Garden Plot:
The Pruning Of Subversive Youth
And the Beginning of the Next ‘60s ,
Which Won’t Be Anything Like the ‘60s….

The most ridiculous person in the news today (Saturday) is Timothy H. Canty, the principal of the Wilton, Connecticut high school who wouldn't let students put on a play criticizing the war in Iraq.

Canty is amusing in the way all Nazis can be amusing, as Chaplin first discovered in The Great Dictator—thinking that they, mere puny men with swelled egos, can censor the effervescence of the human spirit, tamp down its willful goodness.

Wilton is an affluent town, and Wilton High School’s state-of-the-art auditorium cost $10 million. Apparently not only are the poor to be silenced in Bush’s America, but the over-privileged as well (if the poor are “underprivileged," aren’t the rich overly so?). Well of course—look at what happened in the 60s. You let some educated, overprivileged kids start expressing their political ideas, and pretty soon you have a peace movement on your hands.

We already have a peace movement in this country—a widespread, broad-based coalition which has been protesting the Iraq war since before it even started, which has camped out in the halls of the Congress to build fires under the behinds of senators and has attracted hundreds of thousands to marches across the country, media coverage or no. But what we don’t have yet is a fired-up youth contingent with a unified cultural voice; and that is, perhaps, what the powers-that-be fear the most.

Principal Canty reportedly told Wilton High’s would-be activists that “only someone who had actually served in the war could understand the experience." Their play, “Voices of Iraq,” was to be a compilation of “reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19," according to the New York Times. (Despite the students' repeated attempts to revise the play to meet Canty's demands for more "balance," he continued to nix it.)

“In Wilton,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, an actor in the play, “most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight. What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But that might be dangerous, Devon. If you think this is just about your high school play and your meanie of a principal, think again; it's actually indicative of a deeper strain of American style fascism. Suppressing subversive elements among America’s youth has been government policy since the 60s. It’s called "Garden Plot."

The official name is “Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2: Garden Plot.” You can’t get it online anymore—the Department of Defense web site has pulled it—which has led some people to dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. But it’s not. When I was doing a story on protestors at the Republican National Convention in 2004, a researcher in military history gave me a copy of it. It’s about 200 pages long, extremely weird and scary.

Believed to have been a D.O.D. response to the Kerner Commission, "Operation Garden Plot" is a Department of Defense plan for the suppression of dissent through military force and counterintelligence. It advocates domestic spying, the suspension of the Posse Comitatus Act and the easy imposition of martial law—all maneuvers the Bush administration has been very keen on. It places particular emphasis on infiltrating and suppressing the political activities of civil rights advocates and students.

Garden Plot is no dinosaur from the pre-Church Committee era, however, but still active, according to one military official I spoke to in 2004, who asked not to be named. (The plan itself warns military personnel not to discuss it.) It was last activated on September 11, 2001, ostensibly to respond to so-called "civil disturbances" following the terrorists attacks. But the militaristic response to street protest in the last several years since Seattle (which I wrote about in Rosebud #76, below), seems in keeping with the plan's call for the use of force against dissidents.

Garden Plot can still be seen peeking out of several military and law enforcement documents available online, including the Center For Law and Military Operations Domestic Operational Law (DOPLAW) Handbook, published in April of 2001, available at www.jagcnet.army.mil/CLAMO. The DOPLAW handbook discusses the plan at length, stating, for example, that “The Department of Defense Civil Disturbance Plan, named ‘GARDEN PLOT,’ provides guidance and direction for planning, coordinating and executing military operations during domestic civil disturbances"—meaning riots and/or protests.

Garden Plot also lays the groundwork for the surveillance of “counterintelligence targets,” which it says include "disruptive elements, extremists or dissidents perpetrating civil disorder.” Which is pretty broad language, spookily. It could even mean a bunch of high school students putting on a play about the war in Iraq.

Which is all the more reason why this play should go on somewhere. Somebody with some money to spend on something worthy, maybe somebody connected with the theater, should reach out to the “Voices of Iraq” kids at Wilton High and make them America's Idols.

When kids stop talking and thinking about Britney and Shmitney et al and turn their minds en masse toward the state of the world, there’s no limit to the lush garden they can grow. They’re turning. They are. The media gives them no credit for it, often ridicules them when they make some noise, but they're getting louder and more coherent every day. They're waking up. Their friends and schoolmates are dying in America's wars, and they can't sleep.

This is only the beginning. But this time won’t be anything like the last. Not with the technology they now possess, not with the mistakes of their parents and grandparents to learn from. As the 60s bard himself said once, at a similarly pivotal time, The times they are a-changin'. There's no telling what it will look like, except that it will be different. Better.

And make no mistake, the plot is in place for when it happens.
But fear not. We can take 'em.