FBI monitoring of antiwar protests questioned

WASHINGTON -- A key civil liberties group and a politician raised the prospect yesterday that FBI monitoring of antiwar protesters could stifle legitimate dissent and jeopardize people's First Amendment right to speak their mind.

"What is the chilling effect that will be felt by Americans all across the country if they think they will come under FBI scrutiny just by going to a protest?" said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

An FBI official yesterday denied any effort to collect intelligence on people exercising their rights to free speech. The official said the effort was aimed at providing police around the country with information about how to handle such protests, including the possibility of violence.

In one of its weekly bulletins sent to thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide, the FBI detailed last month some of the tactics that police could expect at large rallies in San Francisco and Washington, D.C., from those protesting the Iraq war. Past bulletins, which usually concern terrorist threats and activities, also have discussed activities by such groups as environmental advocates and antiglobalization activists.

The bulletins are confidential, but, largely because of their wide dissemination, media organizations have obtained several of them. The New York Times first provided details yesterday about the October bulletin, which concerned the antiwar protests.

Among other things, the bulletin described how protesters plan their tactics at "training camps," how they use gas masks to defend against tear gas, and how some use fake identification to get into secure places. The document also says that while most demonstrators are peaceful, protests such as those against the World Bank have turned violent.

Critics called attention to a section of the bulletin that urges police to report suspicious or unlawful activity to their local Joint Terrorism Task Force, a multiagency group run by the FBI. The ACLU's Romero said that has the effect of equating protest with terrorism and casts a pall of suspicion over anyone who disagrees with the Iraq war or other government antiterrorism policies.

"There is a very clear difference between legitimate forms of civil disobedience and terrorism, and we have to keep that in mind," Romero said.

During the antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam War era, in the late 1960s, the FBI undertook a broad program to spy on and neutralize what it called the New Left, often translated into opponents of the US involvement in Southeast Asia. The program, called Cointelpro, for "counterintelligence programs," grew out of anticommunist spying of the 1950s and used questionable or illegal tactics to counter terrorism and people who threatened violence.

Speaking yesterday on ABC's "This Week," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the story about the FBI showed him that the Bush administration is going to "extraordinary lengths" to attack anyone who disagrees with the Iraq war.

"That, I think, is a fundamental flaw of this administration," Kennedy said. "How could we be fighting abroad to defend our freedoms and diminishing those freedoms here at home?"

The FBI official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the bureau is not collecting intelligence on protesters, but wants to identify extremist elements, such as proenvironment and antiglobalization groups that vandalize private property.

Most of the October bulletin, the official said, stemmed from publicly available material about the protesters.