In the summer of 2004 I was in St. Petersburg, Florida organizing voter registration teams when I was invited to an anti-war protest at the Baywalk shopping center. Baywalk is a large complex in the downtown area, that has a mega movie complex and a number of restaurants and clothing shops. I wasn’t there to protest the war, but to make sure that everyone was registered to vote, or had information about how to contest their disenfranchisement (it sometimes seemed like a quarter of Floridians are convicted felons).

The protesters were peaceful, but loud and rude. They used a bullhorn, and they were aggressively confrontational to people that were just trying to go to a movie with their families.

After a while I grew frustrated with their tactics, which I considered counterproductive, and I took an elevator up to the second level to get a bite to eat. It was on the second level, near the bathrooms that I discovered a man partially hidden behind a pillar, taking telephotic photos of the protesters on the street below.


I confronted this man, demanding to know who was paying him to take pictures. Unfortunately, he refused to tell me. I then went back downstairs and rallied some troops to come up and demand some answers. But, he had left, and left so quickly that he forgot his camera bag.

At the time, we were not sure whether the man was working for the Baywalk owners, a local paper, or the FBI. But, it now appears likely he was working for the Pentagon.

As Newsweek reports, the Pentagon spied on numerous anti-war demonstrations:

In December, NBC News obtained a 400-page compilation of reports that detailed a portion of TALON’s surveillance efforts. It showed the unit had collected information on nearly four dozen antiwar meetings or protests, including one at a Quaker meetinghouse in Lake Worth, Fla., and a Students Against War demonstration at a military recruiting fair at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Not only did the Pentagon spy on, and infiltrate, anti-war groups, but they broke the law doing it.

Pentagon officials have broadly defended CIFA as a legitimate response to the domestic terror threat. But at the same time, they acknowledge that an internal Pentagon review has found that CIFA’s database contained some information that may have violated regulations. The department is not allowed to retain information about U.S. citizens for more than 90 days—unless they are “reasonably believed” to have some link to terrorism, criminal wrongdoing or foreign intelligence. There was information that was “improperly stored,” says a Pentagon spokesman who was authorized to talk about the program (but not to give his name). “It was an oversight.”

I very much doubt it was an oversight. Cheney and Rumsfeld were working in the Ford administration when the Watergate babies (Class of ’74) swept into Congress and cracked down on the kind of domestic surveillance that made Nixon notorious. And Cheney and Rumsfeld have been agitating to roll back those reforms (like the FISA Act) ever since.

In my opinion, William Arkin (who broke this story) has it right.

“This is a significant Pandora’s box [Pentagon officials] don’t want opened,” says Arkin. “What we’re looking at is hints of what they’re doing.” As far as the Pentagon is concerned, that means we’ve already seen too much.

I’ve seen too much of the Bush administration. I don’t care what Usama Bin-Laden says, I am not going to be distracted from the criminality of this government.