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July 18, 2005
ACLU Sues FBI over surveilance of Bush critics
The ACLU has sued the FBI alleging that "the FBI has engaged in a pattern of political surveillance against critics of the Bush administration".
The FBI has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's anti-terror policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing earlier this month in federal court in Washington.
Unleashing the the FBI tyrants to monitor innocent american citizens is a bad idea. It's such a bad idea, that it was made illegal, due to their outrageously, flagrant, illegal atrocities against the civil rights groups back in the 1960's. The FBI's COINTELPRO - Covert Action Program to Destroy the Black Panthers should serve as a warning to the dangers of abuse of this notorious federal cancre. J. Edgar Hoover, the Black Panther party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country". The FBI's wrath was expressly directed against such leaders as Martin Luther King, Jr., Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Maxwell Stanford, and Elijah Muhammad.
After Frank Church of Idaho exposed the FBI's illegal actions and outed the COINTEL program, new guidlines were drawn up that basically wouldn't allow the FBI to spy on innocent citizens. That is, unless that had some evidence to support the fact that a crime was being committed or planned, they weren't allowed to go spy on people.
Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice at Truthout puts it this way:
Under COINTELPRO, the FBI monitored, infiltrated, manipulated, and secretly fomented divisions within civil rights, anti-war, black, and other entirely lawful organizations who were using the First Amendment to disagree with government policies.The guidelines for FBI investigations imposed after COINTELPRO ordered that agents could not troll for information in churches, libraries, or political meetings of Americans without some reasonable leads that someone, somehow, was doing or planning something illegal.
After 9/11, however, they decided to let the genie out of the bottle. The FBI was, once again, unleashed against an unsuspecting populace. Nat Hentoff reports:
Without even a gesture of consultation with Congress, Ashcroft unilaterally has thrown away those guidelines.
From now on, covert FBI agents can mingle with unsuspecting Americans at churches, mosques, synagogues, meetings of environmentalists, the ACLU, the Gun Owners of America, and Reverend Al Sharpton's presidential campaign headquarters. (He has been resoundingly critical of the cutting back of the Bill of Rights.) These eavesdroppers do not need any evidence, not even a previous complaint, that anything illegal is going on, or is being contemplated.
So, basically, we are operating in this surreal Post 9/11 world, where the FBI has been unleashed to spy upon innocent citizens, and that's just what they're doing. Collecting thick dossiers of information on innocent citizens. I despise the ACLU because they cherry-pick which parts of the Bill of Rights they support (the 2nd amendment doesn't make the cut, for some reason). But, I support the ACLU in their efforts to reign in these serious abuses of our civil rights.
Posted by Peenie Wallie on July 18, 2005 at 3:11 PM
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