COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Counter-Recruitment: General
Pentagon Treats Counter-recruitment Activism as 'Terrorism'
Megan Tady, The Newstandard
Oct. 16, 2006
Documents released last week by the American Civil LibertiesUnion expose the extent to which the government considers First
Amendment-protected activities and civil disobedience a "potential
terrorist activity."
The files contain more evidence that the Pentagon is grouping
nonviolent protests against military recruitment into a database supposedly meant
to catalogue potential terrorism threats.
The documents were obtained as a result of a lawsuit the ACLU filed in
June, after the Pentagon stonewalled a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) request initiated in February. The ACLU filed the FOIA request to
follow up on repeated reports that the Department of Defense was monitoring
protest activities and anti-war organizations.
The documents reveal that the military is tracking groups through its
terrorism-watch database Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON).
The Department of Homeland Security, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force
and local police departments have supplied information to the Pentagon to
help with surveillance, the documents show.
One of the TALON documents was written to "alert commanders and staff"
to a counter-recruitment protest the Broward Anti-War Coalition (BAWC) was
staging at the Ft. Lauderdale Air and Sea Show. The alert, submitted by
the Miami-Dade police department, said, "BAWC plans to counter military
recruitment and the 'pro-war' message with 'guerilla theater and other
forms of subversive propaganda.'"
Another document revealed the government is tracking some of the
anti-recruitment activities of the American Friends Service Committee, a
Quaker peace organization.
A third TALON report detailed counter-recruitment rallies in Georgia,
and cited Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and Iraq
Veterans Against the War as participants.
In December 2005, NBC News obtained part of the TALON database that
included reports on about 48 anti-war meetings or protests.
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