July 12, 2005 – A growing collection of people are raising questions in California over recently-revealed domestic surveillance activities by a special unit of the California National Guard, now including evidence that the unit’s members expressed bigotry against Arabs and Muslims.
Last Wednesday, the Army inspector general began an investigation into allegations that a two-person unit of the Guard known as the Information Synchronization, Knowledge Management and Intelligence Fusion program was monitoring activists groups.
Democratic State Senator Joseph Dunn’s own attempt to look into the matter has already run into problems. A request for information from the California Guard, issued on June 27 – the day after the San Jose Mercury News broke the story – went unfulfilled after technicians erased the hard drive of a computer belonging to the colonel in charge of the unit, the paper reported last week.
Yesterday, the Mercury News reported on a new controversy with the unit over two flyers posted at the Sacramento office containing anti-Islamic messages.
One flyer referenced a World War I era claim that General John J. Pershing had Muslims executed with bullets dipped in pig’s blood in order to deny them entrance to Heaven and stated: "Maybe it is time for this segment of history to repeat itself, maybe in Iraq? The question is, where do we find another Black Jack Pershing," according to the newspaper. Below that flyer was a cartoon mocking the Red Cross’s Middle Eastern presence as a vehicle of terrorism.
Another flyer depicted the tail of a bomb as a peace symbol and carried the caption, "Peace the Old Fashioned Way," the Mercury News reported.
The flyers came to public attention after antiwar activists were invited to the headquarters and a member of the protest group Code Pink photographed them, the paper said. The Guard initially defended the flyers, but they have since been removed.
