Via Unqualified Offerings, here’s the strange case of the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC).
CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle said such evidence wasn’t needed to issue warnings on war protesters.
“You can make an easy kind of a link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that (protest),” said Van Winkle, of the state Justice Department. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”
In fact, CATIC — touted as a national model for intelligence sharing and a centerpiece of Gov. Gray Davis and Attorney General Bill Lockyer’s 2002 re-election bids — has quietly gathered and analyzed information on activists of various stripes almost since its creation.
[…]Yet causing a traffic jam can be enough to trigger a CATIC analysis and bulletin. At the Port of Oakland, where trucks would be blocked from reaching shippers such as APL, a protest target, that logic might have been more compelling, Manavian and Van Winkle suggested.
“If we receive information that 10,000 folks are going to a street corner and going to block it, that’s breaking a law,” Manavian said. “That’s the kind of information that we’re going to relay.”
Said Van Winkle: “I’ve heard terrorism described as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn’t just bombs going off and killing people.”
Both men say CATIC merely supplies information, but it’s up to police to decide what to do with it.
Seems like the Left Coast really is crazy.
