From: harelb@MATH.CORNELL.EDU (Harel Barzilai)
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: RE-FRAMING DISSENT AS CRIMINAL SUBVERSION (part 2)
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Date: 27 Jul 92 05:51:06 GMT
Organization: misc.activism.progressive on UseNet ; ACTIV-L@UMCVMB

Topic 45        Repression & Paradigm Shift Frame       Response  2 of  4 
cberlet 
Public Eye Network      10:08 am  Jul 25, 1992 
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PLAYING FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE FIRST AMENDMENT 

Re-framing of dissenters as criminal subversives  
is a critical process within government law  
enforcement and intelligence agencies. For  
internal and external reasons, government  
institutions must provide justifications for the  
fact that on the surface, members of a dissident  
group under investigation often appear to be  
engaged in activity protected by the First  
Amendment. Agents and officers who become queasy  
about lapses in protecting Constitutional rights,  
or who object to the paranoid assumptions  
underlying the rationalization of the  
investigation, are made aware that their careers  
will suffer unless they become team players.  
Sometimes, if public political conditions are  
favorable, a Congressional committee will start a  
well-publicized investigation and hold hearings  
where the government and right-wing experts who  
started the process are called to testify. This  
forum ensures that the charges against the  
targeted group are distributed widely by the  
media, and hearing transcripts become the  
basis for a new wave of charges.  

When the public is prepared to view the  
dissidents as a clear and present danger, the  
last stage of political repression is  
implemented. Government agents engage in  
intrusive investigative procedures and harass  
members of the targeted group. Suddenly,  
demonstrations or acts of civil disobedience are  
met with huge overreaction and displays of police  
power (and sometimes acts of police misconduct or  
brutality); and unexplained and apparently random  
physical assaults, arson attacks, or robberies  
occur with increasing frequency. 

IN SEARCH OF THE CRAFTY CORE CADRE 

Implicit in the rationalizations and  
justifications for political repression is a  
package of right-wing paranoid beliefs with roots  
deep in xenophobia and nativism. Two key paranoid  
theories could be called the theories of the  
"Slippery Slope" and the "Onion Ring." 

The Slippery Slope Theory of Subversion:  

*** Global liberation movements are not prompted  
by a genuine response to social conditions but by  
outside intervention, most often by  
revolutionaries or communists and their proxies. 

*** Domestic social change movements are not  
fueled by a genuine response to social conditions  
but by outside agitators, most often  
revolutionaries or those under the control of  
revolutionaries .  

*** Liberalism is the crest of a slippery slope  
which leads downhill to the Welfare State, then  
Socialism, and inevitably to Communism or Totalitarianism. 

*** Dissent is provoked by subversion. Subversion  
is a terrorist movement. Terrorism is criminal.  

For the true believers who advocate this view,  
patriotism equals unquestioning obedience to  
authority and undying resistance to social  
change. Surveillance and infiltration are  
justified to stop the spread of subversion. It's  
all a plot. Slippery Slope theorists generally  
also believe in the Onion-ring theory as well. 

The Onion-ring Theory of Subversion.  

*** Subversive cadre bore into the core of all  
social change movements both at home and abroad.  

*** To uncover the cadre who are engaged in  
subversive criminal activity, an informant must  
work step-by-step from the outside onion ring of  
non-criminal free-speech activity through several  
rings of hierarchy toward the center core where  
the criminal activity lurks.  

*** Honest though naive activists are often  
unaware they are being manipulated, and therefore  
should welcome attempts to expose the core of  
crafty covert criminal cadre. 


The Onion Ring theory is less extreme than the  
Slippery Slope theory in its concession that some  
members of radical and liberal political  
movements are sincere, and not sliding towards  
totalitarianism. Nonetheless, its advocates also  
justify surveillance and infiltration to stop the  
criminal activity at the core of groups  
exercising their free speech rights. 

In fact, in order to insure that at least some  
agents or informants succeed in penetrating to  
the criminality at the core, an extraordinary  
level of invasion becomes not only legitimate,  
but essential. Onion-ringers advocate  
infiltrating every group, spying on every member,  
and keeping track of all persons even  
tangentially involved in all social change  
movements. Alas, for the domestic political  
activist, the end result of both the Slippery  
Slope and Onion Ring theories is the same:  
political surveillance and infiltration. While  
courts have consistently ruled that passive  
monitoring of First Amendment activity is  
permissible, critics charge that passive  
monitoring and dossier-compiling often turn into  
disruption or attack, sometimes inadvertently,  
sometimes intentionally. As Donner explains:  

"The listing of individuals, whether for ultimate  
detention in the event of war or for clues to the  
source of civil disorders, masked an underlying  
tension between passive montoring and barely  
suppressed aggression. Why wait for the future  
showdown? What can be done to get at these people  
now? This tension found an outlet in special  
programs directed at `key figures' and `top  
functionaries,' singled out for close penetrative  
and continuous surveillance. <3> " 

Since agents are attempting to find a core of  
criminality that, except in rare cases, does not  
in fact exist, they become frustrated and  
redouble their efforts. This fervor is especially  
problematic with informants and <agents  
provocateur> who fail to find the sought-after  
criminals, and thus may feel compelled to  
inflate, provoke, or invent charges of  
criminality to reach their assigned goal, gain  
status, and continue to receive pay and bonuses.  
The dynamic of informant abuse is discussed in  
<Under Cover: Police Surveillance in  
America.> <4>  

Some critics insist that without unequivocal  
guidelines, firm congressional oversight, and  
thoughtful judicial intervention, intelligence  
activities--whether domestic or foreign--almost  
inevitably turn toward undemocratic techniques.  
Other, more historically informed critics point  
out that all of these constraints have  
consistently failed to deter abuse.  

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