Large Volume of F.B.I. Files Alarms U.S. Activist Groups

From the New York Times courtesy of This Modern World:

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.

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This comes as no surprise given the FBI's historical tendency to meddle with political opposition groups. FBI agents are cops when you get right down to it, and cops, contrary to the conventional wisdom, do not serve the public: rather, as governmental employees, cops serve the wealthy elites who own the government. I don't know whether this obvious attempt to use the FBI to stifle political dissent - and this monitoring can only be seen as being anti-dissent because that is its largest and most inescapable effect, regardless of what the stated motivations are - comes out of some weird zeal on the part of the Bureau or if they were ordered by the Attorney General or President Bush, but it's clear that, ordered or not, the FBI knows the interests of its masters, and is seeking to do their will.

It's also particularly creepy that FBI counterterrorism officials seem to be gunning for groups as benign as the ACLU and Greenpeace. Both groups are without a doubt non-violent, and spending tax dollars on "monitoring" them is either a huge waste of money and anti-terror resources or clear evidence that Bush is every bit the Nazi that the right wing loudly insists he is not. Either way something's rotten in the District of Columbia.

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