What I'm talking about is spying on those who don’t want to see more war, and labeling them as “extremists.”
Last month the ACLU of Massachusetts and the National Lawyers Guild’s Massachusetts chapter released documents and video showing that the Boston Police have steadily been compiling so-called “intelligence reports,” by spying on a variety of ordinary citizens and nonviolent groups. United for Justice with Peace and CodePink, among others, have been classified as domestic threats to homeland security.
That’s bad enough but--on especially on Veterans Day--it's unbelievable that peaceful actions, like a demonstration to mark the anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq, would ever be labeled a “Criminal Act” carried out by “extremists.” The Boston area’s Veterans for Peace Chapter 9 Gen. Smedley D. Butler Brigade earned this dubious distinction, and you can read about others here.
Even the usual respect and deference shown to veterans wasn’t enough to keep this misguided domestic spying effort at bay. I mean, really: does a group that holds peace rallies and writes thoughtful letters like this one, asking politely to march in the American Legion’s Veterans Day parade, sound criminal or extremist to you? What part of “peace” does whoever labeled this group a threat to homeland security not understand? And don’t the agencies carrying this out have anything better to do?
Now that this has been exposed, it’s time to put a stop to it and make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you live in Massachusetts, please sign this ACLU petition to members of the state legislature, and ask others to sign it too. It calls for lawmakers to require police to have an actual reasonable suspicion of criminal activity before they engage in this kind of domestic spying.
As Pat Scanlon, coordinator of Veterans for Peace’s Smedley Butler Brigade, says in a song he has written for the group’s Veterans Day observance today in Boston, “Stop hassling the peace groups, go back to fighting crime”!
ACLU of Massachusetts communications director Chris Ott wrote this blog.