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Tonight is the kickoff party for State v. Pan, a fundraising campaign for the unlikely trial of local artist (and Stranger Genius Award winner) DK Pan.

The short version of the story (you can read the long version here): A few years ago, the SPD and FBI collaborated on a years-long surveillance project. They watched a group of friends in Seattle, some of whom were artists, some of whom were lefty dissidents (marching at Republican National Conventions, that kind of thing), and some of whom broke minor laws—poker games, personal drug use, throwing after-hours parties. But the SPD and the FBI weren’t looking for card-playing and pot smoking.

Law enforcement was looking for, in one FBI agent’s words “domestic terrorists”—ecoterrorists. They didn’t find any, so the undercover SPD agent making friends with this group of friends starting behaving like an agent provocateur, trying to turn them into ecoterrorists. That didn’t work either, so the police rounded everybody up on other charges: a few for drugs, most for gambling (a charge that only one other person in King County has faced in the past ten years).

The police used the arrests as a means to leverage intelligence from the group of friends about activism and ecoterrorism circles. They realized they’d just been surveilling a bunch of dissidents and oddballs, and dropped the investigation. But they didn’t drop the charges. (After a two-year undercover investigation, you presumably have to charge somebody for something.)

By now, most everyone has taken plea bargains on their charges, and most without any jail time. But not Pan. He made the surprising move to go to trial and use it as an opportunity to question the police tactics used in this investigation and investigations like it—which target domestic political dissidents with terrorist funds and tactics—all over the country. The trial is scheduled for late January of 2012.

So Pan is fundraising for his court costs. Tonight is the kickoff at FRED Wildlife Refuge, 9 pm. Pan’s attorney David Whedbee and I will have a conversation about these kinds of cases from the stage, Jose Bold (aka Stranger Genius Award winner John Osebold) will perform a short set, DJ Riz will spin, there will be mug shots by Kelly O, a slide show of legal stuff by DK Pan, and other stuff. Donations between $5 and $50 will be accepted.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

8 replies on “State v. Pan, Tonight at Fred”

  1. That entire blurb is disingenuous. I’m not a Pan detractor, or actually hope he is convicted, but to paint his as some kind of pauper robin hood being persecuted because of his social status and profession as an artist is a bridge to far.

    He was a knowing partner in an illegal venture that committed multiple criminal offenses. I feel the same way about almost everyone involved in this case. They fucked up, sure, but this kind of spin is just intolerable.

    The idea that the reason for their surveillance and subsequent arrests was because they were being subversive is a crock of shit. They were arrested because they committed multiple crimes.

    By all means, support them if you feel like it, but to the strangers, don’t spraypaint a chunk of shit and tell us it’s gold because they are friends of yours.

  3. I don’t think Pan is any kind of Robin Hood—but the reason for the surveillance *was* about subversiveness. Even the investigators say so.

    Just a few excerpts from the longer article.

    By the end of this investigation, Bryan Van Brunt will have won SPD’s Distinguished Service Award, even though his investigation was largely a flop. The SPD was investigating the political-corruption side of the case, looking into city council members Peter Steinbrueck and Nick Licata, according to FBI special agent David Gomez, who runs the counterterrorism program from Seattle’s field office. “With us,” he says, “it was a domestic terrorism case.” The FBI seemed to believe that Rick’s apartment and speakeasy parties were in fact linked to radical environmentalists, including the Earth Liberation Front.

    “There was a sense that there was information that would’ve helped us, if it had worked out,” Gomez says. “But I don’t believe that it did.”

    Whatever the FBI and the SPD and Van Brunt were looking for—and whatever lengths they went to in order to find it—they’ve probably handed King County prosecutors the biggest pile of surveillance for gambling charges in state history. A few days ago, I asked an officer at the SPD about the extremes of the investigation and the paltriness of the charges.

    “Yeah,” he sighed. “This case was pretty low-yield.”

    The FBI, Potter says, has been playing this make-believe game with “domestic terrorists” off and on since 9/11, even though it has been directly criticized for it by the US Department of Justice.

    The DOJ’s 95-page audit report from 2003 opens and closes with the inspector general basically saying that the FBI has been doing a crappy job of protecting American citizens from terrorism because it’s not good at sharing information with other agencies, and it’s been too busy busting the likes of vegans, hippies, artists, anarchists, and other low-risk dissident American subcultures.

  4. #1 – this was a set-up pure and simple. Read brendan’s article. An undercover cop befriended and betrayed, and bankrolled an enterprise in order to try and convince folks to break laws. There’s no doubt about that. I don’t think anyone’s portraying dk as some ‘pauper robin hood’, but just supporting a guy get a fair hearing and find out what exactly prompted the FBI and SPD to spend 2+ years and countless funds surveillancing a bunch of artists and activists and weirdos. Why did Bryan Van Brunt fly dk and others to the RNC, why did he try to get an enlisted soldier to try to steal guns from fort lewis, why did he lease the building on third and battery, why is Rick even in prison… Etc, etc… The whole thing reeks of shit but stinky SPD entrapment shit!

  7. I’m kind a with Sonder. I dunno – someone asks me to break the law, I tell them to fuck off.

    Maybe the methods are questionable, but are the charges fabricated? There is a discussion to be had, but is that about guilt or innocence? Or surveillance? Because they are two separate things.

  8. Hope folks in Seattle come out to support DK. In brief reply to some of the folks above: this is about selectively prosecuting people because of their political beliefs, in order to show some kind of half-ass “victory” in a Keystone “terrorism investigation.” Kudos to Brendan Kiley for breaking this story and exposing this waste of government resources.

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