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Documents released
last week by the American Civil Liberties Union expose the
extent to which the government considers First
Amendment-protected activities and civil disobedience a
"potential terrorist activity."
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Your privacy is strictly respected. The files contain more
evidence that the Pentagon is grouping nonviolent protests
against military recruitment into a database supposedly meant to
catalogue potential terrorism threats.
The documents were obtained as a result of a lawsuit the ACLU
filed in June, after the Pentagon stonewalled a Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request initiated in February. The ACLU
filed the FOIA request to follow up on repeated reports that the
Department of Defense was monitoring protest activities and
anti-war organizations.
The documents reveal that the military is tracking groups
through its terrorism-watch database Threat and Local
Observation Notice (TALON). The Department of Homeland Security,
the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and local police
departments have supplied information to the Pentagon to help
with surveillance, the documents show.
One of the TALON documents was written to "alert commanders and
staff" to a counter-recruitment protest the Broward Anti-War
Coalition (BAWC) was staging at the Ft. Lauderdale Air and Sea
Show. The alert, submitted by the Miami-Dade police department,
said, "BAWC plans to counter military recruitment and the
‘pro-war’ message with ‘guerilla theater and other forms of
subversive propaganda.’"
Another document revealed the government is tracking some of the
anti-recruitment activities of the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker peace organization.
A third TALON report detailed counter-recruitment rallies in
Georgia, and cited Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for
Peace, and Iraq Veterans Against the War as participants.
In December 2005, NBC News obtained part of the TALON database
that included reports on about 48 anti-war meetings or protests.
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