ANDY DRISCOLL: The FBI at War–in Minnesota:The New Gestapo?

The following – slightly edited – was the script used for the weekly hour-long program, TruthToTell for Monday, December 6, 2010 at 9:00AM titled The FBI at War – in Minnesota: The New Gestapo? – on KFAI FM in St. Paul/Minneapolis, MN. This essay version has been requested by several listeners, thus the posting here. It’s still slightly raw, but it’s what we said.

The program can be heard/downloaded from www.TruthToTell.org

By Andy Driscoll, Producer/Host, TruthToTell

It’s come to this: it has become illegal to disagree with this nation’s government, its policies, its cavalier entries into war and to say anything publicly that would thus appear threatening to those policies, no matter how unconstitutional they may be. Oh, they may not be coming to get you right away, but the stories about the overreach of the US government into the lives of other peoples is only as bad as it is in its intrusions into the lives and welfare of average American citizens dissenting from, protesting and challenging the authority of the police, the FBI, Homeland Security, the TSA, CIA and the entire alphabet soup that makes up the country’s military and law enforcement community. And it becomes increasingly apparent that the current administration, the President and his Justice Department are almost as stifling of our First and Fourth Amendment freedoms as any Fascist regime history has dealt humanity.

Extreme? Before you laugh in our faces over the very serious use of that term as it applies to much of what has been termed and institutionalized as national security, homeland security and other post-9-11 federal agencies, listen to this TTT discussion about what is actually going on at home and abroad in the land – our land – as witnessed by the raids conducted, subpoenas issued to and spying invoked on, and generally nasty treatment of  – citizens and immigrants, dissenters and demonstrators, travelers and at-home residents who resist privacy invasions or challenge arrests for even minor offenses. The evidence is rapidly mounting in all of these disparate quarters – word of mouth tales, stories published by credible reporters and publications and videos appearing online of just how bad it’s getting between we the people and our federal, state and local law enforcement agencies. The resemblance to the Gestapo of legendary German fame is all too clear, according to credible observers.

This program was originally going to try to dissect the raids on three of this area’s most vocal antiwar activists, including Jess Sundin, who was scheduled to be with us today, but encountered a medical emergency. Jess is known widely for her antiwar efforts, including around the RNC in 2008 and other time. She and Mick Kelly and others were subpoenaed to appear before a Chicago federal grand jury and they refused to do so.

Those demands went away, but three more subpoenas were later issued to three others – Sarah Martin, a member of Women Against Military Madness, Tracy Molm, an organizer with Students for a Democratic Society and Anh Pham, an anti-war and immigrant-rights activist. This time, US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald is not backing off. Now, after a couple of weeks of research, it is clear that these subpoenas and others issued in Chicago are simply one more of the rocks in the rippling waters of encroaching law enforcement. Some of that research, for instance, has led to serious questions about the legitimacy of the troubled young Somali, Mohammed Mohamud’s plan to trigger a bomb at a crowded Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland.

The well-known critic and filmmaker, Glenn Greenwald, writing in Salon Magazine, goes after media sycophants who have bought the FBI line whole, never questioning once the underlying truth of this episode, which may be a case of well-crafted entrapment, which Mohamud’s family is now loudly claiming. Greenwald’s story is well worth examining in detail we haven’t time to relate today.

But similar stories of such manufactured plots to discredit Muslim-Americans date back several years, including one related in Rolling Stone about a Rockford, Illinois, when members of the Northern Illinois district office of the federal Joint Terrorism Task Force recruited a local Muslim to rope in a hapless young and essentially homeless, video store clerk – an unhappy young jihadist who would rail on about Americans and Jews, thus attracting the attention of the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

He hardly had the wherewithal to do anything about his rantings. Nevertheless, the Task Force recruit offered this kid shelter and some ideas about targeting some local folks and malls for bombing. The convoluted plot ended when the kid tried swapping his stereo speakers for some grenades and guns. In what Rolling Stone’s Guy Lawson calls the Fear Factory, this Joint Terrorism Task Force – the very same that occupied St. Paul during the RNC and conjured cases against the young antiwar protesters here, only to watch those cases dissolve into nothing, has some 100 units operating in similar fashion all around the country.

These task forces are comprised of the agencies of the Justice Department and Homeland Security – the FBI, the Secret Service, CIA, ICE, Drug Enforcement Agency – as well as the State Patrol, sheriff’s offices and local police. They’re everywhere all the time – on our streets, our telephones, and the Internet, interconnected by what are called Fusion Centers.

As we said earlier, the stories are really mounting with regard to the overreach of law enforcement – in so many ways emboldened and set free from Constitutional constraints by the Patriot Act and subsequent court rulings that seem to have unleashed a fearful rise in legal intimidation and concocted events and enemies in several of our cities, focusing, more than ever on our most vulnerable groups – those easily swayed and considered enemies in the eyes of middle-class America, thanks to media reports that fall in, lockstep, behind official pronouncements that Muslims and Latino immigrants are the enemy within.

County sheriffs and city police have become handmaidens of these joint task forces. Local citizens are finding that any arguments with any officer about the legitimacy of an arrest or stop for alleged violations can get them beaten and/or taken to jail for the slightest infraction.

The problem is that most Americans would say we’re exaggerating the fear, the danger of a police state, but others will tell you that this is a creeping phenomenon, not yet fully realized by a good share of society – yet – but not unlike – truly – the German experience of the 1930’s in many more ways than one – as we’ve been reminded by social critic Allen Roland, who quotes liberally from the classic book, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans from 1933 to 1945. He parallels Roland cites to today’s United States are startling and fearsome.

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Resistance can be one of those scary maneuvers when what you’re resisting can bite back with the power and authority currently vested in our myriad law enforcement agencies at all levels. Bur resist we must even as we risk our necks if we’re to uphold the basic tenets of the Constitution – to be free – to dissent – to question authority when authority violates the law.