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When the FBI Comes Knocking The G-men identify the enemy—the activist next door By Marty Logan THEY SAY THEIR QUESTIONS are intended to prevent violent acts, but FBI visits to protestors are contributing to a culture of fear. Sarah Bardwell did not get the names of the four FBI agents and two police officers who questioned her and her roommates late on the afternoon of July 22 on the front porch of their house in Denver. "We asked them for their names and they said they wouldn't give us their names because we wouldn't give them ours.'' "They told us they were doing pre-emptive investigations into possible—I think their exact words were 'terrorists, anarchists and murderers.' Then they specified [they were looking for people] who may be planning actions for the RNC or the DNC,'' she says. After about 25 minutes of a mixture of aggressive and then chummy questioning of Bardwell and her roommates, the six officers left, after warning the group that they would be making "more intrusive efforts'' to find the information they were seeking. According to media reports this week, Bardwell is one of possibly dozens of protesters FBI agents have questioned in recent weeks, an act that has provoked protests countrywide from those who say the visits violate the freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. News of the interrogations comes weeks before the Republican Party is slated to officially nominate Bush at the RNC in New York City, an event that protesters have been planning for months to disrupt. Authorities have been plotting their security response for just as long, with the New York Police Department, for example, working with the Secret Service for the past 18 months. Last month, three members of Congress wrote to the Justice Department asking it to probe the FBI visits, calling them "systematic political harassment and intimidation of legitimate anti-war protests,'' The New York Times reported. In a statement, FBI Assistant Director Cassandra M. Chandler responded that the agency "is not monitoring groups or interviewing individuals unless we receive intelligence that such individuals or groups may be planning violent and disruptive criminal activity or have knowledge of such activity.'' "The F.B.I. conducted interviews, within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution, in order to determine the validity of the threat information,'' she added. But Bardwell, an intern at the American Friends Service Committee who calls herself a social justice activist, says neither she nor her roommates were planning to attend either convention. In February 2003, Bardwell helped organize local antiwar protests. "We hadn't even been following it. I didn't even know when it was going to happen. I think [the FBI is] basically justifying violating people's First Amendment rights,'' she adds. The ACLU warned of a climate of fear following the Sept. 11 attacks after the FBI in 2001 and 2002 questioned 8,000 Muslims and Arabs in the United States. "All public accounts indicate that the questioning did not yield apprehension of a single terrorist,'' the group said in a statement. Last month, the ACLU said it was joining with lawyers around the country to provide free legal advice to Arab-Americans caught in a new round of questioning by the FBI, announced earlier this year. "These types of FBI tactics are counterproductive," said Dalia Hashad, the ACLU's Arab, Muslim and South Asian advocate. "They produce fear and resentment, not results.'' "Fear has two sides of the same coin,'' says James Brochin, a lawyer and teacher who has studied periods in U.S. history when authorities curtailed civil liberties. "One is the fear of communists or terrorism. And the other side is the fear of one's neighbor and the fear of the consequences of saying stuff out loud that would sound like you're sympathetic to these threatening elements. So it's both the fear of communism [or terrorism] and the fear of our own government. Those two things both result in a loss of freedom. One is a self-censorship and the other is either enforcement of existing laws or creation of new laws that actually do result in intrusion into our privacy or create situations where loyalty oaths—either metaphoric or actual—are imposed on the general public." According to Samuel Walker, a professor in the department of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, "There is a general climate of fear and there are specific abuses'' by authorities against civil liberties. He singles out provisions of the USA-Patriot Act, passed in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, which permit security agencies to access medical or library records without a subpoena or warrant. But Walker stresses that "the Bush administration has been challenged in every conceivable forum." In June the court ruled that foreign prisoners of Washington's "war on terrorism" held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to contest their detention in federal court and that U.S. citizens held as ''enemy combatants'' were entitled to due-process rights. The ACLU launched another challenge, arguing the administration should not be able to use secret evidence to defend against a suit from a number of groups opposing the Patriot Act's power to access private records or to use "national security letters'' to obtain personal information from Internet service providers and other businesses. Emily Whitfield of the ACLU says the public is joining her group's fight against the administration. While the number of new members in the group increased by fewer than 1,000 people from 1999 to 2000, it soared by more than 14,000 from 2000 to 2001, by more than 19,000 the following year and by more than 52,000 from 2002 to 2003. Yet a poll by the Council on Foreign Relations found that almost twice as many U.S. citizens were concerned the government had not done enough to guarantee their safety than were worried about restrictions on civil liberties. Send a letter to the editor about this story to letters@metronews.com. [ Silicon Valley | Metroactive Home | Archives ]