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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2020/04/05/israel-palestine-fbi-terrorism-investigation/">https://theintercept.com/2020/04/05/israel-palestine-fbi-terrorism-investigation/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">FBI Opened Terrorism Investigations
Into Nonviolent Palestinian Solidarity Group</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Chip Gibbons - April 5, 2020</div>
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<p><u>In 2006, St.</u> Louis-based activist and academic
Mark Chmiel received a message on his answering
machine from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The
FBI wanted to talk to Chmiel about trip three years
ago that he and other St. Louis activists took with
the International Solidarity Movement to the West
Bank, in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
When Chmiel’s attorney reached out to the FBI, they
did not respond.</p>
<p>Chmiel later wrote that he was motivated to travel to
the West Bank by Palestinians’ calls for volunteers,
international organizations’ inability to deal with
the occupation, and his own country’s complicity in
Israel’s actions. The International Solidarity
Movement, or ISM, which would be Chmiel’s vehicle,
encourages international volunteers to come to the
occupied territories and engage in nonviolent direct
action against the occupation. During the delegation
Chmiel was on, Israel soldiers opened fire on a
Palestinian protest and injured one of the St. Louis
activists. An aging Holocaust survivor who was also
part of the delegation was subjected to a<a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2007/06/13/quot-i-was-not-prepared-for-the-horrors-i-saw-quot/">
humiliating and invasive</a> search when departing
from Israel.</p>
<p>These deprivations of rights experienced by Americans
at the hands of Israeli authorities, however, were not
what interested the FBI. Instead, the FBI was <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6825019-FBI-Documents-on-Opening-and-Closing-of.html">conducting
an international terrorism investigation</a> into
Chmiel and another activist from the delegation (The
Intercept reached out to the second activist, who
asked that their name be withheld).</p>
<p>Neither Chmiel nor the general public ever learned of
the official terrorism investigation until now. Its
existence was revealed by <a
href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1vK35LjHRhDQF0_MXrlFDVuumX6gmE1aU?usp=sharing">hundreds
of pages of FBI files about the International
Solidarity Movement</a> obtained by The Intercept
through a public records request. The documents make
references to other investigations from FBI field
offices around the country involving ISM or its
members, but many of the files are so heavily redacted
that it is impossible to tell what they refer to. In
at least some instances, the FBI appears to be
monitoring the political activity of ISM members or at
the very least noting ISM affiliation of subjects of
FBI monitoring.</p>
<p>It is clear, however, that the FBI conducted at least
two major investigations into ISM. In addition to the
international terrorism investigation into the two St.
Louis activists, the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office
initiated a domestic security investigation into ISM
as an organization.</p>
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<blockquote data-reactid="209"><span data-reactid="210"></span>
<p>“These cases demonstrate the FBI’s unwillingness to
distinguish non-violent civil disobedience protesting
government policy from terrorism.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="212">
<p>Nothing in the documents suggests any of these
investigations ever resulted in criminal charges.
Instead, the documents reveal sprawling investigations
involving FBI field offices in multiple states and the
national headquarters, as well as local law
enforcement. FBI agents resorted not only to
confidential informants and physical surveillance, but
a scandal-prone unit formed in the wake of the
September 11 terrorist attacks accessed the phone
records of at least one activist. In both
investigations, the FBI relied heavily on biased
right-wing publications making fantastical claims of
questionable veracity.</p>
<p>The investigations, the documents show, cast a wide
net. Other groups making nonviolent objections to
Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories were
named as associates of ISM; their board members and
other affiliations were listed in the documents simply
owing to glancing associations with the group under
investigation.</p>
<p>Throughout the documents, the political beliefs of
ISM members and other Palestinian solidarity activist
were treated as though they were synonymous with
terrorism. The approach is of a piece with the FBI’s <a
href="https://rightsanddissent.org/fbi-spying/">long
history</a> of using its intelligence and national
security powers to track domestic dissent.</p>
<p>“These cases demonstrate the FBI’s unwillingness to
distinguish non-violent civil disobedience protesting
government policy from terrorism,” Michael German, a
former FBI agent and current fellow at the Brennan
Center for Justice, who reviewed the documents, told
The Intercept. “The first” — the Los Angeles probe —
“shows the FBI doesn’t even follow its own rules in
opening Terrorism Enterprise Investigations. And the
second” — in St. Louis — “shows the FBI’s use of
tools designed to target foreign enemies against
Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.”</p>
<p>The documents obtained by The Intercept were released
in response to a Freedom of Information Act request
filed in February 2015. The FBI, however, only began
handing over the files in the fall of 2019 after
litigation. While the FBI purports to have processed
all documents exclusively in its possession, it
maintains that it located other records that
originated with or mention other government agencies
and declined to release them. (The files also
reference a separate earlier probe, based out of Los
Angeles, into four individuals instead of ISM as an
organization. Despite the allusions to this
investigation in the documents the FBI sent in
response to The Intercept’s FOIA request, no documents
directly from the investigation were included in the
released materials.)</p>
<p>For ISM members, the episode is a surreal view into
the priorities of America’s premier law enforcement
and domestic intelligence agency. “The fact that ISM
was under this kind of extensive investigation is
ridiculous and a complete waste of taxpayer money,”
ISM co-founder Huwaida Arraf told The Intercept. “ISM
has always been open and transparent about who we are,
what we do, and what we stand for, which is
purportedly what this country stands for — freedom and
human rights.”</p>
<h3>St. Louis Investigation</h3>
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<a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6825019-FBI-Documents-on-Opening-and-Closing-of.html#document/p1"
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src="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6825019/pages/FBI-Documents-on-Opening-and-Closing-of-p1-normal.gif"></a>
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<p>In March 2004, the FBI’s St. Louis Field Office
launched its international terrorism investigation of
two local ISM activists. Despite spending two years
investigating the pair, the FBI ultimately concluded
neither one of them had broken any U.S. laws or posed
any threat to national security. Handwritten notes
scrawled in the margins of both FBI files read “no
leads no evidence.” The FBI concluded the two were
merely pro-Palestinian activists.</p>
<p>Why the FBI ever thought the activists were guilty of
anything other than First Amendment-protected activity
remains unclear. The stated reasoning for the
investigation is that the pair were members of ISM and
that they traveled to the occupied Palestinian
territories with the group. Yet the files indicate
multiple St. Louis activists went on an ISM delegation
to the Palestinian territories; why only the two were
singled out is never explained.</p>
<p>This association with ISM appears to have been enough
to warrant the probe. Local FBI agents had met with an
“asset” of “unknown reliability” who informed them
about ISM. Agents followed up by looking up ISM in the
FBI’s automated case system, which was an electronic
system used to maintain files about the FBI’s
investigative, intelligence, and administrative
activities. Whatever records they found — agents
described the search as “cursory” — led them to link
ISM to Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian resistance
group that is classified as a terrorist organization
by the U.S. But the links rested on thin reeds: The
agents reported that “some persons who claim
affiliation with the ISM are suspected of having
loyalties, or sympathizing with Hamas or other more
radical pro-Palestinian groups. ISM claims to be a
peaceful movement that utilizes nonviolent direct
action protest tactics to drive Israel from the
Palestinian areas.”</p>
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<p>The result of this purported association of some
unnamed individuals within ISM’s orbits with
international terrorists — as well as supposed links
to domestic anarchists — the St. Louis Field Office
took it upon themselves to investigate the two
activists to “assess any possible terrorism links,”
launching the terrorism investigation.</p>
<p>Despite turning up no real evidence of any
wrongdoing, the FBI was able to pull the phone records
of at least one of the two activists. According to the
documents obtained by The Intercept, the FBI’s
Communications Analysis Unit processed Chmiel’s
phone records and found “one telephone number in CAU
analysis of Chmiel’s phone was linked to a highly
classified CIA cable.”</p>
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<p>The FBI’s Communications Analysis Unit, which was
created after the September 11 attacks to support
terrorism investigations by analyzing phone records,
was heavily <a
href="http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34958925/ns/us_news-security/t/review-fbi-skirted-law-get-phone-records/#.XmAiHC2ZPxU">criticized</a>
during this period by the Office of Inspector General
for obtaining phone records without first getting
either a grand jury subpoena or what is known as a
national security letter.</p>
<p>How the Communications Analysis Unit obtained
Chmiel’s phone records or what justification was
provided is unknown. In the document that mentioned
links to the CIA cable, the preceding paragraph
mentioned a grand jury subpoena, but redactions make
it impossible to know what the subpoena dealt with.
(The second activist’s file also contains a redacted
reference to a grand jury subpoena.) The FBI was never
an intended recipient of the CIA cable and the CIA
proved slow to share its contents with the FBI, the
document says.</p>
<p>While the CIA foot-dragging was used to put off
closing one activist’s case even after other had been
closed, eventually the agents relented. “For this
reason further delay of this closing communication is
not deemed feasible,” the <a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6825019-FBI-Documents-on-Opening-and-Closing-of.html">file</a>
said, referring to internal cable that would
officially end the probe. The case was closed on March
21, 2006.</p>
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<p><img
src="https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2020/04/LeonardoSantamaria_TheIntercept_Spot_sm-1024x854.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90"
alt="LeonardoSantamaria_TheIntercept_Spot_sm"></p>
<p class="caption">Illustration: Leonardo Santamaria
for The Intercept</p>
</div>
</div>
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<h3>Los Angeles Investigation</h3>
<p>A mere three months after the St. Louis investigation
was opened, the FBI’s Los Angeles Field office
launched its own investigation into ISM. This time, it
was a so-called Terrorist Enterprise Investigation — a
type of probe reserved for groups that seek political
or social change through violence or force — that
would last until 2005.</p>
<p>Throughout the documents related to the
investigation, the FBI again conflated political
beliefs with terrorism. According to FBI documents
outlining the justification for the probe, ISM members
‘“predisposition to anti-capitalist and anti-global
philosophy” — an apparent reference to the
anti-globalization movement — “coupled with their
sympathetic views on the Palestinian cause gives rise
to the concern that ISM members can be directed,
coerced, or through their own volition, be the
purveyors of acts of terrorism.”</p>
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<a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6825018-FBI-Documents-on-L-a-Field-Office-Investigation.html#document/p1"
target="_blank"><img
src="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6825018/pages/FBI-Documents-on-L-a-Field-Office-Investigation-p1-normal.gif"></a>
<div data-reactid="238">
<p>As part of their investigation, the Los Angeles Field
Office developed confidential informants, circulated
articles from a right-wing website, and tracked the
domestic arrests of ISM members for civil
disobedience, according to the documents. When
profiling “key ISM leaders/associates,” the FBI took
care to note the activists’ nationalities and
religious backgrounds, recording that certain
individuals were “Palestinian,”
“Palestinian-American,” or “born from a Jewish
family.”</p>
<p>Despite the murky justifications for the
investigation, information about the probe made its
way around federal and local agencies. Though the LA
Field Office initiated the investigation, officials at
FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., were both aware
of and supportive of the probe, according to the
documents.</p>
<p>In November 2004, an FBI counterterrorism unit
scheduled a meeting to take place at headquarters to
“assess the current investigative activity to date,
share intelligence, and to coordinate and formulate
strategy for future investigation of the ISM.” The
Washington-based counterterrorism unit requested the
Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, and Texas field
offices all send representatives to the meeting. It’s
not clear from the documents released by the FBI
whether the meeting took place or what came of it.
Many details of the meeting are redacted in the FBI
documents, including one entirely redacted entity that
agents are to meet with as part of the investigation.</p>
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<a
href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6825020-Natinal-Level-FBI-Meeting-on-Terrorism.html#document/p1"
target="_blank"><img
src="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/6825020/pages/Natinal-Level-FBI-Meeting-on-Terrorism-p1-normal.gif"></a>
<div data-reactid="240">
<p>The FBI sent information about the purpose of the
meeting to a legal attaché — the term of art for FBI
offices stationed in embassies abroad. The FBI has 63
such overseas offices, including a Tel Aviv office
that covers Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The location of the legal attaché on the
correspondence about the ISM meeting was redacted on
the grounds that releasing that information “would
disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement
investigations or prosecutions” — though such
information is not removed from publicly released
documents as a matter of course.</p>
<p>In her statement to The Intercept, Arraf, ISM
co-founder, noted that ISM was frequently in touch
with diplomatic outposts in the Middle East. “In the
occupied Palestinian territory,” she said, “we were,
and continue to be, in touch with embassies and
consulates, including that of the United States.”</p>
<p>The LA investigation into ISM also touched offices
beyond those at the Washington meeting. During the
investigation, agents in Chicago; Springfield,
Illinois; Boston; Minneapolis; Atlanta; Richmond,
Virginia; Cleveland; Houston; San Francisco; and
elsewhere all followed leads, gathered evidence, and
in at least on case conducted physical surveillance.
In a number of instances, local police aided these
efforts.</p>
<p>Four months after the investigation was opened, the
FBI files mention for the first time that the probe
centered on claims that ISM members were “conspiring
to violate neutrality laws through direct actions
against the Israeli government for its occupation of
Palestine and to commit other criminal acts within the
U.S.”</p>
<p>This invocation of the Neutrality Act in the LA
investigation is illustrative of the law’s
controversial history of selective enforcement.
Originally passed in 1794 to prohibit private citizens
from engaging in military expeditions against nations
the U.S. is at peace with, the law remains on the
books and has been enforced as recently as 2016. It
has, however, not been neutrally applied.
Controversially, the U.S. government refused to apply
the law to the<a
href="https://www.archives.gov/historical-docs/todays-doc/index.html?dod-date=420">
Bay of Pigs invasion</a> of Cuba in 1961 or the
1980s Contra war to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista
government. Attempts to strike down neutrality act
convictions based on its blatant selective
enforcement, however, have been rejected by courts.</p>
<p>The FBI’s contorted reliance on this law to justify
investigating nonviolent political action in support
of Palestinian human rights is line with this history
of politically convenient selective enforcement.</p>
<h3>The Wide Net</h3>
<p>The FBI’s LA investigation was also based on a claim
that ISM activists “have shown a loose association
with foreign terrorist organizations, such as Hamas,
the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and
Islamic Jihad activists” — referring to a host of
armed Palestinian groups considered to be terrorists
by the U.S and Israel. Associations with domestic
groups were also wrapped in: The case file cites ISM’s
supposed connection to the Ruckus Society, a civil
society group that shares skills about nonviolent
direct action, as a justification for the LA
investigation. A document dated December 13, 2004,
says the Ruckus Society itself is “currently the
subject of a Terrorist Enterprise Investigation out of
San Francisco.” The FBI documents identify the Ruckus
Society as an “anarchist” group, frequently using the
term interchangeably with domestic terrorism group.</p>
<p>A key source for the FBI’s claim that ISM had loose
associations with foreign terrorist organizations
appears to be FrontPage Magazine, a website run by the
far-right David Horowitz Freedom Center that
frequently launches broadsides against pro-Palestinian
activists. <a
href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/david-horowitz">According</a>
to the South Poverty Law Center, FrontPage “has become
a platform for publishing a plethora of far-right and
anti-Muslim writers and commentators.” The December
13, 2004, memo on the investigation cites to two
separate FrontPage articles.</p>
<p>In addition to drawing on loose allegations of
associations of ISM with foreign terrorist
organizations to justify the investigation, the FBI
also tracked ISM’s own domestic associations.</p>
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<blockquote data-reactid="241"><span data-reactid="242"></span>
<p>“In Dr. King’s time, surveillance was justified in
terms of alleged Communist influence; in recent years,
surveillance has been justified by alleged association
with terrorists. In both cases, U.S. citizens were
employing nonviolent action to confront injustice and
oppression.”</p>
</blockquote>
<div data-reactid="244">
<p>The Los Angeles Field Office noted a “strong
association” between the American Friends Service
Committee, a Quaker activist group, and the ISM.”
Later in the case file, it is noted that ISM often
fundraises with “other Islamic organizations” — though
ISM has no religious affiliation. The case file
contains unfounded claims that Al-Awda: The Palestine
Right to Return Coalition; Stop U.S. Tax-funded Aid to
Israel Now; and Palestine Solidarity Movement are
alternative names for ISM, as opposed to separate
organizations who work for a similar cause.</p>
<p>One special agent, according to files, also
discovered on the internet that a member of ISM was
also a member of the U.S. Campaign to End Israeli
Occupation, a group now known as the U.S. Campaign for
Palestinian Rights. The special agent detailed
information that appeared on the U.S. Campaign’s
website about the group’s political views and listed
the names and organizational affiliations of all the
campaign’s board members. The FBI didn’t need to go
beyond the U.S. Campaign’s website to gather this
information.</p>
<p>While the investigations could be viewed as harmless,
since they ultimately failed to turn up any evidence
of terrorism, but they are in line with a dark side of
the FBI’s history. ISM turned out to be exactly what
it said it was — entirely nonviolent — yet the FBI
still justified its probes through paranoid views of
political associations. It wasn’t just that the
federal government was monitoring political speech,
the FBI treated certain forms of speech as evidence of
terrorism. Supposed opinions of ISM members on
political economy make them likely to become
terrorists. It is taken for granted that associating
with anarchists is akin to associating with
terrorists.</p>
<p>It seems the FBI’s investigation resulted in little
more than thousands of pages of documents that did
little other than to make the FBI itself perhaps the
greatest threat, by spying on First
Amendment-protected speech. Today, with the knowledge
that he was under investigation, Chmiel reflected on
the the FBI’s history of spying on social justice
activists like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and how the
targeting of such activism is ongoing. “In Dr. King’s
time, surveillance was justified in terms of alleged
Communist influence; in recent years, surveillance has
been justified by alleged association with
terrorists,” Chmiel said. “In both cases, U.S.
citizens were employing nonviolent action to confront
injustice and oppression.”</p>
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