Criminal Dissent

In the early 1970s, Guy Goodwin, a special prosecutor working for U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell—who was soon to become a star player in President Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal—convened grand juries across the country to target radicals, anti-war activists, unions and others. Goodwin, characterized by the Center for Constitutional Rights as the "grand inquisitor of the politically motivated grand jury," was a man on a mission.

Unlike 30 years ago, the convening of grand juries by John Ashcroft's Department of Justice is only one weapon in the administration's anti-dissent arsenal, Michael Avery, president of the National Lawyers Guild, told TomPaine.com in a telephone interview.

"This administration is trying to criminalize dissent, characterize protesters as terrorists and trying to intimidate and marginalize those opposed to its policies," Avery said. The administration has opened the floodgates for all kinds of investigative activities, and now "police agencies across the country are actively engaged in spying and compiling dossiers on citizens exercising their constitutional rights."

In early February, a federal judge in Iowa ordered officials at Drake University to turn over records about an anti-war forum held on its Des Moines campus in mid-November. Subpoenas were also served on four activists who attended the forum, and the university's chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The subpoena, which sought records identifying the officers of the Drake chapter in November 2003; the current location of any local offices; as well as agendas, "has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with intimidating lawful protestors and suppressing First Amendment freedom of expression and association," Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the Guild, pointed out in a Guild press release issued Feb. 6.

U.S. District Judge Ronald Longstaff also issued an order prohibiting Drake employees from talking about the university's subpoena. Mark Smith, a lobbyist for the Washington-based American Association of University Professors, told the Associated Press that he was not familiar with any other similar situation where a U.S. university's records were subpoenaed. The case, he pointed out, has echoes of the "red squads" of the 1950s and campus clampdowns on Vietnam War protesters.

Within days of the Iowa grand jury story receiving national headlines, the Justice Department withdrew the subpoenas. Bruce Nestor, a Minneapolis attorney and past president of NLG who worked on the case, told TomPaine.com that it was the "tremendous response from across the political spectrum condemning the use of the grand jury," that got the subpoenas quashed.

"In the two years since 9/11, we have heard one refrain from the Justice Department every time the executive branch seeks to arrogate more power to itself: 'trust us, we're the government,'" Benjamin Stone, executive director of the Iowa ACLU, pointed out. "But, if it is going to be issuing secretive slapdash subpoenas and then rescinding them to save face, how can we trust that more expansive surveillance and investigative powers will be used properly?"

"It's really hard to tell what this means in a broader or policy sense for the Department of Justice," Nestor said. "Clearly the FBI memo reported by The New York Times in October, directed the joint terrorism task forces to compile info about political protesters. The actions of the U.S. attorney's office in Iowa appear to be consistent with the directive in that memo."

"Whether that means that the Department of Justice intends to expand the use of the grand jury to investigate political protest movements is unclear. In this instance they clearly used the grand jury fore that purpose."