All right, now it's Stephen Salisbury.
He's been writing some great stuff with Tom Englehart over there at tomdispatch.com, and of course in Tom's archives at antiwar.com.
And he's got this great piece called Surveillance, America's Pastime, a hall of shame of state snooping, prying, and informing aimed at destroying the fabric of civil society.
By Stephen Salisbury, it's also called Keeping an Eye on Everyone.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
I'm pretty good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
Who was Ernest C. Withers?
Well, Ernest Withers was a great photographer.
He was an African-American who grew up in Memphis and chronicled the life of the segregated South during the 1950s and 1960s with his camera.
It's very unusual for a professional photographer to be an African-American in those days in that place.
And so he's credited with creating some of the great iconic images that came out of the civil rights movement, particularly those that were focused on Memphis, such as images of the sanitation workers' strike in 1968 that brought Martin Luther King to that town.
Ultimately, where he met his death.
So Withers was very, very, very well known.
He had access to all the major civil rights leaders, including King.
He's got wonderful photographs of King relaxing in the Lorraine Motel.
Terrific images of the strikers and various actions on the streets of Memphis.
But he had another job as well, which was as an informer for the FBI.
And so at the time that he was chronicling the growth and spread and activism in the civil rights movement, he was also reporting on the doings of the leadership.
And also not just the national leadership, but the black political leadership in Memphis.
And so he was passing that along to the Memphis office of the FBI.
And some of his information led to the takedown of one of the radical groups, African-American groups in Memphis in those days, and 34 people were arrested as a result.
He passed pictures of King and Ben Hooks and Andy Young and all these people to the FBI, and the FBI provided his own insights into what they were thinking, what they were doing, what they were planning at private meetings, because he had total access to these folks.
They trusted him completely.
And the reason we're talking about it is that the Memphis Commercial Appeal, a great little newspaper, did an exhaustive investigation and got all kinds of information through the Freedom of Information Act out of the government that showed the extent of Withers' informing activities.
It's a very, very painful disclosure for the civil rights leaders who are still surviving.
But it's also a painful disclosure for everyone else.
As I report in this piece, Andy Young said, well, he didn't think there was any problem with it.
They weren't trying to hide anything and so forth.
And that got Dick Gregory, the comedian and activist, all riled up and turned him against Andy.
And which is really what the use of informers and in all kinds of surveillance ultimately does.
It corrupts personal relationships, family relationships, social relationships, and certainly political relationships.
Earl Caldwell, who was a great reporter for the New York Times back in those days, now teaches journalism at Howard, excuse me, at Hampton, said that black journalists had a very special relationship with the black community in the South during those days.
And in fact, a group of African-American reporters and photographers took out an ad in several black publications back in 1970, saying that we will never betray the trust of the black community.
We will never inform, we will never spy.
So Earl Caldwell was somewhat devastated by this revelation.
As far as he was concerned, if the records released by the Commercial Appeal proved to be accurate, and there's no reason to doubt that they weren't, then he said that it really put a heavy burden on all journalists.
Of course, journalism is absolutely dependent on informing.
None of us could do our work if we didn't have informants, which we- Yeah, but informing the press and the public is different than being a rat for J. Edgar Hoover.
Well, it depends.
I mean, it depends.
Look at the run-up to the war in Iraq, where you had the New York Times reporting all kinds of anonymous information coming out of the government, all pointing the country into war.
That, to me, is the kind of duplicity that the kind of informants that we're talking about with the FBI, that duplicity is the same.
Because the- Yeah, I'm thinking more like the people who were talking to Knight Ritter and saying, no, this is true.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, Knight Ritter got it right.
Of course, Knight Ritter is no longer with us.
But that's another story.
So anyway, for me, anyway, the Withers revelations really highlighted the kind of subversions of surveillance and how they disrupt social and political relationships within a society.
I mean, whether it's the United States or the Soviet Union, it's the same thing.
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because you can be describing the civil rights era in America or the current COINTELPRO type things being used against the anti-war movement here with, I mean, let's be honest, what we used to accuse the Soviets of all the time is like, this is East Germany where one out of seven works for the Stasi or whatever.
They keep trying to do that.
In fact, there's a headline on antiwar.com today here where the NSA's newest recruiters are cartoons, little animals.
And according to the Danger Room over there at Wired, part of this is encouraging them to rat on their parents.
Well, you know, in this story in America, you would think, see, the word America is supposed to mean that something like that is impossible, right?
Because we're not East Germany.
And yet maybe we are.
Well, we'd like we'd like to think that.
But yet, if you look at the history of the FBI, I mean, it grew out of this kind of subversive surveillance, really, you know, in the wake of World War I, Hoover was put in charge of what was then called the Bureau of Investigation.
Now, Hoover was about 25 years old at the time.
He'd been a clerk at the Library of Congress.
And, you know, what he did was establish a network of informers throughout the country reporting on Russian and immigrant communities, which were then.
You know what, Stephen?
We have a problem, which is that the show's over.
But I wonder, you know, since we had trouble with the phone and all that, maybe you can come back tomorrow and we can fill up and talk more about COINTELPRO and then bring it up to Modern Times.
That'd be all right.
We can try to do that.
Sure.
Okay, great.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm very happy that I'm going to get to follow up yesterday's interview with Stephen Salisbury.
He had a short time at the end of the show yesterday.
And so we're going to be able to talk more about this important subject, which I'll get to in a minute.
But first, I will let you know that Stephen Salisbury is a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and he's the author of many books, at least more than one.
The latest is Mohammed's Ghosts, an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
And I'll go ahead and mention, because I think it's so important, that if you go back and listen to my previous interviews of Stephen Salisbury, you'll see that they're about bogus terrorism cases.
I think there are two of them, if I remember right.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us here again today.
Pleasure.
Okay, so now we talked a bit about the bad old days of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO against the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement a bit, and treachery within those movements on behalf of the national government.
But, you know, since then we've had real reforms.
We've had attorney generals like Janet Reno and Alberto Gonzalez and John Ashcroft and and we've had wonderful FBI directors like Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller.
And so all those bad old days are over and everything's fine now, and civil liberties are protected in America.
So I wonder why you would complain about all, bring up all this old stuff about COINTELPRO from the bad old days of the 1960s.
Well, the bad old days are the good old days and they're still with us.
That's the principal reason.
And I mean, virtually every day you can find evidence of it.
As a matter of fact, there were just this past week, there were two cases involving two so-called terrorism cases that involved what many consider to be entrapment.
One was in Detroit where an imam was gunned down in an aborted sting that was completely arranged by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with informants that had been sent into a very, very poverty stricken area, mosque, to essentially see if they could coax the imam there, who was a longtime radical black activist, actually, who coaxed the imam to engage in some sort of violent activity.
But the imam didn't go along with that.
He said he didn't want to get involved in any violence.
So they hung around and hung around and recorded a lot of conversations, surreptitiously, in which the imam, who liked to boast about the bad old days, referred to him, talked about violence and what he would do if he were ever cornered by the police, and just general street talk, trash talk, I call it.
And they eventually coaxed him into nothing to do with politics, although the criminal complaint initially sworn out against this imam was full of his boasting and his supposed ambition to establish a separate state in Michigan that would be governed entirely by Sharia law.
But they set up a sting that basically was a petty fencing operation, and the imam was sucked into this warehouse, and the police and agents and a dog after him.
And next thing you knew, there was gun shooting everywhere, and he was dead.
Now, just last week, the Justice Department Civil Rights Division, at the request of many, many, many, many people and members of Congress and civic leaders in Detroit, finally issued a report of its review of the case in which they exonerated all the law enforcement authorities for any violation of the imam's, the late imam's, civil rights.
But this is apparently not, this is not satisfied a lot of people in Detroit.
And the report, which I've read, really doesn't answer some basic questions, some basic questions, such as, did the imam even have a gun?
Then the other case was a fairly, the Detroit case, I should add, was, did not receive a lot of press attention outside of Detroit.
Well, and isn't that the case too, where they medevacked the dog, the police dog?
Yeah, it is.
Which I think most people already know that if you somehow hurt a police dog, even if it's attacking your throat or something, then that's assault on a police officer, a class A felony or whatever.
If you kill a one, then that's murdering a police officer under the law.
They give you a life in prison for it.
Here, they medevacked the dog and left this man to die on the cold floor.
This man who, as you say, could not be entrapped.
Yeah.
So they just killed him.
Yeah.
Well, that's what a lot of people think, for sure.
And there have been now two reviews of this case, one by the state of Michigan and one by the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
And both of which were based primarily on interviews with the law enforcement personnel who were involved.
And oddly enough, both reports exonerated those same people that it based its findings on.
So the other case was in Newburgh, New York, where four men, one of mostly homeless, former drug addicts, one was a paranoid schizophrenic, sort of hangers on at the local mosque, met a very flashy guy who came in one day, blew in from out of town in a Mercedes and started talking about lots of money and jobs and so forth.
And they eventually drew four guys into his orbit.
And the next thing you know, these guys are busted for supposedly plotting to shoot down airplanes at Stewart Air Force Base in Newburgh with Stinger missiles, surface-to-air missiles these guys were going to supposedly get.
And the other thing they were doing, and they were arrested in the process of doing this, was to plant bombs at a couple of synagogues in the Bronx.
Now, the issue with this case is that not that they were not doing what they were arrested in the course of doing.
No one disputes that.
But the question is really why they were doing it and how they came to be there.
And they and their attorneys essentially said that they had been totally coaxed into this primarily by offers of huge amounts of money.
We're talking not just $10,000 or $20,000, but one of them was offered $250,000 to carry out these bombings.
Now, these guys did not have the wherewithal to do this to begin with.
They were not thinking about doing it.
So the question then becomes one of, well, what constitutes entrapment?
If you go into a situation and you induce somebody to do something, you keep plugging away and offering more and more and more and more money to people who have no jobs, have no prospects of jobs, have no way to put food on the table.
Eventually, as one of them said on a tape recording, people don't care what it is.
They're going to go and do it for the money.
Well, the thing is, too, Stephen, is we've seen this over and over again.
I mean, there's been bogus terrorism cases, but the actual entrapments like this, it's happened in New York with the kid at the Islamic bookstore, and you had the Detroit Five and the Miami Seven and the kid and his father in Lodi, California, and over and over again.
And now somehow TV says that the FBI has these guys, these heroes from CSI or these serious boot-wearing Tom Clancy novel characters who would never go around searching for the slimmest pickings to entrap, to pretend that there's a terror war.
But that is what it is.
We'll be right back.
It's Stephen Salisbury.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Talking with Stephen Salisbury.
He's got one at Tom Dispatch, keeping an eye on everyone.
And it's also called Surveillance America's Pastime.
If you're familiar with Tom Dispatch, you know how it works.
Two titles, a mini essay introduction, and then the article that's in Tom's archives at Antiwar.com as well.
And now, Stephen, I kind of got the last word before that break about how the reality is so different from the heroic public-spirited cops on TV who would never spend their time finding the dumbest kid at the bookstore to trick into saying something stupid into a microphone so that they can spend millions of dollars and use the US court system if he's lucky to destroy his life.
That just couldn't be.
And yet that's the way it is.
And then we had to go to break and you didn't get to disagree or agree or say whatever you wanted to that.
But then also, I'd like to ask you to please address my worries for one, that it's not just the Muslims.
It's everybody that they're after.
The whole world's a battlefield now and left anarchists or not even left anarchists at the RNC-8 could be charged with terrorism.
And of course, the terrible, scary right-wing militias like Timothy McVeigh, they're all out to get us as well.
And so maybe the rule of law is not adequate to take care of that problem.
So there's two or three issues for you there to address.
Well, the thing of it is that in the wake of 9-11, the budget and the attention that the government is giving to intelligence and so-called security issues, counterintelligence, that whole landscape of government activity has just, I hate to say it, exploded all over the place.
Take one little instance, not so little, but back in 2005, in December of 2005, the New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was scooping up domestic communications and in possible violation of the federal law without probable cause, they were just scooping them all up.
Warrantless wiretapping issue, you may recall.
We now know that the NSA is vacuuming up about 1.6 billion electronic communications, telephone calls, emails, you name it, a day, a day of Americans, of American conversations, American messages, American communications of all kinds, you know, telexes, telegrams.
It's amazing, really, that they let you and me have this conversation at this point.
I mean, why not just have troops go stepping down the street?
Well, I'm sure...
What are they waiting for?
It's all being downloaded.
The fact of the matter is, though, that they've got so much information there, even though they keep going back to the well of Congress trying to get legislation to increase the amount of information that they can legally obtain, they already have so much on a regular basis that they can't see the forest for the trees.
And if you look at the terrorism, the real terrorism instances that have surfaced in the last couple of years, every single one of them, take for instance, the so-called underwear bomber, the guy who was going to blow up his plane over Detroit.
But here's an instance where the guy's father was so concerned about what he was planning to do and the terrorist groups in, actually, in Pakistan and Afghanistan that he was falling in with, that he went to the CIA station in Nairobi to warn this country that, you know, about his son.
And what did they do?
They just blew him off.
They had the information.
In fact, you know...
They put it in a database.
They have so many names, so much information in all these interconnected databases that they can't find anything.
Well, and you know, there's some indications that they helped him change planes in the Netherlands.
Kurt Haskell was a lawyer, an eyewitness on that plane, and he testified on this show twice and told anybody who would listen about the man in orange, but more particularly the well-dressed man who helped convince the people at the airport to go ahead and let him through, said, oh, he's a Somali refugee.
We do this all the time, et cetera.
And there's no real explanation for who these men were but intelligence agents of somebody or another.
And Brian Ross, at the tail end of a little piece for ABC News, admitted that the FBI was looking into who these men were, that they had to admit...
They quit smearing Kurt Haskell and basically conceded that there was something to look into there, but then it just went away.
And so I hate to ever talk about that Detroit case without really bringing that up.
In fact, I'll say one more thing, too.
There's Stefan, and then I'll be quiet, is that Richard Wolff, who, of course, is very close with the Obama White House and their press men, he said on Keith Olbermann's show that, I don't know if he said the president or the White House, but same difference, is concerned that the intelligence agencies may have set Obama up on this one.
And implying some kind of false flag thing, that the White House was concerned about enemies inside the American intelligence agencies over the underbomber.
Well, I have no information about that.
I know.
I'm sorry.
I just have to bring that up whenever that story comes up, because there's more to that that we, I guess, will never know, really.
Yeah.
I mean, the larger point, though, is that all this information, I mean, our conversation is being scooped up and stored.
And this is part of sort of a general view of the country held by law enforcement and intelligence authorities that we're all fair game.
I mean, they've gone, they're quite upfront about it.
You mentioned Bob Mueller a little while ago, the current FBI director.
I mean, right after 9-11, he was saying, you know, that essentially that, you know, the whole landscape of American life is fair game.
He's saying that, you know, he's saying there's a continuum.
I even wrote a little bit about this in the piece you referenced earlier.
There's a continuum between, you know, those people who are expressed dissent and those who might do something, you know, might commit a terrorist attack.
And they've got to, you know, they've got to decide where to intervene.
Well, you know, early on, the policy of the government was prevention.
So when you combine those two ideas, what the conclusion is that you have to intervene as early as possible.
And that means, you know, at the talking stage.
I mean, we've seen that over and over and over again.
And how do you get to the talking stage?
Well, you employ and deploy an army of informers.
You use every possible technological device you can to gather as much information about ordinary, you know, daily life as you possibly can.
And you move as quickly as possible.
Well, now hang on one second, because there's still I think we all kind of know we live in the panopticon for a long time, you know, as you say, but most of us still are allowed to go about our daily lives.
But I'm interested if you could please address, you know, left wing activists and right wing activists outside the party centrist consensus, you know, mainstream of governance, but, you know, so-called militia types and patriots and left anarchists and activists, you know, even the Quakers have been infiltrated and so forth.
But we haven't seen mass roundups of Quakers or, or, you know, hard persecutions of them.
But there have been, you know, there were just those raids on those peace activists in Minneapolis, Chicago.
So can we really expect more of that?
The kind of treatment that Muslims have gotten since 9-11 is this is now for anybody who's politically active outside of the party mainstream?
Well, I think that, you know, you have to, you have to look at not right this moment, but go back about six years or so to the onset of the Iraq War, when you had, you know, really kind of burgeoning political activism and people going to the streets to protest involvement or possible involvement in that war.
That's when you began to see more and more and more of this stuff surfacing outside of the Muslim community.
You saw it in, I mean, you saw it all over the place.
You know, I wrote about the shootings of demonstrators outside of the Port of Oakland, you know, and then you saw government FBI agents interrogating people right before the 2004 Republican Convention.
All that stuff's related to, you know, the level of political unrest within the country.
You see more unrest, you're going to see more of this stuff because they've got the infrastructure is all there and ready to go at any time.
It seems like now the rule of law is off.
Most of the pretense is gone.
As you're saying, you know, the Fourth Amendment, for example, forget about it.
They're downloading everything about us all day and night.
And as you say, the more crisis there is in society, the worse this is going to get.
And I sort of feel like we're in the eye of the hurricane right now, that things are actually about to get really worse.
Like if you take the cliff analogy, George Bush drove us off it, but we're still on the way down.
We haven't hit the crash yet.
And then that's where the army comes out.
That's where the Department of Homeland Security becomes a real national police force embedded within all our sheriff's departments and police city city police departments.
That kind of that's my nightmare, you know, real fascism in America, the kind that they've dreamt about, but haven't had yet.
You know, they the as I say, the infrastructure is in place.
And, you know, the question is what what to do about it.
And I get asked that question all the time.
And I don't have I don't have an answer to it.
But, you know, in the battle days that you referred to earlier, people people, you know, organized and hit the streets.
But then, you know, it's sort of like a chicken and egg thing.
You know, if you if you organize such as people did against the war in Iraq, that brought down even more and more of this stuff.
So it's it's an extremely difficult situation.
And frankly, when you talk about surveillance and privacy and that those kinds of issues for most people, I mean, maybe not you, maybe not me, but for most people, those issues are extremely abstract or they are something that happens to, you know, Muslims or Middle Easterners.
In the old days, there are things that used to happen to blacks.
But now now it's the Muslims have taken over the front lines there.
Well, and local police have just it's clear we've talked with William Grigg and others on this show about this in the past that the training for local cops, something has changed there where, you know, deescalating the situation and trying to find a reason to not take somebody to jail.
Those days are just over.
You will obey or you will get a club over the head these days.
And it's not just that YouTube is able to provide more evidence of these things.
It's that everybody now might as well be a black in the South in the 1960s.
Yeah, well, you know, it's it's interesting.
I've written about a Pennsylvania where where the the state office of Homeland Security had contracted with a private outfit, a private counterintelligence outfit for intelligence information.
And this this group, the Institute of Terrorism Response and Research, was providing the state of Pennsylvania with information on, you know, every conceivable kind of political group from opponents of natural gas drilling to gay groups, anti-war groups, even some groups associated with the governor.
And and and then all this information was coming into the state.
The state was then distributing the information to local police agencies and to corporate corporate entities, probably energy companies.
We still have not got a list of all the receivers of this information.
But but most most importantly, really, I think, to to local police and what happens with that information at the local level is important to everyone because the the the local police are the ones that are going to go out and and try to and, you know, on a micro level, send their own people out to, you know, monitor covertly all these political groups around around here in this instance, Pennsylvania.
But this is nothing unusual about this this activity.
So, you know, you have you have all of the efforts of the federal government, you know, which amounts to about 75 billion dollars of counterintelligence activity per year now.
And that is but that is magnified exponentially by the demands that are that trickle down all the way down to the municipal police departments who have their own armies of informers.
So it's a it's a vast, vast spidery network that reaches out and really touches every community.
Well, I guess they won't be able to say that nobody warned them.
Thanks very much.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thanks a lot, Scott.
I always like coming on.
All right.
That's Stefan Salisbury.
He's a cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquiry.
Inquirer.
His most recent book is Muhammad's Ghost.
An American love.
Jesus.
An American story of love and fear in the homeland.
His newest one at Tom Dispatch is called Keeping an Eye on Everyone.
Surveillance America's pastime.
