Vol. 72/No. 32      August 18, 2008

The moves are the result of documents forced to light through a Maryland Public Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.

The documents consist of 43 pages of the infiltrators’ summaries and computer logs from 2005-2006 compiled on the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, an antiwar group; the Coalition to End the Death Penalty; and the Committee to Save Vernon Evans, a Black man on Maryland’s death row.

Susan Goering, executive director of the ACLU of Maryland, believes the released documents may be only the tip of the iceberg.

“There’s going to be a lot more documents coming out,” Max Obuszewski, a member of the Pledge of Resistance who was spied on, said in an interview. “We don’t know for sure that they stopped in 2006.”

A statement issued by the ACLU says the cops placed Obuszewski’s name in the Washington/Baltimore High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area database. They present no evidence linking Obuszewski to drugs. The entry indicates that the “Primary Crime” linked to him in the database is “Terrorism-Anti Govern[ment],” and a “Secondary Crime” of “Terrorism-Anti War Protestors.”

The spying occurred under Republican governor Robert Ehrlich, Jr. Democratic governor O’Malley has tried to paint his administration as being above such behavior. Nonetheless, it has been put on the defensive by angry letter writers, newspaper opinion pieces, and TV coverage.

David Rocah, the lead ACLU attorney on the case, said in an interview that “Laws were broken and there needs to be some accountability for that.”

“Why was it allowed to go on?” he asked. “The people spied upon need the opportunity to have their names purged.”

The documents are censored in places with whole sections blanked out, reminiscent of the 1970s FBI Cointelpro documents. Still, they show that cops spent at least 288 hours spying. One agent joined a group’s electronic listserv under an alias with a spoof e-mail address. The spies infiltrated private planning meetings and forums at churches.

They also recorded anti death penalty rallies outside Baltimore’s SuperMax prison.

The documents reflect the institutional racism of the cops. Because death-row prisoner Evans is Black and the people he is accused of killing are white, that “will likely raise tensions and could make any gatherings about the execution contentious and possibly violent,” one of the documents states.

To see the documents, go to http://www.aclu-md.org/aPress/Attachments/MSP_Documents.pdf
 
 
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