[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: Interrogating the Protesters

Tue Aug 17 11:13:54 PDT 2004

The article below from NYTimes.com 
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Interrogating the Protesters

August 17, 2004

For several weeks, starting before the Democratic
convention, F.B.I. officers have been questioning potential
political demonstrators, and their friends and families,
about their plans to protest at the two national
conventions. These heavy-handed inquiries are intimidating,
and they threaten to chill freedom of expression. They also
appear to be a spectacularly poor use of limited
law-enforcement resources. The F.B.I. should redirect its
efforts to focus more directly on real threats. 

Six investigators recently descended on Sarah Bardwell, a
21-year-old intern with a Denver antiwar group, who quite
reasonably took away the message that the government was
watching her closely. In Missouri, three men in their early
20's said they had been followed by federal investigators
for days, then subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury.
They ended up canceling their plans to show up for the
Democratic and Republican conventions. 

The F.B.I. is going forward with the blessing of the
Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel - the same
outfit that recently approved the use of torture against
terrorism suspects. In the Justice Department's opinion,
the chilling effect of the investigations is "quite
minimal," and "substantially outweighed by the public
interest in maintaining safety and order." But this
analysis gets the balance wrong. When protesters are made
to feel like criminal suspects, the chilling effect is
potentially quite serious. And the chances of gaining any
information that would be useful in stopping violence are
quite small. 

The knock on the door from government investigators asking
about political activities is the stuff of totalitarian
regimes. It is intimidating to be visited by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, particularly by investigators who
warn that withholding information about anyone with plans
to create a disruption is a crime. 

And few people would want the F.B.I. to cross-examine their
friends and family about them. If engaging in
constitutionally protected speech means subjecting yourself
to this kind of government monitoring, many Americans may
decide - as the men from Missouri did - that the cost is
too high. 

Meanwhile, history suggests that the way to find out what
potentially violent protesters are planning is not to send
F.B.I. officers bearing questionnaires to the doorsteps of
potential demonstrators. As became clear in the 1960's,
F.B.I. monitoring of youthful dissenters is notoriously
unreliable. The files that were created in the past often
proved to be laughably inaccurate. 

The F.B.I.'s questioning of protesters is part of a larger
campaign against political dissent that has increased
sharply since the start of the war on terror. 

At the Democratic convention, protesters were sent to a
depressing barbed-wire camp under the subway tracks. And at
a recent Bush-Cheney campaign event, audience members were
required to sign a pledge to support President Bush before
they were admitted. 

F.B.I. officials insist that the people they interview are
free to "close the door in our faces," but by then the
damage may already have been done. The government must not
be allowed to turn a war against foreign enemies into a
campaign against critics at home. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17tue1.html?ex=1093766434&ei=1&en=3dff1d0913c2813a

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