Tales from Stasiland: The Perils of Wearing Black

By Scott Horton

WaPo's Carol Leonnig reports on information which has surfaced in a civil lawsuit in Washington surrounding the detention of a group of anti-war protestors in a parking garage in 2002. For years, the police has insisted that the incident never happened. Now documents have been uncovered that tell a different story. DC police logs acknowledge the incident and detail the involvement of the FBI.

The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black—a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.

FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.

The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence. Ultimately, the protesters were not prosecuted because there wasn't sufficient evidence of trespassing, and their arrest records were expunged.

The operations closely parallel accounts of joint police/FBI surveillance and infiltration operations run out of New York in connection with the 2004 Republican National Convention which were recently the subject of a major exposé by the New York Times.

The plaintiffs argue that the newly released police logs make clear that the FBI, working hand in hand with local police, is engaged in a concerted effort to spy on and intimidate U.S. citizens who are lawfully exercising their free-speech rights. They contend that this is a national effort that abuses the FBI's broad counterterrorism powers and equates political speech with a risk to national security.

“It really is a secret police: This is an effort to suppress political dissent,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice. “If this was happening in another country that the U.S. was targeting, U.S. officials at the highest levels would be decrying this as a violation of human rights.”

The FBI insists that none of these events ever occurred. (“We are at war with Eastasia. We have always been at war with Eastasia.”) On the other hand, I am convinced of the accuracy of the FBI's belief that people who wear black are anarchists. I think of my travels in Southern Italy, Spain and Greece, for instance—not to mention Johnny Cash.