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Paris’s powerful criminal investigation force, France’s answer to the FBI, is once again embroiled in scandal. After the missing cocaine and the alleged rape of a tourist, the force’s chief has been deposed after being charged with leaking secret info.

Paris’s powerful criminal investigation unit, known as the Police judiciare, is mired in scandal once again.

In less than a year the force, which is often just referred to as “36 Quai des Orfèvres” – the name of its famous HQ on the banks of the Seine – has been hit by three major scandals – the latest one has even claimed the head of the unit’s chief.

“I thought we’d hit rock bottom, but I was wrong, we’re still digging,” a veteran of the unit, considered “a state within a state” told L’Express newspaper.

Here’s a rundown of the three scandals that has seen the reputation of France’s version of the FBI dismantled in a little over eight months.

The LEAKS:

This latest scandal is easily the most serious to hit the unit as it resulted in the Bernard Petit, the force’s chief being suspended after he was charged over allegations he leaked details of a probe to a fellow top officer under investigation.

On Thursday, just minutes after the Paris prosecutor’s office said it was charging Petit, the French interior ministry announced his suspension.

The charges against Petit are unprecedented for the force.

Petit is accused of feeding information to Christian Prouteau, the former chief of the GIGN elite police unit, before he was taken into custody in October over a case relating to fraudulent documentation being given to illegal migrants.

Petit was charged with “violating the secrecy of an inquiry and disclosing information in order to impede efforts to investigate and determine the truth”, Paris prosecutors said in a statement.

His chief of staff, Richard Atlan, was charged with the same offence.

Philippe Lemaitre, an official at the National Welfare Association representing police staff, is suspected as having acted as an intermediary for Petit and Prouteau and has been charged with complicity in influence peddling as well as complicity in violating the secrecy of an investigation.

(Bernard Petit, from the Judicial Police. Photo: François Guillot/AFP)

The MISSING COCAINE:

In August last year the force was left red-faced to say the least when it emerged they had lost 52 kilos of confiscated cocaine, worth a cool €2.5 million.

The haul had last been seen on July 23rd but then vanished.

The cocaine was stored in a secure room at the police headquarters but there was no close circuit television in the area. A source close to the investigation said only three people had keys to the room.

At the time many of those working there said they were astounded at the disappearance and said they did not believe it was pilfered.

“It will be a thunderbolt if theft is proved,” said one police source.

Days later a Paris drug squad officer was charged and remanded in custody.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve described the allegations as “extremely serious” and said the officer had been temporarily suspended.

(A policeman suspected of stealing 52kg of cocaine boards a plane in France. AFP)

The TOURIST RAPE:

This incident in April last year caused outrage in Canada and made headlines around the world.

Four police officers from 36 Quai des Orfèvres were placed under investigation after a Canadian tourist reported at least one of the men took her back to police headquarters in the capital’s centre after a night of drinking in a nearby Irish pub and raped her.

The woman, originally from Toronto and reportedly the daughter of a police chief, was in Paris for a two-week holiday when she says she ran into some officers at The Galway pub

She reportedly agreed to go to the headquarters, but what happened next is at the heart of the allegations. She says the officers, who include a captain belonging to an elite anti-gang unit, sexually assaulted her in an office on the premises.

A source close to the investigation said the woman’s spectacles and stockings disappeared after she filed the complaint.

One officer admitted having sex with the tourist but insisted it was consensual. Days later two elite French police officers were charged with rape.

Once again the interior minister was forced to step in saying the men “would face the full consequences” if found guilty.

The Local/AFP | 6 Feb 2015, 11:14

Find this story at 6 February 2015

Copyright The Local Europe AB

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PARIS — Last June, Patrick Calvar, the head of France’s domestic intelligence service, faced a decision: continue surveillance on a French Islamist who had been viewed as a potential threat for a decade, or shift limited resources to help monitor a swelling new generation of fighters returning from Syria.

The surveillance on the Islamist, Saïd Kouachi, had turned up nothing for over two years, and monitoring of his younger brother, Chérif Kouachi, had been abandoned the previous year, French officials say. Earlier in 2014, the intelligence service had transferred Saïd Kouachi’s case for several months to the Paris police, a sign that it was no longer considered a priority.

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The Paris newsroom of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, after two brothers walked in with military precision and killed 12 people in the name of Allah.Chérif and Saïd Kouachi’s Path to Paris Attack at Charlie HebdoJAN. 17, 2015 Continue reading the main story
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The three-member commission scrutinizing requests for cellphone monitoring by the intelligence agency had signaled that its recommendation would be against further surveillance. And the prime minister, Manuel Valls, was under intense pressure to focus on what seemed to be the more immediate threat emanating from Syria; the previous month, Mehdi Nemmouche, a 29-year-old Frenchman who had fought in Syria, had gunned down four people at a Jewish museum in Brussels.

Photo

From left: Mohammed Merah, who shot seven in Toulouse; Mehdi Nemmouche, a Frenchman who killed four in Brussels Credit From left: France 2, via Associated Press; Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The counterterrorism team reporting to Mr. Calvar, a longtime intelligence official, allowed the surveillance order on Saïd Kouachi to expire. Less than seven months later, the Kouachi brothers burst through the doors at the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and fatally shot 12 people, setting off a two-day manhunt that involved a third gunman and ended with another five victims and the deaths of all three gunmen.

The decision to drop surveillance of the Kouachis was one in a series of developments that, in the aftermath of the deadliest acts of terrorism in France since Algeria’s struggle for independence in the 1960s, suggests substantial failures or weaknesses in French intelligence and law enforcement.

It also highlights security challenges facing other Western governments, as Denmark was reminded this weekend when a native-born Muslim gunman in Copenhagen killed two people in an attack that had numerous similarities to the rampage in and around Paris last month.

Largely caught off guard by the proliferation of potential threats, they now confront wrenching trade-offs in deciding how and whether to monitor hundreds or thousands of their citizens who are traveling in and out of conflict zones, otherwise making contact with radicals or being inspired by assaults like the one on Charlie Hebdo.

The French government is still in the early stages of reviewing what went wrong in the case of the Kouachis and the third gunman, Amedy Coulibaly, who also fell off the radar of the French authorities after being released from prison last spring.

Current and former officials say the surveillance on the Kouachis had turned up nothing to indicate that they were an imminent threat. They point to the lack of resources to conduct physical surveillance on large numbers of targets, estimating that 25 agents, working in shifts, are required to watch over a single person day and night.

Photo

From left: Salim Oman Benghalem, who traveled to Yemen; Peter Cherif, who also traveled there. Credit From left: LeMonde; Benoit Peyrucq/Agence France-Presse
“You can’t follow everyone,” said Bernard Squarcini, who was Mr. Calvar’s predecessor as head of the domestic intelligence agency and was in charge when the Kouachis were placed under surveillance after a tipoff from the United States in 2011. “These were two inactive targets that had been quiet for a long time. They were giving nothing away.”

Others were less forgiving. “Even if you give France a bit of a break,” said one former senior United States counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid antagonizing an ally, “given what we know, and what the French knew then, these guys should have been high on any list. Especially since they seemed to have all the warning signs: travel to the region, a prison record, a social media profile. What more did they need?”

At the very least, the Charlie Hebdo attack has provoked a fundamental debate about the quality of intelligence gathering in France. Long considered among the best in the world, French intelligence has been troubled by three high-profile failures in four years: Before the Kouachis and the Nemmouche case, there was Mohammed Merah, a French-Algerian whose surveillance had been dropped shortly before he shot seven people in Toulouse in March 2012.

At a time when budget cuts and debates over the balance between national security and personal liberty are making the trade-offs for security forces even more complex, the case of the Kouachis stands out. They were well known to the authorities in the United States as well as France before the radical group known as the Islamic State came on the scene — and they struck just when the authorities had turned their attention to the threat posed by the new generation of jihadists inspired by the group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Interviews with current and former French and American officials and other experts provided new details about key moments and the lapses, misunderstandings and turf issues that characterized the case.

The intelligence agencies in France, the United States and elsewhere proved limited in their ability to track potential radicals in countries where they went to fight, train or meet other Islamists.

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Graphic: The Links Among the Paris Terror Suspects and Their Connections to Jihad
Although Yemeni officials had tracked a Frenchman they believed to be Saïd Kouachi on a visit to Yemen in 2011 and eventually informed the United States, who passed word along to the French authorities, it was only after the Charlie Hebdo shootings that it became clear that it was actually Chérif Kouachi who had been to Yemen, traveling on his brother’s passport. And the authorities only learned after the shootings, when Chérif spoke by phone to a television station shortly before he was killed in a shootout, that he had met there with the radical American-born preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, a senior Qaeda commander promoting jihad against the West.

As intelligence cooperation has largely dried up in Syria, and has been imperiled in Yemen by the factional fighting there, the challenge of tracking suspects has become even harder.

The intelligence agencies also failed to appreciate how fully radicalized Chérif Kouachi had become, in particular by missing or not recognizing the importance of his association with two other French fighters who were in Yemen in 2011.

As early as 2011, American and French officials had identified at least one other hardened French jihadist traveling in Yemen at the same time as Mr. Kouachi: Peter Cherif, known for his links to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Qaeda leader in Iraq, and for the time he spent in Abu Ghraib prison before returning to France. Mr. Cherif — who, like Chérif Kouachi, had links to the so-called Buttes-Chaumont group of radicalized young French Muslims in northeastern Paris after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 — is believed to be in Yemen today.

A second Frenchman in Yemen in 2011, Salim Oman Benghalem, who also had ties to members of the Buttes-Chaumont group, was added to at least one United States counterterrorism list last summer, a few weeks after the French government ended surveillance on Saïd Kouachi. Mr. Benghalem is believed by the United States to be fighting in Syria with the Islamic State.

In addition, the authorities failed to update their surveillance methods as their targets grew more sophisticated, raising questions about whether governments have put too much faith in electronic eavesdropping.

Photo

From left: Saîd and Chérif Kouachi, Charlie Hebdo assailants. Credit From left: French Police via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Getty Images
The electronic surveillance employed in France was limited largely to listening in on cellphone conversations. But Chérif Kouachi, who had previously been arrested based on intercepted phone conversations, was almost certainly aware of the likelihood that his phone was being monitored, reducing if not eliminating the possibility that he would have discussed planning for an attack on it. The agencies handling the cases of the Kouachis had few other legal options for surveillance.

“The phone tapping yielded nothing,” Marc Trévidic, the chief terrorism investigator for the French judicial system, said in an interview. “If we had continued, I’m convinced it wouldn’t have changed anything. No one talks on the phone anymore.”

Finally, France’s counterterrorism efforts are spread among a variety of agencies operating under different authorities that do not always appear to cooperate and coordinate. At least 13 bodies have some intelligence-gathering responsibility — including the main domestic intelligence agency, known by its French abbreviation, D.G.S.I., and its better-resourced foreign counterpart, the D.G.S.E., but also smaller units attached to the Paris police, the national police, the paramilitary gendarmerie, the judicial police and even the customs office.

The Kouachi case was handled primarily by the predecessor of the D.G.S.I., which was only created last May and whose internal reorganization and staff expansion is expected to take five years. A year ago, the agency, then known as the D.C.R.I. and still an adjunct to the national police instead of directly reporting to the interior minister, handed the Saïd Kouachi case over to the intelligence arm of the Paris police. But when the police realized that Saïd had moved to Reims, 90 miles northeast of Paris, his file was returned to the newly created D.G.S.I., which subsequently failed to put its Reims station in charge of the case.

Since the Charlie Hebdo shootings, there have been questions about whether the case might have been better handled by the prosecutorial system that falls under the judiciary, an entirely separate bureaucracy that has broader powers than the intelligence agencies to monitor terrorism suspects.

“Ideally, this should have become a judicial affair,” Mr. Trévidic said. “We can bug homes and track cars and confiscate computers. When we’re worried about someone, we get a warrant and go into their flat. We take what we need and analyze their computers, which is something the intelligence services can’t do.”

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The surveillance on Saïd Kouachi did alert the security services to an apparent counterfeiting operation he was involved in, selling fake brand clothes and sports shoes. This followed an episode two years ago, when he was fined for importing fake Nike shoes by postal delivery from China.

A few months before the Charlie Hebdo shootings in January, the intelligence unit of the customs police filed a report to the domestic intelligence service, requesting its support, according to a senior official with knowledge of the case. “But they don’t seem to have done anything with that information,” the official said, a lapse that some experts cited in questions about whether the counterfeiting operation might have been used to raise money to buy weapons for the attack.

Mr. Calvar did not respond to questions about the decision not to extend surveillance on the Kouachis. Jean-Marie Delarue, president of the three-member National Commission for the Control of Security Interceptions, which scrutinizes all demands for phone taps, said in an interview that Mr. Calvar and his deputy, Thierry Matta, were the only ones at the D.G.S.I. authorized to sign such requests.

The Kouachi brothers had been known to the authorities since 2004, when Syrian and American officials separately alerted their French counterparts to a Paris-based cell channeling French-born fighters through Syria to Iraq. A year later, Chérif Kouachi was arrested as he prepared to leave on a one-way ticket to become a suicide bomber in Iraq.

He spent 20 months in prison, where he met his future associate, Mr. Coulibaly, and mixed with convicted militants like Djamel Beghal, a jihadist who trained in one of Osama bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan and was dispatched to France by the No. 3 of Al Qaeda, French prosecutors say, to set up a cell dedicated to targeting American interests.

For years, the Kouachi brothers drifted in and out of different forms of surveillance and, in Chérif’s case, detention. But in November 2011, when American officials informed their French counterparts that Saïd Kouachi had flown to Oman and traveled in Yemen “for a couple of months” that summer, the alert level rose. (One senior European intelligence official said the trip lasted from July 25 to Aug. 10.)

Photo

“You can’t follow everyone,” said Bernard Squarcini, left, the domestic intelligence chief when the Kouachis were put under surveillance. They slipped down the priority list under his successor. Patrick Calvar, right. Credit From left: Martin Bureau/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Silvere Gerard/Reservoir Photo
The information the Americans passed along had come from Yemeni intelligence and law enforcement agencies, which suspected that Mr. Kouachi had met with local Qaeda handlers, according to two senior American officials briefed on confidential reports, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

It was possible, the Yemenis told the Americans, that Mr. Kouachi had received training. The information was enough for Washington to place the older Kouachi on a no-fly list and other counterterrorism lists around November 2011. The French were informed and placed both Kouachis under surveillance, Mr. Squarcini said.

At the time, neither American nor Yemeni officials knew that it was actually Chérif Kouachi who had been in Yemen, traveling on his older brother’s passport because he remained under judicial supervision and was not allowed to leave France.

The officials also did not know that in Yemen, Chérif had been in contact with Mr. Awlaki, who that September became the first American citizen to be killed by a drone.

But early on, the French authorities were aware that Peter Cherif was in Yemen at the same time as Mr. Kouachi. Anyone like Mr. Cherif with past links to Mr. Zarqawi, even indirectly, was considered a serious concern, said Louis Caprioli, the deputy head of France’s domestic antiterrorism unit from 1998 to 2004.

In early 2012, after United States counterterrorism officials had done more analysis on Saïd Kouachi and discovered Chérif’s record in France, Chérif was added to the same American no-fly and counterterrorism lists. Again, the French were informed.

But both Kouachis gradually slipped down the priority list as the authorities scrambled to deal with the largely unforeseen effects of the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. The number of French fighters returning from Syria was climbing rapidly: Some 1,400 people in France are believed to have either joined the jihadist cause in Syria and Iraq or sought to do so.

By law, the domestic surveillance powers of French intelligence agencies are limited. Wiretaps are still governed by rules drafted in 1991, long before cellphones and the Internet became ubiquitous. French intelligence agencies cannot legally track cars or bug apartments in their own country. Since 2006, they have had some access to the metadata of electronic communications, but they cannot spy on the content of emails.

But all along, there had been an alternative means of tracking the Kouachis. The judicial system has long been active in counterterrorism and has considerable flexibility to open investigations into anyone suspected of potentially carrying out a terrorist act.

Mr. Trévidic, the chief terrorism investigator in the judicial system, said if the domestic intelligence agency had wanted to turn the case of the Kouachis over to him, it probably could have. Since the Merah case in 2012, twice as many terrorism cases have been transferred from the intelligence services to become judicial investigations, he said.

“The tools are there,” said François Heisbourg, a former defense official and counterterrorism expert. “But the authorities did not bring all their tools to bear on people who had exactly the profile they said they were worried about.”

Katrin Bennhold reported from Paris, and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Aurelien Breeden and Laure Fourquet contributed reporting from Paris.

By KATRIN BENNHOLD and ERIC SCHMITTFEB. 17, 2015

Find this story at 17 February 2015

© 2015 The New York Times Company

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IRBIL, IRAQ — The gunmen who attacked the Paris editorial offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday appeared to be focused professionals who’d carefully prepared the assault.

Video showing two of the assailants suggests they were well trained, striking their target during its weekly editorial meeting, when most of the publication’s journalists would be gathered in one place.

Other evidence suggests they could be linked to a top French al Qaida operative, David Drugeon, who’s been the target at least twice of U.S. airstrikes in Syria over the last four months.

Witnesses inside the magazine’s offices told the French newspaper L’Humanité that both attackers spoke perfect French and claimed to be members of al Qaida.

Drugeon, who many experts believe was a French intelligence asset before defecting to al Qaida, is alleged to have masterminded a 2012 “lone wolf” attack on French soldiers and Jewish targets in the southern French city of Toulouse. That attack killed seven people before the perpetrator, a French citizen named Mohammed Merah, who French intelligence believes had been trained by Drugeon, was killed by a police sniper after a long, violent standoff with security forces.

Wednesday’s attack killed at least 10 journalists and two policemen, who’d apparently been assigned to guard the magazine because of previous threats made against the publication, including a firebombing in 2011.

The gunmen escaped and were still at large hours after the attack. French authorities said they were seeking three people in the attack.

Witnesses speaking to French television reporters described the attackers as calmly entering the editorial offices of the magazine during its weekly editorial meeting, shooting the victims before declaring “Allahu Akbar” and “We have avenged the prophet,” before quickly and calmly departing the scene before police could respond.

In three videos of the aftermath posted on the Internet by witnesses, two masked gunmen can be seen exiting the building with military efficiency, making coordinated and precise movements indicative of extensive experience and training. Commonly referred to by military professionals as “muscle memory,” the movements reflect the kind of repetitive training that allows someone to efficiently execute tactical movements and maintain fire discipline and accurate marksmanship under the stress of combat.

In one series of photographs, a French police vehicle can be seen with its windshield riddled with bullets in a fairly tight cluster, a pattern that would be nearly impossible for a casually trained beginner to produce with the assault rifles the gunmen were carrying. Though simple to use, the rifles, a variant of the Russian AK-47, tend to be difficult to control when fired on full automatic. But the impact pattern on the police vehicle indicates not just a familiarity with the weapon, but at least a competent degree of marksmanship.

Another video underscores the likelihood that the two were experienced fighters. In it, two gunmen exit the building to board a waiting hatchback sedan when they notice a policeman down the block attempting to engage them as they escape. Without hesitation, the two gunmen shoot the officer, then calmly close on the wounded man as he lies in the street before one of the shooters fires a round into his head from pointblank range.

Again, the calm manner in which the wounded man is murdered before the pair return to the car suggests combat experience or at least extensive training. Both men move quickly but in a very controlled manner. At one point, the lead gunman appears to use a common infantry hand signal to summon his accomplice to his side.

The pair then drive away from the scene, but not before one of the gunmen picks up an object – possibly a shoe – that had fallen from the car as the door opened.

Prothero is a McClatchy special correspondent based in Irbil, Iraq. Email: mprothero@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @mitchprothero

BY MITCHELL PROTHERO
McClatchy Foreign StaffJanuary 7, 2015

Find this story at 7 January 2015

Copyright mcclatchydc.com

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La garde à vue de Claude Hermant, figure de l’ultra-droite régionale, s’est poursuivie ce jeudi. Selon différentes sources, les enquêteurs s’intéressent à un éventuel lien entre le trafic d’armes présumé et les attentats commis en région parisienne. Pour le moment, rien n’est confirmé officiellement.

L’affaire de trafic d’armes dans laquelle Claude Hermant est en garde à vue depuis mardi a-t-elle une ampleur supplémentaire ? Selon plusieurs sources concordantes, les enquêteurs de la PJ de Lille vérifient si des armes utilisées lors des attentats sanglants en région parisienne peuvent provenir de la filière présumée de cette figure de la mouvance identitaire. Ces éléments sont pour l’instant à prendre avec prudence. Interrogés, le parquet de Lille, celui de Paris, tout comme la PJ et l’avocat de Claude Hermant se refusent au moindre commentaire. Ni confirmation, ni démenti. Un black-out total, de part et d’autre de la frontière, rare et troublant.
Si rien n’est donc encore avéré, un proche du dossier concède que des « rebonds » ne sont pas à exclure dans les investigations, dirigées par un juge d’instruction lillois depuis décembre.
Des armes saisies
Ce qui est sûr, c’est que Claude Hermant et sa compagne sont en garde à vue pour trafic d’armes en bande organisée. Leurs auditions peuvent durer 96heures. Des armes ont été saisies. Mais on ignore leur nature et là où elles ont été trouvées. Plusieurs lieux ont été perquisitionnés. À commencer par la Frite Rit, à Lille, où tous deux travaillent.
Le terrain de paintball, rue de la Vallée à Ennetières-en-Weppes, géré notamment par Claude Hermant, a été perquisitionné mercredi, aux alentours de 10 h. « Il y avait une dizaine de policiers », indique une voisine. Y ont-ils trouvé des armes ? La question reste en suspens. Quant aux propriétaires du terrain, les riverains décrivent « des gens discrets, qui gèrent tout par Internet ». Et le maire avoue ne pas les connaître. Le son de cloche est identique à Comines (B) où la police belge avait déployé les grands moyens, mardi soir. Selon le parquet de Tournai, aucune arme ni explosif n’ont été découverts. Mais des éléments « intéressants pour l’enquête » ont été saisis.
Depuis l’Europe de l’Est
Selon nos informations, la PJ lilloise travaille sur un trafic d’armes remilitarisées en provenance d’Europe de l’Est, notamment de la République tchèque. « Nous sommes dans le cadre d’un trafic d’armes, explique une source judiciaire. Pas dans la sphère terroriste. Rien n’indique que les têtes d’un tel réseau s’intéressent à la destination finale de ces armes, marchandises comme une autre. »
Si cette piste est avérée, elle ne serait cependant pas une surprise. Depuis les attentats, policiers belges et français sont persuadés que certaines armes proviennent d’outre-Quiévrain. Ils s’intéressent à celles utilisées par Amédy Coulibaly, notamment un Skorpio tchèque. Le Français aurait d’ailleurs cherché à s’approvisionner auprès d’un fournisseur belge. Aux enquêteurs de déterminer si le clan Hermant est l’un des maillons, même indirect, de la chaîne.

PUBLIÉ LE 23/01/2015 – MIS À JOUR LE 23/01/2015 À 18:05
PAR B. DUTHOIT, V. DEPECKER, P. RADENOVIC ET L. belaid

Find this story at 23 January 2015

Copyright lavoixdunord.fr

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The details of what we do, and do not know, about the weapons used in the recent terrorist attacks in Paris are still far from determined.

We do know that Amedy Coulibaly and the brothers Said and Chérif Kouachi had between them three assault rifles, Soviet-made pistols and a Skorpion submachine gun. It has also been reported that a Tokarev semi-automatic pistol was used by Amedy Coulibaly in his attack on a kosher supermarket. The same weapon was used to shoot and injure a jogger two days earlier on January 7th.

Many media outlets have said that the Kouachi brothers used the AKS-74 Kalashnikov, a weapon produced only by Bulgaria and Romania since 1989. Recent seizures of illicit AKS-74s, both fully functioning and parts thereof, have been reported in Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, India and Ukraine.

Yves Cresson, a journalist who works in the same building as Charlie Hebdo, tweeted: ‘We have just found a cartridge in our offices.’However, the Telegraph claims that the bullets found at the Charlie Hebdo office were 7.62 x 39 mm and purchased in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Telegraph quotes Zivko Marjanac, Bosnia’s deputy defence minister, as confirming the fact that ‘the ammunition used by the terrorists was manufactured in 1986 by Igman Company, a state-owned factory in the town of Konjic south of Sarajevo.’ Mr Marjanac was reported to emphasise the fact that ‘the bullets were manufactured 30 years ago’, and so it would be impossible to explain how they reached France.

The provenance of the bullets might be accurate. However the claimed caliber of the bullets is a curious one, as AKS-74s take the 5.45mm round, not the 7.62mm.

In which case, it might be suspected, as initially claimed by some reports, that the weapons used in the Charlie Hebron attack were actually AK103s – a rifle manufactured in Russia by Izhmash.

The AK103 is not a common weapon. It is used by forces in Pakistan, India and Venezuela – but reportedly mainly by their special forces units. Hugo Chavez was photographed posing with one in 2006.

The AK103 has also been seen across North Africa, notably in Libya and Yemen, possibly coming there via post-Soviet trafficking routes. The AK103 has even been sold openly online on Yemeni Facebook Arms markets.

Screen Shot 2015-01-20 at 14.04.36This Yemeni observation might be insignificant, but Cedric Le Bechec, a witness who encountered the escaping gunmen, quoted Said and Chérif Kouachi as saying: ‘You can tell the media that it’s al-Qaeda in Yemen.’
What is interesting is that the AK103 is not a commonly found assault rifle, even less so in the illegal market. Few media reports cite incidents where it has been seized in illicit transfers.

As for the weapons origins, it has been reported that a Belgian arms dealer sold the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly their arms – but what precise weapons he sold has not been confirmed.

This could mean that he did, indeed, sell the terrorists AK103s. Or, far worse, that he sold them other AK rifles and that there is still a cache of arms somewhere in France, waiting to be used.

By Iain Overton on 20 Jan 2015

Find this story at 20 January 2015

© Copyright AOAV 2004-2015

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Newsagents in three counties questioned about sales of the French magazine’s special issue

Several British police forces have questioned newsagents in an attempt to monitor sales of a special edition of Charlie Hebdo magazine following the Paris attacks, the Guardian has learned.

Officers in Wiltshire, Wales and Cheshire have approached retailers of the magazine, it has emerged, as concerns grew about why police were attempting to trace UK-based readers of the French satirical magazine.

Wiltshire police apologised on Monday after admitting that one of its officers had asked a newsagent to hand over the names of readers who bought a special “survivors’ issue” of the magazine published after its top staff were massacred in Paris last month.

UK police force apologises for taking details of Charlie Hebdo readers
Read more
The case in Corsham, Wiltshire, was thought to be an isolated incident but it has since emerged that Cheshire constabulary and Dyfed-Powys police have also approached newsagents over the sale of Charlie Hebdo.

In at least two cases – in Wiltshire and in Presteigne, Wales – officers have requested that newsagents hand over the names of customers who bought the magazine.

“This is so ridiculous as to be almost laughable. And it would be funny if it didn’t reflect a more general worrying increase in abuse of police powers in invading privacy and stifling free speech in Britain,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive of free expression campaign group Index on Censorship.

“Does possessing a legally published satirical magazine make people criminal suspects now? If so, I better confess that I too have a copy of Charlie Hebdo.”

Paul Merrett, 57, the owner of a newsagent in Presteigne, Wales, said a detective and a police community support officer from Dyfed-Powys police spent half an hour asking his wife Deborah, 53, about the magazine.

“They wanted to know about Charlie Hebdo. They came in unannounced and we had customers,” he said. “There were questions asking where we got the Charlie Hebdo copies from, did we know who we sold them to – which we didn’t say. We were a bit bemused because it was out of the blue.”

“My wife said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ because she thought she was in trouble for selling them. They said, ‘No, you’re not in trouble’ but just continued with their questioning for half an hour.”

Merrett added: “It was all about Charlie Hebdo. I guess they wanted names and addresses of people we sold them to, which we didn’t tell them anything like that. We sold 30 copies.

“My wife was a bit worried with the questioning but she certainly wouldn’t have given any names to the police. I’m shocked they asked. They wanted to know where we got the copies from, how did we let the customers know that we had them.”

A Dyfed-Powys police spokeswoman declined to say why officers sought the names of Charlie Hebdo readers but said: “Following the recent terrorism incidents, Dyfed Powys police have been undertaking an assessment of community tensions across the force area.

“Visits were made to newsagents who were maybe distributing the Charlie Hebdo magazine to encourage the newsagent owners to be vigilant. We can confirm the visits were only made to enhance public safety and to provide community reassurance.”

In Warrington, Cheshire, a police officer telephoned a newsagent that had ordered one issue of the magazine for a customer, who asked to remain anonymous. She said: “My husband ordered a copy of the special edition of Charlie Hebdo from our local newsagent in North Cheshire.

“Several days later the latter had a phone call from the police, saying they’d been told that he had been selling and advertising Charlie Hebdo in his shop. He replied that this was untrue: he had supplied in total one copy, concealed, to a customer who was a French lecturer. I find the police action quite disturbing.”

Charlie Hebdo buyers attract police interest
Letter: A member of Her Majesty’s police service visited the newsagent, requesting the names of the four customers who had purchased Charlie Hebdo
Read more
DCI Paul Taylor, of Cheshire constabulary, said he was not aware of any officer contacting newsagents by telephone but added: “We were aware of the potential for heightened tensions following the attacks in Paris. Therefore where it was felt appropriate officers visited newsagents to provide reassurance advice around the time of its publication.”

In a later statement, a Cheshire police spokeswoman said: “Officers were asked to call into local newsagents in their area to provide visible reassurance around the time of publication and were not asked under any circumstances to make inquiries as to who was purchasing or preordering the Charlie Hebdo magazine. Each area endeavoured to visit as many newsagents as possible however we cannot provide an exact figure.”

The MP and former Conservative shadow home secretary David Davis said he thought the police action was more “stupid than sinister” but disquieting nonetheless.

“Quite what they think they’re doing and why they are wasting police time tracking down individual readers of Charlie Hebdo, really makes you wonder what sort of counter-terrorism and security policy those police forces are pursuing.

“It also has to be said that when police forces check up on what you are reading it’s unsettling in a democracy. I’m quite sure it’s not intentionally so, but it is unsettling and not something you should do lightly.”

The Metropolitan police said they were unaware of any such investigations by their officers in London.

A spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) said there had been no national guidance issued to forces about approaching newsagents that stocked copies of Charlie Hebdo.

However, counter-terrorism officers are known to have shared intelligence nationally following an assessment of potentially vulnerable communities after 17 people were killed in three days of violence in Paris.

The attacks began with two gunmen bursting into Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices and opening fire in revenge for its publication of satirical images of the prophet.

In the UK, counter-terrorism officers have stepped up protection of police officers and the Jewish community over concerns that they may be targeted by Islamist militants.

Five million copies of the magazine – which has a usual print run of around 60,000 – were published in a special edition, with about 2,000 of them reportedly distributed in the UK.

Josh Halliday and Shiv Malik
Tuesday 10 February 2015 19.03 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 11 February 2015 12.09 GMT

Find this story at 10 February 2015

© 2015 Guardian News

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

• Snowden files reveal emails of BBC, NY Times and more
• Agency includes investigative journalists on ‘threat’ list
• Editors call on Cameron to act against snooping on media
GCHQ

GCHQ’s bulk surveillance of electronic communications has scooped up emails to and from journalists working for some of the US and UK’s largest media organisations, analysis of documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Emails from the BBC, Reuters, the Guardian, the New York Times, Le Monde, the Sun, NBC and the Washington Post were saved by GCHQ and shared on the agency’s intranet as part of a test exercise by the signals intelligence agency.

The disclosure comes as the British government faces intense pressure to protect the confidential communications of reporters, MPs and lawyers from snooping.

The journalists’ communications were among 70,000 emails harvested in the space of less than 10 minutes on one day in November 2008 by one of GCHQ’s numerous taps on the fibre-optic cables that make up the backbone of the internet.

The communications, which were sometimes simple mass-PR emails sent to dozens of journalists but also included correspondence between reporters and editors discussing stories, were retained by GCHQ and were available to all cleared staff on the agency intranet. There is nothing to indicate whether or not the journalists were intentionally targeted.

The mails appeared to have been captured and stored as the output of a then-new tool being used to strip irrelevant data out of the agency’s tapping process.

New evidence from other UK intelligence documents revealed by Snowden also shows that a GCHQ information security assessment listed “investigative journalists” as a threat in a hierarchy alongside terrorists or hackers.

Senior editors and lawyers in the UK have called for the urgent introduction of a freedom of expression law amid growing concern over safeguards proposed by ministers to meet concerns over the police use of surveillance powers linked to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Ripa).

More than 100 editors, including those from all the national newspapers, have signed a letter, coordinated by the Society of Editors and Press Gazette, to the UK prime minister, David Cameron, protesting at snooping on journalists’ communications.

In the wake of terror attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and a Jewish grocer in Paris, Cameron has renewed calls for further bulk-surveillance powers, such as those which netted these journalistic communications.

Ripa has been used to access journalists’ communications without a warrrant, with recent cases including police accessing the phone records of Tom Newton-Dunn, the Sun’s political editor, over the Plebgate investigation. The call records of Mail on Sunday reporters involved in the paper’s coverage of Chris Huhne’s speeding row were also accessed in this fashion.

Under Ripa, neither the police nor the security services need to seek the permission of a judge to investigate any UK national’s phone records – instead, they must obtain permission from an appointed staff member from the same organisation, not involved in their investigation.

However, there are some suggestions in the documents that the collection of billing data by GCHQ under Ripa goes wider – and that it may not be confined to specific target individuals.

A top secret document discussing Ripa initially explains the fact that billing records captured under Ripa are available to any government agency is “unclassified” provided that there is “no mention of bulk”.

The GCHQ document goes on to warn that the fact that billing records “kept under Ripa are not limited to warranted targets” must be kept as one of the agency’s most tightly guarded secrets, at a classification known as “Top secret strap 2”.

That is two levels higher than a normal top secret classification – as it refers to “HMG [Her Majesty’s government] relationships with industry that have areas of extreme sensitivity”.

Internal security advice shared among the intelligence agencies was often as preoccupied with the activities of journalists as with more conventional threats such as foreign intelligence, hackers or criminals.

One restricted document intended for those in army intelligence warned that “journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security”.

It continued: “Of specific concern are ‘investigative journalists’ who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.

“All classes of journalists and reporters may try either a formal approach or an informal approach, possibly with off-duty personnel, in their attempts to gain official information to which they are not entitled.”

It goes on to caution “such approaches pose a real threat”, and tells staff they must be “immediately reported” to the chain-of-command.

GCHQ information security assessments, meanwhile, routinely list journalists between “terrorism” and “hackers” as “influencing threat sources”, with one matrix scoring journalists as having a “capability” score of two out of five, and a “priority” of three out of five, scoring an overall “low” information security risk.

Terrorists, listed immediately above investigative journalists on the document, were given a much higher “capability” score of four out of five, but a lower “priority” of two. The matrix concluded terrorists were therefore a “moderate” information security risk.

A spokesman for GCHQ said: “It is longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.

“All our operational processes rigorously support this position. In addition, the UK’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European convention on human rights.”

James Ball
Monday 19 January 2015 15.04 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 20 January 2015 00.17 GMT

Find this story at 19 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News

Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

Journalists represent ‘a potential threat to security’, according to GCHQ
Revelation buried in secret documents leaked from the UK spy centre
Comes amid calls for security services to be given power to monitor emails
Journalists a ‘low’ security risk compared to terrorists who are ‘moderate’
GCHQ scooped up 70,000 emails in just 10 minutes, documents reveal
Among intercepted emails were some sent by BBC and New York Times

British spooks intercepted emails from US and UK media organisations and rated ‘investigative journalists’ alongside terrorists and hackers as potential security threats, secret documents reveal.
Internal advice circulated by intelligence chiefs at the Government spy centre GCHQ claims ‘journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security’.
Intelligence documents leaked by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden also show that British security officers scooped up 70,000 emails in just 10 minutes during one interception exercise in 2008.
Among the private exchanges were emails between journalists at the BBC, New York Times and US network NBC.

The disclosure comes amid growing calls for the security services to be handed more power to monitor the internet following the Paris terror attacks.
Internal security advice, shared among British intelligence agencies, scored journalists in a table of potential threats.
One restricted document, which according to the Guardian was intended for those in army intelligence, warned that ‘journalists and reporters representing all types of news media represent a potential threat to security’.

Furious Chuka Umunna storms off ‘ridiculous’ live TV…
Prime Minister David Cameron makes a speech at Ransomes Jacobsen in Ipswich, Suffolk, where he set out the Tory path to full employment, promising to keep Britain the “jobs factory of Europe” by backing small business. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Monday January 19, 2015. Mr Cameron admitted it had been a “tough few years” for UK plc, but said the country was “coming out the other side” – and urged voters to stick with his plan. See PA story POLITICS Cameron. Photo credit should read: Chris Radburn/PA Wire
Britain is the ‘jobs factory of Europe’, Cameron boasts as…
Prime Minister David Cameron and his wife Samantha take a drink by a beach during their holiday on the Spanish Island of Ibiza today. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Picture date: Sunday May 26, 2013. See PA story POLITICS Cameron. Photo credit should read: Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire
Young Tories promised a holiday in Ibiza with Dave and…

It continued: ‘Of specific concern are “investigative journalists” who specialise in defence-related exposés either for profit or what they deem to be of the public interest.’
The document adds: ‘All classes of journalists and reporters may try either a formal approach or an informal approach, possibly with off-duty personnel, in their attempts to gain official information to which they are not entitled.’
It warns staff that ‘such approaches pose a real threat’, adding it must be ‘immediately reported’.
One table scored journalists a ‘low’ information security risk – compared to terrorists who are seen as a ‘moderate’ threat.

A spokesman for GCHQ refused to confirm or deny if the leaked documents were accurate. The spokesman said: ‘It is longstanding policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters.
‘Furthermore, all of GCHQ’s work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate, and that there is rigorous oversight, including from the secretary of state, the interception and intelligence services commissioners and the parliamentary intelligence and security committee.
‘All our operational processes rigorously support this position. In addition, the UK’s interception regime is entirely compatible with the European convention on human rights.’
According to the Guardian, GCHQ scooped up emails to and from journalists during one 10-minute ‘tapping’ session in November 2008.
Emails from the BBC, the Sun and the Mail on Sunday were picked up and shared on the agency’s internal computer system – alongside memos from US media organisations.
The revelation comes as the British government faces growing pressure to ensure journalists’ texts and emails are protected from snooping.
Newspaper editors and lawyers have called for a new freedom of expression law.

By TOM MCTAGUE, DEPUTY POLITICAL EDITOR FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 16:32 GMT, 19 January 2015 | UPDATED: 18:06 GMT, 19 January 2015

Find this story at 19 January 2015

© Associated Newspapers Ltd

In a Democracy Now! exclusive, we speak to environmental activist Eric McDavid, who has just been released from prison 10 years early after federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding key evidence about how he may have been entrapped by an FBI informant with whom he had fallen in love. In 2008, McDavid was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiring to bomb sites in California including the Nimbus Dam. Defense attorneys say he was entrapped by a teenage informant who went by the name “Anna” and supplied him with food, housing and bomb-making instructions, and pressured him into illegal activity. As part of a settlement reached in the case on Thursday, federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding key evidence, including an FBI request for the informant to undergo a lie-detector test. This damning detail about the government’s star witness was found in thousands of documents released after his trial, when his supporters filed a Freedom of Information Act request. In his first interview since his release, McDavid joins us from Sacramento along with his partner Jenny Esquivel, a member of the group Sacramento Prisoner Support. We are also joined by McDavid’s lawyer, Ben Rosenfeld, a civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct.

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

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Just a week ago, our next guest was a federal prisoner, serving a 19-year sentence for “eco-terrorism” in what his supporters say was a case of FBI entrapment. Today, he’s a free man. In 2007, Eric McDavid was convicted of conspiring to bomb sites in California including the Nimbus Dam. But his attorneys say he was entrapped by a teenage informant who went by the name “Anna” and supplied him with food, housing and bomb-making instructions, and pressured him into illegal activity. Two others arrested in the plot testified against McDavid in a deal that led to lighter sentences.

AMY GOODMAN: For them. Well, as part of a settlement reached in the case on Thursday, federal prosecutors acknowledged withholding evidence in McDavid’s case, including an FBI request for the informant to undergo a lie-detector test. This damning detail about the government’s star witness was found in thousands of documents released after his trial, when his supporters filed a Freedom of Information Act request. During a hearing, federal judge Morrison England demanded to know how the prosecution failed to give potentially exculpatory evidence to the defense, saying, quote, “This is huge. This is something that needs to be dealt with,” the judge said. McDavid pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge with a maximum five-year sentence. He had already served nine years in prison, and he was released.

Eric McDavid now joins us from Sacramento for his first interview since his release. With him, his partner Jenny Esquivel, a member of the group Sacramento Prisoner Support. And in San Francisco, we’re joined by Ben Rosenfeld, McDavid’s lawyer. He is a civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct. He’s also an advisory board member of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Eric, let’s begin with you. How does it feel to be free?

ERIC McDAVID: There is no definition to that. There’s no way to express that with, I don’t think, any language, definitely not the English language.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what it is—

ERIC McDAVID: But it’s definitely beautiful to be with my family.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what—how critical the information was that had you released.

ERIC McDAVID: I think that’s pretty obvious. And to tell you the truth, I think Ben could address that with a lot more clarity.

AMY GOODMAN: OK, Ben Rosenfeld in San Francisco, can you talk about what has taken place in this case? I mean, here you have Eric McDavid, who was supposed to serve 19 years in prison. He’s being released a decade early. Why?

BEN ROSENFELD: Eleven years early, actually. And this was about as egregious a case of entrapment as I’ve seen in my entire legal career. And I should point out, too, that what they’ve done to Eric, they visit a thousandfold on Muslims in this country, so it’s very important that we raise public awareness about this.

But in Eric’s case, in particular, a number of FOIA documents were turned over after the case was long concluded. And supporters started going through those documents, and they went, “Aha, this is stuff that should have been turned over to the defense that would have been absolutely critical to his defense.” It included evidence that the government had called urgently for a lie-detector examination of their informant and then inexplicably canceled it. There are indications that letters of a romantic nature that they had withheld from the defense were included in their files. But even the FOIA was the tip of the iceberg, because it pointed to or hinted at some of those documents, but didn’t include them. And we—as his lawyers, we incorporated that into his habeas claim, and the court showed interest in that. And ultimately, that set the table for his release, when the government was forced to admit that they had in fact withheld documents that should have been turned over to the defense.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ben Rosenfeld, the informant in this case is a critical part of what happened here. In 2008, Elle magazine featured an article about how the FBI paid a young woman, known as “Anna,” to befriend activists and pressure them into illegal activity. It describes in detail her relationship with Eric McDavid and her role in the case against him. In an interview for the piece, Anna says when the group planned to blow up the Nimbus Dam, her role was to track down bomb recipes. She said, quote, “I go to the FBI with this and they said, Well, of course we’re not going to give you bomb recipes that actually work. So they gave me about half a dozen recipes that were all missing components.” Could you talk about the role of Anna? Because she supposedly was involved in gathering evidence as an informant against many activists in the environmental movement.

BEN ROSENFELD: Well, thank you. I want to point out first, there was never any plan to blow up the Nimbus Dam. There was actually never any plan to do anything. There was a lot of talk. And whatever plans there were, were 100 percent the FBI’s and Anna’s. I mean, this is a clear-cut case of entrapment. It’s a case of the government creating and then solving its own so-called conspiracy. The Nimbus Dam, if there was any agreement among the co-defendants in this case, it was specifically not to blow up the Nimbus Dam.

But, yes, Anna entrapped them by literally herding them together from around the country, by plying them with the matériel they needed, by sheltering them and providing them food and transportation, and literally gathering them back together and trying to keep them interested in her plans and her schemes. And each of them, for their own reasons, was trying to please and placate her. It was a lot of talk. It was no action. Nothing was ever done. Nothing was ever agreed upon. Certainly, nothing was ever blown up.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk about the case, Jenny, why you got involved, with Sacramento Prisoner Support, Jenny Esquivel, and how you applied for this information under the Freedom of Information Act?

JENNY ESQUIVEL: Sure. I came to Sacramento immediately after Eric was arrested. He and I were partners right before he got arrested. And so, I came here just to be closer to him and do support work for him, and that’s how I originally got involved in Sacramento Prisoner Support.

As far as the FOIA goes, you know, Mark Reichel, Eric’s original attorney for trial, filed a FOIA request before Eric’s trial in 2007. And at the time, the FBI responded, saying that they had no records responsive to our request, which was interesting. Also, clearly, it was a lie, as at that time we had thousands of pages of discovery that the government had turned over to us for trial. So, we were pretty busy, obviously, at that point in time with trial, also trying to support Eric while he was on hunger strike, trying to get vegan food at the Sacramento County Main Jail. And so, we just didn’t really have time to follow through on that or pursue it, even though we knew that they clearly did have records responsive to our request. So, after Eric was convicted and sentenced in 2008, we filed another Freedom of Information Act request, and about a year and a half later, we started finally receiving records that were responsive to that request. And at that time, we received three or four different packages of documents equaling about 2,500 pages. One other interesting thing about that, though, is that the government admitted to not handing over almost 900 more pages of information. And we still haven’t seen those documents. We still don’t know what’s in those documents, and perhaps, unfortunately, never will.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eric McDavid, can you talk about your reaction when you discovered that this Anna, the informant, was an informant and had been taping conversations, the very person who was trying to instigate activity among you and other activists? And your reaction to her testimony in court?

ERIC McDAVID: Well, initially, to your first question, it was as I was sitting on the back of the car and I heard the locks click all the way around on the automatic lock of the vehicle that she was sitting in, while she was talking on the phone, as about eight—I don’t know, eight to 10 different vehicles pulled screeching up in front of me with JTTF hopping out, AR-15s, everybody all ready to roll. So, I mean, that’s—that was the first when it clicked. So it wasn’t—I had a whole bunch on my mind at the time, so it wasn’t really a predominant or a huge thought.

During trial, that part, after—because I had read a whole bunch of the discovery, and we’d gone over transcripts and everything. And it was difficult to see, definitely, but—I don’t know. It was definitely hard to see. I mean, that part was definitely one of the more harder rides of the whole trial.

AMY GOODMAN: This is an excerpt—

ERIC McDAVID: After—

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to an excerpt of an exchange between, well, the woman who calls herself Anna—and for folks who are listening on the radio, we’re also showing pictures of her; she was featured, as we said, in Elle magazine—the exchange between Anna and Eric McDavid and another activist, Lauren Weiner, when they were in the cabin allegedly planning to bomb the Nimbus Dam. Anna says, “Tomorrow, what are we planning on doing tomorrow? Are we still planning on doing anything tomorrow? Or should I just stop talking about plans?” Eric McDavid says, “Hmmm.” Weiner says, “I would love it if you stopped talking.” Anna says, “I would love it if you guys followed a plan! How about that!” Ben Rosenfeld, what is the significance of this back-and-forth?

BEN ROSENFELD: The significance of that back-and-forth is that it really illustrates 100 percent a case of egregious and grotesque entrapment by the government. Anna literally called them names and threw fits when they didn’t show enough enthusiasm for her plans. And I think that excerpt illustrates that perfectly.

You know, for—and—and I would also point out that right now the government wants to skate away on the claim that this was purely a mistake or inadvertent, on the back of a press office statement. And whether it was a mistake or it was malfeasance or it was malevolence to withhold these documents, they really owe it to Eric, and they owe it to the public, to come up with a much more detailed explanation about how this could have happened. I mean, you know, the deck is completely stacked in their favor. I mean, the job of the defense, in essence, is to go fishing in their deck to ask, “Do you have anything?” And if you’re told they don’t have anything, you’re stuck with that answer, and sometimes for a long time and sometimes forever—in Eric’s case, for nine years of wrongful incarceration.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, Ben, in this situation where prosecutors clearly, deliberately withhold evidence, possibly exculpatory evidence—I’ve seen so many of these cases over the years—isn’t it the responsibility, to some degree, of the judge to insist that an investigation be conducted, because the trial itself was so tainted as a result of these actions of the prosecutors?

BEN ROSENFELD: We’d certainly like to see the judge do that. We’d like to see the judiciary take that up. And there’s some indications by Ninth Circuit judges that they are very concerned about a potential epidemic of Brady violations. Brady is the Supreme Court case that speaks to the withholding of documents. I would point out, too, that from a legal standpoint it doesn’t matter whether it was inadvertent or deliberate. If they withheld documents which were helpful to the defense—in this case, documents showing that there was a romantic interest by Eric, a correspondence between Eric and Anna that the prosecutors held back, and a reciprocation by Anna—that’s good enough to satisfy that constitutional standard and to win release. It should be, but it’s very rare that it happens. And you can see that it takes years and years and years to correct a mistake which should have been corrected a long time ago. And there are a lot of people behind bars who may never get that chance.

AMY GOODMAN: The 2008 Elle article about the Eric McDavid case quotes a juror named Diane Bennett, who was tracked down by the reporter after the trial. Bennett said, quote, “I’ve been bothered by this ever since that day. … [T]he FBI was an embarrassment. … I hope he gets a new trial. I’m not happy with the one he got.” Diane Bennett added, the foreman had “teared up” when he delivered the guilty verdict. She said the judge’s instructions were confusing, but, quote, “People were tired. … We wanted to go home.” Can you talk about the significance of this, Ben Rosenfeld?

BEN ROSENFELD: Well, and she said that so long ago, and it just goes to show how long you can live in this Kafkaesque nightmare, where the government has engaged in total misconduct and the court, perhaps, has abdicated a responsibility to oversee this or maybe is hoodwinked along with the defense because of the overly trusting role and excessive trust that it places sometimes in the government and the prosecutor. I mean, in court on January 8th, the day that Eric walked free, I’ve never seen so many fireworks. And the judge really grilled the prosecutors, and he showed a lot of—a lot of personal pique and interest in getting to the bottom of this. And I really hope that he or somebody does follow up.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you—could you explain the deal that was struck at the end, though?

BEN ROSENFELD: Yeah. You know, Eric had to plead to a simple or general conspiracy count with a maximum penalty of five years. The judge vacated the original conviction and sentence of 20 years on a different charge. So the government extracts its pound of flesh. That’s probably as much justice as you’re going to get out of the Department of Just—Injustice in a case like this. Eric had to waive all civil claims, going forward.

But he’s here now, and we’re extremely grateful for that and for everybody that made that possible and, I will say, too, the team of U.S. attorneys at the end of the case, who behaved extremely honorably and professionally in taking a fresh look at this and enabling that to happen, too. But it took a collaboration of a lot of people to end this nightmare. And there are a lot of people left in prison who are the victims of this kind of government malfeasance also, and there needs to be an inquiry.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eric, could you talk, in the about a minute and a half we have left, of your time in prison? Did you expect at some point to be able to get out and to have this nightmare behind you?

ERIC McDAVID: I had a buddy at the medium-security prison where I was first held who always challenged me in keeping my mind open and keeping my heart open and making sure that I was ready for anything. And given the intensity of that environment, it definitely helped me to adapt to that whole situation. But he was always—every other week or every other day, he’d hit me up: “You ready to go home? You ready to go home?” I’m like, “Yes, I’m ready to go home.” And he’s like, “All right, so here’s the situation how you’re going to go home. Tell me how you’re going to do it.” And so, that part was always kept alive. And the amount of support that I got from folks has just—it’s blown my heart open every day and every moment that I’ve been—that I was away from my friends and family and my loved ones.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Eric, did you meet other people behind bars who you felt were entrapped like you were?

ERIC McDAVID: There is so many people that either are entrapped in the same way or pressured into taking a sentence because they’re threatened with 60, 70 years of prison, and they have to do the 15, or they have to do the 17, or even 20, because otherwise they’re going to spend the rest of their life back there. That was time and time again.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Eric McDavid, we want to thank you for being with us. Congratulations on your release. He was released from prison Thursday, less than a week after federal prosecutors [acknowledged withholding] key evidence in the 2008 trial that led to his conviction on eco-terrorism charges. Jenny Esquivel, member of the Sacramento Prisoner Support, also Eric McDavid’s partner. And thanks to Ben Rosenfeld, joining us from San Francisco, the civil rights attorney who specializes in cases dealing with police and FBI misconduct, the attorney for Eric McDavid.

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 14, 2015

Find this story at 14 January 2015

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In the case of Eric McDavid, alleged to be ring-leader of eco-terrorist cell, ‘game-changing’ documents seen exclusively by the Guardian show informant may have entrapped him

On the surface, she blended in very well. With a skull tattooed on her shoulder, a black-and-white keffiyeh around her neck, a shock of bright pink hair and her standard-issue dress of camouflage skirt and heavy boots, the energetic 17-year-old looked every bit the radical eco-activist she worked so hard to imitate.

But “Anna”, as she called herself, was no ordinary eco-protester. Really, she wasn’t one at all. She was an FBI informant under instructions to infiltrate fringe green groups and anti-capitalist networks and report back on their activities to the US government.

Now “Anna”, in her role at the center of a high-profile prosecution of alleged eco-terrorists in 2006-7, has been put under the spotlight following the embarrassing admission by the US Department of Justice that it failed to disclose crucial documents to defence attorneys at trial.

On Thursday, Eric McDavid, a radical green activist aged 37, was allowed to walk free after having served nine years of a 19-year federal prison sentence. Prosecutors had alleged that he was the ringleader in a small cell of eco-terrorists connected to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) conspiring to bomb the Nimbus Dam in California, cellphone towers, science labs and other targets.

Last week’s dramatic scenes in a courtroom in Sacramento, California, have focused attention on the FBI’s use of undercover informants and prompted claims that the agency lured unsuspecting activists into criminal activity through blatant entrapment.

But last November, the US attorney’s office in the eastern district of California admitted that it had “inadvertently” failed to disclose numerous documents that went to the very heart of the case. Crucially, those previously undisclosed files included correspondence between “Anna” and McDavid that suggests that, far from being the neutral intelligence-gatherer portrayed by prosecutors, she might have entrapped her prey by encouraging him to behave conspiratorially in the hope of romantic fulfilment.

‘I think you and I could be great’
Among the files are a letter and 10 emails written by McDavid to the teenaged woman he thought at the time to be his friend, peer and potential sexual partner. The writings have been seen by the Guardian and extracts of them are published here for the first time.

In the letter, McDavid declared his love for “Anna”, though he coyly added that he was not sure whether his feelings for her amounted to “just infatuation, a crush, or whatever box anybody has for this emotion”. Scrawled diagonally across the page in spindly script, his words expressed the trepidation of someone unused to venting openly his emotions. He feared that unless he shared his feelings, they would “eat me from the inside out”.

“I hope that my forwardness w/expressing all this doesn’t scare the shit out of u,” he wrote, “cause I know if I got this letter I’d probably trip out a bit, to say the least …” Having opened his heart, he blurted out with palpable relief: “Fuck that feels soooooo much better.”

At McDavid’s 2006 trial, his defence team presented evidence to the jury that McDavid had fallen in love with the woman who would turn out to be his downfall. What wasn’t known at that time, and what is revealed by the newly disclosed documents, was that “Anna”, in her guise as a fellow radical, clearly reciprocated.

In an email dated 27 June 2005, six months before McDavid’s arrest, “Anna” responded explicitly to his previous amorous advances. She said: “I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out.” She went on to say: “I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”

The tone of romantic encouragement in the email had an immediate impact on McDavid. He replied three days later, using the ungrammatical language of texting: “hey cheeka, so far as us B’n great, that i think is an understatement… along w/the ‘LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out’… but if u aint learning, u aint live’n… & I do think we could learn a lot from each other.”

In subsequent emails, McDavid continued to express his feelings for her, sending her “big hugs” and saying “miss you much”. Only one of “Anna’s” replies to McDavid is included among the new batch of documents disclosed after so many years. In it she wrote intimately about her hairstyle: “I took out the braids. : ( They were hurting my head SO BADLY by the last night in philly that I was just getting pissy. I’ll do it again, but I think I want the loose pink hair, like I told you about; and I can DIY that. But pain isn’t worth that much – besides, identity is so fluid… but that’s another convo, hopefully for IN. : )”

The tone is almost flirtatious. McDavid evidently took it to be such, because he replied: “sad & glad 2 hear about the braids, glad 2 hear they Rn’t hurting u’r head anymore, sad 2 c them gone… they were pretty damn cute, & that princess laya thing was 2 hot (inside shiver)”.

McDavid’s treatment: ‘not fair’ or an ‘inadvertent mistake’?
Eric McDavid walks out of the Federal Courthouse in Sacramento after being released from prison
The judge in McDavid’s case expressed astonishment and dismay that game-changing documents had not been shown at 2007 trial, adding McDavid’s treatment was ‘not fair’. Photograph: Jose Luis Villegas/AP
It took McDavid’s defence team and his large band of devoted supporters seven years after he was sentenced to extract from the Justice Department those 11 precious documents. They were finally released on 6 November last year, fully two years after reference was made to their existence in a court declaration by “Anna’s” FBI handler, special agent Nasson Walker. That two-year delay alone belies the assurance made by the US attorney’s office in Sacramento to the New York Times after last week’s hearing that “the documents were produced to the defendant promptly after their discovery.”

At the hearing, federal judge Morrison England expressed astonishment and dismay that such game-changing documents had not been shown to the defence at the 10-day trial over which he had presided in 2007. “I’ve never heard or seen anything like this,” he said, adding that McDavid’s treatment was “not fair”.

The judge demanded to be told how such a flagrant breach of disclosure – under the 14th amendment of the US constitution, the prosecution must turn over potentially exculpatory evidence to the defence – could have occurred: “This is huge. This is something that needs to be dealt with, and I want to know what happened.”

McDavid’s current lawyers, Mark Vermeulen and Ben Rosenfeld, said the documents they battled for years to wrestle from US prosecutors would have transformed the trial had they been available at the time. “If the defence had the evidence it has now – that ‘Anna’ encouraged Eric’s romantic advances, leading him to believe that sexual fulfilment would be conditional on him following her plans – that would have confirmed in the jury’s mind that she entrapped him. He would have been acquitted, it’s as simple as that,” Rosenfeld told the Guardian.

If the defence had the evidence it has now … He would have been acquitted, it’s as simple as that.
Ben Rosenfeld
The Justice Department continues to insist it was all an “inadvertent” mistake. But that narrative does not cut it for McDavid’s legal team and supporters. “They took nine years of Eric’s life away from him and they shouldn’t be able to gloss over that with a press release – there needs to be a detailed explanation,” Rosenfeld said.

Concerns raised by the McDavid case about the use of undercover informants will resonate today given the FBI’s continued reliance upon infiltration as a major plank of its counter-terrorism strategy. Its paid moles, especially those planted within Muslim communities in the wake of 9/11, are regularly accused of crossing the line from observation into entrapment.

Rosenfeld said that McDavid’s story was a warning for today’s justice system: “When people see the TV news and hear of the latest foiled terrorist outrage they think ‘Wow! The FBI is so good at its job.’ But so many of these apparent plots are complete inventions of the government in the first place – they are creating and then solving their own conspiracies.”

‘I wanted to get a conversation going with everyone’
Throughout almost a decade of legal wrangling over the McDavid case, the mysterious “Anna” has been a constant factor. In her only known interview, for a 2008 article in Elle magazine, she posed for photographs in her normal outfit of jeans, T-shirt and suede jacket, her hair by then faded from lurid pink to its natural brown.

She told the magazine that 9/11 had motivated her to engage in counter-intelligence. A year after the attacks, when she was just 15, she contacted the Militarywomen.org website to inquire about enlisting in the army.

At a community college night class in Miami she tried to impress her professor by sneaking into a meeting of anti-free trade protesters for what she called “anthropological observation”. The report she presented to class so struck a police officer who was also taking the course that he passed her details to the Miami police department, which in turn quickly recommended her to the FBI.

Within months, she was going undercover among protesters at the G8 summit of leading economic powers in Atlanta. Over the next two years she was given more than 10 federal assignments, including infiltrating protest groups at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in Boston and New York respectively, and delving into the world of radical environmental activism.

At the G8 she met an anarchist named Zach Jenson, and through him fellow eco-activists Lauren Weiner and McDavid who she first met in 2004. All three were eventually arrested, though Jenson and Weiner cut a deal with prosecutors in which they gave evidence against their co-defendant in exchange for a lesser sentence.

“Anna” told the jury at McDavid’s trial that she had been scrupulously impartial, sticking closely to legal guidelines for informants that forbade her from playing a leadership position in the group or from pushing anybody to do anything. Yet under cross-examination, she described some of the proactive steps she took to bring the “cell” together.

She bought plane tickets for Weiner to fly her to McDavid’s house for a group meeting. “I wanted to get a conversation going between everyone,” she said.

Later, she drove Weiner and Jenson across the country to meet McDavid, using a ’96 Chevrolet paid for by the FBI and kitted out with recording equipment. When Weiner showed signs of losing enthusiasm for the project, “Anna” sent her an email saying: “There’s no going back … I don’t want to be dilly-dallying around forever, which I know I could do and fall into that trap but I want to avoid you doing that too.”

In email correspondence that is included in the newly disclosed documents seen by the Guardian, “Anna” wrote to Weiner in September 2005, telling her “I’ve made some more contacts in Philly, esp with the animal liberation movement, which I’d like to bring you and the rest of teh (sic) crew more into. I already talked a little bit about it with [McDavid] – we could make a big difference on multiple fronts.”

In a later email, also to Weiner, she said: “I’d love to start helping you and the rest of the Philly kids in whatever your hearts find to do.”

The FBI also paid for a cabin in Dutch Flat, California, heavily rigged with surveillance devices, where “Anna” assembled the group, telling them she had earned the rent money working as a dancer-cum-escort. There she presented the others with a “burn book” containing six recipes for concocting firebombs, though she told the jury the devices were designed by the FBI to be duds.

‘The government owes it to Eric – to tell the truth’
As these final planning meetings for a potential attack on a science lab were taking place, the FBI appeared to grow jittery about an operation that depended entirely on “Anna”. In November 2005, just weeks before the three activists were arrested at the cabin, a formal request was made to subject her to a lie-detector test.

The request form says the purpose of the polygraph would be to “confirm veracity of [“Anna’s”] reporting prior to the expenditure of substantial efforts and money based on source’s reporting.”

The polygraph was disclosed to McDavid’s defence team under freedom of information laws in 2012, five years after the trial. A small, but potentially significant, footnote to the request form reveals that a senior federal prosecutor (AUSA) approved the test, though the identity of the official is redacted on grounds of “personal privacy”.

The emergence of the polygraph test, and of the romantically tinged correspondence, has incensed Mark Reichel who acted as McDavid’s lawyer at trial. He tried to mount an entrapment defence, having been told by his client of “Anna’s” amorous behaviour, but was ultimately stymied by lack of evidence.

Before the trial began Reichel filed a motion to dismiss the case on grounds of an improper romance between informant and defendant. In it, he accused “Anna” of having “encouraged and urged him on, to write love letters and emails to her”. The US government’s response to the motion left no room for doubt: “The defendant’s claim of a romantic relationship between him and the informant is categorically untrue”.

I demanded to see the love letters before the trial, but the government told me they didn’t exist
Mark Reichel
“I demanded to see the love letters before the trial, but the government told me they didn’t exist,” Reichel said. “They wanted the world to see they had captured a member of ELF. He was innocent, they knew that, but they couldn’t let it be seen.”

The revelation of the newly disclosed documents is likely to prompt a flurry of litigation. Jeffrey Weiner, Lauren Weiner’s attorney (and cousin), told the Guardian that he was considering legal action to have her federal conviction lifted.

He said that “Anna” had encouraged a strong and intimate personal relationship with Lauren that was “so intense and continuous she literally took over Lauren’s will. ‘Anna’ chose the most gullible people that she could find and stopped at nothing to persuade them to commit criminal acts. I’m not saying my client did nothing, but her crime was created by the US government.”

For McDavid, too, this story is not at an end. As part of his release deal, he pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy charge with a terrorism enhancement attached, meaning that although he is a free man he will continue to labour under the stigma of a serious federal conviction.

Nor is the full extent of the official deception yet known. In 2010 the Justice Department released 2,500 pages relating to the case under freedom of information rules, but it refused to hand over a further 900 pages. What nuggets of information those pages contain, particularly among “Anna’s” replies to McDavid’s emails – most of which remain hidden – only the US government knows.

McDavid’s current partner, Jenny Esquivel, who has been a leading member of his support group, said she feared the remaining documents would never see the light of day. “The government keeps trying to frame this as a mistake, but they are the only people who knows what happened and they owe it to the American people – and to Eric – to tell the truth.”

She said that in the five days of freedom he has enjoyed, McDavid has revelled in being reunited with his family and spending time with his two nieces, both of whom were born while he was in prison. “The girls were overjoyed when they heard the news that he was coming home. It was almost impossible to pull them away from him while they were here,” she said.

Amid his joy, McDavid hasn’t lost sight, Esquivel said, of those who remain in the clutches of FBI entrapment. “The travesty is that so many people are dealing right now with exactly the same problem. Hundreds are serving decades in prison for crimes that never happened.”

Ed Pilkington in New York
@edpilkington
Tuesday 13 January 2015 20.01 GMT Last modified on Tuesday 13 January 2015 23.50 GMT

Find this story at 13 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Eric McDavid sentenced to nearly 20 years in 2007 for conspiring to bomb one or more targets including electric power stations and cellphone towers
Eric McDavid.

Eric McDavid, who the US government has considered an eco-terrorist since 2007, was released on Thursday night after a judge determined that important documents related to his case had been filed away in an FBI office.

The government handed over thousands of pages of documents – including love notes from from McDavid to an informant – as part of a trial this week in Sacramento, California.

“I’ve never heard or seen of anything like this,” said US district judge Morrison England, the same man who sentenced McDavid in 2007. England ordered McDavid be released and asked to be given information showing how such evidence was hidden.

“I know [McDavid is] not necessarily a choirboy, but he doesn’t deserve to go through this, either,” England told the Sacramento Bee. “It’s not fair.”

McDavid, 37, was three days away from having spent nine years in prison. As part of the agreement, McDavid pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count and was released with time served.

His lawyers say he was entrapped by an FBI informant – “Anna” – the recipient of the love notes which were hidden away in the FBI office. She was named in the trial and was the subject of a feature in Elle magazine. McDavid’s supporters say she encouraged him to engage in violent acts against the government while suggesting future romantic encounters.

McDavid was arrested in January 2006, and sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison in September 2007. He was convicted of conspiring to bomb one or more targets including electric power stations, California’s Nimbus Dam, cell phone towers and the United States Forest Service Institute of Forest Genetics.

A September 2007 release from the FBI said he and two others, in the presence of “a confidential source”, met at his parents’ house, purchased a book with instructions on how to make homemade bombs, and bought the necessary supplies.

McDavid’s lawyers had been searching for more evidence, but did not receive confirmation from the government about the existence of the hidden documents until recently.

It is not yet clear why the documents sat in the Sacramento FBI office as McDavid served his sentence in a prison near Los Angeles.

“We don’t know exactly why they weren’t turned over,” the chief of the US attorney’s criminal division, John Vincent, told the court.

The US attorney’s office in the Eastern District of California acknowledged that the government’s failure to produce the documents is grounds for a retrial, but both sides agreed to the deal without a retrial to avoid further possible litigation on both sides.

“As the United States stated at the hearing, the nondisclosure was inadvertent, and the documents were produced to the defendant promptly after their discovery,” the office said in a statement.

Soon after England reached his decision, McDavid left a federal building in Sacramento and was met by his parents, sister and girlfriend.

“We are thrilled beyond word that Eric is coming home to us after nine years in prison,” Eric’s mother, Eileen McDavid, said in a statement on behalf of the family.

“We never stopped believing he was wrongly accused. Blessing to all those who made his early release possible.”

Amanda Holpuch in Washington
Friday 9 January 2015 15.35 GMT Last modified on Friday 9 January 2015 23.53 GMT

Find this story at 9 January 2015

© 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

An extraordinary thing happened last month: US prosecutors admitted the government messed up.

Well, technically they admitted that a judge could conceivably decide that the government might have possibly messed up enough to warrant a new trial. But still.

As part of a unusual deal brokered between his defense team and chagrined US attorneys, Eric McDavid, who in 2007 was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison on domestic terrorism charges, walked free on January 8 after the government told a judge it had “inadvertently” failed to hand over thousands of pages of FBI documents to his defense counsel in his original trial.

McDavid, 37, served three days short of nine years in custody before US District Judge Morrison England agreed to reduce his sentence to a lone count of conspiracy and released him on time served.

“This is one of the most unusual things I’ve had to deal with, if not the most unusual, since I started on the bench in 1996 and on this court since 2002,” England said, according to court transcripts. “I’ve never heard or seen of anything like this.”

As part of his deal, McDavid waived his right to sue the government. He is now a free man, but the conclusion of his case is an embarrassing coda to the Bush-era surveillance of radical environmentalists and anti-capitalists in the years following the 9/11 attacks.

McDavid and two other radical environmentalists, Zach Jenson and Lauren Weiner, were convicted in 2007 of conspiring to blow up a dam, cellphone towers, and a US Forest Service lab after a paid FBI informant—an unassuming 18-year-old known only as “Anna”—infiltrated their group, egged them on, and exposed them.

That would have likely been the end of McDavid’s story, but a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by two of his supporters dredged up nearly 2,500 pages of FBI documents that prosecutors had previously insisted did not exist.

The tranche of files led the US attorneys office in Sacramento to turn over even more documents that it had—according to a letter to McDavid’s lawyers—”inadvertently not disclosed during discovery.” Among the documents were flirty notes between McDavid and Anna, as well as a request from an FBI agent for a polygraph exam on Anna to test the veracity of her statements. All of which McDavid’s attorneys say would have been crucial in bolstering McDavid’s entrapment defense.

“It’s somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence.”

“[Anna] fomented the alleged conspiracy, literally herding defendants together from around the country for meetings, badgering them to form a plan, and mocking and berating them when they showed disinterest,” McDavid’s lawyers Ben Rosenfeld and Mark Vermeulen wrote in a motion last year.

The Sacramento Bee described England, who presided over McDavid’s original ten-day trial, as “clearly exasperated” and “sometimes stopping to hold his head in his left hand” during last month’s hearing.

“I know he’s not necessarily a choirboy, but he doesn’t deserve to go through this, either,” England said. “It’s not fair.”

Prosecutors and top brass from the US Attorney’s office, none of whom were involved in the original trial, had little to offer for explanation.

“We don’t know exactly why they weren’t turned over,” John Vincent, chief of the US Attorney’s criminal division, told England. According to the US Attorney’s office, the documents were sitting in an FBI file in Sacramento.

In a statement released following the hearing, the US Attorney’s Office of Eastern California said that “although those documents do not directly bear upon whether the defendant committed the underlying acts… the United States agreed that it is conceivable that a court could conclude that the failure to produce them required a retrial.”

This is a master class in ass-covering, impressive even by government standards. Note how it starts by reaffirming McDavid’s guilt, and then avoids admitting any wrongdoing by saying that the government agreed, in its great magnanimity, that others might come to the conclusion that it had seriously screwed the pooch

Some prosecutors were a bit more forthright.

“We absolutely admit that we made a mistake, but there was no deliberate, knowing withholding of any documents,” said First Assistant US Attorney Philip A. Ferrari in January.

But the notion that the FBI and prosecutors simply misplaced thousands of pages of documents from a highly touted anti-terror investigation and then rediscovered them years later is hard to swallow for many who watched McDavid’s case unfold.

“It’s somewhere along the continuum of mistake, malfeasance, and malevolence,” McDavid’s lawyer Rosenfeld said in a phone interview. “The point is that only the government can explain what level of mistake this was, and the public should demand that explanation.”

In an interview, Will Potter, an independent journalist who has written extensively about the government’s surveillance of radical environmental groups, called the government’s claim that it accidentally failed to hand over the documents “complete nonsense.”

“The FBI and prosecutors have been intimately aware of how many boundaries have been pushed and crossed along the way, and they’ve relentlessly defended it,” Potter said. “Jurors came afterward and said they thought they were misled. In recordings, the court heard [Anna] constantly berating McDavid for not taking action. Every step of the way the government pushed and pushed to get the conviction at any cost.”

The Green Scare

McDavid first met Anna in 2004 at an invitation-only anarchist gathering in Des Moines, Iowa. It was a heady time for both radical leftists and federal law enforcement, which had been given broad discretion and nearly unlimited resources to root out terrorism threats. Love was in the air.

McDavid, 26 at the time, was an on-again, off-again college student from Auburn, California, with a muddled interest in anarchism and environmentalism.

Anna was a no-nonsense girl with pink hair, a short camo skirt, and a keffiyeh around her neck. She told McDavid she had hitchhiked to the gathering. In reality, she had flown out on the FBI’s dime.

She had gotten a taste for informant work after infiltrating an anti-globalization protest group for a paper for her community college class. Impressed by her initiative, a police officer in her class put her in touch with the Miami Police Department, which in turn referred her to the FBI. In a flattering 2008 profile in Elle magazine, Anna said she was a patriotic hawk who wanted to do something for her country after 9/11.

She was a godsend for the FBI. Radicals seemed to be able to sniff out professional undercover officers before they even stepped through the door. But Anna was a natural—quick-thinking, reliable, and able to move through activist circles with ease. She didn’t walk like a cop or otherwise exude cop-ness.

McDavid didn’t know it when he first laid his smitten eyes on Anna in Iowa, but he had just been snared in what activists would later dub the “green scare,” an allusion to the anti-communist red scare of the 1950s.

“The only reason they got on the radar was because they had a political viewpoint,” Mark Reichel, McDavid’s lawyer at his original trial, said in an interview. “At the same time, the head of the Justice Department was testifying before Congress, saying, ‘No, we don’t do that. We don’t spy on people because of political reasons.'”

Indeed, here’s former FBI director Robert Mueller speaking at a press conference announcing the 2006 indictment of 11 “eco-terrorists” responsible for an estimated $80 million in property damages: “The FBI becomes involved, as it did in this case, only when volatile talk crosses the line into violence and criminal activity.”

This is a key point in McDavid’s entrapment defense. Contrary to Mueller’s reassurances, McDavid and Jenson’s rhetoric when Anna first met them in ’04 was about as violent as the average Rage Against the Machine album.

Anna caught up with McDavid again in ’05 in Philadelphia, where he was staying with two friends, Jenson and Weiner. Anna reported back to the FBI that McDavid had become thoroughly radicalized since their first meeting.

Anna’s FBI handlers put her on McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner full-time and outfitted her with the finest in spy gear: a bugged ’96 Chevy Lumina that she used to drive the group around. The FBI also provided Anna with a small cabin in the Sierra Nevada foothills that was to act as the quartet’s base of operations. She paid for groceries and even doled out spending money to the group, sometimes in $100 bills. She wasn’t old enough to buy beer yet, but Anna was passing along fake bomb recipes from the FBI to the trio.

Anna’s recordings of late-night bull sessions showed the trio talking about bombing targets like cell phone towers and fish hatcheries. Later in court, the three activists would try to play off the conversations as purely hypothetical, the musings of some stoned anarchists with delusions of grandeur.

“Anarchists usually just talk shit,” Jenson said in a 2012 Outside story on the case, “but they never really do that much.”

In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists.

But one day, the group drove to a Kmart in Auburn to pick up ingredients for a bomb test. McDavid was sitting on the back of Anna’s car in the parking lot, waiting for Jenson and Weiner to return, when he heard the automatic locks on the car doors click shut. He looked in. Anna was on her cell phone. Moments later, black SUVs screeched into the parking lot, and he was surrounded by heavily armed agents from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. In an interview with Democracy Now!—his first after being released from prison—McDavid said that that was the moment he realized Anna was a snitch.

McDavid, Jenson, and Weiner were charged with conspiracy based on their recorded conversations, their purchase of a book that included bomb-making instructions, their scouting of potential targets, and their purchase of bomb-making materials at Kmart.

For the government’s prosecution of radical environmentalists, Potter said that the McDavid case “represented a turning point in a couple of ways.

“Around September 11, the actions by the radical environmental movement had really subsided significantly,” Potter said. “There were not a lot of crimes by the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front. There were very heavy prosecutions of a few cases, but the climate as a whole, there wasn’t a lot happening. The McDavid case represented a shift. They manufactured terrorism plots, and that’s precisely what McDavid’s case was all about.”

The Trial

In court, the bumbling anarchists became cold, calculating terrorists. US Attorney McGregor Scott claimed the group’s plot to bomb the Nimbus dam, had it not been thwarted by Anna, would have made “what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday pancake breakfast.” (A spokesman for the dam later said that blowing up the gates would just cause water to “trickle” down the American and Sacramento rivers.)

Anna testified that she woke up in the cabin one night with McDavid looming above her holding an eight-inch hunting knife. Meanwhile, Jenson and Weiner both flipped and agreed to testify against McDavid in return for lighter sentences. Years later, Jenson would provide McDavid’s lawyer with a sworn declaration saying he was pressured to contort his testimony to agree with the government’s version of events.

“I became very aware that if I did not testify to the facts that the government felt occurred, which I did not believe occurred, that my plea bargain would be taken away and I would be charged with the major federal charge and would very likely receive a 20-year sentence,” Jenson said. “This was a lot of pressure for me to handle.”

The jury also received confusing, sometimes contradictory instructions. They were told entrapment required a government “agent,” and Judge England told the jurors from the bench that Anna was an agent, but then later sent a written note to the jury that she was not one.

The jury was also told, when considering McDavid’s predisposition for violence, to limit the timeframe to June 2005 and onward, not from when Anna first began reporting on him in 2004.

Of the 12 jurors, ten would later go on the record to various publications expressing serious doubts about the government’s case against McDavid. “I hope he gets a new trial,” Diane Bennett, one of the jurors, told Elle in 2008. “I’m not happy with the one he got.”

England sentenced McDavid to 235 months in prison on an enhanced terrorism charge. He spent the first 28 months of his sentence in solitary confinement. Jenson and Weiner served six months and two weeks in prison, respectively. Anna consulted for the FBI for a bit longer before giving up the spy game and trying to move on with her life.

But perhaps more interesting than the vagaries of the case is what never made it to the jury’s ears. During the trial, Reichel filed dozens of motions to suppress, dismiss, and otherwise muck up the government’s case against McDavid. Among those were numerous motions for discovery for the FBI files on McDavid and Anna.

“The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, ‘God, is this even going to work?'”

“The FBI filed responses in writing saying none of this stuff exists. No cell phone records, no polygraphs, no internal FBI reports, no letters,” Reichel said. “So I did a FOIA and it came back with not much, maybe 20 pages, items of discovery I already had.”

Reichel also filed a motion to dismiss the case based on McDavid’s infatuation with Anna. The prosecution’s response to Reichel’s motion: “The defendant’s claim of a romantic relationship between him and the informant is categorically untrue.”

“I Think You and I Could Be Great”

McDavid lost an appeal before the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court refused to hear his case. He would have languished in prison for the rest of his long sentence had it not been for the dogged work of two of his supporters, Jenny Esquivel and Evan Tucker.

Tucker, now living in Spain, had started a group called Sacramento Prisoner Support in 2004 to help activists who had been targeted by the federal government. In 2008, Esquivel and Tucker filed a FOIA request for McDavid’s FBI file.

“Jenny and I always felt that the government was hiding evidence from the defense,” Tucker said. “How could a person who was investigated by the FBI for one and a half years and then convicted of a federal crime not have an FBI file? So we decided to do our own request. Originally they told us there was nothing, but we kept pushing and finally, one day, several thousand pages of documents showed up in our PO box.”

Tucker says the FOIA sleuthing revealed the FBI was also interested in him.

“They interviewed people about me, sat outside my house, and followed me around,” Tucker said. “They sent informants to our fundraisers and had them report back on me as well. There is a lot I still don’t know about the investigation because they would only give me half my file and even that was heavily redacted.”

With a batch of fresh evidence in hand, McDavid’s lawyers filed a writ for habeas corpus in 2010. The government continued to fight the appeal, but in November 2014 it handed over even more files that should have been given to McDavid’s defense counsel in his original trial. The new documents included mushy notes from McDavid professing his interest in Anna, as well as never-before-seen responses from Anna leading him on.

In a 2005 email six months before McDavid’s arrest, Anna wrote, “I think you and I could be great, but we have LOTS of little kinks to work out. I hope in Indiana we can spend more quality time together, and really chat about life and our things.”

McDavid replied three days later in his idiosyncratic syntax: “hey cheeka, so far as us B’n great, that i think is an understatement… along w/the ‘LOTS of little kinks 2 wk out’… but if u aint learning, u aint live’n… & I do think we could learn a lot from each other.”

It’s fair to say they learned a lot from each other, although Anna and McDavid both clarified that their relationship was never physical. For the most part, it seemed one-sided, with Anna brushing McDavid off and telling him to wait until after their “mission.”

The US Attorney’s Office also handed over a request for a polygraph test on Anna. The request form said the polygraph was to “confirm veracity of [Anna’s] reporting prior to the expenditure of substantial efforts and money based on source’s reporting.”

But the polygraph test never took place. No documents provided by the FBI or the US Attorney’s Office explain why, and the name of the US prosecutor who signed off on the polygraph request was redacted for “privacy” reasons.

I asked Reichel if he was surprised at the contents of the documents, considering the FBI had insisted they didn’t exist. He replied with the typical bravado of a criminal defense attorney who’s been proven right.

“You remember that Johnny Carson bit, Carnac the Magnificent, where he would hold the letter up to his head and predict what was inside?” Reichel said. “I knew exactly what was in those documents.”

But McDavid’s release was far from certain. Even after securing a deal with the US attorneys office, no one was sure how Judge England, who had previously thrown the book at McDavid, would react to such a bizarre request.

“The hell that we had been through for so long, we knew we had to pursue it, but it was like, ‘God is this even going to work?'” Esquivel said in an interview. “It was nine years of struggle and fighting and hoping against hope. A lot of hard work and luck came together.”

There are lingering questions surrounding McDavid’s case. According to Esquivel, the FBI is still withholding 900 pages of documents. And although McDavid cannot sue under the terms of his plea agreement to a single conspiracy charge, a lawyer for Weiner told the Guardian she is considering suing to get her own conviction lifted.

There is also the case of Steve Lapham, the assistant US attorney in McDavid’s case. Lapham fought McDavid’s Habeas appeal tooth and nail.

“The government concedes that a relatively small amount of information pertaining to the case was apparently not disclosed to the defense,” Lapham wrote in response to the appeal. “However, the omitted material was either inculpatory or benign. None of the omitted material was exculpatory.”

It was only after Lapham departed the US Attorney’s Office, according to Tucker, that the government showed any interest in releasing the withheld documents. Lapham is now a judge for the Sacramento County Superior Court.

February 27, 2015
by CJ Ciaramella

Find this story at 27 February 2015

Copyright Vice.com

Elle Anna Informant Green Scare Eco-terrorism McDavid

The May issue of Elle has an article on how the FBI paid a young woman, known as “Anna,” to befriend activists and pressure them into illegal activity. Now, some of those she befriended and entrapped, including environmentalist Eric McDavid, are going to prison as terrorists.

“For two years now, a young woman in camo pants, black sweatshirt, military boots and pink hair, known to both her fellow eco-activists and FBI employers as ‘Anna,’ had been crashing the party.”

Unfortunately Andrea Todd’s article misses the big picture—questioning the relentless push to label non-violent activists as “terrorists,” and the sleazy methods used to do that– for the sake of glamming up an interesting spy story.

She falls head-over-heels for the sexiness of the story—shadowy activists in love out to save the world—and swallows a series of absurdities provided by the FBI. Rather than pick apart every paragraph, I wanted to highlight a few good points buried within the sensationalism:

Eric McDavid, Lauren Weiner and Zachary Jenson are accused of plotting to sabotage a U.S. Forest Service genetics tree lab and the Nimbus Dam. U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott has claimed that damage to the dam would have made “what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina look like a Sunday pancake breakfast.” Todd reports that Jeff McCracken, a spokesperson for the dam, says the water would just “trickle.” (p. 323)This is an important point when we’re talking about labeling people as “terrorists” who endangered human life. It’s a good example of how the government has consistently twisted the truth in the hopes of chalking up a victory in the “War on Terrorism.”
The FBI supplied Anna with a ’96 Chevy Lumina, and gas money, and food money, to drive Jenson and Weiner across the country and meet McDavid. There, the FBI paid for a cabin. And on top of that, the FBI supplied bomb-making recipes and materials.All that was needed was a little encouragement. And the FBI supplied that, too.
At one point when tensions were very high, McDavid tried to calm Anna and Weiner down, saying “relax and chill out and maybe come back and chitchat later.” Weiner agreed, offering to make pasta. Anna flipped out.

Anna: Tomorrow, what are we planning on doing tomorrow? Are we still planning on doing anything tomorrow? Or should I just stop talking about plans?
McDavid: Hmmm.
Weiner: I would love it if you stopped talking.
Anna: I would love it if you guys followed a plan! How about that! (p. 324)

This is a critical exchange, because Jenson’s attorneys argued that his client was “entrapped.” In other words, the three were not likely going to commit these crimes, and Anna was trying to push them down that path, in the hopes of getting a big gold star from the FBI.

“Under cross-examination by Reichel [Jenson’s attorney], Torres [FBI] admitted he hadn’t read all of the literature on informants; nor could he recall any specifics about the Attorney General’s guidelines regarding political protests.” (p. 324)Anna infiltrated lawful gatherings, like a CrimethInc convergence and G8 protests. Todd says that they were secretive and require a special eco-terrorist invitation. In reality, they’re posted widely on the Internet. The danger of tactics like this, beyond ruining the lives of those entrapped and watering down public faith in the criminal justice system, is that basic First Amendment rights are a casualty as well.
During Jenson’s trial, prosecutors went to great lengths to conceal Anna’s identity, even from the attorneys. Part of the justification was that Anna could be a target for retaliation, retaliation by environmentalists who have yet to harm anyone. If environmentalists are such a threat, why is Anna posing glamour-shot-style in the world’s largest fashion magazine?
Perhaps the most disturbing piece in all of this is the final section of the article, where Todd interviewed one of the jurors, Diane Bennett.“I said the FBI was an embarrassment,” she says, as other jurors scrambled to unload similar opinions. “I hope he gets a new trial. I’m not happy with the one he got.”
Bennett said that the foreman “teared up” when he delivered the guilty verdict. But the judge’s instructions were confusing, she said, and “people were tired… we wanted to go home.”

The piece could have been much worse. As someone posted anonymously on Indymedia in Portland: “Perhaps Andrea Todd deserves a little credit. She was, after all, attempting to write an article about someone who lies for a living.”

In light of that, has Elle issued a retraction? These stickers have mysteriously appeared in copies of the magazine on newsstands around the country.

They read, in part:

Following consultation with federal agencies, we at Elle wish to retract this article. Not because of the stream of factual inaccuracies beginning in the second sentence (there has never been a CrimethInc. convergence in Athens, Georgia), but because in the current political climate it is irresponsible to even pretend to give a fair hearing to radical anti-capitalists. Even if Anna’s story is a cut-and-dried case of entrapment, we have to understand this as a necessary defense of our free market freedoms.

by WILL POTTER on MAY 2, 2008

Find this story at 2 May 2008

Elle article

Copyright greenisthenewred.com

WASHINGTON — Was Tim Franzen stockpiling weapons? What was Tim Franzen’s philosophy? What was his political affiliation? Did Tim Franzen ever talk about violent revolution?

The Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to know. In late 2011, an agent or agents — Franzen still isn’t quite sure — began trying to find out. It was during this time that Franzen became a well-known and central presence in Occupy Atlanta. He helped start the Occupy Wall Street offshoot, and had been arrested when police razed their encampment in a downtown Atlanta park.

After the first police sweep of the park, Franzen told The Huffington Post that the FBI began interviewing his fellow Occupy Atlanta activists about whether Franzen might have a cache of weapons for a future violent revolution. He said the feds interviewed three different activists at their homes about his activities and beliefs.

“It definitely rattled my cage to have these kids getting knocks on their door,” Franzen said.

Here’s what the feds would have found out in the course of a background check on the activist: Franzen had a criminal record related to teenage drug use and robberies that supported his habit. But he last spent time in prison when he was 19. Franzen, now 35, went on to found a chain of halfway houses to help people make the transition from addiction to recovery. He later became a community organizer with the Quaker social justice organization American Friends Service Committee, a position he continues to hold while working within Occupy Atlanta.

During one interview, an FBI agent gave one of Franzen’s fellow activists a business card, which was handed over to Franzen, who decided to call the agent and have a little fun.

“I have an expert on all things Tim Franzen,” Franzen remembers telling the agent over the phone. “I said, ‘I’m Tim Franzen.’ … He was sort of dumbfounded. He didn’t know what to say.”

Franzen chastised the federal agent for scaring his younger activist friends. “At first he started denying it,” he said. “He tried to write it off as not a big deal, as sort of protocol.”

At the end of December, the FBI released internal documents that revealed a coordinated — if quixotic — surveillance of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Just about every law enforcement agency gets a cameo in the correspondence: Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, an entity known as the Domestic Security Alliance Council — and even the Federal Reserve. But the extremely limited disclosure makes it difficult to assess exactly with whom the government agencies were coordinating, or why. Was the FBI attempting to infiltrate and undermine the Occupy movement, or simply trying to keep tabs on protesters who were hoping to spark political change?

Of the 110 pages released — first obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund through a Freedom of Information Act request — dozens are heavily redacted. The documents state that 287 additional pages on the FBI’s Occupy activities were “deleted” from the release by the agency for various reasons, including nine labeled “outside the scope” and 14 tagged “duplicate.”

At times, the documents are contradictory and show FBI agents spreading false information. The earliest memo erroneously describes Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that came up with the idea behind Occupy, as a “self-identified American revolutionary anarchist group.” In another, OWS is lumped in with the “Aryan Nations (sic)” and hacker-activists Anonymous as “domestic terrorists.”

In response to a request for comment, FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen replied via email, “The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents.” He continued, “While the FBI is obligated to thoroughly investigate any serious allegations involving threats of violence, we do not open investigations based solely on 1st Amendment activity. In fact, DOJ and the FBI’s own internal guidelines on domestic operations strictly forbid that.”

If there was a unified mission behind the Occupy surveillance, it appears the purpose was to pass information about activists’ plans to the finance industry. In one memo from August 2011, the FBI discusses informing officials at the New York Stock Exchange about “the planned Anarchist protest titled ‘occupy Wall Street’, scheduled for September 17, 2011.[sic] Numerous incidents have occurred in the past which show attempts by Anarchist groups to disrupt, influence, and or shut down normal business operations of financial districts.”

The documents reveal that the FBI met with officials from four banks and one credit union, and spoke over the phone with a representative from a fifth bank. The FBI also talked with officials from the Richmond Federal Reserve, a branch of the central bank that covers much of the American South. If the FBI communicated with any of the trillion-dollar banks that were the primary subject of Occupy Wall Street’s economic critique, however, those discussions have been redacted from the documents.

Citigroup, for example, is not mentioned anywhere the documents, while Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are each mentioned once in passing. No documents show coordination between the FBI and any of those banks — although it would be conspicuous for the FBI to have communicated with smaller banks that were not a major focus of the Occupy movement while ignoring the much larger institutions that were recipients of the 2008-2009 bailouts.

The few direct communications with banks that are detailed in the documents reveal little evidence of improper behavior. On Oct. 6, 2011, the FBI called Zions Bank to inform the bankers that “Anonymous hactivists” had distributed the personal phone numbers of “the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase” online, implying that Zions executives might also be subject to such treatment per an impending Occupy rally in Salt Lake City, where Zions is headquartered. Zions declined to comment on the call for this article, but the bank — which has about 2 percent of the total assets of JPMorgan — has not been a target of Occupy rhetoric before or since the FBI call.

The only other banks named in the FBI documents are Hancock Bank, Peoples Bank, Bancorp South and Regions Bank — all of which declined to comment for this article. The FBI attended a Nov. 16, 2011, meeting of officials from those banks in Biloxi, Miss., where someone from Hancock Bank warned attendees to expect an Occupy protest on Dec. 7 that could include a “sit-in” or efforts to “lock the bank doors.”

None of the banks mentioned in the FBI file would comment on whether the FBI met regularly with bank officials. Bank robbery is a federal crime, which gives FBI jurisdiction.

All of these banks would have been small-ball for a protest movement that targeted massive income inequality and outrageous executive pay. But if the FBI was issuing warnings to and meeting on security issues with these smaller banks, they were almost certainly having talks with bigger New York banks — meaning the portrait of the FBI’s activities around Occupy, insofar as the internal documents are concerned, is likely incomplete in a significant dimension.

Recent FBI investigations have at times put big banks in a negative light, but have yet to result in major actions against financial institutions. In July 2012, an FBI probe found that Bank of America had allowed a Mexican drug cartel to launder money through the bank. While BofA has yet to face any fines for the episode, the head of the FBI in Charlotte, N.C., BofA’s headquarters, recently left the law enforcement agency for a job at Bank of America.

While the FBI communicated with the financial sector about Occupy, it’s unclear the degree to which they engaged with actual Occupy activists like Franzen.

Kevin Zeese was one of the founding organizers of Occupy Washington, D.C., which set up camp just blocks from FBI headquarters and the Department of Justice. Zeese told HuffPost that infiltration by law enforcement agents or informants was an issue, but whether much of it was just shadowy conspiracy or serious agitating remains a mystery.

In one exchange he had with a Homeland Security officer, Zeese said the agent knew a key detail about a scheduled protest at the Environmental Protection Agency. Zeese joked that the officer knew more than he did about what was going on.

Zeese did remember one FBI agent who would bike over to the camp. Some of the younger activists talked regularly with the agent. “He was open about it,” Zeese said. “He would ride through on a bike with the FBI thing on his back.” The agent ended up spending a weekend at the camp and even donating funds to help pay for security.

Whether law enforcement had a hand in breaking up camps, Zeese said, “I can’t tell.” To which he added, “Down the road, there may be proof.”

Franzen suggests that federal agents conducted more clandestine activities than simple Internet searches and protest monitoring. Occupiers frequently complained that the more outspoken activists within their ranks appeared to be targeted by police for arrest. Franzen said there is a connection between the agent who inquired about him among his friends and his subsequent arrest at a protest. He chronicled the incident on his blog a year ago:

Before the police officers warned the crowd to disperse from the street I had already gotten onto the side walk. One of the police Lieutenants yelled to his officers, ‘Get him’ and pointed at me. The police had to worm their way through the crowd in order to grab me and drag me into the street.
When I was dragged into the street, I asked the lieutenant what he was doing and he said, ‘arresting you.’
‘For what,’ I asked.
‘For being in the street,’ he said.
‘But I was on the sidewalk,’ I replied.
‘You’re not now,’ he said with a smile.

Jason Cherkis
Zach Carter
Posted: 01/05/2013 7:42 am EST Updated: 01/23/2014 6:58 pm EST

Find this story at 23 January 2013

Copyright ©2015 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

Newly revealed documents show 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 fusions 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.

Click here to see our extensive coverage of the police crackdown of the Occupy movement.

Read full report on government surveillance of Occupy movement by the Center for Media and Democracy / DBA Press.

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, it’s great to have you with us, editor of The Progressive magazine. And he did this very interesting story, a cover story for June issue of the magazine, “Spying on Occupy Activists: How Cops and Homeland Security Help Wall Street.” Can you compare what you have found—and start off by saying why Phoenix. Why did you focus on Phoenix?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, I focused on Phoenix because the primary researcher for this story, Beau Hodai of DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy, had compiled tremendous amounts of information. He had issued Freedom of Information Act requests from the Phoenix Police Department, from the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. And so, he got thousands, literally thousands, of pages of information, primarily about Phoenix and Arizona, but also some national context. But I thought by focusing on this one city, you could really tell, at the most granular level, how police officers and Homeland Security are really going after left-wing activists. And I thought it was important to really focus in narrowly, because I think those narrow details really give a clearer picture of just how hand-in-glove local law enforcement is with the private sector in going after these Occupy protesters.

AMY GOODMAN: How does this compare to the IRS monitoring tea party groups or, you know, sort of specially targeting them for deciding whether they should get nonprofit status?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, I thought it was outrageous what the IRS was doing in that Cincinnati office. But this, to me, is much worse because, whereas the IRS office in Cincinnati, that may have been, you know, a bureaucratic mistake or bungling or lack of supervision, what’s going on with the spying on Occupy activists was a systematic effort by police departments, not just in Phoenix, but around the country, with Homeland Security, to track the Occupy activists—and to coordinate a response, even. One of the documents that Beau Hodai released, from the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press, was a file—a report on a teleconference that 13 police departments around the country had as to how to respond to Occupy, what they called “growing concerns” about the burgeoning Occupy movement, and that they needed to coordinate an effective response. And so, you know, when we had that crackdown on Occupy simultaneously over a weekend in many different cities, I wondered at the time whether there wasn’t coordination going on between the police departments to crush the Occupy movement. And this suggests that there was.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Matt Rothschild, you also speak specifically about the way in which protests against the NDAA, the National Defense Authorization Act, occurred. Could you elaborate on that and why that was a particular focus of law enforcement?

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Yeah, there’s documents, again, that show that police, from the U.S. Capitol Police all the way to the Phoenix Police Department, were monitoring protests of the National Defense Authorization Act. The National Defense Authorization Act allows the president of the United States to grab any single one of us and throw us into jail and deny us due process and access to a judge for as long as the president says so. And so, this is a huge clampdown on our civil liberties, and people should be protesting it. And it’s ironic that people trying to defend their civil liberties are having their civil liberties violated at the same time.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt Rothschild, explain what these fusion centers are and how they work, both with public law enforcement and with private companies.

MATTHEW ROTHSCHILD: Well, this is a real problem I have with fusion centers, Amy. Fusion centers are—in each state, there’s a fusion center. And the fusion center is supposed to represent law enforcement at every level, from, you know, campus police to city police, to sheriffs, to the FBI and state police. But also, within these fusion centers, there are representatives of the private sector. And there’s also an organization called InfraGard in these fusion centers. Now, InfraGard is an association of more than 50,000 business people with the FBI. They’re essentially FBI minders, with these business people in each state. And sometimes these business people get information from the FBI even before elected officials get it. And also, the FBI tells these business members of InfraGard, “Hey, if you ever have a problem with an employee, just let us know.” And so, you know, is this the kind of collaboration we want? That a boss, who doesn’t like what you’re doing on the workplace—maybe you’re forming a union, the boss calls the FBI, and then what? The FBI opens a file on you? We need to be careful of this institution called InfraGard, too, which was part of the Arizona fusion center, by the way.

AMY GOODMAN: Matt, we want to thank you for being with us. 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 draws heavily on documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and DBA Press. Matt Rothschild is also author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2013

Watch Part One of our interview with Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive

Find this story at 22 May 2013

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