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CounterPunch
December
28, 2002
The FBI's Monkeywrench
Alert
Slander by ANSIR?
by KURT NIMMO
Lockheed Martin, beware. There are property-destroying
anarchists out there who may want to throw a monkey wrench in
the works. These anarchists are determined to stop you from manufacturing
the high-tech grist Bush and his neo-con world conquerors need
to invade Iraq.
According to an advisory issued by the
FBI's Awareness of National Security Issues and Response (ANSIR)
program, these devious anarchists are against the up-and-coming
war with Iraq and are advocating "explicit and direct attack
upon the war machine" during the week of December 15-21.
The curious announcement encouraging attacks was posted on the
internet by a mysterious group supposedly going by the name "Every
Day a Circle Day" and calling for "attacks on the headquarter
facilities and other assets of oil companies and defense contractors,
singling out Boeing and Lockheed Martin" as well as the
"assets" of the Department of Defense.
The FBI's ANSIR program, formerly known
as DECA (Development of Espionage, Counterintelligence and Counterterrorism
Awareness) began in 1995 as a fax service and moved to email
a year later. It has the capacity to service 100,000 subscribers,
mostly corporations, "corporate security professionals,"
law enforcement, and other government agencies. ANSIR releases
unclassified information on the "techniques of espionage"
to corporations worried about their proprietary information falling
victim to the corporate snooping of rivals or foreign agents.
Now, in addition, ANSIR warns the titans of industry about the
threat posed by pernicious antiwar activists.
According to the FBI's ANSIR website,
the agency "has a unique capability to respond when [terrorist]
activities are identified in the United States... The FBI does
more than simply identify problems; it does something about them."
Of course, considering the less than vigilant response to ample
warnings the agency received in regard to al-Qaeda and 911, this
may be nothing more than a PR boast. Nonetheless, if history
serves, the FBI may use the suspected threat of Every Day a Circle
-- either real, imagined, or (certainly not out of the realm
of possibility) covertly created by the FBI -- as a pretext to
go after a real, growing, and sincere threat to "national
security" (as defined by Bush and his neo-con coterie of
chicken hawks): the non-violent antiwar movement.
The FBI has a long and sordid history
of not only monitoring and snooping on civil rights, labor, and
antiwar movements -- from the Palmer Raids, to COINTELPRO, and
beyond -- but of also infiltrating these organizations and inserting
agents provocateurs to discredit them. As the Church Commission
in the 1970s discovered, under COINTELPRO the FBI had used bogus
mail, evidence fabrication, sent fictional material designed
to "create dissention and cause disruption," leaked
information obtained by informants to the media, and adversely
affected the credit and employment status of activists. But it
wasn't strictly wild-eyed anarchists and Weathermen the FBI targeted,
but also mainstream political groups. For example, from 1946-60
the FBI conducted 3,000 wiretaps and 800 bugs on the NAACP. Other
threats to order and national security were posed by the ACLU,
American Library Association, American Jewish Congress, Common
Cause, National Education Association, the New York Review of
Books, and Rolling Stone
But the most vicious COINTELRPO attacks
were reserved for the Black Panthers, tactics that ultimately
led to the murder of Panther leader Fred Hampton and Mark Clark
in Chicago. In Los Angeles, FBI agents provocateurs were partly
responsible for the murder of BPP leader John Huggins and Alprentice
Carter. J. Edgar Hoover characterized the Panthers as "the
greatest threat to the internal security of the country"
and allowed his agents to treat them accordingly.
Will John Ashcroft and Tom Ridge soon
be saying the same about those of us who refuse to cooperate
and who actively resist Bush's up-and-coming war on Iraq -- and
the wars of extension surely to follow against Iran, Syria, Libya,
and possibly North Korea? Bush's multiplication of war and unprecedented
bellicosity in the name of empire will surely require a neo-COINTELPRO
(no longer illegal, as its predecessor, but enshrined in law)
in order to subvert and render ineffectual a growing antiwar
movement. Is it only a matter of time before the newly christened
Ministry of Homeland Security reactivates the dirty tricks of
J. Edgar Hoover and his brainchild COINTELPRO -- working to get
activists fired from their jobs (ask Michael Parenti), collecting
salacious personal information (as Hoover's boys attempted to
do with a bug planted in Martin Luther King's hotel room), framing
dissidents for serious crimes (ask BPP leader Geronimo Pratt
who spent 25 years in prison, only to be released when it was
discovered the FBI concocted the evidence against him), or initiating
violence between political groups (as the FBI tried to do with
the BPP and the followers of the African-American nationalist
Ron Karenga)?
It can be argued COINTELPRO never really
went away, but only experienced a short hiatus when Gerald Ford's
Attorney General Edward Levi issued guidelines of conduct for
the FBI in 1976. In 1983, Ronald Reagan's Attorney General, William
French Smith, revamped the guidelines: "In its efforts to
anticipate or prevent crimes, the FBI must at times initiate
investigations in advance of criminal conduct." In other
words, the agency under Reagan became a de facto Department of
Precrime, investigating and harassing such criminal threats as
the American Indian Movement and the Committee in Solidarity
with the People of El Salvador. Bush Senior and Clinton rolled
back civil liberty protections even more in the guise of "anti-terrorism"
(as a precursor of things to come, Clinton proposed a "partnership
effort" between the Justice Department, the FBI, and other
federal and state law enforcement agencies). Bush Junior stirred
the methodically prepared totalitarian stew with USA-Patriot
and added extrajudicial ingredients: mass arrests, interrogation
of immigrants (and US citizens), disappearances, detaining suspects
without charge or access to lawyers, military tribunals, possible
use of torture to obtain information, wiretapping of attorney-client
conversations, widespread ethnic and religious profiling of Muslims,
Arabs and Asian people, warrantless searches, pervasive electronic
snooping of email and internet travel, and even assassination
of US citizens by presidential directive.
Is it beyond the Bushites, many of whom
are Iran-Contra alumni and hardly strangers to dirty tricks and
covert operations, to have the CIA (now firmly established in
FBI offices nationwide) create a bogus anarchist group designed
to engage in "explicit and direct attack upon the war machine,"
and thus discredit the larger, mostly non-violent antiwar movement?
Is it coincidental that Every Day a Circle Day plans its violent
disruption at the same time United For Peace will hold an interfaith-organized
vigil and candle light procession, forums, fasts, workshops,
panels, and exhibits across the country?
Now that ANSIR has announced violence
in response to violence, antiwar activists are receiving phone
calls from the corporate media asking questions about the anarchists
(reporters are generally not interested in boring and peaceful
protesters marching around with candles, but violence, well,
that plays great on the idiot tube and also delivers the appropriate
message -- the bomb-throwing, window-smashing, capitalist-hating
baddies are back). As the journalist Bill Berkowitz has reported,
none of the antiwar activists he's talked with have ever heard
of Every Day a Circle Day.
Was Every Day a Circle Day created by
the FBI/CIA, or is it a genuine threat? If the latter, it couldn't
have arrived on the scene at a more inauspicious time for the
antiwar movement -- and a more advantageous time for the Bush
warmongers.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
We highly recommend regular visits to
Nimmo's website, Another
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