by Orpheus
Revolutionary Worker #1202, June 8, 2003, posted at rwor.org
On June 2-6 the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) is holding its annual training seminar in Seattle. Most people are probably not familiar with this outfit. But the LEIU, which had its start in the 1950s, is an extensive national and international network of 250 federal, regional, and local police agencies that gathers and shares police intelligence--including on political activists.
Activists from around the Northwest and Canada have been mobilizing to protest the LEIU meeting. A coalition of various groups have united as the LEIU Welcoming Committee. Seattle is blanketed with posters saying, "Do you know about the LEIU? They know about you." There are plans for a large mass protest, educational and cultural events, pickets of LEIU sponsors, and affinity-group actions.
A lot of activists see these protests as an opportunity to raise the level of opposition against not only the LEIU but the overall police-state repression that's coming down on the people.
"Privatization" of Police Spying
LEIU's official stated purpose is to share information on "organized crime and certain criminals." But various investigative journalists and suits filed against police agencies have revealed that LEIU compiles intelligence on political activists.
For instance, as far back as 1962, a regional LEIU meeting in San Francisco discussed the gathering of information by police on "protest groups, demonstrations and mob violence," according to an FBI summary. A 1974 suit against the Chicago Police Dept. revealed that LEIU kept files on members of the American Indian Movement, Black Panthers, Republic of New Afrika, and other radical groups.
LEIU is supposedly a private "non-profit" group, but its members are all public police forces. LEIU's large intelligence database serves as a resource for police and the government. But the LEIU database isn't subject to the same rules, restrictions, and Freedom of Information Act guidelines that supposedly apply to police agencies in general.
Many of these restrictions on police spying were put into place after widespread exposure and outrage about the spying, disruption, assaults, and murders of revolutionaries and others by the local police and FBI's COINTELPRO in the 1960s. The LEIU is one way the state has tried to "privatize" police spying to get around these restrictions.
LEIU's meeting in Seattle is titled "Criminal Intelligence and the War Against Terrorism." Discussion topics for the meeting include "criminal protest groups," "the current state of criminal intelligence," and "domestic and international terrorism." The LEIU seminar web page says, "Focus will be placed on areas still requiring improvement; the current state of intelligence sharing/processing among local and federal law enforcement agencies; and specifics as to what local law enforcement can do to better support the war on terrorism."
The LEIU meeting is cohosted by local and state police agencies and the FBI. The meeting has major corporate sponsors such as Starbucks, Boeing, and Microsoft. Another sponsor is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
The ADL connection is revealing. The ADL has a history of working with top levels of the U.S. state apparatus to spy on and attempt to disrupt political activists and groups. Some of this came to light in a San Francisco spy case that was exposed in 1993. Two main figures in that scandal were Tom Gerard, a former S.F. police inspector and CIA operative, and Roy Bullock, an operative for the ADL and a former paid FBI informant. Gerard and Bullock developed files on 1,000 Bay Area political organizations and 12,000 individuals. Groups were also targeted for infiltration, disruption, and "criminal" investigations.
From the mid-1980s until 1993, Gerard and Bullock spied on all kinds of political groups, ranging from liberal to revolutionary. A particular focus of their spying was political organizations and individuals connected to struggles of the people in Africa, Central America, and the Arab world, as well as Black militants and revolutionaries, in particular the RCP. Spy files were also developed on labor unions, student groups, and radio stations. Files were compiled on basic people under the guise of a "gang" database.
Bullock admitted sharing information with the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, the Israeli government, and South Africa's apartheid regime. A report by Greg Noakes in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs pointed out that the S.F. spy ring was just the "tip of the iceberg." Noakes quoted law enforcement sources investigating the spy ring who said "the ADL is running this all over the country." Files from 20 other police departments and law enforcement agencies were found in the possession of the ADL.
Despite these connections to many police forces and the top levels of the U.S. government, government investigations attempted to picture Gerard and Bullock's spy ring as a "rogue operation."
In the wake of the S.F. spy scandal, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle revealed that the SFPD secretly used the LEIU as a way to preserve intelligence files that were supposed to be destroyed. It also came out that intelligence files from other police departments were transferred to the LEIU when they were ordered to be destroyed.
This background is important to understanding the current role of the LEIU--because the same type of "public/private partnering" that was at work with the ADL/SFPD scandal is central to what the LEIU is about.
Rising Attacks on Political Protest
Police intelligence-gathering and federal-local "joint task forces" aimed at political protest have stepped up in recent years, even prior to 9/11. Police forces involved in countering anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Los Angeles spied on protesters directly, monitored protesters through the Internet, exchanged intelligence, and planned joint strategies to suppress protest. Cops raided protesters' organizing spaces and carried out mass arrests of activists. Protesters as well as passersby were victims of massive police brutality. (See "From Seattle to Genoa: Spies and Billy Clubs Against the Resisters," RW #1147; also available online at rwor.org)
A police scandal uncovered recently in Denver also indicates much about police spying on dissent. In March 2002, the Colorado ACLU obtained documents from the Denver Police Intelligence Unit (DPIU) describing police spying on political activists over decades.
Denver police spied on 200 organizations and 3,200 individuals. Among the targets were groups like American Friends Service Committee, American Indian Movement, and Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center. The DPIU described their spying as intelligence-gathering on "criminal extremist groups." Files were developed on hundreds of individuals and their "associates" who had simply attended a legal protest or political meeting. The ACLU also discovered that the DPIU was routinely sending information on activists for tracking to the FBI's Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force.
The War-Time Police State
Since 9/11 the U.S. government has been rapidly setting in place the cornerstones of a police state. Thousands of immigrants have been detained and registered. Laws are being changed and legal precedents are being thrown out. The Pentagon is moving forward with its "Terrorist Information Awareness" program that will gather information on the lives and personal habits of millions of people.
There is a war on political dissent. An ugly mood of intolerance has been whipped up against anyone who stands up to oppose the policies and actions of the government and the military--professors, activists, and outspoken cultural figures like Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and the Dixie Chicks. The FBI has been given the green light to carry out sneak-and-peak searches of people's homes and start investigations of people who have not been accused of any crime.
Increasingly police are using the justification of "terrorist threat" to suppress protests-- and to treat political protest as "terrorism." The police in New York City cited a "terror alert" as a reason to deny permits to the huge anti-war protests on Feb. 15.
And recently the Oakland Tribune reported that the April 7 attack by the police at the Oakland docks--when cops fired wooden slugs and other projectiles at anti-war protesters--was in part precipitated by a bulletin from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC). The bulletin warned Oakland police about "potential violence," although the CATIC knew a peaceful protest was planned. A spokesman for the CATIC said, "You can make an easy kind of link--if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)."
In light of all this, there's no doubt that spying by police spying units and "private" organizations on activist groups and individuals is rapidly on the rise. According to the website of the LEIU Welcoming Committee, the Seattle police received dozens of files from the LEIU in the past years. But in 2002 alone, the Seattle police--which supposedly functions under guidelines restricting police spying-- received 11,000 files!
The Seattle protests against the LEIU are important and crucial--at a time where massive and determined resistance against the Big Brother police state is urgently needed.
This article is posted in English and Spanish on Revolutionary Worker Online
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