Did OLC Change the Understanding of Riot Investigations to Time w/RNC Convention?

/in /by

There’s an interesting detail in the IG Report on FBI’s investigations of peace groups that suggests FBI was asking OLC for an interpretation of the approval required before conducting a riot-related investigation.

The Attorney General’s Guidelines on “Reporting on Civil Disorders and Demonstrations” were in effect from 1976 until they were repealed and partially incorporated into the 2008 Guidelines. Two FBI OGC attorneys we interviewed told us it was their interpretation that the Guidelines required the FBI to request Attorney General approval to open an investigation under the federal riot statute. 18 USC 2101, and the civil disorders statute, 18 USC 231.

[snip]

In July 2008 the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) sent an informal opinion to OGC that stated that the Demonstration Guidelines do not require Attorney General approval to open an investigation under the riot statute or the civil disorders statute. However the OLC attorney also said that “as a prudential matter” the FBI should consider requesting such approval before initiating investigations under these statutes. The 2008 Attorney General’s Guidelines repealed the Demonstration Guidelines and requires the approval of the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General, or the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division only when the FBI collects information relating to actual or threatened disorders to assist the President in determining whether, pursuant to 10 USC 331-33, “use of armed forces or militia is required and how a decision to commit troops should be implemented.”

This footnote is presented in the context of an investigation pertaining to the FTAA meeting in Miami in 2003, but it’s the changes in interpretation in 2008 that I’m most interested in.

This footnote seems to suggest that in July 2008, in the weeks before the Presidential Convention season, someone in OLC lowered the bar for starting an investigation into a potential riot. That’s all the more interesting, given the liberal use of the riot statute Ramsey County and FBI used in preemptively arresting people leading up to the RNC Convention in September of 2008.

In any case, the lowered standard for investigating people for planning riots appears to be the rule now, as the government only needs to get higher approval for riot investigations if they plan to militarize the response.

  1. parsnip says:

    investigating people for planning riots

    ??

    How do they know ‘people are planning riots’ without investigating first? Are people who plan peaceful demonstrations now considered to be planning riots? I’m under the impression it’s the police who plan and create ‘riots.’

    It’s the US version of Gladio-lite, to blame the ‘left’ for disorder and to justify labeling the left as terrorists. Riot…terrorism….what’s the diff? The tighty righties have their pants in a twist because the people want peace, and a fair shake at life.

    • emptywheel says:

      Well, yeah. THey basically start surveilling someone bc of an affiliation w/a group rather broadly defined as an anarchist group (which appears to mean an opposition to this govt, not necessarily all govt), and then planning meetings become okay for surveillance.

      • TalkingStick says:

        During the Bush era three of my groups were investigated by TALON and another of those Pentagon programs., and I assume they still are being surveilled. The Quakers, the Vegans and the Unitarians. The lists they were on were disclosed by NBC. It was about 5 yr ago. Other regulars on the list is a peace organization that annually holds a vigil at a Nuclear Sub base and the Unitarians who lead protests at Ft. Benning what used to be the SOA. I forgot what they call it now. This surveillance for “riot planning” has included attendance at church worship services.

    • furey says:

      KRAKOW, Poland – Intolerant governments across the globe are “slowly crushing” activist and advocacy groups that play an essential role in the development of democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday. She cited a broad range of countries where “the walls are closing in” on civic organizations such as unions, religious groups, rights advocates and other nongovernmental organizations that press for social change and shine a light on governments’ shortcomings.

      Among those she named were Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Venezuela, China and Russia.

      “Some of the countries engaging in these behaviors still claim to be democracies,” Clinton said at an international conference on the promotion of democracy and human rights. “Democracies don’t fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and agitate.”

      Before an audience of several hundred senior government officials, Clinton recalled Winston Churchill’s warning 60 years ago at Fulton, Mo., that an iron curtain was descending across Europe. She noted that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, that curtain no longer remains.

      “But we must be wary of the steel vise in which governments around the world are slowly crushing civil society and the human spirit,” she said. Social activists, Clinton said, are being harassed, censored, cut off from funding, arrested, prosecuted or killed.

      President Barack Obama, in a statement released in Washington, said the United States is particularly concerned about “the spread of restrictions on civil society, the growing use of law to curb rather than enhance freedom and widespread corruption that is undermining the faith of citizens in their governments.”

      http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/07/04/a-smile-from-a-veil/

  5. ceabaird says:

    More civil liberty beatdown from the fascists surrounding the “permanent republican majority” architects and enablers. I wonder how fast these shitbags would squeal if these loosened regs were used to surveil and intimidate, oh, say. the US Chamber of Commerce? Or maybe some of the teabagging groups?

  6. goldstandard says:

    Did OLC Change the Understanding of Riot Investigations to Time w/RNC Convention? Did the Vatican just get busted for money laundering? Nuff said…:)

  7. parsnip says:

    In reply to geminorange@5:

    Free Speech…dissent…terrorism…what’s the diff?

    As I commented several posts back, the only acceptable form of speech left is voting on hackable machines. And that’s limited, too.

  8. R.H. Green says:

    I may be over-interpreting things, as I am releying on the post only, but it appears that part of what has been accommplished by the revision of ’08 was that the previous distinction between disorder and demonstation was erased.

  9. BMcGarth says:

    Look….it’s only a matter of time before they come knocking on our doors

    for being critical of the Govt…….it will be here soon…don’t worry.

    • bobschacht says:

      I sense a certain convergence between our worries about Executive authority abuses of the Constitution and parallel worries by the Tea Party folks and Libertarians. Jane started a “Strange Bedfellows” program for the 2008 elections, and maybe its time for that again. We don’t appear to raise enough stink by ourselves to get any attention. But perhaps an alliance of Progressives and Libertarians (a la Bruce Fein) against Executive abuses of the Constitution, if genuine, might get enough attention to shake up the complacency in the White House.

      At any rate, I favor almost any kind of move that would grab those guys by the short hairs and give a few hard yanks to get their attention.

      Bob in AZ

      • bmaz says:

        It is a nice theory, and one that has been discussed in a couple of different groups I know, and I am sure several more I don’t know. What I have seen leads me, and I can only speak for myself, to believe that such groups and interests are too fractured, non-cohesive and all over the road to be particularly usable or reliable partners. Even the “tea party” is really nothing more than a name generally used to describe a bunch of localized and diverse groups. Just not sure it is workable; at least not yet, maybe there will be a more cohesive whole that coalesces in the future.

  11. alinaustex says:

    1984 knocking at our door
    bmaz@14 and bobschacht@13
    It might be possible to coalesece these differnt groups in the context
    of the ” big government, big corporations, big threat to the our individual liberties argument” especialy as ‘clear and present dangers ‘ to personal privacy and the right to bear arms .
    And Bruce Fein is a true Patriot on these issues (even though he worried once upon a time overmuch regarding the abuse of Executive blowjobs )

  12. JamesJoyce says:

    THE LOGIC OF NAZIS. No wonder why patriotic Germans opposed to the dysfunction of Hitler committed suicide. So in America if you protest and exercise your constitutional rights you are a threat! These people are sick and represent a threat to every American’s Constitutional rights. Usurpation of law under the color of law!

  13. MadDog says:

    OT – Seems our friends across the pond are busy – via the Guardian:

    MI6 consulted David Miliband on interrogations

    David Miliband gave MI6 the green light to proceed with intelligence-gathering operations in countries where there was a possible risk of terrorism suspects being tortured, the Guardian has learned.

    During the three years Miliband served as foreign secretary, MI6 always consulted him personally before embarking on what a source described as “any particularly difficult” attempts to gain information from a detainee held by a country with a poor human rights record…

    [snip]

    …Today, 24 hours before the Labour leadership election closed, Miliband took the unprecedented step of returning to the Foreign Office to study files relating to three British citizens who were tortured in Bangladesh and Egypt while he was foreign secretary. After spending almost two hours examining the papers, he issued a statement in which he said the documents contained no evidence that UK ministers were asked to grant permission for any of the men to be detained, and said that it would be wrong to suggest that he had ever sanctioned torture. The statement does not address the possibility that intelligence extracted under torture was later received by the UK authorities…

    [snip]

    …Earlier this year, Bangladeshi authorities told the Guardian that during 2007-08 they investigated around 12 British nationals resident in Bangladesh at the request of British intelligence officers. One senior counter-terrorism official in Dhaka said that the question of whether any of these individuals posed any risk to the UK “could not have been dealt with by British law – because of the question of human rights”. The official declined to elaborate…

    [snip]

    …One of the men tortured in Bangladesh, Faisal Mostafa, was detained in March last year. Mostafa has twice been cleared of terrorism offences at trial in the UK. He says he was suspended from his wrists for days at a time, hung upside down, subjected to electric shocks, beaten, deprived of food and exposed to bright lights for long periods. Since his return to the UK he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic shock.

    He also has wounds in his right shoulder and hip that he says were inflicted by a drill…

    [snip]

    …In April this year, a restaurateur from Birmingham was detained in Dhaka and taken to a detention centre known as the Taskforce for Interrogation Cell. Gulam Mustafa, 48, who is no relation…

    …On 2 May Mustafa was transferred to a prison hospital, where he spent the next three months being treated for injuries sustained during his interrogation. As well as being suspended from his wrists, beaten and subjected to electric shocks, Mustafa’s friends allege that he was water-boarded, and that his knees were crushed…

  14. klynn says:

    One of the other disturbing aspects of this story (and the PA story) EW is the fact that there is an aspect that raises questions about the impact of the government actions resulting in the protection of stock values for various industries serving the gov through privatization. When people or groups that are corporate or policy-regulatory watchdogs “find” something and bring it to the media’s attention through protest, information campaign or boycott, this affects a company’s stock value. I find an aspect of this effort and the PA effort to tilt a wee bit towards insider trading/stock manipulation with corporations using the gov as a strong arm to squash any third party accountability that could affect their bottom line or government contracts (not to mention voter manipulation).

    The boat loads of conflict of interest that have driven all of this is offensive. Especially under the disguise of “protection”.

    Have you talked to Amy Goodman about this post?