Shootings Disturb Delicate Balance of Rights, Security

Three decades ago, federal authorities claimed wide-ranging and often-abusive powers in the name of national security as FBI agents trailed, harassed and threatened liberal demonstrators, black militants and many others whose ideas were deemed dangerous.

Today, the pendulum has swung so far away from the abuses of the J. Edgar Hoover era that authorities are wary of proceeding against an extremist group without a “reasonable indication” of criminal activity.

But last week’s shootings in Granada Hills by white supremacist Buford O. Furrow Jr. have set off a vigorous debate over whether the federal government has become too lax in seeking to contain extremists who spew out hateful--and potentially dangerous--ideas.

“We’re going to have to change our policies. I think the safety of our citizens requires that these groups be kept under some surveillance, no less than suspected terrorist groups,” Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), a leading civil rights activist, said in an interview.

Such talk is anathema to civil libertarians, who fear a return to widespread political harassment by federal authorities of groups engaged in legally protected activities.

But statements by federal law enforcement officials suggest that such fears are premature. Although the recent spate of high-profile hate crimes has sparked demands for change, prospects are uncertain for a significant shift in federal policies on the monitoring of extremist groups.

As it is, with reports of hate crimes increasing, it has been left to private groups such as the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, which first turned up a photo this week of Furrow in neo-Nazi garb, to assume the role of watchdog over the nation’s extremists.

These watchdogs work by compiling voluminous research on hate groups, often using the information to sue them for damages and sometimes even to infiltrate their ranks. The people sent by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles to infiltrate white supremacist groups “look more Aryan than the Aryans,” declared Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the center.

Yet for all their newfound prominence, many of these activists would just as soon see the government take the lead again in ferreting out dangerous extremists such as Furrow.

“It is up to the Congress to say they want the FBI back in the business of fighting hate groups,” Rabbi Hier said.

“We’re not saying that the FBI should automatically eavesdrop on everyone who hits a hate site on the Internet,” Hier said. But when an extremist group runs a Web site featuring military commandos shooting at the pope, he said, “it might cross the line from speech to threat.”

But civil libertarians warn that such policies could invite political repression.

“We don’t need to return to the days when the FBI routinely investigated people like Martin Luther King or John Lennon because of their political views,” said Gregory Nojeim, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union here.

As the embarrassing details of the FBI’s political abuses emerged in the mid-1970s, federal authorities first began reshaping the way they went about investigating possible threats to domestic security.

Authorities must have a “reasonable indication” of criminal activity to open an investigation. And the current guidelines, which date to 1989, ban any investigations “based solely on activities protected by the 1st Amendment.”

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno spoke forcefully last week about the Granada Hills shootings, calling for a redoubled attack on hatred and bigotry. But she said she sees no need to loosen the rules for monitoring hate groups, and she declined to name those groups that might be under investigation by her department.

The Granada Hills episode was only the latest deadly mix of violence and racism to rock the country. Just a month earlier, white supremacist Benjamin Nathaniel Smith killed himself after he went on a shooting rampage in the Midwest against Jews, Asians and blacks that left two dead and nine injured. That was preceded by other high-profile hate crimes, including the brutal killings of a gay student in Wyoming and a black man in Texas. Some of the attackers had known ties to white supremacist or extremist groups, while others were unknown even to hate group watchdogs.

As a matter of policy, the FBI does not keep lists on or actively monitor the activities of groups considered extremist unless it has reason to suspect them of criminal activity, said bureau spokesman Tron Brekke in Washington.

“We don’t do that. We can’t do that. We don’t monitor groups,” he said.

“We always want to be proactive and hopefully aid in prevention. It doesn’t do society any good if people are just around reacting after a crime has occurred. But oftentimes, we can only do so much,” Brekke said.

Rep. Conyers said that he was “astounded” to learn from the FBI at a congressional hearing that it does not maintain a list of extremist groups.

“It was clear that the FBI was catering to those who are worried that they will just go around looking for hate groups. But that’s what they ought to be doing,” Conyers said. “I think more and more people are moving away from this hands-off attitude. People are beginning to see [extremist groups] for the menace that they are.”

Some activists believe that the standoff near Waco, Texas, between federal agents and religious separatists in 1993 that led to the deaths of more than 80 Branch Davidian cultists has made authorities gun-shy about moving aggressively against fringe groups.

But Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said that federal authorities have allowed hate groups to use the 1st Amendment as a cover, moving in only after the damage is done.

“We need to have an ability to defend our civil liberties in order to enjoy them,” he said. “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”

Hateful speech on the Internet is a case in point.

Some critics have said that the Justice Department has dragged its feet on the issue. Reno said the department is reviewing the question of potentially incendiary speech on the Internet and federal authorities have gained convictions against two young men in Southern California who sent threatening, racist-laden messages into cyberspace.

But when it comes to civil litigation against hate groups and extremists, the Justice Department often has left that tactic to private watchdogs, who have successfully sued the Ku Klux Klan and other groups for damages.

In Portland, Ore., for instance, Planned Parenthood won a stunning $107-million judgment earlier this year against a militant anti-abortion group whose virulent public messages were found to pose a threat to abortion providers.

The anti-abortion group had posted Old West-style “wanted” posters of named abortion providers, along with an ominous Web site called “The Nuremberg Files” that included detailed information on the doctors. Lines were drawn through three of the doctors’ names after they were killed, but the group maintained that it never specifically advocated violence.

Justice Department lawyers were grateful to be kept up to speed on developments in the case, said Lois V. Backus, executive director of Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette, based in Portland. But they wanted no direct role in the litigation, she said.

For now, much of the Clinton administration’s effort on the hate crime issue has focused on congressional passage of expanded federal hate crime laws, which would make crimes based on gender, sexual orientation and disability also subject to special prosecution. Currently, only race, religion and national origin are covered under federal hate crime statutes.

The expansion has passed the Senate, but it appears in danger of stalling in the House, where the sexual orientation provision has come under particular fire from gay rights critics. Others have attacked the hate crime measure as a needless expansion of federal law that would serve only to divide the country into different groups and classes.

Conyers, sponsor of the House measure, said that the prospects are “iffy.” But he said the Granada Hills shootings may serve to rally support.

“Unfortunately, that’s how we normally get momentum,” he said. “These tragedies just keep piling up, and they shock the American conscience until we decide we have to do something about it. It’s too bad it has to work that way.”