Reply #108: Government cracks down on dissent in name of 'anti-terrorism'

[54anickel]

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=20503

Two releases of local law enforcement files in recent days have shed new light on just how far the Bush administration, federal, and local law enforcement are going to suppress political dissent in the aftermath of 9-11.
The first case was in Pittsburgh, where a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union yielded the revelation that from 2002, when opposition to an invasion of Iraq began in earnest, right through at least until the final, heavily redacted document from 2005, law enforcement officials investigated, monitored, harassed, and infiltrated activists from Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center. Merton was a renowned Catholic theologian and pacifist who fiercely opposed the Vietnam War and all wars, and his namesake descendants apply the same beliefs to Iraq.

As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is "a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism." Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs -- not a "political cause" -- is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.

Or maybe, instead, pacifism is simply terrorism. Because the outfit investigating the Thomas Merton Center wasn't the Pentagon TALON program, which was the tool used to go after the Lake Worth (Florida) Quakers and hundreds (at least) of other domestic peace groups. It wasn't even an NSA monitoring program. The Merton Center caught the attention of the Pittsburgh version of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a program set up in dozens of cities across the U.S. to combine the efforts of the FBI and other federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies to combat the alleged threat of "domestic terrorism." With only so many domestic terrorists to go around, there's got to be something handy to keep all those task forces busy and their budget dollars flowing. Now, we have a better idea of what that "something" might be: investigating ordinary, law-abiding citizens who oppose Bush administration policies. That's now considered terrorism. Of course, it's the far right that has engaged in "domestic terrorism" in our recent history (remember Oklahoma City), but for some reason that's not who these task forces are concerned about.

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Now, such protesters are not only "obvious potential rioters," but "terrorists." The recent reauthorization of the PATRIOT Act, passed with widespread bipartisan support, included a new "anti-terrorist" provision allowing police to establish anti-protester "exclusion zones" at any event of "national significance." (In Seattle, where this idea was first used and then legitimized by the courts, it was more honestly called a "no-protest zone," an egregious violation of the First Amendment.)

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