( ACLU) Manufacturing a “Black Separatist” Threat and Other Dubious Claims: Bias in Newly Released FBI Terrorism Training Materials
By Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:31pm
In a throwback to the J. Edgar Hoover-era COINTELPRO investigations targeting civil rights and anti-war activists, the FBI is now training its agents to be on the lookout for “Black Separatist” terrorists, according to FBI training materials released today by the ACLU. These new disclosures, obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation, are the latest in a growing flood of FBI training materials that include factually flawed and biased information.
The FBI’s apparent concern over a so-called “Black Separatist Threat” first came to light last year, when the ACLU released a 2009 FBI Atlanta Intelligence Notethat purported to examine this “threat,” in part by charting the growth of the black population in Georgia from 2000 through 2015.
It is hard to see how the relative size of the black population has any bearing on the number of alleged “Black Separatists” in a given area, much less the threat they pose, and this question is not answered in the document. We previously raised concerns that the memo, while heavily redacted, focuses undue attention on the First Amendment-protected activities of the groups it identifies as “Black Separatists,” including appearances at political campaign events and protests against police violence, rather than any alleged acts of terrorism.
But the Atlanta Intelligence Note raised a more fundamental question: who are “Black Separatists” and is there any evidence they pose a terrorist threat? Internet searches of “Black Separatist terrorism,” “Black Separatist bombing,” and “Black Separatist shooting” fail to bring up any recent incidents that could be fairly described as terrorist violence. No “Black Separatist” terrorist incidents are included in the FBI’s list of “Major Terrorism Cases: Past and Present,” nor on the more comprehensive list of terrorist attacks going back to 1980, which are detailed in an FBI report entitled “Terrorism 2002-2005.” While Black nationalist groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army were certainly involved in political violence back in the 1970s, they no longer exist, and the last acts of violence attributed to either group were more than two decades ago.
So why are Atlanta FBI agents now searching for black separatist threats? Because the FBI appears to be training them to believe there is one using factually flawed materials.
Newly-released FBI domestic terrorism training presentations on “Black Separatist Extremists” juxtapose decades-old examples of violence by the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army with unorthodox and controversial beliefs expressed by a number of different modern groups to suggest, without evidence, that these latter-day groups pose a similar threat of violence. The FBI admits that the organizations it calls “Black Separatists” have no unifying theme or mission, stating “specific goals historically fluctuated between group to group,” but suggests that “all share racial grievances against the U.S., most seek restitution, or governance base [sic] on religious identity or social principals [sic].” This broad description could of course cover many different groups from the fringe to the mainstream, exposing them all to heightened government surveillance. Related counterterrorism training presentations indicate the FBI has also invented a new class of domestic terrorists in 2009 called “American Islamic Extremists,” which it describes as American Muslims who mix “Islamic theology with some levels of black separatism, anarchism, and racial rhetoric.”
These FBI training materials, obtained through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the ACLU of Northern California, the Asian Law Caucus and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, raise three primary concerns. First, for the FBI to produce training programs that portray groups as violent threats based on old and misleading evidence and false associations is improper, and can only misdirect investigative resources. And because the groups highlighted have little in common save their racial identities, these flawed trainings will encourage racial profiling, rather than fact-based investigations. Second, the presentations’ focus on the unconventional ideologies of these modern groups tends to suggest a direct connection between belief and violence, which will again lead to inappropriate investigations based on First Amendment-protected activities rather than evidence of criminal conduct. Finally, even where these inappropriate investigations based on race and ideology fail to find evidence of violence, under its new rules the FBI may continue to pursue these groups under what it calls a “disruption strategy.”
The FBI’s disruption strategy is laid out in a 2009 memorandum from the Counterterrorism Division to all field offices instituting a “baseline collection plan,” which itemizes the types of information that FBI agents should seek during investigations of suspected terrorists. The plan describes implementation of a “disruption strategy” that is eerily reminiscent of the COINTELPRO-eradisruption activities that were specifically designed to suppress First Amendment activity. The 2009 FBI memorandum states that when “the risk to public safety is too great, or if all significant intelligence has been collected, and/or the threat is resolved,” agents may employ a disruption strategy “including arrests, interviews, or source-driven operations to effectively disrupt subject’s activities” [emphasis added]. This means that groups the FBI believes, but cannot prove, are involved in terrorism (perhaps because they aren’t) can still be investigated and targeted for sting operations or other invasive techniques, not to mitigate a threat, but to disrupt their activities. Read Rest Here
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