uh oh. komerade ashcroft sez: anarchists in our midst!
FBI Questioning Political Demonstrators Across US - NYT
08/15/2004
Dow Jones News Services
(Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the U.S., 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, the New York Times reported in its Monday editions.
FBI 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, the report said.
They say the inquiries, which began last month before the Democratic convention in Boston, are focused solely on possible crimes, not dissent, at major political events, the report said.
But some people contacted by the FBI say they are mystified by the bureau's interest and felt harassed by questions about their political plans, the report said.
"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.'," according to the Times.
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 FBI in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations, the report said.
The bulletins that relayed that request detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment, the report said.
In an internal complaint, an FBI employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity, the report said.
But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed, the report said.
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 FBI's monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional, the report said.
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 FBI 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., the report said.
In the last few weeks, beginning before the Democratic convention, FBI 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, the report said.
FBI officials would not say how many people had been interviewed in recent weeks, how they were identified or what spurred the bureau's interest, the Times reported.
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, the report said.
FBI 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 Times reported. 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, the report said. It is not clear whether there was an actual plot, the Times reported.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
