While
America has gone a century and a half without being “war-torn” in
the conventional sense, the damage of war is not limited to that
inflicted by guns and bombs.
by
Whitney Webb
Part
3 - The chill of civilian spy networks
In
addition to legislative efforts and the use of media to manipulate
opinion and squash dissent, American citizens were also encouraged to
spy on their countrymen, leading to the formation of citizen
vigilante groups likes the Knights of Liberty, the American Defense
Society and the National Security League, among others.
The most
powerful of these groups was the American Protective League (APL), a
semi-official organization that worked with the Justice Department’s
Bureau of Investigation and boasted around 250,000 members in some
600 cities across the U.S. Though ostensibly tasked with identifying
war saboteurs, draft dodgers and foreign spies, the APL’s members
surveilled, harassed, intimidated and “arrested” Americans whose
loyalty to the war effort was called into question.
Declining
to buy Liberty Bonds, being an immigrant of “questionable”
origin, and even having food stores in your home were enough to raise
the suspicion of the APL. They raided factories, union halls and
private homes with impunity, seeking out any American who opposed the
war effort as well as targeting innocent Americans of German descent,
whom they tarred and feathered and attacked with horsewhips in full
public view. They also worked to suppress American labor unions,
calling unions and socialists “pro-German” and “anti-American”
and working with the U.S. government to conduct mass raids on the
socialist labor union International Workers of the World (IWW).
Despite
the clearly illegal tactics of the APL, it had the support of
then-Attorney General Thomas Gregory, who assured a skeptical
President Wilson that the APL “should be encouraged and…not
subject to any real criticism.” During the course of the war,
the APL detained some 40,000 people and claimed to have found more
than 3 million cases of “disloyalty.”
Though
the APL and organizations like it have become relics of wars past,
civilian vigilante groups that collaborate with the government have
attempted to make a comeback in post 9/11 America.
For
instance, under the George W. Bush administration, the Terrorism
Information and Prevention System (TIPS), was created and sought to
create a domestic intelligence-gathering program that would have U.S.
citizens report “suspicious” activity. The measure sought to
recruit one out of every 24 Americans for the program, mainly those
whose work provided access to private homes or businesses, such as
mailmen, utility employees and truck drivers. The program, however,
was eventually canceled and replaced with Homeland Security’s “See
Something, Say Something” initiative.
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