Photographers at Antiwar Demonstrations

I mentioned a couple of days ago my sister's concern about what she described as "the CIA" photographing people at antiwar protests. I received a number of interesting responses. One person suggested that people like zombietime.com might be the photographers in question--who just like to take pictures of the politically deranged at work. (Note: some of the pictures that zombietime.com features are not work-safe, and some are truly disgusting--such as members of Breasts Not Bombs protesting naked--and demonstrating that some of their members are men who haven't completed the sex change process, with female breasts, and male genitals.) This report from the Anti-American July 4th celebration in San Francisco really captures the ability of the left to be offensive, vulgar, and filled with ahistorical inconsistency all at once!

Another reader described submitting a Freedom of Information Act request some years ago about himself:

When I was young and nasty stuff in El Salvador and elsewhere was causing there to be talk of re-instituting the draft, I attended a couple of "anti-war rallies." One of them was at UC Berkeley's Sather Gate. It was a pretty innocuous gathering whose only memorable moment was that of Daniel Ellsberg burning his draft card. There were no obvious cameras in attendance.

Many years later, I did the FIOA requests to see what would come up. I had to be persistent. Eventually, I got my package. Most of it was noise, but interestingly, there was a picture of several people that included me at the rally just mentioned above. To this day, I don't know how 'they' correlated me in the crowd with one [name deleted]. If I remember correctly, that picture was courtesy of the FBI. There was nothing at all inflammatory in the remainder of the packet.

Another reader pointed to this Washington Post article of April 3, 2007:

A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.

For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.

The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.

FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.

The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.

Similar intelligence-gathering operations have been reported in New York, where a local police intelligence unit tried to infiltrate groups planning to protest at the Republican National Convention in 2004, and in Colorado, where records surfaced showing that the FBI collected names and license plates of people protesting timber industry practices at a 2002 industry convention.

Several federal courts have ruled that intelligence agencies can monitor domestic groups only when there is reason to believe the group is engaged in criminal activity. Experts in police conduct say it is hard to imagine how asking questions about a person's political views would be appropriate in a trespassing case.

Hmmm. I can imagine how that would be appropriate. This December 13, 1999 Time magazine article about anarchists in Seattle points out the objectives of some of the lunatic fringe groups (which doesn't necessarily include every antiwar protester):

The anarchist movement today is a sprawling welter of thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine. Ironically, the groups are increasingly organized; the Pacific Northwest in particular, with its unionist past, grungy youth-culture present and ever Green future, is an anarchist hotbed. Add to that the hundreds of under-25ers from San Francisco to Vancouver who spent months learning nonviolent civil disobedience from groups like the Ruckus Society and the Direct Action Network. "The WTO," notes Ruckus Society coordinator Han Shan, "gave us home-field advantage by coming to Seattle." The '98 trashing of a Eugene, Ore., NikeTown was an informal dry run for last week's mayhem, some of whose perpetrators call themselves the Eugene Brickthrowers Local 666. "Their goal is to take things to the furthest edge of acceptability," says Seattle activist Dana Schuerholz of the Eugene radicals, "to get their message out by literally smashing the state."

That's the anarchist's primal goal: to replace central government with the sort of self-sufficient, egalitarian collective now aborning at 918 Virginia Street, a largely vacant building on the edge of downtown Seattle. The "squat" popped up two weeks ago as a protesters' crash pad. About 100 people a night sleep there. There's no power or water, but organizers have set up a kitchen and security and toilet systems. House rules hang on one wall: NO ILLEGAL DRUGS, NO ALCOHOL, NO WEAPONS and so on, ending with NO VIOLENCE.

Oops. Most anarchists publicly decried last week's vandalism, which was perpetrated in part by local teens whose direct actions for social justice consisted of looting StarTACs from a cell-phone store. "Several press accounts have stated that there were only 'hundreds of anarchists'" in Seattle, an online activist wrote last week. "This would be true if you only counted teenagers dressed in black. This would have left out...the vast majority of us, who look just plain ole working class."

If there was not significant overlap between the anarchist riot bunch and the antiwar protesters, there would seem little good reason for the FBI to be taking pictures. But there is substantial overlap there, and identifying particular violent criminals who have a history of violent attacks in cities across the country--such as this incident described in the July 10, 2005 San Francisco Chronicle--seems to be a legitimate action:

A San Francisco police officer was in serious condition with a head injury and three suspects were in custody Saturday following a demonstration by anarchists who broke windows in the Mission District to protest the gathering of the Group of 8 leaders in Scotland.

Police did not release the name of the officer who was hurt in Friday night's melee. Deputy Police Chief Greg Suhr said Saturday that the officer was in serious but stable condition with brain swelling at San Francisco General Hospital. He has developed a blood clot, which doctors hope to dissolve before he is released, Suhr said.

The department's spokeswoman, Maria Oropeza, said the officer and his partner were driving on 23rd Street in response to a vandalism call when protesters threw a mattress underneath their patrol car.

"They got out to apprehend the suspects, at which point they were surrounded by a crowd," Oropeza said. "One of the officers was struck on the head by an unidentified object."

Police arrested Cody Tarlow, 21, of Felton (Santa Cruz County), Doritt Earnst, 31, of Berkeley and a third suspect who refused to identify himself.

They were being held on suspicion of attempted lynching, malicious mischief, battery to a police officer, aggravated assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon and willful resistance to a police officer that results in serious bodily injury.

In addition, Tarlow was held on suspicion of wearing a disguise for the purpose of escaping discovery or identification with a public offense. Earnst was also suspected of removing a weapon other than a firearm from an officer, and the unidentified man was suspected of inciting a riot.

A posting on a Web site used by the organizers of Friday's protest said, "The legal team is working on getting (the suspects) attorneys and getting them released! There will be a meeting to organize support for them." The meeting is scheduled for this morning.

The protest was one of many from around the world in response to the summit in Scotland by leaders of wealthy nations -- the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom. Representatives from China, India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico also attended.

The San Francisco protest was billed as the "West Coast Anti-Capitalist Convergence and March against the G-8." Protesters broke windows and glass doors at two Wells Fargo Bank locations, a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant and a shoe store. Red anarchy signs were spray-painted on sidewalks and windows.