Following protests against a neo-Nazi rally, the FBI opened a terrorism investigation into By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), a civil rights group, conducting surveillance and citing the fact that a BAMN member had been stabbed by a neo-Nazi to justify it.
The investigation is detailed in records retrieved through Freedom of Information Act requests by Property of the People (previously) and reported on by The Guardian’s Sam Levin.
The FBI was seeking to determine whether BAMN was engaged in a “conspiracy” to deprive the KKK of its “rights,” and the Bureau helpfully noted that “the KKK consisted of members that some perceived to be supportive of a white supremacist agenda.”
According to the files, the FBI’s investigation was prompted by BAMN’s advocacy against “police brutality” and “rape and sexual assault.”
Yesterday, news broke that the FBI had invented a fictitious pro-abortion extremist movement and warned law-enforcement of its domestic terror threat, despite the fact that there are zero verified killings or attempted killings by “pro-abortion extremists,” while anti-abortion extremists have murdered, bombed, firebombed, maimed and threatened thousands of people.
The FBI has a history of this kind of thing, helping white supremacists, right-wing terrorists, and other pro-establishment forces in America do battle against black and brown people, poor people, and anyone on the margins of US society.
The 2016 rally was organized by two white supremacist groups: the Traditionalist Worker party (TWP) and an affiliated California entity, the Golden State Skinheads. California law enforcement subsequently worked with the neo-Nazis to identify counter-protesters, pursued charges against stabbing victims and other anti-fascists, and decided not to prosecute any men on the far-right for the stabbings.The FBI appeared to have adopted a similar approach. In a redacted October 2016 document, the FBI labeled its Bamn investigation a “DT [domestic terrorism] – ANARCHIST EXTREMISM” case. The FBI’s San Francisco office wrote that it was investigating allegations that “members of Bamn attended a Ku Klux Klan rally and assaulted a Nazi supporter”. It summarized the Sacramento incident this way:
Revealed: FBI investigated civil rights group as ‘terrorism’ threat and viewed KKK as victims [Sam Levin/The Guardian]