You Say You Want A Revolution? (Pittsburgh City Paper and Alternet.org)

(online at https://www.alternet.org/2003/01/you_say_you_want_a_revolution/)

Written by 

 Richard Lord 

, 

 Pittsburgh City Paper 

and

 Alternet.org 

January 16, 2003

At 8 p.m. on an October night, Sami Almussa was settling in when someone knocked on the door of his Coraopolis apartment. Though dressed only in an undershirt and knee-length shorts, he opened the door to a stranger. "Within a fraction of a second, he showed me his ID and said, 'FBI, can I come in?'" says Almussa, one of the many Saudi Arabians studying at local universities.

State and federal dockets show no record of any criminal charge against Almussa. But in addition to the G-man at the door, another agent stood off to one side. Almussa let them in and asked what he could do for them. "They said, 'We are here from the FBI and we're trying to investigate discrimination. Have you ever faced that? And then we might have other questions we might ask you.'"

Turns out the "other questions" took up most of the two-hour interview. The agents asked about his family, studies and religious beliefs, says Almussa. They asked which banks his tuition payments flow through, and whether he's given money to charities the U.S. accuses of supporting terrorism. They asked whether he supported U.S. policies toward Israel and Iraq, and whether he sympathized with Osama bin Laden. "You're going to laugh," says Almussa. "One of the questions they asked me is whether I was part of a revolution trying to overthrow the government of the United States." He says he's no revolutionary. And if he were, would he tell them?

"I answered everything," says Almussa. "There is nothing in my heart to hide." But the questions made him feel like a suspect. "I was even afraid that if I went and put on clothes, they'd be suspicious."

Since October, the Pittsburgh office of the FBI has interviewed more than 20 individuals from Middle Eastern countries -- some visitors, some citizens -- regarding their finances and religious and political beliefs. The interviews have gone far beyond the "get acquainted" interviews law enforcement held with many Islamic visitors shortly after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. And civil liberties watchdogs say the detailed political questions being asked of Muslims here haven't been mirrored in other cities.

In the post-Sept. 11 world, such inquiries are warranted, argues Larry Likar, a criminal justice and constitutional law teacher at La Roche College and former FBI agent who retired from the Pittsburgh branch in 2001. Told of the questions, Likar says, "They're doing this to obtain information, and they're trying to get to know the community they're dealing with."

Questions on political and religious beliefs are "arguably a First Amendment violation," counters Mike Healey, a Downtown attorney counseling several Muslims who have been asked to submit to interviews. "They're certainly inappropriate." He says the questions reflect stepped-up FBI monitoring of thought and expression. "In this country, we're not used to the national police asking people about their political beliefs."

***

Kenneth T. McCabe likes to be in the thick of things. "In football, I was the center. The center, or linebacker," McCabe says. "In baseball, I was the catcher. Not the pitcher, not the outfielder who was standing around. I wanted the tougher job."

So when his employer, the FBI, started reorganizing to fight the threat of terror, McCabe sought to head up a field office. In June, he was named special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh office, and he took the post on Sept. 13, 2002. In doing so, McCabe found himself at the center of a delicate dance between the bureau assigned to preventing future acts of terror, and a 10,000-strong Pittsburgh Muslim community that largely has felt unfairly suspect since Sept. 11, 2001.

In the hours after the terrorist attacks, there were attacks on Muslims in some cities, but there was reason to believe everybody here would get along. "On the same day, 9/11, Mayor [Tom] Murphy visited the Islamic Center" in Oakland, says Rahim, a local activist who asked that his real name not be used. "He said he would be willing to help us with anything. ... That gave us a little bit of comfort." A few days later, the Islamic Center hosted a press conference that featured Murphy, Allegheny County Executive Jim Roddey, and leaders from a variety of faiths who denounced terrorism and ethnic stereotyping. After that, says Rahim, "We were bombarded with phone calls from societies, churches -- everyone who wanted to help us." The weeks that followed were marked by interfaith prayer vigils and "unity events."

But about a week after Sept. 11, the Muslim community got its first indication that it was under the microscope. FBI agents swarmed the Eat'n Park in Banksville and arrested four Middle Eastern students. It turns out one of the students had known another student who shared the name of United Airlines Flight 175 hijacker Ahmed Alghamdi. Rahim and Mohammed, another local activist, say the students were forced to stand beside Banksville Road for 20 minutes while passing motorists hurled insults. They were taken in for questioning and released after a few hours. The incident -- and particularly the roadside display -- sent a message, says Rahim. "This was a symbol of power [saying], 'We're coming to get you.'"

"It was just days after Sept. 11," says McCabe, who was not yet in Pittsburgh at the time. "Some people were seeing shadows." The students weren't connected to the hijacker Alghamdi, he says, but adds, "How do we know that unless we talk to them?"

In November 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered law enforcement agencies, led by the FBI, to interview some 5,000 young men who had recently entered the U.S. from Middle Eastern and South Asian countries. In March, he ordered another 3,000 interviews, though he said that none of the interviewees was the subject of specific suspicions. Upwards of 120 Pittsburgh-area students and workers have reported to their mosques that they were interviewed in the two sweeps, according to Rahim and Mohammed. Everyone approached by the FBI consented to the interviews, and just a handful insisted on having their lawyers present, says Rahim. "We had nothing to hide. We had an open-door policy," he says.

The Islamic Center even hosted FBI recruitment meetings, and in December 2001 it offered the bureau "sensitivity training" to help the agents understand why, for instance, some Muslim women won't open the door to a man if the women are home alone. The FBI accepted, but canceled the night before the scheduled training. McCabe says he doesn't know why his predecessor canceled the session. But Healey, who was involved with the proposed training, suggests, "They didn't want their agents subject to identification."

In August, as McCabe was preparing to take charge, the Tribune-Review published a series of articles suggesting links between a Green Tree mosque and a magazine -- last published in 2000 -- that advocated an Islamic holy war. The articles indicated that the key people involved in the locally published, Arabic-language magazine had left town, mostly for Saudi Arabia, and mostly years ago. But the Trib's work seemed to spur the FBI to a new round of interviews that raise more questions than they likely answered.

When I came to the U.S., the image I had was from Hollywood movies," says Rahim. "Crimes. People shooting each other in the street for no reason." When he first went food shopping, he looked carefully around the supermarket parking lot for armed berserkers before opening his car door. "But when I started interacting with the society, that stereotype was dispelled," he says.

In fact, he's developed some affection for Americans. "What I have found is unique about the American people is that they are very open-minded," Rahim says. "And that is not true in a lot of places in the world."

Rahim says his trust in American equanimity was shaken recently when an FBI agent and an Immigration and Naturalization Service representative came knocking on his door, unannounced. He let them in and says, "I asked them, 'What's going on? Why are you here?'" They mentioned the newspaper articles, he says. "They said, 'We just want to get a feel for what's going on in the community.'"

To Rahim, though, the questions seemed accusatory. "They asked, 'Have you ever been trained by al-Qaida?'" he says. They also asked about his views on the U.S. sanctions against Iraq, on former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Oct. 1 visit to Pittsburgh, and on the former Taliban government of Afghanistan and its American-engineered ouster (see sidebar, "Questions that Raise Questions"). Like Almussa, he didn't want to seem evasive. "I tried to give them my views," says Rahim, who thinks some U.S. policies are counterproductive. Now he's watching the news of detentions of Middle Eastern visitors, and wondering whether the hammer is going to fall on him. "I'm being profiled. I could be detained at any moment," Rahim says. "All they have to do is say, 'He criticized the policies of the United States. He should be detained.'"

McCabe won't confirm or deny that political questions were asked. "I'm not going into it, because of confidentiality," he says. "Just because we talk to people doesn't mean they're under investigation," he adds, noting that no arrests have yet resulted from the interviews. "Sometimes, those questions may help us determine which way they're leaning."

McCabe notes that the government is tracking donations to several prominent Muslim charities, which have been linked to groups the U.S. deems to be terrorists. "We're trying to either prove or disprove," says McCabe. "Sometimes, 9 out of 10 times in our interviews, we are discounting that this guy is a bad guy. We're coming back with the information that, hey, this was an innocent donation. He knew nothing about it. So, in essence, we're helping."

The bureau may interview many people when only one is a source, says McCabe. "We may be talking with a whole neighborhood because a couple of people do want to share information. And they feel safe being able to do that, because they know we've been in this whole neighborhood, we've talked to everybody, and we are going to protect them by not saying that John said that, Pete said this."

And McCabe says the bureau is preparing to prevent "any type of sympathetic terrorist acts," should the U.S. go to war against Iraq. In meetings with local Islamic leaders, he says, "I told them, 'There's going to be more [interviews] done, and if we ever go to war, there'll maybe be more.'"

Healey says there are indications that the local FBI is monitoring demonstrations, too. "One of the [interviewees] was asked, 'We know you were at the [anti-]Netanyahu demonstration; what are your views on Netanyahu?'" He says he will be sitting in on upcoming interviews the FBI has requested with several foreign nationals. "If it's a legitimate criminal investigation, that's fine. But if they're trying to catalog people's political beliefs, that raises concerns."

Civil libertarians are worried about both who is being interviewed, and what is being asked. "Asking questions about your political and religious beliefs is always inappropriate," says Vic Walczak, legal director for the Pittsburgh branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. "The only exception is if there's a very strong link to some alleged misconduct."

"I think it's racial profiling in a sense, and picking on people of a certain ethnic or religious background," says Rev. Phil Wilson, the Peace with Justice Project coordinator for the United Methodist Church of Western Pennsylvania. "We can't start profiling people and choosing whose civil liberties are being kept and whose are being thrown away."

Mohammed says many of the people the FBI is interviewing in Pittsburgh are "dialogue people. They're people who go to churches and schools and talk about Islam. ... Where can you find terrorists who are that open about themselves? Sleeper cells, if they exist anywhere, would despise people like those who were interviewed."

"They're either trying to intimidate people, or they're dumb," Mohammed says. "They're just harassing people who are absolutely against terrorism."

***

It's Friday night at the Islamic Center, and while a handful of adherents finish their prayers, others set up chairs. It's the Muslim day of prayer, but there's business to attend to. Walczak and immigration attorney Robert Whitehill are here to talk about a process called "special registration," which many of the Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis and others in the audience must submit to.

Once upon a time, Walczak tells 100 or so attendees, America "was the land of freedom and opportunity ... where you didn't have to worry about the government snooping into your personal affairs. ... This is a different country now."

That's especially true for male visitors from 18 Islamic countries and North Korea, who must, by law, report to Immigration and Naturalization Service offices for special registration by Feb. 21. The registrants are fingerprinted, photographed, and interviewed in an effort to determine whether their activities are in accord with their visas; students must be studying, tourists touring, workers working.

But an INS-produced list of special registration questions obtained by City Paper indicates that the interviews probe much deeper. Registrants can be asked for the names, addresses, phone numbers and birthdates of their parents. They can be asked for a list of classes in which they're enrolled, extracurricular activities in which they're involved, and "campus/social/religious/political groups" with which they're associated.

One Qatari national studying at Pitt, who asked that his name be withheld, says he recently went through the process and was asked to provide bank account and credit card numbers. "I told them I didn't want to, but they said I have to," he says.

The INS interviewers have the option to ask for credit card and bank account numbers, cell phone and fax numbers, e-mail addresses and other personal information, says Department of Justice spokesman Jorge Martinez, whose agency oversees the INS. He says there are no guidelines regarding who should and should not be asked which questions. "We don't comment on what this information is being used for," he adds.

Almussa worries that the information might be used to find tiny inconsistencies that could subject him and others to deportation, or worse. For instance, the FBI asked him whether he ever supported the Global Relief Foundation, a long-respected Islamic charity that the U.S. government shut down in 2002 after alleging links to al-Qaida and to separatists in the Indian province of Kashmir. Almussa said he wasn't sure. As a Muslim, he's required to give a portion of his savings to charity annually, and as a noncitizen he has no tax return to attach receipts to. "I don't record all the money I pay," he says. "If I go to a mosque and see people who are supporting people who are dying because of sanctions or in Somalia or Chechnya, I'll give something, but I won't always write it down." Now Almussa has to go through the INS process. "They'll know everything about me," he says. "So I assume that they [will be] checking to see if I was telling the truth."

Any inconsistencies could mean trouble, says Walczak. He says a misstatement or an omission means "they've lied to a federal agent. You can get jail time for that."

McCabe says the FBI can get INS information, but only seeks that which is pertinent to an investigation.

Just 18 months ago, there was little reason to fear that federal agencies would share notes. In fact, it has been widely reported that the failure of the FBI, CIA and INS to communicate opened the door for the Sept. 11 hijackers. But since then, legislation and changes in internal policies have made information sharing much easier. The Defense Department has even launched a project, called the Total Information Awareness System, that aims to probe commercial and government databases for red flags that might hint at a terrorist plot. That project is headed up by retired Admiral John Poindexter, a key figure in the late-'80s Iran-contra scandal whose conviction for lying to Congress was overturned when a court ruled that his testimony was subject to an immunity-from-prosecution agreement.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the federal government has already imprisoned some 1,200 visitors from Middle Eastern countries. Most waited weeks or months to be charged with any civil or criminal violation, and were then slapped with minor immigration code violations. Just one -- Zacharias Moussaoui -- was charged with involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks. Nearly all have been released. Then in December, the INS held some 400 men -- mostly Iranian citizens -- who reported to its Los Angeles office for the special registration interviews. All but 23 were released within days, says Martinez.

Some fear the government is drifting toward a mass internment similar to the detention of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II. The special registration process "is a detention opportunity," says Saleh Waziruddin, a civil rights activist and chemical engineer. Though he's a Canadian citizen, Waziruddin is also a Pakistani national, and therefore required to go through special registration. "They're not asking me [questions] because I'm suspected of being a criminal. They're asking me because of their fears and fantasies regarding race."

***

Mohammed is a naturalized U.S. citizen. Born in Egypt, he has been in the U.S. for seven years, and has chosen Pittsburgh to pursue his career and start a family. He's a well-regarded liaison between the Islamic community and civic leaders. Maybe that's why the FBI called before showing up at his door.

His wife answered and told the agent her husband was sleeping. When Mohammed awoke, he called the agent back. "The next thing I know, he was telling me he was one minute from my home," Mohammed says. He didn't have much time for the interview. "I basically told him, if there's any suspicious activity, I will report this on my own," says Mohammed. "Because terrorism ... hurts Muslims first."

The agent returned on another day -- without calling -- when Mohammed wasn't home, and left a card. Mohammed then did something most interviewees have been afraid to do, for fear of arousing suspicion: "I called him back and said, 'I'm sorry, I can't meet with you,'" he says. The FBI never got a chance to ask Mohammed about his political beliefs. "I would not have been happy to be asked those questions, because it's really misguided to even ask those questions."

If the government is responding to a perceived threat by cataloguing peoples' political views, it isn't the first time. In 1919 and 1920, communists and anarchists, including immigrants from the newly formed Soviet Union, sent mail bombs to several U.S. government and business officials, including Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. A string of suicide bombing efforts followed, including one that ended outside Palmer's Washington home. On Sept. 16, 1920, a bomb went off in a Manhattan office, killing 33 and injuring 400. Using laws passed to prevent sedition during World War I, Palmer ordered the freshly minted FBI to infiltrate socialist groups and other dissident organizations. Palmer identified 60,000 individuals he termed "organized agitators" and issued warrants for the arrest and deportation of 6,000. In the end, other officials got cold feet, and fewer than 1,000 people -- including a handful of U.S. citizens -- were deported.

In the 1950s, Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee shared political blacklisting duties. Tom Kerr, who was then head of the Pennsylvania ACLU, remembers when the committee met in Pittsburgh. "What happened was an unfortunate attempt by some companies to get rid of their labor union leaders," Kerr says. The lone congressman in attendance called labor leaders to testify, and asked them whether they'd ever been members of the American Communist Party. Some said no, and others invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Some were subsequently fired by their companies, either for refusing to testify or for allegedly lying. The unions sued, and some leaders were reinstated; others weren't.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the FBI's counterintelligence program -- called COINTELPRO -- investigated civil rights organizations and groups opposed to the Vietnam War. Kerr was repeatedly interviewed, and remembers seeing agents taking down license plate numbers outside of anti-war meetings. He later requested and got his FBI file, which, he says, reveals that his phone was tapped. He was never charged with a crime; that wasn't the point. COINTELPRO "was in the business of frightening people, so maybe they'd shut up," Kerr says.

COINTELPRO was dissolved in 1971, but the extent of its activities wasn't revealed until congressional hearings were conducted from 1973 through 1975. In 1976, President Gerald Ford approved new guidelines that restricted the FBI to investigating groups and individuals believed to be involved in violent acts or violations of federal law. That same year, Ford abolished the FBI's domestic intelligence branch.

Agent-turned-teacher Likar argues that the restrictions meant "the FBI really couldn't investigate terrorism in this country." It succeeded only in stamping out some terrorist groups, like the Puerto Rican nationalist Macheteros in the early 1980s, by catching the members in criminal acts. "We knew who they were and what they were doing," says Likar, who was involved in the Macheteros busts. "The problem is when you don't have that level of evidence."

If the COINTELPRO revelations shackled the FBI, the Sept. 11 attacks broke the chains. Six weeks after the attacks, Congress passed the Ashcroft-proposed Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act. The 342-page USA PATRIOT Act does many things. For one, it allows the government to detain noncitizens suspected of involvement in terrorism indefinitely, subject to court review every six months. But even more controversial are sections that make subtle changes in the rules for wiretapping, surveillance, e-mail monitoring, financial investigation, and search and seizure.

Pre-PATRIOT Act, if the FBI wanted to wiretap or search, it had to show a judge either that it had probable cause to suspect that a person was engaged in criminal activity, or that it had proof that a person was an agent of a foreign power. In the case of foreign agents, the decision on whether to tap or search was made by the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, which isn't bound by the same civil liberties safeguards as criminal courts. The PATRIOT Act removes the requirement that the FBI prove a person is an agent of a foreign power, and instead requires that the bureau "certify" that the tap or search is intended "to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities."

That's "a completely meaningless standard," says Walczak. "All [a judge] can do is rubber-stamp it."

Not true, says Jeff Killeen, chief division counsel for the FBI's Pittsburgh branch. He says a request to tap or search goes through multiple reviews even before it gets to the FISA court. "We are not going to waste the court's time" with unnecessary requests, he says, "because we don't want to make the court mad." And there are specific, classified guidelines the court uses to determine whether a request is warranted, he says. "They don't just rubber-stamp it." In fact, in August the FISA court rejected a Justice Department plan to allow the FBI's counterintelligence and criminal agents to share information freely. In a rare public ruling, the court instead required that any consultation between the two sides be chaperoned by special agents who serve the court.

Ashcroft and other members of President George W. Bush's administration have also adjusted internal guidelines to give law enforcement more leeway. The FBI can now watch political organizations, churches, public gatherings and even Internet chats "without the slightest evidence that wrongdoing is afoot," according to an ACLU analysis of the changes. The Customs Service can search packages sent overseas and federal airport screeners can search luggage at random. And the Bush administration has skirted normal constitutional protections by declaring alleged al-Qaida and Taliban operatives, including two American citizens, as "enemy combatants." The administration has argued that enemy combatants don't have the same rights to know the charges against them and to consult a lawyer as criminal defendants.

McCabe says the new rules don't mean his agents will be listening in on everyone's phone calls, or taking roll at churches, mosques and demonstrations. "We don't have the time or the manpower to be tapping and listening to everybody's phone," he says. "We're not going to start going to every different church, every different mosque, just to take roll or a picture. There's got to be some sort of predication for us to believe that some type of illegal activity is going on."

Likar notes that much of American history is an effort to balance security concerns with individual rights. When the country is threatened, the pendulum swings toward security. "The Constitution was never written to be a suicide pact for us," he says. If the FBI waits until a terror suspect breaks the law, he says, "while you're watching, they may commit a terrorist act." He cites the case of Jose Padilla, a Chicago thug accused of plotting with al-Qaida to build and explode a low-level radioactive weapon. "Under the old bureau, before 9/11, they'd have to continue to watch him, find out who all of his associates are, maybe catch him making a bomb," Likar says. "But what if he'd have gotten away with it?"

Interviewing people who aren't suspects is also a legitimate way to scare off terrorists, says Likar. "You're my buddy. I'm the terrorist," he says. "All of the sudden the feds pick you up and interview you. I'm going to wonder what you know. I may pick up and run."

In the past, the pendulum has swung back toward civil liberties when perceived threats have died down and government excesses have come to light. "We've come through it before, so maybe we'll come through it again," says Marion Damick, who worked for and then directed the Pittsburgh ACLU for 30 years before her retirement in 1992. "But in the meantime, it can ruin a lot of lives."

***

Many of the people currently under the government's microscope have seen the effects of unchecked government power before. "There is not a single country on the [INS special registration] list where you could not be picked up by the security apparatus in the middle of the night, and thrown in jail for the rest of your life, and there's nothing your friends or family could do about it," says Clifton Omar Slater, the American-born president of the Islamic Council of Pittsburgh, which coordinates activities by local mosques. "They see what's happening, and they fear that that's the way America is going. ... They've stepped into the specter of where they came from."

Adel Fergany says even Muslims who haven't heard the FBI's knock feel like suspects. Fergany came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1981, became a citizen in 1994, and makes a living as a computer consultant. On Sept. 11, 2001, he was the Islamic Center's president, and led the local effort to build bridges between shocked Muslims and the skittish general population. Now he sees those bridges burning in the hot light of suspicion. "You are constantly treated as a suspect until proven innocent. You are required to prove your loyalty over and over again. ... You cannot live constantly under this feeling that you are a suspect," he says. "I have been a citizen for almost 10 years. This is the first time I've considered whether I should get out."

Sami Almussa knows he could have cast himself as a cheerleader for American foreign policy. Instead, he argued that U.S. sanctions against Iraq are only hurting that country's people. When the agents said his home country of Saudi Arabia wasn't free, he pointed out the recent use of secret evidence, closed proceedings, detainment without charge and expanded surveillance right here. When they asked him whether people in his country hated the U.S., he noted that Arab rhetoric is matched by the anti-Islamic pronouncements of the likes of preacher Pat Robertson, whose Christian Broadcasting Network Almussa flipped on to hammer home his point. He even reminded them of anti-Muslim statements attributed to their ultimate boss, Ashcroft, who reportedly called Islam "a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him." (Ashcroft has said the reported remarks "do not accurately reflect what I believe I said.")

"There are some oppressions you can't remain silent about," Almussa says. He knows he may be interviewed again, detained, held, perhaps deported. But he came here to get his degree, and he's determined to complete it. "I have goals I have to achieve," he says. "Whether I'm going to be discriminated against or spat on or interviewed, that is part of the package."

War is not the Answer (Pulp Magazine, Pittsburgh)

War is not the Answer The upcoming Regional Antiwar Convergence may be the biggest protest Pittsburgh has seen in 30 years. In a round-table conversation, some local activists talk about dissent and street-level action INTERVIEW BY GEOFF KELLY All that one can say is that if we act as if peace were necessary and possible, we are more likely to achieve it than if we don't. Sir Michael Howard from Pulp (Pittsburgh) January 16, 2003
In his book The Invention of Peace, the British military historian Sir Michael Howard suggests that peace is much more complicated and high-maintenance than war -- which may be why it breaks down all the time. "Peace is not a natural state of society," he writes, "any more than war is a natural state of society. Conflict is what is endemic and, if you like, is natural. There is only going to be peace if those conflicts can be managed and subsumed. That is what peacemaking is really all about." Precisely how to manage and subsume conflict is a sticky problem, difficult in one's daily life, let alone on a global scale. The important thing, according to Howard, is simply to try. The antiwar movement in this country is a chimera because it is presented in the media incompletely, in fits and starts, viewed from a distance with misunderstanding and sometimes -- especially on the brink of war, when its counterpoint to what passes for prevailing opinion is most needed -- with mistrust. Only when tens of thousands of dissenters converge and take to the streets, as they did famously in Seattle in 1999 and last October in Washington, D.C., does the substance and scope of the country's activist community compel people to take notice. But, of course, activism on behalf of peace and social justice does not begin or end at mass demonstrations. "When people get to the street, it's almost always not the first option," says Tim Vining, executive director of Pittsburgh's Thomas Merton Center, an organization that tackles a wide array of social issues. "I mean, people think that we read the paper at the Merton Center and we say, 'Okay, let's go have a protest.' That's a lot of work."
Pulp (Pittsburgh) January 16 2003 PULPITATIONS In the basement of the Duncan and Porter House on Pittsburgh's North Side, veteran activist, anarchist and all-around iconoclast Vincent Scotti Eirene runs Blast Furnace Radio, a Web radio station that alternates between syndicated alternative news shows such as Pacifica radio's "Democracy Now!" and dusty but charming pop songs played on a Fisher-Price record player. At least once a day, Eirene says, the station plays Cheech and Chong's "Is Dave there?" skit. The coming weeks will be busy for Eirene; this weekend there is scheduled a massive antiwar march in Washington, D.C. The following weekend is the Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence, which organizers say will be the largest antiwar demonstration in Pittsburgh in at least 30 years. And in between, on Monday, January 20, Eirene is organizing a protest in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the corner of Forbes and Morewood in Oakland, in front of Carnegie Mellon University's Warner Hall. Like many private entities, CMU has not declared King's birthday a holiday. "Some at CMU have said that it is better to teach the children about the life of Martin Luther King than have folk sleep in," Eirene says. "I must remember to not have this person plan my itinerary for the Easter holiday." Eirene also believes that King would be appalled by CMU's military contracts. For more information on the Duncan and Porter House or the January 20 protest, or to listen to Blast Furnace radio, check out www.notowar.com. Geoff Kelly	Vining has been hard at work in recent months, along with dozens of activists from Pittsburgh's numerous progressive organizations, planning the Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence. Between January 24 and January 26, organizers expect thousands of dissenters to take to the streets in protest of the George W. Bush administration's escalation of military action against Iraq. Protesters are expected to gather from all directions; no doubt the January 18 antiwar march in Washington, D.C. will feed the ranks. The Convergence's organizers promise that it will be the largest antiwar protest Pittsburgh has seen in at least 30 years. Pulp invited a number of local activists to meet at the Thomas Merton Center's Bloomfield office for a round-table discussion on the nature of activism, the current climate for dissent and next weekend's Convergence. Taking part were Vining; Edith Bell, a board member at the Merton Center and a member of the Raging Grannies; veteran activist Vincent Scotti Eirene of the Duncan and Porter House; Saleh Waziruddin of Zi Activism, who was recently called one of 10 young Pittsburghers to watch by Pittsburgh magazine; Toni Bartone of the Pittsburgh Organizing Group, whose members are integral in planning the Convergence; and Maura Jacob and Claire Schoyer of Pittsburgh Association of Peacemakers and Proactive Youth, an organization linking high-school activists across the city. What follows is excerpted from that conversation, which touched on everything from organizing techniques, the nature of nonviolence in a violent world and the definition of "idiot savant." While we talked, Edith Bell made bandages for protesters who might be injured in confrontations with authorities during the Convergence. Does street-level action promote dialogue and compromise or does it polarize people, push them into extreme positions?   EIRENE: I think the street stuff is absolutely important because it's making the invisible dissent visible. It also breaks up the false unanimity, the illusion that somehow everyone is going along with this. If it alienates people -- well, it's sort of like in a romantic relationship: Things have to fall apart before they can come together. BELL: If it wouldn't have been for the street protests during the Viet Nam era, that war would have gone on and on and on. That helped to turn it. And right now, you see all these polls that have been taken -- 70 percent of the people are with the president? When you talk to people, nobody is. I don't
know where they take these polls. And the media doesn't cover it, so unless we go into the streets and make a big brouhaha, the media is not going to cover our phone calls and the letters we write in protest. VINING: When people get to the street, it's almost always not the first option. That happens when we see the system not working. When we saw that the majority of Americans were against this war, and when we had [Senator Arlen] Specter's and [Senator Rick] Santorum's offices both tell us that every single phone call except one in both offices was against this war, and they went and voted for it anyway, people said, "They don't care. The system's not working, they're not listening." Then people go to street action. We don't get attention until we're in the streets, so people think we've just started. I think that's one of the difficulties, why we can be seen as polarizing or we can be misinterpreted. Very few people go right into the streets, and when they do, [the actions] are generally very small. But when you see, like in October, 100,000 or 150,000 people in the streets in D.C., that's not just people who said, "I've got nothing else to do." JACOB: I'm very concerned how people in other countries perceive us, that they think that we just follow our government into whatever it is that they agree upon. Just as [Vining] said, we called Arlen Specter and we called our representatives, and they voted another way. Street action is an important way of saying to other countries who seem to be, like, "Oh, you have a free government, you vote for your representatives." And I'm, like, "They represent us, but they don't vote for us all the time, and I can't really pull them out of office when I don't agree with them." I wanted to send a tape to the BBC saying, "Help us. We don't agree." Just to let other countries know how we stand. I don't want other countries to see our government's actions as representing our whole entire country. BARTONE: It really helps to put a human face on dissent. Any opinion that challenges the status quo can be perceived as a scary thing. But, for example, if you find that your next-door neighbor is protesting, you may begin to think that it's not so far-fetched, that it's right in your backyard. SCHOYER: It's saying that we're here, we're in Pittsburgh and we're working. I think it's good for the activists, to make them keep going, to realize that this is a big movement, that they're actually doing something. That it does make a difference, even if CNN doesn't cover it very well. What is the climate for dissent nowadays? And how do today's activists and street protesters differ from those who protested previous wars? VINING: I was in college during the Reagan years. I remember never wanting to be called an activist, even as I was doing activism. Somewhere it became a bad thing to protest. What I'm seeing very recently -- last three years, probably since Seattle -- is that among young people protest is not a bad thing. There's a real culture now, especially among young people, that it's okay to protest. EIRENE: Back in the 1960s, anarchism was a dirty word. Most people were Socialists and Marxists. Now, because of the nature of anarchism, no one is waiting around for someone to take the lead. You'll find out about something going on here, and the Beehive Collective going on here, and you'll find out about people organizing a little vigil here. There's no central committee, and I think that that aspect of it is positive. Also, never again will we sit around and try to figure out what rhymes with "One, two, three, four." JACOB: Sometimes kids get afraid of being put in categories. A lot of people shy away from being called liberal. BELL: I kind of marvel at the idea that being called a liberal is putting you in a category. I remember only too well my husband scoffing at being called liberal: "I'm a Communist, not a liberal!" JACOB: Among the high-school crowd, which is what we primarily deal with, a lot of kids are certainly interested in [the war], either for or against, oftentimes just because they don't know a lot about it, even with it being prominent in the news. They don't know all the issues; we weren't very old at the time that the Gulf War was happening, so they don't really know that history. It's an interesting process because they'll sometimes form an opinion before they have a lot of facts. So sometimes [activizing them] can be battle, but they seem to be more open to it the more information you give them, and the more opportunity you give them to learn more or to do something. What interests them the most is not fliers and letter-writing. It's more protesting and rallies and petitions -- action, physical work. BARTONE: That's probably true of the college crowd, too, except people are occasionally openly hostile. Sometimes they're very approachable as well, they just kind of feel a little paralyzed by the way that society is. They feel a little bit powerless, I think. BELL: With the U.S.A. Patriot Act, people are getting concerned. At the meetings people are worried -- what can they do to us? My concern is that if we don't do something now, if we don't act now and just let this Patriot Act intimidate us, then in little while we won't be able to do anything anymore. I lived in Nazi Germany and I know what it's like when, slowly, you can do nothing. There's been a lot of mythmaking attached to the Viet Nam era protests. How does that peace movement compare to today's? EIRENE: It's interesting, because [that movement] really came out of nowhere. One minute we were watching Dick Van Dyke, and the next minute Abbie Hoffman was on TV saying that we should shoot our parents. My dad and I were watching that at the same time and he told me not to get any ideas. And so we see where things have really flipped...we can see now that probably the biggest obstacle to peace is my generation. After Viet Nam was over, and our butts were no longer on the line, for 25 years the Vietnamese were ground into the earth, and my generation did not come to their aid. So, in 1995, when the sanctions were lifted off of Viet Nam, they were willing to take Nike -- it takes three months working in Viet Nam to buy a pair of Nike shoes made at the factory you're working in -- and all the oil companies, too. One of the most untapped resources in the world of oil is in Southeast Asia. My concern is that we create within ourselves an urgency that's going to give us consistency. When the Iraqi war was over, everybody went away, and here these people were living under sanctions. They cut [the Iraqis] off from the whole world and had them drinking water that was like it was out of the Monongahela. I don't know how you do that, in terms of instilling commitment. But I'm not concerned with the peace movement. I'm concerned with the cultures and nations and countries and people we're destroying. If my generation had taken one or two years to investigate what Viet Nam was like in the postwar era, they would have never accepted the Nike factories that so many of the students now are protesting. If all of us had been working on this since 1991, there would be no Iraqi war. We can't even imagine the type of poverty that people have to live in because of the aftermath of war. The best that we can hope for as activists in times like this is to interact with newly interested people and to get some kind of depth of commitment. Because Americans, they always -- if someone steps on their foot, they move it. This type of crisis orientation, you know... JACOB: Viet Nam really showed that there has to be a commitment in multiple fields. You can't look at just one side of an issue and assume that you've won. BARTONE: There is almost a feeling among my generation that we kind of don't know what we're doing. Sure, we have all the lore of the '60s to go by, but it's also so much different, with the Patriot Act and legislation like that. EIRENE: Today there is a really miraculous dynamic of a nonviolent way of life, and that's where students nowadays are way ahead of the game, in terms of animal rights and being a vegan. And the whole puppetista thing -- in the 1960s it was just like a dream that anything could ever be like that, and now it's the norm. We see a lot of creativity. In Seattle, when the police literally took the signs away from people, they didn't know what to do. So they started writing things on their arms and on their shirts. WAZIRUDDIN: Some journalists have this cartoon image of the '60s. They think that the late '60s was the height of activism, when really the early '60s was when they were doing the work of getting people organized. They have this cartoon image from the late '60s that people going wild on campus is where social change comes from. Looking for that cartoon image and not finding it, and not really looking at what is there, they say, "Oh, there's no activism here," because there are no clowns. There is a lot of misunderstanding from journalists who aren't activists and haven't done some of the work, or even looked at some of the work, so they don't know what they should be covering or could be covering. I've had media people call and say, "Oh, they're anarchists. How can they be nonviolent? Don't they break windows? Isn't that what anarchists do?" That's really ignoring the whole history of anarchism. That's not even doing the basic reading. What do you think of the media's treatment of the peace movement? EIRENE: The media is a trap. I would go to demonstrations where everybody was getting along, we were really kicking ass, they were chaining themselves to buildings and everybody was upset. Then people would look at the nightly news and the newspaper and say, "We got no coverage." In the '60s they used to say, "If it's not on film, it hasn't happened." That's really unfortunate. Of course it happened. To somehow say that this virtual reality is the only reality...I would judge things by how this affects all the sick and dying Iraqi children. How is what I'm doing affecting that. As opposed to becoming a clown -- and there's nothing wrong with clowns -- so that the media covers your story. The media likes crowds, they like big stuff. I swear that a lot of people just walked away from the anti-sanctions stuff with Iraq because we weren't getting any coverage. We would go to [CMU's] Software Engineering Institute every year on the anniversary of when we bombed the civilian shelter [in Baghdad during the Gulf War], February 12, and it was getting really sad in terms of people showing up. BELL: You have this big demonstration in Washington, and a small group of people is throwing paint or whatever, and that gets covered. Or a fight breaks out among half a dozen people. But they don't cover the thousands who march peacefully. That's frustrating, because it gives the wrong impression. They don't like peaceful demonstrations. That's too boring. EIRENE: That's why it was exciting when people were being shot in the face with hockey puck bullets -- not little rubber bullets -- in Seattle in 1999. The media didn't report it, so the Indy Media people went to the media in Seattle and said, "Here's video." Then they had to report it. We've entered a whole new era of becoming the media, making our own media. I was at the 2000 Republican National Convention and I walked into this room with 75 computers in it. It was the Indy Media site, with a Web site, a newspaper, a Web radio station and even a TV station uploading to a satellite. This is a lot different than getting on a bus, getting off, protesting for a few hours and back. The depth of that makes me very hopeful. What little violence occurs at these protests does draw attention to the cause. How do you define nonviolent resistance? Where is the line? BELL: As long as you don't hurt other people. VINING: First of all, we're not just talking about nonviolence in the abstract. We're talking about nonviolent resistance to violence. I think we have to keep that in mind. People look to us as this peace movement and pull us out of the culture we live in. What is a nonviolent response to resisting and trying to stop a violent act? Right now we want to stop children and maybe millions of people from being killed in the Middle East. So the question is, how do we take action to stop that in a way that's nonviolent? WAZIRUDDIN: There's a difference between militancy and violence. Militancy is about people saying, "Something bad is happening that's part of my life, I don't have control over my life, and I shouldn't just sit around, I should do something about it." It's about people in society deciding they won't take something anymore and getting control over their political and economic life. That doesn't mean violence. It means that they're active. It means they're going to the source of the problem and changing it directly. It doesn't mean they're using force to hurt people to get there. A sit-in or an occupation of a factory by workers is militant but it's not violent. It doesn't have to be violent. BELL: Some wise person once said, "Evil happens when a lot of good people don't do anything." VINING: And disruptive isn't violent. We often intend to disrupt things, for the system not to function for a day -- whether it's because we fill the jail cells, or because we tie up the fax machines. That's not violent. We're saying that the system is not working, and it's causing violence, and we're trying to disrupt that. What I don't want to see is nonviolence ever meaning passive. Because to me that is actually violent; if I allow someone to wreak devastation in this world by my silence, I think I am almost violent in my passivity. That's the same argument put forward by anti-abortion activist James Kopp when he explained why he shot and killed Dr. Bernard Slepian in Amherst, New York. VINING: That same justification is used to justify war sometimes. I would say, in terms of the demonstration, that a nonviolent resistance is one that does not cause harm, that does not directly lead to the escalation of harm to other human beings -- or animals, or life. BARTONE: An entire movement can't come to an agreement on what is violent or nonviolent either. There are people who feel that breaking a corporate window is nonviolent; there are people who would totally disagree. But the two have the same end goal. People need to use their own best judgment. EIRENE: My main concern is people who keep me up talking until two or three in the morning about revolutionary violence, and the glorification and romanticizing of the Weather Underground and Ted Kaczynski. Of course, my friends who were talking about revolutionary violence in the '60s are now selling antiques. The Pittsburgh Regional Antiwar Convergence takes place January 24-26, and will include marches in Oakland and the South Side, along with countless other attractions. For a detailed calendar, check in with the Pittsburgh Organizing Group (www.organizepittsburgh.org) or the Thomas Merton Center (www.thomasmertoncenter.org). For updates on the action that weekend, your best bet is the Pittsburgh Independent Media Center (www.indypgh.com).

10 to Watch (Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburghers of the Year)

(from https://web.archive.org/web/20031226123200/https://www.wqed.org/mag/features/0103_ten.shtml)

January 2003

Look for this select group of Pittsburghers to shake up 2003.

By Minette Seate | Photos by Blaine Stiger

Change takes time, but it also takes people to make it. Sure, you're already well familiar with many of the newsmakers for 2003, but we've been thinking of some folks you may not have heard of—yet. We looked at the arts, medicine, politics, business, education and other areas to select 10 prime examples of regional evolution. These people stretch their own boundaries and, by doing so, carry the rest of us along for the ride. Join us in the coming year as we keep an eye on these pacesetters.

SYED SALEH WAZIRUDDIN
co-president of the board, Thomas Merton Center
For those who think that political activism died in the '60s, the Thomas Merton Center serves as a thriving enabler of nonviolent protest. As a board member, Waziruddin uses his own consciousness-raising experiences to help guide the center's mission. Waziruddin himself is a microcosm of world views. The son of Indian and Pakistani parents, he was born in Canada, raised in Saudi Arabia and educated at Carnegie Mellon University, where his views on civil rights and freedoms were allowed to bloom. A combo of youth, optimism and reality, Waziruddin might be the way to get folks thinking beyond their own backyards.

Minette Seate is the producer of Black Horizons, which airs Fridays at 10 p.m., with repeats on Sundays at 2 p.m., on WQED 13, and a contributor to OnQ.