Political Views and Surveillance

Concerns about the FBI’s domestic surveillance history have been fueled by controversial surveillance programs that targeted individuals and groups based on their political ideologies or religious affiliations. Maybe the most concerning of these historical FBI surveillance programs was the COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) initiative, which was active from 1956 to 1971. Under COINTELPRO, the FBI infiltrated, surveilled, and disrupted civil rights organizations, anti-war movements, and other so-called “progressive groups”. The FBI surveilled social figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The Black Panther Party was also subjected to intense scrutiny. These FBI surveillance targets may not have been monitored for criminal activity but, instead, for challenging social norms and advocating for change. Some historical views hold that the FBI’s motivations for these actions were likely based on political bias rather than real security concerns. A review of historical documents from the COINTELPRO era revealed that this program actually sought to “neutralize” social leaders who were perceived as threats to the political status quo.

More recently, the FBI has been reprimanded in various circles for reported surveillance of parents who protested against or disagreed with school board policies, decisions, and actions. According to media reports, the FBI’s counterterrorism and criminal investigative programs created an “EDUOFFICIALS” threat designator to track case activities that involved threats against “school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff”. In October 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo directing the FBI to address threats of violence against school officials. This letter was generated in response to a National School Boards Association letter requesting federal assistance to address threats against school board members. Subsequently, whistleblowers revealed that the FBI opened a number of investigations into parents who were identified as protesting prevailing education policies, to include parents who were upset over previous mask mandates. While the FBI denied this type of activity, there have been repeated calls by national leaders for additional investigation. In the end, the FBI’s perceived targeting of people or groups who dissented from school policies and political positions could have undermined democratic principles, chilled free speech, and fostered a culture of fear in our otherwise free and open society.

Christopher M Piehota, Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew (Freiling LLC, 2024). Available at Barnes and Noble and at Amazon.com .

Religious Views and Surveillance

In addition, the FBI has also been accused of religious profiling in its investigative practices. Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the bureau intensified its focus on Muslim communities, often equating religious practices with potential threats. The FBI’s reported use of undercover informants in mosques and Islamic community centers were cited as examples of this troubling approach. Looking back, it was found that a number of FBI informants may have erroneously targeted individuals with no evidence of criminal or terror activity and created an atmosphere of distrust within communities.

In a more recent issue, the FBI received a great deal of negative attention when a leaked internal intelligence document warned that “radical traditionalist” Catholics pose an extremist threat. This memo discussed monitoring “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists” and their possible interest in “Radical-Traditionalist Catholicism”. Basically, this FBI intelligence document noted a growing overlap between the far-right white nationalist movement and Radical Transnational Catholicism, which was described as adhering to anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBT, and white supremacy ideologies. People were shocked at this type of FBI investigative position and the FBI Director confirmed the document was removed from bureau systems, as it did not meet FBI standards. Why did FBI managers allow that kind of intelligence document to be authored to begin with? Maybe, the FBI organizational culture and resultant views and practices merit a critical review for other types of potential bias or shortfalls in objectivity? Such views and practices can alienate affected religious communities, and further exacerbate societal division. We can plainly see how FBI surveillance and intelligence activities can raise questions about the bureau’s observance of the constitutional protections afforded under the First Amendment.

Conclusion

The FBI’s domestic surveillance activities can have far-reaching consequences for the preservation of our democratic governance and civil liberties. Any actual targeting of individuals or groups based on political views or religious beliefs can undermine our foundational principles of freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. These principles are essential to sustaining our democratic processes. Also, questionable FBI’s surveillance activities can erode public trust in law enforcement and domestic security operations. The chilling effect of biased or poorly managed domestic surveillance activities cannot be overstated with targeted people and groups. Knowing that people’s lives and activities may be monitored by the government due to political activism or religious practices can result in self-censorship, stifling dissenting opinions, and weakening of the fabric of our civil society.

The FBI has an awesome responsibility in balancing its domestic surveillance practices and operational effectiveness with the preservation of our foundational principles of democracy, privacy, and justice. While national security is an undeniable priority, security cannot and should not be had at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional rights. The examples above can give the FBI a chance to re-evaluate its current organizational culture, leadership environment, and operational practices in how it is meeting the needs of the American people. Only by addressing these issues with honesty, objectivity, and humility can the FBI do right for the American people. The American people who provide the public trust that the FBI operates under. This is the same public trust that demands that the FBI fulfill its mandate to protect all communities and uphold the Constitution without bias, political hedging, or religious prejudice.

——

Press Release:

November 8, 2024 – Chris Piehota, a 25-year FBI Special Agent who retired as one of the bureau’s eight most senior career executives, shares his personal observations regarding the FBI’s organizational challenges. He shares his thoughts on FBI shortfalls in leadership, cultural norms, and operational decision-making that contributed to the FBI’s current diminished state.

 “Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew” (at Barnes and Noble in paper, at Amazon on Kindle) provides an insider’s view and tells a cautionary tale of how the FBI, once one of the world’s highest-performing organizations, could fall victim to leadership atrophy, cultural erosion, complacency, and core mission distraction. Claims of FBI political polarization and agency misconduct have become the norm. Politicians have discussed the bureau’s disbanding and the American public is losing faith in what was once one of our most trusted and revered institutions.

“Wanted” covers how the FBI fundamentally changed after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, and shifted away from its roots. These drastic shifts in FBI leadership approaches and organizational philosophies negatively impacted what was one of our most respected federal agencies. ‘Wanted” provides the author’s insights and recommendations on how to put our FBI back on a path to restored confidence and credibility in its service to the American people.

“Today’s FBI could benefit greatly from a return to the leadership models, cultural traits, and operational practices that made it great. To some degree, these factors were deprioritized, watered down, and sometimes discarded for new-era management approaches embraced by corporate America…” (Excerpt from “Wanted – The FBI I Once Knew).

“Wanted: The FBI I Once Knew” Published by The Freiling Agency and released in November 2024. (https://www.freilingagency.com/).

Minister of Defense Benny Gantz tweeted that Israel would not cooperate with the FBI and that he viewed the investigation as foreign interference in an internal Israeli affair.

The problem with Gantz’s obfuscation is that the assassination of an American journalist is not an internal Israeli affair. It is an American affair. Can you imagine the 24/7 frenzy the US press would have gone into if the Iranian Revolutionary Guards shot down a seasoned American journalist in broad daylight? Gantz thinks being Israeli means never having to say you are sorry.

The US gives Israel roughly $4 billion dollars a year in direct grants, plus sweetheart deals on access to US markets and technology that are worth many billions of dollars more. Even though Israel is a relatively wealthy country, the US actually gives money to its citizens.

I don’t think a simple request to cooperate with the FBI in looking into the murder of an American in Israeli-Occupied territory is much to ask in return.

Abu Akleh and her crew were wearing big signs saying “press,” and protective helmets. They were outside the gate to the Jenin refugee camp, which the Israeli Occupation army intended to raid in a search for militants. The journalists, working for Qatar’s respected Al Jazeera network, identified themselves to the nearby Israeli forces as press. Shireen’s colleague, Shatha Hanaysha, told CNN, ”We stood in front of the Israeli military vehicles for about five to ten minutes before we made moves to ensure they saw us. And this is a habit of ours as journalists, we move as a group and we stand in front of them so they know we are journalists, and then we start moving.”

Abu Akleh then came under concerted Israeli sniper fire, which expertly caught her just beneath the helmet and killed her instantly. Her colleague, Al Jazeera producer Ali al-Samoudi, was shot in the back. Other members of the six-member team were pinned down for some time by the Israeli sniper fire.

It was immediately obvious that the sniper had been ordered to assassinate Abu Akleh, who had been reporting from the Palestinian West Bank for over twenty years and was a trusted icon of press integrity for millions of viewers. An Israeli official admitted that he considered the journalists to have been armed “with cameras.” Israeli security forces’ and squatters’ constant attacks on Palestinians living under the Israeli jackboot have brought international opprobrium on Israel, with all the major human rights organizations declaring it an Apartheid state over the past two years. The Israeli government’s propaganda arm views this charge as potentially an obstacle to Israeli plans to gobble up ever more Palestinian land. The state has therefore launched a campaign to denounce such charges of Apartheid as “antisemitic,” though the charges are about Palestinian human rights and say nothing about Jews in general. They have also attempted to smear six Palestinian human rights organizations as somehow “terrorists,” suggesting that the official Israeli use of the term “terrorism” refers to anything endowing Palestinians with basic rights.

This campaign to keep the world from seeing what is going on under Israeli Occupation appears to have begun with the decision to rub out Abu Akleh.

CNN did its own investigation and concluded that the killing was done by an Israeli sharpshooter “in a targeted attack.”

It is not an accident that the Israeli military was ordered to take this outrageous and drastic step when Naftali Bennett, a far right extremist and annexationist, was prime minister. He once boasted that he had “killed a lot of Arabs.”

Bennett initially said that Shireen had been killed by Palestinians (!). Then when that allegation was shown to be false they maintained that there was a firefight going on and that Israeli troops responded to it, and perhaps Shireen got caught in the crossfire. But CNN reviewed video and audio recordings and concluded that there were no clashes at the time of Shireen’s killing.

The Israelis finally admitted, long after the spotlight had moved away from the scene of the assassination, that one of their troops was probably responsible for the shooting, but they immediately exonerated him (without naming him), saying he was not guilty of any wrongdoing.

It is never OK to shoot down civilians in cold blood. That is called a war crime.

Will the FBI be able to go beyond CNN’s findings or at least confirm them? The crime scene has gone rather cold and they won’t have access to the Israeli detachment from which the sniper fire came. On the other hand, there is a lot of video evidence, and some physical evidence such as the pattern of the gunfire that hit the trees in front of the Al Jazeera press team.

The AP article quoted at the top of this column worried that the FBI investigation could cause a breech in US and Israeli relations. That is highly unlikely, since the Israelis don’t actually want to lose $4 billion a year or all those sweetheart deals they have with the US economy. They’ll just say some passive-aggressive nonsense about how they are offended that anyone could think them capable of, like, shooting people in cold blood. And then they will go on with their all too frequent shooting of people in the West Bank in cold blood.

The problem isn’t with the Israelis but with their colonial Occupation of the Palestinians. Such occupations make people unbalanced. The French did and said a lot of abominable things in the 1950s when they were trying to keep Algeria, too. And you should have seen the Americans in the Philippines in the early 20th century, where they killed 20,000 directly and set up a situation in which 200,000 people died from displacement, malnutrition and disease. The biggest tragedy ever to strike Israel was its leaders’ reneging on the Oslo Peace Accords, with Binyamin Netanyahu in the forefront. Now he is prime minister again. Hatred is good for some political careers.

Former government officials are not allowed to take home government documents on leaving office, since those belong to the National Archives.Trump himself signed a revision of the relevant law increasing this infraction to a felony. Such officials, including ex-presidents, may especially not take home classified documents. Nuclear secrets, whether those of the United States or foreign powers, are especially sensitive. Presidents have broad power to declassify government documents, but it does not extend to material related to nuclear weapons, which is very highly classified.

The WaPo reporters’ sources did not know the precise nature of the nuclear weapons-related documents Trump may have had at home. The documents, for instance, could pertain to the US, or to the nuclear weapons of another country, such as Russia or North Korea. In the latter cases, those countries’ intelligence agencies would love to know what the US knows about them. Nor does the WaPo team know whether the FBI actually found nuclear-related documents at Mar-a-Lago.

It is not even clear if the public will ever know the nature of these documents, beyond any description in the search warrant, which Attorney General Merrick Garland is now seeking to make public. They may be too classified to describe in public.

It is likely that that the FBI has a confidential informant at Mar-a-Lago and was confident in that person’s report of nuclear-related documents being kept at the resort. if the Department of Justice had strong reason to suspect that there were nuclear weapons-related materials at Mar-a-Lago, that explains the extraordinary decision to search an ex-president’s house for the first time in American history, and explains why a judge would sign off on the warrant. I can’t tell you how nervous top government officials in Washington are about any information pertaining to nuclear weapons.

Trump has long had a cavalier attitude to nuclear arms. When he was running for president in 2016 he made waves in East Asia by suggesting that rather than depending on the US to defend them, Japan and South Korea should simply develop their own nuclear bombs. Most experts believe that the fewer countries that have nukes, the better, since that reduces the chances for them ever to be deployed.

Trump is also alleged to have asked a foreign policy adviser why, if the US has atomic bombs, it can’t just use them.

If the WaPo report is accurate, then Trump is once again guilty of a massive piece of hypocrisy. By signing the Joint Plan for Comprehensive Action (JCPOA), or nuclear deal, in 2015, Iran committed to placing stringent limits on its civilian nuclear enrichment program. That program aims at enriching fuel for the nuclear reactor at Bushehr, to generate electricity, and for further such reactors that Iran has planned. Russia built the Bushehr plant for them.

Iran agreed to limit the amount of low-enriched uranium it stockpiles, to limit the number of its centrifuges to 6,000, to brick in the planned heavy water reactor at Arak, and to allow frequent inspections by the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). These measures closed off all pathways to an Iranian nuclear weapon should the government ever change its mind and develop a military enrichment program. To date, the CIA assesses that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and the country’s theocratic Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has issued several formal legal opinions over the past two decades declaring that making, stockpiling or using nuclear weapons is against Islamic law.

In May of 2018 Trump abruptly pulled the US out of the JCPOA, even though the IAEA had certified that Iran had scrupulously adhered to the terms of the treaty. Trump accused Iran of seeking a nuclear weapon but never presented any proof.

Trump then signed 1,000 (one thousand) laws aimed at crippling the Iranian economy and making it a fourth world country, with all the misery that entails for ordinary Iranians. He even prevented Iran from using international bank exchanges or from ordinary commerce like selling its oil. He waged a financial and trade war against Iran the way you would against a country with which you were in a hot war.

Mind you, Iran was crushed this way even though it had been in compliance with the 2015 deal.

So Trump de facto interfered with Iranians being able to afford imported medicines and harmed their quality of life in myriads of ways. Why? Because, he falsely maintained, the Iranians were acting recklessly regarding nuclear weapons.

But it turns out that the one person in the world who may have been truly acting recklessly regarding nuclear weapons is Donald John Trump.

I give all three names that way because it is the way the journalists refer to felons in the newspapers.

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson excused one of the leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers organization implicated in the January 6th insurrection by describing him as “a devout Christian.” It’s safe to surmise that he wouldn’t have offered a similar defense for a Muslim American. Since September 11th, and even before that ominous date, they have suffered bitterly from discrimination and hate crimes in this country, while their religion has been demonized. During the first year of the Trump administration, about half of Muslim Americans polled said that they had personally experienced some type of discrimination.

No matter that this group resides comfortably in the American mainstream, it remains under intensive, often unconstitutional, surveillance. In contrast, during the past two decades, the Department of Justice for the most part gave a pass to violent white supremacists. No matter that they generated more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil than any other group. The benign insouciance of the white American elite toward such dangerous fanatics also allowed them to organize freely for the January 6th assault on the Capitol and the potential violent overthrow of the government.

Donell Harvin was the chief of homeland security and intelligence for the government of the District of Columbia in the period leading up to January 6th. He assured NBC News’s Ken Dilanian that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seemed completely oblivious about the plans of white supremacist hate groups to violently halt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory, despite plentiful evidence on social media that they were preparing to bring weaponry to the Capitol.

Consider now the treatment that the very same agencies offered distinctly inoffensive Muslim Americans. Rutgers law professor Sahar Aziz has argued that many white Americans see Muslims not merely as a religious group but as a racial one and have placed them on the nethermost rung of this country’s ethnic hierarchy. Muslim Americans are regularly, for instance, profiled at airports and subjected to long interrogations. Over many years, the New York City Police Department gathered intelligence on more than 250 mosques and student groups. The FBI even put field officers in mosques not only to spy on, but also to entrap worshipers who, alarmed by their wild talk, sometimes reported them to… the FBI.

Aziz notes that Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 to register all Muslim Americans in a database, institute widespread surveillance of mosques, and possibly exclude Muslims from the country. Even non-governmental far-right groups like discredited ex-journalist Steve Emerson’s “Investigative Project on Terrorism” have spied on Muslim Americans. As with everything else in the contemporary U.S., a partisan divide has emerged regarding them, with 72% of Republicans holding the self-evidently false belief that Muslims are more likely to commit violence than adherents of other faiths, while only 32% of Democrats say this.

Apparently, though, our concern over the potential commission of violence in this country should actually focus on Republicans. A recent Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found that 34% of Americans now believe that violence against the government is sometimes justified, a statistic that rises to an alarming 40% among Republicans. In other words, this country’s worries about violence should be focused most on the right-wing extremist fringe, exemplified by groups like the Oath Keepers, 11 of whose leaders were arrested by the FBI in mid-January for “seditious conspiracy” in their paramilitary invasion of the Capitol in 2021. More people have perished in political killings in the past 20 years here at the hands of far-right radicals than those of any other group, including extremists of Muslim heritage. Still, this country’s security agencies continue their laser focus on monitoring Muslim Americans, even as they grossly underestimate the threat from white supremacists.

Collectively Punishing Muslim Americans

What most characterizes the American Muslim community, which at nearly four million strong makes up more than 1% of the population, is diversity. It includes white and Hispanic converts, African Americans, Arab Americans, and South-Asian Americans whose families hailed from the Indian subcontinent. Three American Muslims are serving in Congress and even President Trump appointed a Moroccan-born American immunologist, Moncef Slaoui, to head Operation Warp Speed that produced the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. Last summer saw the confirmation of the first Muslim-American federal judge and President Biden has just nominated the first Muslim-American woman to the federal bench. There are also striking numbers of Muslim-American peace activists, either with their own organizations or involved at interfaith centers, as well as many environmentalists and community organizers, but the media and academics seldom focus on this dimension of the religion.

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In my new book, Peace Movements in Islam, my colleagues and I did something remarkably rare in these years: we explored this peaceful dimension of the faith of a fifth of humankind. We focused, for instance, on the Muslims active alongside Mahatma Gandhi in nonviolent noncooperation to end British colonial domination of India. Closer to home, contributor Grace Yukich explores the Muslim-American reaction to the rise of the virulently Islamophobic Trump administration and finds that many responded by promoting the progressive dimensions of their faith, while working against racism and for the rights of immigrants and the poor.

Polling supports her findings, with 69% of Muslim-American respondents saying that working for justice forms an essential part of their identity, nearly the same as the 72% who say that loving the Prophet Muhammad is essential to being a Muslim. In addition, 62% see protecting the natural environment as a key to Muslim identity. The majority of them, in other words, are religiously open-minded. Some 56% of Muslim Americans, for instance, believe that other religions can be a path to salvation. In contrast, only a third of evangelical Christians take a similar position when it comes to religions outside the Judeo-Christian tradition.

And here’s a seldom-recognized reality in this country: Muslims form a longstanding and important thread in the American tapestry, having been in North America for centuries. Rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all arose on the fringes of the Roman Empire between the first and seventh centuries of the common era. All believe in the one God of Abraham, as well as in the biblical patriarchs and prophets. All forbid murder, robbery, and other violent crimes. There are no objective grounds for a United States that recognizes the first two to deny legitimacy to the third.

Muslim-American numbers have increased dramatically since, in 1965, Congress changed formerly racist immigration laws to abolish country quotas that favored northern Europeans. Some 75% of the Muslim Americans here are now citizens. The 9/11 attacks, however, turbocharged hatred of this group, unfairly associating them in the minds of many Americans with violence and terrorism, even though all the hijackers were foreigners and differed starkly in their political and ethnic backgrounds from those of most Muslim Americans. Unlike whites, who suffer no reputational damage from being of the same race as violent white supremacists, Muslim Americans have been collectively punished for bad behavior by any of them or even by foreign coreligionists. While a small number of Muslim Americans have succumbed to the blandishments of radical Muslim ideologies, it has been vigorously rejected by all but a few.

The same cannot be said of white nationalists for whom radicalism stands at the core of their identity, while a disturbing strain of poisonous racism runs through their activities. The 11 leaders of the Oath Keepers arrested in mid-January for seditious conspiracy had stockpiled heavy weapons and coordinated with rapid-response teams pre-positioned outside Washington, D.C., whom they hoped to call on, apparently after they invaded the halls of Congress. According to the indictment, the leader of that 5,000-strong organization, Elmer “Stewart” Rhodes, wrote on its website on December 23, 2020, “Tens of thousands of patriot Americans, both veterans and non-veterans, will already be in Washington, D.C., and many of us will have our mission-critical gear stowed nearby, just outside D.C.”

Rhodes, who spent thousands of dollars on weaponry in December and January, said in an open letter that he and others may have to “take to arms in defense of our God given liberty.” Oath Keeper chapters around the country conducted military training exercises with rifles. Indicted Alabaman Oath Keeper Joshua James, 33, texted on the Signal messaging app, “We have a shitload of QRF [Quick Reaction Forces] on standby with an arsenal.” They were concerned, though, that during the planned civil disturbance, authorities could close the bridges from Virginia (where they had holed up in motels with their assault rifles) into D.C. A QRF team leader from North Carolina wrote, “My sources DC working on procuring Boat transportation as we speak.” Kelly Meggs of Florida, another Oath Keeper leader, sent messages worrying about running out of ammunition: “Ammo situation. I am checking on as far as what they will have for us if SHTF [the shit hits the fan]. I’m gonna have a few thousand just in case. If you’ve got it doesn’t hurt to have it. No one ever said shit I brought too much.”

On the morning of January 6th, one of the organization’s leaders, 63-year-old Edward Vallejo of Phoenix, Arizona, discussed the possibility of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war” on a podcast. On the day itself, members of the Oath Keepers formed paramilitary “stacks” in front of the Capitol to invade it in formation. They were, however, foiled when some Capitol police delayed them by holding the line against thousands of angry, determined fanatics, while others whisked most members of Congress away to secure locations inaccessible to the mob. Before they were rescued, some representatives lay on the floor, weeping or praying. In other words, the American far right came much closer to overthrowing the U.S. government than al-Qaeda ever did and, at the same time, resembles al-Qaeda far more than Republican lawmakers are ever likely to admit.

Ignoring White Nationalists

The Oath Keepers, like the Boogaloo Bois and other far-right groups central to the insurrection, do not so much have an ideology as a mental cesspool of conspiracy theories and imaginary grievances. Typically, in December 2018, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes spoke of asylum-seekers at the border with Mexico as a “military invasion” by “cartels” and part of a “political coup” by the domestic Marxist left. He also managed to blame Muslims and the late Senator John McCain for provoking crises that would leave this country’s borders “undefended.”

Extremists on the white nationalist right have been a known quantity to American law enforcement for decades and have committed horrific acts of violence like Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 truck-bombing of the Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people and wounded more than 800. Unlike Muslim Americans, however, they have been cut remarkable slack.

The Republican Party has had a longstanding and chillingly effective policy of downplaying the dangers of extremist white nationalists. No surprise there, since the GOP depends on the far-right vote in elections and on financial contributions from well-off white supremacists who hate the multiracial Democrats. In 2009, analyst Daryl Johnson of the Department of Homeland Security in the newly installed Obama administration produced a confidential report for law enforcement suggesting that right-wing extremism posed the biggest domestic threat of terrorism to this country. Republicans in Congress leaked it and then, along with right-wing media like Fox News, went ballistic.

House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH) said at the time:

“[T]he Secretary of Homeland Security owes the American people an explanation for why she has abandoned using the term ‘terrorist’ to describe those, such as al-Qaeda, who are plotting overseas to kill innocent Americans, while her own Department is using the same term to describe American citizens who disagree with the direction Washington Democrats are taking our nation.”

According to Johnson, the Obama administration caved to this campaign:

“Work related to violent right-wing extremism was halted. Law enforcement training also stopped. My unit was disbanded. And, one-by-one, my team of analysts left for other employment. By 2010, there were no intelligence analysts at DHS working domestic terrorism threats.”

One can imagine that under Trump such groups received even less government scrutiny, since one of their fellow travelers had ascended to the White House.

The refusal of the Washington establishment to take the menace of far-right white nationalist movements seriously has been among the biggest security failures in this country’s history. The collusion of mainstream Republicans who have, in essence, run interference for such dangerous, well-armed conspiracy theorists has stained the party of Lincoln indelibly, while the participation of active-duty military and police personnel in these groups poses a dire threat to the Republic.

At the same time, this country’s security agencies failed epically in their treatment of Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks by infringing on their civil liberties, while abridging or disregarding constitutional protections for millions of innocent people. Faiza Patel, co-director of the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, points to congressional reports that question the value of all this monitoring of an American minority, not to speak of the absurdities it has entailed. As she put it, “Often, the reports singled out Muslims engaged in normal activities for suspicion: a [Department of Homeland Security] officer flagged as suspicious a seminar on marriage held at a mosque, while a north Texas fusion center advised keeping an eye out for Muslim civil liberties groups and sympathetic individuals and organizations.” In such a world, even Muslim Americans active in peace centers become inherently suspicious, but heavily armed white nationalists in motels just outside Washington aren’t.

Copyright 2022 Juan Cole

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Via Tomdispatch.com

( Tomdispatch.com ) – A relative of mine, who works for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) compiling data on foreigners entering the United States, recently posted a curious logo on his Facebook profile: a white Roman numeral three on a black background surrounded by 13 white stars. For those who don’t know what this symbol stands for, it represents the “Three Percenters,” a group that the Anti-Defamation League has identified as an anti-government militia. Its members have a record of violent criminal attacks and strikingly partisan activity, including arrests and guilty pleas in connection with the bombing of a Minnesota mosque in 2017 and appearances as “guards,” carrying assault-style weaponry, at several pro-Trump rallies. Six of its members have been charged with plotting to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

When my husband, a Naval officer of nearly 20 years, saw this symbol on a family member’s Facebook page, he pointed out to me that, despite the Hatch Act, created to ensure nonpartisanship among federal workers, DHS employees are not always held accountable for exercising “free speech” that would violate that law. The Three Percenters claim that they’re protesting government tyranny. The roman numeral itself refers to a debunked claim that only 3% of Americans in the original 13 colonies took up arms against the British in the Revolutionary War.

What does it mean that an employee of the Department of — yes! — Homeland Security can openly and proudly promote a homegrown militia whose members have threatened and attacked American lawmakers and police? Sadly enough, this fits all too well an agency that national security expert Erik Dahl of the Costs of War Project recently described as looking the other way in the face of rising far-right extremism. That includes anti-government, white-supremacist, and anti-Semitic groups, armed and otherwise. Such right-wing militias and extremist outfits, as Dahl makes clear, have killed an increasing number of people in this country since the 9/11 attacks, significantly more than groups inspired by foreign Islamist organizations like al-Qaeda. And yet, in both its public statements and policies, the domestic agency created after the 9/11 attacks to keep this country “secure” has consistently focused on the latter, while underestimating and often ignoring the former.

How U.S. Security Changed after 9/11

The Department of Homeland Security was quite literally a product of 9/11 and so was formed in a political climate of nearly unwavering support for anything Congress or the White House proposed to combat extremist violence. It officially arrived on the scene just weeks after the 9/11 attacks as the “Office of Homeland Security” when President George W. Bush appointed former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge as its first director. By 2002, now a “department,” it would bring together 22 different government agencies, including the Transportation and Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Its mission, as stated in a proposal by President Bush, was to “protect our homeland… against invisible enemies that can strike with a wide variety of weapons.” In the end, that new department would represent the largest reorganization of government since World War II. Though few here think of it that way, it would prove to be a second Pentagon and, over the years, would be funded in a similarly profligate fashion.

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Under such circumstances, you won’t be surprised to learn that its creation also led to a striking amount of redundancy in the national security establishment. In 2004, Congress created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to provide the president with an overview of all intelligence efforts. According to Dahl, the director of national intelligence and the organizations he or she oversees are supposed to stand on the front lines of combating violent attacks on U.S. soil. Law enforcement groups like the Joint Terrorism Task Forces (under the FBI) have, in fact, thwarted the largest number of potential terrorist attacks since 9/11 and, at the moment, seem to be focused on the most significant threats to this country, which are all too internal. For example, a January 2022 joint statement by senior FBI and Justice Department officials warned that “the threat posed by domestic violent extremism and hate crimes is on the rise” and that FBI investigations of suspected domestic violent extremists have more than doubled since the spring of 2020.

In February 2020, even Christopher Wray, President Trump’s FBI director, testified before the House Judiciary Committee that violent extremists targeting people based on their race or ethnicity “were the primary source of ideologically-motivated lethal incidents and violence in 2018 and 2019, and have been considered the most lethal of all domestic extremist movements since 2001.” Of the 16 (unsuccessful) terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in 2020, 14 were prevented by police or most often FBI agents or those from Joint Terrorism Task Forces. For example, in March 2020, the FBI shot and killed a man in Missouri while attempting to arrest him. He was under investigation for planning to bomb a hospital to protest his city’s Covid-19 lockdown measures.

To be sure, there have also been threats from foreign terrorist organizations and those who act at their behest. Take, for example, the December 6, 2019, attack of a Saudi-born military trainee directed by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He managed to kill three sailors at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida. According to Dahl, since 9/11, there have been 146 thwarted attacks planned by foreign terrorist groups or those inspired by them here. The vast majority were prevented by law enforcement sting operations or tips from the public.

Meanwhile, DHS is often not focused on threats of violence at all, but on responding to allegations of mistreatment by its own officers toward people in their custody or toward one another. A list of 2019 and 2020 congressional testimony by DHS officials typically included topics like monitoring reports on terrible conditions in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, on the mistreatment and deaths of immigrant children in Customs and Border Patrol custody, or on harassment and bullying within the Coast Guard.

When it came to terrorism, prior to the January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, DHS officials were primarily focused on their roles as gatekeepers for those entering or traveling within the U.S. In testimony they gave, there was no mention at all about the rise of domestic extremists and the risk they might pose to American lives and property. Typically, in public remarks at American University in March 2019, then DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen stated that Islamist militants pose the primary terrorist threat to the U.S.

On January 5, the day before the Capitol uprising, DHS’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis published a summary account that oh-so-presciently stated: “Nothing significant to report.” Never mind that law enforcement figures had recently been sharing numerous tips on the subject of domestic terrorism, including from soon-to-be protesters exchanging maps of the Capitol’s interior on social media.

Dangers Ahead

While some amount of redundancy is certainly to be expected in government, the level introduced by the Department of Homeland Security should raise issues that go beyond the logistical problem of too many cooks in the kitchen. After all, what does it say about a department created to make this country more secure that just about all those “cooks” focus on only one potential danger, while ignoring the main and all-too-obvious “security” threat to American lives right now?

It’s simple really. Though the word in its name is “homeland,” as in “domestic,” its focus is almost solely on those who come from outside our borders, both jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS that might indeed plot to launch or at least promote terror attacks here and — a particular emphasis of the Trump years — immigrants illegally crossing our border with Mexico.

Even more sinister, when it comes to redundancy, our government now has a second armed entity that can direct its force in an arbitrary way. Twenty years after the 9/11 attacks, the forever-war and new-Cold-War-focused Pentagon is, of course, staggeringly over-funded, even if its rank and file are — take my word for it as a military spouse — ever more depleted from our endless wars abroad, the pandemic ravaging this country, and relentless training. Meanwhile, since 9/11, we’ve overfunded what quickly became a second Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, capable of focusing on whatever it considers to be most politically expedient.

During the Trump administration, DHS suppressed those populations the president and his advisers deemed the greatest threats to this country, even if that meant young children whose families were seized at the southern border. No less chillingly, during the Trump presidency, DHS Acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli acknowledged that the agency had sent its employees to monitor and suppress protests in Portland, Oregon, against the police killing of George Floyd. DHS officers began patrolling that city’s streets in unmarked vehicles and detaining protesters allegedly without even telling them why in order, according to Cuccinelli, to “move them to a safe location for questioning.” However, a November 2020 report issued by the DHS’s own inspector general concluded that the people deployed to Portland had no authority (or training) to act as law enforcement officers and had engaged in unconstitutional, violent attacks on protesters, journalists, members of watchdog groups, and bystanders.

All of this should be a reminder of what life in another Trump (or Trumpist) presidency in these (dis)United States could be like for a DHS that already ignores the real potential terrorists in this country. Count on one thing: any regard for civil liberties and human rights would undoubtedly go out the window.

If such a president were to use the bully pulpit to denigrate anyone who disagreed with him or whose way of life differed from his own, then imagine what a Department of Homeland Security that, even now, ignores the deepest security threat to this country, might be like. In a New Yorker article in 2020, journalist Masha Gessen pointed out that “homeland” was, from the start, “an anxious, combative word: it denotes a place under assault, in need of aggressive defense from shape-shifting dangers.” She argued that its sudden use by our government, post-9/11, suggested a move from defending ourselves against other militaries towards defending ourselves against individuals who might, in the end, threaten a leader’s power. And this, Gessen pointed out, is the premise on which secret police forces are built.

Before entering the mental-health field, I spent years living and working as an activist in Russia. Its Federal Security Service, or FSB, has used intimidation, detention without charge, and extra-judicial execution to show everyone from opposition figures to feminist rock bands the might of President Vladimir Putin. Its focus has been on keeping people from challenging the status quo of a patriarchal nation expected to show unquestioning loyalty to its strongman ruler.

The terror that many Russians feel about their internal police is, of course, rooted in history. The FSB’s predecessor, the Soviet Union’s notorious KGB, wielded similar violence against many whose free expression was deemed to threaten state power. Most friends and acquaintances of mine in Russia have relatives in older generations who were taken away, never to be seen again, for reasons as subjective as publishing a poem or talking to the wrong neighbor on the street.

As I reflect on how far state oppression can go, I only hope that the U.S. will never again see a leader who allows federal power to be used in such an arbitrary way. Yet, thanks in part to the Department of Homeland Security, I’m all too aware that this country is remarkably well set up for just such a figure.

National (In)Security?

It should be baffling to us all that the organization tasked with protecting our homeland was unable to avert the most threatening violent attack on our democratically elected government since Confederate troops advanced on Washington, late in the Civil War.

A friend and Park Police officer who was stationed at the Capitol on January 6th recalls being more scared than she had ever been in her 20 years of service. She and some 150 colleagues who specialize in crowd control around national infrastructure lacked a memorandum of understanding with the Capitol Police that would have allowed them to help defend Congress. She said that, as far as she could see, January 6th was a failure of leadership more than anything else because capable people had not been given permission to act.

If we and our lawmakers don’t hold the Department of Homeland Security — a creation of this country’s disastrous war on terror — to account for its actions (or lack of them) and question not just what it does but why it even exists, then I fear for our future. After all, what 9/11 really left us with was not just those destroyed towers in New York and a damaged Pentagon, but our own second Pentagon, a “defense” department capable of being aimed in the worst way possible at the American people. The problem is that the enemy of the future for DHS may very well be the American people — and not just the terrorists among us either.

And, in truth, none of us should be surprised. After all, the original proposal for that agency called for the targeting of invisible enemies capable of striking the “homeland.” In other words, the enemy could be anyone. It could, in fact, be the Department of Homeland Security. And that should concern us all.

Copyright 2022 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

The group was founded in 2009 in the wake of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency and comprises far right wing conspiracy theorists. It is led by the terrifyingly looney Rhodes. The Southern Poverty Law Center writes, “In 2014, Rhodes claimed the group had an unlikely 35,000 dues-paying members who are said to be mostly, although not exclusively, current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders.” Some Oath Keepers hold, or are running for, elective office.

Leader Rhodes said things after Biden’s win like ““This is a military invasion by the cartels and a political coup by the domestic Marxist controlled left, which sees open borders and mass-illegal invasion as their ticket to permanent illegitimate political power.”

Note how corporate Democrats like Joe Biden are misidentified as Marxists (!) and this left wing conspiracy is connected to immigration law. Note that Trump did not change immigration law one iota and millions of people immigrated into the US on his watch. This is just white supremacy dressed up as right wing outrage. In 2016, Rhodes had added to his heady mix of imaginary Marxists and menacing immigrant hordes a putative “Islamic” threat of terrorism that would collaborate with the Latino organization La Raza and with the Black Lives Matter movement. Somehow he held that the late Republican Sen. John McCain was orchestrating these sinister forces, and in 2015 Rhodes advocated hanging him.

Despite the group’s pose as a defender of the constitution against what they call “Islamic terrorism,” they are just a homegrown American version of al-Qaeda.

Al-Qaeda hijacked planes with which to attack government buildings in Washington, D.C.

The Oath Keepers planned to use boats on the Potomac to ferry over heavy weaponry with which to do the same thing.

Al-Qaeda saw the US government as a conspiracy to impose a left-liberal democratic order on people, whereas they wanted a government reflective of their ethnic and religious nativism.

The Oath Keepers agree after their own manner.

Al-Qaeda was xenophobic and did not want American Jews and Christians in the Middle East.

The Oath Keepers are xenophobic and don’t want immigrants in the U.S.

Al-Qaeda was fascinated with military training and with weaponry, and were willing to use these against innocent civilians.

The Oath Keepers also armed and trained themselves and were planning attacks on civilian lawmakers.

Al-Qaeda killed twenty-nine people inside the Pentagon with Flight 77 (plus 64 passengers) on 9/11.

The Capitol insurrectionists were responsible for the death of Iraq War vet and Capitol policeman Brian Sicknick, whom they assaulted and sprayed with bear spray, and who died of stroke. They were also responsible for driving 4 members of the Capitol police to suicide.

In fact, the Oath Keepers came much closer to disrupting the workings of the US government than al-Qaeda did.

By the way, the al-Qaeda cell around the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar `Abdel Rahman, who plotted and carried out the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, were also charged with seditious conspiracy, and the government won its case.

The DOJ Indictment alleged that

“Rhodes and certain co-conspirators, to include selected regional leaders, planned to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power by January 20, 2021, which included multiple ways to deploy force. They coordinated travel across the country to enter Washington, D.C., equipped themselves with a variety of weapons, donned combat and tactical ger, and were prepared to answer Rhodes’s call to take up arms at Rhodes’s direction. Som co-conspirators also amassed firearms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C., distributed them among “quick reaction force (“QRF”) teams, and planned to use firerms in support of their plot to stop the lawful transfer of presidential power.”

Although CBS News editors circulated a memo instructing their reporters not to call January 6 an “insurrection,” it seems clear that that is exactly what it was. Why is CBS running interference for these terrorists?

The DOJ complaint says that the insurrectionists invaded the outer part of the Capitol at 2 pm on Jan. 6, and that “at that time, Rhodes entered the restricted area of the Capitol grounds and directed his followers to meet him at the Capitol.”

Then Oath Keeper fascist brown shirts marched up the east steps of the Capitol in “stack” formation. Stack One joined an angry mob, some of whom assaulted police officers shouting “take their shields” and “Our house!” At 2:38, the indictment says, the doors were breached and Stack One advanced into the Capitol with the crowd. Stack One then split up, one group heading for the Senate Chamber, where they ran up against stiff resistance from the Capitol police. Unable to break into the Senate, they regrouped and left the building. The other half of Stack One attempted to find Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the House of Representatives, but failed to do so and left.

Another formation of Oath Keepers constituted Stack Two and forced their way into the Rotunda. They again ran into a forceful response from the police.

Still others were waiting outside Washington, DC, having formed Quick Reaction Force teams.

After Joe Biden was elected president, Rhodes messaged his group on the Signal app, “We aren’t getting through this without a civil war. Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit.” He later said that they should emulate Serbs who rose up when Slobodan Melosevic “stole their election” [ in October 2000].

As his buddies in Florida were undergoing training in “unconventional warfare,” Rhodes later texted his group that if President Biden took office, “It wil be a bloody and desperate fight. We are going to have a fight. That can’t be avoided.”

On Dec. 22, 2020, Rhodes said in an interview with a local Oath Keepers leader that if Biden came to power “We will have to do a bloody, massively bloody revolution against them. That’s what’s going to have to happen.” He also urged Trump to deploy the US military to halt the transfer of power.

Rhodes said he wanted to “scare the shit out of” congressional representatives and frighten them into decertifying Biden. Rhodes then bought a weapon sight and night-vision goggles for $7,000 and sent them to a contact near Washington, D.C., suggesting he had some night-time sniping in mind.

Some conspirators said they planned to bring weapons (“long rifles, some sidearms”), others said they would depend on the quick reaction teams to bring them in from 10 minutes outside the city at the right time. One of them, Caldwell, proposed using a boat on the Potomac to bring the “heavy weapons” over.

Rhodes seems to have spent $20,000 on weaponry and ammunition for the operation. On the morning of January 6, Oath Keeper leaders spoke of “armed conflict” and “guerrilla war.”

After their plot to find Vice President Pence, Speaker Pelosi, and other representatives and Senators failed, the Oath Keepers continued to conspire to return the next morning, or in subsequent weeks. Rhodes bought another $15,000 or so of weaponry and sights. They seem to have wanted to stop the inauguration on January 20, but could not find a way to do so. The inauguration was small and very well guarded, but if it had been a traditional sort of event, it looks as though the Oath Keepers would have tried to shoot it up.

January 6 and its aftermath clearly could have been far more bloody if the Capitol police and then the Secret Service had not done such a good job of protecting elected officials from these heavily armed and militarily trained wack jobs. It should be remembered how the odious Trump cultivated these right-wing militias, and told a similar group to “stand back and stand by” during his debate with Joe Biden. They stood by all right.

Donald Trump worked his white supremacist and conspiracy nut networks throughout the United States to turn it into a Red Zone, i.e. a lawless realm of improvised explosive devices and violent vigilantes and traitorous self-styled ‘patriots.’ Joe Biden won’t be able to have a normal inauguration not only because of the pandemic but because he will have to be carefully kept in the Green Zone.

A Red Zone is a sign of profound failure, perhaps even a failed state. In Iraq, it announced the failure of the Bush invasion and occupation. The US military never controlled anything but the ground its soldiers actually stood on.

I warned about this kind of thing in November, 2016, after Trump was elected, at a talk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York:

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs: “American Muslims and the Trump Administration with Juan Cole”

As I blogged the Iraq War in the zeroes, many of my headlines read like this:

Car Bomber Penetrates Green Zone . (The Bush administration tried to deny that this story was true, but an American in Baghdad sent me a local US government memo acknowledging that it happened.)

20 Rockets Mortar Shells Hit Green Zone

Plot To Bomb Iraqi Govt In Green Zone . (The subtitle is “Plan to declare Emirate in Diyala,” an early manifestation of the ISIL phony caliphate.)

In September, 2004, I asked, If America were Iraq, What would it be Like? . It went viral and was widely reprinted by newspapers. Dude, it was a rhetorical question. I wasn’t expecting Trump actually to answer it.

In 2013, I visited Iraq’s Green Zone. I wrote in the aftermath, “When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 he established blast walls around central government offices, establishing a four square mile Green Zone (i.e. one that was safe and which the US controlled, with the rest of the country being a Red Zone; more or less, that situation never changed). The parliament building and Western embassies were in the Green Zone. I visited it in 2013. You enter through a narrow entranceway and can only really go in by foot (this measure stops car bombs from getting in). The security people who checked us in were international– Ghana and Peru or something. I doubt they would die for the cause. There were Iraqi troops on the outside of the blast walls.”

Once inside, you took mini-buses to reach your destination in the 4 square mile zone. I and some other visiting academics went to see the cultural attache at the US Embassy. That building has attracted rocket fire for the past nearly 17 years, and had been put behind the blast walls of the Green Zone in a bid to protect it from being car-bombed. I don’t know how much cultural exchange could have been done at that time.

Our conference hotel there in 2013 was not in the Green Zone, because the conference (on “Translation”) was hosted by the Ministry of Culture and aimed at advertising that Baghdad was again open for business. We did have a big tank sitting outside on the grounds. I met one young man who said he thought he was the only American living regularly in an apartment in ordinary Baghdad (i.e. the Red Zone) as opposed to staying behind the blast walls of the Green Zone.

Mark LeVine, Nabil Al-Takriti a few other visiting academics and I did some excursions. We talked to the History Department at Baghdad University. Our Iraqi colleagues asked me to explain, in Arabic, the influence of postmodernism and the notion of multiple narratives in history as opposed to a grand master narrative. When I finished, one said, this is something we need in Iraq. We also visited a film center where young Iraqis were taught how to make films.It was near the Tigris and a couple of the young film makers showed us around.

Juan and friends in the Red Zone, 2013.

Our Iraqi government handlers were not happy with their guests wandering about the Red Zone unescorted, but we got away with it.

Actually by 2019, Iraq authorities had removed 16 miles of blast walls from downtown Baghdad, so there really isn’t a Green Zone any more.

It has moved to Washington, D.C.

Featured Photo: Supreme Court, Jan. 6, 2020 Elvert Barnes from Silver Spring MD, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The U.S. militia movement has long been steeped in a peculiar – and unquestionably mistaken – interpretation of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and civil liberties.

This is true of an armed militia group that calls itself the Wolverine Watchmen, who were involved in the recently revealed plot to overthrow Michigan’s government and kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

Embed from Getty Images
Michael Null (L) and William Null (R) attend a anti shutdown rally organized by Michigan United for Liberty on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on May 14, 2020. Others are unidentified. – Thirteen men, including members of two right-wing militias, have been arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and “instigate a civil war”, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on October 8, 2020. The Nulls were charged for their alleged roles in the plot to kidnap Whitmer, according to the FBI. The brothers are charged with providing support for terroristic acts and felony weapons charges. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images).

As I wrote in “Fracturing the Founding: How the Alt-Right Corrupts the Constitution,” published in 2019, the crux of the militia movement’s devotion to what I have called the “alt-right constitution” is a toxic mix of constitutional falsehoods and half-truths.

Private militias

The term “militia” has many meanings.

The Constitution addresses militias in Article 1, authorizing Congress to “provide for organizing, arming and disciplining, the Militia.”

But the Constitution makes no provision for private militias, like the far-right Wolverine Watchmen, Proud Boys, Michigan Militia and the Oath Keepers, to name just a few.

Private militias are simply groups of like-minded men – members are almost always white males – who subscribe to a sometimes confusing set of beliefs about an avaricious federal government that is hostile to white men and white heritage, and the sanctity of the right to bear arms and private property. They believe that government is under the control of Jews, the United Nations, international banking interests, Leftists, Antifa, Black Lives Matter and so on. There is no evidence of this.

On Oct. 8, the FBI arrested six men, five of them from Michigan, and charged them with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer. Shortly thereafter, state authorities charged an additional seven men with, according to the Associated Press, “allegedly seeking to storm the Michigan Capitol and seek a “civil war.” Included were the founders and several members of the Wolverine Watchmen.

As revealed in the FBI affidavit accompanying the federal charges, the six men charged claimed to be defenders of the Bill of Rights. Indeed, some of the men in April had participated in rallies in Lansing, the state capital, where armed citizens tried to force their way onto the floor of the State House to protest Governor Whitmer’s pandemic shut-down orders as a violation of the Constitution by a “tyrannical” government intent upon sacrificing civil liberties in the name of the COVID-19 fight.

According to the FBI’s affidavit, the conspirators wanted to create “a society that followed the U.S. Bill of Rights and where they could be self-sufficient.”

Militia members imagine themselves to be “the last true American patriots,” “the modern defenders of the United States Constitution in general and the Second Amendment in particular.”

Hence, the Bill of Rights – and especially the Second Amendment, which establishes the right to bear arms – figure prominently in the alt-constitution. It is no accident that the initial discussions about overthrowing Michigan’s so-called tyrannical governor started at a Second Amendment rally in June.

According to most militias, the Second Amendment authorizes their activity and likewise makes them free of legal regulation by the state. In truth, the Second Amendment does nothing to authorize private armed militias. Private armed militias are explicitly illegal in every state.

Embed from Getty Images
William Null (R) stands in the gallery of the Michigan Senate Chamber during the American Patriot Rally, organized by Michigan United for Liberty, to demand the reopening of businesses on the steps of the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 30, 2020. Others are unidentified. – Thirteen men, including members of two right-wing militias, have been arrested for plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer and “instigate a civil war”, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel announced on October 8, 2020. The Nulls were charged for their alleged roles in the plot to kidnap Whitmer, according to the FBI. The brothers are charged with providing support for terroristic acts and felony weapons charges. (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY / AFP) (Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images).

No restrictions on rights

Additional foundational principles of militia constitutionalism include absolutism. Absolutism, in the militia world, is the idea that fundamental constitutional rights – like freedom of speech, the right to bear arms and the right to own property – cannot be restricted or regulated by the state without a citizen’s consent.

The far right’s reading of the First and Second Amendments – which govern free speech and the right to bear arms, respectively – starts from a simple premise: Both amendments are literal and absolute. They believe that the First Amendment allows them to say anything, anytime, anywhere, to anyone, without consequence or reproach by government or even by other citizens who disagree or take offense at their speech.

Similarly, the alt-right gun advocates hold that the Second Amendment protects their God-given right to own a weapon – any weapon – and that governmental efforts to deny, restrict or even to register their weapons must be unconstitutional. They think the Second Amendment trumps every other provision in the Constitution.

Another key belief among militia members is the principle of constitutional self-help. That’s the belief that citizens, acting on their inherent authority as sovereign free men, are ultimately and finally responsible for enforcing the Constitution – as they understand it.

Demonstrating this way of thinking, the men arrested in Michigan discussed taking Gov. Whitmer to a “secure location” in Wisconsin to stand “trial” for treason prior to the Nov. 3 election. According to Barry County, Michigan Sheriff Dar Leaf – a member of the militia-friendly Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officer Association – the men arrested in Michigan were perhaps not trying to kidnap the governor but were instead simply making a citizen’s arrest.

Leaf, who appeared at a Grand Rapids protest in May of Gov. Whitmer’s stay-at-home order along with two of the alleged kidnappers, mistakenly believes that local sheriffs are the highest constitutional authority in the United States, invested with the right to determine which laws support and which laws violate the Constitution. The events in Michigan show how dangerous these mistaken understandings of the Constitution can be.

There will be more

The Wolverine Watchmen are not a Second Amendment militia or constitutional patriots in any sense of the word. If they are guilty of the charges brought against them, then they are terrorists.

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The FBI and Michigan law enforcement shut down the Watchmen before an egregious crime and a terrible human tragedy unfolded. But as I concluded just last year in my book, “there is little reason to think the militia movement will subside soon.”

Unfortunately, I did not account for the possibility that President Trump would encourage militias “to stand back and stand by,” which seems likely to encourage and embolden groups that already clearly represent a threat. Expect more Michigans.

John E. Finn, Professor Emeritus of Government, Wesleyan University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

WXYZ Detroit 7: Expect a trial in governor kidnapping plot case, and how it differs from Hutaree trial

A dozen protesters facing federal charges are barred from going to “public gatherings” as a condition of release from jail — a tactic one expert described as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”

By Dara Lind | –

( ProPublica ) – Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a condition for release from jail.

Legal experts describe the move as a blatant violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, but at least 12 protesters arrested in recent weeks have been specifically barred from attending protests or demonstrations as they await trials on federal misdemeanor charges.

“Defendant may not attend any other protests, rallies, assemblies or public gathering in the state of Oregon,” states one “Order Setting Conditions of Release” for an accused protester, alongside other conditions such as appearing for court dates. The orders are signed by federal magistrate judges.

For other defendants, the restricted area is limited to Portland, where clashes between protesters and federal troops have grown increasingly violent in recent weeks. In at least two cases, there are no geographic restrictions; one release document instructs, “Do not participate in any protests, demonstrations, rallies, assemblies while this case is pending.”

Protesters who have agreed to stay away from further demonstrations say they felt forced to accept those terms to get out of jail.

“Those terms were given to me after being in a holding cell after 14 hours,” Bailey Dreibelbis, who was charged July 24 with “failing to obey a lawful order,” told ProPublica. “It was pretty cut-and-dried, just, ‘These are your conditions for [getting out] of here.’

“If I didn’t take it, I would still be in holding. It wasn’t really an option, in my eyes.”

It could not be learned who drafted the orders barring the protesters from joining further demonstrations. The documents reviewed by ProPublica were signed by a federal magistrate in Portland. Magistrates have broad authority to set the terms of release for anyone accused of a crime. They typically receive recommendations from U.S. Pretrial Services, an arm of the U.S. Courts, which can gather input from prosecutors and others involved in the case. ProPublica identified several instances in which the protest ban was added to the conditions of release document when it was drafted, before it was given to the judge. It remained unclear whether the limits on protesting were initiated by Justice Department officials or the magistrates hearing the cases.

Constitutional lawyers said conditioning release from jail on a promise to stop joining protests were overly broad and almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment right to free assembly.

“The government has a very heavy burden when it comes to restrictions on protest rights and on assembly,” noted Jameel Jaffer of Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute. “It’s much easier for the government to meet that burden where it has individualized information about a threat. So for example, they know that a particular person is planning to carry out some unlawful activity at a particular protest.”

Over the past week, the federal government has sharply increased the number of protesters it’s charging with federal crimes — often for petty offenses that are classified as federal misdemeanors only because they occur on federal property. Court documents reviewed by ProPublica show that over a third of the protesters are charged with “failing to obey a lawful order,” which 14 protesters were charged with between July 21 and July 24 alone.

The office of the U.S. attorney for Oregon, Billy J. Williams, did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who was making charging decisions. In a recent interview with The Oregonian, Williams urged local citizens to demand that “violent extremists” who have attempted to break through the fence outside the federal courthouse leave. “Until that happens, we’re going to do what we need to do to protect federal property.”

Craig Gabriel, an assistant U.S. attorney who works for Williams, insisted the office understood and respected the right to protest racial injustice. “People are angry. Very large crowds are gathering, expressing deep and legitimate anger with police and the justice system,” Gabriel told The Oregonian. “We wholeheartedly support the community’s constitutionally protected rights to assemble together in large, even rowdy protests and engage in peaceful and civil disobedience.”

Gabriel did not mention the written restrictions against protest that have been made a condition of release for some of those arrested.

Several protesters who were let go on July 23 had bans against demonstrating added by hand on their release documents by Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta, who signed off on them, a review by ProPublica found. Acosta’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions.

For those released on July 24, the restriction was added to the original typed document, also signed by Acosta. One protester arrested and released earlier in the month had his conditions of release modified at his arraignment on July 24. The modified order, signed by Acosta, added a protest ban not previously included.

Three of the 15 protesters charged on July 27, in orders signed by Magistrate Judge Jolie A. Russo, also had explicit protest restrictions added to their release terms. (One release order has not yet been posted to the federal courts database.) Russo’s office did not reply to ProPublica’s questions.

“I don’t see that as constitutionally defensible,” Jaffer said. And I find it difficult to believe that any judge would uphold it.”

The ACLU’s Somil Trivedi said, “Release conditions should be related to public safety or flight” — in other words, the risk that the defendant will abscond. “This is neither.” He described the handwritten addition of a protest ban to a release document as “sort of hilariously unconstitutional.”

Publicly, the Trump administration has claimed that it has no problem with the protests that erupted in Portland and other American cities in response to the May 25 death of George Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis. The administration said it launched Operation Diligent Valor in July with a massive deployment of federal officers merely to protect federal property from “violent extremists.”

Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School said that imposing a protest ban as a release condition undermines the distinction between protected protest and criminal activity. “Even if they’re right that these people did, in fact, step beyond the bounds of the First Amendment and do something illegal, that doesn’t mean you can then restrict their First Amendment right.”

In many cases, the charges leveled at Portland protesters are closely tied to their presence at the protest — and not to any violent acts.

Eighteen of the 50 protesters charged in Portland are accused only of minor offenses under Title 40, Section 1315, of the U.S. Code. That law criminalizes certain behavior (like “failure to obey a lawful order,” as well as “disorderly conduct”) when it happens on federal property or against people who are located on that property. In other words, it describes behavior that wouldn’t otherwise be a matter for a federal court.

Dreibelbis, like other protesters to whom ProPublica has spoken, said he was arrested for being on the sidewalk outside the federal courthouse. Because the federal government owns the land under the sidewalk, another protester (who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid influencing his upcoming trial) told ProPublica it’s “common knowledge” among protesters that the sidewalk is a no-go zone, and setting foot on it risks federal prosecution.

Dreibelbis told ProPublica he roller-skated into the protest, expecting to attend only briefly. He said he knelt on the sidewalk and was arrested by officers. (The charging document filed against Dreibelbis offers no arrest details.)

Section 1315 is the same law the Trump administration is using to justify initiating the federal show of force in Portland, which the administration has said it intends to employ in other cities where protests have raged since Floyd’s death.

The law allows the secretary of homeland security to supplement the Federal Protective Service, the relatively small agency partly responsible for federal building security, with law enforcement agents from the department’s other agencies (such as Customs and Border Protection).

Both President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have invoked that part of the law in the past. But the use of that same law to file criminal charges appears to be novel. The Obama administration sent a “surge force” of 400 FPS agents, and a dozen CBP agents, to Baltimore in 2015, when the police killing of Freddie Gray sparked broad unrest, but no charges were filed under Section 1315 itself in that response.

In Portland, the federal government has relied on the FPS and U.S. Marshals to write affidavits used to charge protesters in federal court. But it has detailed other agencies on the protest front lines: DHS agencies cited in court complaints include CBP, through its BORTAC tactical unit; Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations unit; DHS’ Office of Intelligence and Analysis, in addition to FPS. Complaints also cite the U.S. Marshals and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which are Justice Department entities.

In the first weeks of the operation, the most common charge against protesters was assault of a federal officer — which, in some cases, counted as a crime on federal property because protesters on the streets were shining lasers at officers inside the courthouse. (DHS has claimed that some officers may permanently lose their vision, but as of July 24, the most serious injury detailed in federal charging documents was an agent who reported seeing spots in his eyes for 15 minutes after the laser attack.)

Over July 23 and 24, however, 10 of the 13 cases opened were charges only of “failing to obey a lawful order.” (One other defendant was charged with assaulting a U.S. Marshal while detained inside the courthouse — where she had been taken after an arrest for “failing to obey a lawful order.”)

Since then, almost all cases have accused protesters of assaulting a federal officer (generally a misdemeanor charge).

In many of the assault cases, files are thin and no details of the allegations have been posted, even for protesters charged as early as July 6. No case files identify an alleged victim — either by name or by the “unique identifier” on their uniforms. (DHS officials have claimed it’s unfair to describe the federal agents in Portland as “unidentified” because they clearly show identification.)

Some assault accusations charge protesters with throwing unidentified objects at officers in body armor, who were unharmed.

Even those defendants who aren’t explicitly barred from attending protests are unable to return to the epicenter of Portland’s unrest as a condition of their release. They are placed under a curfew (either from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m.) and told not to go within five blocks of the courthouse grounds except for court hearings.

Experts said that while restrictions of that sort are common, they’re still questionably constitutional. “Though ‘stay away’ orders from a place where a potential crime has been committed are generally standard,” the ACLU’s Trivedi said, “‘stay away’ orders from public places that are part of the public square are more questionable.” But he and others conceded that the government could make an argument that it was necessary to prevent further wrongdoing.

They saw no legitimate rationale for a blanket ban on protests.

“I suppose the government could argue, ‘You disobeyed a law enforcement officer at a protest, and we don’t trust you to not do it again,’” Trivedi said. But the release documents already instruct defendants that they are not allowed to break any laws while awaiting trial.

“If they want to say ‘don’t break a law again,’ they’ve already said that,” Trivedi told ProPublica. “Beyond that, the only part that’s left would be not letting you exercise your First Amendment right.”

Driebelbis, for his part, must now watch the protests proceed without him. “I work across the water from the protests, and I can see it every” night, he told ProPublica. “I’m protesting from this side.”

He hastened to clarify that he didn’t mean he was attending a protest in violation of the court order. “Not protesting! There’s no protesting going on in the party of one. But I am there in spirit.”

Dara Lind covers immigration policy for ProPublica in Washington, DC. Before coming to ProPublica, she spent five years as Vox’s immigration reporter; she remains a regular cohost of the Vox podcast “The Weeds.”

Via ProPublica

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Portland Protesters Defended By Veterans | NowThis