Pentagon listing has made them 'credible'

"We're not paranoid about it, and in a way, it's given us an opportunity to
talk about the war to different people, to tell people that it was not OK
to invade Iraq," said Kai Sawyer, 23, a member of Students Against War and
a teaching assistant in the psychology department. "Berkeley may have the
reputation for having a lot of anti-war activists, but I feel like Santa
Cruz has had a lot more going on."

Students Against War brought the attention of both the left and the
Pentagon to the hilly, redwood-studded campus through counter-recruiting --
a tactic of directly taking on military recruiting that has become the
leading edge of the anti-war movement.

Marches are still a staple of the movement, and there will be an 11 a.m.
rally Saturday in San Francisco's Civic Center and others elsewhere
nationally to mark the third anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Members of Students Against War will be at the San Francisco rally wearing
T-shirts reading, "Credible Threat" -- a parody of Pentagon spymasters'
assessment of the group's activities.

But counter-recruiting is where the anti-war movement's energies are going.

Counter-recruiting can take the form of demanding that a high school ask
parents' permission before letting military recruiters contact their
children. Or it can be a "queer kiss-in" in front of military recruiters,
something UC Santa Cruz activists did at a campus job fair in October to
protest the military's ban on openly gay service members.

"Talking about a war on the other side of the world can get kind of
abstract for some students," said Kristin Anderson, a San Francisco State
University senior and board member of the nationwide Campus Anti-War
Network. The Santa Cruz anti-war group is the network's largest on the West
Coast.

"(Counter-recruitment) has gotten popular because it gives students
something concrete they can do," Anderson said. "They see a recruiter
trying to get their friend to join, and there's a chance that their friend
might not come back. And if he does, he definitely won't be the same."

It was an April 5 counter-recruiting demonstration at Santa Cruz that led
to Students Against War's national notoriety.

About a dozen protesters entered a career fair in a campus building and
surrounded a table where military recruiters sat, preventing other students
from talking with them. More than 300 people demonstrated outside. In the
jostling that ensued, a career-center staffer was slightly injured.

The recruiters left; some found their tires slashed when they returned to
their cars. No one has been cited in connection with the vandalism.

In December, MSNBC reported that the incident and a separate protest by a
UC Berkeley group had turned up on a Defense Department database of
potential threats against U.S. military facilities and personnel. The Santa
Cruz incident was listed as a credible threat, while the Berkeley one was not.

Since the story broke, the American Civil Liberties Union, California's two
U.S. senators and UC Santa Cruz's chancellor have demanded that the
Pentagon explain how the students landed on the list and what the military
is doing with the information.

The Pentagon has offered few answers. Earlier this month, the ACLU filed a
federal lawsuit against the Defense Department, hoping to force the
Pentagon to release any information it has gathered on the Santa Cruz and
Berkeley groups.

Military recruiters are planning to return to the next campus job fair
April 11, and again will be greeted by student activists. Students Against
War has scheduled a demonstration for today asking UC Santa Cruz
administrators to join the ACLU suit, something campus officials say they
don't plan to do.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that law schools can be stripped of
federal funding if they deny full access to military recruiters. On
Tuesday, the House backed that up with a resolution requiring institutions
of higher education to provide military recruiters with as much access to
students as other employers get, or risk losing federal dollars.

"The administration there is in a tough position," said Rep. Sam Farr,
D-Carmel, whose district includes the Santa Cruz campus. He opposed the
resolution, saying schools should be able to decide the recruiting question
for themselves. "(Administrators) may feel that they have to be careful of
opposing the military because there are a lot of federal research contracts
there."

Liberal students have been drawn to UC Santa Cruz since the campus opened
40 years ago. Their activism isn't limited to the military -- largely at
the urging of students, nearly one-fifth of the food served in university
living quarters is organic and locally grown.

"Just seeing how many students were activists here, how everybody seems to
be into something, makes you want to get involved," said Jessenia Meza, a
19-year-old sophomore from Los Angeles who works with the Latino activist
group MEChA.

This generation of UC Santa Cruz activists sees "the connections between a
range of issues," said Steve Gliessman, a professor of agroecology who has
been on campus 25 years. "They see how the war impacts everything from
global trade to corporate control of resources."

That said, the most recent planning meeting of Students Against War seemed
hardly the stuff of a terrorist cell. Not unless al Qaeda begins each
meeting by asking each attendee the ice-breaker, "What is your favorite
dance song or dance move?"

Jammed into a small on-campus conference room, 60 members plotted strategy
while passing around bags of Dum-Dum Lollipops and day-old bagels. They
planned wonky social outings like a house party to watch the 1992
documentary "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media," about the
dissident linguist and liberal icon.

Decorum demands that even the tiniest group decisions be punctuated with
the question, "Are people comfortable with that?" Leadership is rotated
weekly, and all decisions are reached by consensus, which explains why
Students Against War spent 35 minutes trying to decide whether to send a
press release outlining their latest demands before or after today's
demonstration.

Members like to point to the group's diversity. Though anti-war groups tend
to be largely white, roughly a third of the members at last week's meeting
were people of color. About half were women, and several were gay.

"Having that diversity of experience allows us to attack the same monster
from a variety of angles," said Sam Aranke, a 20-year-old junior from
Orange County. "So even if some people aren't comfortable with petitioning
the government (through the ACLU lawsuit), they support it. Same goes for
people who aren't comfortable demonstrating.

"So when we go to San Francisco Saturday for the march, we can't all just
march around in a circle and have that be the end," Aranke said. "We all
have to go back to our communities and do something about it."

E-mail Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli [at] sfchronicle.com.