Winds of Change Newsletter, February 2006     See sidebar for table of contents

Chilling Dissent
FBI Collecting ‘Research’ Reports on Enviro Groups

by Bill Berkowitz (excerpted), mediatransparency.org

From spying on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil right activists, to the Cointelpro program that targeted the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and scores of anti-Vietnam War groups…spying on Americans by assorted government agencies is as American as…cronies getting jobs in the Bush Administration (and) unsafe coal mines…

The story of government agencies spying on the American people has many layers. Through an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it was discovered that the FBI has been collecting information from partisan, ideologically-driven right wing think tanks that have long had environmental activists in their cross hairs.

Recently National Public Radio’s show Living on Earth broadcast a segment called “Big Brother,” that explored the FBI’s program that spies on environmental activists. (Former WV Public Broadcasting reporter Jeff Young hosted the segment.)

Young and his guest, Ann Beeson, the associate legal director of the ACLU, talked about how right wing think tanks are providing grist for FBI investigations:

YOUNG: …the FBI seemed to rely pretty heavily on research done by a couple of think tanks that are very conservative, pro-business, anti-regulation in their mindset and their mission. There’s the Capital Research Center (and the Washington Legal Foundation, plus others)…who generated a lot of that information that the FBI apparently relied on. What do you make of that connection there?

BEESON: Well, I think that, unfortunately, it’s another bit of information that might lead one to conclude that the FBI is not, in fact, just doing this to investigate crimes, but is doing it purposefully to suppress legitimate dissent and criticism of the administration’s policies. There’s another example, actually, in one of the Greenpeace-related documents. What the document says is that the FBI is concerned that the protest itself could harm the public image of the missile defense system. Now, to me that sounds very much like the FBI trying to assist the administration in preventing criticism of its positions and programs from getting out there in the public. And that’s a very dangerous job for the FBI to be engaged in.

According to a posting at the ACLU website, the documents they obtained revealed that the FBI and local law enforcement agencies have been monitoring, infiltrating and targeting political, environmental, anti-war and progressive religious groups…

While (Deepa) Isac, (a staff attorney with Greenpeace) acknowledged that it was difficult to make an informed judgment about exactly what role these (think-tank generated) documents played in FBI decision making as to which groups to spy on, she did point out that “it is clear that FBI was using documents from conservative groups and it appears that they had no documents from counter-balancing organizations.”