MAJOR HUGE NEWS STORY BREAKING OUT OF Washington D.C. today, via Drudge. The Washington Post is reporting that the FBI conducted...(gasp)... interviews of protestors, leading up to the party conventions last summer.
anti-terrorism agents who questioned antiwar protesters last summer in Denver were conducting "pretext interviews" that did not lead to any information about criminal activity.
The authorities claimed the interviews were based on credible threats of violent activity.
FBI officials and then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said at the time that the interviews were based on indications that radical protesters may be planning violent disruptions. Authorities said one specific threat involved plans to blow up a media van in Boston.
But no says the Washinton Post and the ACLU. Something far more insidious was at work.
Instead, one heavily censored memo from the FBI's Denver field office, dated Aug. 2, 2004, characterized the effort as "pretext interviews to gain general information concerning possible criminal activity at the upcoming political conventions and presidential election."
In other words, the FBI assumed that the greatest collections of American political leadership in one place might be targets for violence. Where could they have possibly gotten that idea?
One can only imagine the herds, hundreds deep, of anti-war protestors being subjected to questions regarding knowledge of criminal activity. Oh wait, it guess it was just a few.
The memos...provide a glimpse of the FBI's controversial efforts to interview dozens of members of leftist protest groups...
Dozens?
Not surprisingly, the ACLU is pissed.
ACLU officials said yesterday that the documents show that investigators from the FBI and the local Joint Terrorism Task Force were on a fishing expedition.
Come to think of it, I'm pissed too. Those FBI stooges were supposed to be protecting the conventions, not fishing.
Mark Silverstein, a legal director for the ACLU, said this in response to these frightening allegations, apparently from his cell at Gitmo:
"It lends credence to what a lot of critics have said: that the FBI is starting to regard some forms of dissent as potential terrorism."
Official moonbat (as opposed to the ACLU legal variety) Sarah Bardwell, had this gem to add:
It's very clear to me that the purpose of those interviews was to intimidate activists in the Denver area from exercising their First Amendment rights.
Remarkably, Silverstein and Bardwell continue to walk the streets of America, free to give interviews to the Washington Post. The Feebs must be here in Minnesota for the fishing opener.
If I was Bardwell, I'd be more pissed about the cages she and her ilk were kept in at the Democratic convention.
1 comment:
agents who questioned antiwar protesters last summer in Denver were conducting "pretext interviews
Oh how I long for the days when hippies were beaten before bieng questioned.
They call this progress?
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