In October, Professor Alhabeeb, a US citizen, was visited in his office at the university, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (UMass-Amherst) by an FBI agent and a campus police officer. The cops told him they were acting on a tip that he held "anti-American views" and questioned him on his loyalty to the United States.

The meeting had also been prompted by news that a campus cop acts as an official liaison with the FBI under the supervision of the latter’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force.

Held despite the fact that evening classes on campus were canceled owing to a winter storm, the meeting was sponsored by the Department of Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC), the Office of ALANA Affairs, the UMass Anti-War Coalition, and an ad-hoc committee of faculty, staff, students, and community members.

Lennox, who works in STPEC, said in introducing the panel that although the speakers would go over the record of the FBI, the meeting was "not a history class," but an open forum that would disclose and discuss the antidemocratic practices of the federal police.

Bill Newman, head of the Western Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, spoke first, reporting that the ACLU was filing under the Freedom of Investigation Act to get all records from the FBI on "the enlistment of campus security officers to serve the intelligence interests of the FBI within the academic community. We have to guard against any government action that chills speech, inquiry, and debate," he said.

History Department professor Milton Cantor described incidents from the early 20th century in which the U.S. armed forces had been used against the labor movement. He cited the example of 35 leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World who were rounded up by the army in collaboration with the bosses in Seattle during a labor battle there. The immigrant workers and union fighters were put on a sealed train and shipped across the country to Ellis Island for deportation.

"They were refused habeas corpus, and they were denied the right to see lawyers," Cantor said. "It is similar to what we see the government doing today to non-citizens at Guantánamo."

Currently the US is holding more than 600 prisoners at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which it maintains in face of protests by the Cuban government. Some of the prisoners have gone more than a year without seeing a lawyer.  
 
Cockroaches in corners
Speaker John Bracey of the African American Department recounted his own experiences with the FBI, both in Chicago in the 1960s and more recently at UMass-Amherst. "We need to make a lot of noise," about FBI activity on campus and other abuses, he said. "When you turn on the lights the cockroaches go to the corners."

"For me the first FBI agents rolled up on our shores in 1492 and have been keeping surveillance on us ever since," said Joyce White Deer Vincent, of the Native American Student Support Services, referring to the first landing by ships of the European colonial powers. Native American activists have been closely monitored and targeted by the FBI and other agencies, she said, citing Leonard Peltier as a case in point. Peltier is serving consecutive life sentences in the federal prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, convicted on frame-up charges of killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1975.

Greensboro Justice Fund representative Marty Nathan, whose husband Michael Nathan was one of five members of the Communist Workers Party murdered in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and Nazi gunmen at an antiracist rally in Greensboro, North Carolina, detailed the role of the FBI in the "Greensboro Massacre." Greensboro police agent and former FBI informant Edward Dawson helped lead the attack, she said. Despite the fact that the attack was filmed by television crews, the six Klan and Nazi members charged with the murders were acquitted in a jury trial.

The last speaker on the panel, Ryan Coughlin, a student and leader of the UMass Anti-War Coalition, said that while today the Bush administration targets Iraq in its so-called "war on terrorism," when "I was young the ‘war on terrorism’ was against Nicaragua and Grenada." In both those countries the workers and farmers had organized to overthrow U.S.-backed dictatorships in 1979, and had established workers and farmers governments that drew Washington’s deep hostility.

In the discussion this reporter urged people to back the fight of Militant and Perspectiva Mundial reporter Róger Calero against INS moves to exclude him from the country (see article front page). Thirty-five people signed the campaign petition and several contributed to the defense committee’s funds.

Ted Leonard is a meatpacking worker in the Boston area.  
 
 
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