|
June 1, 2000
The DOJ Gave Him $4 Million
Antiwar.com Meets
the New McCarthyism
Back in April
CounterPunch was invited to an Anti-war.com day-long event in
San Mateo, down the peninsula from San Francisco. We were a left
presence at an event organized to show that opponents of US wars
range across the political spectrum. We were happy to go and
tell the crowd our take on things, from the bombing of Serbia,
to the sanctions against Iraq, to our view that capitalism has
an inherent need for wars. We were given a friendly hearing by
the crowd, many of them from the libertarian slice of the political
spectrum.
We'd met the Antiwar.com folks a year earlier,
at a meeting organized by Socialist Action, protesting the bombing
of Serbia. We thought then, as we think now, that we may disagree
with much of their economic outlook, but if Antiwar.com wants
to protest bombing workers' homes in Belgrade and the starving
of Iraqi kids under US sanctions policy, then on these issues
we like them a lot better than the Virtue-through-Bombs crowd
that made up all but thirty or so of the Democratic caucus in
the House of Reps last year. And their website has a very useful
links page, once again running across the spectrum.
It's not escaped the attention of the Democratic
Party that antiwar and anti-WTO alliances stretch across the
board. Here at CounterPunch we've been following the readiness
with which supposedly "liberal" watchdogs are now trying
to demonize such alliances and ad hoc coalitions. Six weeks ago
we reported Morris Dees's outfit saying, without a shred of evidence,
that the neo-Nazis were out in full force and exerting great
influence in the anti-WTO protests in Seattle.
And now we find another "liberal"
watchdog, heavily financed by the Justice Department, casually
stigmatizing as "militia-related" an outfit like Antiwar.com.
To have the militia label hung round one's neck these days is
no laughing matter.
Here's a report on the matter by Cletus Nelson.
Mark Pitcavage
wears two hats and from this fact stems his malign potential.
On the one hand this Ohio-based academic is employed as a full-time
senior associate researcher by the Institute for Intergovernmental
Relations, a non-profit orga nization which provides training
services to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Pitcavage's job is to head the research department of the Institute's
State/Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) Program. From the
US Justice Department, funnelled through the Institute, SLATT
has gotten since 1997 no less than $4 million, according to the
Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA), with the money
supposedly devoted to the training of law enforcement officials
in how to recognize and combat domestic terrorism.
So in his capacity as research director for
SLATT Pitcavage can provide officially dignified "intelligence
information" to law enforcement. But in his private capacity
Pitcavage also maintains a personal website called "The
Militia Watchdog", where he maintains a list of outfits
he deems to be militia-related.
To give an example, Pitcavage attacked Waco:
Rules of Engagement in a New York Times article last September,
defending the conduct of the FBI. The article identified him
only as "a historian who specializes in right-wing extremist
groups" and operator of the Militia Watchdog website, without
also stating that Pitcavage makes his full-time living through
a grant from the Department of Justice.
So is Pitcavage
using information from DoJ files to which he has access in his
SLATT capacity to flesh out his speculations on his personal
website? And is this self-styled "militia watchdog"
importing his personal feuds and piques into government intelligence
files which are of course mostly filled with garbage anyway.
Piss off Pitcavage and you could find yourself denounced on CNN
as a terrorist.
Pitcavage's expanding purview isn't limited
to Christian patriots and neo-Nazis. He has begun monitoring
the political activities of law-abiding 2nd Amendment advocates,
libertarian groups, and most recently, the popular on-line forum
for bipartisan opponents of US intervention known as Antiwar.com.
While the notion of equating principled opposition
to Clinton's cluster-bomb compassion with sagebrush rebellion
sounds ludicrous, Pitcavage justifies his conduct by ominously
declaring that Antiwar.com is "essentially an isolationist
right-wing libertarian site". The implication of this tendentious
statement is obvious: behind the anti-war rhetoric lurks the
Rough Beast.
The relationship between Pitcavage's pubblic
and private roles poses the question whether his recent posting
of Antiwar.com on his personal website was done to please his
federal paymasters. Eric Garris, director of Antiwar.com says
he wouldn't be surprised if this was part of a concerted attempt
by the DOJ to discredit his organization. "The tactics
of the Clinton administration are to attack the ability of his
opponents to speak openly," Garris observes. Despite the
bipartisan tone of the site, Garris says allegations of right-wing
extremism are frequent. "We constantly are getting that
sort of thing."
Garris isn't
alone. Anarchist Bill White, onetime Media coordinator for the
Utopian Anarchist Party (UAP), was amazed to see the anti-authoritarian
political faction appear on Pitcavage's web page alongside various
rightist groups. "He lists all kinds of groups that really
shouldn't be there", he observes. White theorizes that a
column by Antiwar.com columnist Justin Raimondo assailing Pitcavage
for his self-serving attempts to downplay FBI skullduggery during
the 1993 WACO siege provided the impetus for the group's new
classification. "When you write something like that and
Pitcavage sees it, he adds your name to the list", White
says. From a civil libertarian perspective, these machinations
by an asset of the federal government to "expose" and
denounce constitutionally protected political speech advertise
a highly sinister trend. CP
|
