Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
Alright, so let's see, what time is it?
It's almost too late, but I guess not quite too late to go to our first guest here on the show today.
It's John Cook from Gawker Magazine, Gawker the website anyway, I don't know if it's a magazine.
But Gawker.com, and he's also worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, Yahoo News, Radar Magazine, and Mother Jones.
And he's got this article, How the FBI Monitored Krusty Punks, Anarchist Hangouts, and Organic Farmers Markets Under the Guise of Combating Terrorism.
It's at Gawker.com, Terror in Portlandia, welcome to the show, how are you doing?
Good, how about yourself?
I'm doing alright, sorry for making you hang through the last of that rant there.
Don't worry, it was very interesting.
We do not have a magazine, by the way, we're digital only.
Okay, well that's good, we saved the lives of those trees.
Oh, I hope I didn't just get myself investigated by the FBI for taking the side of a tree.
Terror in Portlandia, and I love the little photoshopped image here of the FBI SWAT hostage rescue team killer with his black mask standing in the middle of a farmer market, but it's not much of an exaggeration, is it?
Well, no, the agents that were at the farmers market were conducting surveillance, so they were playing close, sitting in a car, watching people.
But yes, it's certainly true that the FBI at one point, in Portland, the FBI officer spent about three years, as part of a very large nationwide effort by the FBI to target animal rights extremists and environmental activists, in Portland they spent about three years investigating animal rights activists and environmental folks there in Portland, and they wound up doing things like literally sitting at an organic farmers market and watching people.
There's a memo that I got, I got these files for the Freedom of Information Act, there's one memo that records surveillance that these agents took, and they were tailing these people driving Subarus from the farmers market to a protest, and there's no criminal activity, and they did not know the identity of the people they were tailing, they just found some cars and followed them.
Yeah, I mean, reading that summary, it sounds as though the one cop said to the other, look, two Subarus, like maybe that was meaningful, that was what caught their attention.
Now, it could be that they were only going on a license plate number, so they may have just looked for the car that they thought they had some reason to follow a license plate number.
The documents are redacted, so it's not clear, but it is clear they did not know who was in those cars, and that the only thing those people in those cars did was shop and buy some organic bananas or whatever, and then go to a protest that was perfectly legal.
And there's dozens of documents like this, and there's about 400 pages in this particular file, and there's just dozens of instances of informants who are sitting outside of quote-unquote anarchist hangouts, and reporting back what they saw, and the license plates of cars that are parked in front of anarchist hangouts.
All right, well, I'm sorry we'll have to leave it here for the break, but we'll be right back with John Cook from Gawker.com.
The article is Terror in Portlandia.
The FBI is after your local hippies.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Cook from Gawker, Gawker.com, and we're talking about the FBI.
They had this investigation, Seizing Thunder, which I guess started, sounds like it started out, no, no, no, yeah, it started out as Operation Backfire.
Actually, it had something to do with criminal activity.
I'd say it was a stretch to call it terrorism or even really a federal matter in a constitutional sense.
Seems like local police stuff.
But anyway, so the feds got involved in, you know, lefties setting SUVs on fire and that kind of stuff, hippie stuff.
But then it moved into this other operation, Seizing Thunder, which became Let's Just Monitor Lefties.
And from reading your article here, John, it sounds like just run-of-the-mill lefty is a good enough categorization.
If you're wearing a tie-dye shirt and some flip-flops, then you're under suspicion and there's a fed following you around somewhere.
Right, or if you're wearing, you know, all black and a balaclava or something, they were really interested.
Well, but that's all the undercover cops.
Right, right, right, right.
But no, actually, Seizing Thunder was the name of this operation.
It actually was before Operation Backfire.
Seizing Thunder was one of – Oh, I'm sorry, I had it wrong then.
This started in 2002.
This ran from 2002 to 2005.
And in the mid-2000s, as of 2005, there were 150 federal investigations into what the Justice Department called animal rights and environmental terrorism.
So animal rights and environmental extremism was, after 9-11, elevated to the top domestic terrorism priority for the Bush Justice Department.
This is what they decided to focus all of their domestic counterterrorism efforts on.
There were some serious crimes.
There were arsons.
There was a notorious arson in the mid-90s of a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado that did about $12 million in damage.
A lot of these people were actually breaking laws, as you point out.
I think a lot of them are state matters rather than federal matters.
But the federal government decided to get into this.
And Seizing Thunder was based out of Portland, but there were 150 other ones just like it around the country.
And Seizing Thunder actually did eventually – was merged into something called Operation Backfire, which resulted in 11 indictments of extremists, including the people who pulled off that arson in Vail, Colorado.
So there were actual law enforcement interests at stake here, but what happened is it metastasized into agents just – I think almost for purposes of make work.
They didn't have the actual goods on the people they were going after, so they just expanded things to just a ludicrous extent and literally were following around people because they're anarchists, which is not a crime.
And a lot of the stuff sounds like files from the 1920s and the Palmer Raids or something.
It's literally like a known anarchist hangout because there's people parked in front of a known anarchist hangout.
The FBI is recording their license plate.
Well, and you know what?
There are a lot of anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists and, for that matter, anarcho-capitalists in America.
None of them are hell-bent on some imminent violent revolution.
And there may be – there's probably more anarchists in America now than ever before, but they're not a violent threat to the state.
They're simply an ideological one.
There's no criminal – there's obviously no criminal element to believing in the tenets of anarchism.
There's no criminal element to believing in animal liberation.
I mean, I can see where, back in the day, reactionaries would say, well, send out the Pinkertons because there are hardcore leftists who are actually doing things, you know, waging a massive strike, which, of course, is against the interests of people with power or whatever.
But in this case, I mean, what are they doing at all?
Instead of hanging out on Monkey Ranch books, they ain't doing a damn thing.
Right, and in terms of specifically focusing on anarchists, I mean, the biggest potential threat, I think, would be that they would view it as sort of a World Bank protest and that sort of thing, the black bloc folks.
The cops, yeah.
Again, I don't know why – it doesn't seem like a rational distribution of federal law enforcement priorities to focus on 18- to 24-year-olds who may, on one day, at a World Bank protest in six months in the future, break a window.
I mean, it might be a problem for the municipalities that are hosting the G8 or whatever these events are, but it certainly seems like an odd law enforcement priority.
And I don't see how it's a federal matter.
I mean, one thing when I was looking through these I thought of is, you know, I guarantee you when the Occupy Wall Street documents come out, when everyone has filed their FOIA requests about the FBI's involvement in policing the Occupy Wall Street movement, you're going to find a lot of informants and a lot of surveillance of those groups, because that's simply what they're doing.
They're gathering information and intelligence on radicals who they feel may break the law.
And I think that the black bloc folks, to the extent the black bloc folks show up at these Occupy Wall Street movements, the FBI's certainly monitoring them and keeping tabs on them.
Well, yeah, I don't know.
To me, the whole thing betrays kind of a guilty conscience.
I mean, I guess I see what you're saying, too, that it's just make work.
You have a government program like the FBI.
They'll never scale back their own power ever, ever.
They'll always find reason to expand and expand and expand.
And since there never were more than a couple hundred Al-Qaeda guys in the entire history of the planet Earth, what are they going to do with all this stuff?
They've got to persecute somebody.
Right.
They've got to justify their jobs.
And if their bosses are saying the most important threat domestically to our security is this group of hippies and anarchists, then they're going to follow orders and keep tabs on the hippies and anarchists and wait for them to commit a crime.
I mean, the only evidence of an actual – in the 400 pages of this file that I got, and there were about 700 or so pages, I believe, redacted from it, so there's a lot more there.
But the only evidence of an actual discreet crime that I saw was there was a little bit in there about someone who had keyed some cars at a car dealership with Al-F, A-L-F, Animal Liberation Front.
And we've got the Portland office of the FBI worried about who's keying cars.
Well, why not?
Again, this is what I was kind of wondering about out loud earlier on the show was why not just nationalize every police department in America?
I mean, if everything that happens is the FBI's business, crime or not, certainly these things that are obviously matters for the local sheriff's department, why even have a local sheriff's department?
Right.
And this file definitely shows an enormous amount of cooperation between the Eugene, Oregon Police Department, the Portland, Oregon Police Department, and the FBI.
Basically, the FBI became a kind of intelligence service for these local police departments.
There's a great memo in there about where an informant had clued in the FBI to a planned anarchist march in Eugene, Oregon to protest the IMF.
And, of course, this great nugget of intelligence came via a flyer that had been passed out by these anarchists who wanted people to come to their march.
So it's not like it was a great secret.
But the FBI clued in the Eugene Police Department, and there's a memo written by one of the agents saying, you know, we averted a riot.
You know, the anarchists had planned a riot in Eugene, and because of our fast efforts to communicate the intelligence to the Eugene Police Department, they were able to avert a planned riot.
Which is just, I mean, there was no evidence that there was going to be a riot.
There was a flyer that these folks put out saying, come down, we're going to have music.
There were bands playing.
There was going to be a teach-in.
There was going to be a protest, a First Amendment demonstration.
And these FBI agents, I think part of this mentality of like, well, we have to show we did something.
Let's say we averted a riot.
Well, and you know, the thing is, you read through this article and you think, well, what a waste of time and energy and whatever.
But it doesn't sound like they were, you know, really persecuting these kids, prosecuting them all for, you know, federal pot possession laws or some kind of craziness.
They were just going way too far in surveilling them.
But to me, I mean, I don't know, I think it's almost as big of a deal because of the chilling effect, as Terry Liberty Parker would have called it back in the day.
That once a hippie hears about something like this, he's less likely to engage in things like this, even if he really wants to.
He might just go down to the creek today instead of going to the protest with the rest of you guys kind of a thing, you know.
And it's the same thing with Internet surveillance.
People really are.
It's not that they're terrified sweating, but it does occur to them.
Maybe I don't want to have it on my permanent record that I use these particular search terms before, you know.
Same kind of thing.
So, anyway, yeah, pretty bad violation.
Everybody, please check out Gawker.com.
John Cook's article is called, it's got a couple different names, Terror in Portlandia.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thanks, Scott.
