[discuss-dan] disinformation | snitch culture: jim redden watches the watchers

[Persephone Moonshadow Howling Womyn <moonshadow@persephone.org>]

This fascinating article deals with many issues relevant to many of us 
involved with DAN and direct action generally.  Worth reading all of the 
pages ... below is just the first page ... to see the rest, go to the web 
article itself.

Howling .......... Moonshadow

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http://www.disinfo.com/pages/article/id730/pg1/

Welcome to Disinformation   |   January 25, 2001


snitch culture: jim redden watches the watchers
by Cletus Nelson (cletus@disinfo.net) - January 10, 2001

Mass movements make extensive use of suspicion in their machinery of 
domination," remarks Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, his seminal study of 
religious and political fanaticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1951).

If the drive toward a Global State can be similarly perceived as a dynamic 
social force, the ascendancy of the snitch in contemporary America 
exemplifies this pernicious trend. Although the framers of the Constitution 
presciently granted the accused the right to "be confronted with the 
witnesses against him," the pernicious doctrine of universal suspicion has 
long eroded this vital safeguard and elevated a once dishonorable act into 
a thriving cottage industry.

This unsettling phenomenon provides the basis for Snitch Culture: How 
Citizens Are Turned Into the Eye and Ears of the State (Los Angeles: Feral 
House, 2001), an explosive new book by veteran journalist Jim Redden which 
unflinchingly documents our emergent cult of betrayal.

Redden's book features a wealth of historical analysis and rich anecdotal 
material. Few readers will fail to be disturbed by the many vivid 
depictions of children being indoctrinated to snitch on their parents, 
government-connected "watchdog" groups infiltrating and discrediting 
political movements, global surveillance systems monitoring citizen 
communications, and horrifying tales of desperate offenders coerced into 
manufacturing evidence against the innocent at the behest of malevolent 
prosecutors.

Redden is no stranger to America's multifaceted national security state. 
Since he began writing for Oregon's underground press during the late 
1960s, the prolific reporter has covered government covert operations in 
publications such as EYE, The Lobster, Willamette Week, and PDXS, the 
twice-monthly alternative publication he produced throughout the 1990s.

The seasoned writer has had a lifelong fascination with alternative 
political movements, and has also delved into the controversial milieu of 
violent Nazi Skinheads, paramilitary "Patriot" factions, black-clad 
anarchists, Lesbian S&M aficionados, and other denizens of America's 
sociopolitical fringe. He is currently working as Senior Staff Writer for 
the Portland Tribune, a new, twice-weekly newspaper in Portland, Oregon.

Shortly after his first book's release, Redden consented to an interview 
with Disinformation, in order to provide further insights into the many 
snitches in our midst.

Disinformation:What was the genesis of this particular project?

Redden: My own personal experiences, for starters. I first became aware of 
government informants in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when I started and 
worked on a number of underground newspapers opposed to the War in Vietnam. 
The largest was the Augur, published by a cooperative of left-wing 
political activists in Eugene, Oregon. The police routinely sent undercover 
officers to our weekly editorial meetings. We knew they were cops because 
they looked and acted like they were straight out of Dragnet. They had 
short hair, wore new jeans and dark sunglasses, and just sat in a corner 
saying nothing. It was funny, but, at the same time, it was obvious the 
police were keeping track of us.

I had a large, communal house a few blocks off the campus of the University 
of Oregon. It was near one of the regular routes for protest marches, and I 
let them assemble in the front yard. I would frequently come home and find 
men in dark suits on the front porch, writing down the names on the 
mailbox. People would take my picture in stores or as I was walking down 
the street. We assumed our phones were tapped.

At the time, I didn't mind the surveillance. It meant we were being heard. 
But looking back, I can see how easy it would have been for the government 
to arrest us on trumped up charges. We were seriously pissed about what was 
happening in Vietnam, and it wasn't unusual for someone to say something 
like, "We should blow up the selective service office," or something like that.

We weren't serious about it. We didn't have guns or bombs or anything like 
that. We were just frustrated and shooting off our mouths. But an informant 
could easily have encouraged our conversations, then had us arrested for 
conspiracy.

After the war ended, the left pretty much collapsed and I eventually went 
to work for Willamette Week, the leading news weekly in Portland, Oregon. I 
began doing true crime stories after a few years and began running across 
informants again. Some of them were obvious liars who had cut deals with 
the police to get out of trouble. But some of them were the only way that 
serious crimes got solved. I'm not talking about prostitution, drug use, or 
civil disobedience, which I regard as political and victimless crimes. I'm 
talking about murders, rapes, assaults, things like that. Crimes committed 
by dangerous people who need to be taken off the streets. Iıve interviewed 
and even become friends with the parents and siblings of murder victims who 
are desperate for someone to step forward and tell them who killed their 
children. I understand that law enforcement agencies have to rely on 
informants to solve such crimes, even if the snitches are not completely 
clean themselves.

Then, in 1991, I started my own paper, PDXS. Within a few months, the Randy 
Weaver and Branch Davidian fiascos prompted a lot of people to begin 
questioning the government. I started going to various meetings organized 
by people who considered themselves populists, patriots and militia 
members. Although most of them tended to be more conservative than me, I 
found them to be sincerely disturbed about the government's willingness to 
use military force against American citizens.

Then, at one meeting, a guy pulled me aside and asked if I wanted to form 
an underground cell and do something to retaliate against the government. 
He was obviously a cop, just like the ones who attended the newspaper 
meetings in Eugene, and I realized the government was infiltrating this new 
political movement, such as it was. From that point on, every time I saw a 
story about a militia group being busted for conspiring to overthrow the 
government, I looked to see if they have been infiltrated. And, sure 
enough, they all were, usually many months before their alleged plot was 
suppose to take place. And I had to ask myself, was, are groups seriously 
conspiring to break the law, or were they just shooting their mouths off, 
like my friends and I did on Eugene. I think it's significant that few if 
any of these alleged militia members were ever convicted of conspiracy.

PDXS never made any money, and I finally shut it down in early 1999. Adam 
Parfrey, the owner of Feral House, visited Portland a short time later. I 
had known Adam for several years, and we got together one day to see if 
there was anything I could write for him.

By coincidence, the day we met, the Portland school district announced it 
was going to begin paying students up to $1,000 to report classmates 
suspected of breaking the law or school rules. Adam was outraged about it. 
He thought the schools were teaching kids to fink, and we started talking 
about the sheer number of informants at work in America today, especially 
in the War on Drugs, which is essentially a war against inner-city 
African-Americans.

I offered to do a book on snitches, provided there wasnıt another one 
already out there. And there wasn't, really, not on the general topic. 
There are a lot of books on the McCarthy Era that mention the FBI's use of 
informants at that time, but very little about the government's efforts to 
infiltrate the so-called militia movement in the 1990s. I found some 
newspaper stories and magazine articles that talked about drug snitches, 
but they usually focused on specific cases and didn't deal with their 
overall impact on American society. And there was almost nothing about 
informants in the private sector, which is something I'd stumbled across at 
Willamette Week. So I said I'd do the book and spent the next year or so on 
it.


İ 1997-2000 The Disinformation Company Ltd., a member of Razorfish 
Subnetwork. All rights reserved.

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