Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide by Mike German

Author:Mike German
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

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TARGETING INNOCENT “OTHERS”

The FBI’s “preventative” approach to addressing national security threats requires identifying the suspect communities from which they believe these threats emerge and employing its disruption strategies against them. The lowered evidentiary thresholds in the FBI’s investigative guidelines allow this targeting of innocents. As bureau officials articulated throughout its post-9/11 transition, the bureau’s efforts are no longer designed to enforce federal law but to disrupt potential threats. Often, the threatening “other” is not a foreign enemy but a fellow American.

THE PERPETUAL FOREIGNERS

Americans in the past took pride in characterizing the United States as a melting pot, a country where immigrants can come from anywhere in world with nothing, work hard, prosper, and become American citizens equal to those native born. Out of many, one. Jeffrey Wang and Denise Woo are both products of this American dream. Woo is a fourth-generation Californian of mixed Chinese and Japanese ancestry who joined the FBI at thirty-five, walking away from her more lucrative engineering career at IBM to serve her community as a federal agent.1 She worked white collar crime cases in the Long Beach resident agency for a few years, then transferred to a child pornography squad in Los Angeles in 1999.

Jeffrey Wang’s father came to the United States from China in the 1920s on a scholarship, became a radiologist in Hawaii, and married a Chinese American woman from New York whose family had lived here for generations. Wang was born in Honolulu, earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, and got a job in Raytheon’s airborne radar division, where he worked on classified technical projects involving U.S. fighter jets and the stealth bomber.2

Wang joined Woo’s extended family when he married a Japanese American woman named Diane Misumi. The Woo and Misumi families were not blood relatives but bonded through a shared history when fear and bigotry overruled reason. Misumi’s father and Woo’s mother went to high school together in Los Angeles after spending World War II in Japanese internment camps. They ended up raising their families in the same neighborhood and going to the same church. Woo babysat Misumi as a child and they remained close through adulthood, continuing to see each other at holidays and family functions after Misumi and Wang married.3

Scholars have identified a “perpetual foreigner” stereotype that stigmatizes racial minorities in the United States, particularly Asian Americans, by more closely associating them with their ethnicity and national origin than their nationality, no matter how long they’ve been Americans. Asians are often regarded as the “model minority” for the relative success many Asian immigrants achieve, particularly in math, science, and engineering. Since the atomic age, these fields have been closely associated with national security, however, which creates a dissonance in intelligence agencies that tend to view Asian Americans as not fully assimilable. “They want us to be Americans and work in their defense labs,” one Taiwanese-born scientist said during the Wen Ho Lee scandal, “but they never treat us as Americans.”4

Robert Vrooman,

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