Terrorism Task Force Investigates dumpster divers as freegan terrorists? (Reprinted from Underground Examiner)
When we were pursuing a story on Boulder area Freegans, we kept hearing the rather odd claim that the group, particularly Food Not Bombs had made the terrorist watch list. As we wrote:
At first blush, Freegans hardly seem able to make it to class in the morning, let alone orchestrate a terrorist attack.
A call to the number on the Web site for Food Not Bombs, an organization that roots through Dumpsters for trash to feed the homeless, reached the private residence of a frustrated Boulderite who has been trying to get the group to correct the site for more than two years.
The group's blog has zero entries since going live six months ago.
It didn't make the article, but the Underground did a lot of legwork trying to track down this rather remarkable claim that the government has suspected the group of terrorism.
Mark Silverstein of the Colorado ACLU told us the files they had obtained from the Denver police a few years earlier said they were "keeping files on activist groups and listing them as terrorist groups, so.... we did a series of FOIA requests to the Task Force regarding its collection."
It turns out an FOIA request by the ACLU produced memos showing the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) indeed visited the home of Sarah Bardwell, which doubled as the Denver chapter of FNB and Derailer Bicycle Collective, a group that repairs old bicycles.
What prompted the investigation was the fact that another group, Anarchist Black Cross (which, despite the scary name, appears to be a prisoner's rights group), held a meeting on the same group. According to the LA Times:
The organizer of the meeting, Dawn Rewolinski, said the prospective chapter would have been part of the movement’s other wing, which writes letters to prisoners. The chapter was never established, Rewolinski said. "All we did is eat some cookies and talk about various prisoners and realize we didn’t have enough money for a P.O. box."
Students of the University of Texas Law School also reported Supervisory Senior Resident Agent G. Charles Rasner posted a list of terrorist organizations that included Food Not Bombs during a guest lecture. The blog post of one attendee, a Mormon law student who ran the blog Probative, was replaced with the cryptic "[Chilled speech]". An article on IndyMedia by Elizabeth Wagoner, who attended the lecture, said:
Student Elizabeth Wagoner requested a copy of the PowerPoint presentation at the end of the class. Rasner refused, claiming the presentation was private government property. He then refused a request for the contact information of the FOIA officer in his bureau, saying it "was not worth [his] time".
A copy of the PowerPoint presentation has been requested via the Freedom of Information Act. We will publish the presentation on Indymedia as soon as it becomes available.
When we followed up with Wagoner, she responded in email:
I didn't appeal the FOIA, I wish I had. But no reason someone else couldn't pick it up. As for Probative, I think at some point he decided to back down because the prof threatened to kick us out of class and basically publicly shamed us for having reported on it.
The correspondence Wagoner was referring to quotes the FBI's response to her FOIA request:
To promptly respond to requests, we concentrate on identifying main files in the central records system at the San Antonio Field Office. No records responsive to your FOIA request were located by a search of the automated indices. You specifically have requested "a complete electronic and print copy of this entire PowerPoint presentation" that was presented at the University of Texas School of Law on March 8, 2006. An inquiry by a member of my staff, discovered that the presentation was not an FBI generated document, nor is it maintained in FBI files. We have been advised that the presentation was compiled with public source information from the website titled www.indymedia.com. I hope this information is helpful to you.
A call to Rasner’s office was not returned, but he seemed to suggest he was rethinking the categorization of FNB in the Times article.
It has always amazed me to hear about what kind of pacifists made the FBI's watch list back in the Red Scare days: Einstein, John Lennon, Martin Luther King, Jr. What makes the government, upon hearing the lyric, "Give peace a chance," think, "threat to the Republic"? It seems, the government hasn't gotten any better about recognizing real threats.