Journalists have uncovered a Pentagon list of antiwar protests and meetings considered "threats." The document is over 400 pages long and covers events over a 10-month period. A 5-page excerpt from the report, includes seven events that were organized by chapters of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN). City College New York, New York University, Southern Connecticut State University, University of CA Berkeley, University of CA Santa Cruz, University of Madison Wisconsin

read excerpt from Department of Defense "Threat" List

Are antiwar protests a "threat?"
Democracy Now! interviews CAN members

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales interviewd antiwar activists from around the country, including CAN members, who organized protests that were listed as "threats" by the Pentagon. 

listen to interview
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listen to Democracy Now report on Pentagon Surveillance

CAN members' comments from the interview

SNEHAL SHINGAVI: My name is Snehal Shingavi, and I'm a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley and a member of the Berkeley Stop the War Coalition. The report that was just released on MSNBC about a kind of scrutiny of activists around the country, who have been doing counter recruitment activity included in the list a protest that we have done at Berkeley about military recruiters, when the military recruiters showed up to campus a few months ago.

The protest itself was very peaceful. It included about 20 students who went in and confronted military recruiters about their presence on campus. And the thing that's quite striking about the report is not that they are watching anti-war and anti-recruitment activity -- we sort of suspected as much -- but it's how nervous the military has actually become by some pretty tame and pretty peaceful protests against military recruitments and against the war in Iraq. This has everything to do, in our opinion, with the fact that this has been the largely unpopular war and a war that they have had serious difficulties in recruiting young people into the military to go and fight. And it seems pretty clear to us as activists that the military is really very nervous that their ability to conduct the kind of campaign that they would like is hinging on the very thing that activists are attempting to prevent, i.e., recruiting students and young people for this war.

KRISTIN ANDERSON: Hi. My name is Kristin Anderson, I am a student at San Francisco State University, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of Campus Antiwar Network. I was involved in the May 7, 2005 rally at the San Francisco recruiting [inaudible]. That was the launch rally for the Proposition I “College, Not Combat” ballot proposition that passed this November here in San Francisco. While it is not entirely unheard of for the government to be monitoring peace groups, it is not surprising, considering the climate that we're in with the PATRIOT Act, and it takes us back to the days of the COINTEL Program that the government was engaged in.

AMY GOODMAN: Some people from groups that were listed in the domestic intelligence Pentagon database that was exposed by Bill Arkin and NBC News this week. We are joined in our studio by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field -- yes, that's her real name -- a student at New York University and member of the national coordinating committee of the Campus Antiwar Network. She helped organize a protest at NYU in February that was mentioned in the Pentagon intelligence papers... Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, let's begin with you.

ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD: Hi.

AMY GOODMAN: Hi. What do you know? What about the Pentagon observing your protest? What were these protests?

ELIZABETH WRIGLEY-FIELD: Well, to be honest, the protest at NYU was an incredibly mild one, so I was very surprised to see it on the list. We had recruiters from the Judge Advocate General, which is the legal arm of the military, coming to recruit at the law school, and we had just inside the building a group of law students from the gay and lesbian organization holding signs and handing out stickers, and just outside the building, students from the Campus Antiwar Network were petitioning in solidarity with Pablo Paredes, who is a war resistor, because we wanted to tell people that if you are recruited by JAG, what you wind up doing is you prosecuting war resistors like Pablo, who I think is doing the right thing. You know, so the idea that these stickers or these petitions were some sort of threat to the military is a little mind boggling to me.

Articles on Pentagon surveillance of antiwar activism

MSNBC Report: Is the Pentagon Spying on Americans?
MSNBC: Pentagon to Review Spy Files
New York Times: Pentagon Is Said to Mishandle a Counterterrorism Database
Daily Page: Pentagon Surveillance of Antiwar Groups Extends to Madison
Albany Times Union: Feds kept tabs on UAlbany anti-war events

Students Respond to Repression

University of California-Santa Cruz
UCSC Students Denounce Pentagon Surveillance of Counter-Recruitment Activities