||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||| ||| ||| A N T I F A ||| ||| ||| ||| I N F O - B U L L E T I N ||| ||| _____ ||| ||| ||| ||| * News * Analysis * Research * Action * ||| ||| ||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| ***** ||/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\|/\||/\|| || * -- SPECIAL -- * August 07, 1998 * -- EDITION -- * || ||\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/|\/||\/|| * SPECIAL EDITION * * * * `Legislation of the New World Order' _________________________________________________________________ THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT AND AMERICA'S SECRET COURT _________________________________________________________________ By Paul DeRienzo and Joan Moossy AFIB Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the National Lawyers Guild New York News, August 1998. Co-author Paul DeRienzo has written extensively on police abuse, state repression and CIA connections to international narco- fascism. His articles have appeared, among other places, in New York City's premier alternative paper, _The Shadow_. He can be reached at: pdr@echonyc.com * * * Imagine a secret court made up of anonymous judges chosen by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and empowered to grant wiretaps, approve break-ins, tap psychiatrist's offices and bug homes -- all without probable cause. The hearings are conducted in secret without notification of the proposed target and without due process, since the subject of the investigation can't challenge the evidence or answer the charges brought against them. Such a secret court does in fact exist. It was created in 1978 under a law entitled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, that was designed to limit the abuses of authority made legion by the administration of former President Richard Nixon and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. However, according to many legal experts, FISA may in fact facilitate civil-rights violations against Americans. Even conservatives like Yale law school professor Robert Bork, who said FISA would "not be the first regulatory scheme that turned out to benefit the regulated rather than the public," are troubled by this legislation. In February 1998, Kurt Stand, Theresa Squillacote and James Clark were indicted under FISA for alleged conspiracy to commit espionage for the former German Democratic Republic, Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, and the Republic of South Africa. The arrests were carried out as a result of a so-called false flag or sting operation. Stand, 43, North American representative of the International Union of Food Workers, along with Squillacote, 40, his wife for 20 years and a former procurement lawyer for the Pentagon, are charged with attempted espionage on behalf of South Africa and obtaining national defense information to be used to the injury of the United States. Squillacote is also charged with violating an oath regarding the handling of classified material upon her January 1997 resignation from the Pentagon. The roots of FISA lie in the upheavals in the 1960s and '70s. During that time tens of thousands of citizens were drawn into a plethora of political movements, from the civil-rights movement to anti-war demonstrations. Rebellions rocked cities and college campuses and many began to seriously question traditional obligations of a citizen to their government as a bloody, unpopular war raged. The federal government moved quickly to staunch the tide of rebellion and social change through a program of dirty tricks and unprecedented violations of personal rights and privacy, often justified as necessary for the national security. As public outrage towards government abuses grew, Congress was forced to investigate through a committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The Church committee found that the nation's intelligence agencies had ignored and violated the Constitution. The FBI had been responsible for the infamous COINTELPRO Counter-intelligence program that targeted those forces director Hoover believed were politically dangerous, such as the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement, and a host of popular political leaders, including the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. Until the Church Committee report freewheeling conduct by intelligence agencies under the purview of the executive branch had been considered part of the president's "inherent authority," a concept popularized by President Nixon's term of "executive privilege." One of the main issues was the separation of federal domestic law enforcement and counter-intelligence activities. Electronic surveillance in criminal investigations requires a warrant under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control Act of 1968 and the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. The purpose of FISA was to create a warrant procedure in counter-intelligence surveillance to allegedly right the wrongs of the Nixon years. Warrantless national security surveillance is illegal if its basis is the furtherance of a criminal investigation. When FISA was enacted, Senator Edward Kennedy, chair of the House-Senate FISA conference committee, predicted that domestic targets of the Act might number about 100 each year. In the 20 years since FISA, the court has not turned down any of the government's approximately 10,000 surveillance requests. According to a Department of Justice official who conducted an internal review of FISA, "so many FISAs were being conducted with so few attorneys that the review process to prevent factual and legal errors was virtually nonexistent." Using FISA, the FBI has investigated over 1,330 progressive domestic political and religious groups because of their solidarity with the Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador. The threat, according to Herman Schwartz, writing in The Nation is that, "the enactment of FISA has not eliminated the incentive to use intelligence gathering authority improperly to obtain evidence for criminal prosecutions. After the exposure of FBI spying against CISPES in the 1980s pressure built for reform. In 1995 Attorney General Janet Reno issued new guidelines setting rules for the conduct of FBI agents in counterintelligence operations using electronic surveillance. But the new guidelines also expanded FISA to permit physical searches based on the same minimal level of suspicion used to permit electronic surveillance. The 1995 extension of FISA now allows for the first time in US history actual searches of citizens and legal residences outside the Fourth Amendment. The DOJ internal report spreads the alarm that "Under the Clinton administration, the nation's two systems for wiretapping - [Title III] for criminal cases, [FISA] for intelligence gathering - [have] become freight trains running at full throttle down parallel tracks." Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist bloc in 1991, FISA wiretap and search authorizations have increased dramatically from 484 in 1992 to 839 in 1996, while Title III criminal wiretaps have increased at a slower rate going from 340 in 1992 to 581 four years later. Currently there are more FISA wiretaps approved each year than normal criminal wiretap warrants. Although the goal of FISA is to protect the rights of citizens while allowing counterintelligence probes under the president's authority to conduct foreign policy the catch is that the law allows the fruits of FISA searches and wiretaps to be introduced as evidence in criminal prosecutions. THE SQUILLACOTE-STAND CASE On January 5, 1990, less than a year before the Berlin wall fell, an angry crowd stormed the Ministry of State Security for the German Democratic Republic and seized raw files containing the names of agents, informers, contacts and targets. The FBI doesn't say how it came to believe that Squillacote and Stand worked for East Germany. The government's affidavit is deliberately unclear about the source of this information. The information could have come from the files stolen in 1990, an operation credited by some to the CIA, or it could have come from a huge store of files still in Berlin. Supporters of the two defendants wonder if the source of the allegation was a former East German agent informing to bargain for a shorter sentence, or phone taps from the East German embassy. Both are considered unreliable even by the FBI. Under FISA, the FBI is permitted to hide its sources from the defendants and provide the information only to the secret FISA court. In 1996 the FBI began 24-hour surveillance of Stand, Squillacote and Clark, that lasted for nearly 2 years. The surveillance intruded into all aspects of their lives, including their family, health, relationships, finance and professional work. Most seriously, the surveillance targeted direct conversations with Squillacote's psychiatrist and included a hidden microphone in her bedroom recording conversations with her husband. The FBI prepared a psychological profile of Squillacote identifying what they perceived to be her vulnerabilities. In one of three secret searches of their residence the FBI found a 1995 letter from Squillacote to South African Defense Minister and Communist Party leader Ronnie Kasrils. That stolen letter became the basis of the government's sting operation. An FBI agent posing as an official of the Mandela government approached Squillacote requesting information. The documents Squillacote removed from the Pentagon and turned over the undercover FBI agent are the only actual documents involved in the entire case. No documents are alleged to have been turned over to a foreign power. The FBI forged a letter from the South African government with Kasrils signature requesting meetings with Squillacote. The letter states that the South African government needed Squillacote's assistance in the United States and eventually a series of meetings were set up between Squillacote and the phony South African. When the arrests were made in October the FBI originally stated that the sting had been carried out with the cooperation of South Africa. The South African government protested and demanded an apology which was personally extended by FBI director Louis Freeh. Kasrils has said he will attend the trial and testify on Squillacote's behalf. Since the arrest both Stand and Squillacote have been imprisoned without bail at a jail in Alexandria, Virginia. The trial is before United States District Judge Claude Hilton in the Eastern District of Virginia, the so-called "rocket docket," where conservative judges and juries are famous for making short work of defendants. Supporters of Squillacote and Stand maintain that the government went "venue-shopping" and the arrests were made in Alexandria in order to avoid a liberal Washington, DC jury. The trial was originally slated to start on Monday, October 5th, but in a July 20 hearing, Judge Hilton, blaming a "judge's conference," moved the start of the trial to October 7th. Hilton apologized, saying the trial would now have to continue over a weekend. Apparently he has intended for the trial, including jury selection, to last only five days. Kurt Stand is represented by Richard Sauber of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver, and Jacobson. Theresa Squillacote is represented by Lawrence Robins of the century-old law firm of Mayer, Brown, and Platt. Robbins' clients include First Lady Hillary Clinton. The defense has also been aided by a number of well-known New York attorneys including Leonard Weinglass and Ron Kuby, as well as the Center for National Security Studies and the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. According to sources on the defense team, preparations have been made to win the case on appeal since a May 18th opinion where Judge Hilton turned down every defense motion aimed at suppressing evidence obtained or derived from searches conducted in violation of FISA. At the July 20th hearing, judge Hilton refused to suppress evidence collected during a six-day search of the Squillacote and Stand residence. The judge also ruled that extensive wiretaps of their conversations were legally authorized. The judge also rejected a bid for a "taint hearing' after the defense lawyers argued that FBI agents used wiretaps to collect information protected by psychotherapist and marital privileges. In a post Cold War world where the tensions between former great powers has been replaced by a multiplicity of struggles throughout the developing world, many more Americans will become involved in the affairs of countries at odds with US foreign and economic policy and may find themselves under attack under FISA. In the 60s it was civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War protesters who were the targets, in the 1980s it was the movement to support the people in war-torn El Salvador who were victimized by government spying and dirty tricks; today it could be Indonesia, Chiapas, Iraq or any other hot spot. According to a 1978 editorial in The New Republic, "The vagueness of the requirement under FISA that the target of surveillance be a foreign power or agent of a foreign power invites abuses... conceivably it could include any American with commercial, educational or personal relationship with a foreign person or organization." For more information on this case contact the Fund for the Fourth Amendment, PO Box 5685 Washington, D.C. 20016; (202) 829-6167. An informational event/fundraiser on the Squillacote-Stand case and FISAN is scheduled for New York City in September. Call 212-209-2955 for the date and location. * * * ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN (AFIB) 750 La Playa # 730 San Francisco, California 94121 E-Mail: tburghardt@igc.org * On PeaceNet visit ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN on pol.right.antifa Via the Web --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib.html Archive --> http://burn.ucsd.edu/~aff/afib-bulletins.html * ANTI-FASCIST FORUM (AFF) Antifa Info-Bulletin is a member of the Anti-Fascist Forum network. AFF is an info-group which collects and disseminates information, research and analysis on fascist activity and anti-fascist resistance. 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