Friday, March 13, 2015

Black Lives Matter on the US Terrorist Organizations List?

Members of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force tracked the time and location of a Black Lives Matter protest last December at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, email obtained by The Intercept shows.

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Activists had planned the protest at the mall to call attention to police brutality against African Americans.

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The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces are based in 104 U.S. cities and are made up of approximately 4,000 federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The FBI characterizes them as “our nation’s front line on terrorism.”

[...]

The FBI has been criticized in the recent past for its actions regarding domestic advocacy groups. A 2010 report by the Department of Justice Inspector General found the FBI opened investigations connected to organizations such as Greenpeace and the Catholic Worker movement that classified possible “trespassing or vandalism” as domestic terrorism cases. The report also found the FBI’s National Press Office “made false and misleading statements” when questioned by the media about documents obtained by public records requests.

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Documents stolen from an FBI field office in 1971 showed the Bureau was keeping literally every black student at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania under surveillance.

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As reported by the Star Tribune, emails released earlier this week reveal apparent coordination between Sandra Johnson, the Bloomington city attorney, and Kathleen Allen, the Mall of America’s corporate counsel. [...] Johnson emailed to Allen two days after the protest, encouraging the mall company to wait for a criminal charge from the city before pursuing its own lawsuit. “Agree — we would defer any civil action depending on how the criminal charges play out,” Allen wrote back.

“That’s pretty unprecedented to use a criminal proceeding for a corporation to collect their costs, costs for policing and protest,” said [Jordan Kushner, one of the activists’ defense attorneys]. “It’s not like people stole from them or damaged belongings.”

  The Intercept
But highly likely collectible, I imagine.

...and hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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