I Was a "Domestic Terrorist": Tales From a Post-9/11 America

Tuesday 6 September 2011 by Brad Crowder, The Indypendent

Locked up: Protesting the 2008 Republican National Convention, Crowder was
pepper-sprayed, incarcerated and eventually prosecuted as a "domestic
terrorist." (Credit: Ramsey County Sheriff’s office.)

Editor’s Note: In August 2008, Brad Crowder and David McKay, two young
activists from Austin, Texas, traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, to protest
the Republican National Convention. After a trailer full of their supplies
and homemade shields were seized by St. Paul police without explanation,
the two sought retaliation.

For months an older activist and FBI informant had been goading Brad and
David to take stronger action, telling them he was going to St. Paul to
“shut the fucker down.” The night of Aug. 31 Crowder and McKay assembled
eight Molotov cocktails in the building they were staying in near the
convention center. The next day they decided not to use them, but failed
to dispose of the devices before leaving for protests.

On the morning of Sept. 3 – right after Sarah Palin was introduced to the
world – McKay was awakened by a cop’s rifle pointing at his face. Labeled
by officials as “domestic terrorists” and the “Texas Two” by supporters,
they found themselves the subject of a high-profile government case meant
to justify tens of millions of dollars in security expenses for the
convention. Crowder was sentenced to two years in jail and was released
last year, while McKay was sentenced to four years.

Brad and David’s story are told in the award-winning new documentary,
Better This World, which will air nationwide Sept. 6 on the PBS program
POV.

The following is Brad Crowder’s first published account of his experience,
an exclusive to The Indypendent newspaper and Truthout.

It began with the sound of the cold metal ratchet, the pressure gripping
my wrists and squeezing all the way up to my heart. A brief, almost
flippant sentence uttered by Special Agent Christopher Langert signified
my terrifying new reality: “Mr. Crowder, you are under arrest by the FBI.

Five days earlier, I had been arrested by the cops in Minneapolis for
“Failure to Disperse from an Unlawful Assembly.” We had been rounded up en
masse. I had just seen David surrender to the police and witnessed another
cop wield his baton like a bat across the head of a photojournalist.
Another comrade, whom I knew from antiracist and antifascist organizing,
was with me. Tears were streaming down his face; he was screaming at the
police, his voice a poignant mix of rage, indignation and helplessness.

“Noah, come on man, we’ve got to go.” I pressed against his chest, trying
to keep him from being separated from the herd to be picked off by
black-clad jackals who carried their fangs in their hands and on their
belts.

But it was too late, and we had been corralled into a parking lot. The
ranks closed ahead of us as we ran, turning to see another line of
professional violence block each avenue of freedom. The dark noose quickly
began shrinking, choking us off. I had seen protest videos before. I knew
what was coming.

“Noah! We gotta get down!” I grabbed him by the shoulder and we went belly
down on the asphalt amid the chaos. I looked up at the sky and saw it fill
with black. A boot came down on my back, pinning me. I turned my head in a
pathetic attempt to escape the spray. A stinging cloud soaked my long,
blonde hair, hit the asphalt and splashed across my face and eyes. I felt
the oily, peppery stench of capitalism, of the state, clinging to my flesh
and burning it.

I managed to look up and see a riot cop barreling toward a videographer.
He was backpedaling, camera in one hand, press credentials in the other,
pleading, “But I’m press! I’m press!” It seemed naïve: a sweet faith in
goodness and reason regardless of the batshit craziness going on all
around.

That cop never missed a step, plowing into the journalist with a full head
of steam, leaving him splayed across the parking lot and his camera
destroyed. Let this be a lesson to those inclined to reason with the
state. It contains no reason; it has only command, obedience and violence.

HARD TIME

My hands were zip-tied and I was bundled onto a bus to be taken to Ramsey
County Jail. As far as I knew, I was looking at a petty misdemeanor charge
that carried a $300 bail. I had been arrested before for a $20 sack of
weed and various traffic fines that I had refused to pay due to a
combination of poverty, principle and irresponsibility. Jail wasn’t a new
experience for me, so I was nervous but relatively light hearted.

That changed two days later, when I heard the door to my unit slam shut. I
was in a cell by myself at the time, laying on my bunk and trying to block
out the burn of the pepper spray that still soaked my hair and clothes.
Ultimately they held me for about five days covered in pepper spray,
unable to escape that god-awful burn. My hands were beginning to crack due
to my incessant hand washing. I held them to a vent to blow the pepper
off. I doused them in milk. Without a change of clothes and a shower, it
was all just a practice in desperate futility. I still really fucking
resent those assholes for that.

Anyway, I heard the door slam. I saw David being led into the unit by a
pair of men who wore their credentials on chains around their necks and
clearly shopped at Men’s Warehouse.

David was wearing completely different clothing from the protest. This
confused me and I became very scared. What I didn’t know at the time was
that the building where David and the rest of us were staying had been
raided by the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

I became scared because David and I had made eight Molotov Cocktails the
night before the protests began. The firebomb of the poor, they consisted
of motor oil and gasoline poured into wine bottles that were duct-taped
closed, with cotton tampons rubber-banded to the sealed necks. When the
tampon was lit and the bottle thrown, the shattered glass would release
the accelerant to be ignited by the flame. We were stupid for making them,
but smart for not using them. When we woke up the next day we decided not
to use them and to destroy them when we had the chance. What had gone
wrong? Something had clearly spiraled out of control, but I had no idea
what lay in store for me.

WHO’S THE TERRORIST?

I learned soon enough that our faces were all over the papers, television
and the internet. I was now a “domestic terrorist.” They were serious.

I wasn’t allowed a phone call for a week. All my family and friends
learned of my fate via the media. My mom saw it on the local Midland news.
Two close friends saw my mug shot plastered across the big screen TV at a
club in Austin.

I couldn’t process any of it. The term domestic terrorist sounded so
melodramatic. I could never build any sort of connection between my
identity and the term itself. Hell, as far as it seemed to me, David and I
were the only ones terrified.

DON’T MOURN: After two years in prison, Brad Crowder is currently studying
economics in college and vows to keep organizing “until I’m dead.”
(Credit: Mike Nicholson)

IN THE PIT

When Special Agent Langert ratcheted those cold metal cuffs on my wrist,
it was to transport me from state to federal custody. When I arrived at
the intake, the booking area was stuffed with bodies, around 70, all
coming in from anti-immigrant ICE raids. Processing was going to take a
lifetime.

They split David and me up into isolation cells consisting of a concrete
slab on the floor and a metal toilet/sink combination that lacked hot
water. What I thought was a frosted window turned out to be a mind-numbing
light that never switched off, totally disorienting me as to the passage
of time. The walls were covered with a repulsive greasy paste. I never
figured out what the substance was, but I didn’t investigate because of a
fear of what it might have been.

I sat on the concrete slab, disgusted but thankful I was only going to be
in there while they processed all the immigration raid victims into the
general population. Hours seemed to pass before a guard cracked the door
to have me processed. At long last this included a shower and change of
clothes from my street wear into jailhouse oranges. They processed my
paperwork and I was anxious to move from the dungeon in which they had
housed me.

When the guard placed me back into my isolation cell, he looked in,
paused, and then asked why I hadn’t gotten bedding. My heart sank because
I then realized I was stuck in this disgusting pit on 24-hour lockdown.
Two days in I received a paper from the prison administration, stating
that I was being held in isolation for “my safety and the safety of the
institution.”

After a few days in the pit, I was transported to my first federal fourt
hearings. I sat in the Chief Justice’s courtroom with my attorney Andrew
and looked back at the galley to see reporters scattered around. I turned
to Andrew and asked in a quiet, shaky voice if this was a high-profile
case. He pursed his lips and bobbed his head. Yes, it was a high-profile
case. At first these were terrifying, surreal ordeals. Eventually they
became another numbing routine of incarceration.

THE TRIAL

Prison was bad, but court was worse. In prison, the monsters in the room
were generally the minority and much less dangerous. More honest, too. I
can’t recall the number of times I watched police testify in damning
detail of anything that could hang me or David, while conveniently being
“unable to recall” anything that might paint us as halfway human. The most
enraging example was the “wooden baton” issue.

One officer testified under oath that during a warrentless raid of our
travel group’s UHaul trailer, he and his team had seized a large number of
wooden batons that were to be used to attack cops during the protest. I
wanted to stand and scream, to demand to see one “baton,” one photo of a
“baton,” for God’s sake, one witness to one of these “batons.” It was pure
fiction. Nothing approximating a “wooden baton” existed. All I could do
was sit in my chair and stare dumbfounded around the courtroom. I knew,
abstractly, that the system was crooked, but this was concrete reality.

The same officer was asked why they had conducted the raid without a
warrant. His answer pissed me off as much as the manufactured evidence. He
said that given the protests the department was in “disruptive” and not
“investigative” mode. Since they were more interested in disrupting
protest activity as opposed to prosecuting under due process of law, there
was no worry about “tainting” any evidence. The only check that was
supposed to prevent illegal raids was tossed out the window, with total
legality.

TRUTH-TELLING

What needs to be said about my trip through the gantlet that is the
Federal Criminal Justice System can never be properly articulated in a
book or a movie or a miniseries. The truth won’t fit into those boxes.
Corners and edges of the story must be clipped.

I want, desperately, to write about what I learned from inmates. I want to
write volumes, inspirational volumes, extolling the humanity of those I
met inside the god-awful human warehouse that is prison, that these men
are neither angels or demons, in all their fucked up, contradictory glory.
I want to defend David against the sloppy misstatements and outright lies
and attacks leveled against him. I want to put his one lie against the
wall of lies built against him by this system that postures so
self-righteously over the bodies it jails and buries.

But I can’t in any medium. There can be no representation of the truth. It
can only be leveled by the historical movement of myself, of David, of
Cowboy, Ghost, Peanut, Bob, and all the others, inside and out, slammed by
a twisted and historically irrelevant system. The truth can be told in
only one way, through the revolution of this system, this shit. The truth
of racism can only be articulated in the revolution against it. The truth
of prisons, of terrorism, of State violence, of poverty, of war, and
hopelessness can only be articulated in their negation.

Am I a domestic terrorist? It is a question I often asked myself, and
others asked me how it felt to be labeled as such. The truth is it didn’t
mean anything at all. The term is fundamentally absurd and deeply
politicized. Kicking in people’s doors at 3 a.m. and raiding their home at
gunpoint is terrorism, whether in Baghdad or Baltimore. Building bombs may
be really stupid, but at least David and I had enough of a moral compass
to choose not to use them, as opposed to dropping them on civilians and
cities.

But then again I’m “red-blooded” white American. Yes, I was targeted for
my activism, but not for my name, for my faith, or the color of my skin. I
wasn’t targeted because I have family being crushed in the desert on the
other side of the world. I’m not Muslim. And that is who is being
targeted, spied upon, egged on, entrapped and then destroyed en masse.
Domestic terrorist is an absurd term, and in its absurdity it is
terrifyingly dangerous.

Despite the danger the term poses, I see only hypocrisy. Would you take
Bernie Madoff seriously if he called you a crook? Why should I take the
Feds, the most bomb-laden, destructive gaggle of lost souls on the planet,
seriously for calling me a terrorist?

My life today is fine, except for knowing how many great people are in
prison: David in particular. I’m in college studying economics. It’s
terrible, but for some reason I love it. I work at a local sandwich shop,
the same one I worked at before I was arrested. I still organize and will
continue to do so until I’m dead. I look at the Arab Spring, the European
rebellions, and the rumblings of working people in the U.S., and I see
clearly on whose side history rests.

They say I’m a domestic terrorist. I say they are on their way out. Let’s
see who’s right.

The newspaper Naomi Klein calls "utterly unique," full of insightful
dispatches from around the world, The Indypendent offers a fresh take on
today's events.

How a Radical Leftist Became the FBI's BFF

Illustration: Jeffrey Smith

To many on the left, Brandon Darby was a hero. To federal agents consumed with busting anarchist terror cells, he was the perfect snitch.

—By Josh Harkinson Mother Jones Magazine September/October 2011 Issue

For a few days in September 2008, as the Republican Party kicked off its national convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Twin Cities were a microcosm of a deeply divided nation. The atmosphere around town was tense, with local and federal police facing off against activists who had descended upon the city. Convinced that anarchists were plotting violent acts, they sought to bust the protesters' hangouts, sometimes bursting into apartments and houses brandishing assault rifles. Inside the cavernous Xcel Energy convention center, meanwhile, an out-of-nowhere vice presidential nominee named Sarah Palin assured tens of thousands of ecstatic Republicans that her running mate, John McCain, was "a leader who's not looking for a fight, but sure isn't afraid of one either."

The same thing might have been said of David McKay and Bradley Crowder, a pair of greenhorn activists from George W. Bush's Texas hometown who had driven up for the protests. Wide-eyed guys in their early 20s, they'd come of age hanging out in sleepy downtown Midland, commiserating about the Iraq War and the administration's assault on civil liberties.

St. Paul was their first large-scale protest, and when they arrived they were taken aback: Rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, tumbling tear-gas canisters—to McKay and Crowder, it seemed like an all-out war on democracy. They wanted to fight back, even going so far as to mix up a batch of Molotov cocktails. Just before dawn on the day of Palin's big coming out, a SWAT team working with federal agents raided their crash pad, seized the Molotovs, and arrested McKay, alleging that he intended to torch a parking lot full of police cars.

Since only a few people knew about the firebombs, fellow activists speculated that someone close to McKay and Crowder must have tipped off the feds. Back in Texas, flyers soon began appearing at coffeehouses urging leftists to beware of Brandon Darby, an "FBI informant rat loose in Austin."

The allegation came as a shocker; Darby was a known and trusted member of the left-wing protest crowd. "If Brandon was conning me, and many others, it would be the biggest lie of my life since I found out the truth about Santa Claus," wrote Scott Crow, one of many activists who rushed to defend him at first. Two months later, Darby came clean. "The simple truth," he wrote on Indymedia.org, "is that I have chosen to work with the Federal Bureau of Investigation."

Darby's entanglement with the feds is part of a quiet resurgence of FBI interest in left-wingers. From the Red Scare days of the 1950s into the '70s, the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program, a.k.a. COINTELPRO, monitored and sabotaged communist and civil rights organizations. Nowadays, in what critics have dubbed the Green Scare, the bureau is targeting the global-justice movement and radical environmentalists. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI official in charge of domestic terrorism, ranked groups like the Earth Liberation Front ahead of jihadists as America's top domestic terror threat.

FBI stings involving informants have been key to convicting 14 ELF members since 2006 for a string of high-profile arsons, and to sentencing a man to 20 years in prison for conspiring to destroy several targets, including cell phone towers. During the St. Paul protests, at least two additional informants infiltrated and helped indict a group of activists known as the RNC Eight for conspiring to riot and damage property.

Brandon Darby. Courtesy Loteria Films

But it's Darby's snitching that has provided the most intriguing tale. It's the focus of a radio magazine piece, two documentary films, and a book in the making. By far the most damning portrayal is Better This World, an award-winning doc that garnered rave reviews on the festival circuit and is slated to air on PBS on September 6. The product of two years of work by San Francisco Bay Area filmmakers Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega, it dredges up a wealth of FBI documents and court transcripts related to Darby's interactions with his fellow activists to suggest that Darby acted as an agitator as much as an informant. (Watch the trailer and read our interview with the filmmakers here.)

The film makes a compelling case that Darby, with the FBI's blessing, used his charisma and street credibility to goad Crowder and McKay into pursuing the sort of actions that would later land them in prison. Darby flatly denies it, and he recently sued the New York Times over a story with similar implications. (The Times corrected the disputed detail.) "I feel very morally justified to do the things that I've done," he told me. "I don't know if I could have handled it much differently."

Darby "gets in people's minds and can pull you in," one activist warned me. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

Brandon Michael Darby is a muscular, golden-skinned 34-year-old with Hollywood looks and puppy-dog eyes. Once notorious for sleeping around the activist scene, he now often sleeps with a gun by his bed in response to death threats. His former associates call him unhinged, a megalomaniac, a manipulator. "He gets in people's minds and can pull you in," Lisa Fithian, a veteran labor, environmental, and anti-war organizer, warned me before I set out to interview him. "He's a master. And you are going to feel all kinds of sympathy for him."

The son of a refinery welder, Darby grew up in Pasadena, a dingy Texas oil town. His parents divorced when he was 12, and soon after he ran away to Houston, where he lived in and out of group homes. By 2002, Darby had found his way to Austin's slacker scene, where one day he helped his friend, medical-marijuana activist Tracey Hayes, scale Zilker Park's 165-foot moonlight tower (of Dazed and Confused fame) and unfurl a giant banner painted with pot leaves that read "Medicine." They later "hooked up," Hayes says, and eventually moved in together. She introduced him to her activist friends, and he started reading Howard Zinn and histories of the Black Panthers.

Some local activists wouldn't work with Darby (he liked to taunt the cops during protests, getting them all riled up). But that changed after Hurricane Katrina, when he learned that Robert King Wilkerson, one of the Angola Three—former Black Panthers who endured decades of solitary confinement at Louisiana's Angola Prison—was trapped in New Orleans. Darby and Crow drove 10 hours from Austin towing a jon boat. When they couldn't get it into the city, Darby somehow harangued some Coast Guard personnel into rescuing Wilkerson. The story became part of the foundation myth for an in-your-face New Orleans relief organization called the Common Ground Collective.

It would eventually grow into a national group with a million-dollar budget. But at first Common Ground was just a bunch of pissed-off anarchists working out of the house of Malik Rahim, another former Panther. Rahim asked Darby to set up an outpost in the devastated Ninth Ward, where not even the Red Cross was allowed at first. Darby brought in a group of volunteers who fed people and cleared debris from houses while being harassed by police, right along with the locals who had refused to evacuate. "If I'd had an appropriate weapon, I would have attacked my government for what they were doing to people," he declared in a clip featured in Better This World. He said he'd since bought an AK-47 and was willing to use it: "There are residents here who have said that you will not take my home from me over my dead body, and we have made a commitment to be in solidarity with those residents."

But Common Ground's approach soon began to grate on Darby. He bristled at its consensus-based decision making, its interminable debates over things like whether serving meat to locals was serving oppression. He idolized rugged, iconoclastic populists like Che Guevara—so, in early 2006, he jumped at a chance to go to Venezuela to solicit money for Katrina victims.

Darby was deeply impressed with what he saw, until a state oil exec asked him to go to Colombia and meet with FARC, the communist guerrilla group. "They said they wanted to help me start a guerrilla movement in the swamps of Louisiana," he told "This American Life" reporter Michael May. "And I was like, 'I don't think so.'" It turned out armed revolution wasn't really his thing.

David McKay. Courtesy Loteria Films

Darby's former friends dispute the Venezuela story as they dispute much that he says. They accuse him of grandstanding, being combative, and even spying on his rivals. In his short-lived tenure as Common Ground's interim director, Darby drove out 30 volunteer coordinators and replaced them with a small band of loyalists. "He could only see what's in it for him," Crow told me. For example, Darby preempted a planned police-harassment hot line by making flyers asking victims to call his personal phone number.

The flyers led to a meeting between Darby and Major John Bryson, the New Orleans cop in charge of the Ninth Ward. In time, Bryson became a supporter of Common Ground, and Darby believed that they shared a common dream of rebuilding the city. But he was less and less sure about his peers. "I'm like, 'Oh my God, I've replicated every system that I fought against,'" he recalls. "It was fucking bizarre."

By mid-2007, Darby had left the group and become preoccupied with the conflict in Lebanon. Before long, Darby says, he was approached in Austin by a Lebanese-born schoolteacher, Riad Hamad, for help with a vague plan to launder money into the Palestinian territories. Hamad also spoke about smuggling bombs into Israel, he claims.

Darby says he discouraged Hamad at first, and then tipped off Bryson, who put him in touch with the FBI. "I talked," he told me. "And it was the fucking weirdest thing." He knew his friends would hate him for what he'd done. (The FBI raided Hamad's home, and discovered nothing incriminating; he was found dead in Austin's Lady Bird Lake two months later—an apparent suicide.)

McKay and Crowder first encountered Darby in March 2008 at Austin's Monkey Wrench Books during a recruitment drive for the St. Paul protests. Later, in a scene re-created in Better This World, they met at a café to talk strategy. "I stated that I wasn't interested in being a part of a group if we were going to sit and talk too much," Darby emailed his FBI handlers. "I stated that I was gonna shut that fucker down."

"My biggest impression from that meeting was that Brandon really dominated it," fellow activist James Clark told the filmmakers. Darby's FBI email continued: "I stated that they all looked like they ate too much tofu and that they should eat beef so that they could put on muscle mass. I stated that they weren't going to be able to fight anybody until they did so." At one point Darby took everyone out to a parking lot and threw Clark to the ground. Clark interpreted it as Darby sending the message: "Look at me, I'm badass. You can be just like me." (Darby insists that this never happened.)

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use" the Molotovs, Crowder told me.

When the Austin activists arrived in St. Paul, police, acting on a Darby tip, broke open the group's trailer and confiscated the sawed-off traffic barrels they'd planned to use as shields against riot police. They soon learned of similar raids all over town. "It started to feel like Darby hadn't amped these things up, and it really was as crazy and intense as he had told us it was going to be," Crowder says. Feeling that Darby's tough talk should be "in some ways, a guide of behavior," they went to Walmart to buy Molotov supplies.

"The reality is, when we woke up the next day, neither one of us wanted to use them," Crowder told me. They stored the firebombs in a basement and left for the convention center, where Crowder was swept up in a mass arrest. Darby and McKay later talked about possibly lobbing the Molotovs on a police parking lot early the next morning, though by 2:30 a.m. McKay was having serious doubts. "I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street," he texted Darby.

"You butt head," Darby shot back. "Text me when you can." He texted his friend repeatedly over the next hour, until well after McKay had turned in. At 5 a.m., police broke into McKay's room and found him in bed. He was scheduled to fly home to Austin two hours later.

Bradley Crowder. Courtesy Loteria Films

The feds ultimately convicted the pair for making the Molotov cocktails, but they didn't have enough evidence of intent to use them. Crowder, who pleaded guilty rather than risk trial, and a heavier sentence, got two years. McKay, who was offered seven years if he pleaded guilty, opted for a trial, arguing on the stand that Darby told him to make the Molotovs, a claim he recanted after learning that Crowder had given a conflicting account. McKay is now serving out the last of his four years in federal prison.

At South Austin's Strange Brew coffeehouse, Darby shows up to meet me on a chromed-out Yamaha with flames on the side. We sit out back, where he can chain-smoke his American Spirits. Darby is through being a leftist radical. Indeed, he's now an enthusiastic small-government conservative. He loves Sarah Palin. He opposes welfare and national health care. "The majority of things could be handled by people and by communities," he explains. Climate change is "a bandwagon" and the EPA should be "strongly limited." Abortion shouldn't be a federal issue.

He sounds a bit like his new friend, Andrew Breitbart, who made his name producing sting videos targeting NPR, ACORN, Planned Parenthood, and others. About a year after McKay and Crowder went to jail, Breitbart called Darby wanting to know why he wasn't defending himself against the left's misrepresentations. "They don't print what I say," Darby said. Breitbart offered him a regular forum on his website, BigGovernment.com. Darby now socializes with Breitbart at his Los Angeles home and is among his staunchest defenders. (Breitbart's takedown of ACORN, he says, was "completely fucking fair.")

"No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," Darby says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

Entrapment? Darby scoffs at the suggestion. He pulls up his shirt, showing me his chest hair and tattoos, as though his macho physique had somehow seduced Crowder and McKay into mixing their firebombs. "No matter what I say, most people on the left are going to believe what reinforces their own narrative," he says. "And I've quit giving a shit."

The fact is, Darby says, McKay and Crowder considered him a has-been. His tofu comment, he adds, was a jocular response after one of them had ribbed him for being fat. "I constantly felt the need to show that I was still worthy of being in their presence," he tells me. "They are complete fucking liars." As for those late-night texts to McKay, Darby insists he was just trying to dissuade him from using the Molotovs.

He still meets with FBI agents, he says, to eat barbecue and discuss his ideas for new investigations. But then, it's hard to know how much of what Darby says is true. For one, the FBI file of his former friend Scott Crow, which Crow obtained under a Freedom of Information Act request last year, suggests that Darby was talking with the FBI more than a year before he claims Bryson first put him in touch. Meanwhile, Crow and another activist, Karly Dixon, separately told me that Darby asked them, in the fall of 2006, to help him burn down an Austin bookstore affiliated with right-wing radio host Alex Jones. (Hayes, Darby's ex, says he told her of the idea too.) "The guy was trying to put me in prison," Crow says.

Such allegations, Darby claims, are simply part of a conspiracy to besmirch him and the FBI: "They get together, and they just figure out ways to attack." Believe whomever you want to believe, he says. "Either way, they walk away with scars—and so do I."

Josh Harkinson is a staff reporter at Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. Email him with tips at jharkinson (at) motherjones (dot) com. To follow him on Twitter, click here. Get Josh Harkinson's RSS feed.

Guadalupe M. Guajardo, Jr.

Guadalupe Guajardo, Jr., Et Al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, Cross-Appellants, v. W. J.
Estelle, Jr., Director, Texas Department of Corrections, Et Al.,
Defendants-Appellants, Cross-Appellees., 580 F.2d 748 (5th Cir. 1978)

John L. Hill, Atty. Gen., Gilbert J. Pena, Asst. Atty. Gen., Ed Idar, Jr., Sp. Asst.
Atty. Gen., Nancy M. Simonson, Asst. Atty. Gen., David M. Kendall, Jr., 1st
Asst. Atty. Gen., Daniel E. Maeso, Asst. Atty. Gen., Austin, Tex., for
plaintiffs-appellees, cross-appellants.

Ann Lents, Harry M. Reasoner, John L. Carter, Scott J. Atlas, Houston, Tex.,
for defendants-appellants, cross-appellees.

Appeals from the United Stated District Court for the Southern District of
Texas.

Before THORNBERRY, RONEY and HILL, Circuit Judges.

THORNBERRY, Circuit Judge:

In 1971 plaintiff Guadalupe Guajardo, an inmate of the Texas Department of
Corrections, filed suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983 on behalf of himself and other TDC inmates to challenge the constitutionality of the TDC correspondence rules and
practices then in effect. The district court found a number of the TDC rules
constitutionally invalid and ordered injunctive relief. Guajardo v. McAdams,
349 F.Supp. 211 (S.D.Tex.1972). On appeal the Fifth Circuit reversed and
remanded, holding that the Texas Department of Correction's rules and
regulations applied statewide and could be enjoined only by a three-judge
court. Sands v. Wainwright, 491 F.2d 417 (5 Cir. 1973), Cert. denied, 416 U.S. 992 ,
94 S.Ct. 2403, 40 L.Ed.2d 771 (1974)
________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Prison support community and advocates for constitutional law:

This is but the initial opening to Guadalupe Guajardo, Jr., et. al. v.
W.J. Estelle, Jr., TDCJ, et. al., (5th Cir. Ct. 1978), you can read
the entire text at:
(http://federal-circuits.vlex.com/vid/guadalupe-guajardo-estelle-corrections-36893042);
if you care to.

Suffice it to say, from beginning in 1971, right through the 80’s and 90’s the state fought tooth and nail with all their oil-rich Texas Attorney General Office’s legal firepower that they could muster to derail Guajardo v. Estelle, which was eventually overruled in the later part of (Spring) 2003, what with the 9/11 hysteria being
implemented in all U.S. prison systems to return the TDCJ (Texas Department of
Criminal Justice) to banning “prisoner-to-prisoner” correspondence; except in
pre-arranged legal contacts.

“Gee-Gee”, as I’ve referred to him in respect to the above ban when communicating through my Legal Collective, or “Lupe”, has recently suffered a serious stroke that has left his left side and arm paralyzed, to what extent a close friend at the Carol S. Young Medical Facility Complex,

Roddy Pippin, himself a Diabetic sufferer like Guadalupe, didn’t
elaborate much.

So, out of respect to all the current and past Pro Se indigent Petitioners and writ writers in the TDCJ-CID, the Cruz’; the Ruiz’ the Hernandez’; the Millers; ad infinitum; I want to put out this shout-out to y’all to send Gee-Gee a short note of
admiration and respect he truly deserves for all his efforts made on behalf of
all similarly situated comrades powerless to stop the Texas Plantation-Machine
Factory as a tireless legal warrior.

You can write both Roddy Pippin, who reads to him and has been caring
for Lupe since he’s returned to Carol S. Young; Lupe has helped Roddy
immeasurably in his own appeals; at:

Guadalupe M. Guajardo, Jr.,

TDCJ-CID#
170864,

Carol S. Young Medical Facility Complex,
5509 Attwater Avenue,
Dickinson,
Texas 77539-4157

Roddy A. Pippin, TDCJ-CID# 1276478,

can be reached there too.

Thanks,
in the struggle in and out of court

Twitch – Entropy,

Central Texas ABC,
Austin, Texas

For Anarchist, Details of Life as F.B.I. Target

May 29, 2011 NY Times

AUSTIN, Tex. — A fat sheaf of F.B.I. reports meticulously details the
surveillance that counterterrorism agents directed at the one-story house
in East Austin. For at least three years, they traced the license plates
of cars parked out front, recorded the comings and goings of residents and
guests and, in one case, speculated about a suspicious flat object spread
out across the driveway.

“The content could not be determined from the street,” an agent observing
from his car reported one day in 2005. “It had a large number of
multi-colored blocks, with figures and/or lettering,” the report said, and
“may be a sign that is to be used in an upcoming protest.”

Actually, the item in question was more mundane.

“It was a quilt,” said Scott Crow, marveling over the papers at the dining
table of his ramshackle home, where he lives with his wife, a housemate
and a backyard menagerie that includes two goats, a dozen chickens and a
turkey. “For a kids’ after-school program.”

Mr. Crow, 44, a self-described anarchist and veteran organizer of
anticorporate demonstrations, is among dozens of political activists
across the country known to have come under scrutiny from the F.B.I.’s
increased counterterrorism operations since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Other targets of bureau surveillance, which has been criticized by civil
liberties groups and mildly faulted by the Justice Department’s inspector
general, have included antiwar activists in Pittsburgh, animal rights
advocates in Virginia and liberal Roman Catholics in Nebraska. When such
investigations produce no criminal charges, their methods rarely come to
light publicly.

But Mr. Crow, a lanky Texas native who works at a recycling center, is one
of several Austin activists who asked the F.B.I. for their files, citing
the Freedom of Information Act. The 440 heavily-redacted pages he
received, many bearing the rubric “Domestic Terrorism,” provide a
revealing window on the efforts of the bureau, backed by other federal,
state and local police agencies, to keep an eye on people it deems
dangerous.

In the case of Mr. Crow, who has been arrested a dozen times during
demonstrations but has never been convicted of anything more serious than
trespassing, the bureau wielded an impressive array of tools, the
documents show.

The agents watched from their cars for hours at a time — Mr. Crow recalls
one regular as “a fat guy in an S.U.V. with the engine running and the
air-conditioning on” — and watched gatherings at a bookstore and cafe. For
round-the-clock coverage, they attached a video camera to the phone pole
across from his house on New York Avenue.

They tracked Mr. Crow’s phone calls and e-mails and combed through his
trash, identifying his bank and mortgage companies, which appear to have
been served with subpoenas. They visited gun stores where he shopped for a
rifle, noting dryly in one document that a vegan animal rights advocate
like Mr. Crow made an unlikely hunter. (He says the weapon was for
self-defense in a marginal neighborhood.)

They asked the Internal Revenue Service to examine his tax returns, but
backed off after an I.R.S. employee suggested that Mr. Crow’s modest
earnings would not impress a jury even if his returns were flawed. (He
earns $32,000 a year at Ecology Action of Texas, he said.)

They infiltrated political meetings with undercover police officers and
informers. Mr. Crow counts five supposed fellow activists who were
reporting to the F.B.I.

Mr. Crow seems alternately astonished, angered and flattered by the
government’s attention. “I’ve had times of intense paranoia,” he said,
especially when he discovered that some trusted allies were actually
spies.

“But first, it makes me laugh,” he said. “It’s just a big farce that the
government’s created such paper tigers. Al Qaeda and real terrorists are
hard to find. We’re easy to find. It’s outrageous that they would spend so
much money surveilling civil activists, and anarchists in particular, and
equating our actions with Al Qaeda.”

The investigation of political activists is an old story for the F.B.I.,
most infamously in the Cointel program, which scrutinized and sometimes
harassed civil rights and antiwar advocates from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Such activities were reined in after they were exposed by the Senate’s
Church Committee, and F.B.I. surveillance has been governed by an evolving
set of guidelines set by attorneys general since 1976.

But the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 demonstrated the lethal danger of
domestic terrorism, and after the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. vowed never
again to overlook terrorists hiding in plain sight. The Qaeda sleeper
cells many Americans feared, though, turned out to be rare or nonexistent.

The result, said Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent now at the American
Civil Liberties Union, has been a zeal to investigate political activists
who pose no realistic threat of terrorism.

“You have a bunch of guys and women all over the country sent out to find
terrorism. Fortunately, there isn’t a lot of terrorism in many
communities,” Mr. German said. “So they end up pursuing people who are
critical of the government.”

Complaints from the A.C.L.U. prompted the Justice Department’s inspector
general to assess the F.B.I.’s forays into domestic surveillance. The
resulting report last September absolved the bureau of investigating
dissenters based purely on their expression of political views. But the
inspector general also found skimpy justification for some investigations,
uncertainty about whether any federal crime was even plausible in others
and a mislabeling of nonviolent civil disobedience as “terrorism.”

Asked about the surveillance of Mr. Crow, an F.B.I. spokesman, Paul E.
Bresson, said it would be “inappropriate” to discuss an individual case.
But he said that investigations are conducted only after the bureau
receives information about possible crimes.

“We do not open investigations based on individuals who exercise the
rights afforded to them under the First Amendment,” Mr. Bresson said. “In
fact, the Department of Justice and the bureau’s own guidelines for
conducting domestic operations strictly forbid such actions.”

It is not hard to understand why Mr. Crow attracted the bureau’s
attention. He has deliberately confronted skinheads and Ku Klux Klan
members at their gatherings, relishing the resulting scuffles. He claims
to have forced corporate executives to move with noisy nighttime protests.

He says he took particular pleasure in a 2003 demonstration for Greenpeace
in which activists stormed the headquarters of ExxonMobil in Irving, Tex.,
to protest its environmental record. Dressed in tiger outfits, protesters
carried banners to the roof of the company’s offices, while others wearing
business suits arrived in chauffeured Jaguars, forcing frustrated police
officers to sort real executives from faux ones.

“It was super fun,” said Mr. Crow, one of the suits, who escaped while 36
other protesters were arrested. “They had ignored us and ignored us. But
that one got their attention.”

It got the attention of the F.B.I. as well, evidently, leading to the
three-year investigation that focused specifically on Mr. Crow. The
surveillance documents show that he also turned up in several other
investigations of activism in Texas and beyond, from 2001 to at least
2008.

For an aficionado of civil disobedience, Mr. Crow comes across as more
amiable than combative. He dropped out of college, toured with an
electronic-rock band and ran a successful Dallas antiques business while
dabbling in animal rights advocacy. In 2001, captivated by the philosophy
of anarchism, he sold his share of the business and decided to become a
full-time activist.

Since then, he has led a half-dozen groups and run an annual training camp
for protesters. (The camps invariably attracted police infiltrators who
were often not hard to spot. “We had a rule,” he said. “If you were burly,
you didn’t belong.”) He also helped to found Common Ground Relief, a
network of nonprofit organizations created in New Orleans after Hurricane
Katrina.

Anarchism was the catchword for an international terrorist movement at the
turn of the 20th century. But Mr. Crow, whose e-mail address contains the
phrase “quixotic dreaming,” describes anarchism as a kind of locally
oriented self-help movement, a variety of “social libertarianism.”

“I don’t like the state,” he said. “I don’t want to overthrow it, but I
want to create alternatives to it.”

This kind of talk appears to have baffled some of the agents assigned to
watch him, whose reports to F.B.I. bosses occasionally seem petulant. One
agent calls “nonviolent direct action,” a phrase in activists’ materials,
“an oxymoron.” Another agent comments, oddly, on Mr. Crow and his wife,
Ann Harkness, who have been together for 24 years, writing that “outwardly
they did not appear to look right for each other.” At a training session,
“most attendees dressed like hippies.”

Such comments stand out amid detailed accounts of the banal: mail in the
recycling bin included “a number of catalogs from retail outlets such as
Neiman Marcus, Ann Taylor and Pottery Barn.”

Mr. Crow said he hoped the airing of such F.B.I. busywork might deter
further efforts to keep watch over him. The last documents he has seen
mentioning him date from 2008. But the Freedom of Information Act exempts
from disclosure any investigations that are still open.

“I still occasionally see people sitting in cars across the street,” he
said. “I don’t think they’ve given up.”