Our New Anahuac

It is difficult to find a government program which is criticized by both Fox News and Democracy Now but fusion centers seem to fit the bill.  Even many avid news watchers have never heard of fusion centers, despite the fact that the federal government has set up around sixty of them throughout the country.  Put plainly, fusion centers are government spy networking offices.  They were originally set up to “connect the dots” between and through intelligence agencies, after 9/11.  The idea was that differing intelligence agencies each had information but they had neither the inclination nor the mechanism to share information. Lately, however, it seems that these centers have been used to gather information on regular citizens who seem to have even a moderately different opinion than the mainstream. FoxNews.com was quick to quip “If you’re an anti-abortion activist, or if you display political paraphernalia supporting a third-party candidate or a certain Republican member of Congress, if you possess subversive literature, you very well might be a member of a domestic paramilitary group (according to the fusion centers),” summing up a report entitled the Modern Militia Movement created by the Missouri Information Analysis Center (MIAC), one of the fusion centers created by Homeland Security. The fox report continues.

People who supported former third-party presidential candidates like Texas Rep. Ron Paul, Chuck Baldwin and former Georgia Rep. Bob Barr are cited in the report, in addition to anti-abortion activists and conspiracy theorists who believe the United States, Mexico and Canada will someday form a North American Union.

“Militia members most commonly associate with 3rd party political groups,” the report reads. “It is not uncommon for militia members to display Constitutional Party, Campaign for Liberty or Libertarian material.”

Other potential signals of militia involvement, according to the report, are possession of the Gagsden “Don’t Tread on Me” flag or the widely available anti-income tax film “America: Freedom to Fascism.”

Barr, the 2008 Libertarian Party presidential nominee, told FOXNews.com that he’s taking steps to get his name removed from the report, which he said could actually “dilute the effectiveness” of law enforcement agencies.

However, it has been the tradition of intelligence agencies to focus their intelligence activities on progressive or left-wing groups. Today seems to be no different. Even the fox news story gave a nod to the harassment of people on the other side of the spectrum: “ACLU officials blasted a Texas fusion center last month (Feb 2009) for distributing a ‘Prevention Awareness Bulletin’ that called on law enforcement officers to report activities of local lobbying groups, Muslim civil rights organizations and anti-war protest groups.”

However, yesterday’s report on CNN, shows the flimsy excuses that fusion centers can use to begin an intelligence file. Here is a partial transcript of the report, which describes the results of an investigation at a fusion center.

WILLIS: It was the morning of Governor Jodi Rell’s inaugural parade.

KEN KRAYESKE, POLITICAL ACTIVIST: I pulled out my camera and I shoot the Governor Rell, about 23 shots.

WILLIS: Moments later, Ken Krayeske was stopped by Hartford police officers, handcuffed, arrested, and jailed.

KRAYESKE: I said “What did I do?” They said you shouldn’t have been making those threats.

WILLIS: Local police had been on the lookout for him after state police gave out a security bulletin with his photo on it. officials wouldn’t comment pending a civil lawsuit, but court documents reveal state police were alarmed by Krayeske’s blog posts — “Whose going to protest the inaugural ball with me?” And, “No need to make nice.”

KRAYESKE: Why do I have to be nice to a political figure simply because she won an election?

WILLIS: Police began digging for more information, mining public and commercial data bases. They learned Krayeske had been a Green Party campaign director, had protested the gubernatorial debate, and had once been convicted for civil disobedience. He had no history of violence.

Law professor Danielle Citron says police aren’t supposed to gather information on citizens who aren’t suspected of a crime.

DANIELLE CITRON, PRIVACY ADVOCATE: If we’re interested in someone because they are an advocate for a Green Party candidate and we think they are suspicious because they want to get people to protest ideas but not because we think there is a true threat to their lives, I think that’s troubling.

Protests? Antipathy toward politicos? Third parties and blogs? Could be me and you, right?

The whole program sounds eerily similar to the COINTELPRO Program which was originally set up to gather counter-intelligence on the Soviet Union, but which slowly changed its attention to progressive activists, especially organizations which tried to empower people of color like the Brown Berets, the Black Panther Party and La Raza Unida Party.  These modern fusion centers were created to gather information on acts of terrorism, and they are now in the business of harassing bloggers who promote protests, and third-party supporters.

I have been guilty in the past of not taking the possibility of government intelligence gathering too seriously. My thought had always been that everything I do is overt (nothing covert) and within my legal rights. However, I recently re-read an article from my undergrad days: “Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant.”

The article was a good reminder that even if a group is acting responsibly and within the boundaries of the law, the informants may have differing motives to report something completely different. Informants have often fabricated lies to advance their career or to seem like a more valuable asset to their handlers. Even worse, law enforcement officers themselves, have repeatedly fabricated lies which they have represented to community supporters, courts and spouses. All of this has been done in an attempt to disrupt and “neutralize” (to use COINTELPRO’s term) their target.

If history is teaches us anything, it might be that it does not matter so much that an activist or organization is acting legally, once they become the targets of these fusion centers.  Still, those of us committed to justice must not allow fear of surveillance paralyze us.  It’s just one other thing to keep in mind as we push hasta la victoria.

Here are just a few of the COINTELPRO activities listed in the article.

-A Chicano leader helped organize the Brown Berets, while working as an informer for the Treasury Department in Texas and California. His actions permitted police to raid the Chicano Moratorium Committe and arrest some of its members.

-Malcolm X’s personal bodyguard, the man who delivered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to him, was a New York detective who had been undercover for seven years…He earned a black belt in karate and taught it to one black nationalist group he infiltrated.

-In demonstrations at the University of Alabama, a police agent reportedly urged violence, set fire to at least one building, and threw fire bombs at police. His actions were used to declare unlawful assemblies in which 150 people were arrested.

-A deputy sheriff posed as a campus radical and testified that he helped students build and test explosive devices in Buffalo, New York

-”Tommy the Traveler,” posing as an SDS organizer, offered bombs, guns and lessons in guerilla tactics to students on various New York campuses. Two students whom he had trained burned down the campus ROTC building and were immediately arrested.

The article cites 24 of these incidents.