By Michael Munk, The Portland Alliance, January 2001

For more than a week after the City Council's approval of the "Portland Joint Terrorist Task Force"-the notorious new link between an expanded Portland Police Red Squad and the FBI--the Oregonian was silent. That's par for the course: for years, the monopoly media have pretended that the Portland's political police didn't exist. If you relied on the Big O, you would not have known in 1996 that Multnomah district court judge Michael Marcus found the Red Squad (the infamous Siewert) guilty of violating the civil rights of citizens by spying on that 1992 meeting. Three years ago, it even managed to ignore Mayor Katz's contemptuous rejection of efforts of the Metropolitan Commission on Human Rights to reform the Red Squad.

What a change from the Oregonian's view of the Red Squad 60 years ago! In 1939, it gave relatively generous space to both its supporters and critics and even ran a strong editorial calling for its abolition. That was the last time when Portlanders were adequately informed about the long standing cell of political police they continue to support with their taxes

In 1939, the Red Squad was led by Walter Odale, a police patrolman, whose politics the Oregonian summarized as holding that "Communists were the source of all woe." Odale's boss was chief of detectives Lt. John J. Keegan, who achieved his 15 minutes of fame by testifying that Harry tridges was a Communist who wanted to "overthrow the government." Their Red Squad included Bill Browne (its head in the McCarthy era), M.E. Bacon, who posed as a member of the Communist party, and several "civilian" members evidently paid by rightist groups such as the American Legion. As they are today, Mayors were in charge of the Police Bureau and in the 30s that was Joe Carson, whose nickname "Bloody Shirt" was bestowed after his police fired on strikers in the 1934 longshore strike.

The Portland chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, in a report signed by future federal judge Gus Solomon and other prominent local attorneys, exposed that crew of fanatics as thugish political police who believed the ACLU was a Communist organization, harrased leftists, union organizers and non-citizens. The report documented the hiring of provocateurs from the underworld and maintaining a black list for the use of rightwing employers. The Red Squad even conspired to photograph radical painter Martina Gangle sharing a drink with Keegan in the Multnomah hotel bar in an effort to suggest to the left she was an informer.

It was that report, authored by "respectable" members of the Portland Establishment that persuaded the Oregonian to publish its own expose and call for abolition of the Red Squad. In the face of this evidence Mayor Carson continued to deny its existence and claimed that he was not interested in suppressing mere "talk" but rather "acts resulting from talk." Referring to unions, he declared the "right to belong..is no more sacred than the right not to."

While the Oregonian's take on the Red Squad has changed, Mayor Katz's support for its expansion today and links to the FBI follows in the footstep of her notorious predecessor, "Bloody Shirt" Carson.