FBI Visits Progressive Activists Over Upcoming Republican Convention Protests

[Im The Truth]

F.B.I. Goes Knocking for Political Troublemakers
August 16, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 15 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has
been questioning political demonstrators across the country,
and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive
effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and
disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in
New York.

F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their
communities for information about planned disruptions aimed
at the convention and other coming political events, and they
say they have developed a list of people who they think may
have information about possible violence. They say the
inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic
convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes,
not on dissent, at major political events.

But some people contacted by the F.B.I. say they are
mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by
questions about their political plans.

"The message I took from it," said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an
intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six
investigators a few weeks ago, "was that they were trying to
intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us
know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' ''

The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in
a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to
controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I in urging
local police departments to report suspicious activity at
political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism
squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for
help detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from
violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment.

In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the
bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully
protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a five-page internal
analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed.

The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion -
since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against
terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First
Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the
political protests was negligible and constitutional.

The opinion said: "Given the limited nature of such public
monitoring, any possible 'chilling' effect caused by the
bulletins would be quite minimal and substantially outweighed
by the public interest in maintaining safety and order during
large-scale demonstrations."

Those same concerns are now central to the vigorous efforts
by the F.B.I. to identify possible disruptions by anarchists,
violent demonstrators and others at the Republican National
Convention, which begins Aug. 30 and is expected to draw
hundreds of thousands of protesters.

In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic
convention, F.B.I. counterterrorism agents and other federal
and local officers have sought to interview dozens of people
in at least six states, including past protesters and their
friends and family members, about possible violence at the
two conventions. In addition, three young men in Missouri
said they were trailed by federal agents for several days and
subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury last month,
forcing them to cancel their trip to Boston to take part in a
protest there that same day.

Interrogations have generally covered the same three
questions, according to some of those questioned and their
lawyers: were demonstrators planning violence or other
disruptions, did they know anyone who was, and did they
realize it was a crime to withhold such information.

A handful of protesters at the Boston convention were
arrested but there were no major disruptions. Concerns have
risen for the Republican convention, however, because of
antiwar demonstrations directed at President Bush and because
of New York City's global prominence.

With the F.B.I. given more authority after the Sept. 11
attacks to monitor public events, the tensions over the
convention protests, coupled with the Justice Department's
own legal analysis of such monitoring, reflect the fine line
between protecting national security in an age of terrorism
and discouraging political expression.

F.B.I. officials, mindful of the bureau's abuses in the
1960's and 1970's monitoring political dissidents like the
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., say they are confident their
agents have not crossed that line in the lead-up to the
conventions.

"The F.B.I. isn't in the business of chilling anyone's First
Amendment rights," said Joe Parris, a bureau spokesman in
Washington. "But criminal behavior isn't covered by the First
Amendment. What we're concerned about are injuries to
convention participants, injuries to citizens, injuries to
police and first responders."

F.B.I. officials would not say how many people had been
interviewed in recent weeks, how they were identified or what
spurred the bureau's interest.

They said the initiative was part of a broader, nationwide
effort to follow any leads pointing to possible violence or
illegal disruptions in connection with the political
conventions, presidential debates or the November election,
which come at a time of heightened concern about a possible
terrorist attack.

F.B.I. officials in Washington have urged field offices
around the country in recent weeks to redouble their efforts
to interview sources and gather information that might help
to detect criminal plots. The only lead to emerge publicly
resulted in a warning to authorities before the Boston
convention that anarchists or other domestic groups might
bomb news vans there. It is not clear whether there was an
actual plot.

The individuals visited in recent weeks "are people that we
identified that could reasonably be expected to have
knowledge of such plans and plots if they existed," Mr.
Parris said.

"We vetted down a list and went out and knocked on doors and
had a laundry list of questions to ask about possible
criminal behavior," he added. "No one was dragged from their
homes and put under bright lights. The interviewees were free
to talk to us or close the door in our faces."

But civil rights advocates argued that the visits amounted to
harassment. They said they saw the interrogations as part of
a pattern of increasingly aggressive tactics by federal
investigators in combating domestic terrorism. In an episode
in February in Iowa, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Drake
University for records on the sponsor of a campus antiwar
forum. The demand was dropped after a community outcry.

Protest leaders and civil rights advocates who have monitored
the recent interrogations said they believed at least 40 or
50 people, and perhaps many more, had been contacted by
federal agents about demonstration plans and possible
violence surrounding the conventions and other political
events.

"This kind of pressure has a real chilling effect on
perfectly legitimate political activity," said Mark
Silverstein, legal director for the American Civil Liberties
Union of Colorado, where two groups of political activists in
Denver and a third in Fort Collins were visited by the
F.B.I. "People are going to be afraid to go to a
demonstration or even sign a petition if they justifiably
believe that will result in your having an F.B.I. file opened
on you."

The issue is a particularly sensitive one in Denver, where
the police agreed last year to restrictions on local
intelligence-gathering operations after it was disclosed that
the police had kept files on some 3,000 people and 200 groups
involved in protests.

But the inquiries have stirred opposition elsewhere as well.

In New York, federal agents recently questioned a man whose
neighbor reported he had made threatening comments against
the president. He and a lawyer, Jeffrey Fogel, agreed to talk
to the Secret Service, denying the accusation and blaming it
on a feud with the neighbor. But when agents started to
question the man about his political affiliations and whether
he planned to attend convention protests, "that's when I said
no, no, no, we're not going to answer those kinds of
questions," said Mr. Fogel, who is legal director for the
Center for Constitutional Rights in New York.

In the case of the three young men subpoenaed in Missouri,
Denise Lieberman, legal director for the American Civil
Liberties Union in St. Louis, which is representing them,
said they scrapped plans to attend both the Boston and the
New York conventions after they were questioned about
possible violence.

The men are all in their early 20's, Ms. Lieberman said, but
she would not identify them.

All three have taken part in past protests over American
foreign policy and in planning meetings for convention
demonstrations. She said two of them were arrested before on
misdemeanor charges for what she described as minor civil
disobedience at protests.

Prosecutors have now informed the men that they are targets
of a domestic terrorism investigation, Ms. Lieberman said,
but have not disclosed the basis for their suspicions. "They
won't tell me," she said.

Federal officials in St. Louis and Washington declined to
comment on the case. Ms. Lieberman insisted that the
men "didn't have any plans to participate in the violence,
but what's so disturbing about all this is the pre-emptive
nature - stopping them from participating in a protest before
anything even happened."

The three men "were really shaken and frightened by all
this," she said, "and they got the message loud and clear
that if you make plans to go to a protest, you could be
subject to arrest or a visit from the F.B.I."
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