Absolute power corrupts absolutely. In the wake of COINTELPRO, the surveillance of peace activists and other government dissidents has become part of a long tradition of eliminating, by whip if necessary, those elements of the population which cannot be controlled or subdued though more typical channels. America’s history of “communist” suppression should give pause to any such efforts. Yet the Patriot Act and other similar efforts have reinvigorated programs of domestic thought control.
A majority of Americans now support ending the war in Iraq. Our government has spearheaded a program designed to infiltrate the very groups that advocate on our behalf; because we don’t agree with this administration’s conquer and destroy foreign-policy, we’re being watched.
SAN FRANCISCO – At least 186 antiwar protests in the United States have been monitored by the Pentagon’s domestic surveillance program, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which also found that the Defense Department collected more than 2,800 reports involving Americans in a single anti-terrorism database.
The documents were obtained by the ACLU through a Freedom of Information Act request filed last February.
“It cannot be an accident or coincidence that nearly 200 antiwar protests ended up in a Pentagon threat database,” Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU, said in a statement. “This unchecked surveillance is part of a broad pattern of the Bush administration using ‘national security’ as an excuse to run roughshod over the privacy and free speech rights of Americans.”
The internal Defense Department documents show it is monitoring the activities of a wide swath of peace groups, including Veterans for Peace, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Military Families Speak Out, Code Pink, the American Friends Service Committee, the War Resisters League, and the umbrella group United for Peace and Justice, which is spearheading what organizers hope will be a massive march on Washington this Saturday.
“This might have a chilling effect on some groups,” United for Peace and Justice’s Leslie Cagan told OneWorld, “particularly among high-risk communities like immigrants who don’t have their papers yet and U.S. citizens or people with green cards who are of Muslim or South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. They’ve already been targeted by the government and they might feel like, with this, it’s just too dangerous to come out and protest.”
— Igor Volsky
Leave a comment