefly addressed supporters. “Thank you for being here today,” she said.

Her lawyer, the National Lawyers Guild’s Martin Stolar, reiterated to reporters and supporters present that McMillan had a “reputation [as] somebody who promotes non-violence as the preferred method of achieving political ends.” (Indeed, views on revolutionary violence are among McMillan and my political differences.) “An innocent woman is being accused of something that could send her to prison for seven years,” Stolar said. “She was leaving the park pursuant to the police department’s orders when she was brutally assaulted by a police officer and subsequently accused of assaulting that police officer.”

McMillan’s case is among the very last Occupy legal challenges on the New York courthouse docket. It’s a sad but appropriate final testament to a brief moment in New York history when the sprouts of a new and radical politics emerged and seemed to birth new possibilities. McMillan’s ongoing ordeal — synechdochal of a criminal justice system that stifles dissent while upholding and rewarding brutal impunity — is a reminder that the anger that drove thousands of us into the streets for Occupy should continue to drive us; bold and radical dissent is as necessary as ever.

Natasha Lennard is an assistant news editor at Salon, covering non-electoral politics, general news and rabble-rousing. Follow her on Twitter @natashalennard, email nlennard@salon.com [4].

April 8, 2014
Natasha Lennard
Monday, April 7, 2014

Find this story at 8 April 2014

from the holds-several-‘most-rights-violated’-trophies,-however dept

Certain demographics are desirable. 18-34? Taste-makers and early adopters. 35-49? Money. Muslim and New York City resident? Being a member of this group meant (until recently) having First Amendment-protected activities being closely scrutinized by the NYPD’s now-defunct “Demographics Unit.”

This special unit was recently disbanded, roughly a decade after it should have been, thanks to a new mayor and a new police commissioner. The unit was put together by a former CIA officer who used the post-9/11 attack climate to push for expansive surveillance of the city’s Muslim population, including designating entire mosques as terrorist-related entities. Despite all the extra attention being paid to Muslims, not a single useful investigation resulted from this unit’s work.

The surveillance being done by this unit so pervasively subverted civil liberties protections that not even the CIA could access the NYPD’s files without breaking its internal rules. The same goes for the FBI, which has long partnered with the NYPD in its counter-terrorism efforts. Don Borelli, a former FBI agent, has written a piece for the New York Daily News, detailing why police commissioner Bill Bratton was right to disband the Demographics Unit.
Together, we were able to stop many threats — and save many lives — including a serious plot against the subways from Najibullah Zazi, an ethnic Afghan who grew up in Queens and went on to become an Al Qaeda operative.

Interestingly enough, the NYPD demographics unit had detailed files on Zazi’s neighborhood in Flushing during the period in which he was becoming radicalized. It kept files on businesses and visited coffee shops believed to be hangouts for potential terrorists. The unit even visited the travel agency where Zazi bought his ticket to travel to Afghanistan for terrorism training.

So why wasn’t Zazi identified until he was driving to New York from Denver to blow up the subway? Because the program was ineffective. The mission of the demographics unit was to spot the terrorists in the haystack, but again and again it failed to do so.
All haystack, no needle, like so many other surveillance programs. The unit overwhelmed itself in useless data, keeping it from finding what it needed when it mattered most. These data swamps built by investigative agencies have proven to be more dangerous than old-fashioned police work.
During my time with the Joint Terrorism Task Force, I read many reports derived from investigations conducted by the NYPD Intelligence Division, which may well have relied on the demographics unit’s work. I was presented with many interesting facts about where people were attending Friday prayers and who belonged to various Muslim student associations.

But rarely did I learn anything I didn’t already know through traditional investigations, much less anything that would have led me to open a terrorism investigation.
Adding to the mess here is the NYPD’s twisted relationship with the FBI. While it clearly enjoys access to G-men and their tools, former police chief Ray Kelly often made it clear that his officers did superior work and that the FBI’s production of information was too slow to be useful. Of course, FBI agents have said the same thing about the NYPD, particularly in the information department, where the sharing was usually a one-way street that flowed out of the FBI and into the NYPD’s hands.

Beyond the antagonistic relationship is the Demographic Unit itself — its own worst enemy. The former CIA officer who had a local judge rewrite guidelines to give the NYPD unprecedented permission for pervasive surveillance also managed to ensure that most info flowing back upstream to the FBI ended up being routed directly into the trash can.
Moreover, I wound up shredding some of these reports because they had no investigative value and, in my opinion, did not belong in any FBI file because they solely reported on what was First Amendment-protected activity.
Much like other failures to stop terrorist activity, the problems here were communication (too little) and information (too much). As Borelli notes, in his experience, it’s been more useful to build trust than to endlessly spy, something the NYPD really hasn’t made much effort to foster over the years. But its failure to do so means it has buried itself in data and alienated those who could bring an inside perspective. A decade’s worth of spying resulted in nothing but violated rights.

by Tim Cushing
Mon, Apr 28th 2014 4:05pm

Find this story at 28 April 2014

• Photographer arrested after 2008 protest wins ruling
• FBI sought to protect ‘confidential sources’

The FBI has lost a legal battle to prevent the disclosure of documents that could reveal the identity of two of its covert informants.

In highly unusual case Laura Sennett, a freelance photojournalist, has won a ruling from a district court that compels the FBI to provide her with documents that shed light on informants use by agents used in their investigation into a protest which resulted in damage to a hotel lobby in Washington.

The FBI launched its joint terrorism task force investigation days after anarchists protested a World Bank and International Monetary Fund meeting in the capital in April 2008.

Protesters stormed into the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel around 2.30am, chanting slogans and throwing paint-filled balloons. Most of the criminal damage, including a broken window, was minor, although the hotel said a statue worth more than $200,000 was damaged.

Sennett had been tipped off about the protest and attended to take photographs. She believed the protesters planned to wake up the IMF delegates by making a commotion, and maintains she had no prior knowledge of their criminal intent. She did not enter the hotel lobby – choosing to photograph events from outside.

Both of the “confidential sources” cited in the court case were asked by the FBI to review surveillance footage of the protest, in order to help identify who was there. They identified a handful of activists as well as Sennett, who specialises in reporting grass-roots activism.

The FBI placed the photojournalist under surveillance before raiding her home with two-dozen armed law enforcement officials, who seized memory cards, hard drives and computer and camera equipment.

In an effort to find out more about why she was targeted, Sennett, 51, has been running a legal campaign to obtain information the bureau holds about her, using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

She had so far been given more than 1,000 pages of FBI documents, which the Guardian has seen, but the bureau withheld key portions, claiming they fell under an exemption intended to protect the identity of “confidential sources”. That decision has been challenged in court by Sennett’s lawyers.

On Wednesday, district judge James E Boasberg sided with Sennett, ordering the FBI to release the contested documents, which all parties accept “could reasonably be expected to disclose the identity of a confidential source”.

The judge said that despite three attempts, the FBI had failed to convince him the sources would have inferred confidentiality from their interactions with agents.

Dan Metcalfe, who directed the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy for more than 25 years before retiring in 2007, and has represented the FBI in dozens of similar cases, said it was “extremely rare” for the bureau to be forced to reveal the identity of a source.

“I can think of just a handful of cases at most in which the FBI has had to disclose potentially identifying information about a confidential source over the past 40 years,” he said.

The case, he said, was a significant blow for the FBI, which is very strongly opposed to revealing the identity of its sources, not least because doing so could discourage future informants from co-operating.

Metcalfe, now a law professor at the American University, said the solicitor general was highly unlikely to launch an appeal.

“I’ve read thousands and thousands of FOIA opinions,” he said. “I would put this in the top percentile for being analytically sound and written exceptionally well. Based upon the facts that one gleans from reading the opinion, this is an entirely correct outcome. I see little or no prospect for reversal on appeal.”

Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said he believed the two informants in the case, one of whom is said to have attended anti-capitalist meetings, could be private investigators.

“That is something that, having seen the documents, the judge may be less keen on keeping secret,” he said.

German said the fact an act of vandalism against the Four Seasons was even investigated by the FBI’s counter-terrorism teams followed a pattern of investigations into protest movements that are “more about suppressing dissent than investigating serious or violent crime”.

Detective Vincent Antignano, the federal marshall deputised to run the FBI’s investigation into the protest, said in a deposition conducted by Sennett’s legal team he believed Sennett was “like-minded like anarchists”, because she was among the 16 people captured on the hotel’s surveillance video.

“Everyone on that video is a suspect, so that’s the way I look at it,” he said, adding that he assumed she had similar views to the protesters captured in the video “who despise their government”.

Asked to elaborate, Antignano said that while he did not know Sennett’s dietary preference, “she could also be a vegan like … [people] who are against animal protests [sic] or animal research or won’t eat meat and stuff like that.”

Antignano had a broad notion of what behaviour constituted “terrorism”, saying that even an assault could fall within the definition.

“If you get assaulted and you believe you’ve been terrorised, then maybe that is terrorism,” he told Sennett’s lawyer.

The deposition was part of a separate case, in which Sennett’s lawyers sued the FBI for damages they said Sennett suffered as part of the raid on her home, which was led by Antignano.

Sennett said the raid was traumatising. Around two-dozen agents “yanked my 19-year-old son out of bed at gunpoint”, she said, before quizzing her about political books on her shelf and asking what “kind of an American” she was.

Sennet said she replied: “I’m a photographer.”

A freelancer whose images have appeared on CNN, MSNBC and the History Channel and in the Toronto Free Press, Sennett is adamant the FBI must have known she was present at the protest in a journalistic capacity. The FBI denied its agents knew of her occupation.

Sennett was never arrested or charged. She believes undercover police or moles within the protest group may have been responsible for giving the FBI details, including a cellphone number, which allowed agents to track her down.

Her lawyer, DC-based Jeffrey Light, argued that her status as a photojournalist should have barred agents from seizing her material, under a clause of the Privacy Protection Act.

However in that case a district court ruled against Sennett – a decision upheld in 2012 by the court of appeal, which found that while Sennett’s occupation provided “an innocent explanation” for her presence at the protest, the FBI, when it launched its inquiry, still had “probable cause” to believe she was part of a conspiracy to commit vandalism.

Wednesday’s court ruling by judge Boasberg, a Barack Obama appointee, was far more sympathetic to Sennett’s case.

Boasberg said the FBI had failed to provide sufficient proof that its informants “inferred that their communications with the bureau would remain confidential”. While acknowledging the FBI’s argument regarding preserving the confidentiality of informants – “one of source protection and empowerment of law-enforcement agencies” – Boasberg added: “That solicitude, however, can only carry the court so far.”

Light said he hoped Wednesday’s victory, which the government has 90 days to appeal, would take the capital’s protest community a step closer to discovering the identity of potential moles in their midst.

“People want to know who is spying on them,” he said.

Sennett said she hoped that by identification of the FBI’s informants in her case would discourage the bureau from conducting similar quasi-terrorist investigation in the future.

“I pursued this case because I don’t think anyone – activists, freelancers, bloggers – should have to go through what I went through.”

The US attorney’s office said it was reviewing the case but declined to offer further comment.

The FBI also declined a request for comment.

Paul Lewis in Washington
theguardian.com, Friday 2 May 2014 18.01 BST

Find this story at 2 May 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies.

The timely new documentary Better This World tells a provocative and cautionary story about the shifting fault lines of civil liberties, protest and government vigilance. Two boyhood friends from the heart of Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, find themselves increasingly out of step with their neighbors as they react against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After moving to Austin, they go to a presentation at a local bookstore about protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention (RNC) in Minneapolis-St. Paul. There they are approached by a charismatic older activist, who suggests that they work together to prepare for the demonstrations.

Six months later, on the eve of the convention, the two young friends make eight Molotov cocktails but then decide not to use them. The matter might have ended there — but not everything was as it seemed. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies had been engaged in a two-year, multimillion-dollar counterterrorism effort leading up to the convention. The young men’s mentor, it turns out, was a government informant and had been long before meeting them; Crowder and McKay were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism.

McKay calls home from jail
David McKay calls home for the first time from jail
Credit: Mike Nicholson

Growing up in Midland, Texas, Crowder and McKay had little political education beyond their parents’ encouragement to “stand up for the oppressed” and to “stand up for what you believe in.” Somewhere along the way, partly in late-night walks through the town’s deserted streets, the friends began to form their own interpretation of their parents’ words. It was Crowder who made the first public statement of his political beliefs in 2003 when the United States declared war on Iraq. He drew an upside-down American flag with the words “No War” on a T-shirt and wore it to his high school the next day — a move that, he recounts, “became a pretty dramatic event.”

Seeking “something else,” Crowder and McKay moved to more progressive Austin, where they met Brandon Darby, who had gained prominence as the co-founder of Common Ground, a grassroots relief organization that fed and housed thousands of victims of Hurricane Katrina. Crowder and McKay were flattered when the larger-than-life activist approached them at a bookstore in Austin about organizing together.

Two years prior to the 2008 RNC, Minneapolis-St. Paul was designated a “homeland security site” and the FBI began “preventative” intelligence operations nationwide, including sending informants into many activist circles. As FBI Special Agent Christopher Langert says, “We . . . knew that there were . . . some people [coming] to St. Paul to do more than just demonstrate. . . . They were going to try to block delegates, cause destruction.” So the FBI tasked Darby with infiltrating Austin-based activist groups.

Police pepperspray protesters at the 2008 RNC
Police unleash pepper spray at protesters during the 2008 Republican National Convention.
Credit: Courtesy of Better This World

As several people in the film who knew Darby, Crowder and McKay recount, Darby urged the young men to become more radical — to take more extreme actions. According to Larra Elliott, one of the activists who accompanied the three to the RNC, “Brandon . . . said something that caught my attention, like, ‘Don’t you feel that firebombs and armed militias . . . that kind of . . . action is necessary sometimes?’ And Brad was like, ‘No, I don’t feel that way.’ Brandon would not leave it alone.”

Darby echoes some of this sentiment in letters to his FBI handler about meetings with McKay and Crowder. “I told them that direct action is intense, and we could all expect to have violence used against us. I told them I was ready to deal with that, and if they weren’t, then they shouldn’t work with me.”

On Aug. 28, 2008, Crowder and McKay joined Darby and several other activists Darby had brought together for the long van ride up to the RNC, where they would join thousands of other protestors. Within days Crowder and McKay were under arrest. The “Texas Two” faced multiple domestic terrorism charges, agonizing legal decisions and decades in prison. Darby, until then their mentor, would be the government’s star witness against them.

Better This World reconstructs the story of the relationship between these three men and the subsequent twists and turns of their legal cases through interviews with Crowder, McKay and their family members; FBI agents and attorneys; and a wealth of intriguing surveillance and archival footage — presenting an extraordinarily well-documented account and untangling a web of questions: Why did Darby, a committed activist, become a government informant? What led these young men to build eight homemade bombs? Did Darby and law enforcement save innocent victims from domestic terrorists bent on violence and destruction? Or were Crowder and McKay impressionable disciples set up by overzealous agents and a dangerous provocateur? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between?

Better This World probes these questions and more as it paints a gripping portrait of the strange and intriguing odyssey of these men — poignantly describing not only the problems of power and authority, but also the ultimate power of friendship, forgiveness and love.

Premiere Date: September 6, 2011

Find this story at 6 September 2011

Copyright © 1995–2014 American Documentary, Inc.

FOR A FEW DAYS IN SEPTEMBER 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters’ hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was “a leader who’s not looking for a fight, but sure isn’t afraid of one either.”

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush’s Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they’d come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration’s assault on civil liberties.

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St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin’s big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

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Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an “FBI informant rat loose in Austin.”

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. “If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus,” wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. “The simple truth,” he wrote on Indymedia.org, “is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Darby’s entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the ’70s, the FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America’s top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.

Brandon Darby.: Couresy Loteria Films
Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria Films
But it’s Darby’s snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It’s the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby’s interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI’s blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) “I feel very morally justified to do the things that I’ve done,” he told me. “I don’t know if I could have handled it much differently.”

Darby “gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” one activist warned me. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”
BRANDON MICHAEL DARBY is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. “He gets in people’s minds and can pull you in,” Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. “He’s a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him.”

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin’s slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park’s 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read “Medicine.” They later “hooked up,” Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn’t work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana’s Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn’t get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. “If I’d had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people,” he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he’d since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: “There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents.”

But Common Ground’s approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. “They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana,” he told “This American Life” reporter Michael May. “And I was like, ‘I don’t think so.'” It turned out armed revolution wasn’t really his thing.David Mckay: Couresy Loteria Films
David McKay. Courtesy Loteria Films

Darby’s former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground’s interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. “He could only see what’s in it for him,” Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. “I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve replicated every system that I fought against,'” he recalls. “It was fucking bizarre.”

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. “I talked,” he told me. “And it was the fucking weirdest thing.” He knew his friends would hate him for what he’d done. (The FBI raided Hamad’s home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin’s Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

MCKAY AND CROWDER FIRST encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin’s Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. “I stated that I wasn’t interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much,” Darby emailed his FBI handlers. “I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down.”

“My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it,” fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby’s FBI email continued: “I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren’t going to be able to fight anybody until they did so.” At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: “Look at me, I’m badass. You can be just like me.” (Darby insists that this never happened.)

“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use” the Molotovs, Crowder told me.
When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group’s trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they’d planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. “It started to feel like Darby hadn’t amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be,” Crowder says. Feeling that Darby’s tough talk should be “in some ways, a guide of behavior,” they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

“The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them,” Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. “I’m just not feeling the vibe on the street,” he texted Darby.

“You butt head,” Darby shot back. “Text me when you can.” He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay’s room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.

Bradley Crowder: Courtesy Loteria Films
Bradley Crowder. Courtesy Loteria Films
The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn’t have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

AT SOUTH AUSTIN’S STRANGE BREW coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he’s now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. “The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities,” he explains. Climate change is “a bandwagon” and the EPA should be “strongly limited.” Abortion shouldn’t be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn’t defending himself against the left’s misrepresentations. “They don’t print what I say,” Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart’s takedown of ACORN, he says, was “completely fucking fair.”)

“No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” Darby says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”
Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. “No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative,” he says. “And I’ve quit giving a shit.”

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. “I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence,” he tells me. “They are complete fucking liars.” As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it’s hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby’s ex, says he told her of the idea too.) “The guy was trying to put me in prison,” Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: “They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack.” Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. “Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I.”

—By Josh Harkinson | September/October 2011 Issue

Find this story in September/October 2011

Copyright ©2014 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

A well-known activist—an anarchic, revolutionary activist—is accused of spying on other activists for the FBI. The strangest thing about the rumor is, it’s true. How Brandon Darby transformed from cop-hater to federal witness. Plus, a story by Etgar Keret, about a boy who betrays his people with a pair of shoes.

Brandon Darby was a radical activist and one of the founders of the incredibly effective relief organization Common Ground. Michael May reports on how Darby changed from a revolutionary who wanted the overthrow of the U.S. government into an informant working with the FBI against his former radical allies.

MAY 22, 2009

Find this story at 22 May 2009

© 1995 – 2014 Chicago Public Media & Ira Glass

Last year on Aug. 28, eight Austin activists traveled north in a rented white van to join thousands of protesters in St. Paul, Minn., for the Republican National Convention. In the trailer behind them were shields homemade from traffic barrels – cut in half, painted black, and fitted with Plexiglas windows. The shields mimic police riot gear and are often used in “black blocs,” a method of street protesting with origins in Germany that became prominent stateside at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, during which a black bloc caused property damage to various businesses. The black bloc is sort of like the punk rock version of protest, and its alluring combination of direct action and danger similarly attracts mostly young, white men.
On Aug. 31, a couple of days after the group’s arrival in Minnesota, St. Paul police searched the trailer without a warrant and seized the shields. The next day, two of the van’s passengers, David McKay, 22, and Bradley Crowder, 23, were arrested for disorderly conduct. McKay was released later that day, but Crowder remained in jail. According to a subsequent police affidavit, McKay met the next day with fellow activist Brandon Michael Darby, 32, who had also traveled to St. Paul with the Austin group. Angry that his friend was still being held, McKay told Darby that he and Crowder had made some Molotov cocktails (i.e., bottled gasoline bombs) and that he was planning on throwing them at cop cars parked in a parking lot.
According to the partial transcript in the affidavit, Darby asked McKay, “What if there’s a cop sleeping in the car?” “He’ll wake up,” replied McKay. “What if he doesn’t?” Darby asked. McKay was silent. Darby pressed on, asking McKay if he would “leave the scene with a cop burning or dying.” McKay answered, “Yes.” And then, again, according to a partial transcript of the recorded conversation, McKay told Darby that it was “worth it if a cop gets burned or maimed.” These words, along with eight Molotov cocktails found in the basement of the house in which McKay was crashing, have him facing up to 30 years in federal prison for charges related to possession and assembly of “unregistered firearms,” as the weapons are defined by federal law.
McKay did not know that his words to Darby, spoken in a moment of foolish hotheadedness that his friends say he is known for, were being transmitted to agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation via electronic surveillance gear that Darby had hidden out of sight. Nor did he know that Darby had supplied the FBI with the information that led to the seizure of the homemade riot gear. More­over, Darby had already told the feds that, in retaliation for the cops’ apparently illegal bust, the group had gone to Wal-Mart with a shopping list that might have supplied a touring Roller Derby team – elbow pads, gas cans, bike helmets, motor oil, tampons – but included also the potential fixings for some Molotov cocktails. The youths’ recklessness, as well as their implicit trust in Darby, had led them into a police trap.
Who Is Brandon Darby?
At first glance, Brandon Michael Darby seems a typical Austin lefty activist. He entered Austin’s radical progressive scene nearly a decade ago; through a former activist girlfriend, he became involved in a variety of small groups engaged in progressive projects: getting dirty drug needles off the streets, innocent prisoners out of jail, and recent immigrants into stable homes. He’s a boyishly handsome guy, in good shape from martial arts training, and he currently lives on several acres of farmland beyond the city limits, where he keeps chickens and a pig. He says he’s planning on getting a goat and has a “massive compost operation” going. He talks excitedly about making his home more sustainable and about the impending installation of a solar water heater. He collects rainwater for the garden and is restoring an old house.
Darby’s now employed as a legal and investigative assistant for an attorney, work that he feels good about because, he says, his employer doesn’t buy in to the whole “how much justice can you afford” system and does a lot of pro bono work. He recently became a father, to 9-month-old Olivia, and though he and Olivia’s mother don’t live together, he says that they are “co-parenting.” All in all, a contemporary portrait in progressive rationality and sustainable ambitions.
Prior to his latest incarnation, Darby had also acquired a considerable national reputation as a valiant and committed community activist, especially in New Orleans. There, initially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, he had helped rescue stranded residents and rebuild housing and had been centrally involved in the work of the Common Ground Relief – a community effort focused on restoring neighborhoods, defending residents’ rights, and trying to rebuild the community from the ground up. Darby was featured in national interviews about post-hurricane New Orleans and more particularly had a reputation for defying authority and especially cops – not necessarily the profile of a potential police informant.
But ask around Austin activist circles, and a more contradictory portrait emerges. Several local activists describe Darby as a troubled, paranoid man with a volatile history with women, a penchant for violent rhetoric, and a strong authoritarian streak. At best, Darby might be just an ordinary and confused young person, fired with generalized idealism and stumbling through this world on his own tangled, misguided mission to save it. But at worst, he might have been – might have become over the last several years – a manipulator with a hero complex, bent on inflating his own self-importance in the comfortable guise of moral superiority.
Finding Common Ground
For much of 2006, Darby was heavily involved with Common Ground Relief, the post-Katrina recovery effort that has gained national attention for its endeavors. Darby himself came to national attention when he and one of Common Ground Relief’s founding members, Scott Crow, the prominent anarchist community organizer behind a host of Austin organizations including Radical Encuentro Camp, Ecology Action, and Treasure City Thrift, traveled to New Orleans right after the levees broke in search of their friend Robert “King” Wilkerson, who had stayed in his home to weather out the storm.
Crow’s detailed account of the apocalyptic journey, “It Takes a Spark to Start a Prairie Fire: Desperation, Racism and the Beginnings of Common Ground Relief,” can be read in full at Infoshop News (news.infoshop.org). (Crow’s book, Black Flags and Windmills: Anarchy, Hope and Common Ground, which also recounts the episode, comes out this year.) Their first effort failed, but the two friends decided to try again when they got a call from Malik Rahim, a former Black Panther, community organizer, and childhood friend of King’s, who reported that his neighborhood, Algiers, was being patrolled by white militias harassing unarmed black residents. The men set out once again, this time determined to bring supplies and aid to Rahim and to bring King back to Austin.
It was on this second trip that Rahim and Crow planted the seeds for Common Ground Relief using, Crow writes, “a strategy mixed from the Black Panther survival programs, the current work in Chiapas, Mexico of the Zapatistas and good old community organizing.” It was also when Darby made national headlines by taking a dip into the dreaded “toxic sludge,” a gnarly mix of industrial waste, waterlogged carcasses, and other nastiness, to find King. Crow writes: “Brandon called me one last time before he dropped into the dark water, and Malik and I told him we would come looking for him if he didn’t return. He started swimming with his phone held in the air, and he made good progress alternating between wading and swimming, trying to keep the water out of his mouth.” Federal Emergency Management Agency agents spotted Darby and ordered him out of the water, but he would not do so until they dispatched a boat to find and retrieve King; a hero’s welcome awaited Darby when he and King returned to Rahim’s home. After celebrating the reunion, everyone went to work, doing what they could to put the world right again.
At the time of Common Ground’s inception, the mood in New Orleans was tense. The U.S. government had completely failed the community, all the proof that most people needed that the system wasn’t working. Revolution was in the air, and Common Ground was at the forefront of envisioning a potential new world. In that heady atmosphere, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez offered the group monetary relief in the form of Citgo gas cards, and Common Ground sent a delegation, including Darby, to Caracas. On pirate radio, Crow described Common Ground as “a paramilitary organization” – a statement for which he was criticized within the group. But given the atmosphere of chaos and devastation and uncertainty, people behaved in ways they normally would not.
As for Darby, those who were involved in Common Ground describe him as a simultaneously dynamic and divisive character, with an authoritarian streak that the mostly anarcho-hippie crowd didn’t care for. One volunteer coordinator who worked with Common Ground from January to July 2006 recounted a disturbing episode: A couple of volunteers called back to headquarters concerned they were about to get jumped, and Darby leaped into his truck to save the day – reportedly by firing his gun into the air in the middle of the street. “It just seemed like an unnecessarily violent escalation,” she recalled. “Everything I heard about Brandon Darby during my time at Common Ground was that he was crazy, and what I witnessed was that he was very prominent and very divisive. He’d come into town and everybody would be whispering, like: ‘Oh, shit. Brandon Darby’s back.’ ”
Darby explains the perception of him as authoritarian this way: “For some, Common Ground might have been about creating a little anarchist utopia. For me, it was about helping people have their rights heard and have their homes [restored], and it was about getting things done.” Darby also denies that he has ever discharged a firearm anywhere in the state of Louisiana.
“I know that Brandon has been trained in firearm safety, and I just don’t see him doing that,” says Andy Gallagher, a New Orleans resident who’s known Darby since he was 18 and who has lived with him in the past. “In all honesty, there have been situations that I have witnessed where Brandon has had a gun on hand and used it [in] a way that actually de-escalated the situation and protected the lives [of those] who were with him.” Though Gallagher wasn’t involved with Common Ground, he was in town at the time doing his own aid work – locating displaced foster children – and would often visit Darby.
Another prominent organizer of the Com­mon Ground effort was Lisa Fithian, who says she has never gotten along with Darby. “He was a leader of the organization, though, and because of that, he was able to set some patterns in motion that I believe led to systemic issues of sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and violence,” she says. “He kicked the door down of a women’s center at 2am to throw a guy out; he kicked in the door of a trailer where there were volunteers with guns on them. He did a lot of Wild West shit – Mister Macho Action Hero.”
Darby responds that this portrait is both inaccurate and unfair. “We were in an aggressive situation that was frightening; we felt like it was the end of the world,” he explains. “So if there is a man living in a women’s center illegally, against the wishes of the women in the center, and all of the women exit that center, leaving that one guy who barricades himself in and is pissing and pooping on the floor, I think it’s totally fine to kick down the door. But really, if I was so bad, why was I the spokesperson for Common Ground Relief for so long?” Darby asks. “Why, after 2006, did they have me come back and ask me to direct the organization and be the spokesperson again?”
In retrospect, Darby’s friend Crow adds his own doubts. “He inserted himself as ‘co-founder’; he wanted that status, even as people were getting written out of the Common Ground history, people who did a lot of work organizing. He also made sure that the media followed him extensively and didn’t interview other people when he was director and also when he was just another person around,” insists Crow. “If you look at the way Brandon tells it, he did the whole Lower 9th Ward with one hand tied behind his back, when really there were a lot of people who did the work, and the organizing too, who you’ll never hear about because of Brandon’s monopoly on the media. So, did he do that just because he’s crazy, or did he do that to get more credibility for himself so that he could gather more information?”
Bad Intentions
Malik Rahim now fervently believes that Darby was an informant for at least part of the time he worked for Common Ground, a conclusion he describes as heartbreaking. “Look, Brandon and Scott brought weapons to my house to help me defend my home,” he says. “So my first feeling for both of them was love.” But that love, Rahim laments, soon turned to blind defense of someone with whom many in the organization, including his own family members, had problems. “It came to the degree that my son just knew that there was something too wrong with Brandon, and he searched Brandon’s possessions, because he said, ‘This guy is an agent, or he is an informant,'” Rahim recalls. “And, let me tell you, it caused a rift between my son and I, so much so that eventually, he left. Because I believed Brandon. I defended him.”
Rahim believes that something happened to Darby while he was in Venezuela and that it was then that he became an informant, because that is when Rahim now sees that Darby began to impede the group’s progress. “I think that Brandon had a nervous breakdown in Venezuela and that when he came back he was messed up in the head,” Rahim explains. “At the very beginning, he was helpful, but after Venezuela, he became harmful. … He did everything he could to destroy St. Mary’s, which was where we were housing the majority of our volunteers, by letting a bunch of crackheads move in there. And he also drove a wedge between me and Lisa Fithian and eventually caused her to leave, too. He was doing everything you’re supposed to do as a government agent in that situation. Divide and conquer.”
What Rahim considers sabotage and what Fithian calls patriarchal power plays Darby just sees as trying to do something good in a bad situation. Though he disagrees that his adamant refusal to turn people away from St. Mary’s was harmful, he agrees that something bad really did happen to him in Venezuela and that he came back a changed man. “I probably should have left New Orleans at that point and come back to Austin and gone to therapy. But I didn’t. I stayed,” he says. “I didn’t want to be there, but I thought I should have been there. Maybe that was my biggest mistake.” While in Venezuela, Darby says, he was informed by “someone in the Venezuelan government” that what he was doing – essentially seeking funds from the Chávez administration to undermine the Bush administration – was illegal. Darby freaked out and says that at times he was frightened for his life. He thought he might be arrested when he returned to the States, and he was angry that he had been put in that position by Common Ground, particularly Crow and Fithian. But he swears, again and again, that he was never working for the federal government while in New Orleans. Not ever.
These activists believe Brandon Darby reported on their activities to the FBI. Those interviewed for this story include Scott Crow (back, center). Next to Crow is Ann Harkness. Simon Evans is back row, far right, and Lisa Fithian stands in front of Evans.
These activists believe Brandon Darby reported on their activities to the FBI. Those interviewed for this story include Scott Crow (back, center). Next to Crow is Ann Harkness. Simon Evans is back row, far right, and Lisa Fithian stands in front of Evans.
PHOTO BY JANA BIRCHUM
Though he refuses to give a start date, Darby says he’s been working with the FBI for less than two years. FBI documents have him making phone calls to the bureau beginning in November 2007. Though he still describes himself as a lefty and says he’s “the furthest thing from a Republican,” it was protecting the rights of Republicans, he says, that finally persuaded him to work with the feds. “One morning, I woke up and realized that I disagree with the group I was associating with as much as I disagree with the Republican Party,” he recalls. “I began to feel that a small select group of people had bad intentions, and I felt the need to do something about it.”
The relationship began with a call to a cop that Darby knows in another city, because, he says, there was a situation that needed to be reported. He told that person what his concerns were, and that cop gave him the name of a federal agent. Darby says he met with some federal agents, told them what he had to say, and left. The agent later contacted him again, they had what Darby says was a “good conversation,” and over the course of a few months, Darby agreed to go undercover. Though he won’t say what it was exactly that made him make that initial call, he will say this about the eventual decision to go undercover: “My deal was with a small group of people whom I personally wouldn’t call terrorists but whose views and ideologies, in addition to their actions, are a little bit frightening and not in the best interest of the world. … So, with that said, I did what I can to make sure that that’s not an issue. Because I felt like I owed that to life, and I felt like I owed it to this little collective we call a nation who are trying to get through the world together.”
This sudden bout of patriotism sounds odd coming from a guy who witnessed complete governmental breakdown in New Orleans and went to Venezuela with revolution on his mind, but Darby says that it was those very experiences that added to his shift. “I think I began to see things very differently as a result of my experiences around Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath and my experiences as a person of leadership in a large organization. I saw the absolute importance and the absolute negative effect that happens to individuals or groups whenever there’s no stability in a system,” he explains. “I began to feel that we as a radical, radical left, because of the way we pseudo-governed, I started to feel like we were a little silly, critiquing the U.S. government, when we had so many faults of our own.”
Soul on Fire
Some people who worked with him are frankly suspicious that Darby’s acknowledged collaboration with the FBI hints of something much larger and more sinister. Some Austin activists have formed the Austin Informant Working Group; currently focused on the McKay and Crowder cases, they are also considering the wider implications. The term “Green Scare” (by analogy to earlier anti-communist “Red Scares”) refers to the federal government’s growing interest in prosecuting environmental activist groups, particularly the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. Austin Informant Working Group member Simon Evans points to a report by former University of Texas law student Elizabeth Wag­goner, who said that FBI agent Charles Rasner announced to her class that Food Not Bombs and Austin Indymedia were on the bureau’s terror watch list. “It doesn’t seem unreasonable to question,” says Evans, “whether or not something larger is at play here.”
“They’re going after me and Scott and other organizers, but they nabbed the low-hanging fruit,” said Fithian, who was also involved in the RNC protests in Minnesota. Fithian was not surprised at the news that Darby was an informant. “I always said at Common Ground: If he was not a cop or an agent of the state, he was doing their job for them, creating division and disrupting our work.”
Crow initially came to Darby’s defense, posting a strenuous denial, when a story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press first fingered him as an informant, based on FBI documents. “It was more about defending the truth than it was about defending Brandon as a person,” says Crow. “When I asked him, he told me it wasn’t him, and I believed him. I’ve had to apologize to people like Lisa, because I gave him credibility with my initial statements. I just wanted to make sure he wasn’t being maligned. Now, I didn’t defend his misogyny or his antagonism; I defended him based on what he told me. It’s still heartbreaking, you know.” Darby eventually wrote an open letter coming out as an informant, but Crow first learned the truth by reading FBI documents furnished to him by McKay’s defense team. Crow was hurt by the news, as this wasn’t the first time he had found himself defending Darby.
“A lot of women had been hurt by this man, and a lot of men had defended him over the years, and it’s not OK,” says Fithian. “That’s a whole part of the healing process that we are going to have to deal with as a community.” This sentiment was echoed by other sources who spoke of a particular romantic relationship in Darby’s past that they describe as emotionally abusive and Darby as paranoid, jealous, and possessive. “I was a total asshole in my early 20s,” Darby admits freely. “My entire adult life has been a process of trying to be less of an asshole. What on earth my penis has to do with this case, I have no idea.”
Regarding Darby’s obsessive and paranoid nature, Crow says that sometimes Darby would call him 30 times a day. “I’m not a psychologist, but I would definitely say that guy’s paranoid. I mean, he sleeps with guns under his pillow. This is not something I have been told; this is something I have seen. The guy has a cache of weapons.” This depiction from Crow, who legally owns an AK-47, pisses Darby off. “I have legal firearms that I have a right to own,” he says, “and I live out in the country, and I think it’s OK. And I did have a gun in New Orleans, and as a citizen I have a right to do that.”
Sometimes, when Darby speaks of his old friend Crow, there’s a catch in his voice – as when he says that they were close, once, but that Crow hasn’t accepted his recent invitation to his home nor met his daughter. “I will always have a bond with him because of what we went through together, and no evil or anything that he would perceive as bad would come from my hand toward that person,” he says, sounding sincere. Yet the documents reflect that during 2007, Darby secretly informed on Crow’s whereabouts and actions. His defense is that he reported what he saw. “Wouldn’t it be more frightening,” he asks, “if the person in my position picked and chose what truth they told rather than say the facts?”
“Even though I was a shield for him in a lot of ways,” Crow now argues, “he really was marginalized in our community. A lot of people wouldn’t work with him on stuff, and even I didn’t have anything to do with him for a year before Common Ground, because he would start getting paranoid and do divisive things, like tell everyone that Lisa was out to get him, for example. For one period in New Orleans, he started to get King to think that Lisa and I were colluding against him – and I took Brandon’s calls more than anybody would. I counseled that guy many times and actually considered it more of a mentorship than a friendship. That guy asked me a lot of questions. And now of course, it all makes sense.”
So when he had his personal epiphany, why didn’t Darby reach out to other activists and tell them about his change in world-view – rather than begin spying on them? “If I felt like the best thing I could have done to right my wrongs was to come out and say how I felt, I would have done so. I just didn’t feel like it was. I felt like I would be completely marginalized and nobody would want to hear my opinions.” Darby uses the controversial civil rights leader and Black Panther turned Republican born-again Christian Eldridge Cleaver as an example. “He wrote a book called Soul on Ice, and it sold a million copies and is touted at all the anarchist bookstores. Most people in radical communities have heard of it. Then, if you say to an auditorium, ‘Have you ever heard of a book called Soul on Fire?’ No. That’s when Eldridge Cleaver became a born-again Christian and changed his views and recanted much of what he had earlier believed. They don’t promote it. Just like the school board: They promote a version of history that isn’t historically accurate.” Like a petulant teenager whose parents just don’t get him, Darby adds: “Nobody lets you voice your opinions. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to hear it.”
Pissed Off and Pissed On
Fithian says she was wary of Darby’s presence in Minnesota last September. “Nothing about Brandon going to the RNC made any sense to me, and I spoke out about it, and I warned people. When he came to meetings, I actually asked, ‘What the fuck is he doing here?'” She says she pulled him aside and asked him to leave communication meetings where strategic details of actions are worked out. “He said he was there to do medical, but instead he was at all the meetings, all the comms. When he stood up at a spokes meeting [i.e., organized like ‘spokes’ on a wheel], I told him he needed to leave.”
Gabby Hicks, a 21-year-old activist who traveled in the van with Darby, McKay, Crowder, and others, said that the Darby in the open letter – who sounds like a thoughtful guy opposed to violence – is very different from the argumentative and nonsensical Darby she met. Once, on the drive up, Darby became agitated because he needed to go to the bathroom. “He at one point threatened a driver of the van, because the person didn’t pull over fast enough, and Brandon was literally yelling, ‘I’m a 31-year-old revolutionary, and you can’t tell me when I can or can’t pee!'” Hicks laughed. “Once we pulled over, they were still fighting, and someone asked if they needed mediation. Brandon was like, ‘I can put it behind us if we can all act like adults.’ He turned the whole thing around and acted like we were the ones who had freaked out. That was his tactic. It was just weird.”
At the heart of the Darby story remain those two young men from Midland, Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, who are currently facing years in federal prison based in no small part on information that Darby gave to the FBI. Though there are no legal restrictions preventing Darby from commenting on the case, he says he declines to do so out of “respect for the bureau.” Darby is a decade older than either defendant and, as far as direct action is concerned, much more experienced. So why didn’t he simply try to talk these guys out of doing something stupid or criminal instead of turning them over to the feds?
“Why didn’t I try to discourage them? You don’t know that I did or didn’t,” Darby insists. “For all you know, I could have gotten in trouble for violating the rules and trying to discourage somebody from doing something. I’m just saying you don’t know what the facts are yet.”
Indeed we don’t, says Evans of the Austin Informant Working Group. “There is still the issue of entrapment: I want to be clear that we may never know Brandon Darby’s full role or motivations in this incident, as these details are omitted from the FBI documents and informant reports provided to the defense. But something I keep coming back to is: What would I have done in the same position? I consider myself a moral and ethical person; I believe in nonviolence; I’m an ‘anarchist.’ What I would have done is talk to anyone thinking of illegal action, weigh in with my experience, point out the potential consequence, and dissuade that person. If that didn’t work, I would have prevented them from purchasing the materials or going on the action. I feel that a strong community can educate and police itself.”
Darby rejects the depiction of McKay and Crowder as kids easily influenced by an older activist. “If these two ‘kids’ had been stopped in the midst of a plot to bomb an abortion clinic, all these same people would be like: ‘Why wasn’t the government watching these people? Why weren’t they involved?'” he says, exasperated. “The guys who dragged James Byrd to death were the same age as these two, and they weren’t kids; they were monsters.” (Actually, two of the perpetrators in Byrd’s 1998 murder in Texas were 24; the third was 32.) In any case, Darby is sticking to his story. “In regards to this case, there’s no evidence that shows that I assumed a leadership role, and I didn’t,” he says. “I didn’t encourage anybody to do anything, and if you think that I should have done everything I could have to talk these guys out it, you’re not going to be let down [as the trial proceeds] a month from now.”
Good Career Move
Whatever his current motivations, Darby acknowledges his past mistakes. “When I was younger, I identified as a revolutionary, and I believed that many people around the world had a right to take up arms against oppression,” he says. “But I mistakenly felt that our system was one where that would be appropriate.” Then why does he feel that he deserved the benefit of maturity and hindsight, when McKay and Crowder deserve multiple years in the pen? How does he justify robbing them of their chance to go through their own maturing process and personal evolution of political ideology? “Because I didn’t actually do any of it,” he says. “Because I always had enough sense to know that I didn’t have the wisdom to make decisions that endanger people’s lives.”
Darby does say that McKay and Crowder were not the focal point of the investigation. In the course of an ideological shift that took him from armed revolutionary to FBI mole, Darby says he began to see major problems with certain actions that were being planned for the Republican National Convention – particularly by the black bloc and a group of organizers calling themselves the Welcoming Committee. “Anytime that a group of people get together and say that they are going to use ‘any means necessary’ and have images of firebombs and all kinds of other things on their website and they organize around the country, not to protest but to specifically prevent another group of American citizens to exercise their right to assemble, the U.S. government is going to get involved,” he says. “And they should get involved, and I support it wholeheartedly.”
Crowder and McKay, he suggests, were just in the wrong place at the wrong time, adding, “Then, if at the very end of an investigation like that, as a complete shock to everybody, a group of people decide to do something that’s insane, they’re going to get in trouble for it.”
None of this fully explains why Darby chose to go undercover as an FBI informant and surreptitiously spy on his friends when he could have instead simply left the movement and tried to get involved in public policy in some other productive way. “I’ve watched countless activists begin to work in the Legislature and begin to do things that participate in the system; we have a system that is wide open for our involvement,” he said. “You can get involved and have a say so; if you disagree with the way our city is run, you can get involved. If you have an ideological bent that’s on social justice, you can become a law enforcement officer, you can get involved with the FBI, or a lawyer.”
Darby says he was indeed compensated at times for his work with the feds, although he’s vague on the details except to say he turned down witness protection and a lump sum offered to people who testify in federal cases. He does say he is able to be independent because he has some money from his family. Darby sees his current role with the FBI as something akin to a “volunteer firefighter” and believes it to be a natural extension of his desire to do what’s right, no matter how uncomfortable. Yet with his decision to go undercover instead of any other of the myriad choices he had to change the direction of his life, Darby has effectively reinforced the notions that many in the activist community already had: that the Man is always out to get you, and you just can’t trust anyone.
Activist, adventurer, hero, revolutionary, informant. For his next transformation, Darby sees a future for himself in law enforcement. His first gig was surely a foot in the door.

BY DIANA WELCH, FRI., JAN. 23, 2009

Find this story at 23 January 2009

COPYRIGHT © 1981-2014 Austin Chronicle Corp.

Die Geiselnahme der OSZE-Militärbeobachter ist vorbei, die Debatte geht erst richtig los: CSU-Vize Gauweiler übt heftige Kritik, Verteidigungsministerin von der Leyen will den Einsatz überprüfen lassen. Und dann ist da noch der Vorwurf der Spionage, der die OSZE zu beschädigen droht.

Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel hat am Sonntag den Telefonhörer in die Hand genommen. Am anderen Ende der Leitung: Wladimir Putin, der russische Präsident. Es war das erste Gespräch der beiden nach der Freilassung der OSZE-Militärbeobachter, die nach acht Tagen in der Gefangenschaft prorussischer Separatisten am Samstag freigekommen und nach Berlin ausgeflogen worden waren.

Darüber habe sich Merkel am Telefon “erleichtert” gezeigt, teilte die Bundesregierung mit. Der Schwerpunkt des Gesprächs sei aber ein anderer gewesen: Die Kanzlerin habe mit Putin vor allem über den Besuch von Didier Burkhalter beim russischen Präsidenten am Mittwoch geredet.

Welche Rolle spielt die OSZE?
Burkhalter ist Bundespräsident der Schweiz und amtierender Vorsitzender der OSZE, der Organisation für Sicherheit und Zusammenarbeit in Europa. Ihre Hauptaufgabe: Frieden sichern. Die Ukraine, Russland und 55 weitere Staaten sind Mitglieder dieser Konferenz, die 1975 mit der Schlussakte von Helsinki unter dem Namen KSZE gegründet wurde und sich immer als blockübergreifend betrachtet hat. Damit ist sie – eigentlich – gut geeignet, um in der Ukraine-Krise zu vermitteln, in der es auch um die russische Furcht vor einer Ausbreitung der Nato nach Osten geht.

ANZEIGE

Doch die Vermittlung hat sich seit Beginn der Krise als schwierig erwiesen. Burkhalters Idee einer internationalen Kontaktgruppe wurde nie umgesetzt. Von Burkhalters “persönlichem Gesandten” für die Ukraine, Tim Guldimann, ist wenig zu hören. Ein Mitte April zwischen der Ukraine, Russland, USA und EU vereinbartes Genfer Abkommen wird von Moskau als gescheitert betrachtet. In ihm war die Entwaffnung illegaler Kräfte und ein Gewaltverzicht vereinbart worden. Beides lässt auf sich warten, weshalb Bundesaußenminister Frank-Walter Steinmeier nun ein zweites Treffen in Genf fordert. Burkhalter hingegen will “runde Tische” etablieren, um die Präsidentschaftswahl in der Ukraine am 25. Mai vorzubereiten.

Nato-Spione unter dem Deckmantel der OSZE?
Vor allem in Deutschland wird die Arbeit der OSZE überlagert von der Debatte um die Geiselnahme in Slawjansk. Dort, im Osten der Ukraine, waren am 25. April die Militärbeobachter – darunter vier Deutsche – von prorussischen Separatisten entführt worden. Der Anführer der Separatisten, Wjatscheslaw Ponomarjow, rechtfertigte die Entführung mit dem Vorwurf, die Beobachter seien Spione der Nato.

Seitdem tobt in der Politik, aber auch in Medien und Leserkommentarspalten, ein zum Teil erbitterter Streit über mehrere Punkte: Welche Rolle spielte die OSZE? Warum fuhren die Beobachter nach Slawjansk? Und, neuerdings: Warum war der deutsche Leiter der Gruppe, Axel Schneider, seinem Geiselnehmer gegenüber so höflich? Aber der Reihe nach.

Direkt nach der Geiselnahme hatte Claus Neukirch, Sprecher der Organisation, im österreichischen Fernsehen erklärt: “Ich muss sagen, dass es sich im Grunde genommen nicht um Mitarbeiter der OSZE handelt.” Diese Passage wird seitdem immer wieder als Beweis dafür angeführt, dass es sich bei den Geiseln tatsächlich um Spione handle. Dabei sagte Neukirch auch: “Es sind Militärbeobachter, die dort bilateral unter einem OSZE-Dokument tätig sind.”

Dieses “Wiener Dokument 2011” (hier als PDF) erlaubt es jedem der 57 OSZE-Mitgliedsländer, andere Länder um die Entsendung von Militärbeobachtern zu bitten, um “ungewöhnliche militärische Vorgänge” zu untersuchen. Genau das ist passiert. Die Ukraine berief sich darauf.

Nach den gescheiterten Einsätzen auf der Krim gemäß Kapitel III des Dokuments (Verminderung der Risiken) bat Kiew um weitere Missionen gemäß der Kapitel IX (Einhaltung und Verifikation) und insbesondere Kapitel X (Regionale Maßnahmen), in dem es heißt: “Die Teilnehmerstaaten werden ermutigt, unter anderem auf der Grundlage von Sondervereinbarungen in bilateralem, multilateralem oder regionalem Zusammenhang Maßnahmen zur Steigerung der Transparenz und des Vertrauens zu ergreifen.” Diese Maßnahmen könnten angepasst und im regionalen Zusammenhang angewendet werden.

Auf dieser Basis wurden in der Ukraine bislang nacheinander fünf multinationale Teams von jeweils etwa acht Militärbeobachtern aktiv. Die erste Mission begann Ende März unter dänischer Leitung, dann übernahm Polen als “Lead Nation”, gefolgt von den Niederlanden und schließlich Deutschland. Inzwischen ist eine neunköpfige Gruppe aktiv, die von Kanada geführt wird. Weitere Team-Mitglieder kommen aus Frankreich, Moldawien, den USA und der Ukraine selbst.

Die OSZE listet die Mission auf ihrer Website unter dem Titel “Verschiedene Formen des OSZE-Engagements mit der Ukraine” auf. Ein OSZE-Twitterkanal sprach am Sonntag von einer “OSZE-Militärverifikationsmission”.

Der Vorwurf, das Team habe nichts mit der OSZE zu tun gehabt, ist also haltlos. Was die Spionage betrifft: Während der Dolmetscher vom Bundessprachenamt in Hürth kommt, gehören die drei Soldaten dem Zentrum für Verifikationsaufgaben der Bundeswehr (ZVBw) im nordrhein-westfälischen Geilenkirchen an. Dort gibt es nach SZ-Informationen zwar auch eine geheime Außenstelle des Bundesnachrichtendienstes (BND). Doch keiner der Männer war für den Geheimdienst – oder sein militärisches Pendant, den Militärischen Abschirmdienst – tätig. Der BND berät deutsche OSZE-Beobachter allerdings vor ihren Einsätzen. Auch wenn die OSZE-Beobachter also selbst keine Spione sind, zu tun haben sie mit ihnen allemal.

Warum gerade Slawjansk? Von der Leyen verspricht Prüfung
Wie das deutsche Verteidigungsministerium erklärte, besuchen OSZE-Militärbeobachter, die über Diplomatenstatus verfügen, Orte auf Empfehlung des Gastgebers. Wohin sie fahren, entscheidet letztlich der jeweilige Leiter der Mission. Warum Oberst Axel Schneider das Risiko einging, sich in unmittelbare Nähe der Separatisten zu begeben, ist unklar – und ein Streitpunkt in Berlin, über die politischen Lager hinweg.

Der SPD-Verteidigungsexperte Lars Klingbeil fordert in der Bild-Zeitung Aufklärung darüber, ob die Militärbeobachter wirklich die Aufgabe hatten, nach Slawjansk zu fahren. Die Bundesregierung habe das bislang “nicht plausibel erklären können”, kritisiert etwa die Vorsitzende der Linkspartei, Katja Kipping, im Gespräch mit der Zeitung Die Welt.

Außenminister Steinmeier verteidigte hingegen die Mission: Sie habe wertvolle Hinweise geliefert. Verteidigungsministerin Ursula von der Leyen kündigte an, den Einsatz überprüfen zu wollen. Sie sagte aber auch: “Wir lassen uns nicht einschüchtern.”

Der Verteidigungsexperte der Grünen im Bundestag, Omid Nouripour, sagte SZ.de, er sei für die Überprüfung des Einsatzes. “Aber wir dürfen jetzt nicht eine Diskussion anzetteln, die am Ende dazu führt, dass sich Deutschland nicht mehr beteiligt an einem jahrzehntelang bewährtem Instrumentarium.” Die OSZE-Mission sei “in vollem Wissen Russlands” absolviert worden. “Das Instrument ist ein Gutes.”

Warum so höflich dem Geiselnehmer gegenüber? Alle gegen Gauweiler
Als der selbsternannte Bürgermeister von Slawjansk, Ponomarjow, am 27. April seine Geiseln der Weltpresse vorführte, bedankte sich Oberst Schneider bei ihm und gab ihm die Hand. Der CSU-Bundestagsabgeordnete Peter Gauweiler hat das im Spiegel kritisiert: “Der ganze Vorgang macht auch für die Bundeswehr einen unguten Eindruck.” Deutschland habe sich “in dieser plumpen Weise noch tiefer in den Konflikt hineinziehen” lassen.

Nun hagelt es wiederum Kritik an Gauweiler. Der CDU-Europaabgeordnete Elmar Brok nannte dessen Äußerungen “komplett unverständlich”. Der Parlamentarische Geschäftsführer der CSU-Landesgruppe, Max Straubinger, sprach von einer “ziemlichen Frechheit, vom gemütlichen Schreibtisch in München aus das Verhalten deutscher Soldaten in Geiselhaft zu maßregeln”.

Und auch der Grüne Nouripour reagiert mit Unverständnis auf Gauweiler: Was er von Oberst Schneider auf der Pressekonferenz gesehen habe, sei konfliktentschärfend gewesen und damit “vorbildlich.”

OSZE-Militärbeobachter werden vor ihrem Einsatz in Konfliktbewältigung geschult. Vermutlich hat Schneider also nur umgesetzt, was er gelernt hat.

5. Mai 2014 13:46
Von Michael König und Markus C. Schulte von Drach

Find this story at 5 May 2014

Copyright © Süddeutsche Zeitung Digitale Medien GmbH

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s well-organized espionage operations from the Baltic Sea to the Caucasus are described as “soft power with a hard edge,” but his efforts across the region have been more systematic than the unrest in Ukraine suggests

On Sept. 8, 2012, the Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky participated in the opening of a Russian nationalist organization called the Izborsky Club in the monastery town of Pskov, just across the border from Estonia. His speech itself was not particularly memorable, but the Russian official’s presence at the affair was not lost on the Estonian Internal Security Service, which believes the club’s imperialist message and outreach to ethnic Russians across the border are part of an anti-Estonian influence operation run by Moscow.

The head of the club, Aleksandr Prokhanov, seemed to confirm the Estonian suspicions later that month when he declared, “Our club is a laboratory, where the ideology of the Russian state is being developed. It is an institute where the concept of a breakthrough is created; it is a military workshop, where an ideological weapon is being forged that will be sent straight into battle.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin has many such weapons in his irredentist arsenal. The rapid collapse of the pro-Moscow government of Victor Yanukovich in Ukraine brought some of them, like paramilitary force, to the attention of the western public. But Putin’s efforts across the region have been far more systematic and carefully thought out than the recent chaos in Ukraine suggests. Over the last decade, Putin has established a well-organized, well-funded and often subtle overt and covert operation in the vast swath of neighboring countries, from Estonia on the Baltic Sea to Azerbaijan in the Caucuses, say western and regional government officials. “He’s implementing a plan that he’s had all along,” says Clifford Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and co-author of a biography of Putin.

The operation has been described by local intelligence officials as “soft power with a hard edge” and includes a range of Cold War espionage tools. His Baltic neighbors say, for example, that he has deployed agents provocateurs to stir up their minority ethnic Russian groups which make up 25% of the population in Estonia and as much as 40% of the population in Latvia. They say he has established government-controlled humanitarian front organizations in their capitals, infiltrated their security services and energy industry companies, instigated nationalist riots and launched cyber attacks. The goal, says the Estonian Ambassador to the U.S., Marina Kaljurand, is “to restore in one form or another the power of the Russian Federation on the lands where Russian people live.”

The operation has the secondary, larger goal of undermining and rolling back western power, say U.S. and European officials. And while the greatest threat is to his immediate neighbors, his activities also challenge Europe and the U.S. All NATO countries have committed to each other’s mutual defense, which means the U.S. is treaty-bound to come to Russia’s NATO neighbors, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, if Putin were to attack.

For now, Putin seems unlikely to risk a direct conflict with NATO. But his espionage efforts in relatively weak NATO countries can be as effective as military action. “If you look at the complex sort of strategy that Moscow has employed in Crimea and in Ukraine it becomes much less clear what constitutes an invasion or measures to destabilize,” neighboring countries, says Sharyl Cross, director of the Kozmetsky Center at St. Edward’s University. That uncertainty about what kind of invasion the Baltics might face could make a strong NATO response impossible.

That in turn, says former CIA chief John McLaughlin, could be even more damaging to the U.S. and Western Europe by fatally undermining one of the most successful peacetime alliances in history. “If he were to challenge NATO in some way that paralyzed us over an Article Five issue, that would be a dagger to the heart of the alliance,” McLaughlin says.

The espionage confrontation between Russia and its Western neighbors started with their independence back in the early 1990s, but it escalated in 2007. In one particularly bad incident, the Estonian government removed a statue of a Russian soldier from central Tallinn in April that year, sparking riots by ethnic Russians. In the wake of the riots, Amb. Kaljurand, who was then the Estonian ambassador to Moscow, was attacked in her car by a mob on her way to a press conference. Days later a massive Distributed Denial Of Service cyber attack was launched against the computer systems of the Estonian government and major Estonian industries. In private meetings with the U.S. Ambassador to Estonia, top Estonian officials said Russia was behind the organization and implementation of all the attacks, according to confidential cables sent to Washington by the U.S. embassy and published by Wikileaks.

The war in Georgia in August 2008, sharpened NATO’s focus on Putin’s threat. Russia declared it was protecting ethnic Russians from a hostile Georgian government, an assertion that was taken as a direct warning by other countries in the region with Russian minorities, including the Baltic States and Ukraine. Around the world, intelligence agencies noticed a shift in Russian behavior, according to other Wikileaks cables. In a meeting between a State Department intelligence officer and his counterpart from the Australian government in Canberra in mid-November 2008, for example, the Australian warned the U.S. that Russia was launching a regional program to destabilize its neighbors and advance its interests. In a secret cable back to Washington, the State official said his Australian counterpart “described the Baltic states and Ukraine as ‘countries that are in Russia’s sights,’ with the dangerous similarities in Moscow’s view of the ethnically Russian population and strategic geography of Crimea to those which motivated its recent actions against Georgia.”

In response to the war in Georgia, the U.S. agreed for the first time that NATO should draw up contingency plans to respond to a Russian attack against the Baltic states. The alliance set about expanding plans known as Operation Eagle Guardian, which were developed to defend Poland, to include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Russia for its part also stepped up its game. Putin encouraged the Russian parliament to pass a law authorizing him to intervene in other countries to protect ethnic Russians. More subtly, in 2008, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs established a national agency dedicated to advancing Russian interests especially in the former Soviet Union, now known as the Commonwealth of Independent States, and to engaging with and organizing what Moscow calls “compatriots living abroad.” Called Rossotrudnichestvo, the agency performs a variety of traditional cultural roles at embassies around the world. It also helps organize local ethnic Russian groups abroad in ways that unsettle host governments.

According to a report by the Estonian security services, membership in one local ethnic Russian group in Estonia, “Coordination Council of Russian Compatriots” is approved by the Russian Embassy and its activities are guided by the embassy. The purpose of the group “is to organize and coordinate the Russian diaspora living in foreign countries to support the objectives and interests of Russian foreign policy under the direction of Russian departments,” according to the most recent report of the Estonian Internal Security Service. “The compatriot policy aims to influence decisions taken in the host countries, by guiding the Russian-speaking population, and by using influence operations inherited from the KGB,” the report says.

Last October, Mother Jones magazine said the FBI had interviewed Americans who had accepted travel stipends from the office of Russotrudnichestvo in Washington as part of an investigation into potential spying by the Russian agency. The head of the Rossotrudnichestvo office denied the charges and called on the U.S. government to distance itself from the allegations. The FBI and other U.S. agencies declined to comment on the report.

Russia also targets regional businesses and businessmen to establish influence over key sectors, especially energy. Recently, Latvian intelligence identified a top businessman in the energy sector holding clandestine meetings with a Russian intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover out of the Russian embassy, according to an official familiar with NATO and Latvian intelligence. When Latvian security services reached out to the businessman in an attempt to work with him, his meetings with the Russian official stopped, but his trips to Russia increased. The Latvian intelligence services concluded he was meeting with his Russian handler out of their view, the official says.

Putin has also used his intelligence advantage in neighboring countries to go after NATO itself. After Estonia arrested the former head of its National Security Authority, Herman Simm, in 2009 on charges of spying for Moscow, the Atlantic alliance uncovered and expelled two alleged Russian co-conspirators working at its headquarters in Brussels.

Most recently during the crisis in Ukraine, Putin has stepped up the traditional use of media propaganda, especially on television. The propaganda peaked with outlandish and false accusations of attacks against Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine. Russia’s neighbors have taken a variety of approaches to countering the propaganda, from outright censorship to counter-programming. On Mar. 21, Lithuania banned broadcasts of Gazprom-owned NTV Mir station after it showed a movie that the government said “spread lies about” Lithuania’s move to declare independence from the Soviet Union in early 1991. On Apr. 3, Latvia’s National Electronic Mass Media Council suspended the broadcast rights of Rossiya RTR for three weeks, claiming the station was peddling “war propaganda.”

Estonia, for its part, considered banning Russian broadcasts but opted to leave Russian channels on and instead to compete with a barrage of “counter-programming” through Russian language TV, radio and print media. “If you ban things it creates more interest,” says Amb. Kaljurand, “The better way is to give better facts and the point of view of the West.”

The U.S. and its allies are hardly innocents in the international spy game. The U.S. government uses overt and covert means to influence and organize pro-Western groups in many of the same countries Putin is targeting. It works through cultural and diplomatic channels to recruit intelligence sources around the world and in eastern Europe, and the Ukraine crisis has only heightened that work. Says CIA spokesman Dean Boyd, “The Agency’s strong partnerships throughout the region enable cooperation on a variety of intelligence issues. When a foreign crisis erupts, it’s normal for the CIA to shift into overdrive to ensure that our officers have access to the best available information to support the policy community.”

It is also true that Russia’s western neighbors include some with anti-Russian and anti-Semitic views that are occasionally reflected in political debate. Lithuania and Latvia in particular are noted in repeated U.S. diplomatic cables from the region to Washington for the presence of “strident” anti-Russian and anti-Semitic voices in politics, some of them belonging to powerful figures.

In late April the U.S. deployed 600 troops to the Baltics and Poland, and U.S. and other NATO countries increased air patrols in the Baltics. The largely symbolic deployment was intended to reassure all four countries that the U.S. takes its Article 5 obligations seriously, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at the time. Likewise, Kirby said, “If there is a message to Moscow, it is the same exact message that we take our obligations very, very seriously on the continent of Europe.”

Even the most nervous Russian neighbors believe Putin’s use of force is likely to stop in Ukraine, but his espionage program is likely to continue. “[He] is using the soft power tools and other forms of indirect coercion and influence against the Baltics states,” says the official familiar with NATO and Latvian intelligence, “He will use all of these tactics.”

That is a particular concern for Moscow’s neighbors as Russians everywhere prepare to celebrate on May 9 Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany. “If we have a little bit of rioting that will make people become scared and they’ll say maybe we need to find an accommodation with the Russians,” the official says.

Massimo Calabresi @calabresim May 7, 2014

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