Spying on Quakers and other peace activists

You will remember that on Tuesday I indulged in something of a rant about Bush's use of the straw man argument. I mentioned parenthetically in that post that there was surveillance being carried out on the Catholic Worker Movement and the Quakers. Well, Carolyn L. left a comment expressing dismay at this and asked for a link. I have three for you (there are many more.) The first one is entitled, "The Return of Total Information Awareness" by Ted Rall. Here's part of what it says:

NEW YORK--Civil libertarians relaxed when, in September 2003, Republicans bowed to public outcry and cancelled Total Information Awareness. TIA was a covert "data mining" operation run out of the Pentagon by creepy Iran-Contra figure John Poindexter. Bush administration marketing mavens had tried to dress up the sinister "dataveillance" spook squad--first by changing TIA to Terrorism Information Awareness, then to the Information Awareness Office--to no avail. "But," wondered the Electronic Frontier Foundation watchdog group a month after Congress cut its funding, "is TIA truly dead?"

At the time I bet "no." Once a regime has revealed a predilection for spying on its own people, the histories of East Germany and Richard Nixon teach us, they never quit voluntarily. The cyclical clicks that appeared on my phone line after 9/11 corroborated my belief that federal spy agencies were using the War on Terrorism as a pretext for harassing their real enemies: liberals and others who criticized their policies. As did the phony Verizon employee tearing out of my building's basement, leaving the phone switching box open, when I demanded to see his identification. He drove away in an unmarked van.

So I was barely surprised to hear the big news that Bush had ordered the National Security Agency, FBI and CIA to tap the phones and e-mails of such dangerously subversive radical Islamist anti-American terrorist groups as Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the American Indian Movement and the Catholic Workers, without bothering to apply for a warrant. "The Catholic Workers advocated peace with a Christian and semi-communistic ideology," an agent wrote in an FBI dossier, a man sadly unaware of the passings of J. Edgar Hoover and the Soviet Union.

Old joke: A suspect running away from a cop ducks down a long dark alley. When the policeman's partner catches up he finds the first cop walking around in circles under a bright streetlamp. "What are you doing?" the second officer asks. "The guy ran into that alley!" "I know," his colleague replies, "but looking for him out here is a lot easier."

No wonder they haven't found Osama bin Laden. Tapping the ACLU's phones is easier than traipsing through Pakistani Kashmir.

The second link I have for you is entitled, "American Civil Liberties Union releases documentation of spying" . Here's the pertinent excerpt:

The FBI spy files included spying on a vegan community as well as students and peace activists who participated in a 2002 conference at Stanford University that focused on ending U.S. sanctions against Iraq.

The documents released by the ACLU include FBI observances on the supposed communist leanings of the Catholic Workers Group. In an e-mail to the counterterrorism unit, an unidentified official wrote, ''the Catholic Workers advocated peace with a Christian and semi-communistic ideology.''

Finally, I want to call your attention to an MSNBC article entitled, "Is the Pentagon spying on Americans?" Here's how it gets started:

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

I think it's beyond question that the government has a file on me. I'm a member of both the ACLU and PETA as well as the Democratic Party. I support all of these organizations with a monthly pledge automatically charged to my credit card. I operate this blog under my own name. I'm a liberal nun. I have marched in solidarity with the Muslim community here in Tulsa. I've run Google searches that take me to liberal, anti-Bush websites. It makes me kind of sick to think that I'm being spied upon. But I don't think reality can be avoided here. My only consolation is that there are so many of us that there are not enough jails to lock all of us up. Of course, I imagine that's what the gays and the Gypsies and the Jews in Germany thought during the 30s.