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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.
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