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Frightening questions: Who’s watching you and what lists are you on?
The two Dominican nuns had mixed it up with the feds before. For more than 30 years they’ve worked against U.S. militarism. They’ve each spent several years in jail for acts of non-violent civil disobedience. They know what it is to be under surveillance.
But for Sr. Ardeth Platte, 72, and Sr. Carol Gilbert, 61, being listed as terrorism suspects in a federal data base was escalation of another order. This latest twist to their long story of resistance has played out internationally as a kind of absurdist tale -- the terrorist nuns -- of the Homeland Security era.
The terrorism designation may indeed be an absurdity to anyone who’s known the sisters, who live at Jonah House, a resistance community in Baltimore. At the same time their story raises more frightening questions for those who dissent from government policy or exercise unpopular free speech in this age of Homeland Security: Who’s watching you and what lists are you on?
The questions were brought into stark relief with the acknowledgement earlier this year that the Baltimore state police had engaged in covert surveillance of anti-death penalty and anti-war groups from March 2005 to May 2006.
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See related story: Thirty years of speaking peace to power
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In an earlier era, a bit of “overreaching,” as the surveillance was described in a report on the matter, might have been viewed as easily corrected overzealousness on the part of a local law enforcement agency. What ups the ante today, however, is the automatic dumping of information into interwoven data bases shared by regional state groupings and, ultimately, the federal government.
David Rocah, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, is attempting to find out just how far the information has traveled and into what databases. “There’s been a lot of focus on the fact that they labeled them as terrorists even when (the police) internally knew they were nothing of the kind. That level of abuse is adding insult to injury. But it is easy to lose track of the fact that they (Maryland State Police) should never have been entering” the names of innocent people into a database in the first place.
Someone considering involvement in a political movement might well be dissuaded from joining if they fear being characterized a terrorist by the government, said Rocah. “That’s precisely why it is a practice in totalitarian regimes around the world to keep those kinds of lists. It keeps people intimated from joining such activities. Now we’re not saying that was the intent of the Maryland police, but the intent is irrelevant. The fact is they were doing it and the effect is the same regardless of the intent.”
Former Maryland Atty. Gen. Stephen H. Sachs, in a 93 page-report requested by Gov. Martin O’Malley, said the surveillance “intruded upon the ability of law abiding Marylanders to association and express themselves freely.” He added that the police activity was “inconsistent with an overarching value in our democratic society -- the free and unfettered debate of important public questions. Such police conduct ought to be prohibited as a matter of public policy.”
O’Malley, a Democrat, was elected in 2006, following the period of surveillance.
The surveillance was carried out primarily by an unnamed state trooper, who used the alias Lucy, and who infiltrated “more than two dozen protests and meetings,” building trust with individuals involved and reporting on the views of individuals and groups and how they planned to publicly express those views.
The trooper was part of the Maryland State Police Homeland Security and Intelligence Division and she entered information obtained about the individuals and groups in to the HSID electronic data base. The state police “assigned labels such as “Security Threat Group” and “Terrorism -- Anti-War Protester” to certain groups and individuals,” according to the Sachs report, which was released at the end of September.
Supervisors in the state homeland security division “then transmitted certain information about these groups and individuals -- including, in some cases, the ‘terrorism’ designation -- to a federally funded database,” according to the Sachs report.
Sachs contends that the state police violated federal law when information from the surveillance was transmitted from the Maryland police’s Case Explorer data base to the federally funded data base maintained by the Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area. The program promotes information sharing among local, state and federal authorities.
At several points in the report, Sachs emphasizes that the surveillance turned up no illegal activity or plans to perform illegal acts. The peaceful demonstrations and activities provided no justification, he wrote, for the “terrorism designation” or “to equate anti-death penalty and anti-war activism with ‘terrorism.’”
In all, 53 people were incorrectly labeled terrorists, including Barry Kissin, a lawyer, and his wife and two other members of a group that regularly protests the government’s biodefense research efforts at Fort Derrick, and Pat Elder of Bethesda, who leads a national movement opposed to military recruitment of high school students.
No one in the department was disciplined, according to a police spokesman.
Platte and Gilbert and others received letters in October from the Maryland State Police as a follow up to a recommendation of the Sachs report. The department said it was contacting “all individuals who are presently described in the MSP’s Case Explorer database program as being ‘suspected of involvement in terrorism but as to whom MSP has no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime.’ ”
In addition, those incorrectly accused of terrorism were to have an opportunity to view “relevant Case Explorer entries” before they were eliminated.
The two nuns said that so far all they have received are heavily redacted documents where much of the information is blacked out. “Our biggest concern is not for ourselves,” said Platte, who presumes that they are in countless government files for their work against nuclear weapons and on behalf of conscientious objectors.
“We’re really concerned for people who have never done an action or who will be afraid to join a movement. We’re also concerned about the misinformation in the files,” she said.
Rocah, the ACLU lawyer, said he is concerned that all the information in the federal data base eventually “gets into homeland security data information” and “everything about national terrorist lists is a black box, it’s classified,” he said.
“The state has to come clean about all that it was doing,” Rocah said. “Our goal is to find out what happened, to force them to answer why they’re doing this and the scope of what they were doing.”
If he can’t achieve that goal through the Freedom of Information Act, he said, he’ll sue to get all the information collected on the individuals involved and to learn how widely it has been shared.
(Tom Roberts in NCR editor at large. His e-mail address is troberts@ncronline.org.)
