Then she came to our banner peace vigils that my group--We had about twenty people and we held a red banner that said "Support the Troops, End the War" over a highway. Totally legal in Minnesota law. When I was sitting next to her, I said come to ours and hold this banner. She came four or five times to our vigil."
At the US Social Forum in Detroit in June of 2010, she represented the Anti-War Committee. At the School of Americas Watch protest action, she helped lead the protest. At local meetings, she was taking leadership roles. This went on for two and a half years.
Rowley discusses how this happened during Vietnam. Martin Luther King Jr. was a victim of McCarthyism in the late "50s and early "60s. That later turned into COINTELPRO. She recounted how "the COINTELPRO group actually wrote an anonymous letter to MLK"that basically blackmailed him on the eve of his acceptance of his Nobel Peace Prize and suggested that he might want to commit suicide otherwise the FBI might release all this derogatory information they had." Then the FBI went after feminists, antiwar activists, and advocacy groups like the National Lawyers Guild.
While the Church Committee did work to put strict restrictions on government agencies that would protect civil liberties in the late "70s, 9/11 provided the moment for government agencies to return to the days of COINTELPRO.
According to Rowley, in April of 2008, Attorney General guidelines were "eradicated" reversing the "presumption that you need level of factual justification" or something to show to support infiltrating or closely monitoring an activist group. This to her is largely symptomatic of the world created in the aftermath of 9/11, "Top Secret America," which William M. Arkin and Dana Priest investigated for the Washington Post.
Part of it is, with 854,000 analysts, agents, consultants, operatives and contractors, 854,000 --- Between you and I, the average salary has got to be close to $100,000 for each of these. They have to prove that they're working. I can talk about the FBI that there are things called "work performance evaluations. And every so often there's a periodic evaluation where you actually have to show your statistics and these are things like subpoenas served and arrests and convictions. And the emphasis is on "terrorism" because that's the priority right now. So there's a strong pressure to categorize many, many things as "terrorism." And you've got to show that you're doing something. In fact, some of those abuses that the IG were basically a slow work day. So they have to actually keep busy and they have to do things. So you're going to this create systemic pressure toward opportunistic opening of cases, infiltrating, and even prosecuting.
It's also quantity of massive data collection over quality, which actually is counterproductive. From the standpoint of law enforcement, what good does it do to collect all of this irrelevant data? All it's doing is making it hard to focus in on any true terrorist threats.
She highlights how FBI wasting resources on infiltrating antiwar groups just might be why terrorists like Abdulmutallab, Shahzad and Hasan slipped past the FBI. If the FBI wasn't sending people to infiltrate organizations like the Thomas Merton Center or protecting corporate profits by infiltrating and working to disrupt or stall environmental groups, they would have more of an ability to actually prevent terror attacks.
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