The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.
Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July.
And don't even get 'em started on them horrorist vegetarians and feminazis!
The department started sending letters of notification Saturday to the activists, inviting them to review their files before they are purged from the databases, Sheridan said.
"The names don't belong in there," he told the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee. "It's as simple as that."
Nonetheless, this should not be read as the "happy ending" to the tale of right-wing "they hate our freedom" police-statism so much as an early chapter in what is sure to be a long blood-curdling chronicle of similar revelations over the next few years. Also, there are real questions as to thoroughness of the "purgations" of the files of those who have been maligned by wingnut paranoids in the War on Terra. Onto what other databases has this information attached itself, waiting to do mischief? What equally horrific surveillance and cataloguing gathered and administered in the service of what equally lunatic-fringe assumptions lurks still-unseen or perhaps never to be seen in the dizzyingly ramifying labyrinth of wingnut appointed bureaucracies? How many fringe patridiots remain in administrative positions who believe this police statism is righteous and hear their weird version of war-mongering money-grubbing white-racist flag-diapered baby Jeebus whispering in their ears to refuse to comply with purgations?
The surveillance took place over 14 months in 2005 and 2006, under the administration of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R). The former state police superintendent who authorized the operation, Thomas E. Hutchins, defended the program in testimony yesterday. Hutchins said the program was a bulwark against potential violence and called the activists "fringe people."
I often idly wonder to myself just what percentage of the population actually affirms as true the saucer-eyed authoritarian ravings that Republicans in their more charming militarist and theocratic modes like to ascribe so glibly to "Moral Majorities" and "All American Values."
Sheridan said protest groups were also entered as terrorist organizations in the databases, but his staff has not identified which ones.
How exciting!
Stunned senators pressed Sheridan to apologize to the activists for the spying, assailed in an independent review last week as "overreaching" by law enforcement officials who were oblivious to their violation of the activists' rights of free expression and association. The letter, obtained by The Washington Post, does not apologize but admits that the state police have "no evidence whatsoever of any involvement in violent crime" by those classified as terrorists.
Hutchins told the committee it was not accurate to describe the program as spying. "I doubt anyone who has used that term has ever met a spy," he told the committee.
[Rather, they] were monitoring "open public meetings."
It's not spying, it's monitoring, y'all. A couple paragraphs down we get a glimpse into just how non-spy-ey the monitoring got. But first:
His officers sought a "situational awareness" of the potential for disruption as death penalty opponents prepared to protest the executions of two men on death row, Hutchins said.
"I don't believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government," he said. Hutchins said he did not notify Ehrlich about the surveillance….
Just for shits and giggles here, can we all be reminded that ours is a government of "we the people," "of the people, by the people, and for the people," that the legitimacy of our form of governance rests on "the consent of the governed," and that the free clash of the diversity of stakeholders to questions of the day and the free expression of dissent is literally the life's blood of this republic? It may seem a bit paradoxical, I suppose, but it is no less vitally and urgently true for all that, that it is in the facilitation of dissent that we see the actually substantiating work of consent on which the Founders rightly sought to establish and maintain the legitimacy of American governance. Please be clear about this if it hasn't been something you've given more than idle thought to since your high school civics class or what have you. Consent is not obedience, nor, realize, is the presence of consent indicated by appearance of consensus. In politics -- that is to say, in that mode of reasonable belief and action that takes the dynamic and ineradicable plurality of stakeholders who share the world, peer-to-peer, as its literal point of departure -- consensus, like conformity, is almost inevitably a sign of tyranny, not of freedom. It is literally nonsensical to claim at once to be patriotic while repudiating "as disruption" the dissent on which legitimate democratic governance interminably depends for its ongoing legitimation and substantiation.
But Sen. James Brochin (D-Baltimore County) noted that undercover troopers used aliases to infiltrate organizational meetings, rallies and group e-mail lists.
It's not spying, it's -- it's, monitoring, it's… oh, never mind…
He called the spying a "deliberate infiltration to find out every piece of information necessary" on groups such as the Maryland Campaign to End the Death Penalty and the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance. When Hutchins called their members "fringe people," the audience of activists who filled the seats in the hearing room in Annapolis sighed.
Oh, how I know that sigh by now…
Some activists said yesterday that they have received letters; others said they were waiting with anticipation to see whether they were on the state police watch list.
Laura Lising of Catonsville, a member of the Baltimore Coalition Against the Death Penalty, received her notification yesterday. She said she wants a hard copy of her file, because she does not trust the police to purge it. "We need as much protection as possible," she said.
Quite so.
Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists' names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.
Classic!
The police also entered the activists' names into the federal Washington-Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database, which tracks suspected terrorists. One well-known antiwar activist from Baltimore, Max Obuszewski, was singled out in the intelligence logs released by the ACLU, which described a "primary crime" of "terrorism-anti-government" and a "secondary crime" of "terrorism-anti-war protesters."
Now, doesn't that make you feel more safe? Be sure to thank our Republican friends this November, now, you hear?
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