|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
||| |||
||| A N T I F A |||
||| |||
||| I N F O - B U L L E T I N |||
||| _____ |||
||| |||
||| * News * Analysis * Research * Action * |||
||| |||
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
*****
||/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\||/\||
|| * -- SPECIAL -- * August 07, 1998 * -- EDITION -- * ||
||\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/||\/||
* SPECIAL EDITION *
* * *
`Legislation of the New World Order'
_________________________________________________________________
THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT
AND AMERICA'S SECRET COURT
_________________________________________________________________
By Paul DeRienzo and Joan Moossy
AFIB Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the
National Lawyers Guild New York News, August 1998. Co-author
Paul DeRienzo has written extensively on police abuse, state
repression and CIA connections to international narco-
fascism. His articles have appeared, among other places, in
New York City's premier alternative paper, _The Shadow_. He
can be reached at: pdr@echonyc.com
* * *
Imagine a secret court made up of anonymous judges chosen by
the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and empowered to grant
wiretaps, approve break-ins, tap psychiatrist's offices and bug
homes -- all without probable cause. The hearings are conducted
in secret without notification of the proposed target and without
due process, since the subject of the investigation can't
challenge the evidence or answer the charges brought against
them.
Such a secret court does in fact exist. It was created in
1978 under a law entitled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act, or FISA, that was designed to limit the abuses of authority
made legion by the administration of former President Richard
Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
However, according to many legal experts, FISA may in fact
facilitate civil-rights violations against Americans. Even
conservatives like Yale law school professor Robert Bork, who
said FISA would "not be the first regulatory scheme that turned
out to benefit the regulated rather than the public," are
troubled by this legislation.
In February 1998, Kurt Stand, Theresa Squillacote and James
Clark were indicted under FISA for alleged conspiracy to commit
espionage for the former German Democratic Republic, Soviet
Union, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of South Africa.
The arrests were carried out as a result of a so-called false
flag or sting operation. Stand, 43, North American representative
of the International Union of Food Workers, along with
Squillacote, 40, his wife for 20 years and a former procurement
lawyer for the Pentagon, are charged with attempted espionage on
behalf of South Africa and obtaining national defense information
to be used to the injury of the United States. Squillacote is
also charged with violating an oath regarding the handling of
classified material upon her January 1997 resignation from the
Pentagon.
The roots of FISA lie in the upheavals in the 1960s and
'70s. During that time tens of thousands of citizens were drawn
into a plethora of political movements, from the civil-rights
movement to anti-war demonstrations. Rebellions rocked cities and
college campuses and many began to seriously question traditional
obligations of a citizen to their government as a bloody,
unpopular war raged. The federal government moved quickly to
staunch the tide of rebellion and social change through a program
of dirty tricks and unprecedented violations of personal rights
and privacy, often justified as necessary for the national
security.
As public outrage towards government abuses grew, Congress
was forced to investigate through a committee headed by Senator
Frank Church of Idaho. The Church committee found that the
nation's intelligence agencies had ignored and violated the
Constitution. The FBI had been responsible for the infamous
COINTELPRO Counter-intelligence program that targeted those
forces director Hoover believed were politically dangerous, such
as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and a
host of popular political leaders, including the Reverend Martin
Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.
Until the Church Committee report freewheeling conduct by
intelligence agencies under the purview of the executive branch
had been considered part of the president's "inherent authority,"
a concept popularized by President Nixon's term of "executive
privilege." One of the main issues was the separation of federal
domestic law enforcement and counter-intelligence activities.
Electronic surveillance in criminal investigations requires a
warrant under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968
and the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The purpose of
FISA was to create a warrant procedure in counter-intelligence
surveillance to allegedly right the wrongs of the Nixon years.
Warrantless national security surveillance is illegal if its
basis is the furtherance of a criminal investigation.
When FISA was enacted, Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the
House-Senate FISA conference committee, predicted that domestic
targets of the Act might number about 100 each year. In the 20
years since FISA, the court has not turned down any of the
government's approximately 10,000 surveillance requests.
According to a Department of Justice official who conducted an
internal review of FISA, "so many FISAs were being conducted with
so few attorneys that the review process to prevent factual and
legal errors was virtually nonexistent." Using FISA, the FBI has
investigated over 1,330 progressive domestic political and
religious groups because of their solidarity with the Committee
in Support of the People of El Salvador. The threat, according to
Herman Schwartz, writing in The Nation is that, "the enactment of
FISA has not eliminated the incentive to use intelligence
gathering authority improperly to obtain evidence for criminal
prosecutions.
After the exposure of FBI spying against CISPES in the 1980s
pressure built for reform. In 1995 Attorney General Janet Reno
issued new guidelines setting rules for the conduct of FBI agents
in counterintelligence operations using electronic surveillance.
But the new guidelines also expanded FISA to permit physical
searches based on the same minimal level of suspicion used to
permit electronic surveillance. The 1995 extension of FISA now
allows for the first time in US history actual searches of
citizens and legal residences outside the Fourth Amendment.
The DOJ internal report spreads the alarm that "Under the
Clinton administration, the nation's two systems for wiretapping
- [Title III] for criminal cases, [FISA] for intelligence
gathering - [have] become freight trains running at full throttle
down parallel tracks."
Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern
European communist bloc in 1991, FISA wiretap and search
authorizations have increased dramatically from 484 in 1992 to
839 in 1996, while Title III criminal wiretaps have increased at
a slower rate going from 340 in 1992 to 581 four years later.
Currently there are more FISA wiretaps approved each year than
normal criminal wiretap warrants.
Although the goal of FISA is to protect the rights of
citizens while allowing counterintelligence probes under the
president's authority to conduct foreign policy the catch is that
the law allows the fruits of FISA searches and wiretaps to be
introduced as evidence in criminal prosecutions.
THE SQUILLACOTE-STAND CASE
On January 5, 1990, less than a year before the Berlin wall
fell, an angry crowd stormed the Ministry of State Security for
the German Democratic Republic and seized raw files containing
the names of agents, informers, contacts and targets. The FBI
doesn't say how it came to believe that Squillacote and Stand
worked for East Germany. The government's affidavit is
deliberately unclear about the source of this information. The
information could have come from the files stolen in 1990, an
operation credited by some to the CIA, or it could have come from
a huge store of files still in Berlin. Supporters of the two
defendants wonder if the source of the allegation was a former
East German agent informing to bargain for a shorter sentence, or
phone taps from the East German embassy. Both are considered
unreliable even by the FBI. Under FISA, the FBI is permitted to
hide its sources from the defendants and provide the information
only to the secret FISA court.
In 1996 the FBI began 24-hour surveillance of Stand,
Squillacote and Clark, that lasted for nearly 2 years. The
surveillance intruded into all aspects of their lives, including
their family, health, relationships, finance and professional
work. Most seriously, the surveillance targeted direct
conversations with Squillacote's psychiatrist and included a
hidden microphone in her bedroom recording conversations with her
husband. The FBI prepared a psychological profile of Squillacote
identifying what they perceived to be her vulnerabilities. In one
of three secret searches of their residence the FBI found a 1995
letter from Squillacote to South African Defense Minister and
Communist Party leader Ronnie Kasrils. That stolen letter became
the basis of the government's sting operation. An FBI agent
posing as an official of the Mandela government approached
Squillacote requesting information. The documents Squillacote
removed from the Pentagon and turned over the undercover FBI
agent are the only actual documents involved in the entire case.
No documents are alleged to have been turned over to a foreign
power.
The FBI forged a letter from the South African government
with Kasrils signature requesting meetings with Squillacote. The
letter states that the South African government needed
Squillacote's assistance in the United States and eventually a
series of meetings were set up between Squillacote and the phony
South African. When the arrests were made in October the FBI
originally stated that the sting had been carried out with the
cooperation of South Africa. The South African government
protested and demanded an apology which was personally extended
by FBI director Louis Freeh. Kasrils has said he will attend the
trial and testify on Squillacote's behalf.
Since the arrest both Stand and Squillacote have been
imprisoned without bail at a jail in Alexandria, Virginia. The
trial is before United States District Judge Claude Hilton in the
Eastern District of Virginia, the so-called "rocket docket,"
where conservative judges and juries are famous for making short
work of defendants. Supporters of Squillacote and Stand maintain
that the government went "venue-shopping" and the arrests were
made in Alexandria in order to avoid a liberal Washington, DC
jury.
The trial was originally slated to start on Monday, October
5th, but in a July 20 hearing, Judge Hilton, blaming a "judge's
conference," moved the start of the trial to October 7th. Hilton
apologized, saying the trial would now have to continue over a
weekend. Apparently he has intended for the trial, including jury
selection, to last only five days.
Kurt Stand is represented by Richard Sauber of Fried, Frank,
Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson. Theresa Squillacote is represented
by Lawrence Robins of the century-old law firm of Mayer, Brown,
and Platt. Robbins' clients include First Lady Hillary Clinton.
The defense has also been aided by a number of well-known New
York attorneys including Leonard Weinglass and Ron Kuby, as well
as the Center for National Security Studies and the American
Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. According to sources on the
defense team, preparations have been made to win the case on
appeal since a May 18th opinion where Judge Hilton turned down
every defense motion aimed at suppressing evidence obtained or
derived from searches conducted in violation of FISA.
At the July 20th hearing, judge Hilton refused to suppress
evidence collected during a six-day search of the Squillacote and
Stand residence. The judge also ruled that extensive wiretaps of
their conversations were legally authorized. The judge also
rejected a bid for a "taint hearing' after the defense lawyers
argued that FBI agents used wiretaps to collect information
protected by psychotherapist and marital privileges.
In a post Cold War world where the tensions between former
great powers has been replaced by a multiplicity of struggles
throughout the developing world, many more Americans will become
involved in the affairs of countries at odds with US foreign and
economic policy and may find themselves under attack under FISA.
In the 60s it was civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters
who were the targets, in the 1980s it was the movement to support
the people in war-torn El Salvador who were victimized by
government spying and dirty tricks; today it could be Indonesia,
Chiapas, Iraq or any other hot spot. According to a 1978
editorial in The New Republic, "The vagueness of the requirement
under FISA that the target of surveillance be a foreign power or
agent of a foreign power invites abuses... conceivably it could
include any American with commercial, educational or personal
relationship with a foreign person or organization."
For more information on this case contact the Fund for the
Fourth Amendment, PO Box 5685 Washington, D.C. 20016; (202)
829-6167. An informational event/fundraiser on the
Squillacote-Stand case and FISAN is scheduled for New York
City in September. Call 212-209-2955 for the date and
location.
* * *
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (AFIB)
750 La Playa # 730
San Francisco, California 94121
E-Mail: tburghardt@igc.org
*
On PeaceNet visit ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN on pol.right.antifa
Via the Web --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib.html
Archive --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib-bulletins.html
*
ANTI-FASCIST FORUM (AFF)
Antifa Info-Bulletin is a member of the Anti-Fascist Forum
network. AFF is an info-group which collects and
disseminates information, research and analysis on fascist
activity and anti-fascist resistance. More info:
E-mail: aff@burn.ucsd.edu
Web: http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff
+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
+: A N T I F A I N F O - B U L L E T I N +:
:+ :+
+: NEWS * ANALYSIS * RESEARCH * ACTION +:
:+ :+
+: RESISTING FASCISM * BY ALL MEANS NECESSARY! +:
+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+:+
++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++
++++ if you agree copy these 3 sentences in your own sig ++++
++++ see: http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/spg-l/sigaction.htm ++++
(
geocities.com/CapitolHill)