Then and now (2)

NOW: Muslims in Lodi believe mystery man who spoke of jihad was a federal mole in terror investigation by Demian Bulwa San Francisco Chronicle 08/27/05.

In the days after federal agents arrested five residents of Lodi in a terror investigation in June, a clean-cut young man who had befriended the suspects and had spent nights at their homes vanished.

He hasn't been seen in town since, and now members of Lodi's Muslim community suspect they know why: The man, who called himself Nasim Khan, was a government mole, they believe, an informer whose surreptitious tape recordings of one of the suspects are at the heart of the federal probe.

Community members said Khan, who is in his early 30s, sometimes spoke of "jihad" in what they now believe was an attempt to get others to express radical sentiments.

In his three years in Lodi, Khan -- who spoke fluent Pashto, Urdu and English -- forged deep ties in the Muslim community. He once lived in one of two apartments that overlook Lodi's mosque, helped set up a Web site for a Muslim school that was forming in the area and took the teenage son of one of the suspects to ride roller-coasters at Paramount's Great America in Santa Clara. ...

The "witness" appears to be critical to the case. Prosecutors are using him in an attempt to connect Hamid Hayat to terrorism, while defense attorneys and some community members - who say he was an aggressive provocateur in conversations - are trying to find out more about him. Whether he is a civilian informant or an undercover agent could affect what information the defense is entitled to receive. (my emphasis)

Moreover, his actions provide a look at one of the ways the government has been searching out Islamic extremists since Sept. 11, 2001. Some experts say such surveillance is critical to the war on terror, while critics say it violates people's freedom to practice their religion. ...

"When an informant goes in and talks about jihad, and that you will be at the hand of Muhammad, and rattles sabers and builds up the religious fervor, to me that's a form of entrapment -- but legally it's not," John Ransom, a Portland attorney who represented one of the defendants who pleaded guilty in [a Portland terrorism] case, told The Chronicle.

He added that the Portland and Lodi cases, as well as others, "seem to be following a pattern."

THEN: From The Hidden History of the Vietnam War by John Prados (1995), discussing the Nixon administration's campaign against the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) group, a nonviolent veterans' antiwar organization (my emphasis):

The Nixon administration apparently felt especially threatened by the existence of an organization made up primarily of veterans and opposing the Vietnam War. Attorney General John Mitchell gave instructions to Robert C. Mardian, then director of the Internal Security Division at the Justice Department, to take the offensive against the antiwar movement. With the national attention VVAW received from its Dewey Canyon III demonstration in 1971, the general instructions were applied specifically to that organization. Mardian ordered the chief of his special litigations section, Guy L. Goodwin, to develop an investigation of VVAW. The veterans' movement again made news in December 1971 when members simultaneously occupied the Statue of Liberty, the Betsy Ross House in Philadelphia, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, and the South Vietnamese consulate in San Francisco, plus a veterans' hospital ward in California. Federal Bureau of Investigation documents declassified in the late 1980s and 1990s make clear that the U.S. government had detailed knowledge of the demonstrations, including accounts of meetings held for planning and itineraries. Despite the material excised from these documents, one can readily infer from the type and quality of the information that the sources must have included not only informers infiltrated into the organization but also wiretaps and home break-ins.

Prados discusses the "Gainsville Eight" case, a nasty piece of trumped-up accusation brought against eight VVAW activists, featuring some serious prosecutorial and judicial misconduct.  Despite an amazingly shabby performance by the judge, the jury took only 3 1/2 hours to acquit the defendants on all charges.  Prados quotes one of the jurors saying, "They had nothing on those boys."

But the extent to which the Nixon-Agnew administration used informers and undercover agents against a legal, legitimate and nonviolent veterans' political organization is illustrated in the following account by Prados (my emphasis):

After the Miami convention there was almost a year of legal maneuvering before the Gainesville Eight, as they came to be called, went to trial. During all that time the government continued its campaign of intimidation against the VVAW. In New Orleans, which for a time had only three men in its VVAW chapter, all three were government informants. Two of three in Jacksonville were informants and stole materials from the third. In Miami, FBI and Dade County police broke into members' homes and planted drugs, later to recruit the individual under threat of a drug arrest. Other Dade County police joined the VVAW organization and became its most militant members, constantly advocating violent tactics. The individuals involved were later to be produced as witnesses at the Gainesville trial. [Defendant] Scott Camil's lawyer had her office burglarized and his case file stolen. In New York other members' apartments were also burglarized and their files rifled. Harassment reached such heights of pettiness that at the national office the bathroom was seeded with an itching powder that contaminated the skin and clothes of anyone who sat on the toilet seat.

A wider, Watergate context was supplied by the U.S. Senate investigation of the Nixon administration's unsavory activities. An individual previously used as an informer to infiltrate another antiwar group testified to the Senate that he had been ordered by H. Howard Hunt, Republican intelligence chieftain (and former CIA officer), to penetrate VVAW. Another individual declared that Hunt had offered him a large salary to do the same but that he had rejected it. One political-cum-intelligence operation that Hunt did pull off, the harassment of Daniel Ellsberg, included not only a break-in into his psychiatrist's office but an out-and-out beating from a group of thugs as he emerged from a speaking engagement. Later it transpired that one of those arrested for the assault, a Miami Cuban named Pablo Manuel Fernandez, had been a police informant too, and was specifically sent to Scott Camil to try to elicit an overt act of conspiracy, offering access to weapons of types ranging from rifles to 81 mm and 60 mm mortars. The antiwar veteran had had no interest. When VVAW lawyers tried to question senior Justice Department officials in the matter of political motivation for the actions taken against VVAW, federal district judge Winston E. Arnow disallowed seven of the eight proposed subpoenas. Only former Attorney General John Mitchell came before the court to make a bland statement, after which the judge refused to permit more than thirty questions posed by the lawyers. It was a harbinger of what was to come [in the Gainsville Eight trial].

Referring back to the Lodi case, it's not clear to me at this point that there was any kind of official misconduct involved.  And it's also obvious that undercover police work and infiltration of terror networks is a necessary and valuable tool in combatting the radical-Salafi jihadist groups like Al Qaeda.

But the history of official misconduct during the 1960s and early 1970s in political espionage and sabotage are exactly why there need to be strict laws and effective administration, Congressional and judicial oversight over such activities.  If law-enforcement groups are enticing people into incriminating situations and then prosecuting them in the effort to meet some quota, of for the office-holders of the moment to look good, that produces both a terrible injustice to people unfairly prosecuted and is a waste of public time and money that should be going to serious anti-terror investigations.

I wonder if the Bush administration is conducting similar probes now of the American Legion, which is overtly promoting vigilante violence against war critics.  But since they sent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff there to bless the Legion's call for violent suppression of peaceful protesters expressing majority opinions, somehow I doubt it.