Political Skullduggery

We have known for quite a while now about the FBI's surveillance of anti-war protesters and environmental activists, but today's Los Angeles Times reports on several other shadowy groups that the feds are spying on. One stands out as particularly suspicious.

It is people who feed vegetarian meals to the homeless.

The FBI's encounters with activists are described in hundreds of pages of documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act after agents visited several activists before the 2004 political conventions. Details have steadily trickled out over the last year, but newly released documents provide a fuller view of some FBI probes...

The list included Food Not Bombs, which mainly serves vegetarian food to homeless people, and, with a question mark next to it, Indymedia, a collective that publishes what it calls radical journalism online.

I hope these agents got hazardous duty pay.


It is interesting that the feds target groups opposed to war. The logic there must be that groups that dislike official violence may embrace non-official violence as psychological compensation. Or something like that.

Denver, where the ACLU fought a lengthy court battle with local police over its spying on political groups, has the most extensive records of encounters between the FBI and activists. Documents obtained by the ACLU there revealed how agents monitored the lumber industry demonstration, an antiwar march and an anarchist group that activists say was never formed...

In June 2002, environmental activists protested the annual meeting of the North American Wholesale Lumber Assn. in Colorado Springs. An FBI memo justified opening an inquiry into the protest because an activist training camp was to be held on "nonviolent methods of forest defense, security culture, street theater and banner making."...

About 30 to 40 people attended the protest; three were arrested for trespassing while hanging a political banner. Colorado Springs police faxed the FBI a three-page list of demonstrators' license plate numbers...

"There's a lot of responsibility on the FBI," said Joe Airey, head of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Denver. "We have a real obligation to make sure there are no additional terrorist acts on this soil."

The bottom line is that if and when any future terrorist attacks occur in the U.S., the investigative agencies will have to explain how wasting manpower on crap like this helped to detect the plot that they will have just missed.