Even the conservative Erie Times-News supports Clamor readers’ right to protest at the RNC. We hope to see you there…

FBI again crosses that very thin line
Considering what has occurred in U.S. Attorney John Ashcroft’s stormy tenure, we suppose nobody is truly surprised that for several months before the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, FBI agents have repeatedly interrogated likely political demonstrators, their friends and families.

What aroused FBI suspicions?

These individuals planned to protest at the conventions in Boston and New York City. This is alarming.

Nobody questions the FBI’s right or responsibility to keep an eye on the lunatic fringe operating on the political extremes; or the FBI’s ability to conduct aggressive investigations into any threats of violence or criminal behavior in the name of political protests.

But as The New York Times reported, the FBI’s focus here were on between 40 and 50 anti-war protesters with no history of violent or criminal conduct at any protests. They were planning nothing more than routine demonstrations and at both parties’ political conventions.

This unnerving activity forces us to ask if the FBI learned nothing from its troubled past. Americans remember the tens of thousands of FBI files assembled on civil rights activists in the 1950s and 1960s. The Vietnam War protesters, too, caught the FBI’s attention and thousands more files were routinely gathered.

When the FBI was forced to release these files over the next 30 years, Americans read the useless and inanely trivial information agents collected through their domestic spying. These sad episodes still stain the FBI’s reputation.

Now as The New York Times reported, “The FBI is going forward with the blessing of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — the same outfit that recently approved the use of torture against terrorism suspects.” In the view of the Justice Department, any “chilling effect” these investigations create is “quite minimal” and “substantially outweighed by the public interest in maintaining safety and order.”

Should Americans feel safer now?

Protests at political conventions are as American as apple pie. This dissent should be encouraged and welcomed. Instead, protesters are prevented from getting within view of the actual convention sites, and in the case of the Boston Democratic Convention, effectively pinned in miles from any convention delegates.

Now the FBI is basically attempting to intimidate protesters with surveillance, subpoenas and grand juries. Consider Sarah Bardwell, a 21-year-old intern at a Denver antiwar group. Six FBI investigators swooped down on her last month, asking her questions about her activities at the two conventions.

“The message I took from it,” said Bardwell, “was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, ‘Hey, we’re watching you.’”

There is a fine line between legitimate investigation and harassment.

The FBI has sadly crossed it again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 24th, 2004 at 3:37 pm by josh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.