The first time “Danny” (far right) officially ran as a CAM medic: March 18, 2012 at a protest to mark the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war.
On March 27, Chicago teachers and their supporters – including parents, students and community residents – rallied against the largest mass public school closure in US history. News of the mobilization sparked huge public interest before the demonstration – including from an undercover police officer calling himself “Danny Edwards.”

The day before the big rally, “Danny” reached out in individual emails to fellow volunteer street medics he had met a year earlier after he took a 20-hour training with Chicago’s local street medic collective, Chicago Action Medical (CAM). CAM’s volunteer emergency medical technicians (EMTs), nurses, doctors and trained street medics provide emergency medical treatment at local protests.

His aim in reaching out: to learn more about the next day’s plans.

“Danny” – who admitted to us on May 6 that he is, in fact, a Chicago police officer – could have saved himself the trouble and his department the expense. After all, organizers had already coordinated directly with top CPD brass about their plans for the next day and widely promoted their intent to stage nonviolent civil disobedience.

After the CTU rally, “Danny” also tried to recruit at least one CAM volunteer street medic via email on April 30, the day before a May 1, 2013, immigrants’ rights march, to pair up with him as a partner. There were no takers, so he showed up alone at the rally sporting marked medic regalia.

His latest undercover sortie as a fake volunteer street medic bookends a hectic year for him.

The Paper Trail

“Danny” was a fixture at CAM events beginning in early March 2012, when he participated in a 20-hour introductory training for new street medics – a training he described in an email to CAM volunteer street medic Scott Mechanic as “great.”

May 1, 2012: “Danny Edwards” – posing with fellow Chicago Action Medical volunteers at their health care booth in Union Park, where street medics were volunteering to provide first aid and emergency health care for participants at the annual May Day rally and march. “Danny” – the only medic not smiling – is standing in front of the CAM banner.

The email address “Danny” used in that correspondence, which he did not sign by name, was pegged to the name of a Chicago police officer cited months later in court documents involved in undercover work around the NATO protests.

Less than half an hour after sending that initial email, “Danny” sent the first in a flurry of emails to Mechanic from a different email address, writing “let me know what going on so i can get involved (sic).”

“Danny’s” March 2012 foray into spying on CAM aligns with the date prosecutors say the Chicago Police Department (CPD) posted two other undercover agents who went by the street names “Mo” and “Nadia” on a 90-day temporary duty undercover assignment to Field Intelligence Team 7150. That team was tasked with infiltrating Occupy and anarchist groups in the run-up to the NATO Summit, according to court documents filed by Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez in April 2013.

Those two officers, “Mo” and “Nadia,” are also purported linchpins in the criminal cases against five activists known as the “NATO 5,” three of whom are scheduled to go to trial on NATO-related domestic terrorism charges this September.

The NATO prosecutors’ October 2012 Answer to Discovery lists this same police officer among the CPD officers, detectives and other police officials who may be called to testify in this fall’s upcoming trial. He is also mentioned in the NATO defendants’ February 25, 2013, Motion to Compel Discovery as “a CPD undercover officer related to this investigation.”

Busy Year for “Danny” – and Early Red Flags

Five days after he inadvertently emailed Scott Mechanic under his given name and scrambled to cover his tracks, “Danny” acted for the first time as a CAM street medic at a small permitted peace march on Chicago’s north side. The March 18, 2012 event was organized to mark the anniversary of the launch of the Iraq War in March 2003.

May 1, 2013: “Danny Edwards,” undercover Chicago police officer, at a May Day rally for immigrant rights in Chicago’s Union Park.
“Danny” ran again as a marked CAM street medic on April 7, 2012 at Occupy Chicago’s “Occupy Spring” event, also emailing Mechanic on April 26, 2012 about bringing a “friend” to an upcoming health workshop. On May 1, 2012, he volunteered as a marked CAM street medic at a May Day rally and march, where his refusal to follow CAM operational guidelines – reportedly abandoning his street medic partner to make a b-line for a group of young protesters wearing black clothes – began to raise real alarms with fellow street medics.

After “Danny’s” behavior on May Day, a number of veteran CAM volunteers – including Mechanic – moved immediately to isolate him from new and less experienced street medics, to monitor his behavior closely and to broadly urge the practice of good security culture.

But without a smoking gun, they were unwilling to expose him publicly. The chill from veteran street medics didn’t discourage “Danny” from continuing to reach out and show up to actions.

On May 11, a week and a half later and as local organizers were scrambling to find housing for out-of-town protesters traveling in for the demonstrations, he emailed Mechanic directly for information about housing that other groups or collectives might be offering. “I have a group of friends in need and I wanted some direction,” he wrote.

On May 20, 2012, at a large protest against the NATO Summit, CAM street medics demanded that he remove his medic markings after he again ignored CAM street operations protocols by deserting his partner to sprint after a group of protesters clad in black clothes.

“Danny” sent emails to individual members of CAM’s listserv – but almost never to the larger listserv – strategically for the next year, seeking information about upcoming demonstrations and meetings. The off-list queries continued to raise red flags with CAM members he contacted, some of whom had never met him and did not know who he was.

When we asked “Danny” at the 2013 May Day rally to confirm his name and identity as a CPD officer, he insisted he was “Danny Edwards” and claimed to be a friend of a local activist.

That’s not how the activist described “Danny” to CAM volunteers at a street medic training before the NATO protests last spring. At that training, he told CAM members that “Danny” had recently befriended him, and he raised concerns there about “Danny’s” interest in topics ranging from Molotov cocktails to property damage.

“NATO 5” Connection

According to court documents released in the months after the NATO Summit protests, “Danny”is one of the undercover officers at the heart of the “NATO 5” criminal cases. He’s mentioned in the pre-NATO Summit pre-emptive raid search warrant documents as “Undercover Officer C,” and is also cited by his given name in court documents for one of the NATO defendants, Sebastian “Sabi” Senakiewicz, as a potential trial witness.

We tried to question “Danny” about his undercover activities on May 6 at a house that had a sheet of paper with his given name and phone number taped to the front door. While he admitted he was, in fact, the named police officer he’d denied being just five days earlier, he declined to answer our questions.

“Danny’s” post-NATO activities raise a key question: Why keep an undercover officer in play as a volunteer street medic in a nonviolent health-care project almost a year after the NATO protests that ostensibly put him into motion as a police spy in the first place?

It’s virtually impossible to say from the official record. That’s because the CPD and Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez have fought tooth and nail in court for almost a year to prevent defense attorneys in the remaining NATO cases from learning more about the scope and character of police spying on political activity leading up to last year’s NATO Summit.

At a “NATO 3” status hearing on May 14, 2013, prosecutors again opposed disclosing information about the wider scope of police spying on Chicago’s activist groups (as they have before in official court filings) in the months leading up to the NATO Summit. Defense attorneys rebutted in open court – as they did in writing earlier in their April 30, 2013, “Reply to the State’s Response to Defendants’ Motion to Compel” – that this information remains directly relevant to the NATO cases because it would broaden the context of the arrests of the NATO 3 and the CPD’s pre-NATO spying efforts targeting the activist community.

Broader Context

Police spying in recent years has targeted peace groups, environmentalists and the Occupy movement, a focus on protest as a potential flashpoint of “terrorism” that sometimes has disastrous consequences. By way of example, in Boston, local police focused their attention on the political activism of local residents at the same time they missed the threat posed by the Boston Marathon bombers.

And law enforcement has also demonstrated a disturbing pattern of working undercover to create crime to prosecute crime. Notable cases like the “Cleveland 4” fit into a pattern that journalist Arun Gupta has described as law enforcement’s “war of entrapment against the Occupy movement.”

Law enforcement infiltration in Chicago in the run-up to the 2012 NATO Summit unfolded most publicly with the use of at least two undercover cops who went by the names “Mo” and “Nadia.”

Both were regular fixtures at a spring 2012 encampment to try to prevent the closure of the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic on Chicago’s south side, one of six public mental health clinics slated for closure by city officials and hardly a flashpoint of “potential terrorist activity.” They also showed up at one point at an independent media center organized to cover the NATO protests and at numerous other documented locales in the two and a half months before the NATO Summit.

“Red Squad” 2.0 Rolling Back into Town?

Ongoing police spying a year after the NATO meeting by “Danny” – and potentially others – raises a real alarm among activists, including CAM street medics, whose national community traces its origins to the Medical Presence Project of the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR).

MCHR was first formed in 1964 to provide medical assistance to the civil rights movement. Its Chicago-based volunteers, who also provided medical aid at protests organized by peace projects and student groups opposed to the Vietnam War, were among thousands of civilians spied on by the CPD’s notorious Red Squad.

“The CPD’s decision to plant an undercover police spy in Chicago Action Medical is outrageous, but sadly, comes as no surprise,” said CAM street medic Dick Reilly in an interview. “The CPD has a long and sordid history of surveillance and infiltration of labor, peace and social justice groups dating back to the 1886 railroading of the Haymarket defendants – efforts that led to the creation of Chicago’s infamous Red Squad. Over a hundred years later, the cops are clearly still at it.”

For Reilly, CAM’s ongoing infiltration threatens core freedoms that range from the privacy rights of the people they treat to police officials’ ongoing assault on dissent in the city.

“When the CPD targets a volunteer medical project like CAM – which seeks to provide basic first aid to people exercising their democratic rights and whose primary principle is to ‘do no harm’ – it underscores the lengths to which they’ll go to criminalize dissent, suppress resistance and pander to the agenda of the political and economic elites they actually serve and protect,” Reilly said.

The Chicago Red Squad’s abuses of basic constitutional rights were so egregious – targets included the Parent-Teachers’ Association and the League of Women Voters – that a federal court slapped the city with a consent decree in 1982 that expressly barred politically motivated police spying unless police could show at least some evidence of criminal intent on the part of the targets of their spying.

The city was finally able to win relief from the consent decree in January 2001, after arguing for years constitutional protections thwarted its ability to investigate gangs and “terrorism.”

The consent decree’s demise hasn’t kept the CPD out of hot water for spying on political projects, either, beginning as early as 2002. Were the old consent decree still in place, CAM members believe “Danny’s” undercover spying on their work over the past year would have been illegal.

McCarthy’s Spy-Ops Background at NYPD, Newark PD

Just before he was sworn in as Chicago’s new mayor in May of 2011, Rahm Emanuel – a former US Congressman and chief of staff for President Obama – announced the appointment of new police superintendent Garry McCarthy. Three months later, McCarthy created an intelligence-gathering unit tasked to perform “counter-terrorism” work in preparation for the May 2012 NATO meetings.

A career New York cop, McCarthy is no stranger to the use of systematic police spying.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a contentious track record in this arena, prompting the implementation of New York’s own version of Chicago’s Red Squad consent decree – the Handschu Decree – while McCarthy was climbing up the NYPD’s ranks to a senior command position.

It wasn’t long after he formally assumed the mantle of CPD superintendent in 2011 that McCarthy drew fire for allowing the latest iteration of New York’s police spy ring to operate in Newark, NJ, where he had served as police chief before taking the position as CPD’s top dog.

McCarthy also served as an NYPD commander when the police set up spy rings before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City and during “CIA on the Hudson,” the joint NYPD/CIA project that was set up and run by former CIA Deputy Director for Operations David Cohen to “map the human terrain” of New York City’s Islamic community.

Targeting Street Medics

Volunteer street medics have historically been an attractive target for undercovers.

CAM street medic Scott Mechanic met “Anna,” before she was outed as a police infiltrator, an FBI informant who used her position as a street medic to befriend and entrap environmental activists. One of those activists, Eric McDavid, is serving a 20-year sentence in a case built around Anna’s testimony and her reported entrapment activities.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Mechanic was also a street medic volunteer at New Orleans’ Common Ground Collective, where he and dozens of other volunteer health-care providers ran into Brandon Darby, an agent provocateur and FBI informant at the heart of another entrapment case, this one against David McKay and Bradley Crowder.

“These kinds of informants and undercover police represent a real threat to activists, in no small part because they’re committed to manufacturing crime where none exists to terrorize the public and justify their abuses of our right to dissent,” said Mechanic. “This Chicago cop’s infiltration of our group raises real questions about police intrusion into protesters’ medical histories – and it’s a truly despicable example of exploiting people’s caregivers as part of the national campaign to criminalize dissent.”

Convergence of the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism

As a Chicago cop, the CPD officer who infiltrated CAM has worked on narcotics and gang cases, including as an undercover officer.

Given the growing conflation of the “War on Drugs” with the “War on Terrorism,” which is increasingly married to a War on Dissent, it’s not surprising that the Chicago police officer who infiltrated CAM would segue into COINTELPRO-style undercover work. By the 1990’s, the CPD was listing dissidents by alleged political affiliation in their gang database, in tandem with then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s claim that the Red Squad Consent Decree shackled cops’ ability to investigate both gangs and “terrorism.”

Shahid Buttar, executive director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, points to the delayed notice search warrants enabled by Section 213 of the USA PATRIOT Act – presented to the public as a counter-terrorism tool – as a key example of the War on Drugs’ convergence with the War on Terrorism.

“Both the War on Drugs and the War on Terrorism have long represented cash cows for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, from the FBI all the way down to local police departments,” Buttar said in an interview. “Beyond the serial corruption of agencies pimping public fears to inflate their budgets, many particular powers claimed as necessary for one ‘war’ are actually used more in the other.”

The Chicago Police Department did not respond to our phone calls or emails about this story.

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 09:55
By Steve Horn and Chris Geovanis, Truthout | Report

Find this story at 21 May 2013

© 2012 Truthout

A high-stakes game is being played in the United States today called, “To Catch a Terrorist.” The public need not worry, though, as the risks are surprisingly low. In this game, the police claim to prevent nefarious terrorist plots, while in reality they’re taking credit for foiling the same victimless crimes they themselves manufacture. This deceitful strategy is used primarily on Muslims and Arab-Americans, but a string of recent cases shows how political dissidents are also being entrapped, both figuratively and literally.

Last year, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez dusted off a rarely used 11-year-old Illinois State terrorism statute and, with great fanfare, charged several dissidents with crimes of terrorism on the eve of a national political protest. The NATO 5, as they became known, have since garnered widespread support in Chicago, across the country, and around the world.

This week marks a dramatic shift in their lengthy prosecution. Attorneys for three of the defendants, most of whom are members of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), will be filing briefs today, January 25th in order to challenge the constitutionality of the state terrorism statute under which four of the activists were originally charged. If the court finds the law to be unconstitutional, the three highest profile cases could go to trial in September with no terrorism charges, fewer felonies to defend against, and facing a far less ominous sentence than the current 40 years in prison.

* * *

Wednesday, May 16th wasn’t particularly memorable, except that it fell three days prior to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit, a National Special Security Event (NSSE) held in Chicago from May 19th-21st. It was the first time in 13 years that NATO member states had met on U.S. soil, well before the 9/11 attacks, and the Obama administration funneled millions of federal taxpayer dollars into a massive “security” apparatus to ensure a seamless summit.

Ever since the NSSE designation was established by President Clinton in 1998, it has been synonymous with heavy surveillance and infiltration of political groups, police brutality, preemptive raids and mass arrests. The NATO summit in Chicago last spring would be no exception.

In the dark of night with guns drawn, the police used “no-knock” search warrants to break down the doors of an apartment building in the Bridgeport district of Chicago at approximately 11:30 pm that Wednesday. Unbeknownst to the thousands of anti-NATO activists in the city at the time, and members of the local NLG chapter which was providing legal support for the demonstrations, the police arrested nine activists, seizing computers, cell phones, political literature and other personal belongings from the building. Police also searched neighboring apartments and questioned residents, allegedly repeatedly calling one of the tenants a “Commie faggot.”

The Chicago Police Department (CPD) refused to acknowledge they had arrested anyone in Bridgeport that night, let alone divulge where they were being held. It wasn’t until the following afternoon that NLG attorneys determined nine activists had been taken to the Organized Crime Division of the CPD. Within 72 hours, six of the nine were released without charges.

On Saturday, the first day of the NATO summit, the three remaining activists were brought before Cook County Judge Edward Harmening on charges of possessing an incendiary device, material support for terrorism, and conspiracy to commit terrorism. The prosecutor wasted no time in labeling the defendants as “self-proclaimed anarchists,” as if to inherently equate thought crime and political ideology with criminal activity or terrorism, though Assistant State’s Attorney Matthew Thrun provided no evidence to substantiate his hyperbole. Thrun accused the three defendants — Brian Jacob Church, who was 20 at the time, and Jared Chase and Brent Betterly, who were both 24 — with preparing to commit “terrorist acts of violence and destruction directed against different targets in protest to the NATO summit”:

Specifically, plans were made to destroy police cars and attack four CPD stations with destructive devices, in an effort to undermine the police response to the conspirators’ other planned action for the NATO summit. Some of the proposed targets included the Campaign Headquarters of U.S. President Barack Obama, the personal residence of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel (sic), and certain downtown financial institutions.

Although no evidence of the allegations was provided, Assistant State’s Attorney Thrun asked the court to impose a bond of $5 million for each defendant. Judge Harmening rejected his request, but was apparently convinced enough by the State’s proffer to impose an equally unreasonable amount of $1.5 million bond each. The prosecutor and judge likely reasoned that such a prohibitively high bond would keep the three defendants imprisoned until trial. They were right. Church, Chase, and Betterly have been held in Cook County Jail for more than eight months now, with their trial currently scheduled to begin on September 16, 2013, more than a year after they were arrested.

Shortly after tracking down Church, Chase, and Betterly, the Guild’s legal team discovered two more activists — Sebastian Senakiewicz and Mark Neiweem — who were also surreptitiously arrested on terrorism-related charges. Senakiewicz, 24, was arrested at his Chicago home the day after the Bridgeport raid and charged with falsely making a terrorist threat, another felony under the State’s 2001 terrorism statute. Neiweem, a 28-year-old local activist, was arrested the same day, but in a far more sensationalized way. In broad daylight, he was snatched by numerous undercover police officers from Michigan Avenue, one of the busiest streets in the city, undoubtedly aimed at inducing fear in those witnessing the aggressive apprehension. Neiweem was slapped with felony solicitation and attempted possession of an incendiary device, but was not charged under the State’s terrorism statute as the others were.

NLG attorneys representing Senakiewicz and Neiweem argued at their bond hearing that they were denied their Constitutional due process rights by being refused a hearing within 48 hours. Senakiewicz was allegedly held for 68 hours without seeing a judge or being able to access a phone or his attorney, who finally got to visit Senakiewicz only minutes before his bond hearing. Neiweem was allegedly held for 66 hours before getting a hearing, and was denied medical treatment in detention. According to the NLG, on several occasions Neiweem was forced to choose between seeing his attorney and going to the hospital.

Once before a judge, the State’s Attorney painted Senakiewicz and Neiweem as violent criminals and convinced the court to impose similarly high bonds of $750,000 and $500,000 respectively. Unable to raise sufficient funds, Senakiewicz and Neiweem also remain incarcerated at Cook County Jail.

But the terrorism-related charges weren’t the only threads connecting the NATO 5 cases together. At least two undercover Chicago police officers are also believed to have been integral to each defendant’s arrest and prosecution. Shortly after the Bridgeport raid, Occupy Chicago activists began piecing together a CPD spying operation that had lasted for months before the NATO summit. As early as March, two assumed activists who went by the names “Mo” and “Gloves” began working with the Occupy Chicago movement. On April 13th, at least one of them was arrested with a small group of Occupy Chicago activists, who had held a demonstration with STOP (Southside Together Organizing for Power) in order to keep open the Woodlawn Mental Health Clinic, which had been scheduled for closure by Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

By the time Church, Chase and Betterly arrived in Chicago around May Day, Mo and Gloves had fully ingratiated themselves in the ranks of the Occupy movement and were supposedly involved in helping plan the NATO demonstrations. By contrast, the three activists from Florida were unfamiliar with the political terrain in Chicago and, more than most, were vulnerable to manipulation by two unsuspected undercover cops.

While little is publicly known about the interactions between Church, Chase, and Betterly and the infiltrators, we do know that Mo and Gloves were arrested with the nine activists the night of the Bridgeport raid. For the past six months, defense attorneys have been poring over trillions of bytes of recorded and written information, an overwhelming amount of data that was dumped on them by the prosecution, thereby significantly complicating and hampering the discovery process.

Of course, that’s part of the game… hiding the ball in plain sight, especially if the ingredients of entrapment are present. The defense wants to know how instructive Mo and Gloves might have been in getting the three to engage in the alleged criminal behavior. Did the undercover cops or their federal counterparts instigate the idea to use Molotov cocktails? How dependent were the three activists on Mo and Gloves to execute the plan? Answers to these questions would better enable the attorneys for Church, Chase, and Betterly to mount an entrapment defense, but by contrast the lack of answers will make that effort much more difficult.

To successfully assert an entrapment defense, the accused must show by a preponderance of the evidence that they were induced or coerced to commit the crime. By no means is this easy to do in a court of law. In fact, no terrorism charges since 9/11 have been beaten based on an entrapment defense, though there have been numerous cases involving undercover police and paid informants.

Three activists were charged with federal terrorism-related crimes during the 2008 Republican convention protests in St. Paul for possession of unused Molotov cocktails. And, in advance of May Day protests last year, five Occupy Cleveland activists were arrested and charged with attempting to blow up a bridge with fake explosives, supplied by the FBI. In each of these cases, paid FBI informants cultivated relationships with activists in order to carry out plans that would never have been hatched or developed without law enforcement participation.

The entrapment defense, however, opens the door for prosecutors to argue that Church, Chase, and Betterly had the propensity to commit the crime. And, while the State’s Attorney must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the three were predisposed, that open door is still a serious concern for the defense.

With the discovery process scheduled to wrap up by February 25th, the defense is continuing to push for more information, especially related to the federal government. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is mentioned in the State’s Attorney’s proffer and the defense wants to know the extent of the agency’s involvement. The FBI is commonly integral to these types of criminal investigations, as the lead counter-intelligence agency for NSSEs. However, the FBI chose not to bring federal charges and has tried to downplay its involvement in the case.

Right now, though, the focus for the defense is challenging the IL State terrorism statute, 720 ILCS 5/29D. Indicating early on that it intended to question the basis of the charges being brought by the State’s Attorney, the defense is now preparing to file its initial brief today, January 25th. Attorneys will argue that the terrorism statute is so vague as to be unconstitutional on its face and as applied against their clients. The goal of the legal challenge is not only to dismiss terrorism charges against the NATO defendants, but also to prevent the State’s Attorney from using a flawed criminal statute against others in the future.

“The State’s Attorney is using sensational terrorism charges to justify the extensive investigation against Occupy Chicago, including months of infiltration as well as this expensive and ongoing prosecution,” said Sarah Gelsomino, who is representing Church as an attorney with the People’s Law Office. “We intend to show that the State’s terrorism statute is bad law that should be stricken.”

The State’s Attorney will have until February 15th to reply to the defendants’ challenge. Cook County Judge Thaddeus L. Wilson, who is presiding over the case, is expected to rule some time after February 25th, when the defense files its final brief in the pre-trial challenge. If the IL State terrorism statute is found to be unconstitutional, either facially or as applied, the defendants’ highest-level felonies could be thrown out. However, that would not necessarily mean their cases would be dismissed entirely. When Church, Chase, and Betterly were finally indicted by grand jury on June 12th, the State’s Attorney had tacked on eight more felonies, including additional counts of possession of an incendiary device, attempted arson, solicitation to commit arson, conspiracy to commit arson and two counts of unlawful use of a weapon, for a total of eleven charges each. Prosecutors have been known to overcharge in criminal cases as a means of getting at least some of the charges to stick. It’s difficult to deny that such a strategy is being used in this case.

Though their cases and situations are different than the three most seriously charged, Senakiewicz and Neiweem are getting the same level of support from activists in Chicago and elsewhere around the country. Neiweem is a local activist who has been targeted before by police for his lawful political activity. On at least one occasion since his incarceration, Neiweem allegedly has been badly beaten and hospitalized by Cook County Sheriff jail guards, and allegedly has been repeatedly held in isolation. Senakiewicz, an activist and Polish immigrant living in Chicago who was facing up to 15 years in prison, accepted a plea bargain in November, in which he agreed to a single terrorism-related felony, and a 4-year prison sentence. Although the prosecution led Senakiewicz to believe he would only have to serve a 120-day sentence in an out-of-county “boot camp” for non-violent offenders, he was ultimately ineligible for the program and will be forced to serve the entire sentence. Supporters also fear his immediate deportation upon release.

“Honestly, how serious was this case?” asked Guild attorney Jeff Frank, who represented Senakiewicz (also known as “Sabi”) with fellow NLG attorney Melinda Power. “Sabi is guilty of imprudent language,” said Frank. “That’s hardly grounds to extract a guilty plea for a serious felony, but that’s how Ms. Alvarez has chosen to spend the taxpayers’ resources.”

So, why were the NATO 5 arrested in such a spectacular way, just days before a controversial summit in Chicago? And, why are they being used as pawns in a high-stakes game of “To Catch a Terrorist?” Maybe the answers partly lie in the questions.

The motivations are actually just beneath the surface. The State’s Attorney’s aforementioned need to justify the investigation, infiltration and prosecution of the NATO 5 is likely a primary impulse. The tactic of preemptive police raids, a common trademark of NSSE law enforcement operations used to chill imminent protest activity, cannot be discounted. But, there is also a coordinated effort by local and federal officials to perpetuate a billion-dollar “protection racket,” in which law enforcement uses an aggressive counter-terrorism approach to both instill fear in the public and then, after solving the “crime,” induce the perception of safety. It’s also reasonable to assume that the NATO terrorism cases are an extension of the ongoing efforts to monitor and undermine the Occupy Wall Street movement. Perhaps there are elements of each in the effort to prosecute the NATO 5.

Regardless of the motivations, the NATO 5 case is indicative of a growing trend in law enforcement strategies used during political demonstrations: entrapping dissidents in manufactured terrorism crimes. As Glenn Greenwald recently wrote in the Guardian:

The most significant civil liberties trend of the last decade, in my view, is the importation of War on Terror tactics onto U.S. soil, applied to U.S. citizens… It should be anything but surprising that the FBI — drowning in counter-terrorism money, power and other resources — will apply the term ‘terrorism’ to any group it dislikes and wants to control and suppress.

Disclosure: Kris Hermes is a member of the National Lawyers Guild.

May 24, 2013
Posted: 01/25/2013 4:01 pm

Find this story at 25 May 2013

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau’s more ethically murky practices

Craig Monteilh: ‘It is all about entrapment.’ Photograph: The Washington Post

Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

“They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did,” Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of “confidential informants” in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist “attacks” at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant’s criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. “The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It’s such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It’s fixed,” he said.

But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. “They don’t have the humility to admit a mistake,” he said.

Monteilh’s story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian alter ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County’s Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.

Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.

By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.

It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. “It was a bad time in my life,” he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.

Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.

Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. “Paul Allen said: ‘Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America’,” Monteilh said.

The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.

Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.

“Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: ‘OK, now start to ask questions’.”

Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.

He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. “The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say “jihad”,” he said.

Of course, the chats were recorded.

In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.

Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not there. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.

He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County’s Muslim population.

He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.

None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.

At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: “Kevin is God.”

Monteilh’s own attitude evolved into something very similar. “I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: ‘You are an untouchable’,” he said.

But it was not always easy. “I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist,” he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.

But he was wrong about being untouchable.

Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.

A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.

But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.

He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)

What is not in doubt is that Monteilh’s identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.

The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden “an angel”. That was Monteilh’s work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.

Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. “I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot,” he said. The FBI’s charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.

Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.

That has now put Monteilh’s testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.

The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.

But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh’s lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.

In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.

Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI’s use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.

FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh’s – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.

In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: “Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again.”

Paul Harris in Irvine, California
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012 16.50 GMT

Find this story at 20 March 2012

© 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

As the Obama administration faces criticism for the Justice Department’s spying on journalists and the IRS targeting of right-wing organizations, newly released documents show how the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police forces partnered with corporations to spy on Occupy protesters in 2011 and 2012. Detailed in thousands of pages of records from counter terrorism and law enforcement agencies, the spying monitored the activists’ online usage and led to infiltration of their meetings. One document shows an undercover officer was dispatched in Arizona to infiltrate activists organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. We’re joined by Matt Rothschild of The Progressive, who tackles the surveillance in his latest article, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

Watch Part Two of interview here
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end our show with a look at newly revealed documents showing how police partnered with corporations to monitor the Occupy Wall Street movement. DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy have obtained thousands of pages of records from counterterrorism and law enforcement agencies that detail how so-called “fusion centers” monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. These fusion centers are comprised of employees from municipal, county and federal counterterrorism and homeland security entities, as well as local police departments, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.

The documents show how fusion center personnel spied on Occupy protesters, monitored their Facebook accounts, and infiltrated their meetings. One document showed how the Arizona fusion center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing protests around the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, the secretive group that helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. The undercover officer apparently worked for the benefit of the private entity ALEC despite being on the public payroll.

AMY GOODMAN: Democracy Now! reached out to the Phoenix Police Department to join us on the show, but they declined our request. Sergeant Trent Crump in the media relations department said in an email, quote, “Occupy Phoenix presented itself with a great deal of civil unrest over a long period of time. We monitored available Intel all the time, as it is used for Intel-driven policing. Intel dictated resources and response tactics to address, mitigate, and manage this ongoing activity which was very fluid and changing day-to-day. This approach ensured that citizens can exercise their civil rights, while we protect the community at the same time,” they said.

Well, for more, we go to Matt Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine, wrote the cover story for the June issue of the magazine, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street,” the piece drawing heavily on the documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press. Matt Rothschild is also the author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression.

Matt, welcome to Democracy Now! Just lay out what you have found.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Hey, Amy. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, I mean, these documents from the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press show that law enforcement and Homeland Security have equated protesters, left-wing protesters, as terrorists. They have diverted enormous amounts of resources from counterterrorism efforts to spy on these local protesters, and then they’ve collaborated with the private sector, some of the very institutions—banks—that these protesters were aiming at. And as you read in that statement from the Phoenix Police Department, the effort was to mitigate these protests. I mean, why is law enforcement, why is Homeland Security, in the business of mitigating protests?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to a response that we received from the Phoenix Police Department when we reached them for comment. And they said that they were not treating Occupy protesters as potential terrorists. They said, “[W]e are an all hazards incident management team, we have gathered information at all types of events [such as] Superbowl, World Series, SB 1070 protest etc.” So can you say how it is that their monitoring of Occupy protesters differed qualitatively from the other events that the Phoenix Police Department named?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Sure. Well, they’re using resources from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, the Arizona fusion center, and they’re using Homeland Defense personnel in the Phoenix Police Department to track Occupy activists. So, it’s a little disingenuous of them to say they’re not treating these protesters as terrorists when they’re using their own anti-terrorist personnel to spend a lot of time simply tracking these activists. One of the police officers who was on the Homeland Defense Bureau of the Phoenix Police Department said she was primarily spending her time tracking Occupy activists on social media.

AMY GOODMAN: We also asked the Phoenix police if law enforcement is infiltrating Occupy meetings. And he replied, quote, “Infiltrate? No. Attend open meetings? Yes.” Democracy Now! also asked Trent Crump if law enforcement tracked Occupy activists online. He replied, “Yes, we gather intel on a number of social media sites regularly.” So, what about this? And also, this issue of law enforcement monitoring the protests against ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, when we asked him this, he said, “Yes, public safety.” Your response?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, they not only monitored the ALEC protests in late November 2011, but they also sent a face sheet to the security personnel for ALEC, a face sheet of the faces and names and identities of Occupy protesters who have been doing some activism in the Phoenix area, to make the ALEC security personnel aware of who may be coming to their protests. They were also tracking—

AMY GOODMAN: So the police are working with the companies and the organizations.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Absolutely. Yeah, they were working with security for the American Legislative Exchange Council. They were also letting security know when Jesse Jackson was going to be in town to join an Occupy protest and an ALEC protest. Is that really their job to be passing information on to these private entities?

And then, with some of the bank protests that Occupy Phoenix was planning, they were giving downtown banks all sorts of information. “Give downtown banks everything they need.” That was one internal memo from the Phoenix Police Department, when it was a day of protest against these banks and Occupy was urging the bank customers to cut up their credit cards from these banks. And which banks are we talking about? We’re talking about Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase—some of the very targets that Occupy had been protesting against. So, the question is: Who are the police department working for? Are they working for citizens? Are they working for the private sector? Are they working for the banks?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Can you put—Matt Rothschild, can you put this in a wider historical context? Is this kind of surveillance unprecedented in the U.S.? And what accounts for its occurrence during Occupy in the way that you describe?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, unfortunately, it’s not unprecedented. There’s a terrible history of law enforcement and the FBI spying on left-wing activists, going back to the COINTELPRO program of the FBI in the ’60s and ’70s, where they infiltrated the Black Panther movement and the American Indian Movement. But interestingly, after those revelations came out, there were guidelines imposed by the Justice Department itself, the so-called Levi guidelines. Edward Levi was the attorney general under the Ford administration who said you can’t go spying on and infiltrating activist groups in this country unless there’s a predicate of criminal activity. Well, after 9/11, the Bush administration and Ashcroft, his attorney general, completely destroyed the Levi guidelines and let law enforcement do any kind of infiltration they want, without any necessity for any hint of criminal activity on the part of the activists.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, you’ve called for the resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder. Why?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, for a number of reasons, Amy, first of all, for this scandal about investigating reporters. I think that’s outrageous. We had more than a hundred AP reporters and editors that the Justice Department was gathering information on, and now we have the revelation about the Fox News reporter James Rosen, who was being accused of being a co-conspirator under the Espionage Act of 1917 simply for doing his reporting job. Also, the attorney general has been essentially waging war on whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.

And on top of that, let’s remember, this attorney general, Eric Holder, has been rationalizing the assassination program that the Obama administration has been engaging in, saying that a drone can drop a bomb on a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world, and that U.S. citizen will already have had due process simply because the Obama administration itself or the president or the secretary of defense calls that person a terrorist. Now, that’s not due process, and that’s not what the Justice Department should be doing. Certainly the attorney general, the chief law enforcement officer of this country, should know better than that.

AMY GOODMAN: Matthew Rothschild, isn’t he just carrying out President Obama’s policies?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, he very well might be, and then we have a more serious problem. We have a serious problem at the very top with a president of the United States, again, like George W. Bush, engaging in illegal activity.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you for being with us. We’re going to do part two of the interview and post it at democracynow.org. Matt Rothschild, editor and publisher of The Progressive magazine, wrote the cover story for the June issue, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.”

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Find this story at 22 May 2013

We host a discussion on policing and the Occupy Wall Street movement with Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which helped organize calls among police chiefs on how to respond to the Occupy protests, and with Norm Stamper, the former police chief of Seattle, who recently wrote an article for The Nation magazine titled “Paramilitary Policing from Seattle to Occupy Wall Street.” “Trust me, the police do not want to be put in this position. And cities really need to ask themselves, is there another way to handle this kind of conflict?” Wexler says. Stamper notes, “There are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, ‘bad apples.’ What both of them have in common is that they ‘occupy,’ as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.” We are also joined by Stephen Graham, author of “Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism,” and by retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer Tuesday morning in New York after the police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment. “I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.” [includes rush transcript]
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, a number of questions have been raised about how much cities across the country have coordinated their actions against Occupy Wall Street. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan recently admitted in an interview with the BBC that she and leaders participated in a conference call.

MAYOR JEAN QUAN: I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same situation, where what had started as a political movement and a political encampment ended up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them. And what I think you’re starting to see is that the Occupy movement is looking for more stability. I spent a lot of last week talking to peaceful demonstrators, ones who wanted to separate themselves in my city away from the anarchist groups who had been looking for a confrontation with the police.

AMY GOODMAN: The conference calls were organized by the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group. For a discussion on policing and the Occupy Wall Street movement around the country, we’re joined by two people. Chuck Wexler is the director of the Police Executive Research Forum. And Norm Stamper is with us, the former police chief of Seattle, who recently wrote an article for The Nation magazine, titled “Paramilitary Policing from Seattle to Occupy Wall Street.”

I want to start with Norm Stamper, because you just may have heard Dorli say, “Thank you, Norm Stamper,” as she got pepper-sprayed, today, remembering what it was like in 1999, as well, at the Battle of Seattle, at the time when you were presiding over the police actions. Your thoughts today?

NORM STAMPER: Well, we made huge mistakes back in 1999, and I’m afraid they’re being repeated today across the country, in Seattle, in Oakland, and in all other cities where there have been confrontations between the police and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Norm Stamper, in your article you mention that you think that there are institutional problems, structural problems in policing, that no matter who the political leaders are or what the top brass are, that these problems continue to crop up and appear to be getting worse.

NORM STAMPER: I certainly do believe that. I think the drug war, which has put police officers against young people and poor people and people of color, the war on terrorism, the domestic dimensions of that war, have all served to increase the militarization of America’s police forces. And this is particularly tragic because, prior to these developments, we were on a path to create what I would call authentic partnerships with the community. That means no more unilateral decision making. It means, for example, today, police officers and Occupy movement leaders understanding the diffusion of that leadership, getting together and carving out rules of engagement, if you will, that will help protect public safety, public health, and also assure civil liberties, human rights and some degree of social justice.

AMY GOODMAN: As I said, we’re also joined on the phone by Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum that coordinated the conference call with mayors and police officials around the country. Can you talk about what’s happening today—the Occupy Oakland, the massive police response, the kind of police response we saw in Seattle with the pepper-spraying of not only Dorli Rainey, but many other people directly in the face—the conversation that took place, and why you coordinated this call, Chuck?

CHUCK WEXLER: Well, yeah. Good morning.

But first of all, a correction: we did not coordinate the call with the mayors. It was simply with police chiefs. And it originated from Boston and Portland. The police chiefs in those cities asked to just compare notes.

You know, I think, you know, this movement has evolved since it started. It was very—you know, relatively peaceful. And quite frankly, I think a lot of the police officers had a lot in common with, you know, the demonstrators, in terms of the concerns about the economy and working-class people and so forth. But I think, you know, over time, in some cities, the nature of the demonstration has changed. But it’s hard to talk about it, you know, all over the United States, because I think you probably have—you know, it’s very idiosyncratic depending upon the city, depending upon the nature of who’s involved. But in some cities, it has—that the hand of the police has been forced by, you know, either violence or the changing nature of what’s been happening on the ground.

I’m not—you know, I don’t have the details about Oakland and Seattle and so forth. I can just tell you—and I know Norm Stamper would agree, at least insofar as we learned a lot from what happened in Seattle, when he was chief up there, about handling demonstrators. And I think the police are far more careful about not wanting to be drawn into something that really has nothing to do with them, and really trying as much as they can to exercise restraint, to use intermediaries, to reach out to the leaders of these Occupy movements. The challenge is, there aren’t really any leaders, or if there are leaders, they don’t want to be leaders. So it’s difficult to know who’s responsible, who’s in charge. But I think, you know, the police today are far more careful about exercising restraint—I mean, by and large. I mean, you have 17,000 police agencies in the country, so, you know, it’s hard to make generalizations. But I do think that—you know, when the first Occupy Wall Street movement started, and police saw what happened on the bridge and so forth, and the police sort of getting drawn into that, there’s been really a reluctance on the part of the police, you know, to want to move, unless absolutely necessary. And so, I think the political structure within these cities has played a big role in determining what kind of action the police are going to take.

AMY GOODMAN: Norm Stamper, your response?

NORM STAMPER: Well, I have great respect for Chuck, and I do believe that since 1999 and the Battle in Seattle there have been many changes. My concern is, many of those changes have been for the worse. The officers, for example, in Oakland were dressed as my police officers were in Seattle, which is, in effect, for full—in full battle gear. We were using military tactics. I authorized the use of chemical agents on nonviolent offenders. I thought I had good justification at that time. I did not. The police officer in me was thinking about emergency vehicles, fire trucks, aid cars being able to get through a key intersection. The police chief in me should have said, “This is wrong,” and vetoed that decision. I will regret that decision for the rest of my life. We took a military response to a situation that was fundamentally nonviolent, in which Americans were expressing their views and their values, and used tear gas on them. And that was just plain wrong.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, Chuck Wexler, I’d like to ask you about that, not only about this issue of the increased militarization, also that there have been other cities where law enforcement has taken a very different approach. In Philadelphia and Albany, the district attorney is refusing to—declining to prosecute cases of arrests of people who are being arrested for being in a park. But also, the way that the—some of the police forces are dealing with the press, and of the—because the press are supposed to be there to be able to be the eyes and ears of the public in these events, but increasingly you’re getting reporters arrested, removed, not allowed to be at the biggest flash points or to be able to take photos or to take camera shots of them.

CHUCK WEXLER: Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it’s—the police response is going to vary from city to city. But let me just kind of back up a little bit and respond to what Norm said. You know, we—you know, I have a lot of respect for Norm Stamper, too. We learned a lot. He’s very forthcoming with what went right and what went wrong with the Battle for Seattle, if you will. But, you know, in fairness, you know, you were faced, Norm, in a very difficult situation, and in fact, there really hadn’t been many demonstrations up ’til Seattle. I mean, prior to the Vietnam era, there was a big lag time. But what was—what does happen in some of these events is you can have 90 percent of the people are there peacefully, and you have this small contingent—and I think, Norm, what you had in Seattle is you had this group of anarchists that somehow was able to cause such disturbances that it forced a reaction, that perhaps was an overreaction, but I don’t think the police were prepared for it. And today, you know, the police struggle between these two extremes, between people who go to exercise their First Amendment rights and then people who are there to cause, you know, damage and destruction.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Norm Stamper, respond to that issue, why you still think you were wrong, that you’re taking issue with Chuck Wexler here, that given the situation in 1999 you now say you did the absolutely wrong thing.

NORM STAMPER: Well, for five years after I retired, I remember being on book tour and having people come up to me and say, “I was on the streets, and I’ve got to tell you, I was shocked at the behavior of the police.” And I asked them about what was particularly shocking about the behavior, and it all came back to me. It came back to my authorization of the use of chemical agents, a euphemism for tear gas or pepper spray, and the effect that that had from that moment on and throughout the week.

There is no question about what anarchists, by definition, or for that matter, even recreational rioters, who are simply sitting in a bar and see the action and get attracted to the downtown area—we had some of that—can help distract attention away from the cause itself and create major public safety issues for the police. Here’s my point: if the police and the community in a democratic society are really working hard—and it is hard work—to forge authentic partnerships rather than this unilateral, paramilitary response to these demonstrations, that the relationship itself serves as a shock absorber. Picture police officers helping to protect the demonstrators. Picture demonstrators saying, “We see people on the fringes, for example, who are essentially undemocratic in their tactics. And so, we need to work together to resolve that issue.” These resolutions are clearly not easy. One of the things that complicates the picture enormously is when a woman like Ms. Rainey is pepper-sprayed. When innocent people who are there to protest what I consider to be very legitimate grievances against corporate America, against a government that has, in many respects, been bought off by corporations, the police have a responsibility to be neutral. It should be apparent that I’m not neutral, but I’m no longer a cop. And police officers on the streets really do need to be neutral referees, and they need the help of their civilian, if I may use that term, partners.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking of neutral referees, I wanted to bring a judge into this discussion, retired New York Supreme Court Judge Karen Smith, who worked as a legal observer early Tuesday morning here in New York. I saw her right on the corner of Wall Street shortly after police raided the Occupy Wall Street encampment. Judge Smith, what did you see?

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Well, I arrived about 1:30, 1:40 in the morning, got out and walked to Dey and Broadway. And the police were in full riot gear. I mean, it was a paramilitary operation if there ever was one, I mean, which sets off—here it is, 1:30 in the morning, what we call a stealth eviction, 1:30 in the morning, and they were just lined up two blocks from—on either side from the park, so that nobody could get near, this solid wall of police.

I was wearing—and I brought this—a hat, which says the “National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer.” And as you can see, in color, it’s quite bright. And at night—

AMY GOODMAN: It’s fluorescent green.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): It’s fluorescent green. And then I was wearing it, and I had a pad and a pen, and I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested so we could follow them through the system and just observe what was going on. And as I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, “I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.” And he said, “Move on, lady.” And he kept pushing—they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she said—and she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head. And I walk over, and I say, “Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.” And he said, “Lady, do you want to get arrested?” And I said, “Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.” He said, “You want to get arrested?” And he pushed me up against the wall.

And, you know, it was late at night. There was a lot going on. People were—all of a sudden, there was like a cordon of police pushing everybody into Dey Street between Broadway and Church. And it seemed like they were setting everybody up to get arrested. And then they started—some people broke away, some of the police, and started running after people. I moved away and then decided that I needed to get on the other side. I received a call that there were things developing on Pine and Broadway, and so I moved all the way east to go around the police and then ended up on Pine and Broadway, which is really where I ran into you.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, of course, you had a personal interest, as well. Your son was also one of the participants in Occupy Wall Street.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, my son was a—he’s a staff person for SEIU 1199. And they were there in support. They were not going to get arrested, but they wanted to show the demonstrators and the occupiers that—and they’ve been supportive all along as one of the unions. And he was there. And I was watching carefully to make sure that he did not get hurt, as well. I was very concerned.

At Pine and Broadway, it was sort of a standoff. People were—there was a lot of confusion. People didn’t know what was going on. There were some people that may have sat on some police cars just in comfort, but nobody was—I heard later on reports—talk about objectivity of the press—you know, that they were jumping up and down and they were taunting the police. The only time I ever saw on—when I first got there on Dey and Broadway, they were just saying, “Shame on you,” you know, to the police, and—but that was it. And down on Pine and Broadway, at least until about 4:30 in the morning, I didn’t see any provocation whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to lose the satellite for Dorli—for Dorli Rainey in Seattle. But I wanted to ask you, Dorli, what did it feel like to be pepper-sprayed in the face? This dramatic photograph of you being helped by two people right afterwards.

DORLI RAINEY: Well, first of all, it’s very painful. And when they say there are no after effects, I still have a pain in my lungs, and my voice is kind of raspy. I don’t know how long that will last. But the thing really is not about me getting pepper-sprayed. It is a much bigger issue than that, and I would like everybody to keep that in mind, that while we’re getting pepper-sprayed, other issues are not being heard. And that’s my problem. I feel issues become a major focus to the detriment of the real issues that cause this whole problem.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And I’d like to ask Chuck Wexler, this whole issue of the police chiefs trying to exchange information, was there any involvement of the Department of Homeland Security or the federal officials in the discussions with the various police chiefs?

CHUCK WEXLER: Not on our conference call at all.

But, you know, if I can just say a few things just in response to the last conversations. You know, this is really the struggle that the police have. This is why, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I think what Norm was saying about the partnerships and intermediaries and communication is so important, because this is a no-win situation for the police, that, you know—and one of the things we’ve learned out of the ’60s and out of the, you know, Chicago Democratic convention, and all the ways in—from the South, and all of the ways the police have had to handle these kind of situations is, you know, a minimum amount—a use of restraint. And I think that’s the real challenge here. The police don’t want to be in this situation. And whatever you can do to have intermediaries, like the judge, whatever, be the people that are intervening rather than the police, I think it’s a real—it’s a no-win situation for most police departments. They have worked really hard to develop partnerships with the community, the community policing all of those things. And sometimes you have one officer that does something—forgive me—stupid, and it characterizes the entire police force. But I think, you know, if you look at the restraint that police use today versus what they used 10, 20, 30 years ago, it’s substantially less use of force. But there are still mistakes, and there are still officers that are going to act inappropriately. And I think—

AMY GOODMAN: Chuck Wexler, in New York, I mean, we saw a massive phalanx of police moving in. In the area where the judge was just describing, the police forced everyone out of the street onto the sidewalk and said, “Just get on the sidewalk!” They were screaming to everyone, “Get on the sidewalk!” As soon as people got on the sidewalk, they rushed them on the sidewalk up against the—up against the rails along the sidewalk. But I did want to ask you, how involved is FBI and Homeland Security in these discussions, Chuck Wexler?

CHUCK WEXLER: We haven’t had—they haven’t been involved—maybe they’re involved at the local level, but nationally, at least on our conference calls, I don’t think—they didn’t have a role.

JUAN GONZALEZ: There were some press reports that there were Homeland Security presentations urging that these arrests be conducted late at night.

CHUCK WEXLER: That may have been done at the city level. It wasn’t on our conference calls. We had that—no one from, you know, Homeland Security made that kind of presentation, nor—you know, we were really—we were just comparing notes. We were like, how are different cities trying to deal with this in the most civil way possible? You know, what are some of the strategies? In some cities, for example, they didn’t have the police directly involved. They had, you know, the sanitation people and Health and Human Services and folks like that on the front end. And that was interesting, because why—I mean, at the end of the day, why are the police the ones that own this issue? I mean, because the police really don’t want to be the ones dismantling these encampments. But, you know, why is it, if you ask—you should ask cities, why do we put the police in these areas? Because, you know, at the end of the day, people feel as though you need some kind of legal authority or someone who’s going to come in. But trust me, the police do not want to be put in this position. And cities really need to ask themselves, is there another way to handle this—you know, this kind of conflict?

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Karen Smith, you retired in 2010 as a Supreme Court judge, so you obviously have dealt, over many years, with the police department and police officials. Your sense—when we spoke a couple of days ago, you also talked about your sense that there was a really hostile or tense situation from the very beginning with how the police were responding to the protesters. Could you talk about that?

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, well, I don’t know if Mr. Stamper was the one who said this, but I think it was structural. You—at night, 1:00 in the morning, people dressed in riot gear. There were trucks, remember, lined up for the sanitation to just throw people’s things in—computers and everything. And now people, I’m told, they can’t get their stuff. There was a them and us. I, I mean, worked with police officers for years. There are very—I agree that there are very good ones. It’s not individuals. It’s a system that’s being set up of us and them.

And the other thing that needs to be brought out—and I think it was in the court case in front of Judge Stallman, who was a colleague of mine—is how often do you get the police and the state enforcing private property rights? The contradictions are tremendous, just that. I mean, as you pointed out in your article I read in some—and also even David Letterman last night, you know, points out, you know, it’s OK for prostitutes, drug dealers, and now we’re having our Christmas fair, where they’re putting up tents. You know, but that’s for profit. So that’s OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Wait, explain that, because maybe people in other parts of the country don’t understand.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Oh, at Christmas time in New York, and I think around the country, there are these little craft things that are set up for private businesses, and they put up tents, and they’re there—they have to leave by 11:00, but they’re—

AMY GOODMAN: Tents all over, for example, Union Square.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): All over Union Square.

JUAN GONZALEZ: In the parks, yes.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): In the parks, Columbus Circle. So that’s OK. But—and I don’t know what evidence was presented, because I wasn’t in court the other day, about the so-called sanitation violations that were the basis of the state using its authority to come in. But in the end, they were enforcing private property interests. And that’s really what—the message, I think, from the whole Occupy Wall Street’s about.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break and then come back to this discussion. And hopefully Ydanis Rodriguez will also be joining us, the New York City Council member who was arrested by police on Tuesday night, when they evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment. And right now, down at Wall Street, arrests have already started. We will also get a report from there. This is Democracy Now! Back in a minute.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Ryan Devereaux is on the phone with us right now, Democracy Now! reporter on the scene outside the New York Stock Exchange. Ryan, what’s happening at this point?

RYAN DEVEREAUX: I’ve made my way around the Financial District, and it looks like Occupy Wall Street protesters have blocked a number of intersections, sort of with the help of the NYPD and their barricades. Protesters have sat down in intersections. And right now, I’ve returned to the intersection of Wall Street and Hannover, about two blocks or so east of the New York Stock Exchange. About two dozen protesters or so had linked arms across the street, forming a line across [inaudible] the police blockade. They started chanting, “This is a nonviolent protest.” And then the police started shoving into them from behind as hard as they could and eventually broke through the line, knocking a number of protesters to the ground. The police then leaped onto the backs of the protesters. About three were arrested. And the blockade—the protesters’ line was cleared out of the streets and has now been replaced by scores of police officers in riot helmets. This is directly in front of the Deutsche Bank on Wall Street.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Ryan Devereaux right near Wall Street. And the plans for today, Karen Smith, a former New York State Supreme Court judge, you have felt that the media has mischaracterized what the plans are for the protest, the mass protest today.

JUDGE KAREN SMITH (ret.): Yes, particularly the statement that there were plans to take over the subways. There’s never been plans to take over the subways. What the plan was for the afternoon session, I’ve been told and been—and had meetings about so that I’m aware of it, is that they are planning to just have people give stories outside of subways, what they call soapboxes, on how the economics have affected them, and then to go into the subways and try to talk to the public on the subway trains on the way down to Foley Square later on, as to how this economy has affected them personally, to broaden the struggle on all—and they have what they call hubs throughout the city. There is no plan, and never has been, to take over any subway.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to bring Stephen Graham into the discussion right now. We started speaking to him yesterday. He wrote the book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. Just in from Britain, in Philadelphia. Can you talk about—as we were just speaking with the former police chief, Norm Stamper, of Seattle, and he oversaw the Battle of Seattle, how the police dealt with that—the militarization that we are seeing of police forces around our country?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Yes, well, it’s a longstanding process that has its roots in policies against drug use. It has its roots in the development of SWAT teams, Special Weapons and Tactics teams, and it has its use in some of the responses to the 1960s disturbances across the West, as well. And really, the effects of this, as we see in New York and elsewhere, is an increasing use of full-on riot squads, increasing use of non-lethal weapons, including things like acoustic systems that make it impossible for people to remain in spaces, including the pepper spray, including the tasers. And we have to remember, this is a really big growth industry that military and security corporations are investing heavily in terms of new research and development.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And Stephen Graham, what’s the market? You’re talking about a growth industry. What are we talking about here in terms of investment of dollars by—because there are so many, obviously, municipalities in the United States with their own police forces?

STEPHEN GRAHAM: Well, I mean, globally speaking, the so-called homeland security market is a real—is in real boom town—boom time, excuse me. I mean, in a world where actual defense contracts are often being reduced, a lot of the big companies are moving into civilian applications. They’re moving into these non-lethal weapons, moving into all of the technologies of crowd control and civilian disturbance control. And that has to be added to, of course, the much bigger markets that are growing in terms of broader questions of surveillance and security for buildings, for cities, for special events, as we see these systems established more and more in terms of everyday spaces and everyday bits of cities. So, I haven’t got figures at hand, I’m afraid, but it’s multibillion-dollar markets that are projected to grow globally at very, very high rates over the next 15 years, according to some of the recent market research reports.

AMY GOODMAN: Norm Stamper, if you’re still on the line with us, former police chief of Seattle, does what Stephen Graham is saying ring a bell for you? Does it resonate with your experience?

NORM STAMPER: Well, it certainly does. I might even add to that mix the increased privatization of the prison industry in the United States, where people are in fact making huge sums of money on the backs of those arrested for nonviolent drug offenses. And we’re talking really in the millions in this country. So I think there’s that that needs to be considered, as well.

About the non-lethal tools at the disposal of local law enforcement, many of those were developed in the wake of a controversial shooting. We understand that cops got a dangerous job. It’s delicate. It’s demanding. There are situations that call for life-and-death decision making, oftentimes with no real time to contemplate options and possibilities. Let’s find non-lethal alternatives to that firearm. So, the motive is good. The question is, to what extent are those non-lethal weapons being abused today? We have seen far too many examples of tasers, for example, used in situations where no force was necessary. It’s just simply a way to get somebody to move faster or to get out of a car when they’re passively resistant.

So, it’s important, I think, to understand the complexities of everything that we’re talking about. For example, there are many compassionate, decent, competent police officers who do a terrific job day in and day out. There are others who are, quote, “bad apples.” What both of them have in common is that they occupy, as it were, a system, a structure that itself is rotten. And I am talking about the paramilitary bureaucracy.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there, Norm Stamper, but I thank you so much for being with us, as well as Stephen Graham and Chuck Wexler and Dorli Rainey and Karen Smith.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Find this story at 17 November 2011

Emails released by Washington D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department about the Occupy Our Homes movement reveal frustration from one Bank of America intelligence analyst.

Occupy our Homes, a part of the Occupy movement that began in fall 2011, gained headlines as protesters fought back against home foreclosures across the country. Bank of America Senior U.S. Crime and Intelligence Analyst Amanda Velazquez offered weary commentary in an Occupy email she shared with MPD in September 2012.

“With all the Occupy DC leaders back home, it appears some concrete plans have materialized for the one-year anniversary. Our day for action is Tuesday, 2 October. I think there should be more participation that [sic] the last attempt against us; they seemed pretty excited …”

The anniversary plans included two days of “plays, music, art, political discussions and general assemblies” in Freedom Plaza, according to the email Velazquez forwarded. The occupiers had been forcibly evicted by police in February 2012.

…

The emails were requested as a part of the File for Aaron project.

by Tom Nash on May 1, 2013, 1 p.m.

Find this story at 1 May 2013

© 2013 MuckRock

On May 20, 2013, DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.” The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012.

The report also examines how fusion centers and other counter terrorism entities that have emerged since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have worked to benefit numerous corporations engaged in public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. While the report examines many instances of fusion center monitoring of Occupy activists nationwide, the bulk of the report details how counter terrorism personnel engaged in the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center (ACTIC, commonly known as the “Arizona fusion center”) monitored and otherwise surveilled citizens active in Occupy Phoenix, and how this surveillance benefited a number of corporations and banks that were subjects of Occupy Phoenix protest activity.

While small glimpses into the governmental monitoring of the Occupy Wall Street movement have emerged in the past, there has not been any reporting — until now — that details the breadth and depth with which the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.

REPORT Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street

REPORT APPENDIX open records materials cited in report.

PRESS RELEASE “New Report Details How Counter Terrorism Apparatus Was Used to Monitor Occupy Movement Nationwide”(PDF)

SOURCE MATERIALS almost 10,000 pages of open records materials are archived on DBA Press.

PRWATCH ARTICLE “Dissent or Terror: How Arizona’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate Interests, Turned on Occupy Phoenix”
Key Findings

Key findings of this report include:
How law enforcement agencies active in the Arizona fusion center dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing both protests of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the launch of Occupy Phoenix and how the work of this undercover officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that were the subjects of these demonstrations.
How fusion centers, funded in large part by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of Occupy Wall Street and other activist groups.
How the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has financed social media “data mining” programs at local law enforcement agencies engaged in fusion centers.
How counter terrorism government employees applied facial recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver’s license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in the effort to profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.
How corporations have become part of the homeland security “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships. The report examines multiple instances in which the counter terrorism/homeland security apparatus was used to gather intelligence relating to activists for the benefit of corporate interests that were the subject of protests.
How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, Chase Koch (Charles’ son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council have hired off-duty police officers — sometimes still armed and in police uniforms — to perform the private security functions of keeping undesirables (reporters and activists) at bay.
How counter terrorism personnel monitored the protest activities of citizens opposed to the indefinite detention language contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.
How the FBI applied “Operation Tripwire,” an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups. [Note: this issue was reported on exclusively by DBA/CMD in December, 2012.]

Government Surveillance of Occupy Movement
– by Beau Hodai, CMD/DBA

Find this story at 22 May 2013

Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s ‘Counter Terrorism’ Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street

Counter-terror police officers collaborated with corporate entities to combat protests. Undercover police officers monitored and tracked the Occupy movement. A right-wing corporate-backed group hired a police officer to help protect a conference. These are some of the details revealed in a new report published by the Center for Media and Democracy’s Beau Hodai, along with DBA Press. The revelations are based on government documents the group obtained.

The report, titled “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” is an eye-opening look into how the U.S. counter-terror apparatus was used to track the Occupy movement in 2011 and 2012 and also help protect the business entities targeted by the movement. The report specifically looks at the activities of “fusion centers,” or law enforcement entities created after 9/11 that transform local police forces into counter-terror units in partnership with federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. The fusion centers devoted a lot of time–to the point of “obsession,” the report notes–to monitoring the Occupy movement, particularly for any “threats” to public safety or health and to whether there were “extremists” involved in the movement.

The documents obtained for the report from government agencies reveal “a grim mosaic of ‘counter-terrorism’ agency operations and attitudes toward activists and other socially/politically-engaged citizens over the course of 2011 and 2012,” writes Hodai. He adds that these heavily-funded agencies indisputably view Occupy activists as “terrorist” threats. Additionally, Hodai writes that “this view of activists, and attendant activist monitoring/suppression, has been carried out on behalf of, and in cooperation with, some of the nation’s largest financial and corporate interests.”

Much of the report hones in on the Occupy Phoenix branch of the movement and Arizona counter-terrorism agents monitoring, tracking and cracking down on the protests.

For instance, when JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was planning on coming to Phoenix in October 2011, a “counter-terrorism” detective employed by the Phoenix Police Department’s Homeland Security Bureau exchanged information on potential protests with a JP Morgan Chase security manager. The detective, Jennifer O’Neill, received information on Dimon’s travel plans, and then shared information about Occupy Phoenix. O’Neill said that she and another officer had tracked the online activities of Occupy protesters to find out if they were planning to protest Dimon. No plans for protest were discovered by O’Neill, who also works with the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center, otherwise known as the Arizona fusion center.

Another similar example of how corporate entities were helped by counter-terrorism units of police forces also occurred in October 2011. Then, businesses–including banks–received alerts authored by the Arizona fusion center about planned protest activities. Similar alerts to banks were given in the run-up to the November 5 day of action labeled “Bank Transfer Day,” which encouraged people to move their money from corporate banks to more local financial institutions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation also engaged in similar activity, according to the report. “The bureau had been in the business of alerting banks (and related entities) tothe planned protest activity of OWS groups as early as August of 2011.”

The extent of law enforcement-corporate cooperation has also been taken a step further by the practice of corporations or right-wing corporate backed groups hiring officers for pay to police protests.

In late November-early December 2011, the largest Occupy Phoenix action took place outside of a conference held by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate-funded group that brings together right-wing lobbyist groups and conservative politicians to push model legislation in state legislatures. The protest was marred by police violence, with officers deploying pepper spray and pepper ball projectiles on activists and arresting 5. While the police portrayed the action as the work of violent anarchists, Hodai writes that this narrative of events had little grounding in reality.

Hodai reveals that the “tactical response unit” of officers working at the action was under the direction of Phoenix Police Department Sgt. Eric Harkins. What makes this noteworthy is that Harkins was “actually off-duty, earning $35 per hour as a private security guard employed by ALEC.” ALEC also “hired 49 active duty and 9 retired PPD officers to act as private security during the conference.” ALEC also employed off-duty police officers from Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department during another ALEC summit in May 2012.

The Center for Media and Democracy report also provides details on how police officers tracked and went undercover to monitor the Occupy movement. The report focuses on an undercover police officer who went by the name of “Saul DeLara,” who presented himself as a homeless Mexican activist. “DeLara” went to Occupy meetings and then reported back on their contents to the police.

The revelations are confirmation that, as the Center for Media and Democracy noted in a press release,”the nation’s post-September 11, 2001 counter terrorism apparatus has been applied to politically engaged citizens exercising their Constitutionally-protected First Amendment rights.”

May 21, 2013
AlterNet / By Alex Kane

Find this story at 21 May 2013

After the seizure of AP’s phone records, we ask if the US is still the land of the free for journalists and sources.

On May 10th, the Associated Press news agency received an email from the US Department of Justice saying that records of more than 20 phone lines assigned to its reporters had been secretly seized as part of an investigation into a government leak.
The government claimed it was a matter of national security, while the AP called it an unprecedented intrusion into its newsgathering operations. But should the journalistic community be so surprised? With the Obama White House’s track record on whistleblowers and WikiLeaks, the move to spy on AP seems consistent with an administration more committed to secrecy than ever before.
Is the United States still the land of the free for journalists and their sources? In this week’s News Divide we speak to Laura Malone, legal counsel for the Associated Press; Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars; The World is a Battlefield; the investigative reporter Dana Priest of the Washington Post; and Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union.
This week’s Newsbytes: After two years in hiding, a prominent Bahraini blogger reappears in the UK; Globovision, a leading opposition outlet in Venezuela, is sold to businessmen allegedly friendly with the government; and Islamabad is missing one of the most prominent Western journalists based there – the New York Times’ Declan Walsh was ordered to leave the country before the election.
One of the lesser-known consequences of the US-led ‘war on terror’ has been a wave of anti-terrorism legislation in other countries. One of them is Ethiopia. It is not a country known for its freedom of the press and, with ongoing internal conflicts with separatist groups, and the powers that be keeping a wary eye on the nearby Arab Spring, the government in Addis Ababa has been cracking down on the media.
It is doing so with an anti-terror law passed in 2009, which has led to the sentencing of 11 journalists, sent dozens of reporters into exile and has forced countless others to practice self-censorship. The Listening Post’s Nic Muirhead reports on the law that blurs the line between journalism and terrorism.
Unless you have been in orbit or beyond, you have probably already seen our Video of the Week – it’s astronaut Chris Hadfield and his version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded while on board the International Space Station. It has been watched online and on TV millions of times over, but it is so good that we wanted to run it anyway.

Listening Post Last Modified: 18 May 2013 08:09

Find this story at 18 May 2013

There’s evidence that the Justice Department’s seizure of Associated Press phone records is far from unprecedented.

The Justice Department’s seizure of call logs [1] related to phone lines used by dozens of Associated Press reporters has provoked a flurry of bipartisan criticism, most of which has cast the decision as a disturbing departure from the norm. AP head Gary Pruitt condemned the decision, part of an investigation into leaks of classified information, as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion.” Yet there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting the seizure may not be unprecedented—just rarely disclosed.

The Justice Department is supposed to follow special rules [2] when it seeks the phone records of reporters, in recognition that such snooping conflicts with First Amendment values. As Pruitt complained in an angry letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, those logs provided the government a “road map” of the stories his reporters were investigating, and there is evidence that such seizures deter [3] anonymous sources from speaking to the press—whether they’re discussing classified programs or merely facts that embarrass the government.

Federal regulations require that the attorney general personally approve such a move, ensure the request is narrow and necessary, and notify the news organization about the request—in advance whenever possible. In this case, however, the Justice Department seems to have used an indiscriminate vacuum-cleaner [4] approach—seeking information (from phone companies) about a wide range of phone numbers used by AP reporters—and it only notified AP after the fact.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were more cases like this we’ve never heard about. Here’s why: The Justice Department’s rules only say the media must be informed about “subpoenas” for “telephone toll records.” The FBI’s operations guidelines [5] interprets those rules quite literally, making clear the requirement “concerns only grand jury subpoenas.” That is, these rules don’t apply to National Security Letters [6], which are secret demands for information used by the FBI that don’t require judicial approval. The narrow FBI interpretation also doesn’t cover administrative subpoenas, which are issued by federal agencies without prior judicial review. Last year, the FBI issued NSLs for the communications and financial records of more than 6,000 Americans—and the number has been far higher in previous years. The procedures that do apply to those tools have been redacted from publicly available versions of the FBI guidelines. Thus, it’s no shocker the AP seizure would seem like an “unprecedented intrusion” if the government doesn’t think it has to tell us about the precedents. And there’s no telling if the Justice Department rules (and the FBI’s interpretation) allow the feds to seize without warning other types of electronic communications records that could reveal a journalist’s e-mail, chat, or Web browsing activity.

Is it paranoid to fear the Justice Department and the FBI are sidestepping the rules? Consider a case first reported in 2008 [7], and discussed at length in a damning (but heavily redacted) 2010 report [8] from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. In this instance, the FBI obtained nearly two years of phone records for lines belonging to Washington Post and New York Times bureaus and reporters—even though the FBI had initially requested records covering only seven months. In what the OIG called a “serious abuse of the FBI’s authority to obtain information,” agents seized these records under false pretenses, “without any legal process or Attorney General approval.” And these records remained in the FBI’s database for over three years before the OIG or the press found out [7].

It gets worse. The OIG report noted that the FBI had made “community of interest” requests to phone carriers; these requests sweep in not only the target’s call records, but those of people the target has spoken with—which can include reporters. Such requests can provide investigators an incredibly revealing portrait of entire social networks. Yet the OIG found that agents used boilerplate requests for information from the carriers; some claimed they submitted the requests without actually knowing exactly what “community of interest” meant, and even when they did it didn’t necessarily occur to them that they were likely to obtain reporter records through such requests. In other words, FBI agents often made these requests without fully understanding what they were requesting.

…

By Julian Sanchez | Fri May. 17, 2013 1:01 PM PDT

Find this story at 17 May 2013

Copyright ©2013 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Justice Department’s controversial decision to seize phone records of Associated Press journalists was just one element in a sweeping U.S. government investigation into media leaks about a Yemen-based plot to bomb a U.S. airliner, government officials said on Wednesday.

The search for who leaked the information is being led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington and has involved extensive FBI interviews of personnel at the Justice Department, U.S. intelligence agencies, the White House’s National Security staff and the FBI itself.

The interviews have been lengthy and thorough, said people who have been questioned in the investigation, but requested anonymity. Two of those interviewed said leak inquiries were always aggressive and that being questioned is a wearing and unpleasant experience.

The investigation, which a law enforcement official has said was prompted by a May 7, 2012, AP story about the operation to foil the Yemen plot, appears to be ongoing. Some potential witnesses have been advised they are likely to be interviewed in the next two or three weeks.

Officials in the office of Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, could not immediately be reached for comment.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who recused himself from involvement in the case, largely sidestepped questions from angry lawmakers on Wednesday about his department’s secret seizure of AP records, which the news agency revealed on Monday.

The seizure, denounced by critics as a gross intrusion into freedom of the press, has created an uproar in Washington and led to questions about how the Obama administration is balancing the need for national security with privacy rights.

There are signs the administration’s efforts to find the alleged leaker were unproductive – at least before the Justice Department seized two months of records of phone calls by the AP and its journalists.

“Seeking toll records associated with media organizations is undertaken only after all other reasonable alternative investigative steps have been taken,” Holder’s deputy, James Cole, said in a letter on Tuesday to AP President Gary Pruitt, who has protested the government’s action.

In that letter, Cole revealed the Justice Department had conducted more than 550 interviews and reviewed tens of thousands of documents before subpoenaing phone company records of AP calls.

Reuters was one of nearly 50 news organizations that signed a letter to Holder on Tuesday complaining about the AP phone record seizures.

‘BREATHTAKING SCOPE’

Floyd Abrams, a prominent First Amendment and media attorney, said, “The breathtaking scope of these subpoenas served on the telephone companies might suggest that after all this time, they have no idea who they’re looking for.”

Another possibility is “they are touching all bases” because they suspect someone but are not sure, said Abrams, a partner at Cahill Gordon and Reindel LLP in New York. He said it was difficult for an outsider to know.

“I don’t think that there is any doubt that this is a serious investigation that they have spent a lot of time on and that they feel deeply about,” Abrams said. Justice’s targeting of a large number of phone lines and the AP journalists who use them “taken together, certainly makes it look like the largest, most intrusive action by the government vis-a-vis the press that I can remember.”

Holder has called the leak “very, very serious” and said it “put the American people at risk.” He did not provide details.

The AP has reported that it delayed reporting the story of how the United States had foiled a plot by a suicide bomber affiliated with Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, at the request of government officials, who said it would jeopardize national security. Once U.S. officials said those concerns were allayed, the AP said, it disclosed the plot.

A law enforcement official said on Wednesday that because officials were so concerned and shocked by the leak, they opened an investigation into how the AP found out about the spy operation even before the news agency ran its initial story. The AP had contacted the government and asked for comment several days before the story was published.

The AP’s first story reported the CIA had “thwarted an ambitious plot” by AQAP to attack an airline with a newly designed underwear bomb and said the FBI had acquired the bomb. The AP reported it did not know what had happened to the alleged bomber.

A few hours after the story was published, John Brennan, then chief White House counterterrorism adviser and now director of the CIA, held a conference call with former counterterrorism officials who frequently appear as TV commentators. Brennan said the plot was never a threat to the U.S. public or air safety because Washington had “inside control” over it.

…

(Editing by Warren Strobel and Peter Cooney)
Wed, May 15 2013

By Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria

Find this story at 15 May 2013

© Thomson Reuters 2011. All rights reserved.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – White House efforts to soft-pedal the danger from a new “underwear bomb” plot emanating from Yemen may have inadvertently broken the news they needed most to contain.

At about 5:45 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 7, just before the evening newscasts, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top White House adviser on counter-terrorism, held a small, private teleconference to brief former counter-terrorism advisers who have become frequent commentators on TV news shows.

According to five people familiar with the call, Brennan stressed that the plot was never a threat to the U.S. public or air safety because Washington had “inside control” over it.

Brennan’s comment appears unintentionally to have helped lead to disclosure of the secret at the heart of a joint U.S.-British-Saudi undercover counter-terrorism operation.

A few minutes after Brennan’s teleconference, on ABC’s World News Tonight, Richard Clarke, former chief of counter-terrorism in the Clinton White House and a participant on the Brennan call, said the underwear bomb plot “never came close because they had insider information, insider control.”

A few hours later, Clarke, who is a regular consultant to the network, concluded on ABC’s Nightline that there was a Western spy or double-agent in on the plot: “The U.S. government is saying it never came close because they had insider information, insider control, which implies that they had somebody on the inside who wasn’t going to let it happen.”

DOUBLE AGENT

The next day’s headlines were filled with news of a U.S. spy planted inside Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), who had acquired the latest, non-metallic model of the underwear bomb and handed it over to U.S. authorities.

At stake was an operation that could not have been more sensitive — the successful penetration by Western spies of AQAP, al Qaeda’s most creative and lethal affiliate. As a result of leaks, the undercover operation had to be shut down.

The initial story of the foiling of an underwear-bomb plot was broken by the Associated Press.

According to National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor, due to its sensitivity, the AP initially agreed to a White House request to delay publication of the story for several days.

But according to three government officials, a final deal on timing of publication fell apart over the AP’s insistence that no U.S. official would respond to the story for one clear hour after its release.

When the administration rejected that demand as “untenable,” two officials said, the AP said it was going public with the story. At that point, Brennan was immediately called out of a meeting to take charge of damage control.

Relevant agencies were instructed to prepare public statements and urged to notify Congressional oversight panels. Brennan then started the teleconference with potential TV commentators.

White House officials and others on the call insist that Brennan disclosed no classified information during that conference call and chose his words carefully to avoid doing so.

The AP denies any quid pro quo was requested by them or rejected by the White House. “At no point did AP offer or propose a deal with regard to this story,” said AP spokesman Paul Colford.

As for his appearance on ABC, Richard Clarke acknowledges he made a logical “leap” when he said that “inside control” meant “there was human inside control rather than anything else I could imagine.” But he adds that over the course of a week, ABC “took extraordinary measures … to make sure” that nothing it was planning to broadcast would damage ongoing counter-terrorism operations.

PREMATURE SHUTDOWN

As a result of the news leaks, however, U.S. and allied officials told Reuters that they were forced to end an operation which they hoped could have continued for weeks or longer.

Several days after the first leaks, counter-terrorism sources confirmed to Reuters that a central role in the operation had been played by MI-5 and MI-6, Britain’s ultra-secretive domestic and foreign intelligence services, whose relationship with their American counterparts has been periodically strained by concern about leaks.

These sources acknowledged that British authorities were deeply distressed that anything at all had leaked out about the operation.

The White House places the blame squarely on AP, calling the claim that Brennan contributed to a leak “ridiculous.”

“It is well known that we use a range of intelligence capabilities to penetrate and monitor terrorist groups,” according to an official statement from the White House national security staff.

…

(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by Warren Strobel and Jim Loney)

Fri, May 18 2012

By Mark Hosenball

Find this story at 18 May 2013

© Thomson Reuters 2011

Antiwar.com has a troubling story detailing how what appears to be either an FBI counterintelligence investigation of suspected Israeli spies or an attempt to track down everyone who had posted terrorist watch lists online led to the FBI to investigate the site and Justin Raimondo and Eric Garris.

The story is troubling for several reasons:
The report on Antiwar.com reveals the FBI’s Electronic Communications Unit (the same one involved in using exigent letters to get community of interest phone numbers) was already monitoring Antiwar.com when the FBI did a threat analysis of them in 2004.
Based on the fact that they had posted two watch lists, that a number of people under investigation read the site, and other redacted reasons, the FBI recommended a preliminary investigation into whether (basically) they were spying.
The report cited electronic communications collected under FISA. While that may be no more than 4 FISA references in another case out of the Newark Office (which appears to be a prior investigation tied to the Israelis), that’s not clear that that’s the only FISA-collected information here.
Whether or not the FBI already had used FISA on Antiwar.com, the low bar for PATRIOT powers (connection to a counterterrorist or counterintelligence investigation; the Israeli investigation would qualify) means the government could have used PATRIOT powers to investigate them.

So here’s my analysis.

Someone emailed Antiwar.com this set of FOIAed FBI documents. The documents appear to show that the FBI did some research on Antiwar.com in 2004 and recommended a Preliminary Investigation of them to see if they were spies. Their research appears to include 4 pieces of electronic communication collected under FISA, though it appears those were collected in another case.

The Contents of the FBI File

What follows assumes that the documents are authentic (Antiwar.com did not FOIA this themselves and they just received it out of the blue). It’s possible they’re an elaborate forgery, but they certainly appear to be valid FBI documents.

Roughly speaking, here’s what’s included in the document packet as a whole.
1-2: The faxed copy of a 302 (interview report) dated September 16, 2002 related to the Israelis
3-4: A transfer document
5-26: A document, dated October 4, 2002, documented the return and translation of evidence taken from the Israelis as well as xeroxes of the evidence
27-29: An interview report dated October 2, 2002, first requested September 10, 2002
30-32: An October 29, 2002 report on photos confiscated from an Israeli when he was detained on October 30, 2001
33-34: An April 23, 2003 report on an earlier arrest of four Israelis on August 14, 2001
35: Mostly blank cover sheet
36-37: An FBI handwriting analysis of documents taken from the Israelis
38-51: A report, dated July 10, 2003, summarizing and closing the case on the Israelis
52-58: A report, dated July 10, 2003, summarizing the results of the case on the Israelis
59-61: Paperwork from February and April 2004 reopening and transferring the investigation of the Israelis
62-71: A 10-page report, dated April 30, 2004, on Raimondo, Garris, and Antiwar.com
72-84: Web printouts of antiwar.com related information
85-89: Paperwork related to the closure of the investigation into the 5 Israelis and the destruction of evidence collected from them
90-94: FOIA notations

Only the two bolded sections pertain to Antiwar.com. The rest (plus–it appears from the title of the Scribd file, http://www.scribd.com/doc/62394765/1138796-001-303A-NK-105536-Section-6-944900, which appears to come from the Newark case number–at least five other sections) describes the FBI’s investigation of the five Israelis alleged to have filmed the destruction of the World Trade Center (read pages 38-51 for the most complete description of the FBI investigation). The short version of the conclusion in that investigation is that the Israelis did have ties to the Israeli government, but did not appear to have foreknowledge of the attack.

The Antiwar.com Threat Assessment appears to have been forwarded to the counterterrorism people working on the Israeli case; it’s likely the FOIA asked for everything relating to the Israeli investigation.

The Genesis of the Antiwar.com Threat Assessment

Which brings us to the report on Antiwar.com itself.

It appears that, in March 2004, the FBI may have done a search of everyone who had a 9/11 “watch list” available online.

An electronic communication from the Counterterrorism, NTCS/TWWU to all field offices, dated 03/24/2004, advised that the post-9/11 “watch list,” “Project Lookout,” was posted on the Internet and may contain the names of individuals of active investigative interest. Different versions of these lists may be found on the Internet. This assessment was conducted on the findings discovered on www.antiwar.com.

The file doesn’t actually say whether that’s why the FBI started investigating Antiwar.com. Rather, it says,

While conducting research on the Internet, an untitled spreadsheet , dated 10/03/2001, was discovered on the website antiwar.com.

Given the recently reopened investigation into the Israelis at that time, the FBI may have found it in research on them and used the watch list directive to conduct further investigation. Or it may have just been the watch list directive.

The FBI’s Research into Antiwar.com

As Raimondo notes, he posted links to that document–sourced clearly to Cryptome–in this post on the Israelis.

Ostensibly to figure out how and why he was posting a terrorist watch list, the FBI:
Did searches on its Universal Index on both Garris and Raimondo (there was significant material on one of them)
Did a scan of the Electronic Case File, apparently finding:
One completely redacted file
A counterintelligence report forwarded from the Counterintelligence office to the Office
Several documents (from a different FBI office) that appear to be based on posts of Raimondo (these have serial numbers reading “315M/N-SL-188252), though the second is a Letterhead Memo
A document citing Antiwar.com as a source of information on US military aid to Israel
A report on a peaceful protest in the UK including a reference to an article handed out at the protest citing antiwar.com
A report on a Neo-Nazi conference at which a member recommended reading Antiwar.com for information on the Middle East conflict
The contents of a seized hard drive showing its owner visited Antiwar.com between July 2002 and June 2003.
Recorded six more completely redacted entries
Looked up details on DMV, Dun and Bradstreet, Lexis Nexis, business, and phone searches
Looked up several other database searches the description of which are redacted
Cited four FISA-derived references from a case file in Newark, but with no description of contents
Referred to a bunch of other articles on Antiwar.com, both access via Lexis Nexis and via web searches.

The FBI’s Verdict: Further Investigation

All of which the FBI used to come to the following conclusion:

The rights of individuals to post information and to express personal views on the Internet should be honored and protected; however, some material that is circulated on the Internet can compromise current active FBI investigations. The discovery of two detailed Excel spreadsheets posted on www.antiwar.com may not be significant by itself since distribution of the information on such lists are wide spread. Many agencies outside of law enforcement have been utilizing this information to screen their employees. Still it is unclear whether www.antiwar.com may only be posting research material compiled from multiple sources or if there is material posted that is singular in nature and not suitable for public released. There are several unanswered questions regarding antiwar.com. It describes itself as a non-profit group that survives on generous donations from its readers. Who are these contributors and what are the funds used for? [two lines redacted] on www.antiwar.com. If this is so, then what is his true name? Two facts have been established by this assessment. Many individuals worldwide do view this website including individuals who are currently under investigation and [one line redacted].

With the recommendations (for DC’s corrupt ECAU office):

It is recommended that ECAU further monitor the postings on the website www.antiwar.com.

And in San Francisco:

It is recommended that a [Preliminary Investigation] be opened to determine if [redacted] are engaging in, or have engaged in, activities which constitute a threat to National Security on behalf of a foreign power.

Now, it’s bad enough the FBI doesn’t consider Antiwar.com a journalistic site at all. It’s also pretty appalling that they used pretty unnecessary questions to justify further investigation.

And remember, the bar for the FBI to use First Amendment “protected” reasons to investigate someone have been lowered since 2004.

Apparently, for the FBI, advocating for peace and making a publicly available PDF available constitutes sufficient threat to conduct a counterintelligence investigation.

Posted on August 22, 2011 by emptywheel

Find this story at 22 August 2011

WASHINGTON — Two editors of AntiWar.com sued the FBI on Tuesday, alleging that the bureau has failed to comply with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for documents about the government’s investigation of the website.

FBI documents posted online show that the bureau recommended opening an investigation into the website in 2004 after it posted terrorist watch-lists online.

…

The Huffington Post | By Ryan J. Reilly Posted: 05/21/2013 5:13 pm EDT | Updated: 05/21/2013 6:04 pm EDT

Find this story at 21 May 2013

Copyright © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc

Shortly after FBI agent Jim Treacy arrived in Moscow in early 2007 as the new legal attache at the U.S. Embassy, he turned around outside a Metro station and saw a man photographing him. Treacy had no doubt his shadow was an agent with the FSB, Russia’s Federal Security Service, and that he wanted to be seen — the officer, after all, was standing 15 feet away, clicking ostentatiously with a long-range lens.

“I just assumed it was the FSB welcoming me back to Moscow,” said Treacy, who did a tour in the Russian capital in the late 1990s.

For much of the past decade, cooperation between the FSB and the FBI has been guarded and pragmatic at best. In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, and the identification of ethnic Chechen suspects with potential ties to an Islamist insurgency in the Russian Caucasus, the White House and the Kremlin have been talking up greater cooperation on counterterrorism.

“This tragedy should motivate us to work closer together,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a news conference late last month. “If we combine our efforts, we will not suffer blows like that.”

President Obama echoed those remarks, and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III visited Moscow this week for what were described as productive meetings. FBI agents have been working closely with the FSB to determine whether suspected Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a shootout with police four days after the blasts, received any training when he visited Dagestan for six months in 2012. Dagestan, which borders fellow Russian republic Chechnya, has been plagued by a bloody Islamist insurgency.

Russia has provided more information since the April 15 bombing, including details about intercepted telephone conversations involving Tsarnaev’s mother that were the basis of Moscow’s initial concern about his possible extremist leanings. But U.S. counterterrorism agencies have not seen evidence to substantiate reports in Russia that Tsarnaev met with militants in Dagestan.

Deep mutual suspicion, which stretches back to the Cold War and is periodically inflamed by cases such as the sleeper agents busted by the FBI in 2010, means there are significant limits to U.S.-Russian security cooperation, according to former and current law enforcement officials and scholars of the countries’ relationship. Putin once named the United States as the “main opponent,” and the United States and Europe are the targets of aggressive high-tech and industrial espionage by Russia, according to intelligence officials.

“There is a broad culture of mistrust that is going to be very hard to change,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “That’s a huge obstacle to moving forward on counterterrorism. It’s the same sets of people who have to cooperate.”

Hill said that “for real counterterrorism cooperation, as you have with the Brits or the Europeans, you have to be able to share operational information.”

Beyond slivers of intelligence in cases with some mutual interest, neither side appears prepared to risk its secrets. That has limited potential cooperation ahead of Russia’s 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Hill said.

For their part, Russians are no more sanguine about the true state of the bilateral security relationship.

“The key word is trust,” Nikolai Kovalyov, the former director of the FSB, said in a telephone interview. “Trust between people, trust between our politicians and trust between security services. Because we have this mistrust, ordinary Americans now suffer, and some of them had to sacrifice their lives.”

The limit on any broad collaboration does not mean that the agencies cannot work together productively on specific cases — as they appear to be doing on the Boston bombing. “It’s gotten better,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. Before the bombing, the official added, “It was obviously zero.”

During Treacy’s tenure in Moscow, each side sent the other about 800 requests annually for information or assistance on financial crimes, cyberattacks and organized crime, as well as terrorism.

“Cooperation certainly still existed, because the Russians are nothing if not pragmatic,” said Treacy, who retired in 2009 after 24 years with the FBI. “They look at their relations with the U.S. agencies as a resource that they can mine, and they certainly attempt to do that — at an arm’s length.”

The Russians formed a similar impression of American willingness to take without giving much in return after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when Russia cooperated with U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. But Putin believed that he was repaid for his assistance with NATO’s eastward expansion and U.S. meddling in post-Soviet republics. And the Kremlin views U.S. information sharing as equally self-interested.

…

Michael Birnbaum and Anne Gearan in Moscow and Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.

By Peter Finn, Published: May 8

Find this story at 8 May 2013

© The Washington Post Company