One-Finger Salute

California "anti-terrorist" center monitored anti-war activists

More on the equation of dissent with "terrorism" that I wrote about earlier this year. (The item below is a few days old, but I'm putting it up because it appeared in the local daily rag, the Oakland Tribune, so the chances that very many people saw it are miniscule.)

Information gathered in the wake of the brutal police suppression (scroll down a bit) of a peaceful protest in Oakland on 7 April 2003 has revealed that the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) has been collecting information on activists in the Bay Area. CATIC makes very little distinction between "criminal" activity and "terrorism". The targets of CATIC bulletins have included Critical Mass bicycle riders, protestors employing nonviolent direct action, and even longshoremen discussing labor issues.

...causing a traffic jam can be enough to trigger a CATIC analysis and bulletin. At the Port of Oakland, where trucks would be blocked from reaching shippers such as APL, a protest target, that logic might have been more compelling, [CATIC officials] Manavian and Van Winkle suggested.

"If we receive information that 10,000 folks are going to a street corner and going to block it, that's breaking a law," Manavian said. "That's the kind of information that we're going to relay."

Said Van Winkle: "I've heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs going off and killing people."[emphases added]

Certainly not - why not just dispense altogether with the notion of "terrorism" causing terror, like the US State Department has done? Hell, why don't we just say that "terrorism" is the same as "vandalism" or "jaywalking" or preventing capitalists from "maximizing" their profits?

Speaking of definitions of "terrorism", how does CATIC determine what is "terrorist" and what isn't, leaving aside the "hurting-profits-is-terrorism" rule of thumb?

The center draws $6.7 million a year in state funds to prevent terrorism. Analysts must obey one federal rule to limit the intelligence they gather, analyze and disseminate: It must have a criminal predicate, a "reasonable suspicion" that criminal acts will be committed.
...

The state's anti-terror center also operates without a clear definition of terrorism. Asked for one, Van Winkle replied: "I'm not sure where to go with that. But as a state organization, we have this information and we're going to share it."
...

"You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department."You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act"[emphases added].

Inescapable logic - and from a state Justice Department official who doesn't even know what "terrorism" is. Guess he'll have to get his marching orders on who's a terrorist from Bush, Rumsfeld and the gang - people who, thanks to their happy and beneficial dealings with tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Islam Karimov and others, really know what terrorism is all about.