President Bush changed his stance today on his close adviser Karl Rove, stopping well short of promising that anyone in his administration who helped to unmask a C.I.A. officer would be fired. "If someone committed a crime, they will no longer work in my administration," Mr. Bush said in response to a question, after declaring, "I don't know all the facts; I want to know all the facts."
So.
Leaving aside the fact that Our Glorious Leader has moved the target from "if anyone was involved in releasing this information" to "if someone committed a crime" -- the question is fast becoming an issue of which parts of this administration will be prosecuted for commiting some sort of crime.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.
The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's antiterrorism 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 this month in a federal court in Washington.
The filing came as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act brought by the A.C.L.U. and other groups that maintain that the F.B.I. has engaged in a pattern of political surveillance against critics of the Bush administration. A smaller batch of documents already turned over by the government sheds light on the interest of F.B.I. counterterrorism officials in protests surrounding the Iraq war and last year's Republican National Convention.
F.B.I. and Justice Department officials declined to say what was in the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace files, citing the pending lawsuit. But they stressed that as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups and that any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech. They said there might be an innocuous explanation for the large volume of files on the A.C.L.U. and Greenpeace, like preserving requests from or complaints about the groups in agency files....
Now, hold it right there.
They truly want us to believe that they have over 3,000 pages that they've retained purely in reponse to consumer complaints.
Right.
Leaving aside the fact that they expect the public to be credulous enough to believe that crap, we're left with the statement "...as a matter of both policy and practice, they have not sought to monitor the political activities of any activist groups and that any intelligence-gathering activities related to political protests are intended to prevent disruptive and criminal activity at demonstrations, not to quell free speech." The first problem with that statement is that ACLU and Greenpeace do little else but political activity. It's pretty much impossible to either monitor or "gather intelligence" on those groups without monitoring political activity. Thus, Justice's actions, absent a specific criminal complaint, were perforce illegal.
The Justice Department is opposing the A.C.L.U.'s request to expedite the review of material it is seeking under the Freedom of Information Act, saying it does not involve a matter of urgent public interest, and department lawyers say the sheer volume of material, in the thousands of pages, will take them 8 to 11 months to process for Greenpeace and the A.C.L.U alone. The A.C.L.U., which went to court in a separate case to obtain some 60,000 pages of records on the government's detention and interrogation practices, said the F.B.I. records on the dozens of protest groups could total tens of thousands of pages by the time the request is completed.
"8 to 11 months to process for Greenpeace and the A.C.L.U alone." So just how many groups have they been observing, and how many pages of documents do they have in their guilty little hands? (Seriously, why on earth would the FBI ever care about an American Indian Movement group in Denver protesting Columbus Day? It wouldn't be a large protest. Where are the terrorist implications? What reason did the FBI have to even pay the slightest bit of attention?)
What we have, unfortunately, is an administration acting much like the Nixon administration ... and for much the same reasons. They're engaged in prosecuting a thoroughly unpopular war, facing a certain amount of upset over paranoid tactics at home. What they also have, which the Nixon administration really didn't, is certain knowledge that there will be further terrorist attacks both abroad and here. (I do not mean that the administration knows of specific attacks that will take place -- I mean that they know that attacks in general will take place -- as do any thinking persons -- although they don't know how or when. They know that they will likely be especially devastating, because despite being a very soft target, we're also a fairly distant target, and it's more difficult to obtain the materials needed within the US, or to get them outside and get them inside the US these days.) Couple that with an administration populated by ideologues and corporatists, and the actions of this administration can't possibly be considered even a little surprising. Revolting, appalling, disgraceful, possibly (probably) illegal, but not even a little unexpected by anyone paying attention.
Which, of course, most of the press seems not to have been. But that's another matter.
Posted by iain at July 18, 2005 02:54 PM
