Now, here is where it gets interesting.
According to published reports at the time and the months that followed it seems that the entire Great Philly Puppet Raid of 2000 was instigated and based on rumors delivered to the Pennsylvania State Police by a little-known and well financed Right-wing Institute that grew out of the John Birch Society.
Long after the First Amendment Rights of the protestors had been denied, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on September 10, 2000 that Rumors Had Troopers Seeing Reds During The GOP Convention:
In state police affidavits justifying a raid on a West Philadelphia warehouse used by convention protesters, troopers alleged that communists were behind the demonstrations.
"Funds allegedly originate with Communist and leftist parties and from sympathetic trade unions," the state police declared in the affidavits. "Other funds reportedly come from the former Soviet-allied World Federation of Trade Unions." [snip]
Known as "the puppet warehouse," police called it a center of illegal activity; activists said it was a workshop in which they made more than 100 puppets and a large satirical float, "Corpzilla." [snip]
Without elaboration, the affidavits stated that the allegations of communist funding had come from the little-known Maldon Institute. [snip]
Lewis [a state police spokesman ] said that state police and other police departments "routinely receive information from the Maldon Institute at no cost, via e-mail. The department did not solicit this information."
Asked whether state police had attended Maldon Institute conferences, Lewis responded: "State police personnel have had contact in the U.S. with representatives of the institute."
According to public records, the institute is funded, at least in part, by Scaife, the Pittsburgh political philanthropist best known for his financial support of several private investigations of President Clinton in recent years. [snip]
In an interview last week, Chip Berlet, who studies conservative and far-right groups, said a key figure within the 15-year-old institute has been John H. Rees, a British-born contributor to the John Birch Society and publisher of a newsletter devoted to intelligence-gathering and distributed to police.
In the 1970s, Rees published the Information Digest, which gave details gathered after he infiltrated left-leaning groups under a false name, the Baltimore Sun reported in 1988.
Just this year, Rees, as director of the Maldon Institute, helped organize an invitation-only conference in New York City on terrorism that drew FBI agents and police, according to conference sponsors.
If the FBI in 2000 was working with the Maldon Institute to organize a conference on fighting terrorism, it is not surprising that 9-11 happened. These guys are tinfoil wearing right-wing paranoids. And the FBI has known that they are unreliable. The founder of the Maldon Institute was peddling information to the Feds since the 1960s. And since then, his work has been revealed in a number of civil law suits. One of these cases produced a 1968 FBI memo on the reliability of John Rees and the Information he peddles:
"Rees is an unscrupulous unethical individual and an opportunist who operates with a self-serving interest. Information from him cannot be considered reliable..."
And yet, the word of John Rees was enough to arrest more than 400 people gathered to exercise their right of free speech. Time and time again, his word has been used to justify domestic spying and his Maldon Institute has been used by politicians, corporations and law enforcement entities that want their domestic spying to stay under the radar.
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