That Time I Ended Up on an FBI Watchlist
I've mentioned this in passing a few times and sparked some curiosity, so I'm going to tell the story of the time I ended up on an FBI watchlist, which was creepy AF but still a badge of honor for getting under the skin of the man.
I live near Ft. Bragg, the gigantic U.S. Army base that's home to the 82nd Airborne and Special Forces, AKA The Green Berets. I was in the Army in the '80s, and two of my kids are also military vets. The Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq was an abomination, one that I deeply opposed to the point where protesting that war became the center of my life. I was a member of various groups, but my work centered on my relationships in three of them: Military Families Speak Out, Veterans for Peace, and our local group of old Quaker ladies and the usual lefty suspects.
On the first anniversary of the invasion in March of 2004, local folks organized a demonstration against the war that surprised us with its turnout and drew attention from all over because of the proximity to the large local military community. We decided to do it again in 2005, and it quickly became obvious that we had more support than we could imagine. Everybody who was against the war wanted to come. The list included a member of Congress and Cindy Sheehan, a Gold Star mom who became infamous for protesting outside W. Bush's Texas ranch to confront him about the death of her son. The newly formed Iraq Veterans Against the War was there, along with a parade of groups like Code Pink and veteran activists from Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Nelson Johnson, a survivor of the Greensboro Massacre, spoke. Multiple documentary filmmakers contacted us.
It took months of planning. It was clear from the beginning that we were a threat to the pro-war crowd. They definitely didn't like the participation of so many disaffected members of the military community. I got doxxed on a local message board and started receiving hate mail addressed to my house. At work, I started finding pro-war propaganda left on my desk regularly. The rear window of my car was shot out in my driveway. Then the phone calls started.
The callers, always men, presented themselves as active-duty soldiers who were against the war. I'd talked to many GIs who thought the war was bullshit, and they didn't sound like the men who called me. The callers wanted to know if we were going to "do anything," meaning direct action, e.g., trying to enter the military base or "anarchist-type shit." It was obviously a clumsy attempt to gather intelligence on our already very public plans.
The demonstration was a huge success. It was the largest antiwar event outside a military base since Vietnam. We held it at the same park where Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland had once entertained antiwar GIs in the early '70s. The local police called in reinforcements from 11 other agencies, including horse-mounted cops and surveillance units with cameras and telescopes. The following week, a newspaper poll of the community found that 50% of the people in our community were against the war. That was pretty telling in a county where the vast majority of people were on active duty, veterans, or members of military families.
Since the war didn't miraculously end, I kept on organizing, locally and nationally. In early 2006, I got a call one day from a reporter from NBC. He told me he was working on a story about government violations of the Patriot Act. He'd discovered that the FBI was maintaining records of antiwar activists past the legal time limit on such lists. Of course, my name was on the list that had been leaked to him. He wanted to know if I would comment on the record about the information. I gave him a sound bite about the evils of the Bush administration and the similarities to government actions against activists during the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
I didn't hire a lawyer or call Washington with an attitude. It took a couple of days for the shock to wear off, but I took it more as a badge of honor than anything else. It made me happy that our movement was such a threat to the government that they felt they had to use resources to keep tabs on us. I knew that I wasn't doing anything illegal. No behavior modification was needed on my part. I was fatalistic about anything happening to me. Nothing would have made the war machine happier than to intimidate people like me into silence. That wasn't going to happen.
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