Big Brother in Maryland

By: Phil Tajitsu Nash, Jul 21, 2008

Tags: National, Washington Journal |

Do you care passionately enough about any issue to attend a public meeting? Have you ever taken part in a meeting where public protests may be planned?

Thanks to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union here in Maryland, we now know that groups meeting to promote peace and end the death penalty were infiltrated by government agents. These agents, who pretended to be active partisans for the anti-death penalty cause, took notes and spied on people exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly.

Students of history know that Americans exercising their Constitutional right to protest racist segregation in the 1950s, the Vietnam War in the 1960s and other government policies were the targets of illegal police spying. Individuals such as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and singer-activist Paul Robeson were spied upon and harassed for legal social change activities.

Today King and Robeson are celebrated on United States postage stamps, but we still have not learned the lesson of why state-sponsored surveillance of legal activities is not only morally wrong but also a distraction from legitimate police activities and a waste of taxpayer dollars.

A 46-page document released as a result of the ACLU lawsuit is online at the Maryland ACLU’s website. It is well worth spending a few minutes to read this document and think about how your civil liberties may have been impacted by illegal surveillance.

For example, how many of you have ever attended a commemoration of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945? I have seen many Asian Pacific Americans among the peace activists who attend these yearly reminders about the need for peaceful resolution of conflict and the insanity of using nuclear bombs on human populations.

Here in Maryland, if you were at the August 8, 2005, Hiroshima-Nagasaki commemoration rally at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, then you were under surveillance by the Maryland State Police Homeland Security and Intelligence Division. According to the surveillance report released last week, “The rally started at 1700 hours and approximately 20 people stood at 34 th and North Charles Street across from the school and the protestors held up anti-war, anti-weapons testing and anti-nuclear war banners to passing motorists. The protestors were careful not to block traffic or obstruct any pedestrians.”

At 1800 hours (6 p.m.), the group moved to a gazebo that the group had received permission to use. The covert agent’s report notes that about one and one-half hours were spent in poetry, songs, a brief history of nuclear weapons and an update on the current status of nuclear weapons usage. Uniformed members of the Johns Hopkins University Police were present at the event, so it is clear that the event organizers were not saying anything that they wanted to hide from law enforcement authorities.

The covert agent’s report concludes, “Rally participants were not observed breaking any laws.” Two public and widely discussed anti-Iraq war activities were mentioned, but “nothing else of intelligence value was discussed.”
In fact, so little of intelligence value was discussed that the covert agent him or herself ended the report by stating, “Due to the above facts, I request that this case be closed. Total investigative time for [Agent name redacted]: 13 hours.”
The released document shows that 27 meetings of peace and anti-death penalty activists were spied upon in Maryland during 2005 and 2006. The current Democratic governor has stated that the spying carried out under the regime of his Republican predecessor has ended.

Worse yet, the classified amounts of funding, perhaps millions or billions of dollars, that have been allocated to this undefined “war” have meant that government entities such as the Maryland State Police and the private contractor that filed a request to be paid for spending 13 hours at a public peace rally both have a motivation to keep the funding spigot open.

“It serves no security purpose to infiltrate peaceful groups,” said Michael German, a former FBI counter-terrorism agent who joined the ACLU two years ago as a policy counsel. “It completely misuses law enforcement resources.” Since the tragedy of September 11, 2001, said Mr. German, the government has “actively encouraged” local police agencies to become intelligence gatherers and to compile information that does not necessarily have a connection to criminal activity.

This return of Big Brother is now documented in Maryland. Similar activities may have occurred in other states. Anyone who values and uses their First Amendment rights should thank the ACLU for their efforts and re-commit themselves to defending free speech and the right to lawful assembly for all people.

Comments

Dear Mr. Nash:

I find it dishonest and frankly contemptable, that you should write about Asian Pacific Americans attending a peace rally marking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when you do not write about Asian Pacific Americans commemerating Nanking, Bataan and all of the other atrocities committed by Japan. You really tell history like it wasn’t Mr. Nash

Tell me something Mr. Nash, would you like the the sex slave survivors to just shut up and die?

Are you proud of the fact that you never wrote a column marking the suicide of Iris Chang, who exposed Nanking to the world?

Mr. Nash I think it is shameful that you do this type of mis-history!

–Reader on Jul 21, 2008
Reader:
Come out from behind your nom de plume and identify yourself as to your bona fides here.
Phil Nash is talking about domestic “American” affairs here, not WWII Japan or Nazi Germany or even today’s neo-Zionist Israel.
As such, he is absolutely on-target about Big Bro here, no doubt the FBI, which is merely repeating its performance during the late and unlamented spoch of Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover idiocies.
The goal is intimidation, and, with at least 99% of the public, it works, as it did in the midcentury past.
Informing is contemptible, and surveillance is largely useless, much like the claims of “spies” and “spying,” especially in this day and age of instant info and misinfo, and the fact that all ANYone has to do is a tad of “research” to establish the obvious.
It’s only in the minds of the manipulators and those they succeed in manipulating that these matters matter.
Elsewhere, it is to laugh, gut and belly, but for the fact that these selfsame “agents” and their “bosses” exploit same for profit — war and destruction.
And, bottom line, “Reader” is chiefest among the deluded, or is he, in fact, another “infiltrator,” another agent of “divide and conquer,” another paid lackey of the literal “police state” we seem to be today.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Is “Reader” an alias for “observer”?
P.P.S.: “Nanking” is one of the atrocities of all time, ranking, indeed, with Nagasaki and Huroshima, and no one I know apologizes for even OUR excesses in Gitmo, with or without renditions and waterboarding. But the argument by Reader simply serves to divide the APA presence and “clout” in today’s climate and doesn’t begin to address the issue of info-cop.

–Frank Eng on Jul 21, 2008
Dear Mr. Eng:

In my mind, what Mr. Nash is doing vis a vi Japanese atrocities is no better than the white wash Patrick Buchanan or Joseph Sobran have done with the Jewish Holocaust.

He is making the ridiculous and offensive argument that APAs are focusing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rather than Nanking and the countless other atrocities the Japanese military did.

Let’s all ask ourselves why Mr. Nash has written about Koramatsu and others who have nobley fought for justice for those Japanese Americans who were wrongly interned during WWII, but has never written about the Korean sex slaves who have challenged the Japanese government. Is it not ironic that Phil Tajitsu Nash acts as if he so cares about social justice but for the victims of the Japanese war machine it has been just ice with Phil Tajitsu Nash.

–reader on Jul 21, 2008
Dear “rezder”:
Ah, no doubt I have been misreading your posts, and, in that regard, I apologize.
From this latest, my presumption is that you are identifying with the victims of the Nanking Massacre of the ’30s, which is every bit as valid as the identification of ALL victims with ALL such atrocities.
I, for one, and I believe so would each and every child, woman, and man of good-will, mourn the victims, honor their martyrdoms to institutionalized murder and mayhem and destruction, AND commiserate the bereaved and the survivors.
But, that said, may I suggest that denunciations and damnings of the perpetrators should NOT extend to the blameless and fellow “innocents.”
The supermacho military types, going back to their gung=ho bushido and ronin types, AND including the likes of that latterday exponent Yukio Mishima?, are a staple in ALL militarist societies, including, very pertinently, our very own neocon “hawks” today.
There is, of course, always the romanticized “takes” on such, in every expression and projection of tribal and nationalist claims to “superiority” and “hegemony.”
All cultures entertain the same nonsense or no-sense. At least to those wbo have not been consulted before the bloodletting began.
And, true too, the fact that far too many, the so-called “majority” as well, are almost inevitably drawn into THEIR culpabilities by virtue of their passive acceptance of their putative “leaders.”
Personally, I too “hate” the perpetrators of the Nanking Massacre, but I decry the present and future murderers even more.
And, I hope, I must also separate the sheep from the wolves and the blameless from the blood-drenched war-makers, whether they merely punched “keys” or literally raped and disembowelled their betters.
It’s likely far too late for those Meiji? militarists who didn’t commit sepuku? But, since today, Karadzic has finally been summoned before an international court, perhaps the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Rummies and the Roves and that entire neocon gang may yet get their turn in the “dock” in the not-too-distant future-
I know that will be scant comfort vis-a-vis your specific psychic torture about Japanese WWII atrocities.
In that regard, it seems to me your only true catharsis would be for you to continue Iris Chang’s work.
The survivors of The Holocaust continue to pursue their killers and torturers and have emplaced their shrine to their dead and sacrificed.
I hear tell of a comparable monument/epitaph in Nanjing.
But, as today’s neo-Zionists have sadly demonstrated, vengeance can go too far.
My “take” is that the vicious cycle MUST be broken, and that we make the effort to “learn” from the past, and not repeat the horrors as this administration AND even Obama appears to be bent upon, out of Iraq but splat back further into the Afghani quagmire.
I wish you well of your struggles with “Japanese” atrocities.
Frank Eng
P.S.: And I have never heard or read a word of Phil Tajitsu Nash that even hints that he is an apologist for “Nanking.” Please separate “issues” and references, and examine your own precepts about “race” and nationalisms and historic events. And note ye well that this is supposed to be about “domestic” issues that involve “us” as American citizens in a rapidly shrinking yet ever-evolving world of disparate tribes and races and cultures and creeds.

–Frank Eng on Jul 22, 2008
Mr. Eng:

Mr. Nash has opened the door for this by 1. condemning the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 2. by honoring who he believes to be APA heros.

In November, 2004, when Chang passed away, Asianweek did extensive coverage about the passing of Ms. Chang. It is a fact that Mr. Nash wrote absolutely nothing as part of this commemeration in November, 2004. Is he the one who gets to decide who is and who is not worthy of praise?

–reader on Jul 22, 2008
Dear “reader”:
Only Mr. Nash can respond to your personal reactions here.
But I, for one, still believe in the benefit of the doubt.
I came upon this site belatedly, very belated, slow and old as I am, during the Kenneth Eng episode, which, by the way, ironically, put AsianWeek “on the map” more or less? Wikipedia still makes it a defining definition.
As such I have absolutely not idea-one as to who said what or contributed what to the acknowledgment of Iris Chang’s passing.
The “mainstream media” hardly registered a ripple, as expected, since HER passing lacked the histrionics of Mishima’s ritual seppuku?
AsianWeek’s coverage, by your measure, was relzatively thorough. Did Emil eulogize? Were there lead editorials? Were both author and “history” properly examined?
Remember that this entire nation, aside from the New Yorker’s, a sniffish weekly that has long reigned and NEVER taken a position on ANYthing that matters, publishing of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” has also NEVER acknowledged, much less rued, its decision to “nuke” two cities AFTER it was commonly known to the movers and shakers that Japan was ready to “surrender.”
There is NO remedy OR credit in comparing atrocities and those who commit them, each being sui generis.
Chiang’s armies chased the ragtag “commies” in that fabled “long march” to the loess caves of the north. Too many “warlords” “taxed” their peasants to subsistence prior to that, and the cyclic dynastic waves of ruler, domestic or tribal, were rarely any better over the millennia.
That said, what has “race” to do with it?
And even if Mr. Nash has “opened the door” to this discussion, celebrating one’s own, if indeed it is that, is no more and no less than rooting for the JabbaWockeeZ, so long as we do not denigrate others in the process.
And I, personally, find Mr. Nash an excellent spokesman for the cause of the common good.
Frank Eng
P.S.: Did Iris Chang commit suicide? If so, why? And, if so, I find it a curious non-parallel to Mishima’s, yet “symmetrical.” Life AND death are equally ambivalent, but those who kill are purely sick. Evil? That too.

–Frank Eng on Jul 22, 2008

Post your comments.

Comments using inappropriate language will not be posted. AsianWeek reserves the right to re-publish comments, into "Letters to the Editor," in which case, we reserve the right to edit comments for length and style. If you would like to write a letter to our editor, please email: asianweek@asianweek.com.