Home Page

 

 

 

 

 

ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES

 

May 26, 2005

ACLU demands FBI’s Hub activist spy files

Jeremy Schwab

Less than a year after the September 11 bombings, Yaju Dharmarajah received a call from his wife while he was at work organizing for the Service Employees International Union Local 509.

She said Amherst Police and FBI agents had come to their home saying they had received a call that suspected terrorists wanted to videotape a Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency disaster relief training.

Apparently, when Dharmarajah had called MEMA the week before hoping to get training that would improve his qualifications for human rights jobs overseas, the MEMA outreach director heard his foreign accent and last name and called the FBI.

“An irony here is that I’m a Sri Lankan and a Hindu, but now anyone with a foreign accent and a name like [mine] is seen as being a terrorist,” said Dharmarajah.

The overzealous pursuit of potential “terrorists” has led the FBI to investigate other political activists, according to American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts Legal Director John Reinstein. Reinstein’s organization filed Freedom of Information Act requests last week asking for all records kept by the FBI and other counterterrorism agencies on four local groups and 10 individuals, including Dharmarajah.

The list includes the ACLU, the American Friends Service Committee, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the International Action Committee Boston, an anti-war group.

Some of the individuals named say they have been followed or otherwise spied upon by federal agents, particularly last summer leading up to the Democratic and Republican national conventions. Others are simply prominent activists opposed to Bush administration policies, and suspect their activities could lead federal agents to track them.

An FBI spokeswoman would not comment on the information requests.

Even if the FBI or other agencies are conducting widespread spying on political activists, it would be difficult for the ACLU to stop them, according to Reinstein.

“It certainly violates the spirit of the First Amendment, but could we go into court tomorrow and say you can no longer do this? No,” said Reinstein.

But some are considering taking legal action if it is found they have been spied on.

Kazi Touré, co-coordinator of the AFSC’s criminal justice program, says that what appeared to be federal agents followed him to and from New York last summer prior to the Republican National Convention there, parked outside his house and even followed him to the AFSC office in Cambridge where he alerted his co-workers, who took pictures of them in their cars.

“I would like to bring a lawsuit against them for a few things — the harassment they caused me and still cause me, but also what they said about me wasn’t true. On Nightline, they said I was training terrorists, training people in weapons [use].”

Touré was convicted of conspiracy to overthrow the government in connection to 14 bombings in the 1980s, he said. But he said he now does educational work and did not even plan on attending the Republican Convention.

Other federal investigations in the Boston area in recent years have angered civil liberties activists, including the case of Palestinian activist Amer Jubran, who agreed to be deported in 2003 based on alleged technicalities in his visa application. He had been detained by the FBI, apparently for carrying leaflets for a pro-Palestine demonstration and refusing to answer questions without a lawyer present.

Back to Lead Story Archives

Home Page