By Andrew Becker
Many of the thousands of new border agents hired in recent years as part of a push to block drug traffickers and other safety threats from entering the country might actually pose security risks themselves, a Homeland Security official testified today.
"The City of Corpus Christi hasn't used the $188,000 video screen it bought with homeland security funding in 2008," begins Texas Tribune reporter Brandi Grissom in a March 8 story about federal preparedness and anti-terrorism grants.
Confidential informants who don't have legal immigrant status have been led to believe that federal agencies would help them get U.S. residency in exchange for their assistance in undercover investigations, only to have the implied or explicit promises broken. CIR's Andrew Becker reports for the Los Angeles Times.
On KGO-TV, Matthew Bettenhausen, Acting Secretary of the California Emergency Management Agency, responds to questions in unedited interview with investigative reporter Dan Noyes about homeland security expenditures in California:
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| Police watch protestors at the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. |
The Republican National Convention was scheduled to begin Sept. 1 in St. Paul last year. With just days left on Aug. 26, a pair of videographers from New York who film street protests wandered around downtown Minneapolis lost and looking for a Greyhound station where a friend from Chicago was arriving. After finally retrieving her, they lugged a pile of heavy gear onto a city bus headed for the northwest section of the city to a house they planned to stay at for the night.
The tired trio climbed off the bus well past midnight near a busy corridor of cargo trains. Two police cars showed up and flooded them with search beams. The officers, saying they were investigating auto burglaries in the area, began searching their packs. They discovered pamphlets handed out by the Welcoming Committee and became alarmed. "It was like they'd found Al-Qaeda or something," Vladimir Teichberg, one of the filmmakers on the scene, recalls.
Cameras, phones, laptops, notebooks and cash were taken away. Each was questioned individually in the squad cars. Their IDs came up clean. The group made sure, for the record, to deny consent to the searches before demanding itemized receipts of everything confiscated. None were given, nor was anyone charged with a crime. "This is your case number. Call tomorrow," the officers said. They rushed to the house and began contacting lawyers.
The officers later sought approval for a warrant to examine all the electronic equipment they'd taken. The case was assigned to Minneapolis police Sgt. Thomas Stiller, who attempted to establish that the group had committed a "gross misdemeanor" by trespassing on the railroad property. That would mean a violation of the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act of 2002, which forbids anyone from nearing a "critical public service facility" without permission. Employees of such facilities are even empowered to carry out arrests of trespassers under the post-Sept. 11 state law.
The next day after the three were stopped, they held a press conference with legal aid volunteers and denounced the incident to reporters. Under pressure, the Minneapolis Police Department finally called to say they could have their possessions back, but batteries on the laptops were run down and film on an analog camera was exposed. They've since filed a lawsuit alleging civil rights violations.
Raid at a theater
Three days later during the weekend before the convention, multiple federal and local law enforcement agencies undertook a more coordinated drive against protesters they would later describe in court records as "disruption mode." Their list of targets started with a fading brick building known as the Smith Theater, located across the Mississippi River from St. Paul's Xcel Center where the convention would be held. According to their intelligence, activists from around the country were gathering there. About 70 people had convened inside.
On the evening of Aug. 29, the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office, the St. Paul Police Department and the FBI raced up to the theater in cars and screeched to a stop. The group inside suddenly heard a loud commotion as sheriff's deputies burst into the theater yelling "Police! Get on the floor! Get on the floor!" leveling rifles and side arms at the crowd. The authorities sealed off the area around the building and everyone was zip-cuffed. They then demanded that the activists consent to having photographs taken and show their IDs if they wanted to leave.
Police walked through the theater looking for explosives, sticks and poles, chicken wire, roofing tar, spray paint, hollowed-out puppets, "urine and feces" they believed would be hurled during protests, and virtually every type of electronics possible, including X-boxes and iPods, all listed in a warrant signed by a judge. They breezed past a grand staircase that led to an adjacent screening room where people were watching movies and instead of using the steps to reach them counted to three before knocking down a nearby door with a battering ram.
But the raid by its end didn't net a weapons cache as the warrant described. There was a traffic barrel with an anarchist symbol on it, two flares, one slingshot, "glass jar with unknown substance" and maps with entrances to the city allegedly color-coded to assist in blockading downtown St. Paul. The findings were enough for police to justify seizing laptops and cell phones, cameras, supplies for making banners and signs, bus-route maps handed out to visitors from out-of-town, piles of political pamphlets and other items. No one in the building was arrested during the raid.
Activist Garrett Fitzgerald, 26, was watching the front door of the theater when the raid occurred and didn't get to his home south of downtown Minneapolis until 4 or 5 a.m. after police let everyone go. He set the alarm for 8 a.m., but before it went off, Fitzgerald heard the back door being broken down and the sound of police filling the house with commands — "Get on the floor! On your stomach!"
He was frightened and thought, "Well, I'd sure like to be wearing pants when they come in." Fitzgerald dressed quickly and called a legal aid number before setting the live phone nearby as he lay down on the floor. They didn't answer and police hung it up after crashing through his bedroom door with a battering ram. "Put your hands behind your back!" they shouted, Fitzgerald said in interviews.
Police proceeded to seize items from his house that Fitzgerald said could be found anywhere — jars of staples, a hatchet, spray paint, wire cutters and a hacksaw. But they also found 37 caltrops, steel points that can be placed in the street to deflate tires, according to court records.
Monica Bicking, 24, and Eryn Trimmer, 23, who also lived at the house with Fitzgerald, were arrested along with him and taken to a jail. Police from departments across the Twin Cities joined by the FBI carried out two more raids at homes that morning in Minneapolis and discovered "throwing-style knives in a bag," a lock-picking kit, U-locks for the alleged tactic of attaching protesters to immovable objects, and light bulbs, which police claim can be filled with paint and other chemicals to be thrown.
Eight people total were arrested in the days to come, police charging them with "conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism," criminal enhancements contained in the Minnesota Anti-Terrorism Act and used for the first time during the Republican National Convention. Seven months later, after the global media presence dissipated, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner dropped the terrorism accusations, complaining that they "complicated" the case. Today the RNC 8, as supporters have dubbed them, face charges of conspiring to riot and damage property.
Followed by undercover agents
RNC 8 defendant Garrett Fitzgerald, who's out on bail, wasn't shocked by his arrest, believing police commonly pursue political activists with undue haste. Infiltration of his group the Welcoming Committee had never been out of the realm of possibility. But police this time had gone to the extreme. Preemptive raids. Months of spying. Terrorism charges.
Paid undercover informants had followed him and the other activists to protest planning meetings around the country for months and were alleging in charging papers that Fitzgerald had discussed ways to disable police cars, puncture their gas tanks and use carpeting nails as road spikes. They described him as "present" during workshops where attendees proposed "kidnapping delegates," "capturing federal buildings" and "sabotaging the Xcel Center."
Lawyers have encouraged the group not to answer too many prying questions about specific claims made by informants. But the RNC 8 and their supporters have disputed implications that old tires and bricks found by police were going to be used for starting noxious fires and shattering windows. They're also pointing to statements made in jest to informants that were then earnestly reported to police handlers as obvious plans for destruction.
"People need to be very wary of trusting these informants' accounts of things," said Fitzgerald. "Ramsey County filed the complaints. It's their job to make the very best case they can, not necessarily to get the truth."
It's difficult to tell how much of the material collected was going to be used for furthering terrorism and rioting, such as ninja foot spikes and throwing-style knives. A memo from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center – one of many intelligence-oriented fusion center established by local police with homeland security grants after Sept. 11 – admits many of the items police should look for are everyday objects like bottled water, first-aid supplies, computers and pamphlets. The center doesn't offer meaningful advice for how police can establish probable cause and conclude reliably that something will be used for "illegal direct action" activities and thus be seized or photographed.
Tony Bouza is a former Minneapolis police chief whose own wife of 50 years was arrested during an anti-war protest in 1983 when he headed the department. He hasn't hesitated in the past to criticize law enforcement decision-making, but on the issue of preemptive raids, Bouza called them "brilliant."
"They secured search warrants. They secured evidence. If they turned up innocent people, then I would be critical," he said. "I thought the aggressive police tactics [in advance of the convention] were well carried out. I don't subscribe to the notion that these were baseless raids of innocent people."
Police claims challenged
But other "intelligence-led policing" that occurred on Aug. 30 as the final countdown to the Republican convention began challenges the legitimacy of police claims.
Around 1 p.m. that day, a dozen St. Paul police officers rushed toward a duplex west of the city dressed in black and armed with pistols and rifles. Michael Whalen, a waiter at the North Star Hotel for 30 years where the city's business and political elite frequently dine, saw the curious spectacle of police running past his window as he sat in the living room. More were coming through the yard.
The officers asked to be allowed in the house but didn't have a warrant and were told no. So they waited for two hours until a judge approved one detaining all those who tried to leave before then. Whalen started calling newspapers and TV stations as the incident turned into a circus with media filling the neighbor's yard angling for a view.
"This is what we're going to do," an officer said to the 10 or so people inside after the warrant arrived. "We're going to search you, handcuff you, take you into the back yard, and then we're going to search the house." Each of the occupants was photographed after being sat down.
Whalen was dumbstruck. Sure people knew him as a noisy supporter of Irish independence and a radical on other issues. But his nephew dates the mayor's daughter, and Whalen's old roommate was once a top DFL official. Judges and mayoral candidates had attended events supporting the reunification of Ireland that he helped organize. "I've never been afraid of what I do politically," he said.
Police, it turned out, had told the judge that a local bookstore Whalen helped run called Arise! was co-owned by Sara Jane Olson, a Vietnam-era political activist, sympathizer with the Symbionese Liberation Army and fugitive of more than 20 years who lived under an assumed name as a community volunteer and doctor's wife in St. Paul. When finally arrested in June of 1999, she served seven years in prison and was released recently for her alleged role in planting bombs under Los Angeles police cars and a bank robbery stemming from the mid-1970s.
The affidavit supporting the search warrant also claimed that 21 heavy packages were delivered to Whalen's home and that a postal carrier questioned by police could only lift them two at a time. An FBI agent learned from a "reliable source" that the packages contained weapons intended to be used at the convention. A St. Paul police officer assigned to the area's Joint Terrorism Task Force told the judge they were conducting surveillance on Whalen's house when he allegedly climbed into a Chevy Cobalt to leave. They attempted to pull the car over and the driver fled briefly before being stopped, according to the affidavit.
But the St. Paul Police Department's own later report of the incident, obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting, contradicts the sworn affidavit and says that Whalen himself was not in the car. The document further states that the Cobalt was pulled over after the warrant was served, not before.
No dangerous arsenal was discovered in the duplex and no one was arrested, including Whalen. The boxes a reliable source alleged were full of deadly weapons turned out to contain pamphlets that offered advice on how to convert to a vegetarian diet and belonged to someone who rented a room in the house. The roommate earned $17 an hour handing them out on college campuses around the Midwest.
"That application for a search warrant was ridiculous," said Eileen Clancy, a founder of I-Witness Video based in New York who was in the home that day. "We were not involved even in organizing demonstrations, not that there's anything wrong with that."
Whalen's had little to no contact with Olson since she withdrew from Arise! in 1995. He has filed suit over the incident.
Searching a bus
Raids continued elsewhere that day.
At around 5 in the afternoon six miles west of Whalen's home, two bike patrol officers from the Minneapolis Police Department learned about a green bus located in a parking lot downtown with a group of people gathered around loading supplies. Police had been told to be on the lookout for feces and urine that protesters might attempt to throw during clashes on the street, or devices that could be used to link demonstrators together making it more difficult for them to be removed.
According to one fusion center document, arriving demonstrators will likely have "limited financial resources," which should make it "difficult for these groups to restock their logistical support system" if protest materials are taken away by police. "History has shown that violent demonstrators collect and stockpile items at various locations to be used to further their cause at these types of events. … Anything that seems out of place for its location could indicate the stockpiling of supplies to be used against first responders."
As they watched, the officers noticed two five-gallon buckets near the rear entrance of the bus. Because the sun shined through them, the pair could see irregular-shaped mounds inside the pails that didn't appear to be entirely liquid. One container lid fell off and suddenly they could smell an odor coming from the area of the bus resembling human feces, according to a police report. There was a large amount of PVC pipe and plywood stacked in the back of the bus, and someone also loaded in an animal kennel. They must be planning some type of direct action, the officers thought, so the two contacted a lieutenant to relay their fear, police documents state.
The bus pulled out of the parking lot, and Stan Wilson sat in the driver's seat, his wife Delyla helping to navigate as they made their way toward St. Paul for an event there. With their daughter, the family of permaculture enthusiasts travels the United States teaching sustainable living techniques.
At around 6:30 police lights flashed behind the bus. At least two more cars were waiting for them when they pulled over on a highway exit. Soon several law-enforcement vehicles crammed the road's shoulder, including an unmarked black suburban, and around two-dozen officers were on scene from Ramsey County, St. Paul, Minneapolis, the highway patrol and a local university.
"Everybody off the bus now," one officer ordered.
Stan Wilson asked why they were pulled over. But none of the explanations were quite clear, according to the couple.
What Delyla and Stan Wilson couldn't have known at the time was that local authorities had contacted a fusion center in Montana where the bus was registered. Police there possessed information that the Wilsons were affiliated with Earth First!, a group that at times has advocated radical methods for ending environmental degradation. The Montana center then supplied a "full report" on the "suspects," according to a partially redacted document the Center for Investigative Reporting obtained.
But it doesn't indicate whether there was reasonable suspicion to believe any crime had occurred involving the bus or what details fusion center analysts from Montana included in their shared report.
Delyla Wilson freely admits being involved with Earth First! years ago. She served five days in jail and two years probation after splattering animal entrails on a top agriculture official in 1997 to protest hundreds of bison being killed near Yellowstone National Park. She hasn't been charged with any crime since.
Police decided to tow the bus off the highway. A case report says they did so "after officers received information relating to illegal activity that this vehicle was involved in." But no one was arrested or charged in connection to the incident.
The Wilsons were allowed to keep the five-gallon buckets, which didn't contain feces and urine, but rather chicken feed. As for the other supplies police considered potentially dangerous, the family had piping and scrap lumber onboard for random building projects and heavy-gauge fencing to enclose their birds.
The city of Minneapolis concluded later that the bus contained numerous mechanical violations. But on Sept. 2 of convention week, officials relinquished it after receiving a wave of angry phone calls supportive of the family and lifted all fines for the alleged vehicle infractions. A city spokesman, Matt Laible, said the bus was released because the Wilsons had agreed to address "brake issues."
Delyla Wilson disputes even that claim. "The city attorney's office called, apologized for the mistake, and told us we could have the bus back free and clear without fear of being harassed or the bus being re-impounded," she said. "When, and if, we made the repairs was up to us."
The Wilsons were abandoned on the road that day, the last officer telling them it's illegal to stand on a freeway exit as he sped away, the family claims. Minnesota's fusion center described in documents the role it played in receiving the shared information on the Wilsons from Montana. But center director Michael Bosacker would only say that any data his team requests from other jurisdictions must be linked to an active probe in which police have reasonable suspicion a crime occurred or is about to occur.
"I'm an old-time cop. I worked investigations and I know a lot of veteran investigators [who] wouldn't even share with the guy sitting next to them," he said in defense of intelligence-led policing. "That's the extreme other side of this thing. If they don't even share within their own agency, how are you going to get them to share outside, which could benefit more than one department in getting a handle on a real crime problem? We have to figure out how to do that."
'Huge mistake'
Chuck Samuelson, executive director of the ACLU affiliate in Minnesota, counters that police wanted to frustrate protest groups through sweeps and other means in order to tactically outnumber them on the streets during the convention.
"These fusion centers are a huge mistake policy-wise. This is bad, bad juju. It is a refutation of our ideals as a republic," Samuelson said. "Michael Bosacker is a nice guy. None of these guys are evil. That's what makes it so banal, which makes it so scary to me. If this guy was a drooling Bull Connor [the Civil Rights-era Klansman and belligerent police official from Alabama], it'd be easy. People would be enraged and we'd shut it down."
On Aug. 31 following the day of area-wide raids, the police disruption of protesters continued. An informant reported to a case agent from the FBI's Domestic Terrorism Squad that a trailer rented by demonstrators from Texas contained 35 shields fashioned out of highway barrels that they planned to use in confrontations with law enforcement.
St. Paul police investigator David Langfellow of the Joint Terrorism Task Force notified his commander that he'd found the trailer on Woodbridge Street northwest of downtown. Instead of instructing Langfellow to seek a warrant, the commander told him to "disrupt the trailer" and "deal with it," in part because local law enforcement had decided they were in disruption mode and not investigative mode. So Langfellow broke into the trailer and seized the contents, which included helmets, plastic shields, a medic bag and "batons that looked like cut-off shovel handles," according to court records.
A federal judge later ruled that the search was illegal and remarked in a telling footnote on the notion of police preemption, "the law does not recognize a distinction between disruption mode and investigation mode. … Law enforcement is required at all times to comply with the Constitution regardless of whether it is seeking to disrupt potentially unlawful activities or to investigate crimes for later prosecution."
By the convention's end, Ramsey County prosecutors had charged just 14 people out of the hundreds of demonstrators arrested with felonies. The remaining 800 or so were mostly held for unlawful assembly, disorderly conduct, obstructing traffic and other misdemeanors before being released. Three felony cases were eventually dismissed due to insufficient evidence, another seven resulted in guilty pleas or jury convictions for criminal property damage and the rest are pending.
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher held a press conference weeks after the RNC at the same time a public meeting was convened to hear citizen comments on the police handling of demonstrators. He reportedly pasted the walls of a room with booking sheets of people arrested during the convention's first turbulent day and declared that a majority were not from Minnesota. The town could have been destroyed after nightfall without a confrontational police response, he insisted.
Several requests for an interview with Fletcher were denied, and the St. Paul Police Department wouldn't answer detailed questions in an e-mail or follow-up requests for comment. More than two-thirds of the misdemeanor arrests that took place during the convention have since been declined or dismissed due to lack of evidence and other reasons, including more than three-dozen cases brought against journalists.
Peter Erlinder, a St. Paul attorney representing one of the RNC 8, said the behavior of law enforcement created a "chilling effect" for future protests. "It's clear," Erlinder said, "that there was a conscious effort to carry out surveillance and penetration and to infiltrate all of the groups that had any idea of expressing their opinions in St. Paul."
This account is based on in-depth interviews, news stories and an extensive examination of police reports, available court records and other public and government documents, including memos obtained from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center through the state's open-records laws.
This story is part of a collaborative project by the Center for Public Integrity and CIR examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts. Support for this partnership project is provided by the Open Society Institute.
More from this investigation:
Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 1 of 2 Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2 of 2 Greetings from St. Paul [video] A Legacy of Spying Fighting Crime with Computers in Minnesota Are Things Any Different in Denver?
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| A screenshot from the amateur video produced by the RNC Welcoming Committee. |
The spying began late in the summer of 2007, after police in St. Paul discovered an amateur video online. It showed youths dressed in black, their faces covered with dark bandanas, tossing home-made fire bombs and seeming to prepare for an assault.
The group called itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee."
For authorities in St. Paul, the whole thing seemed like serious business. The city was deep in preparations for the Republican National Convention, scheduled to take place in September of 2008. Security was their paramount concern, and nothing worse than a terrorist attack could happen during the four-day event.
In the year leading up to the convention, police would spend countless hours working to identify those behind the video and others who might be planning to disrupt the Republican Party’s nominating bash. They would draw on a new domestic intelligence infrastructure and take unprecedented advantage of laws expanded after 9/11 that give police more intrusive authorities to halt potential subversives and terrorists before they attack.
But far from yielding major revelations, some police work prior to and during the RNC resulted in a series of missteps, poor judgments, heavy-handed tactics and inappropriate detentions, according to interviews and a review of official documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting.
Critics say many of the police actions were unconstitutional and a judge called one seizure illegal after the fact. Law enforcement officials a year later continue to defend their handling of the convention, arguing it was the only way to keep extremist hoodlums from disrupting the RNC and prevent violent incidents.
Their coordinated security operations, known generally as intelligence-led policing, have become common in cities across the country. A growing number of law enforcement agencies are linking their computer networks together in a national, classified data system that enables the extraordinary mining and sharing of police intelligence, while also adopting spy methods to gather information.
In contrast to Bush administration officials who wanted to limit how much the federal government spent sustaining such state and local homeland security initiatives, President Obama's proposed budget for 2010 asked that $260 million from existing antiterrorism grants be used to pay for thousands of new intelligence analyst positions.
The results of St. Paul's campaign against political protesters raises serious questions about whether police are properly trained to use their new authorities for good effect.
Police deployed infiltrators to report on political groups, tapped into information exchanges to examine data about people who were not accused of any crimes and conducted questionable searches based on intelligence.
One document revealed that a federally funded "fusion center" in Minnesota carried out "over 1,000 hours of support to intelligence operations" and "disseminated approximately 17 RNC situation reports to over 1,300 law enforcement recipients."
Elsewhere, fusion centers in Iowa, Tennessee, Oregon and South Dakota supplied Minnesota authorities with driver's license photos and criminal history records on people perceived as suspicious in connection with the Republican convention.
By the convention's end, more than 800 people had been arrested, including eight who were charged with "conspiracy to riot in the furtherance of terrorism." But a majority of the charges, including several treated as serious, were later dropped or downgraded after prosecutors had a chance to review the police allegations and activity.
Actors on a video
Police in St. Paul set off on the wrong foot when they saw potential terrorism in the online video.
The actors did look dressed for street demonstrations. In one scene, a woman wields bolt cutters as if preparing to tear down a steel fence. Then she is shown standing outside a small Navy recruiting station with a bowling ball in her hands labeled "Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League," a reference to political activists in the 1980s who gained modest notoriety by shattering the windows of an enlistment storefront in response to Ronald Reagan's plans for invading Nicaragua with U.S. troops. Someone else in the video appears to throw rocks at people dressed as police officers attempting to control a riot.
"We're getting ready," the film says ominously. "What are you doing?"
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher and his team would cite the video among other things in later warrant affidavits as a basis for his probe into the Welcoming Committee when police stormed the group's headquarters just before the convention began as thousands of reporters and more Republican delegates converged on St. Paul.
But court affidavits ignored something crucial. The Molotov cocktail in the video is phony and lands in a barbecue grill lighting charcoals ablaze as an outdoor chef smiles thankfully. The bolt cutters are passed to another individual beyond the fence who uses them harmlessly as hedge clippers. The bowling ball rolls past the Navy recruiting station and into a group of pins assembled on the sidewalk. A youngster, 4 or 5 years old at most, is the only one seen throwing rocks in the video and they strike the ground rather than the actors.
The film was a juvenile satire of popular anarchist imagery, but police allowed their fear and enthusiasm for fighting terrorism to prevail. Within days of the video's release on the Internet, Fletcher, alongside other law enforcement agencies, launched what became a $300,000 investigation into the RNC Welcoming Committee and other protest groups. Authorities later told a judge the film depicted "significant property damage" and "violence toward law enforcement."
They said it provided reasonable suspicion that the RNC Welcoming Committee was conspiring to destroy property, create civil disorder, wreak havoc with bombs and engage in "unlawful assembly," all for the purposes of undermining the Republican National Convention.
But there wasn't a consensus about the threat among officials in St. Paul and Minneapolis, or the need to conduct an open-ended intelligence effort. Police even quarreled over how many protesters would arrive. One document predicted 100,000 demonstrators planned to show up. Fletcher wrote to the St. Paul Police Department that inside the throngs there could be as many as 3,000 "anarchist-affiliated protesters." The actual number was close to 10,000 total demonstrators, a fraction of them thugs intent on creating real trouble.
Expanded program
The proponents of intelligence-led policing won out despite disagreement. In the months leading to the convention, police expanded their program.
According to documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting from Minnesota's fusion center, police from the Twin Cities asked their partners in the law enforcement community to collect information on where protesters were camping or renting land, snap photographs of their belongings and, if possible, seize supplies that might be used for "illegal direct actions."
"One of their goals will be to attempt to create images of law enforcement personnel engaging them so they can claim brutality and violations of their civil rights," a memo from the Minneapolis Police Department states about protesters. "They will likely attempt to use such incidents as a basis for future law suits against the city of Minneapolis." The list of logistical items these direct-action groups might accumulate includes food that will "be as organic as possible," and when they arrive their preferred method of transportation could be "older, low-value" bicycles.
Police in Minnesota downplay the reach of its fusion center. "Data mining doesn't make any sense," said center director and career police investigator Michael Bosacker in an interview with the Center for Investigative Reporting. "For us to just pick a person and start looking at him – unless it's part of a case and raises suspicion of a crime – doesn't make any sense. We don't have the personnel to do that. We don't have the time to do that."
Instead the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center relied on "intelligence analysts" to disseminate memos to other law enforcement agencies advising them on what authorities anticipated would occur during the convention and how to respond.
Fletcher's office, meanwhile, began a surveillance campaign of the Welcoming Committee, taking hundreds of photographs of political organizers, many of whom were not ultimately charged with anything illegal. Informants joined the group and fed police confidential but unverified information that became the basis of eventual search warrants and criminal charges.
They attended multiple protest planning meetings, including one in Lake Geneva, Minn., where attendees allegedly used water bottles as mock Molotov cocktails to practice throwing at vehicles and buildings. "Numerous" informants, according to police claims, told authorities of another meeting in Wisconsin where activists reviewed military training manuals and discussed slamming into lines of police with shields.
Two of the informants were women who worked for Fletcher's department, one as a narcotics officer and the other as a jail guard. A third young man built like a high school wrestler with close-cropped hair was hired as an informant by Fletcher and later began working as a jail guard for the sheriff.
A fourth informant, Twin Cities resident Andrew Darst, reportedly provided information to the FBI but threatened to derail the government's campaign against protesters when after the RNC he was arrested in an unrelated case. A local judge found him guilty of assault in March after he kicked down the door of a home in pursuit of his wife who was attending a party inside.
Efforts against planned protests grew — the FBI directed additional informants as far away as Texas to spy on those heading to St. Paul for the RNC. Documents show that confidential FBI sources infiltrated anti-war meetings at a public library in Iowa City during August of 2008. The height, weight, hair color, lisps, grooming habits, online activities, phone numbers and e-mails of attendees were documented. Also in April of last year, according to published reports, an informant working for Ramsey County attended activist gatherings in Iowa.
Informants at meetings
Police infiltration and surveillance did not come as a total surprise to those involved in the Welcoming Committee's planning get-togethers. They considered themselves essentially a logistical group but assumed authorities would misconstrue their intentions anyway.
Activist Rob Czernik, 34, grew up as an Army brat and moved frequently about the country before becoming politicized at age 13 by the sight of poverty and destructive mountain-top removal in West Virginia, he said recently. Czernick moved to the Twin Cities 11 years ago.
The Welcoming Committee's meetings were public and anyone could attend. Two who did, Czernik sensed, were informants and he turned out to be right. "Just the way they acted and behaved," Czernik said, "aloof and not really making an effort to understand the politics of what we were doing."
Among the protesters, anxiety escalated as the convention neared. Rumors circulated that people were being stopped at the Canadian border.
+ Read "Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2"
This account is based on in-depth interviews, news stories and an extensive examination of police reports, available court records and other public and government documents, including memos obtained from the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center through the state's open-records laws.
This story is part of a collaborative project by the Center for Public Integrity and CIR examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts. Support for this partnership project is provided by the Open Society Institute.
More from this investigation:
Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 1 of 2 Assessing RNC Police Tactics, Part 2 of 2 Greetings from St. Paul [video] A Legacy of Spying Fighting Crime with Computers in Minnesota Are Things Any Different in Denver?
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| Graphic by House Committee on Homeland Security Republican Staff. |
Tom Ridge, the Department of Homeland Security's first secretary, testified before the 9/11 Commission on a May morning in 2004. Ridge spoke before a hall packed with emotional New Yorkers, about two miles from the site of the World Trade Center. His subject, however, was Washington.
When Commissioner Tim Roemer asked for suggestions on improving DHS, Ridge brought up an institution in which both he and Roemer had served: Congress. It would be helpful, Ridge said, if Congress took a look at the number of committees that had power over DHS.
"I think we could be even more effective in what we're doing," he began, "if there was some means of reducing, frankly, the multiple layers of interaction that we encounter every single day."
"Well, sir, you're very polite about it," Roemer responded. "It is absolutely absurd that Congress would require you to report to 88 different subcommittees and committees when we're supposed to be fighting al-Qaeda."
Five years ago next week, the 9/11 Commission, a congressionally mandated panel investigating al-Qaeda's 2001 attacks, made 41 recommendations on such topics as improving screening at airports and creating a director of national intelligence. Commissioners say Congress and the executive branch have enacted 80 to 90 percent of their suggestions. The recommendation that Congress "create a single, principal point of oversight and review for homeland security" is a notable exception.
While insisting on changes in the executive branch, Congress did not demand that its members make the same tough choices. Under pressure from powerful committee chairs, congressional leaders allowed a system of widely distributed oversight to remain largely intact. As a result, the Department of Homeland Security is still coping with an extraordinary number of demands from Capitol Hill, which are tripping up a fledgling organization. And the crazy quilt of oversight is making it difficult for Congress to provide cogent guidance on budgeting, organization, or priorities for a department still struggling on all those fronts.
"When you have oversight conducted by numerous committees and subcommittees you tend not to get the rigor you need in oversight," 9/11 Commission vice-chair Lee Hamilton told the Center last week. "The more [committees] you have engaged in the topic, the less robust it is. We think the executive branch needs very rigorous, independent oversight that can only really come from the Congress."
Created in 2002, DHS fused together an unwieldy collection of 22 agencies ranging from the Secret Service and Coast Guard to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The department is still struggling to manage its myriad responsibilities: With a budget of more than $40 billion and more than 200,000 employees, DHS must accomplish missions as disparate as screening airplane passengers, enforcing border security, processing immigration applications, protecting the president, and responding to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
In 2007 and 2008, DHS officials attended more than 370 hearings and gave more than 5,000 briefings to staffers and members of Congress representing 108 committees, according to department records. No other agency spends as much time on Capitol Hill: Officials at Veterans Affairs, a department of comparable size and budget, testified at half the number of hearings, 183, before just two committees, and gave 413 briefings over the same time period.
"It takes a lot of time away from what you're trying to accomplish," says David Paulison, the administrator who fought to rebuild FEMA after the disastrous 2005 hurricane season. "I understand that Congress has the right to know what's going on and the right to ask questions. But there are just too many committees."
Others put it less delicately. A New York Times editorial late last year called the current situation "a comedy that invites fresh national tragedy unless congressional leaders finally resolve to streamline down to a few dedicated panels."
In response to the 9/11 Commission report, Congress did designate a committee in each house as the primary point of oversight for some DHS functions, reforms that congressional leaders described as sweeping, but that fell far short of the commission's vision. Committees continue to joust over slices of the department, and neither Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, nor House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, has shown any interest in making the political compromises that further reorganization would demand.
A House Divided
Secretary Ridge was the first person to experience the problem directly, after taking office in January 2003. But before DHS' creation and even before 9/11, the Washington establishment had doubted Congress' ability to oversee homeland security. Two earlier commissions — the 2000 Gilmore Commission on America's capacity to respond to a major terrorist attack and the 2001 U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century — had suggested a special congressional committee to coordinate homeland security efforts. When Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, and Senator Joe Lieberman, then a Connecticut Democrat, drafted the 2002 bill authorizing the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States — the 9/11 Commission — they required that it examine congressional oversight.
The 9/11 Commission didn't spend much time on the congressional issue, focusing instead on failures of diplomacy, intelligence, and law enforcement, and relying on the long experience of members like Hamilton to guide its thinking on congressional organization. The recommendation that made it into the final report — the call for "a single, principal point of oversight" — required little debate.
What was uncontroversial for the Commission, however, would prove contentious in Congress. Consolidating oversight for homeland security would require taking away turf — "jurisdiction," officially — from other committees.
In 2004, the leaders of committees standing to lose jurisdiction over homeland security — a group that included tough infighters like Representative Don Young and Senator Ted Stevens, both Alaska Republicans — opposed the 9/11 Commission's recommendation. They argued that an increased focus on security within the current committee structure was already producing better results.
Since 2003, Representative Christopher Cox, a California Republican, and Representative Jim Turner, a Democrat of Texas, had led a temporary house committee on homeland security, formed to oversee implementation of the 2002 legislation that created DHS. The two representatives wanted to make their committee permanent, despite opposition from rival chairs, nine of whom sat on their panel. Cox worked well across party lines with Turner, according to John Gannon, the committee's first staff director; but that harmony did not extend to the other Republican chairmen on the committee. "Some chairmen were singularly unhelpful at times," Gannon says.
At four hearings on the committee's future, the first in May 2003, the last in March 2004, most witnesses cautiously supported Cox and Turner. Only the last panel, featuring high-ranking representatives of committees from Agriculture to Judiciary, disagreed.
"There is no substitute for expertise, institutional knowledge, and experience," said Representative John Mica, a Florida Republican, of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. "The standing committees are the only place where that depth of knowledge and experience exists. The stakes are too high to cast them aside."
Although Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, threw his support behind a permanent homeland security committee in November 2004, its fate was undecided until the night before the opening of the 109th Congress. For a month, Republican chairmen like Young (Transportation and Infrastructure), Wisconsin's James Sensenbrenner (Judiciary), and Joe Barton of Texas (Energy and Commerce) had fought to cripple, if not eliminate, the fledgling committee. Only after a late-night session on January 3, 2005, where these antagonists secured prime turf for themselves, did the House Republicans agree on a plan.
The permanent House Homeland Security committee they created ended up with what one congressional observer called "fuzzy jurisdiction." The Transportation and Infrastructure panel retained significant power over FEMA and the Coast Guard, for instance, and to this day, the Homeland Security committee's responsibilities overlap significantly with other committees, particularly those whose chairs opposed the new panel's creation.
'The Ugliest and Lowest Point'
Over in the Senate, following the 9/11 Commission report, Senator Harry Reid and Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, the two parties' whips, were given two months to negotiate which committee would oversee DHS. One committee in particular had its eye on the department: the chair of the Governmental Affairs committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, had been holding hearings on DHS nominations, budgets, and grant programs, while making the case to Senate leadership that, when the time came, her committee should be granted jurisdiction over the new department.
After leading a few unproductive meetings of high-powered senators like Ted Stevens and Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, Reid and McConnell retreated to produce a resolution on their own. Their offering handed jurisdiction over most of DHS to Collins and the re-named Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Finance Committee kept revenue functions of the Customs Service, and the Commerce committee, which Stevens would lead in 2005, retained power over the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard.
Michael Bopp, then Republican staff director for the Governmental Affairs committee, remembers the debate on Reid and McConnell's resolution as "by far the ugliest and the lowest point of my career on the Hill." He was in his office when he received a call from the Senate cloakroom, telling him he'd better get down there. The resolution was on the floor, and the ranking member of the Finance committee, Senator Max Baucus, a Democrat of Montana, was offering an amendment to take back still more DHS customs functions. By the time Bopp had rushed to the floor, the amendment had passed. One of McConnell's aides apologized to him, saying it was too late to do anything about it.
Once the Baucus amendment passed, the flood gates flew open, and it was clear that neither Reid nor McConnell would go to the mat for their plan. Collins and Lieberman, then ranking Democrat for Governmental Affairs, took to the floor to argue for streamlining jurisdiction — keeping hold of their new turf — but over the next two days, a parade of testy committee leaders used amendments to take back jurisdiction they would have relinquished under the resolution's original terms. Their sense, as Stevens put it: "We didn't need the 9/11 Commission to tell us what to do."
When the resolution finally passed 79-6 on Oct. 9, 2004, the new Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had lost jurisdiction over major chunks of DHS — Customs, flood insurance, the Secret Service, immigration, the Coast Guard and the TSA.
"It was like no other bill," says Bopp. "The coalitions were completely different. They weren't geographical, or partisan, or any of the normal ways that Congress divides up. It was purely about committee jurisdiction."
Reid and McConnell called the effort a success, and an advisor to Reid told the Center that the changes made "were the most substantial reforms of congressional oversight in years." Collins, chair of Governmental Affairs, was visibly upset, but as Reid said during the floor debate, "We have people here grousing from 10 different committees saying we gave [the Governmental Affairs committee] too much. … If people think we did nothing, why have I been berated the last few days about: How could you do this? How could you take this from me?"
The New Order
Estimates on the number of committees overseeing DHS have always varied, but no one is arguing that the Capitol Hill reshuffling substantially reduced the number of panels asserting some claim on DHS. "As a practical matter, any committee that has any part of jurisdiction is going to try to assert it, in order to get a shot on the news back home," says Representative Peter King of New York, ranking Republican member of the House Homeland Security committee. "Congress is like kids in school; you have to have rules."
In 2005, after the reforms, the bickering over jurisdiction moved to the back rooms of Congress, and top aides spent hours fighting for "primary referral" of legislation. Small changes in a bill's language can change which committee has power over it: when the House Energy and Commerce committee introduced a shorter version of chemical security legislation originally drafted by the Homeland Security Committee, the absence of the word "terrorism" meant it was referred to the energy and commerce panel. (The House Homeland Security committee took up the issue again this spring, and the bill that committee passed is now in the hands of the energy and commerce panel.) In 2006, a port security bill was held up for months when three different Senate committees — Commerce, Finance, and Homeland Security — pounced on the issue.
"We had almost identical bills for port security coming out of each committee," says Ken Nahigian, former chief counsel to the Commerce Committee. "For 30 straight days we were locked up in a room from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. arguing about jurisdiction."
As the 110th Congress began in January 2007, eight different full committees in the House had a jurisdictional stake in H.R. 1, a bill implementing additional 9/11 Commission recommendations, most of which primarily affected DHS. Under the normal referral process, each committee would have had the chance to change the legislation or formally waive its right to referral, perhaps after striking a deal to have certain provisions included. The bill reached the House floor only because newly minted Speaker Pelosi bypassed that procedure and designated the House Homeland Security Committee as the lead committee. Her action was interpreted as a way to unofficially recognize the House homeland security panel's primary role without fighting a turf battle.
Even so, the committee had to negotiate with representatives of the other seven committees at meetings that could approach one hundred people.
This year, the House Homeland Security Committee put aside its long-stated desire to pass an authorization bill for DHS as a whole in favor of a piecemeal approach. The first step is a TSA authorization bill, which passed the House in early June. This bill was referred only to the Homeland Security committee.
Aides say that they're spending less time fighting over jurisdiction these days, perhaps because it's clear nothing will change in the near future. "A number of other committees continue to scrutinize aspects of protecting the homeland — and they should, as I don't think there are too many eyes on these issues," said that advisor to Reid who considers the 2004 changes substantial. "We rely heavily on the leadership of Chairman Lieberman and Ranking Member Collins and their committee staff … to shape the oversight agenda."
In the House, the rules for the current Congress granted the Homeland Security committee more leeway to conduct oversight, but no new legislative powers. A spokesperson for Pelosi reiterated that "the primary responsibility for the Department of Homeland Security falls on the House Committee on Homeland Security."
"We spent the better part of the last two plus years fighting for more jurisdiction," Lanier Avant, the staff director of the House Homeland Security Committee, explained recently. At the end of 2008, Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and the panel's chair, submitted a proposal to expand the committee's legislative jurisdiction. "The truth is that when we sat down with committee chairmen, and staff directors — there were about 15, 16 of us in a room on a December night for probably four or five hours — if you look around the room and look at other committee chairmen, you say well, this is what I want to take from you, it really doesn't happen like that," Avant said.
'The Secretary Better Come Testify'
Congressional leaders might have considered the 2004 changes significant accomplishments, but Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chair and vice-chair of the 9/11 Commission, later called them "halfhearted reforms, followed by steps backward." Hamilton told the Center last week that "we don't think sufficient progress has been made." For DHS staffers the reforms had little impact. In 2005, DHS officials attended essentially the same number of hearings as in 2004 (166 versus 165) and provided more than 300 additional briefings. In 2006 and 2007, these numbers only increased, and in 2008, although the number of hearings dipped to 146, the number of briefings continued apace.
"It's unbelievable," says Don Kent, a former assistant secretary for legislative affairs. "But if you're on the Hill, it's not a problem for you. You just want your briefing and your hearing."
And, in Kent's experience, congressional staffers want to have the highest-ranking person possible there. "We got a lot of: 'The secretary better come testify,'" he says.
Ridge, the first DHS secretary, did just that; he testified at eight hearings between January and May of 2003, and another eight between February and June of 2004. Asa Hutchinson, the undersecretary for border and transportation security, testified 25 times between January 2003 and August 2004, including six hearings in March 2004.
"It does get to the point that it is distracting to other objectives that you're trying to achieve," Hutchinson says.
In the last Congress, David Paulison, the FEMA administrator, testified before 12 different committees and subcommittees. Sometimes the interaction between the Hill and DHS seemed to border on the absurd. Kent remembers receiving a subpoena threat for the deputy secretary for a hearing in the Small Business committee about post-Katrina recovery.
In a typical week, DHS might handle more than 40 briefings, whether there's a hearing scheduled or not. Some weeks, the department testifies at multiple hearings and provides upwards of 50 briefings. Top officials are careful to emphasize that they consider working with Congress a necessity and a privilege but say responding to that volume of requests consumes too much time. DHS estimates that the average testimony takes about 60 hours to prepare but that, in some cases, a single hearing can require more than 200 hours of preparation.
"The pressure really was on the men and women on the staff level, who were briefing an assistant secretary or answering questions when there was real work to be doing on the budget or on the mission," says one former official.
Particularly frustrating are the thousands of "questions for the record" sent over after hearings. DHS gets more than 3,000 such questions each year, and while some require little more than a yes-or-no answer, others demand more thorough responses.
"It doesn't take a long time to write questions and push the send button, but it takes time to answer those questions in a thoughtful way," says Colonel Bob Stephan, a former assistant secretary for infrastructure protection. "I had a whole staff of people dedicated to being term paper writers."
Colonel Stephan actually found that for the most part the amount of congressional oversight of his area was about right. But many others remain skeptical. Since the 111th Congress kicked off in January, new Secretary Janet Napolitano has appeared eight times. When Peter King brought up the oversight issue with Napolitano, she was polite, but did cite the number of hearings department officials testified at during the last Congress — 269 in the House alone. "While it would be presumptuous of me to recommend to Congress how it be organized," she said, "I think that's a fact that is relevant."
Editor’s Note: This story marks the beginning of a collaborative effort between the Center for Public Integrity and CIR. Over the next few months, the two organizations will be working together to produce a series of investigative reports examining the effectiveness of America’s homeland security efforts.
Support for this partnership project of the Center for Public Integrity and the Center for Investigative Reporting is provided by the Open Society Institute. Organizational support for the Center for Public Integrity is provided by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, Greenlight Capital Employees, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Park Foundation, and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
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