Grassroots/Hank Kalet

The Dangers of Anti-Terror Laws

This is a perilous moment for civil liberties. In the wake of the Jan. 6 mob attack on the US Capitol, there have been calls to expand efforts to combat domestic terrorism, including a new “national strategy” unveiled by the Biden administration and legislation introduced by Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin that would create new federal offices, and mandate new assessments and training requirements for law enforcement.

But these efforts are built on a dangerous foundation: Local, state, and federal law enforcement use of surveillance and profiling, which historically have targeted communities of color, religious minorities, and peaceful activists.

Law enforcement’s anti-terror strategies have, going back before 9/11, “have disproportionately targeted Black, Brown, Muslim, and immigrant communities through the lens of ‘security threat,’ and harmed our rights to free expression, due process, and equal protection under the law,” the ACLU said in a recent statement.

The Biden strategy, the organization says, builds on these flaws rather than addressing them or fixing them. Relying “too heavily on law enforcement suspicion, investigation, and policing of beliefs rather than actual conduct — violence or attempted violence.”

There is no doubt that right-wing domestic terrorism is a threat, accounting for “the majority of all terrorist incidents in the United States since 1994,” says the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which calls itself a bipartisan research group. The CSIS report, released in 2020, found that “Right-wing extremists perpetrated two thirds of the attacks and plots in the United States in 2019 and over 90% between Jan. 1 and May 8, 2020,” and that “terrorism in the United States will likely increase over the next year” in response to the election, COVID, and other issues, the report predicted. This was in June 2020, not long after arrests were made in Michigan in connection with a plot to kill the state’s governor.

BuzzFeed News reporting raises questions about how the Michigan plot unfolded that echo the excesses of the Bush administration’s efforts against al Qaeda, with accusations that FBI may have entrapped the plotters. If this is true — and this remains a big if — it would not be the first time law enforcement engaged in what former FBI Director Robert Mueller once called “forward leaning – preventative – prosecutions.”

Cases like the Fort Dix Five and Newburgh Four are just the high-profile tip of this spear. There are hundreds of other, smaller instances of law enforcement’s use of “entrapment,” which carries multiple meanings. As The Guardian pointed out several years ago, “the common usage” defines it as when law enforcement “manipulat(es) unwary people who otherwise were unlikely to become terrorists,” but who are predisposed to an outside-the-mainstream political belief, to join a violent plot. For this to be legal, The Guardian adds, “the prosecution merely has to show a subject was predisposed to carry out the actions they later are accused of.”

That means most of those accused of terrorism under these circumstances, including the alleged plotters against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, can be prosecuted and potentially convicted despite law-enforcement involvement. And if they were engaged in a real plot, they deserve prosecution.

Still, this kind of police behavior can cross a line and is ripe for potential abuse, as the ACLU points out. Federal policy already targets whole communities (Blacks, Muslims) and protesters with often “unjustified surveillance, investigation, and prosecution.” Our history is pockmarked with instances of this kind of overreach, whether it was the early Red Scare, decades of anti-communism, the COINTELPRO program, the Patriot Act, or the targeting of leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, of Muslims, of Black Lives Matter organizers for surveillance.

We need to be conscious of the dangers unleashed when we let law enforcement loose on political actors and political speech. The goal here cannot be to rein in fringe political beliefs. That must remain outside the purview of law enforcement, no matter how noxious and ugly some of those beliefs may be. The goal should be to use our already broad web of legal tools to prevent violence if possible and to prosecute it when it happens, and not to surveil political actors based on their beliefs.

Hank Kalet is a writer base in central New Jersey. Email hankkalet@gmail.com; Twitter @newspoet41; Instagram, @kaletwrites; Patreon @newspoet41; Substack, hankkalet.substack.com.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021

Populist.com