Interrogating the Protesters

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/opinion/17tue1.html?ex=1093749624 & ei=1 & en=34fb\

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August 17, 2004

Interrogating the Protesters

 

For several weeks, starting before the Democratic

convention, F.B.I. officers have been questioning

potential political demonstrators, and their friends

and families, about their plans to protest at the two

national conventions. These heavy-handed inquiries are

intimidating, and they threaten to chill freedom of

expression. They also appear to be a spectacularly

poor use of limited law-enforcement resources. The

F.B.I. should redirect its efforts to focus more

directly on real threats.

 

Six investigators recently descended on Sarah

Bardwell, a 21-year-old intern with a Denver antiwar

group, who quite reasonably took away the message that

the government was watching her closely. In Missouri,

three men in their early 20's said they had been

followed by federal investigators for days, then

subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury. They ended

up canceling their plans to show up for the Democratic

and Republican conventions.

 

The F.B.I. is going forward with the blessing of the

Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel - the

same outfit that recently approved the use of torture

against terrorism suspects. In the Justice

Department's opinion, the chilling effect of the

investigations is " quite minimal, " and " substantially

outweighed by the public interest in maintaining

safety and order. " But this analysis gets the balance

wrong. When protesters are made to feel like criminal

suspects, the chilling effect is potentially quite

serious. And the chances of gaining any information

that would be useful in stopping violence are quite

small.

 

The knock on the door from government investigators

asking about political activities is the stuff of

totalitarian regimes. It is intimidating to be visited

by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly

by investigators who warn that withholding information

about anyone with plans to create a disruption is a

crime.

 

And few people would want the F.B.I. to cross-examine

their friends and family about them. If engaging in

constitutionally protected speech means subjecting

yourself to this kind of government monitoring, many

Americans may decide - as the men from Missouri did -

that the cost is too high.

 

Meanwhile, history suggests that the way to find out

what potentially violent protesters are planning is

not to send F.B.I. officers bearing questionnaires to

the doorsteps of potential demonstrators. As became

clear in the 1960's, F.B.I. monitoring of youthful

dissenters is notoriously unreliable. The files that

were created in the past often proved to be laughably

inaccurate.

 

The F.B.I.'s questioning of protesters is part of a

larger campaign against political dissent that has

increased sharply since the start of the war on

terror.

 

At the Democratic convention, protesters were sent to

a depressing barbed-wire camp under the subway tracks.

And at a recent Bush-Cheney campaign event, audience

members were required to sign a pledge to support

President Bush before they were admitted.

 

F.B.I. officials insist that the people they interview

are free to " close the door in our faces, " but by then

the damage may already have been done. The government

must not be allowed to turn a war against foreign

enemies into a campaign against critics at home.

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company